Posts
PNN
NOTES: 4/30/17
1. @POTUS on getting things done in government:
"It's
a very rough system. It's an archaic system...
It's
really a bad thing for the country."
Donald
Trump doesn’t like the whole concept of government of, by and for
the people,
the
idea that political power derives from the will of the people rather
than
gods
or kings or priests or…dare we say, political strongmen, real and
imagined.
Archaic
means “old-fashioned” and “obsolete” and “out of date”
and, perhaps wistfully
here
for would-be dictator Donald Trump, “no longer used.”
You
know, because we have this whole thing about three co-equal branches
of government and checks and balances that prevent the president from
ruling like a king
– or
a Putinesque banana republican dictator.
It’s
inefficient, he says. In other words, he’s frustrated that he can’t
do
anything
he damn well pleases without appeal to all those pesky and
inconvenient laws. He can’t try to rule by fiat without somebody
saying “un-Constitutional!”
Of
course, Trump doesn’t want any of that, having to work with people
and persuade
them
with intelligible arguments (foot-stomping tantrums don’t count).
He
wants people to just do what he says because he’s “kind of a
smart guy”
and
he’s the only guy who can fix it. Just ask him. Why does he have to
bother
with
all these lesser beings who just get in the way of his brilliance?
If
Trump’s tears were just excuse-making it would be bad enough. Sure,
he
needs
to explain why he hasn’t done anything in his first hundred days
(cutting
back on the golf game might seem an obvious solution) but the
real
problem here is that Donald Trump honestly thinks his word should be
law.
Even
though it is the word of a guy who hasn’t made the slightest
attempt
to
learn a single thing while he’s been in office and leaves it at
every
opportunity
to play.
His
executive orders and his reaction to judicial oversight as mandated
by
the United States Constitution verifies his dictatorial leanings.
Judges
are unelected, he says. What right do they have to “set policy”
– in
reality, of course, to question his judgment?
Trump
is used to ruling like a king in the corporate world.
A
government isn’t like that, outside a monarchy or a dictatorship.
Trump
thinks it’s inefficient. What it is safe. It protects us
from
people like, well…Donald Trump.
The
Constitution was set forth to protect us from dictators and kings.
And
as Trump’s frustrated and whiny rants have shown, it is a
protection
we
very badly need.
2. PRES DISSES
Commission’s
Rule on Privacy of Customers of Broadband Services
S.J.Res.
34 – Disapproving the Federal Communications Commission’s
Rule
on Privacy of Customers of Broadband Services
(Sen.
Flake, R-AZ, and 24 cosponsors)
The
Administration strongly supports House passage of S.J.Res. 34,
which
would nullify the Federal Communications Commission’s
final
rule titled "Protecting the Privacy of Customers of Broadband
and
Other Telecommunication Services," 81 Fed. Reg. 87274
(December
2, 2016). The rule applies the privacy requirements
of
the Communications Act of 1934 to broadband
Internet
Service Providers (ISPs) and other telecommunications
carriers.
In particular, the rule requires ISPs to obtain
affirmative
"opt-in" consent from consumers to use and
share
certain information, including app usage and web browsing
history.
It also allows ISPs to use and share other information,
including
e-mail addresses and service tier information,
unless
a customer "opts-out." In doing so, the rule departs
from
the technology-neutral framework for online privacy
administered
by the Federal Trade Commission. This results
in
rules that apply very different regulatory regimes
based
on the identity of the online actor.
If
S.J.Res. 34 were presented to the President, his
advisors
would recommend that he sign the bill into law.
3. ICE Data Shows Half of Immigrants Arrested in Raids Had Traffic Convictions or No Record
About
half of the 675 immigrants picked up in roundups across the United
States in the days after President Trump took office either had no
criminal convictions or had committed traffic offenses, mostly
drunken driving, as their most serious crimes, according to data
obtained by The Washington Post.
Records
provided by congressional aides Friday offered the most detailed look
yet at the backgrounds of the individuals rounded up and targeted for
deportation in early February by Immigration and Customs Enforcement
agents assigned to regional offices in Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta,
San Antonio and New York.
Two
people had been convicted of homicide, 80 had been convicted of
assault, and 57 had convictions for “dangerous drugs.” Many of
the most serious criminals were given top billing in ICE news
statements about the operation.
The
largest single group — 163 immigrants convicted of traffic offenses
— was mentioned only briefly. Over 90 percent of those cases
involved drunken driving, ICE said Friday. Of those taken into
custody in the raids, 177 had no criminal convictions at all, though
66 had charges pending, largely immigration or traffic offenses.
The
raids were part of a nationwide immigration roundup dubbed Operation
Cross Check, which accounts for a small portion of the 21,362
immigrants the Trump administration took into custody for deportation
proceedings from January through mid-March.
The
two-month total represents a 32 percent increase in deportation
arrests over the same period last year. Most are criminals,
administration officials have said. But 5,441 were not criminals,
double the number of undocumented immigrants arrested for deportation
a year earlier. The administration has released a detailed breakdown
of the criminal records only of the raids in early February.
Trump
has said that public safety threats are his top priority. Shortly
after he was elected, he vowed to first deport serious criminals from
the United States.
But
critics say immigration agents instead have also targeted students,
parents of U.S. citizens who do not have serious criminal records and
minor offenders.
“That
makes me so angry,” said Kica Matos, a spokeswoman for the Fair
Immigration Reform Movement, which is organizing demonstrations
Monday to protest Trump’s immigration policies. She said that many
of the DUI convictions are years-old and that the data “confirms
our worst fears, which is that this administration is really trying
to deport as many as possible regardless of whether they have a
criminal record.”
President
Barack Obama also deported thousands of people who never committed
crimes, but toward the end of his administration, he imposed strict
new rules that prioritized the arrest of criminals.
The
Trump administration has said the current president also wants to
prioritize deporting criminals. But officials add that anyone in the
United States illegally could be detained and deported.
“As
Secretary Kelly has made clear, ICE will no longer exempt classes or
categories of removable aliens from potential enforcement,” said
ICE spokeswoman Jennifer Elzea, referring to Homeland Security
Secretary John F. Kelly. “All of those in violation of the
immigration laws may be subject to immigration arrest, detention and,
if found removable by final order, removal from the United States.”
ICE
arrested immigrants across the United States in February as part of
Operation Cross Check, an initiative that seeks to detain immigrants
that also occurred during the Obama administration.
Jessica
M. Vaughan, director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration
Studies, which favors limits on immigration, said ICE is properly
enforcing immigration laws by arresting criminals and people in the
United States without papers.
“Those
are legitimate reasons to remove people,” she said. “ICE officers
are no longer operating under the restraints imposed by the Obama
administration. They’re not forced to look the other way when they
encounter people who are removable.”
Congressional
aides said the information from ICE follows months of frustration
from lawmakers that the agency is not responding fast enough to
requests for information.
After
initially being supportive of Kelly, many Democrats have turned on
him, believing he is being less than forthcoming about his sprawling
department’s moves to implement Trump’s immigration policy.
Kelly,
a retired Marine general, shot back at congressional critics last
week in a speech at George Washington University.
“If
lawmakers do not like the laws they’ve passed and we are charged to
enforce, then they should have the courage and skill to change the
laws,’’ Kelly said. “Otherwise they should shut up and support
the men and women on the front lines.’’
That
kind of approach “wasn’t a constructive way to deal with
Congress,” House Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) said in an
interview Friday. Democrats, he said, are frustrated by Trump’s
immigration policies but are unable to change laws because they don’t
currently control Congress.
“That
kind of language ought to be jettisoned,” Hoyer said.
4. THE NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY on Friday suddenly announced it is curtailing one of its major surveillance programs.
Under
pressure from the secret court that oversees its practices, the NSA
said its “upstream” program would no longer grab communications
directly from the U.S. internet backbone “about” specific foreign
targets — only communication to and from those targets.
This
is a major change, essentially abandoning a bulk surveillance program
that captured vast amounts of communications of innocent Americans –
and turning instead to a still extensive but more targeted approach.
“This
change ends a practice that could result in Americans’
communications being collected without a warrant merely for
mentioning a foreign target,” Senator Ron Wyden said in a
statement. “For years, I’ve repeatedly raised concerns that this
amounted to an end run around the Fourth Amendment. This transparency
should be commended. To permanently protect Americans’ rights, I
intend to introduce legislation banning this kind of collection in
the future.”
The
“upstream” surveillance program is one of two controversial
programs authorized by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act, which is scheduled to expire in December unless it
is reauthorized by Congress. It was among several programs whose
existence was a secret until being revealed by NSA whistleblower
Edward Snowden.
Until
now, upstream was examining every Internet communication that
traveled on the huge telecommunication cables going in and out of the
U.S., searching through every word, grabbing sometimes very big
chunks of data that included even a single mention of a specific
target, and then putting everything into a database for NSA analysts
to look through.
Communications
between people, including Americans, was being captured and examined
not because they were suspected of anything, but because of what they
were saying. And the program wasn’t even efficient at limiting it
to that.
The
NSA statement on Friday said the move came “after a comprehensive
review of mission needs, current technological constraints, United
States person privacy interests, and certain difficulties in
implementation.”
But
reading between the lines, it wasn’t voluntary.
In
a companion statement, the NSA acknowledged that it had failed to
follow the rules the FISA court established for “about”
collection in 2011: “NSA discovered several inadvertent compliance
lapses,” is how they put it.
“NSA
self-reported the incidents to both Congress and the FISC, as it is
required to do. Following these reports, the FISC issued two
extensions as NSA worked to fix the problems before the government
submitted a new application for continued Section 702 certification.
The FISC recently approved the changes after an extensive review.”
In
other words, after giving the NSA two extensions, the court refused
to reauthorize the wider program until it stopped “about”
searches entirely.
That
is less surprising considering that the 2011 FISC decision
establishing the new rules came after a judge was shocked to learn
that the 702 program wasn’t just snatching communications to and
from targets, but was in fact looking through everything. Judge John
Bates wrote at the time:
Based
upon the government’s descriptions of the proposed collection, the
Court understood that the acquisition of Internet communications
under Section 702 would be limited to discrete “to/from”
communications between or among individual account users and to
“about” communications falling within [redacted] specific
categories that had been first described to the Court in prior
proceedings.
The
independent Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board concluded in
its 2014 reportthat “certain aspects of the Section 702 program
push the program close to the line of constitutional reasonableness.”
One of those aspects: “the use of ‘about’ collection to acquire
Internet communications that are neither to nor from the target of
surveillance.”
Laura
K. Donahue, the director of the Center on Privacy and Technology at
Georgetown University – and now an amicus for the FISC – wrote in
a seminal 2015 law review articlethat the “about” collection
“significantly expands the volume of Internet intercepts under
Section 702.” She noted that “to obtain ‘about’
communications, because of how the Internet is constructed, the NSA
must monitor large amounts of data” and was “not just considering
envelope information (for example, messages in which the selector is
sending, receiving, or copied on the communication) but the actual
content of messages.”
And
she said it was clearly unconstitutional. “While the targeting
procedures and the interception of information to or from non-U.S.
persons located outside the United States meet the Fourth Amendment’s
standard of reasonableness, when looked at in relation to Section
702, the inclusion of communications ‘about’ targets or selectors
and the knowing interception of entirely domestic conversations shift
the program outside constitutional bounds.”
Privacy
activists expressed delight over the change Friday, although they
retained their mistrust of the NSA and their demand that Congress
refuse to reauthorize Section 702 as is.
“The
NSA should never have been vacuuming up all of these communications,
many of which involved Americans, without a warrant. While we welcome
the voluntary stopping of this practice, it’s clear that Section
702 must be reformed so that the government cannot collect this
information in the future,” said Michelle Richardson, Deputy
Director of the Freedom, Security, and Technology Project at the
Center for Democracy and Technology, in a statement.
“As
a baseline, this makes a statutory ban on ‘about’ collection much
more feasible. It becomes much harder for the NSA to justify the
necessity of something they’re not doing,” said Jake Laperruque,
senior counsel at the Constitution Project.
The
change does not affect the other major program that operates under
Section 702, called Prism. That program warrantlessly harvests
communications to and from foreign targets from major Internet
companies like Facebook and Google. But like upstream, Prism
“incidentally” sweeps up innocent Americans’ communications as
well. Those are then entered into a master database that a Justice
Department lawyer once described as the “FBI’s ‘Google’ of
its lawfully acquired information.” Critics call those “backdoor
searches” of warrantless surveillance.
Wyden
and other members of Congress have been trying to understand the
scope of 702 surveillance for years, but the government has refused
to provide even a ballpark figure.
Security
fences surround the National Security Agency’s Utah data collection
center in Bluffdale, Utah near Salt Lake City on April 12, 2017.
5. Civilians holding the Oligarchs accountable
Who/What/Why
Twenty-five
years ago, a California jury failed to convict four cops accused of
savagely beating a black man. What sounds today like an
all-too-common story was anything but back then. The verdict
triggered massive unrest and, within a week, parts of Los Angeles had
gone up in smoke and 55 people had died. So what made this case of
police brutality different? The beating of Rodney King was caught on
tape.
Fast-forward
to this month, when a passenger on a United Airlines flight was asked
to give up his seat to make room for a crew member who had to get to
Louisville. The man refused and was subsequently bloodied and dragged
off the plane. This event was also caught on tape. Within hours, the
video had been seen by millions and had become a PR nightmare for
United. Within a few days, airlines had begun making changes to how
they “bumped” passengers.
In
both cases, seeing an injustice committed was much more powerful than
reading about it. Without the videos, high-priced attorneys
protecting the ruling class could have spun both of these events into
something completely different — if they had made the news at all.
This
is an important lesson to keep in mind.
There
is no doubt that the lives of Americans have never been more exposed
than at this very moment. Using the pretext of “national security,”
the government constantly assaults and chips away at privacy
protections that had been established throughout the course of US
history.
In
many cases, those in power don’t even bother to change the laws —
which would more often than not turn out to be unconstitutional. It’s
much easier to give agencies such as the NSA carte blanche.
At
the same time, lawmakers are opening the doors to allow their
corporate paymasters to collect unprecedented amounts of information
about their customers and then use that data as they see fit.
Last
week, for example, it was revealed that the NSA identified holes in
Microsoft’s Windows software and then exploited these
vulnerabilities instead of warning the company and its customers.
Earlier in April, President Donald Trump signed legislationthat
voided privacy rules preventing Internet service providers from
selling the browsing history of their customers without their
consent.
In
fact, unless you have taken extraordinary steps, either the
government or at least one corporation (and probably both) know that
you are reading this article right now.
There
is a bit of a silver lining. Just as new technologies have allowed
those in power to invade your privacy and gobble up massive amounts
of data about your life, they also give you the means to expose them.
You can turn the tables by keeping an eye on the powerful.
Bad
cops don’t want you to record them. A huge corporation does not
want you to be there with a camera when it violates a customer in
order to save a few bucks or pays hired hands to clear out
protesters. Lawmakers don’t want you to ask them difficult
questions while putting a microphone or camera in their faces.
And
none of these people — all of whom want to exert their authority
over your life in some way — wants you to put this video online and
make it available to a wide audience.
So
please do both these things. In the American oligarchy, it’s one of
the few ways to keep the powerful accountable.
6. Nuclear Regulatory Commission from OPED News
What
could you be thinking of in transporting high level radioactive
waste, the most toxic substance in the universe, across many miles in
many states?
What
could you be thinking of in wanting to bury this high level
radioactive waste in low income communities? This is not
environmental justice, in fact - just the opposite. Bury it in your
own yards instead of theirs.
What
could you be thinking of in wanting to bury this high level
radioactive waste in communities of color? This is White Supremacy.
Bury it in your own yards instead of theirs.
What
could you thinking of in calling this burial "temporary"?
Another lie, and we've got plenty [borrowing from Holly Near] from
you already.
What
could you be thinking of in allowing nuclear power plants anywhere at
any time since radioactive waste lasts millions of years? See the
film "Containment" with people you love. Will you want your
children to see this film, to know this, will you tell them?
What
could you be thinking of in allowing nuclear power plants anywhere at
any time, since there is no way to get rid of this high level
radioactive waste? Again, see the film "Containment" with
people you love. Will you want your children to see this film, to
know this, will you tell them?
What
could you be thinking of in allowing nuclear power plants to be built
in the first place?
What
could you be thinking of in relicensing old nuclear power plants?
What
could you be thinking of in allowing nuclear power plants to exist -
causing leukemia and other cancers not only seven generations out,
but into eternity - affecting fetuses, our children, grandchildren,
their children - into eternity? Will you tell your children,
grandchildren, nieces, nephews, great grandchildren this?
What
could you be thinking of in not caring that "Children are 10 to
20 times more vulnerable to the carcinogenic effects of radiation than
adults?" [Dr. Helen Caldicott] Will you tell your children,
grandchildren, great grandchildren, nieces nephews this?
What
could you be thinking of in not caring that girls are more sensitive
to radiation than boys? [Dr. Helen Caldicott] Will you tell your
children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, nieces, nephews this?
Read and see the film on Hulu "The Handmaid's Tale" and
watch it with the women you love in your lives.
What
could you be thinking of in not caring that women are more sensitive
to radiation then men? [Dr. Helen Caldicott] Will you tell this to
the women in your lives? Read and see the film on Hulu "The
Handmaid's Tale" and watch it with the women you love in your
lives. Margaret Atwood, the author, sends the least valued women in
this cautionary tale - elders, other women who cannot bear children -
to clean up the radioactive waste and they die there while they are
cleaning.
What
could you be thinking of in not caring that fetuses are thousands of
times more sensitive, more prone to cancer than adults? [Dr. Helen
Caldicott] Will you tell this to the women in your lives? "The
Handmaid's Tale" again is your required assignment and to watch
with the women in your lives.
What
could you be thinking of in allowing more nuclear power plants to be
built when in 2014 Dr. Ian Fairlie warned us that "There's a
very close association between increased childhood leukemias and
proximity to NPP's [nuclear power plants]." Will you tell your
children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, nieces, nephews this?
How
are you going to answer this question when you are asked - Mommy,
daddy, grandmother, nana, granny, grandpa, auntie, uncle - why did
you not close all nuclear power plants when you knew how dangerous
they are because people all over the country were telling you this
and even some very few officials. What will you say to them?
You
are on the wrong side of history and you will not be absolved.
7. Foxes in Our Henhouse
In
early 2007, a group of Morgan Stanley bankers bundled a group of
subprime mortgage instruments into a package they hoped to sell to
investors. The only problem was, they couldn't come up with a name
for the package of mortgage-backed derivatives, which they all knew
were doomed.
The
bankers decided to play around with potential names. In a series of
emails back and forth, they suggested possibilities. "Jon is
voting for 'Hitman,'" wrote one. "How about 'Nuclear
Holocaust 2007-1?'" wrote another, adding a few more possible
names: Shitbag, Mike Tyson's Punchout and Fludderfish.
Eventually
they stopped with the comedy jokes, gave the pile of "nuclear"
assets a more respectable name – "Stack" – and sold the
$500 million Collateralized Debt Obligation with a straight face to
the China Development Industrial Bank. Within three years, the bank
was suing a series of parties, including Morgan Stanley, to recover
losses from the toxic fund.
The
name on the original registration document for Stack? Craig S.
Phillips, then president of Morgan Stanley's ABS (Asset-Backed
Securities) division. Phillips may not have written the emails in
question, but he was the boss of this sordid episode, and it was his
name on the comedy-free document that was presented to Chinese
investors.
This
is just another detail in the emerging absurd narrative that is
Donald Trump naming Phillips, of all people, to head up the effort to
reform the Government-Sponsored Entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
As
ace investigative reporter Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times
noted in a piece back on April 7th, Phillips headed a division that
sold billions of dollars of mortgage-backed investments to Fannie and
Freddie. Many of those investments were as bad as the ones his unit
sold to the Chinese. In fact, as Morgenson noted, Phillips became a
named defendant in a lawsuit filed by the Federal Housing Finance
Authority (FHFA), which essentially charged, as the Chinese did, that
Morgan Stanley knowingly sold Fannie and Freddie a pile of crap.
Morgan
Stanley ended up having to pay $625 million apiece to Fannie and
Freddie to settle securities fraud charges in that case.
Phillips
worked in an area of investment banking that was highly lucrative and
highly predatory. The basic scam in the subprime world in particular
was buying up mortgages from people who couldn't possibly afford
them, making those bad mortgages into securities, and then turning
around and hawking those same mortgages to unsuspecting institutional
dopes like the Chinese and Fannie and Freddie.
Phillips
had a critical role in this activity. As Morgan Stanley's ABS chief,
he was among other things responsible for liaising with fly-by-night
subprime mortgage lenders like New Century, who fanned into
low-income neighborhoods and handed out subprime mortgages to anyone
with a pulse.
In
a 2012 suit, a group of Detroit-based borrowers accused Morgan
Stanley of discriminatory practices, claiming the bank helped New
Century target minority areas with predatory loans. One Morgan
Stanley due diligence officer, Pamela Barrow, joked in an email about
how to go after borrowers.
"We
should call all their mommas," Barrow wrote. "Betcha that
would get some of them good old boys to pay that house bill."
Phillips
was named in the suit and quoted in the complaint. He said that New
Century was "extremely open to our advice and involvement in all
elements of their operation."
The
worst actors in the financial crisis worked in this shady world
involving the creation of subprime-backed securities.
Of
those bad actors, there is a subset of still-worse actors, who not
only sold these toxic investments to institutional investors like
pension funds and Fannie and Freddie, but helped get a generation of
home borrowers – often minorities and the poor – into deadly
mortgages that ended up wiping out their equity.
Phillips,
who helped Fannie and Freddie into substantial losses and worked with
predatory firms like New Century, belongs in this second category. As
Beavis and Butthead would put it, Phillips comes from the "ass
of the ass."
Donald
Trump, then, has essentially picked one of the last people on earth
who should be allowed to help reshape the mortgage markets. This is
like putting a guy who sold thousand-dollar magazine subscriptions to
your grandmother on the telephone in charge of the Consumer Financial
Protection Bureau, or the A.A.R.P.
More
foxes for more henhouses. Welcome to the Trump era.
He read the lyrics to a 1960s song about a woman who took in a snake that which bit her after she nursed it in her bosom to explain why the United States should block immigration. It was a hit of the campaign trail, as he noted.
9. comment from Naked Capitalism
11. Net Neutrality under Attack
The term “net neutrality” was coined by Tim Wu (interviewed at NC here when he was a candidate for Lieutenant Governor of New York). In fact, Wu wrote the FAQ (which you should read in its entirety):
And if you think about how you “surf the web,” treating “all content, sites, and platforms equally” (“access to all content and applications regardless of the source “) pretty much describes how your Internet works; you can click seamlessly from a small blog like Naked Capitalism to an enormous website like Google’s search page to YouTube or Vimeo for video to satellite imagery from NASA to a Bear Cam in Katmai National Park, Alaska. Who could be against that?
8.
TRUMP the Snake Charmer
He read the lyrics to a 1960s song about a woman who took in a snake that which bit her after she nursed it in her bosom to explain why the United States should block immigration. It was a hit of the campaign trail, as he noted.
"You
knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in!" he said,
imitating the snake, his voice rising to a climax.
- IIRC, the DNC bylaws explicitly stated that the DNC was to be neutral until a candidate won the primary. Gabbard stated this when she resigned to endorse Sanders.
The DNC has an uphill climb to remove itself from that point as this bylaw is in writing, was used or enforced, and was clearly violated by their own admission in testimony and in their emails. Now I’m not an attorney, but on its face this is a strong case for fraud if I’ve ever seen one.
The term “net neutrality” was coined by Tim Wu (interviewed at NC here when he was a candidate for Lieutenant Governor of New York). In fact, Wu wrote the FAQ (which you should read in its entirety):
Network
neutrality is best defined as a network design principle. The idea is
that a maximally useful public information network aspires to treat
all content, sites, and platforms equally. This allows the network to
carry every form of information and support every kind of
application.
That’s
more than a little wonky, so let’s give an English translation.
From the Google:
From the Google:
The
principle that Internet service providers should enable access to all
content and applications regardless of the source, and without
favoring or blocking particular products or websites.
And if you think about how you “surf the web,” treating “all content, sites, and platforms equally” (“access to all content and applications regardless of the source “) pretty much describes how your Internet works; you can click seamlessly from a small blog like Naked Capitalism to an enormous website like Google’s search page to YouTube or Vimeo for video to satellite imagery from NASA to a Bear Cam in Katmai National Park, Alaska. Who could be against that?
