Did You Know
Did You Know
Report documents criminality and corruption at heart of global banking system
Barry Grey: An explosive report published Sunday by BuzzFeed News documents the role that major US and international banks knowingly play in laundering and circulating trillions of dollars in dirty money from terrorist organizations, drug cartels and assorted international financial criminals. ... The report is an unanswerable indictment not only of the banks, but also of Western governments and regulatory agencies ... The report goes on to explain that “even after they were prosecuted or fined for financial misconduct, banks such as JPMorgan Chase, HSBC, Standard Chartered, Deutsche Bank and Bank of New York Mellon continued to move money for suspected criminals.”...
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Sep 22, 2020, 12:48pm
Did You Know
O, Homo Contractus, Where Art Thou?
John Hawkins: “Deep State” derives from a John le Carré spy novel. ... the Deep State ... “a hybrid of corporate America and the national security state.” ... “where elected and unelected figures collude to protect and serve powerful vested interests.” ... “Homo Contractus,” perhaps the most important chapter of Edward Snowden’s recently released memoir, Permanent Record. ... expands on and clarifies the inherent corruption and darkness of Deep State doings, and paints an inescapable picture of a dystopian nightmare underway. ... the Deep State is “the red thread that runs through the history of the last three decades. It is how we had deregulation, financialization of the economy, the Wall Street bust, the erosion of our civil liberties and perpetual war.”...
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Aug 31, 2020, 10:52am
Did You Know
Voting by Mail Faces Obstacles Beyond the US Postal Service
Gabriella Novello: One concern is that thousands of voters will be casting an absentee ballot for the first time and inadvertent mistakes could disenfranchise many voters. ,,, Hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots were rejected in at least 23 states during the 2020 primary elections. In many cases, the ballots were rejected because of a failure to sign the ballot with a signature that was an “exact match” with the signature filed when the voter initially registered. ... Witness signature requirements have also come under scrutiny in recent months....
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Aug 25, 2020, 11:53am
Did You Know
Send in the Clowns for the Circus is in Town
Edward Curtin: Don’t bother, they’re here, already performing in the center ring under the big top owned and operated by The Umbrella People. ... Trump, Biden, Pence, Harris, and their clownish sidekicks, Pompeo, Michelle Obama, et al., are performing daily under the umbrella’s shadowy protection. ... The Umbrella People are the moguls who own the showtime studios – some call them the secret government, the deep-state, or the power elite. They run a protection racket ... Meanwhile, as the circus rolls along, far away and out of mind, shit happens: ... With more than 400 military bases equipped with nuclear weapons surrounding China, the United States military continues...
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Aug 20, 2020, 1:12pm
Did You Know
We need a full investigation into Siri's secret surveillance campaign
Ted Greenberg, The Guardian: The public deserves to know the extent to which Apple employees have been listening to our private conversations and intimate moments ... Now, in a 20 May letter to EU privacy regulators, the whistleblower, Thomas Le Bonniec, renounced his non-disclosure agreement with Apple and demanded that regulatory authorities investigate Apple. He told the EU that while working for Apple his work included listening to the private conversations of people all over Europe ... Le Bonniec said regulators needed to take action because big tech companies “are basically wiretapping entire populations”. ... What’s clearly needed now is a comprehensive investigation in the US, as well as in Europe, into what Apple did with its Siri monitoring program, and whether the other big tech companies have been responsible for similar abuses...
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Aug 14, 2020, 4:59pm
Did You Know
Louisiana Supreme Court denies review of Fair Wayne Bryant’s life sentence for allegedly stealing a pair of hedge clippers
Helen Halyard: Fair Wayne Bryant, now 60 years old, has spent the last 23 years at Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana on one count of attempted simple burglary. ... In 2018, Bryant’s attorney Peggy Sullivan appealed his sentence before the Second Circuit Court of Louisiana, stating that her client “contends that his life sentence is unconstitutionally harsh and excessive.” ... Although Louisiana’s State Supreme Court refused to hear the case, Bryant will have one more chance at possible parole. ... One finds one set of rules for the poor and oppressed and another set of rules for those who control the wealth ... Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate in the United States....
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Aug 11, 2020, 11:51am
Did You Know
Police Budgets Are Ballooning as Social Programs Crumble
Indigo Olivier: Faced with mass teacher layoffs, deep cuts to education and social services, and a looming eviction crisis, police budgets across the nation remain absurdly high ... despite the fact that racial justice protesters across the country are clearly calling for the defunding of police ... The expansion of the security state, as the welfare state shrivels, is the product of decades of policy. ... On average, roughly a third of city and town general funds, which are discretionary and largely made up of property taxes, are devoted to police departments ... even in a number of cities that have announced cuts to police departments, budgets will remain the same or even increase ...
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Jul 22, 2020, 3:58pm
 Did You Know
Oklahoma Is – Always Has Been – Native Land
Dwanna L. McKay: North America was not a vast, unpopulated wilderness when white colonizers arrived in 1620. Up to 100 million people of more than 1,000 sovereign indigenous nations occupied the area that would become the United States. ... Historically, indigenous nations emphasized equity, consensus and community ... U.S. policymakers argued that the federal government had a divine duty to fully develop the region. Racist in language and logic, they contended that “Indians” did not know how to work or to care for the land because they were inferior to whites. ... Oklahoma was born of this institutionalized racism...
Jul 17, 2020, 3:48pm
Did You Know
The Microsoft Police State: Mass Surveillance, Facial Recognition, and the Azure Cloud
Michael Kwet: Nationwide protests against racist policing have brought new scrutiny onto big tech companies like Facebook, which is under boycott by advertisers over hate speech directed at people of color, and Amazon, called out for aiding police surveillance. ... But Microsoft, which has largely escaped criticism, is knee-deep in services for law enforcement, fostering an ecosystem of companies that provide police with software using Microsoft’s cloud and other platforms. ... Microsoft has partnered with scores of police surveillance vendors who run their products on a “Government Cloud” supplied by the company’s Azure division...
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Jul 14, 2020, 2:25pm
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Seattle: Get Police Out Of Handling Homeless
Joaqlin Estus, Indian Country Today: Removals ‘often re-trigger trauma, deepen mistrust between Native community members and government institutions.’ ... The National Coalition to End Urban Indigenous Homelessness wrote to the mayor of Seattle this week demanding the removal of the Seattle police department from a team handling homelessness. ... It recommended that the $2.6 million that goes to police to address the issue instead go to organizations that specialize in serving Indigenous people experiencing homelessness...
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Jul 13, 2020, 2:20pm
Did You Know
What Do the Racial Wealth Gap, Police Brutality, and the Climate Crisis Have in Common? Wall Street
Alec Connon: For generations, the slave trade and the financial system operated in a twisted symbiosis. ... When plantation owners defaulted on their debts, banks would take direct ownership of slaves. ... Wall Street was New York's first slave market ... The end of slavery certainly didn't bring an end to Wall Street's white supremacy. Redlining systematically cut black communities out of the housing market ... Wall Street made $891 million in profit from what they call police brutality bonds―high-interest rate loans to cities and counties that cover the costs of police brutality legal settlements. ... The fossil fuel corporations funded by Wall Street cause vast harm to black communities; yet, black communities reap almost no benefit from the industry...
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Jul 9, 2020, 2:13pm
Did You Know
Shield of the Union: How the Russian Navy Protected America in the Civil War
Martin Sieff: The incredible story is well told in “Friends in Peace and War: The Russian Navy’s Landmark Visit to Civil War San Francisco” by C. Douglas Kroll published in 2007. ... the U.S. Navy’s tiny Pacific Squadron was weak at the time and Confederate commerce raiders indulgently encouraged by Britain roamed the Atlantic ... The message the Russian forces sent was unmistakable: Any British or French naval attack on New York or San Francisco, the two great centers of U.S. commerce and financial power on the East and the new West Coast, would be an attack on Russia too. ... The British Empire’s efforts to dismantle the United States during the Civil War have been documented...
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Jul 6, 2020, 3:39pm
Did You Know
The Racist Underpinnings of the American Way of War
Walden Bello: The deadly interplay of racism, genocide, and denial at the heart of American white society has been reproduced in the country’s wars. ... The political economy of the U.S. is built on two “original sins.” One was the genocide of Native Americans, the main function of which was to clear the ground for the implantation and spread of capitalist relations of production. The second was the central role played by the slave labor of African Americans in the genesis and consolidation of U.S. capitalism. ... These original sins have had such a foundational role that the reproduction and expansion of U.S. capitalism over time have consistently reproduced its racial structures...
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Jul 3, 2020, 2:16pm
Did You Know
The Two-Headed Hydra of Racism and Imperialism
Behrooz Ghamari Tabrizi: Race relations in the U.S. and the violence with which the country operates has always been accompanied by the civilizing logic of colonial expansion and imperialist wars that the United States has raged around the world. ... Despite legal gains, the ideology that incentivized the U.S. to commit mass murder around the globe, disincentivized it to put in place meaningful structural changes that would recognize racial hierarchies that informed the existing political order. ... Racism was and is not about an attitude. Rather, it is the problem of a political order that sustains and perpetuate that attitude through a complex system of legal and economic institutions at home and around the world...
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Jun 25, 2020, 11:45am
Did You Know
CIA acknowledges its trove of cyber warfare tools was exposed by WikiLeaks in 2017
Kevin Reed: A newly-released 2017 internal review of security practices at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) confirms that the top secret agency had developed an arsenal of cyber espionage tools and would not have known about the massive “Vault 7” data hack of them had WikiLeaks not made it public. ... The Vault 7 release by WikiLeaks exposed the CIA’s use of special software to take control of cars, smart TVs, web browsers, smartphones and personal computers for the purpose of spying on individuals and organizations.... An example is a malware tool called Athena which was developed in conjunction with the release of Microsoft Windows operating system 10 in 2015 ..... enabling an unauthorized user to gain access to the PC and steal and delete private data or install additional malicious software...
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Jun 19, 2020, 1:56pm
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