Government

Democrats, Republicans and our Liberties, Home and Abroad

July 8, 2013 The Emergency Labor Network (ELN) www.laborfightback.org Educate! Edward Snowden, Government, NSA

As the country reels from yet another revelation of spying on American residents, it might be useful to look at what the spokespersons for our two major political parties have to say on the matter. In the wake of the revelations of internet spying carried on by government agencies such as the National Security Administration (NSA) against the email and cell phone accounts of average American residents, liberal Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein of California hastened to defend the spying.

Lack of Transparency Means Tainted Justice for Bradley Manning

July 8, 2013 Alexa O'Brian, www.readersupportednews.org Educate! Chelsea Manning, Government, Human Rights

The lack of contemporaneous access to court documents has caused irreparable harm to the American public's right to scrutinize the conduct of military prosecutors and the rulings of the presiding military judge. This will surely taint the final outcome of Pfc Bradley Manning's trial. "Military confinement. That's like a term of art," said the spokesperson for the military district of Washington (MDW) - which is responsible for convening a fair and impartial trial for the accused - to an American TV reporter last summer. The reporter was known for investigating infotainment websites during pre-trial sessions. "The practical effect?" commented the spokesman to the reporter. "He's in jail."

Save the Post Office, Stop the Theft of Its Buildings and Artwork

July 1, 2013 Lauren Steiner, www.PopularResistance.org Organize! Finance and the Economy, Government

Corporate America worked hand and hand with our federal representatives to manufacture a fiscal crisis within the US Postal Service in order to achieve the privatization of yet another public good. In 2006, a bi-partisan group of Congress people, including our own once liberal Democrat Henry Waxman, co-sponsored the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) which required the agency to pay for health care benefits for workers 75 years in advance. Ostensibly this was to fix some complex issue concerning unfunded pension liability. However, there were other fixes that could have been made that would not have pushed the Post Office into bankruptcy. Further evidence that this was their goal is that the PAEA also prohibited the Postal Service from providing any other services that would compete with the private sector in order to get out of debt. As a result, the Post Office went from being profitable to being $23.5 billion in the red, and 1000 US Post Offices have been closed and/or sold off across the country.

Protests Growing in Bosnia and Herzegovina Over Government Aid

July 1, 2013 Staff, www.jmbg.org Organize! Bosnia, Government

In recent days protests have been surging because the government is no longer issuing government ID numbers that allow people to get health and other services. This has resulted in the death of an infant who needed health care. A large protest is planned for today, leaflets have been dropped by plane announcing it, large banners dropped from buildings, word is spreading. People are gathering under the title Otkaz 01.07, which means Cancel01.07, they sought to have the government cancel amendments to the personal identification number (PIN) by June 30.

Democracy Is Busting Down the Doors of State Capitols Across the Country

June 30, 2013 Dave Johnson, www.alternet.org Organize! Energy, Environment, Finance and the Economy, Government, Health Care

From the Texas filibuster to Pennsylvania's low-wager-worker sleep-in, citizens are rising up. What's happening in your state? Madison. Occupy… Now in North Carolina it’s Moral Mondays. In Texas it’s a filibuster, hundreds of thousands watching online, and the spectator gallery goes nuts when Republicans try to shut down the speaker. In Pennsylvania low-wage workers are sleeping in the capitol. In Nebraska it’s Pipeline Fighters. What’s happening in your state?

500,000 Sign On to “Stop Watching Us”

June 29, 2013 Julie Bort, www.businessinsider.com Organize! Government, NSA

Stop Watching Us has attracted more than 500,000 signers, sent more than 1 million emails and spent 15,000 minutes on calls to Congress. The goal of the group is simple: It wants to pressure Congress into revealing how much agencies like the NSA are spying on U.S. citizens. Ideally, of course, they want Congress to make the NSA knock it off. It has big, powerful players including Mozilla, the creators of the Firefox browser, and Tim Berners-Lee, the guy that invented the World Wide Web.

FBI Sued Over Secretive Facial Recognition Program

June 29, 2013 Staff, www.rt.com Educate! Government, Police abuse, Surveillance

Soon the FBI will be done building a database containing the photographs, fingerprints and other biometric data for millions of Americans, but the agency has been far from forthcoming with the details. A new lawsuit filed this week aims to change that. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit digital rights group based out of California, sued the United States Department of Justice this week for failing to comply with multiple Freedom of Information Act requests filed last year by the EFF. “Governmental use of face recognition — and the potential for misuse — raises many privacy concerns,” the EFF says in the lawsuit. Further, “The FBI has also stated in a public presentation given at a national biometrics conference that it wants to use its facial recognition system to 'identify unknown persons of interest from images' and 'identify subjects in public datasets,'” the complaint continues. “In the same presentation, the FBI included a graphic image that implied the Bureau wanted to use facial recognition to be able to track people from one political rally to another.”

Pepper Spray, Rubber Bullets and IRS Questionnaires

June 28, 2013 Chip Gibbons, www.truth-out.org Educate! Freedom of Speech and Assembly, Government, Police abuse

Pepper spray, rubber bullets or an IRS questionnaire - which of these poses the greatest threat to your political speech? If the recent brouhaha over the IRS's singling out of Tea Party groups and the lack of a similar uproar over the systematic use of state violence against the Occupy movement is any indication, only the IRS questionnaire poses any threat to our democracy. It may seem rather bizarre, but in our current political and media climate, Karl Rove and his well-monied friends are potential victims of a nefarious political police and Occupiers are just a public nuisance.

Portland’s Austerity Resistance Movement Sparks Changes to City Budget

June 28, 2013 Solidarity Against Austerity, www.occupy.com http://www.occupy.com/article/portlands-austerity-resistance-movement-sparks-changes-city-budget Organize! Austerity, Freedom of Speech and Assembly, Government

Mayor Hales and the City Council's pursuit of austerity was met with a public outpouring of opposition at public budget hearings. The resistance culminated on April 11 when over 400 protesting participants surprised the City Council and overwhelmed their staff. Attending were members of the Metropolitan Youth Commission, Laborers International Local 483, Portland Community College, Friends of Trees, Portland Safety Net, SUN Schools, Eastside Action Plan, Elders in Action, AFSCME Local 189, and numerous others. They stunned the City Council with emotional and at times confrontational testimony. Many dressed in red to show solidarity and carried an array of signs in defense of threatened social programs. Council members were visibly displeased to see people in the audience respond in large numbers to requests from the activists to stand or raise their hands and signs in opposition to the cuts. There was vocal support from the audience, with loud objections when City Council tried to cut off anti-austerity testimony. About an hour before the start of a follow-up budget hearing, the mayor announced they had devised new ways to lessen cuts by working with the Multnomah County Government. Many programs had their funding at least partially restored from the cuts they were expecting.

US Cyber Security Chief Quits After Hacker Attacks

June 28, 2013 Josh Halliday, www.guardian.co.uk Educate! Government, NSA

The head of the US body responsible for combating cyber-attacks has resigned unexpectedly following a string of online assaults on the CIA and other government agencies. Randy Vickers, the director of the US computer emergency readiness team (US-CERT), stepped down on Friday, according to a Department of Homeland Security email obtained by the Reuters news agency. Vickers's resignation follows a number of online attacks on government websites including the Senate, the CIA and the FBI. William Lynn, the US deputy defence secretary, revealed earlier this month that a foreign intelligence service had stolen up to 24,000 computer files from a Pentagon supplier in March – one of the largest successful cyber-attacks on a US government agency.

IRS Also Screened for “Occupy” and “Progressive” in Tax Filings

June 26, 2013 Alan Fram, www.ap.org Educate! Freedom of Speech and Assembly, Government

The Internal Revenue Service's screening of groups seeking tax-exempt status was broader and lasted longer than has been previously disclosed, the new head of the agency acknowledged Monday. Terms including "Israel," ''Progressive" and "Occupy" were used by agency workers to help pick groups for closer examination, according to an internal IRS document obtained by The Associated Press. While investigators have said that agency screening for Tea Party groups had stopped in May 2012, Monday's revelations made it clear that screening for other kinds of organizations continued until earlier this month, when the agency's new chief, Danny Werfel, says he discovered it and ordered it halted.

There’s a New Fascism on the Rise, and the NSA Leaks Show Us What It Looks Like

June 25, 2013 John Pilger, www.alternet.org Educate! Government, Media, NSA

The power of truth-tellers like Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden is that they dispel a whole mythology carefully constructed by the corporate cinema, the corporate academy and the corporate media. WikiLeaks is especially dangerous because it provides truth-tellers with a means to get the truth out. This was achieved by Collateral Damage, the cockpit video of an US Apache helicopter allegedly leaked by Bradley Manning. The impact of this one video marked Manning and Assange for state vengeance. Here were US airmen murdering journalists and maiming children in a Baghdad street, clearly enjoying it, and describing their atrocity as "nice". Yet, in one vital sense, they did not get away with it; we are witnesses now, and the rest is up to us.

Anti-War Activists Targeted as ‘Domestic Terrorists’

June 25, 2013 Sarah Lazare, www.commondreams.org Educate! Freedom of Speech and Assembly, Government, Human Rights, Infiltration, Wars and Militarism

Anti-war activists who were infiltrated and spied on by the military for years have now been placed on the domestic terrorist list, they announced Monday. The shocking revelation comes as the activists prepare to sue the U.S. military for unlawful spying. The discovery is the latest development in a stunning saga that exposes vast post-9/11 spying networks in which military, police, and federal agencies appear to be in cahoots. Documents declassified in 2009 reveal that military informant John Towery, going by the name 'John Jacob,' spent over two years infiltrating and spying on Olympia, Washington anti-war and social justice groups, including Port Militarization Resistance, Students for a Democratic Society, the Industrial Workers of the World, and Iraq Veterans Against the War.

Senators: NSA Still Lying to Us, but Senators Can’t Tell Us How

June 25, 2013 Spencer Ackerman, www.guardian.co.uk Educate! Freedom of Speech and Assembly, Government, NSA

Senators Ron Wyden (Democrat, Oregon) and Mark Udall (Democrat, Colorado) wrote to General Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA, to correct "inaccurate" portrayals about restrictions on surveillance published in a factsheet available on the NSA's homepage. "In our judgment, this inaccuracy is significant, as it portrays protections for Americans' privacy as being significantly stronger than they actually are," the senators write. Yet they specified the "inaccurate" statement only in "the classified attachment to this letter."

Demonizing Edward Snowden: Which Side Are You On?

June 25, 2013 John Cassidy, www.newyorker.com Educate! Freedom of Speech and Assembly, Glenn Greenwald, Government, Human Rights, NSA

I suspect that many Washington journalists, especially the types who go on Sunday talk shows, feel the way Marshall does, but perhaps don’t have his level of self-awareness. It’s not just a matter of defending the Obama Administration, although there’s probably a bit of that. It’s something deeper, which has to do with attitudes toward authority. Proud of their craft and good at what they do, successful journalists like to think of themselves as fiercely independent. But, at the same time, they are part of the media and political establishment that stands accused of ignoring, or failing to pick up on, an intelligence outrage that’s been going on for years. It’s not surprising that some of them share Marshall’s view of Snowden as “some young guy I’ve never heard of before who espouses a political philosophy I don’t agree with and is now seeking refuge abroad for breaking the law.”

«1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 »

Daily movement news and resources