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Field of sunflowers. September, 2013. Photo by: joanneleon.
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In this story on a Defense News site, it is revealed that the White House has been meeting with eight Republican Senators all summer, trying to make the Grand Bargain happen. The headline says that the talks "collapsed" but what really happened is that the Republican senators insisted that some Democratic Senators be included in more Grand Bargain talks. So it's not off the table at all. This week a pivot happened and the Republican House is clearly rejecting Cruz's strategy and the defund Obamacare thing. They're deciding to go after it in the typical death by a thousand cuts way. So, as is typical for this government, the real deal making is done behind closed doors and at the last minute. Expect the Grand Bargain to appear again now. Just as another confirmation, the Fix the Debt creeps are active again too now and believe it or not, they're still using that "Can Kicks Back" ridiculous meme too. Everyone was asleep at the wheel but yesterday they suddenly woke up and realized that the Grand Bargain was looming again. I don't know why anyone would be the least bit surprised and didn't see it coming for months. We knew it would rear up again whenever an opportunity to take advantage of one of the manufactured crises came up. Shock Doctrine tactics, as usual. And of course none of the left grassroots organizations were prepared for it.
GOP-White House 'Grand Bargain' Talks Collapse
WASHINGTON — Senior Republican US senators say talks with the White House about a sequester-addressing fiscal deal have broken down, and they say any future talks must include Democratic members.
Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., was the first among a group of GOP senators with whom senior White House officials had been talking all summer about a “grand bargain” fiscal deal to reveal those talks had stalled. Corker told reporters the White House has lost credibility with Republican senators on several issues, including pursuit of a big fiscal deal.
[...]
Several participants confirmed efforts with the White House to strike a deal that lessens or voids sequestration have been scuttled, and signs of hope for a Pentagon and defense sector eager to avoid more cuts to planned military spending began to recede.
One of them, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told reporters last week the talks “are certainly on hold.”
Such a big fiscal deal has proven elusive for several years. Republicans and Democrats remain far apart on the contents of a grand bargain. The former wants more federal spending cuts and deep cuts to domestic entitlement programs; the latter wants some spending cuts, new tax revenues on wealthy earners and to mostly protect entitlement programs.
Digby.
"All the cuts they need are there to avoid a possible shutdown"
As I said in my earlier post, it's important to remember that the earlier deals didn't fail to materialize because the two ides disagreed on cutting Social Security. They didn't. It failed because the president refused to give up on some sort of tax hike in exchange. Both sides are on board with the cuts. So now we have a situation where the Republicans have added another demand: defund Obamacare. If they want to come up with some sort of agreement in which the GOP saves face, to me the logical way to do that would be for the Democrats to agree to drop their demand for tax hikes if the Republicans drop their demand for defunding Obamacare. What's left of the deal? You guessed it.
This "Social Good Summit" was held over the weekend and it's in coordination with the president's and Samantha Power's... movement, I guess you could call it... for "civil society". The tweets from this summit were bizarre but even more bizarre were the things that Samantha Power said in her Q&A remarks and she said them totally without irony. I'm still taken back by them and I've read them a few times. Could she possibly have not recognized the extreme irony in what she said? Also, Cashmore, the host of this and the CEO of Mashable kept saying that it had a lot of momentum online, but where did the people come from? Did you hear anything about this summit and did you have an opportunity to join this movement?
Remarks at the Mashable Social Good Summit
[...]
MR. CASHMORE: I mean, fundamentally you kind of hinted at that question and we can get into specifics soon. But with regards to technology, is it fundamentally a tool of democracy and of civil society and of these values you’re trying to push? Is it fundamentally, as we often discuss on this stage, is it just a very neutral thing and it depends how you use it? I mean, what’s your take on that?
AMBASSADOR POWER: Well, we’ve got examples on both sides of the ledger. I mean, governments are growing more and more sophisticated at shutting down the internet, blocking, filtering, using technology to trace human rights activists – the famous incident in Syria, devastating incident where Marie Colvin, who was one of the greatest journalists of our time, greatest war correspondent – one of the greatest war correspondents of the last century--was, we think, tracked down by virtue of her cell phone, the coordinates on her cell phone, and then struck by the Assad regime, and taken, killed. And, so we have those examples on the one hand.
And then I just came from a meeting just now, there were a lot of civil society activists who were in town and I met with a subset of them just before coming on stage. Many of them are going to be meeting with President Obama tomorrow, who is himself very concerned about the crackdown on civil society that’s going on around the world, the use of technologies to impede rather than expand democratic accountability and civic activism. It’s a major problem right now – major. I just want to make sure everybody is alert to this trend around the world, even with all the technology.
[...]
MR. CASHMORE: Well, (inaudible) on time, but I’d love to ask you finally: We’re talking about 2030 Now. What is the outlook for civil society, for democracy in 2030? Is it a situation where more people are empowered, where more voices are heard? Is it a situation where crackdowns continue to happen and, you know, the internet gets cut off and having your voice heard is just as difficult? I mean, what is your outlook for 2030 in civil society?
AMBASSADOR POWER: Well, I think right now the trend lines are not positive. But I think the truth of the matter is one reason that these governments are having to grow more sophisticated, in the last five years, 40 laws, restrictive NGO laws have been put in place – more than 40, even in countries that are democratic; restricting freedom of speech, expression, religion, association. I mean, basic stuff. So as I said, they’re sharing worst practices, but they’re doing so also because they’re aware of the explosion in civil society and they’re aware of the power of social media.
[Emphasis added]
Paying attention to the shield law’s critics
Journalists shouldn’t blindly support the shield law without taking in the whole picture
When a Senate committee this month approved the “Free Flow of Information Act of 2013,” applause was heard from scores of media shield law supporters, from the Newspaper Association of America to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. To them, the news came as a relief after revelations the feds had secretly seized Associated Press phone records and labeled a Fox News reporter a criminal “co-conspirator” as an excuse to get his emails.
So perhaps it isn’t surprising that the AP story on the bill and newspaper coverage generally was unburdened by complexity: Long-overdue shield law advances; journalists to protect confidential sources and information. Yet magazine websites told a different story, one of a flawed law with holes that worry “even some supporters.” This raises a question: Shouldn’t the critics get more attention in the mainstream coverage?
[...]
“I guarantee you,” Armstrong countered, that “they will find the exceptions within the prospective shield law to continue to investigate … and it’s being investigated that destroys the trust and credibility we have with our sources.”
[...]
“At its core,” said panelist Charlie Savage of The New York Times, the federal media shield bill “moves from the attorney general’s office to a judge’s chamber the decision: Are we going to issue the subpoena or not? … That alone is a deterrent to frivolously or overly broad requests and it may in fact have a significant change in how often such a subpoena is issued.”
Why We Should Fear – and Fight – An Entitlement-Cutting “Grand Bargain”
It’s autumn, when a politician’s fancy turns to thoughts of a Grand Bargain.
Right now it looks as if the two sides are at an impasse. But President Obama’s “no negotiations” posture only applies to the debt ceiling, and his budget still includes the “chained CPI” cut to Social Security. The Republicans who are attempting to force a showdown over Obamacare are still railing against the programs they call “entitlements.” ...
Tea Party Republicans are demanding Obamacare’s repeal in return for a budget deal. The President says he’ll refuse to negotiate. Things look hopelessly gridlocked.
Look again. Boehner will want to give his party’s Tea Party wing something in return for dropping their futile Obamacare attacks, and entitlements would be the perfect prize. As for the president, in a terse conversation with Boehner on Friday he merely said “he wouldn’t negotiate with him on the debt limit,” according to Boehner’s office. ... That’s an argument about process, not content. When it comes to “entitlement” spending, the two sides’ positions are disturbingly close. The president’s budget still contains the “chained CPI” cut. Boehner has talked about cutting these programs for years. On the Senate side, Republican Rob Portman of Ohio called for cutting “the 65 percent of the budget that is not touched: entitlements.”
And Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma said this: “If we found $700 billion in savings from entitlements — Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security — it would relieve pressure on the Pentagon and on non-mandatory spending. All the cuts they need are there to avoid a possible shutdown.”
The Average American Family Pays $6,000 a Year in Subsidies to Big Business
That's over and above our payments to the big companies for energy and food and housing and health care and all our tech devices. ... The $6,000 figure is an average, which means that low-income families are paying less. But it also means that families (households) making over $72,000 are paying more than $6,000 to the corporations.
$870 for Direct Subsidies and Grants to Companies
$696 for Business Incentives at the State, County, and City Levels
$722 for Interest Rate Subsidies for Banks
$350 for Retirement Fund Bank Fees
$1,268 for Overpriced Medications
$870 for Corporate Tax Subsidies
$1,231 for Revenue Losses from Corporate Tax Havens
[See the article for details]
Merkel Victory a Blow to Europe Reeling Under Austerity's Thumb
German Chancellor Angela Merkel won a historic third term to office on Sunday, leading the conservative parties most closely aligned with her to their best election results in more than two decades while rivals—both further to the right and those on the left—suffered lost ground at the polls. ...
Germany's left-wing Die Tageszeitung newspaper offered this editorial on the election results:
And so, the worst chancellor in the country's postwar history is set to stay in office. Though her conservatives will be forced to enter into a new coalition government -- probably with the Social Democrats -- not much is likely to change as a result. The key questions of our time have been left undiscussed. The fact that Merkel's euro-zone policies benefit only the banks and investors in rich member states, and the fact that people in the troubled economies and taxpayers in the relatively stable economies are the ones to foot the bill were barely touched upon by the Social Democrats and the Greens during this campaign.
The fact that Merkel is set to stay in office is bad news for Europe. The possibility that she might govern alongside the Social Democrats in a grand coalition hardly softens the blow. The SPD does have remnants of a Keynesian approach -- they know that debts cannot be reduced through austerity. They are familiar with simple mathematics -- they understand that without a debt haircut, Greece will never get back on its feet. So there is a possibility the SPD will push through the occasional amendment to Merkel's euro-zone policies. But a fundamentally different political approach -- a totally new direction -- is not to be expected.
Merkelism = Thatcherism 2.0? Critics accuse Merkel of pushing EU in wrong direction
India among top targets of spying by NSA
Among the BRICS group of emerging nations, which featured quite high on the list of countries targeted by the secret surveillance programs of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) for collecting telephone data and internet records, India was the number one target of snooping by the American agency.
In the overall list of countries spied on by NSA programs, India stands at fifth place, with billions of pieces of information plucked from its telephone and internet networks just in 30 days.
According to top-secret documents provided to The Hindu by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the American agency carried out intelligence gathering activities in India using at least two major programs: the first one is Boundless Informant, a data-mining system which keeps track of how many calls and emails are collected by the security agency; and the second one is PRISM, a program which intercepts and collects actual content from the networks. While Boundless Informant was used for monitoring telephone calls and access to the internet in India, PRISM collected information about certain specific issues — not related to terrorism — through Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, Apple, YouTube and several other web-based services.
Asked by The Hindu why a friendly country like India was subjected to so much surveillance by the U.S., a spokesman of the U.S. government’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence said: “The U.S. government will respond through diplomatic channels to our partners and allies. While we are not going to comment publicly on every specific alleged intelligence activity, as a matter of policy we have made clear that the United States gathers foreign intelligence of the type gathered by all nations. We value our cooperation with all countries on issues of mutual concern.”The DNI spokesman chose not to respond to questions about how the NSA managed to pick so much data from India — 13.5 billion pieces of information in just one month — especially from its telephone networks, and about whether it had received the cooperation of Indian telecom companies.
Spilling the NSA's Secrets: Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger on the Inside Story of Snowden Leaks
In secret, Fisa court contradicted US supreme court on constitutional rights
On Tuesday, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) declassified an opinion in which it explained why the government's collection of records of all Americans' phone calls is constitutional, and that if there is a problem with the program, it is a matter of political judgment, not constitutional law. So, should Americans just keep calm and carry on phoning? Not really.
Instead, we should worry about a court that, lacking a real adversarial process to inform it, failed while taking its best shot at explaining its position to the public to address the most basic, widely-known counter-argument to its position. The opinion does not even mention last year's unanimous US supreme court decision on the fourth amendment and GPS tracking, a decision in which all three opinions include strong language that may render the NSA's phone records collection program unconstitutional. No court that had been briefed by both sides would have ignored the grave constitutional issues raised by the three opinions of Justices Scalia, Sotomayor, and Alito in United States v Jones. And no opinion that fails to consider these should calm anyone down. ...
In Jones, the government attached a GPS device to a suspect's car and tracked all the car's movements for four weeks. The government argued that since the car was visible on public roads, and could have been tracked in the open by a police officer, no warrant was needed. Just like phone metadata, the car's movements were not in private – they were on public roads. The lower court had already excluded evidence from when the car was parked in its private parking lot. All nine justices found the tracking unconstitutional, and each of the opinions offer strong reasons to reject the Fisa court's interpretation of the fourth amendment with regards to phone metadata.
Action
Stop Watching Us.
The revelations about the National Security Agency's surveillance apparatus, if true, represent a stunning abuse of our basic rights. We demand the U.S. Congress reveal the full extent of the NSA's spying programs.
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