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| Whistle-blower: 27 prescient Edward Snowden Quotes about the US Govt abusing power!

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27 Edward Snowden Quotes About U.S. Government Spying That Should Send A Chill Up Your Spine ~ The Economic Collapse.

Would you be willing to give up what Edward Snowden has given up?  He has given up his high paying job, his home, his girlfriend, his family, his future and his freedom just to expose the monolithic spy machinery that the U.S. government has been secretly building to the world.  He says that he does not want to live in a world where there isn’t any privacy.  He says that he does not want to live in a world where everything that he says and does is recorded.  Thanks to Snowden, we now know that the U.S. government has been spying on us to a degree that most people would have never even dared to imagine.  Up until now, the general public has known very little about the U.S. government spy grid that knows almost everything about us.  But making this information public is going to cost Edward Snowden everything.  Essentially, his previous life is now totally over.  And if the U.S. government gets their hands on him, he will be very fortunate if he only has to spend the next several decades rotting in some horrible prison somewhere.  There is a reason why government whistleblowers are so rare.  And most Americans are so apathetic that they wouldn’t even give up watching their favorite television show for a single evening to do something good for society.  Most Americans never even try to make a difference because they do not believe that it will benefit them personally.  Meanwhile, our society continues to fall apart all around us.  Hopefully the great sacrifice that Edward Snowden has made will not be in vain.  Hopefully people will carefully consider what he has tried to share with the world.  The following are 27 quotes from Edward Snowden about U.S. government spying that should send a chill up your spine…

 

#1 ”The majority of people in developed countries spend at least some time interacting with the Internet, and Governments are abusing that necessity in secret to extend their powers beyond what is necessary and appropriate.”

#2 ”…I believe that at this point in history, the greatest danger to our freedom and way of life comes from the reasonable fear of omniscient State powers kept in check by nothing more than policy documents.”

#3 ”The government has granted itself power it is not entitled to. There is no public oversight. The result is people like myself have the latitude to go further than they are allowed to.”

#4 ”…I can’t in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building.”

#5 ”The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything.”

#6 ”With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your e-mails or your wife’s phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your e-mails, passwords, phone records, credit cards.”

#7 ”Any analyst at any time can target anyone. Any selector, anywhere… I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the President…”

#8 ”To do that, the NSA specifically targets the communications of everyone. It ingests them by default. It collects them in its system and it filters them and it analyzes them and it measures them and it stores them for periods of time simply because that’s the easiest, most efficient and most valuable way to achieve these ends. So while they may be intending to target someone associated with a foreign government, or someone that they suspect of terrorism, they are collecting YOUR communications to do so.”

#9 ”I believe that when [senator Ron] Wyden and [senator Mark] Udall asked about the scale of this, they [the NSA] said it did not have the tools to provide an answer. We do have the tools and I have maps showing where people have been scrutinized most. We collect more digital communications from America than we do from the Russians.”

#10 ”…they are intent on making every conversation and every form of behavior in the world known to them.”

#11 ”Even if you’re not doing anything wrong, you’re being watched and recorded. …it’s getting to the point where you don’t have to have done anything wrong, you simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody, even by a wrong call, and then they can use this system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you’ve ever made, every friend you’ve ever discussed something with, and attack you on that basis, to sort of derive suspicion from an innocent life.”

#12 ”Allowing the U.S. government to intimidate its people with threats of retaliation for revealing wrongdoing is contrary to the public interest.”

#13 ”Everyone everywhere now understands how bad things have gotten — and they’re talking about it. They have the power to decide for themselves whether they are willing to sacrifice their privacy to the surveillance state.”

#14 ”I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under.”

#15 ”I don’t want to live in a world where there’s no privacy, and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity.”

#16 ”I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong.”

#17 ”I had been looking for leaders, but I realized that leadership is about being the first to act.”

#18 ”There are more important things than money. If I were motivated by money, I could have sold these documents to any number of countries and gotten very rich.”

#19 ”The great fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change. [People] won’t be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things… And in the months ahead, the years ahead, it’s only going to get worse. [The NSA will] say that… because of the crisis, the dangers that we face in the world, some new and unpredicted threat, we need more authority, we need more power, and there will be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose it. And it will be turnkey tyranny.”

#20 ”I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant.”

#21 ”You can’t come up against the world’s most powerful intelligence agencies and not accept the risk.”

#22 ”I know the media likes to personalize political debates, and I know the government will demonize me.”

#23 ”We have got a CIA station just up the road – the consulate here in Hong Kong – and I am sure they are going to be busy for the next week. And that is a concern I will live with for the rest of my life, however long that happens to be.”

#24 ”I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions, and that the return of this information to the public marks my end.”

#25 ”There’s no saving me.”

#26 ”The only thing I fear is the harmful effects on my family, who I won’t be able to help any more. That’s what keeps me up at night.”

#27 ”I do not expect to see home again.”

Would you make the same choice that Edward Snowden made?  Most Americans would not.  One CNN reporter says that he really admires Snowden because he has tried to get insiders to come forward with details about government spying for years, but none of them were ever willing to…

As a digital technology writer, I have had more than one former student and colleague tell me about digital switchers they have serviced through which calls and data are diverted to government servers or the big data algorithms they’ve written to be used on our e-mails by intelligence agencies. I always begged them to write about it or to let me do so while protecting their identities. They refused to come forward and believed my efforts to shield them would be futile. “I don’t want to lose my security clearance. Or my freedom,” one told me.

And if the U.S. government has anything to say about it, Snowden is most definitely going to pay for what he has done.  In fact, according to the Daily Beast, a directorate known as “the Q Group” is already hunting Snowden down…

The people who began chasing Snowden work for the Associate Directorate for Security and Counterintelligence, according to former U.S. intelligence officers who spoke on condition of anonymity. The directorate, sometimes known as “the Q Group,” is continuing to track Snowden now that he’s outed himself as The Guardian’s source, according to the intelligence officers.

If Snowden is not already under the protection of some foreign government (such as China), it will just be a matter of time before U.S. government agents get him.

And how will they treat him once they find him?  Well, one reporter overheard a group of U.S. intelligence officials talking about how Edward Snowden should be “disappeared”.  The following is from a Daily Mail article that was posted on Monday…

A group of intelligence officials were overheard yesterday discussing how the National Security Agency worker who leaked sensitive documents to a reporter last week should be ‘disappeared.’

Foreign policy analyst and editor at large of The Atlantic, Steve Clemons, tweeted about the ‘disturbing’ conversation after listening in to four men who were sitting near him as he waited for a flight at Washington’s Dulles airport.

‘In Dulles UAL lounge listening to 4 US intel officials saying loudly leaker & reporter on #NSA stuff should be disappeared recorded a bit,’ he tweeted at 8:42 a.m. on Saturday.

According to Clemons, the men had been attending an event hosted by the Intelligence and National Security Alliance.

As an American, I am deeply disturbed that the U.S. government is embarrassing itself in front of the rest of the world like this.

The fact that we are collecting trillions of pieces of information on people all over the planet is a massive embarrassment and the fact that our politicians are defending this practice now that it has been exposed is a massive embarrassment.

If the U.S. government continues to act like a Big Brother police state, then the rest of the world will eventually conclude that is exactly what we are.  At that point we become the “bad guy” and we lose all credibility with the rest of the planet.

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Paranoia1

 

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| UK Economy: Must we live with a post-truth media?

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Must we live with a post-truth media? ~ Simon Wren-Lewis,

. 

Something odd but familiar was going on when I wrote this post on Labour’s economic record. The Labour leader and shadow chancellor both made speeches that had apparently been months in the making, and which were (I think intentionally) spun as trying to convince voters that they could trust a future Labour government with fiscal management.

Why odd? Because it presumes that there is some real problem to solve. It presumes that the last Labour government managed the nation’s fiscal affairs very badly, and so today’s politicians have to show they would be different. Yet the paper I wrote tells a very different story. The previous Labour government set up fiscal rules that were both responsible and better than rules subsequently adopted elsewhere. Until the financial crisis, they kept to those rules. Here is the basic data: the top line is the debt to GDP ratio, the bottom line a scaled up current balance to GDP ratio.
Labour Government’s Fiscal Record: source OBR

Of course it is possible to find fault, and I do. In hindsight it would have been better if the debt to GDP ratio had been kept nearer 30% of GDP, or even reduced further. But debt to GDP was lower before the recession than when Labour took office, and the current balance was almost zero. Hardly a profligate government. Indeed one of the faults I find, over optimism in Treasury forecasts, has been fixed, to the Conservative party’s credit, with the creation of the OBR.
With the financial crisis everything changed, because this produced the Great Recession. Deficits go up in recessions. There was a small contribution from the government’s attempt to reduce the impact of the recession, an attempt which analysis suggests was successful, so they should take credit for that. It is pretty obvious that you cannot use the fact that the deficit rose in the recession to argue that Labour cannot be trusted with the public finances. Again, the data speaks – look at when the deficit rose in the past.
Of course you could say that the Great Recession was the government’s fault. It should have foreseen the financial crisis coming. It should have known that levels of GDP in 2007 were going to be interpreted, five years later, as a massive economic boom rather than as they appeared at the time as something close to trend. It should have known this, despite the advice it was getting to the contrary from the Bank of England, the IMF, OECD, most economists …. and Her Majesty’s opposition! You can take that idealist view – but not if you were agreeing with all this advice at the time.
So the idea that the last Labour government seriously mismanaged the nation’s finances is a myth. What is more, unlike older myths like the earth is flat, as these charts show it is not something that is generated by perception and which requires expertise to unravel. Unless you are completely naive about the impact of recessions on deficits, a quick look at the data tells the true story. So it is a manufactured myth that distorts what the numbers appear to show. The problem with myths is that after a time, even otherwise good journalists at good places like the Financial Times start believing them.
Now we all know who manufactured the myth. Yet I think most people believe that if a political party started telling a story that was clearly at variance with the facts, it would be found out. In short, people expect journalists and economic commentators to confront politicians who attempt to create and perpetuate myths. In this case they did not. Its also pretty obvious why they did not. The incentive for organisations like the BBC is to stay out of trouble. And who has been making most noise about bias in economic reporting – the government. As any economist will tell you, its all about incentives.

So it really is the duty of academics to speak to truth, as loudly as they can, when it is being ignored by the media. On this topic, the media in general and the BBC in particular have been hopelessly biased in allowing the government to get away with this myth. They have some serious explaining to do.

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| Put the NSA on trial!

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Put the NSA on trial ~  , Salon.

With potential perjury by top officials, and new questions about spying, let’s stop assuming everything is legal!

Put the NSA on trialJames Clapper, Keith Alexander(Credit: AP/Manuel Balce Ceneta/Ann Heisenfelt)

“When the president does it that means it is not illegal.” These infamous words from Richard Nixon appear to summarize the public legal justification for the Obama administration’s unprecedented mass surveillance operation. Perhaps worse, Permanent Washington would have us believe that this rationale is unquestionably accurate and that therefore the National Security Administration’s surveillance is perfectly legal.

For example, Richard Haas of the Council on Foreign Relations said of Edward Snowden: “‘Whistleblower’ is person who reveals wrongdoing, corruption, illegal activity. none of this applies here even if you oppose U.S. government policy.” Likewise, the Boston Globe’s Bryan Bender insists, “I wish media would stop calling Snowden a whistleblower — it maligns those who truly reveal corrupt or illegal activity.” And the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin definitively states: “These were legally authorized programs.”

The idea here, which has quickly become the standard talking point for partisans trying to defend the NSA program and the Obama administration, is that while you may object to the NSA’s mass surveillance system, it is nonetheless perfectly legal as is the conduct surrounding it. Therefore, the logic goes, Snowden isn’t an honorable “whistle-blower” he’s a traitorous “leaker,” and the only criminal in this case is Snowden and Snowden alone.

The first — and most simple — way to debunk this talking point is to simply behold two sets of testimony by Obama administration national security officials. In one, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper categorically denies that the government “collect(s) any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.” In another, the Guardian reports that NSA Director General Keith Alexander “denied point-blank that the agency had the figures on how many Americans had their electronic communications collected or reviewed.”

Both of those claims, of course, were exposed as lies by Snowden’s disclosures. So at minimum Snowden deserves the title “whistle-blower” (and the attendant protections that are supposed to come with such a title) because his disclosures outed Clapper and Alexander’s statements as probable cases of illegal perjury before Congress. In other words, in terms of perjury, the disclosures didn’t expose controversial-but-legal activity, they exposed illegal behavior.

That’s not some technicality, by the way; the whole reason perjury before Congress is considered a serious crime is because if executive branch officials like Clapper and Alexander are permitted to lie to the legislative branch, then that branch cannot exercise its constitutional oversight responsibilities. Harsh punishment for perjury is considered a necessary deterrent to such deception.

There’s also the issue of whether the NSA’s surveillance itself is legal, and whether Snowden’s disclosures show the NSA is continuing to break U.S. federal statutes (we’ll get to the Constitution in a second). Yes, you read that right: The word “continuing” is appropriate because back in 2009, NSA officials admitted they were breaking the law.

As the New York Times reported at the time, the agency “intercepted private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress.” Additionally, the Times noted that “several intelligence officials, as well as lawyers briefed” about the illegal activity “described the practice as significant and systemic.” Meanwhile, Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., yesterday declared that his review of the program proved it violates federal statutes.

“When I saw what was being done, I felt it was so out of sync with the plain language of the law,” he told MSNBC.

In light of the NSA itself already admitting it broke the law in “systemic” fashion; in light of a prominent senator saying the program is illegal; and in light of the “Boundless Informant”disclosure showing the NSA may be broadly surveilling domestic (rather than exclusively foreign) communications as statutes are supposed to curtail: In light of all that, why would anyone simply assume at face value that the program Snowden exposed is perfectly legal?

Finally, over and above whether the NSA program is complying with federal statutes, there’s the issue of the program’s constitutionality — aka the ultimate definition of “legality.”

Permanent Washington and Obama partisans who support the NSA surveillance program cite the Patriot Act and the fact that NSA obtained a FISA warrant as proof that the program is legal and as a way to ignore the constitutional questions. They would have us not only ignore the NSA’s own aforementioned admissions of illegal behavior, but additionally have us believe the constitutionality of NSA’s unprecedented surveillance and of such a broad-sweeping “ongoing”FISA warrant has already been definitively established, even though, of course, it hasn’t. Not even close.

Four cases are particularly relevant here. In the first two (ACLU vs. NSA and the al-Haramain charity case), district courts ruled for plaintiffs in their arguments that the NSA’s warrantless surveillance is illegal. There was also the Clapper vs. Amnesty International case, which challenged the constitutionality of the underlying FISA law, which authorizes the kind of surveillance that Snowden’s disclosures document. And, according to Mother Jones, there is “an 86-page court opinion that determined that the government had violated the spirit of federal surveillance laws and engaged in unconstitutional spying.” In that latter case, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence actually admits that the NSA has engaged in behavior that is “unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment” and that “circumvented the spirit of the law.”

In the first three cases, technicalities won the day when they were all eventually overturned not on grounds that the NSA’s mass surveillance is constitutional, but on grounds that the plaintiffs supposedly didn’t have standing. Summing it up, Reuters reports, to date, “The (Supreme Court) has refused to review government surveillance practices adopted since the attacks of September 11, 2001.”

Why weren’t all these plaintiffs granted standing, you ask? As legal expert Marcy Wheeler notes, it’s all related to — you guessed it! — secrecy.

“The government has gone to great lengths to say because this is all secret, no one can prove they’ve been surveilled, so (plaintiffs) can’t make a harm argument,” she said.

Put another way, it’s difficult to prove a case against the government when the government is allowed to keep case-critical information classified.

Meanwhile, on the fourth case reported by Mother Jones, the government is still fighting to keep the court ruling secret.

All of that brings us back to Snowden’s disclosure. With his whistle-blowing, more germane details about the NSA’s entire surveillance operation are now public, meaning other plaintiffs may now have access to information necessary to achieve standing. And there are, indeed, already other plaintiffs: For instance, Sen. Rand Paul (R) is promising to mount a Supreme Court challenge to the constitutionality of the broad FISA warrant at issue in Snowden’s disclosure (at issue will be the yet-to-be-adjudicated question of whether such an “ongoing” warrant that allows spying on millions of Americans really comports with the Fourth Amendment’s “probable cause” precept). Similarly, the Electronic Frontier Foundation already has a case against NSA surveillance pending.

Those cases coupled with the information from Snowden could, in turn, compel an explicit Supreme Court ruling on the entire surveillance system’s legality.

Looked at from a constitutional perspective, then, we shouldn’t simply assume Snowden’s disclosures are about a controversial-but-legal NSA program, as NSA defenders and Obama loyalists assert. Instead, it’s quite possible they may help definitively prove the illegality of the surveillance operations.

No doubt, all these statutory and constitutional questions surrounding the NSA’s surveillance operations are why when publicly claiming that the program is perfectly legal, Obama officials also, according to Businessweek, refuse to make public their jurisprudential justifications for such a claim. They clearly fear that when subjected to scrutiny, the program will be shown to be, as Sen. Merkley put it, “Out of sync with the plain language of the law.”

Thus, the administration’s strategy is to at once stonewall on the details and insist ad nauseam that everything is perfectly legal, when that assertion is, at best, a fact-free assumption, and more likely a devious misdirect. That Permanent Washington and so many Obama loyalists would nonetheless echo such a misdirect is a commentary on how political self-interest and partisanship now trumps everything else — even the law of the land.

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Paranoia1

 

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| US Debate: Supreme Court OKs Unfettered DNA Collection — An Invasion of Privacy or a Blow to Crime?

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Debate: Supreme Court OKs Unfettered DNA Collection — An Invasion of Privacy or a Blow to Crime? ~ Democracy Now.

In a landmark decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled the police can collect DNA samples from people they arrest even before they are convicted of a crime. Supporters of the swabbing method call it “the fingerprinting of the 21st century” that will help nab criminals and break open unsolved cases. But privacy advocates say the ruling is vague because it does not define what constitutes a “serious crime,” and could create an incentive for police to make more arrests. The Supreme Court’s 5-to-4 ruling will likely fuel an expansion of DNA swabbing nationwide. We host a debate between Michael Risher of the American Civil Liberties Union and Mai Fernandez of the National Center for Victims of Crime.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We turn now to a major decision by a divided U.S. Supreme Court that allows police to take DNAsamples when a person is arrested for a, quote, “serious” crime. The case centered on a Maryland law used to take a DNA test of a man arrested for a felony assault. The test matched DNA in a rape case six years earlier that had previously gone unsolved. This is an exchange from the case’s oral arguments, between Maryland’s Chief Deputy Attorney General Katherine Winfree and Justice Antonin Scalia, who later wrote in his dissent that the law violates the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure.

KATHERINE WINFREE: Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the court, since 2009, when Maryland began to collect DNA samples from arrestees charged with violent crimes and burglary, there have been 225 matches, 75 prosecutions and 42 convictions, including that of respondent King.

JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA: Well, that’s really good. I’ll bet you if you conducted a lot of unreasonable searches and seizures, you’d get more convictions, too. That proves absolutely nothing.

KATHERINE WINFREE: Well, I think, Justice Scalia, it does in fact point out the fact that the statute is working. And in the state’s view, the act is constitutional.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Ultimately, the court upheld Maryland’s law, which lets police use a swab to collect DNA from the cells inside a person’s cheek. Supporters of the method call it, quote, “the fingerprinting of the 21st century.” So far, 25 states have passed laws that are similar to Maryland’s. Some even allow DNA swabs for misdemeanor arrests. But privacy advocates say the ruling is vague because it does not define what constitutes a “serious crime” and could create an incentive for police to make more arrests.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, with this five-to-four ruling, more states are likely to adapt similar measures despite such concerns.

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| Your online freedom is worth fighting for, isn’t it?

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Your online freedom is worth fighting for, isn’t it? ~

    • ____________________________________________________________

      We need to find a means of realigning the balance between who profits from personal information and who loses.
      ____________________________________________________________

 

 

Courtesy of technology, we are all authors today as well as audiences – not to mention our own part-time publicists, social secretaries, agents and ambassadors. Though some people still shun social media, for most of us “identity” is something we forge in the eyes of the world, composed of countless comments, tags, status updates, images, and half-forgotten submitted forms.

If there’s one thing that publicists and ambassadors alike have long known, it’s that we cannot control the afterlife of our words. As soon as they are written or spoken they become the property of the world, grist to its mills of rumour and opinion and to a vengeful eternity of quotation and misquotation. When it comes to our online outpourings, forgetfulness is equally impossible. Data only accumulates, and the uses to which it can be put defy all anticipation.

This doesn’t mean anticipation isn’t a game worth playing, though. What might the thousands of words and images sent out by a teenager today be used for decades down the line, not to mention the gigabytes of data representing their recorded actions and preferences? The right algorithms can crunch this information into almost any context, from credit scores to health and motor insurance premiums; from indexes of employability and influence to net worth.

Hence the European Union’s recent emphasis on revising the rules around data protection, and on our so-called right to be forgotten – a proposition that raises important questions: what counts as personal data in the first place, where burdens of proof and administrative effort will lie, and how amenable present business models are to such a notion in the first place.

For some people it’s a losing battle, and scarcely worth debating. When you sign up to the terms and conditions of a particular service, they argue, you should know what you’re getting into. And if you’re using that service for free, you should accept that your words and actions themselves form the product that’s being sold.

It’s an appealingly absolute argument: shut up and put up, or opt out. Yet what it fails to acknowledge is the degree to which many alleged options are becoming less optional. Don’t want to own a mobile phone, have a social media account or provide your personal details to online merchants? Count yourself out of the running for an increasing number of jobs, insurance schemes and government services. And don’t forget that the gaping holes in your data will set red flags waving across a host of algorithms every time you do pop up on the grid.

baby's and man's hand on keyboard

What might the gigabytes of data representing our recorded actions and preferences be used for decades down the line? Photograph: Garry Gay/Alamy

Apocalyptic pictures are easy to paint, of course. Yet personal privacy already looks like the rock on which one utopian vision of technology will founder. This is the notion that openness is a certain good, and that “free” is automatically aligned with “freedom” – a faith that’s hard to maintain in the light of the consequences of putting so much of our identities into the hands of third (and fourth, and fifth) parties.

As the author and computer scientist Jaron Lanier puts it in his recent book,Who Owns the Future?, “It is all too easy to forget that ‘free’ inevitably means that someone else will be deciding how you live.” As they stand, most free and open online business models rest on a grotesque inequality between what is given by the many – detailed, constantly updated personalised data – and what is taken by the few: profit, knowledge, and the indefinite and largely unaccountable possession of both.

Realigning this balance is a more complex business than just earmarking certain types of data for deletion. It’s also, though, a battle eminently worth fighting. To protect our rights as 21st-century citizens, able to participate in society on an equal footing, means affording our digital shadows some of the same protections that guarantee our own freedom – freedom from lies and abuse, from indefinite detention, from the unappealable verdicts of unseen tribunals.

All of the above describes the ways in which some information systems work now – as if we were nothing more than data ourselves. Yet – to quote Lanier again – “people are the only sources or destinations of information, or indeed of any meaning to the machine at all”. We must not betray the great gifts of our tools by valuing ourselves too little.

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| UK Budget 2013: George Osborne is failing on his own terms!

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Budget 2013: George Osborne is failing on his own terms ~ James Meadway,
Senior Economist, NEF (THE NEW ECONOMICS FOUNDATION).

Albert Einstein had a working definition of madness: doing the same thing twice, and expecting a different result the second time. I’m not sure where that leaves George Osborne, now into his fourth cuts Budget. There is something almost admirable about his dogged persistence of austerity against the siren calls of basic economic theory, assortedNobel Prizewinners, the IMF and simple brute reality to change course. But Osborne follows his own, increasingly lonely, path.

I say almost admirable. Of course there is nothing to admire in the reports of the former soldier and his wife driven to suicide after their benefits were cut, or the child starved to death in Westminster, or the 32 sick and disabled people dying every week after failing new, stringent disability tests that found them “fit to work”.

There is nothing to admire in seeing most people’s real living standards slide as the recession grinds onwards. Real average incomes have fallen some 4.5% since the crash and are forecast to fall well into the future.

There is nothing to admire, once again, in seeing a Budget that hits the poorest hardest, even according to the Treasury’s own figures. Everyone loses something under Osborne: but the poorest 40% lose more than the middle 40% (Chart 2.C). The poorest fifth of the population lose more than the average.

Osborne promised us, in his emergency Budget of June 2010, that he would deliver growth, cut the deficit, and reduce the national debt. Austerity would deliver “fiscal credibility”, attracting investment and driving the recovery. His pet forecasters, the Office for Budget Responsibility – now showing at least some signs of straining on the leash – predicted 2.8% growth for 2013 as the private sector recovered. Real incomes, they predicted, would be rising by 3.8% this year (Table 3.1). Business investment would be booming by nearly 11%.

The reality is, by now, wearily familiar. The private sector rebound simply has not happened. Business investment is down £49bn from its peak. That is feeding into a collapse in productivity, now down 12% on its pre-crisis trend. A feeble private sector has fed into falling real wages, its weakness – disastrously – reinforced by sharp cuts to public expenditure. Cuts to public spending, in a weak economy, drag the economy down further: as government spends less, the rest of us earn less, and as we earn less, we spend less: a vicious circle of decline.

Osborne, apparently realising this, has attempted to correct his folly in pushing through major cuts to capital expenditure. £2.5bn extra will now be found for capital project by slicing departmental spending still further. But while the cuts to individual departments will be severe, the impact on the whole economy will be miniscule – on the Treasury’s own impact estimates, it will add approximately 0.06% to GDP over each year. This, to use the technical term, is knack all.

Are there any positives in this? An increase in the zero income tax personal allowance to £10,000 will be welcomed by many, but of course will be overwhelmed for the poorest by the earlier VAT hike. Likewise on National Insurance Contributions. Osborne gives a little, but takes far more away.

Growth down. National debt up. Government deficit going nowhere. Industrial production down but financial services growing. Osborne has failed on every measure he set himself. Like the Bourbons, he has learned nothing and forgotten nothing. The worst Chancellor in modern British history.

nef has today released a report on how we might start to dig ourselves out of this mess. It details not just the failings of this government, but how the pursuit of austerity and the failure to recover are tied to deep, long-term problems in the British economy. We need an alternative macroeconomic strategy.

Austerity UK 1 _____________________________________________________________________

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| “No reason exists” to justify “inherently unfair” UK Secret Courts, say expert lawyers!

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“No reason exists” to justify “inherently unfair” Secret Courts, say expert lawyers ~ Reprieve.

The Special Advocates, a group of expert lawyers who work in cases involving national security, have attacked the Government’s plans for secret courts, describing them as “inherently unfair and contrary to the common law tradition.”

They have also criticised the lack of evidence produced by the Government in support of the plans to roll out secret courts – or ‘Closed Material Procedures’ (CMPs) – across the civil justice system, saying that “no…reasons have been advanced” to justify the move, and adding that “in our view, none exists.”

The new criticisms, contained in a note submitted to Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights in February, come ahead of this week’s Commons debates on the plans, which are contained in the Justice and Security Bill.

The use of CMPs would mean that, in cases brought against the Government, ministers would be able to exclude the press, the public and even their opponents from the court room, and present a one-sided case to the judge.  They have been criticised as a significant departure from long-established principles of open and natural justice, including the right to hear and challenge the evidence used against you in court which is at the heart of Britain’s adversarial system.

The Special Advocates warn that, under CMPs, “it will be possible to have proceedings in which the court’s decision is based entirely on evidence about which one of the parties has been told nothing at all.”

Civil liberties groups, including Reprieve, have expressed concerns that it would be possible to use CMPs to cover up Government embarrassment or wrongdoing in cases involving abuses such as torture.

In their note, the Special Advocates say:

  • “[We] reaffirm our view that no compelling justification for the proposals in Part 2 of the Bill has been made out, notwithstanding the Government’s assertions to the contrary”
  • “We consider CMPs to be inherently unfair and contrary to the common law tradition, because they allow the court to makes its decision based on evidence which one party is unable to see or comment on or challenge.”
  • “There is to date no example of a case in which a fair trial has been shown to be impossible because of the application of existing rules to sensitive national security evidence.”
  • “It has not been shown in practice that the present system has led to any unfairness, as no case has been identified which could not be tried fairly under existing procedures”
  • “We therefore remain of the view we previously expressed: ‘that CMPs are inherently unfair and contrary to the common law tradition; that the Government would have to show the most compelling reasons to justify their introduction; that no such reasons have been advanced; and that, in our view, none exists.’”

Commenting, Reprieve’s Executive Director, Clare Algar said: “The Special Advocates are the experts in this field, and it is shameful that the Government has not respected their views.  They are taking a principled stand against plans for secret courts which would undermine centuries-old British freedoms and put the Government above the law.  Even if ministers won’t listen to them, our MPs must, and vote against these plans in the Commons this week.”

ENDS

Notes to editors:

  1. For further information, please contact Donald Campbell in Reprieve’s press office: 07791 755 415 / donald.campbell@reprieve.org.uk
  2. The Special Advocates note can be viewed in full here.
  3. The Justice and Security Bill is expected to be debated at Report Stage in the House of Commons on Monday 4 and Thursday 7 March.  Further information on the Bill can be found here.

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NO MORE LIESa

 

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| Osborne’s obduracy’s backfired: 10 steps to kickstart the UK economy!

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10 steps to kickstart the UK economy ~

 

 

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The human cost of George Osborne‘s austerity politics is too high. We need to invest in jobs and increase benefits.
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George Osborne

‘The news is not good for George Osborne just two weeks before his budget statement.’ Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

The loss of the UK’s triple-A rating, an economy teetering on the brink of a triple-dip recession and a deficit growing rather than shrinking – the news is not good for George Osborne just two weeks before his budget statement.

But before I risk evoking sympathy for the chancellor, it’s worth remembering that the human cost of his failing austerity policies is not merely reputational but material for millions of people. Increasing numbers of people are finding it impossible to make ends meet – with over 6 million unemployed or underemployed, hundreds of thousands dependent on food banks, and child poverty rising again.

So here is a 10-point plan to boost the economy in the public interest, in place of the government’s failing approach:

1. Break the pay freeze

Pay across all sectors has risen below inflation in the last four years – taking £50bn out of workers’ pockets. For the 250,000 public servants I represent it means they are more than £1,200 a year worse off. These real-term pay cuts are forcing millions to cut back on their spending, denting economic demand and forcing thousands deeper into debt and payday loan lenders. It would also reduce public spending on tax credits and housing benefit – 93% of new housing benefit claimants in the last two years have been in work.

2. Increase the minimum wage

The value of the minimum wage has been allowed to drop in recent years. If it had kept pace with inflation, it would be more than 6% higher. People on low incomes spend their wages because they need to – it prevents poverty – which puts money back into our economy.

3. Stop cutting jobs

Over 300,000 public sector jobs, including 75,000 in the civil service, have been cut under the coalition government. This has damaged local services and caused hardship for many of those without work. But public jobs also save money, and lives – the knock-on effects of public sector job cuts are visible and costly: mistakes are made due to higher workloads, fraud increases, standards of care and cleanliness fall in the NHS, emergency services don’t reach people in time.

4. Cap rents, not benefits

Housing benefit levels (around £23bn per year) are a national scandal. But the problem isn’t tenants, it’s landlords. By capping the level of rents we would save not only billions in housing benefit, but also thousands for private tenants to spend in the economy too.

5. Invest – and yes, that means borrowing more

The chancellor previously prioritised our credit rating because it influences the interest rate at which we can borrow. With historically low rates, the government should be borrowing to invest in job-creating opportunities: primarily house-building and renewable technology.

6. Scrap the work programme and increase benefit levels

Assessments of the government’s flagship welfare-to-work programme show that it is worse than doing nothing. Forcing people into workfare reduces work for those who want it and, as the DWP’s own studies show, is counterproductive in weak labour markets. The welfare state should not be providing free labour to profitable multinationals – if companies can provide work placements, they should be paid at the going rate. For people on social security, benefit levels have lost real value: in 1979 unemployment benefit was worth 21% of average earnings, today it’s just 11%. If we raised it to 21% again jobseeker’s allowance would be £130 a week instead of the measly £71 it currently is.

7. Nationalise the banks

The banks, still propped up with public money and many with large public shares, must be taken into public ownership. The bloated banking sector was the cause of the crisis, and still represents the largest systemic threat to relapsing into crisis. We support the TUC policy to bring the banks into publicownership (pdf). By controlling the banks we can cap bonuses, clamp down on tax dodging, end the inflated pay deals and direct investment to socially useful and job-creating schemes.

8. Scrap Trident

To say Trident is a necessary deterrent to defend our national security rather begs the question of why Germany and Japan haven’t been invaded, since their larger economies possess no nuclear weapons – and neither does more than 90% of the world. Our nuclear weapons suck in billions of public money and some of our best engineers and scientists. These resources can be put to much more socially beneficial use.

9. Close the tax gap

Thanks to the high-profile activities of UK Uncut and others, tax avoidance and evasion has even been described by David Cameron and Osborne as “morally wrong” and “morally repugnant”. Yet their government continues to cut jobs and resources from HM Revenue and Customs. Our research with the Tax Justice Network suggests that £120bn in tax is evaded, avoided and left uncollected each year – dwarfing benefit fraud by a ratio of nearly 100 to 1.

10. Reverse the tax cuts for millionaires

From April this year the government will give those earning over £150,000 per year a tax break worth £3bn. While we’re at it, the corporation tax cuts should also be reversed – we already had the lowest rate in the G7, so largesse to the corporate sector is not a priority.

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UK Economic Woe

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| UK govt work scheme in crisis over Poundland ‘slavery’ case!

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Government’s flagship work scheme in crisis after Poundland ‘slavery’ case ruling ~ ANDREW GRICE, The Independent.

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The Government has suffered an embarrassing setback when the Appeal Court upheld a 24-year-old graduate’s claim that its back-to-work schemes were legally flawed.

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The Government has suffered an embarrassing setback when the Appeal Court upheld a 24-year-old graduate’s claim that its back-to-work schemes were legally flawed.

Cait Reilly, 24, claimed a mandatory work experience scheme for the  jobless, which required her to work for nothing at a Poundland store, breached laws on forced labour.

Although the Court did not support that claim, it said the regulations allowing benefit payments to be docked if people refused to take up work placements were unlawful because they were not specific enough.

The Government moved quickly to limit the damage. It dismissed lawyers’ statements that the ruling could result in refunds for unemployed people who had seen their benefits cut. It tabled emergency regulations in Parliament allowing its welfare-to-work schemes to continue unchanged and is seeking leave to appeal against the ruling in the Supreme Court.

Miss Reilly, a geology graduate, and a 40-year-old jobless HGV driver Jamieson Wilson, from Nottingham, both succeeded in their claims that unpaid schemes were flawed because the rules did not comply with the Act of Parliament giving the Department for Work and Pensions the power to introduce them. They lost their original case but won part of it on appeal.

In November 2011, Miss Reilly was told to stop doing voluntary work at a local museum to work unpaid at the Poundland store in Kings Heath, Birmingham, or she would lose her jobseeker’s allowance. Mr Wilson was told that his allowance would be stopped after he refused to take part in the community action programme, working unpaid for 30 hours per week for six months.

After the ruling, a delighted Miss Reilly said: “Those two weeks were a complete waste of my time, as the experience did not help me get a job. I was not given any training and I was left with no time to do my voluntary work or search for other jobs. The only beneficiary was Poundland, a multimillion-pound company. Later I found out that I should never have been told the placement was compulsory. I don’t think I am above working in shops like Poundland. I now work part-time in a supermarket. It is just that I expect to get paid for working.”

Tessa Gregory, of Public Interest Lawyers, who represented both claimants,  said the Government had been sent back to the drawing board to make fresh regulations . “Until that time, nobody can be lawfully forced to participate in schemes affected such as the work programme and the community action programme,” she said.

But ministers vowed to overturn what they saw as a technical breach. Mark Hoban, the Employment minister, said: “We have no intention of giving back money to anyone who has had their benefits removed because they refused to take getting into work seriously.” He was “disappointed and surprised” at the Court’s decision. “We do not agree with the Court’s judgment and are seeking permission to appeal” he said.

Frances O’Grady, the TUC general secretary, said: “This blows a big hole through the Government’s workfare policies. It is pointless to force people to work for no pay in jobs that do nothing to help them while putting others at risk of unemployment.”

Welfare-to-work: A brief guide

Iain Duncan Smith’s department has come up with a variety of back-to-work schemes, including Mandatory Work Activity, which requires jobseekers to do one month’s work for no wages. Some have been deprived of their benefits payments if they do not. The judgesw’ ruling does not quash the MWA scheme.

The Work Programme is mainly for long-term unemployed, who can be compelled to work for months at a time without wages.

Cait Reilly was sent to work at Poundland as part of a Sector-Based Work Academy scheme. Participants are made to work for up to six weeks without wages and get a guaranteed job interview at the end of it, but not necessarily a job.

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Poundland 1

| Every Dollar of your Income Tax except the last one goes to Wars and Preparation for Wars!

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Every Dollar of Your Income Tax Except the Last One Goes to Wars and Preparation for Wars ~ David Swanson, War is a Crime.org

A year ago, in budget reporting on defense costs, the figure of $525 billion got wide play, as did the fact that the number was down slightly from the previous year. The New York Times reported that “the military budget is to be $525 billion,” a decline of $6 billion mostly because of increased health insurance fees paid by military personnel, while the Los Angeles Times reported that “the $525 billion sought in fiscal year 2013 is $6 billion less than Congress approved for 2012.” The $525 billion figure was also cited by The Wall Street Journal,
Bloomberg, and The Associated Press (via Fox).

The Washington Post’s Federal Eye blog did a little better. It used a qualifier word, “core” budget, while Reuters used the a different qualifier—“base”

But even qualifiers like “core” or “base” don’t quite do the trick. They don’t help readers understand the much larger costs of national security. Journalists covering the fiscal 2014 budget that the White House will issue in a matter of days should look carefully at the document as well as at other sources that have analyzed the total costs.

So how misleading is the $525 billion figure?

For starters, the $525.4 billion does not include $88.5 billion for unbudgeted costs of wars overseas, called Overseas Contingency Operations. Add other Pentagon spending details and the projected outlays (see fiscal 2013 budget at p. 84) come to $672.9 billion, which is 28 percent more than the basic Defense budget.

But wait!—There’s more.

Each year the Director of National Intelligence releases a total budget figure for national intelligence. For fiscal 2013 it was $52.6 billion, down from $53.9 billionin fiscal 2012. National security includes the NSA, CIA, and other intelligence services. Military intelligence spending, included in the base Defense budget, was $19.2 billion. (A good place to track these budget issues is the Federation of American Scientists Intelligence Resource Program.)

Next there’s $19.2 billion for the nuclear bomb-making arm of the Energy Department. Homeland Security includes $13.2 billion for customs and border patrol and $10.5 billion for the Coast Guard.

Then there is the considerable cost of wars past. The budget shows almost $139 billion for Veterans Affairs, though the numbers are presented in the budget text in a way that anyone not reading carefully would think is less than half that much.

Add all these up and the total cost grows 86 percent, to $977.5 billion. Most military intelligence spending is buried in these figures.

Meanwhile, wars are debt-financed, even though taxes were raised to help pay for every war American prior to Afghanistan and Iraq. Add in interest costs attributable to past conflicts, as the pacifist War Resisters League does, and the fiscal 2013 cost of national security comes to more than $1.3 trillion—two and a half times the basic Defense budget.

That pretty much all-in cost almost equals the $1.6 trillion expected to be raised through the individual federal income tax in fiscal 2013, as shown in Table S-5 of the proposed White House budget.
By this broadest measure, the cost of national security consumes every individual income tax dollar except the last one paid by each American.

ALSO SEE:
Columbia Journalism Review

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