organization:congress

Navy Seeks $30 Million to Fix Gear That Hobbled Its New Carrier - Bloomberg
▻https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-25/navy-seeks-30-million-to-fix-gear-that-hobbled-its-new-carrier

The Navy is asking Congress to shift $30 million from other accounts to start repairing a damaged gear on the service’s costliest warship, the Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier.

The request for funds to repair the $13 billion carrier is part of a Pentagon package asking congressional approval to shift $4.7 billion in previously approved Army, Air Force and Navy funding into new programs or higher-priority projects. The package must be approved by all four congressional defense committees, where it’s pending.

The $30 million is needed to pay for repairs to the propulsion-system gear while the carrier’s builder, Huntington Ingalls Industries Inc., “seeks compensation from the original manufacturer for warranty defects,” Naval Sea Systems spokesman William Couch said in an email.

The Ford was forced to return to port after the failure in January of a “main thrust bearing” that’s a key propulsion system component. It returned to sea after the damage was contained. The defective gear was the result of “machining errors” by a General Electric Co. unit, according to Navy documents. Full repairs will take place during the vessel’s current yearlong shakeout period.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Historic Win and the Future of the Democratic Party | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/07/23/alexandria-ocasio-cortezs-historic-win-and-the-future-of-the-democratic-p

https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5b465113554b7b0b88500348/16:9/w_1200,h_630,c_limit/180723_r32440.jpg

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is twenty-eight. She was born in the Parkchester neighborhood of the Bronx and lives there now, in a modest one-bedroom apartment. Parkchester was originally a planned community conceived by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and was for decades segregated, predominantly Irish and Italian. Today, it’s largely African-American, Hispanic, and South Asian. Ocasio-Cortez comes from a Puerto Rican family in which the parents’ self-sacrifice has been rewarded by their daughter’s earnest striving, and, now, a historic achievement. Come November, Ocasio-Cortez is almost certain to become the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. As recently as ten months ago, she was waiting tables at a taco place near Union Square called Flats Fix. On June 26th, she pulled off a political upset in the Democratic primary for the Fourteenth Congressional District, soundly defeating the incumbent, Joseph Crowley, the most powerful politician in Queens County and the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives.

We sat down at a table near the window. She allowed that she was getting worn down. “You’re speaking to me when I am still emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, and logistically processing all of this,” she said. “The whole thing’s got me knocked a little flat.”

With good reason. Not long ago, Ocasio-Cortez was mixing margaritas. Today, she is the embodiment of anti-corporate politics and a surge of female candidates in the midterm elections. “It’s a lot to carry,” she said. As a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, she was on the receiving end of Murdoch-media hysteria. The Post greeted her win with the headline “RED ALERT.” Sean Hannity pronounced her “downright scary.” And Ben Shapiro called her a member of the “howling at the moon” segment of the Democratic Party. On the anti-Trump right, Bret Stephens wrote in the Times that “Hugo Chávez was also a democratic socialist,” and warned that, in a national election, the likes of Ocasio-Cortez will be “political hemlock for the Democratic Party.” None of it seemed exactly real. When I asked her where she was going to live in D.C., her eyes widened in surprise, as if it had not occurred to her that she would no longer be spending most of her time in the Bronx. “Not a clue,” she said.

One of her most effective strokes was a two-minute-long video, the creation of Naomi Burton and Nick Hayes, D.S.A. activists from Detroit, who started Means of Production, a media-production company, and set out looking for working-class-oriented campaigns. They learned about Ocasio-Cortez on Facebook and sent her a direct message on Twitter. For less than ten thousand dollars, they produced a soulful social-media-ready film that showed the candidate in her apartment, on a subway platform, in a bodega, talking with a pregnant woman, to kids selling cupcakes. All the while, in voice-over, she speaks directly to the viewer:

Women like me aren’t supposed to run for office. I wasn’t born to a wealthy or powerful family. . . . This race is about people versus money. We’ve got people, they’ve got money. It’s time we acknowledged that not all Democrats are the same. That a Democrat who takes corporate money, profits off foreclosure, doesn’t live here, doesn’t send his kids to our schools, doesn’t drink our water or breathe our air cannot possibly represent us. What the Bronx and Queens needs is Medicare for all, tuition-free public college, a federal jobs guarantee, and criminal-justice reform.

The video went viral. Something was afoot.

On Election Day, in a car on the way to the billiards hall where Ocasio-Cortez was going to watch the returns, some of her advisers were getting encouraging reports from polling places. Shut it down, she said. No more looking at phones, no more guessing: “Let’s see the vote.” That night, cameras captured her expression of shock as she watched the news: a thirteen-point landslide. She had no words. It was a moment of pure joy playing out live on television. Crowley gamely accepted the results and, with a pickup band behind him, took out his guitar and dedicated “Born to Run” to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. For a man in six kinds of pain, he sang a creditable version.

If the Murdoch press was predictably outraged, some establishment Democrats were wary, too. Nancy Pelosi dismissed the win as a local phenomenon. And, while her tone was curt and superior, her larger point was clear: in November, Democratic candidates, no matter what shade of blue, had to beat Republicans. Districts had to flip. At dinner, Ocasio-Cortez bristled at the establishment dismissals. She did not doubt that there were many factors in her win—her identity as a young woman, as a Latina, as a daughter of a working-class family—but she had also out-organized a party boss, hammered away at immigration and health-care issues, and brought out new voters. It was infuriating for her to listen to the condescension.

“I’m twenty-eight years old, and I was elected on this super-idealistic platform,” she said. “Folks may want to take that away from me, but I won. When you hear ‘She won just for demographic reasons,’ or low turnout, or that I won because of all the white ‘Bernie bros’ in Astoria—maybe that all helped. But I smoked this race. I didn’t edge anybody out. I dominated. And I am going to own that.” The more complicated question was how she was going to own her identity as a democratic socialist.

When Ocasio-Cortez is interviewed now, particularly by the establishment outlets, she is invariably asked about “the S-word,” socialism; sometimes the question is asked with a shiver of anxiety, as if she were suggesting that schoolchildren begin the day by singing the “Internationale” under a portrait of Enver Hoxha. When I asked her about her political heroes, though, there was no mention of anyone in the Marxist pantheon. She named Robert F. Kennedy. In college, reading his speeches—“that was my jam,” she said. R.F.K., at least in the last chapter of his life, his 1968 Presidential campaign, tried to forge a party coalition of workers, minorities, and the middle class.

D.S.A., which was founded in 1982, is not a party but a dues-paying organization, and it has seen a bump in membership recently, from five thousand in 2016 to more than forty thousand today. The first co-chairs were Harrington and the author Barbara Ehrenreich. David Dinkins, the former mayor of New York, was a member of D.S.A. There’s no question that some members are Marxists in the traditional sense; some want to see the destruction of capitalism and the state ownership of factories, banks, and utilities. Jabari Brisport, a D.S.A. member from Brooklyn who recently ran, unsuccessfully, for City Council, told me that the group is “a big umbrella organization for left and leftish types, from Bernie-crats to hard-core Trotskyists.” Julia Salazar, a D.S.A. member in her mid-twenties who is running for the New York State Senate with the ardent support of Ocasio-Cortez, told Jacobin, a leftist quarterly, that a democratic socialist “recognizes the capitalist system as being inherently oppressive, and is actively working to dismantle it and to empower the working class and the marginalized in our society.”

Ocasio-Cortez and, for the most part, the people around her speak largely in the language of Sanders. Sanders calls himself a democratic socialist, and yet in the most extensive speech he ever gave on the theme—at Georgetown University, in November, 2015—he did not mention Debs. Rather, he focussed almost entirely on Franklin Roosevelt and the legacy of the New Deal. He said that he shared the vision that F.D.R. set out in his 1944 State of the Union speech, what Roosevelt called the Second Bill of Rights. Sanders pointed out that universal health care was “not a radical idea” and existed in countries such as Denmark, France, Germany, and Taiwan. “I don’t believe government should own the means of production,” he said, “but I do believe that the middle class and the working families who produce the wealth of America deserve a fair deal.”

Ocasio-Cortez and her circle focus less on the malefactions of the current Administration than on the endemic corruption of the American system, particularly the role of “dark money” in American politics and the lack of basic welfare provisions for the working classes and the poor. When they hear conservatives describe as a “socialist” Barack Obama—a man who, in their view, had failed to help the real victims of the financial crisis, while bailing out the banks—they tend to laugh ruefully. “I think the right did us a service calling Obama a socialist for eight years,” Saikat Chakrabarti, one of Ocasio-Cortez’s closest associates, said. “It inoculated us. But people focus on the labels when they are not sure what they mean. What people call socialism these days is Eisenhower Republicanism!”

#Alexandria_Ocasio_Cortez #Politique_USA #My_heroin_for_now

How a Potential Crypto-asset Security Classification Would Threaten to Unwind The Budding…
▻https://hackernoon.com/how-a-potential-crypto-asset-security-classification-would-threaten-to-u

How a Potential Crypto-asset Security Classification Would Threaten to Unwind The Budding Decentralized Economy (High-Level Overview)In light of recent news that U.S. regulators are reviewing crypto-assets under securities laws, it has become clear that classifying crypto-assets within the framework of traditional financial instruments has proven to be a daunting task for several regulatory bodies as well as Congress, and for good reason. Crypto-assets that function as utility tokens, or tokens representing vouchers to receive products or services employed by specific decentralized platforms, simultaneously represent characteristics of currencies, commodities, and securities alike. Think of utility tokens akin to the Dave & Busters’ Power Card, which is its company-specific voucher (...)

#security-classification #crypto-classification #blockchain #decentralized-economy #crypto-regulation

Hasbara is dead – Mondoweiss
►https://mondoweiss.net/2018/07/hasbara-is-dead

The Jewish defection is key, of course. Jews have a privileged position in the global discourse of Israel, and the Jewish monolith is crumbling. The young Jews of IfNotNow are conducting a full-scale assault on the Jewish establishment. “Israel doesn’t have a public relations crisis; it has a moral crisis,” IfNotNow says (quoting Avrum Burg), while a Jewish leader howls to a synagogue full of older Jews: “Where did we go wrong in our homes and our schools!?”

Rebecca Vilkomerson of the burgeoning group Jewish Voice for Peace observes that everyone from her daughter’s New York public high school to Bette Midler are openly critical of the massacre, even as Israelis endorse it overwhelmingly, and when the New York Times said dozens of Palestinians “died” in protests in Gaza, Judd Apatow had enough.

“Have died.” Shame on you. This is like calling Trump’s lies “factual innacuracies.” Please tell me an intern is running your twitter feed.

The Democratic political establishment is even beginning to steer clear of this mess. Vilkomerson (to the Real News):

I think with the exception of [Chuck] Schumer, no Democrats have been defending Israel’s actions. In fact, quite a number, in fact over a dozen, have spoken out against what Israel has done over the course of the last six weeks. And you contrast that with 2014 [when Israel killed over 2200 in Gaza, including 500 children], when I think it was something like 78 senators signed a statement supporting the Gaza war. So there has been a shift. in terms of Congress and who’s willing to speak out and being able to speak out. And that there’s enough backing from their own constituents to speak out that they’re not going to be punished by AIPAC or other organizations…

This puts the Israeli government in a new position. It is just another rightwing authoritarian country with a story to tell about why change isn’t necessary but force is that talking heads in the U.S. are going to ignore or make fun of.

Is Facebook a publisher ? In public it says no, but in court it says yes
▻https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/02/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-platform-publisher-lawsuit

In its defense against a former app startup, Facebook is contradicting its long-held claim to be simply a neutral platform Facebook has long had the same public response when questioned about its disruption of the news industry : it is a tech platform, not a publisher or a media company. But in a small courtroom in California’s Redwood City on Monday, attorneys for the social media company presented a different message from the one executives have made to Congress, in interviews and in (...)

#CambridgeAnalytica #Facebook #algorithme #domination #BigData #procès

▻https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/23b04eaac2db6316bfd7e6e807b7a091ca8cb73a/0_67_3000_1800/master/3000.jpg

Opinion | The Millennial Socialists Are Coming - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/30/opinion/democratic-socialists-progressive-democratic-party-trump.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/07/01/opinion/sunday/01goldberg/01goldberg-facebookJumbo.jpg

In May, three young progressive women running for the state Legislature in Pennsylvania, each endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America, won decisive primary victories over men heavily favored by the political establishment. Two of the women, Summer Lee, 30, and Sara Innamorato, 32, ousted incumbents, the distant cousins Dom Costa and Paul Costa, members of an iconic Pennsylvania political family.

On Twitter, Trump has fantasized about a red wave that will sweep even more Republicans into power in November and reinforce his rule. But the real red wave may be democratic socialism’s growing political influence, especially among young people. “She really showed that you can run on these issues and win,” Maria Svart, national director of the Democratic Socialists of America, said about Ocasio-Cortez’s platform, which includes Medicare for All, abolishing the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, and a federal jobs guarantee.

The D.S.A., to which Ocasio-Cortez belongs, is the largest socialist organization in America. Its growth has exploded since the 2016 election — when, of course, avowed democratic socialist Bernie Sanders ran in the Democratic primary — from 7,000 members to more than 37,000. It’s an activist group rather than a political party, working with Democrats in the electoral realm while also agitating against injustice from the outside.

Many of the D.S.A.’s goals, reflected in Ocasio-Cortez’s platform, are indistinguishable from those of progressive democrats. But if the D.S.A. is happy to work alongside liberals, its members are generally serious about the “socialist” part of democratic socialist. Its constitution envisions “a humane social order based on popular control of resources and production, economic planning, equitable distribution, feminism, racial equality and non-oppressive relationships.”

Talk of popular control of the means of production is anathema to many older Democrats, even very liberal ones. It plays a lot better with the young; one recent survey shows that 61 percent of Democrats between 18 and 34 view socialism positively. The combination of the Great Recession, the rising cost of education, the unreliability of health insurance and the growing precariousness of the workplace has left young people with gnawing material insecurity. They have no memory of the widespread failure of Communism, but the failures of capitalism are all around them.

The D.S.A. alone neither claims nor deserves sole credit for the victories of candidates it endorses. Many groups came together behind Ocasio-Cortez, including the populist Brand New Congress and local chapters of the resistance group Indivisible. Nor was the D.S.A. the prime mover behind the Fiedler, Lee and Innamorato wins, though it helped in all of them.

Indeed, while there’s a lot of talk about an ideological civil war among Democrats, on the ground, boundaries seem more fluid. In Pennsylvania recently, I met with moderate suburban resistance activists who’d volunteered for Innamorato, thrilled to support a young woman who could help revitalize the Democratic Party.

alking to Cohen and others from the D.S.A.’s Pittsburgh chapter, which has more than 620 members, I was struck by the work they put into building community. On some days that public schools are closed, the D.S.A.’s socialist-feminist committee puts on all-day events with child care and free lunches. Like several other chapters, the Pittsburgh D.S.A. holds clinics where members change people’s burned-out car brake lights for free, helping them avoid unnecessary police run-ins while making inroads into the community. A local mechanic named Metal Mary helped train them.

Democratic socialist chapters have constant streams of meetings and social events, creating an antidote to the isolation that’s epidemic in American life. “Everything is highly individualized, and it is isolating,” Svart said. “People are very, very lonely. Suicide rates have gone up astronomically. And we do create a community for folks.” This fusion of politics and communal life isn’t so different from what the Christian right has offered its adherents. Such social capital is something no amount of campaign spending can buy.

#Politique_USA #Democratic_socialists_of_america

The feminist storm troopers
The battle for equal rights is being won, but do women really want the right to perpetrate war crimes or to maintain the occupation?
Gideon Levy - Jul 01, 2018 - Haaretz.com
▻https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-the-feminist-storm-troopers-1.6222588

https://www.haaretz.com/polopoly_fs/1.6222657.1530400734!/image/3137703679.JPG_gen/derivatives/headline_1200x630/3137703679.JPG

Merav Michaeli admires MJ Hegar. She even says she would vote for her – although, as far as is known, the Israeli Knesset member has no voting rights in Texas, where Hegar is vying for a Congress seat. Hegar was a helicopter pilot who served in Afghanistan until her chopper was shot down during her third tour. She’s since been on a crusade, aimed at opening combat roles in the U.S. Army up to women without discrimination.

Michaeli, the queen of Israeli feminists and a representative of the center-left, wants to see more American female helicopter pilots in Afghanistan and Yemen – who can continue bombing no matter what, who and how much is on the receiving end. She also wants more female pilots in Israel to take part in airstrikes against Gaza, along with female tank combatants who can shell whatever the female helicopter pilots leave standing.

The Labor Party meat grinder, which distorts the moral image of anyone elected to its list, alongside blind and rapacious feminism, have caused even Michaeli – one of the most impressive and committed members of the Knesset – to temporarily lose her moral compass. Just give her more female bombers. Let them bomb and shell in Afghanistan and Gaza, only let them be women.

Four female soldiers who completed a tank commanders’ course last week induced drooling militaristic pride among numerous men and women in Israel: the feminist in the tank rules! Now there are female combatants in the air, on land and at sea, and the Israel Hayom and Yedioth Ahronoth dailies could not let the opportunity pass without spouting headlines such as “Queens of the skies” and “Armor piercing.”

Corp. Keren Beit-On will complete her Snapir course this week and join a unit of naval speedboats patrolling the Gaza coast. On a good day, she might participate in the shooting of desperate Palestinian fishermen who exceeded the boundaries of their cages for their livelihoods, or at least spray them with water cannon until, helpless, they fall off their flimsy and pathetic surfboards into the water. This time, it won’t be at the hands of a macho male combatant, but one of the first female graduates of the feminist Snapir course. Beit-On, like Hegar the helicopter pilot, will fulfill the ideal of gender equality, without any discrimination. In the air, on land and at sea.

The just and triumphant feminist train is racing ahead and no one stops to ask: Sorry, but equality in what? In oppression? In tyranny over another people? Female equality in abuse? Gender equality in perpetrating war crimes?

https://www.haaretz.com/polopoly_fs/1.6222594.1530388859!/image/1299953372.jpg_gen/derivatives/size_1496xAuto/1299953372.jpg

A course instructor of the Snapir ("Fin") Unit, a mixed male and female combat unit, practicing in inflatable rubber boats in the Haifa Bay.IDF Spokesperson’s Unit

Is this what you want? Is this what you deserve? Is this what we deserve? After this goal is achieved, the feminists will be able to advance toward their next objective: gender equality in organized crime. That’s another arena where male dominion must be ended – to the barricades, until Rinat Abergil controls the family business equally with her husband Meir!

Of course, the IDF should not be compared to crime families in order to understand the depth of the darkness. In order to achieve a goal that itself is absolutely correct – namely, gender equality in society – men and women are prepared to abandon any other moral value. It is true that the entrance to many halls of power still runs through service in combat units, though happily this is diminishing. But nothing could justify turning this service – a major part of which is geared toward perpetuating the occupation and the settlements – into a desired objective for women seeking equality.

No Border Policewoman, armed from head to toe while evacuating a family in Silwan, raiding a house in Nablus in the middle of the night while brutally waking up female household members, or lording it over Palestinian passersby in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City in order to protect a handful of settlers, will add an iota of dignity to the struggle for gender equality. It will only bring shame by the fact that women are also participating in these actions.

Women, you should be proud that you don’t have an equal role in maintaining the occupation. Be proud that you don’t share equally in bombing kite warehouses in Gaza, and that there isn’t yet gender equality in the disgraceful nightly arrest raids in the West Bank. There are more than enough male occupation-serving storm troopers doing this work.

The road to equality, just and absolute, should be pursued using other, more moral, paths.

L’écart se creuse entre les besoins et les offres de places de réinstallation pour les réfugiés

Le HCR, l’Agence des Nations Unies pour les réfugiés, s’est déclaré aujourd’hui préoccupé par l’écart croissant entre le nombre de réfugiés ayant besoin d’une réinstallation et les places offertes par les gouvernements à travers le monde.

Dans son rapport 2019 sur les besoins prévus de réinstallation dans le monde (Projected Global Resettlement Needs 2019 report, en anglais) présenté à Genève lors de sa réunion annuelle sur le sujet, le HCR montre que le nombre de réfugiés en attente d’une solution dans des pays tiers atteindrait 1,4 million en 2019 selon les prévisions, tandis que le nombre de places de réinstallation dans le monde est tombé à seulement 75 000 en 2017. Sur la base de ces chiffres, il faudrait 18 ans pour que les réfugiés les plus vulnérables à travers le monde soient réinstallés.

« Au Niger où je me trouvais la semaine dernière seulement, j’ai vu combien la réinstallation permet littéralement de sauver des vies et ce, grâce à un dispositif innovant qui permet d’évacuer vers le Niger des réfugiés libérés d’épouvantables conditions en Libye pour les réinstaller ensuite dans de nouveaux pays. Nous avons besoin de davantage de places de réinstallation pour que ce programme perdure et de voir dans tous les États une transposition massive de ce type d’objectif commun et de détermination afin de relever les défis qui se posent au monde aujourd’hui », a déclaré Filippo Grandi.

L’augmentation des possibilités de réinstallation offertes aux réfugiés dans des pays tiers est l’un des objectifs clés d’une nouvelle approche globale des crises de réfugiés approuvée en septembre 2016 par les 193 États Membres des Nations Unies dans la Déclaration de New York pour les réfugiés et les migrants, ainsi que l’un des axes majeurs du nouveau Pacte mondial sur les réfugiés qui sera présenté à l’Assemblée générale des Nations Unies d’ici la fin 2018.

« La réinstallation n’est pas seulement une essentielle bouée de sauvetage pour certains des individus les plus vulnérables de la planète, c’est aussi un moyen concret pour les gouvernements et les communautés de mieux partager la responsabilité de la crise mondiale des déplacements. Nous avons d’urgence besoin que de nouveaux pays viennent rejoindre les rangs des États de réinstallation et que ces derniers trouvent des moyens pour élargir leurs propres programmes », a encore déclaré Filippo Grandi.

Trente-cinq pays font aujourd’hui partie du programme de réinstallation du HCR, contre 27 États en 2018. Selon le rapport, des réfugiés de 36 nationalités relevant de 65 opérations menées dans différents pays du monde ont aujourd’hui besoin d’une réinstallation. Les réfugiés originaires de Syrie et de République démocratique du Congo représentaient deux tiers des dossiers de réinstallation présentés par le HCR en 2017.

Le HCR exhorte les pays à accueillir davantage de réfugiés de différents pays et opérations qui présentent d’impérieux besoins en matière de protection internationale et à s’engager à les accueillir durablement. À l’heure actuelle, seulement 14 des 25 États de réinstallation reçoivent des réfugiés provenant de plus de trois opérations de réinstallation. Le HCR appelle également les États à réserver au moins 10 % des places offertes aux cas graves et urgents présentés par le HCR.

Plus de 250 délégués gouvernementaux et représentants d’ONG, d’universités, d’entreprises privées et de réfugiés participent aux consultations tripartites annuelles du HCR sur la réinstallation qui se tiennent cette semaine à Genève et constituent le premier forum sur les problèmes en matière de réinstallation à travers le monde.

▻http://www.unhcr.org/fr/news/press/2018/6/5b32163ca/lecart-creuse-besoins-offres-places-reinstallation-refugies.html
#réinstallation #asile #migrations #réfugiés #places_de_réinstallation #monde #statistiques #chiffres #monde #besoins

#rapport :
Projected Global Resettlement Needs 2019

https://i.imgur.com/q26o3Xd.png

@_kg_ Tu peux montrer dans ton mémoire que la réinstallation... une solution pendant la crise indochinoise, aujourd’hui, ne marche plus ! Ce qui, aussi cause les problèmes de blocages dans les pays de transit.
(regarde tout ce fil de discussion, sur la réinstallation)

U.S. House committee approves bill that would pave way for penalizing Israel boycotts
If it passes a House vote, the Israel Anti-Boycott Act would give the government authority to punish institutions and companies who boycott Israel
Amir Tibon | Jun. 29, 2018 | 6:50 AM
▻https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-u-s-house-committee-approves-israel-anti-boycott-act-1.6221634

https://www.haaretz.com/polopoly_fs/1.6221637.1530244137!/image/106244310.jpg_gen/derivatives/headline_1200x630/106244310.jpg

WASHINGTON – The Foreign Affairs Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives approved on Thursday a bill that would give the Trump administration authority to penalize American institutions and companies that participate in international boycotts of Israel and its settlements in the West Bank. Following the committee’s approval, the bill will advance to a vote on the House floor.

The controversial bill, known as The Israel Anti-Boycott Act, was first introduced by Republican and Democratic lawmakers last year. However, it has not advanced until recently, because of strong criticism it faced from civil rights groups, most notably the American Civil Liberties Union, who warned that it hurts free speech and is therefore unconstitutional. A number of Democratic lawmakers came out against the bill, and one prominent legislator, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, withdrew her support forthe legislation.

Following that wave of criticism, the bill went through some modifications. The version that passed the committee vote on Thursday is different than the original version, but critics of the bill claimed on Thursday that it is, in fact, even more harmful to free speech than previously, because the new version gives the Trump administration influence in determining who is involved in such boycott activities and how to respond.

One group, the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, which is affiliated with the BDS movement, has stated that under the new version, “Congress will be essentially abrogating its legislative duties and turning the keys over to the Trump administration. This would be a reckless threat to the rule of law, especially given the Trump administration’s record on executive actions such as the Muslim ban and immigrant family separation. Once again, Congress will be trying to push anti-boycott laws past the limit of the First Amendment.”

The bill passed the committee unanimously, with support from both Democrats and Republicans. In order to become law, it will now have to be approved in a vote on the House floor, and also in the Senate. The original bill received strong support from the pro-Israeli lobby group AIPAC, but AIPAC hopes to advance it on the basis of a strong bi-partisan consensus, which means that leading Democrats in the Senate could still have influence on its final phrasing.

#BDS

Ironiquement, alors que l’Europe s’apprête à généraliser les Robocopyrights, une des affaires les plus emblématiques de leurs dérives (Dancing Baby) arrive à son terme aux États-Unis après 10 ans de procédure...

After More Than a Decade of Litigation, the Dancing Baby Has Done His Part to Strengthen Fair Use for Everyone.
▻https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/06/after-more-decade-litigation-dancing-baby-ready-move

https://www.eff.org/files/dancing-baby_0.jpg

Litigation can always take twists and turns, but when EFF filed a lawsuit against Universal Music Group in 2007 on behalf of Stephanie Lenz, few would have anticipated it would be ten years until the case was finally resolved. But today, at last, it is. Along the way, Lenz v. Universal contributed to strengthening fair use law, bringing nationwide attention to the issues of copyright and fair use in new digital movie-making and sharing technologies.

It all started when Lenz posted a YouTube video of her then-toddler-aged son dancing while Prince’s song “Let’s Go Crazy” played in the background, and Universal used copyright claims to get the link disabled. We brought the case hoping to get some clarity from the courts on a simple but important issue: can a rightsholder use the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to take down an obvious fair use, without consequence?

Congress designed the DMCA to give rightsholders, service providers, and users relatively precise rules of the road for policing online copyright infringement. The center of the scheme is the notice and takedown process. In exchange for substantial protection from liability for the actions of their users, service providers must promptly take offline content on their platforms that has been identified as infringing, as well as several other prescribed steps. Copyright owners, for their part, are given an expedited, extra-judicial procedure for obtaining redress against alleged infringement, paired with explicit statutory guidance regarding the process for doing so, and provisions designed to deter and ameliorate abuse of that process.

Without Section 512, the risk of crippling liability for the acts of users would have prevented the emergence of most of the social media outlets we use today. Instead, the Internet has become the most revolutionary platform for the creation and dissemination of speech that the world has ever known.

The NSA’s Hidden Spy Hubs in Eight U.S. Cities
►https://theintercept.com/2018/06/25/att-internet-nsa-spy-hubs

https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2018/06/NSA-building-feature-02-1529697466.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90&fit=crop&w=1200&h=800

The NSA considers AT&T to be one of its most trusted partners and has lauded the company’s “extreme willingness to help.” It is a collaboration that dates back decades. Little known, however, is that its scope is not restricted to AT&T’s customers. According to the NSA’s documents, it values AT&T not only because it “has access to information that transits the nation,” but also because it maintains unique relationships with other phone and internet providers. The NSA exploits these relationships for surveillance purposes, commandeering AT&T’s massive infrastructure and using it as a platform to covertly tap into communications processed by other companies.

It is an efficient point to conduct internet surveillance, Klein said, “because the peering links, by the nature of the connections, are liable to carry everybody’s traffic at one point or another during the day, or the week, or the year.”

Christopher Augustine, a spokesperson for the NSA, said in a statement that the agency could “neither confirm nor deny its role in alleged classified intelligence activities.” Augustine declined to answer questions about the AT&T facilities, but said that the NSA “conducts its foreign signals intelligence mission under the legal authorities established by Congress and is bound by both policy and law to protect U.S. persons’ privacy and civil liberties.”

Jim Greer, an AT&T spokesperson, said that AT&T was “required by law to provide information to government and law enforcement entities by complying with court orders, subpoenas, lawful discovery requests, and other legal requirements.” He added that the company provides “voluntary assistance to law enforcement when a person’s life is in danger and in other immediate, emergency situations. In all cases, we ensure that requests for assistance are valid and that we act in compliance with the law.”

Dave Schaeffer, CEO of Cogent Communications, told The Intercept that he had no knowledge of the surveillance at the eight AT&T buildings, but said he believed “the core premise that the NSA or some other agency would like to look at traffic … at an AT&T facility.” He said he suspected that the surveillance is likely carried out on “a limited basis,” due to technical and cost constraints. If the NSA were trying to “ubiquitously monitor” data passing across AT&T’s networks, Schaeffer added, he would be “extremely concerned.”

An estimated 99 percent of the world’s intercontinental internet traffic is transported through hundreds of giant fiber optic cables hidden beneath the world’s oceans. A large portion of the data and communications that pass across the cables is routed at one point through the U.S., partly because of the country’s location – situated between Europe, the Middle East, and Asia – and partly because of the pre-eminence of American internet companies, which provide services to people globally.

The NSA calls this predicament “home field advantage” – a kind of geographic good fortune. “A target’s phone call, email, or chat will take the cheapest path, not the physically most direct path,” one agency document explains. “Your target’s communications could easily be flowing into and through the U.S.”

Once the internet traffic arrives on U.S. soil, it is processed by American companies. And that is why, for the NSA, AT&T is so indispensable. The company claims it has one of the world’s most powerful networks, the largest of its kind in the U.S. AT&T routinely handles masses of emails, phone calls, and internet chats. As of March 2018, some 197 petabytes of data – the equivalent of more than 49 trillion pages of text, or 60 billion average-sized mp3 files – traveled across its networks every business day.

The NSA documents, which come from the trove provided to The Intercept by the whistleblower Edward Snowden, describe AT&T as having been “aggressively involved” in aiding the agency’s surveillance programs. One example of this appears to have taken place at the eight facilities under a classified initiative called SAGUARO.

In October 2011, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which approves the surveillance operations carried out under Section 702 of FISA, found that there were “technological limitations” with the agency’s internet eavesdropping equipment. It was “generally incapable of distinguishing” between some kinds of data, the court stated. As a consequence, Judge John D. Bates ruled, the NSA had been intercepting the communications of “non-target United States persons and persons in the United States,” violating Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. The ruling, which was declassified in August 2013, concluded that the agency had acquired some 13 million “internet transactions” during one six-month period, and had unlawfully gathered “tens of thousands of wholly domestic communications” each year.

The root of the issue was that the NSA’s technology was not only targeting communications sent to and from specific surveillance targets. Instead, the agency was sweeping up people’s emails if they had merely mentioned particular information about surveillance targets.

A top-secret NSA memo about the court’s ruling, which has not been disclosed before, explained that the agency was collecting people’s messages en masse if a single one were found to contain a “selector” – like an email address or phone number – that featured on a target list.

Information provided by a second former AT&T employee adds to the evidence linking the Atlanta building to NSA surveillance. Mark Klein, a former AT&T technician, alleged in 2006 that the company had allowed the NSA to install surveillance equipment in some of its network hubs. An AT&T facility in Atlanta was one of the spy sites, according to documents Klein presented in a court case over the alleged spying. The Atlanta facility was equipped with “splitter” equipment, which was used to make copies of internet traffic as AT&T’s networks processed it. The copied data would then be diverted to “SG3” equipment – a reference to “Study Group 3” – which was a code name AT&T used for activities related to NSA surveillance, according to evidence in the Klein case.

#Surveillance #USA #NSA #AT&T

“National security” cited as reason Al Jazeera nixed Israel lobby film | The Electronic Intifada
▻https://electronicintifada.net/content/national-security-cited-reason-al-jazeera-nixed-israel-lobby-film/24566

Al Jazeera’s investigative documentary into the US Israel lobby was censored by Qatar over “national security” fears, The Electronic Intifada has learned.

These include that broadcast of the film could add to pressure for the US to pull its massive Al Udeid air base out of the Gulf state, or make a Saudi military invasion more likely.

A source has confirmed that broadcast of The Lobby – USA was indefinitely delayed as “a matter of national security” for Qatar. The source has been briefed by a high-level individual in Doha.

One of the Israel lobby groups whose activities are revealed in the film has been mounting a campaign to convince the US to withdraw its military forces from Qatar – which leaders in the emirate would see as a major blow to their security.

The tiny gas-rich monarchy houses and funds satellite channel Al Jazeera.

In April, managers at the channel were forced to deny a claim by a right-wing American Zionist group that the program has been canceled altogether.

In October 2017, the head of Al Jazeera’s investigative unit promised that the film would be aired “very soon.”

Yet eight months later, it has yet to see the light of day.

In March, The Electronic Intifada exclusively published the first concrete details of what is in the film.

The film reportedly identifies a number of lobby groups as working directly with Israel to spy on American citizens using sophisticated data gathering techniques. The documentary is also said to cast light on covert efforts to smear and intimidate Americans seen as too critical of Israel.

Some of the activity revealed in the film could include US organizations acting as front operations for Israel without registering as agents of a foreign state as required by US law.

The latest revelation over the censored film shows how seriously Qatar’s leadership is taking threats of repercussions should it air.

Threats
The Israel lobby groups reported on in the film could be expected to take legal action against Al Jazeera if it is broadcast.

However, such threats alone would be unlikely to deter Al Jazeera from broadcasting the film.

The network has a history of vigorously defending its work and it was completely vindicated over complaints about a documentary aired in January 2017 that revealed how Israel lobby groups in Britain collude with the Israeli embassy, and how the embassy interfered in British politics.

Israel’s supporters are also pushing for the US Congress to force the network, which has a large US operation, to register as a “foreign agent” in a similar fashion to Russian channel RT.

But the high-level individual in Doha’s claim that the film is being censored as “a matter of national security” ties the affair to even more serious threats to Qatar and bolsters the conclusion that the censorship is being ordered at the highest level of the state.

A year ago, with the support of US President Donald Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates cut off diplomatic relations with Qatar and imposed a transport and economic blockade on the country.

Saudi rulers and their allies see Qatar as too independent of their influence and too open to relations with their regional rival Iran, and the blockade was an attempt to force it to heel.

The Saudis and Israel accused Qatar of funding “terrorism,” and have taken measures to restrict Al Jazeera or demanded it be shut down altogether over what they perceive as the channel’s anti-Israel and anti-Saudi-monarchy biases.

The blockade and the diplomatic assault sparked existential fears in Qatar that Saudi-led forces could go as far as to invade and install a more pliant regime in Doha.

French newspaper Le Monde reported on Friday that the Saudi king has threatened “military action” against Qatar should it go ahead with a planned purchase of a Russian air defense missile system.

In 2011, Saudi and Emirati forces intervened in Bahrain, another small Gulf nation, at the request of its ruling Khalifa monarchy in order to quell a popular uprising demanding democratic reforms.

For three years, US and British-backed Saudi and Emirati forces have been waging a bloody and devastating war on Yemen to reimpose a Saudi-backed leadership on the country, clear evidence of their unprecedented readiness to directly use military force to impose their will.

And no one in the region will have forgotten how quickly Iraqi forces were able to sweep in and take over Kuwait in August 1990.

Air base
The lesson of the Kuwait invasion for other small Gulf countries is that only the protection of the United States could guarantee their security from bigger neighbors.

Qatar implemented that lesson by hosting the largest US military facility in the region, the massive Al Udeid air base.

The Saudi-led bloc has pushed for the US to withdraw from the base and the Saudi foreign minister predicted that should the Americans pull out of Al Udeid, the regime in Doha would fall “in less than a week.”

US warplanes operate from the Al Udeid air base near Doha, Qatar, October 2017. US Air Force Photo
It would be a disaster from the perspective of Doha if the Israel lobby was to put its full weight behind a campaign to pull US forces out of Qatar.

Earlier this year, an influential member of Congress and a former US defense secretary publicly discussed moving the US base out of Qatar at a conference hosted by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD).

FDD is a neoconservative Israel lobby group that happens to be one of the subjects of the undercover Al Jazeera film.

As The Electronic Intifada revealed in March, FDD is one of the groups acting as an agent of the Israeli government even though it is not registered to do so.

In July 2017, FDD’s Jonathan Schanzer testified to Congress that it would be an “insane arrangement” to keep US forces at the Al Udeid air base while Qatar continued to support “terror.”

It will concentrate minds in Doha that FDD was one of the lobby groups most dedicated to destroying the international deal with Iran over its nuclear energy program, a goal effectively achieved when the Trump administration pulled out of it last month.

In a sign of how vulnerable Qatar feels over the issue, Doha has announced plans to upgrade the Al Udeid base in the hope, as the US military newspaper Stars and Stripes put it, “that the strategic military hub will be counted as one of the Pentagon’s permanent overseas installations.”

The final straw?
The cornerstone of Qatar’s effort to win back favor in Washington has been to aggressively compete with its Gulf rivals for the affections of Israel and its Washington lobby.

Their belief appears to be that this lobby is so influential that winning its support can result in favorable changes to US policy.

Qatar’s charm offensive has included junkets to Doha for such high-profile Israel supporters as Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz and Morton Klein, the head of the Zionist Organization of America who publicly took credit for convincing Qatar’s ruler Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani to veto broadcast of the documentary.

While an all-out Saudi invasion of Qatar over a film series may seem far fetched, the thinking in Doha seems to be that broadcast of The Lobby – USA could be the final straw that antagonizes Qatar’s enemies and exposes it to further danger – especially over Al Udeid.

With an administration in Washington that is seen as impulsive and unpredictable – it has just launched a trade war against its biggest partners Canada and the European Union – leaders in Doha may see it as foolhardy to take any chances.

If that is the reason Al Jazeera’s film has been suppressed it is not so much a measure of any real and imminent threat Qatar faces, but rather of how successfully the lobby has convinced Arab rulers, including in Doha, that their well-being and longevity rests on cooperating with, or at least not crossing, Israel and its backers.

Asa Winstanley is associate editor and Ali Abunimah is executive director of The Electronic Intifada.

Qatar Al Jazeera The Lobby—USA Al Udeid air base Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani Donald Trump Jared Kushner Saudi Arabia United Arab Emirates Bahrain Iran Kuwait Foundation for the Defense of Democracies Jonathan Schanzer Morton Klein Alan Dershowitz Zionist Organization of America

Gaza medic killed by Israel as she rescued injured
Ali Abunimah 2 June 2018

Who is the Labour Party’s “witchfinder general”?
Asa Winstanley 31 May 2018

Israeli minister threatens to destroy Gaza “once and for all”
Ali Abunimah 30 May 2018

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The Greatest Crimes Against Humanity Are Perpetrated by People Just Doing Their Jobs
▻https://truthout.org/articles/the-careerists

https://truthout.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/The-Greatest-Crimes-Against-Humanity-Are-Perpetrated-by-People-Just-Doing-Their-Jobs.jpg

The greatest crimes of human history are made possible by the most colorless human beings. They are the careerists. The bureaucrats. The cynics. They do the little chores that make vast, complicated systems of exploitation and death a reality. They collect and read the personal data gathered on tens of millions of us by the security and surveillance state. They keep the accounts of ExxonMobil, BP and Goldman Sachs. They build or pilot aerial drones. They work in corporate advertising and public relations. They issue the forms. They process the papers. They deny food stamps to some and unemployment benefits or medical coverage to others. They enforce the laws and the regulations. And they do not ask questions.

Good. Evil. These words do not mean anything to them. They are beyond morality. They are there to make corporate systems function. If insurance companies abandon tens of millions of sick to suffer and die, so be it. If banks and sheriff departments toss families out of their homes, so be it. If financial firms rob citizens of their savings, so be it. If the government shuts down schools and libraries, so be it. If the military murders children in Pakistan or Afghanistan, so be it. If commodity speculators drive up the cost of rice and corn and wheat so that they are unaffordable for hundreds of millions of poor across the planet, so be it. If Congress and the courts strip citizens of basic civil liberties, so be it. If the fossil fuel industry turns the earth into a broiler of greenhouse gases that doom us, so be it. They serve the system. The god of profit and exploitation. The most dangerous force in the industrialized world does not come from those who wield radical creeds, whether Islamic radicalism or Christian fundamentalism, but from legions of faceless bureaucrats who claw their way up layered corporate and governmental machines. They serve any system that meets their pathetic quota of needs.

These systems managers believe nothing. They have no loyalty. They are rootless. They do not think beyond their tiny, insignificant roles. They are blind and deaf. They are, at least regarding the great ideas and patterns of human civilization and history, utterly illiterate. And we churn them out of universities. Lawyers. Technocrats. Business majors. Financial managers. IT specialists. Consultants. Petroleum engineers. “Positive psychologists.” Communications majors. Cadets. Sales representatives. Computer programmers. Men and women who know no history, know no ideas. They live and think in an intellectual vacuum, a world of stultifying minutia. They are T.S. Eliot’s “the hollow men,” “the stuffed men.” “Shape without form, shade without colour,” the poet wrote. “Paralysed force, gesture without motion.”

It was the careerists who made possible the genocides, from the extermination of Native Americans to the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians to the Nazi Holocaust to Stalin’s liquidations. They were the ones who kept the trains running. They filled out the forms and presided over the property confiscations. They rationed the food while children starved. They manufactured the guns. They ran the prisons. They enforced travel bans, confiscated passports, seized bank accounts and carried out segregation. They enforced the law. They did their jobs.

Political and military careerists, backed by war profiteers, have led us into useless wars, including World War I, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. And millions followed them. Duty. Honor. Country. Carnivals of death. They sacrifice us all. In the futile battles of Verdun and the Somme in World War I, 1.8 million on both sides were killed, wounded or never found. In July of 1917 British Field Marshal Douglas Haig, despite the seas of dead, doomed even more in the mud of Passchendaele. By November, when it was clear his promised breakthrough at Passchendaele had failed, he jettisoned the initial goal—as we did in Iraq when it turned out there were no weapons of mass destruction and in Afghanistan when al-Qaida left the country—and opted for a simple war of attrition. Haig “won” if more Germans than allied troops died. Death as score card. Passchendaele took 600,000 more lives on both sides of the line before it ended. It is not a new story. Generals are almost always buffoons. Soldiers followed John the Blind, who had lost his eyesight a decade earlier, to resounding defeat at the Battle of Crécy in 1337 during the Hundred Years War. We discover that leaders are mediocrities only when it is too late.

#politique #pouvoir #carrièrisme

Some of Trump’s Biggest Donors Are Profiting Big-Time on Immigration Detention Centers | Alternet
▻https://www.alternet.org/some-trumps-biggest-donors-are-profiting-big-time-immigration-detention-ce

https://www.alternet.org/sites/default/files/story_images/452666038.jpg

The giant retail stores being converted into detention centers and these large tent cities cropping up to house immigrants, where did they come from? As always, it is important to follow the money. This plan to lock-up asylum-seeking migrants may seem like it happened overnight, but it has been years in the making. Only weeks after Donald Trump put his filthy hand on Lincoln’s Bible and took the Oath of Office, this was the February 24, 2017, headline at CNN Money:

The actions Donald Trump, his sycophant Stephen Miller and Minister of White Supremacy Jeff Sessions are taking today are a huge payoff to the prison lobbyists and the border security industry that spent millions helping to get Donald Trump elected. Private for-profit prison executives were furious that President Obama decided to end the practice of using private prisons. They poured everything into Donald Trump and his campaign, maxing out $250,000 donations and even helping Trump raise $100 million in sketchy, secret money for his “inauguration committee.” And it paid off, as one of the first decisions from the Trump administration was to rescind Obama’s order to phase out private prisons.

They didn’t stop there. These groups have been spending lavishly at Trump’s private business as well. The Miami New Times noted the private prison company GEO Group was one of the newest big spenders at Trump’s Doral property in Florida.

In March of 2017, then Homeland Security chief John Kelly told Wolf Blitzer on CNN that he was considering a plan to separate families and detain them.

“We have tremendous experience of dealing with unaccompanied minors,” he told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on “The Situation Room.” "We turn them over to (Health and Human Services) and they do a very, very good job of putting them in foster care or linking them up with parents or family members in the United States."

It didn’t take long for Kelly to publicly walk back that statement, denying he meant it would be a cruel, intentional warning or deterrent to others who might be thinking of seeking asylum in the U.S. But we can clearly see now, they’ve been plotting this for quite some time.

[UDPATE] Bloomberg reports a Texas non-profit got a nearly $500 million contract to take care of the immigrant kids.

The Trump administration plans to pay a Texas nonprofit nearly half a billion dollars this year to care for immigrant children who were detained crossing the U.S. border illegally, according to government data.

The nonprofit, Southwest Key Programs Inc., is to be paid more than $458 million in fiscal 2018, according to the data — the most among the organizations, government agencies and companies that run a detention and care system for immigrant children on behalf of the Department of Health and Human Services. Southwest Key has about a dozen facilities in Texas, including a site at a former WalMart Inc.store in Brownsville that has drawn attention from members of Congress and national news organizations.

#Capitalisme_carcéral #Prédation #Conflits_intérêt

Net neutrality will be repealed Monday unless Congress takes action | Ars Technica
▻https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/net-neutrality-will-be-repealed-monday-unless-congress-takes-action

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/getty-paul-ryan-760x380.jpg

With net neutrality rules scheduled to be repealed on Monday, Senate Democrats are calling on House Speaker Paul Ryan to schedule a vote that could preserve the broadband regulations.

The US Senate voted on May 16 to reverse the Federal Communications Commission’s repeal of net neutrality rules, but a House vote—and President Trump’s signature—is still needed. Today, the entire Senate Democratic Caucus wrote a letter to Ryan urging him to allow a vote on the House floor.
Further Reading
Senate votes to overturn Ajit Pai’s net neutrality repeal

“The rules that this resolution would restore were enacted by the FCC in 2015 to prevent broadband providers from blocking, slowing down, prioritizing, or otherwise unfairly discriminating against Internet traffic that flows across their networks,” the letter said. “Without these protections, broadband providers can decide what content gets through to consumers at what speeds and could use this power to discriminate against their competitors or other content.” The letter was spearheaded by Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), and Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii).

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai led a commission vote to repeal the rules in December 2017, but the rules remain on the books because the repeal was contingent on US Office of Management and Budget (OMB) approval of modified information-collection requirements. The OMB approval came last month, allowing Pai to schedule the repeal for Monday, June 11.

#Neutralité_Internet

News — At The Edge — 6/9
▻https://hackernoon.com/news-at-the-edge-6-9-de5fc87c1189?source=rss----3a8144eabfe3---4

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Two sets of unwanted harbingers this week.Undermining our #future — banks, inequality, & bad faith — by going in wrong direction.Harming our future — panopticon & war — without any redeeming benefit.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Undermining our futureFed Makes a Risky Bet on Banks —“That banks can’t be…trusted to judge the risks they take was a painful lesson…from the Great Recession…[so] Congress established the Volcker Rule… [that] restricted banks from speculating with depositors’ money…in hedge funds and private equity funds…[and] to demonstrate to regulators that such trades were for permitted purposes….Not any more….[Fed says] banks would establish their own risk limits and determine whether such trades are compliant….In other words, trust them, they’re risk-taking experts….If banks are (...)

#privacy #economics #politics #technews

Enough already. Not all criticism of #Israel is anti-Semitism.
▻http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-anti-semitism-20180608-story.html

http://www.latimes.com/resizer/9RngEhRCIrh1Yc9YEgEb4k4fuQQ=/1200x0/arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-tronc.s3.amazonaws.com/public/N4B5IT5CGRCW7EM2LI52QWJ53U.jpg#.jpg

Freedom of speech on college campuses is under enough pressure without the federal government adding to the problem by threatening to withdraw funding to punish people for expressing their political opinions. That would be a real possibility if Congress enacted and President Trump signed a bill called the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act of 2018.

#liberté_d'expression #démocraties #Etats-unis “#nos_valeurs” "#monde_libre" #slogans

#Seymour_Hersh on spies, state secrets, and the stories he doesn’t tell - Columbia Journalism Review
▻https://www.cjr.org/special_report/seymour-hersh-monday-interview.php

https://cdn.cjr.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/portrait_hersh_orange-800x419.jpg

Bob Woodward once said his worst source was Kissinger because he never told the truth. Who was your worst source?

Oh, I wouldn’t tell you.

He’s pro-incest, pedophilia, and rape. He’s also running for Congress from his parents’ house. - The Washington Post
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2018/06/01/hes-pro-incest-pedophilia-and-rape-hes-also-running-for-congress-fro

He believes in instituting a patriarchal system, with women under the authority of men; he supports abolishing age restrictions for marriage and laws against marital rape; he believes that white supremacy is a “system that works,” that Hitler was a “good thing for Germany,” and that incest should be legalized, at least in the context of marriage. And at one point in a conversation with The Post, he seemed to express admiration for the system run by the Taliban in Afghanistan, noting that the country’s birthrate fell as a consequence of increased opportunities for women after the United States’ more than decade-long intervention.

But Larson, 37, is hoping to take his views toward the mainstream by mounting a campaign for a congressional seat in Virginia, running as an independent libertarian for the state’s 10th district, a swath of land across three counties in Northern Virginia outside the Washington suburbs. The seat is currently held by Republican Barbara Comstock, but has attracted strong Democratic interest; Hillary Clinton won the district by 10 percentage points in 2016.
[…]
The HuffPost reported this week that Larson had created two websites that catered to the furthest fringes of the Internet: suiped.org and incelocalpse.today, information that Larson confirmed in an interview with The Post.

Both websites have since been removed by their domain hosts. Suiped or Suicidal Pedophiles, was a site and self-described organization created to lobby for pedophiles and other convicted or potential sex offenders to be able to kill themselves at clinics legally, according to cached images.

According to a cached image, Incelocalypse was created to “serve as both headquarters and casual hangout for the hardest core of the hardcore incels,” the small but vocal community of “involuntary celibates” online who rage against feminism and a system of female empowerment that has deprived them of sexual gratification, an Internet subculture that has begun to draw some attention by mainstream media outlets.

Larson said he considers himself to be part of the “#incel movement” and said his views took a turn for the more extreme after an acrimonious divorce.

How to Talk About Vaccines on Television - Issue 60: Searches
▻http://nautil.us/issue/60/searches/how-to-talk-about-vaccines-on-television

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In 2008, John Porter, a Washington, D.C. lawyer and former Republican member of Congress, stood in front of a group of scientists at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and urged them to make their cases to the media and to the people. “America needs you,” Porter said, “fighting for science.” At the time, the number of science articles in American newspapers had shrunk dramatically. Science on television also suffered. CNN dismissed its entire science, space, environment, and technology unit. According to a National Science Foundation report, network nightly news programs from 2000 to 2012 devoted less than 2 percent of air time to science, space, and technology, and less than 1 percent to biotechnology and basic medical research. Nonetheless, (...)

The alarming statistics that show the U.S. economy isn’t as good as it seems | Business | stltoday.com
▻http://www.stltoday.com/business/local/the-alarming-statistics-that-show-the-u-s-economy-isn/article_140475b7-864e-52a5-a68b-7a78eb17e9e3.html

Article du Washington Post repris (25/5/2018)

– Forty percent of American adults don’t have enough savings to cover a $400 emergency expense such as an unexpected medical bill, car problem or home repair.

– Forty-three percent of households can’t afford the basics to live, meaning they aren’t earning enough to cover the combined costs of housing, food, child care, health care, transportation and a cellphone, according to the United Way study. Researchers looked at the data by county to adjust for lower costs in some parts of the country.

– More than a quarter of adults skipped necessary medical care last year because they couldn’t afford it.

– Twenty-two percent of adults aren’t able to pay all of their bills every month.

– Only 38 percent of non-retired Americans think their retirement savings is “on track.”

– Only 65 percent of African Americans and 66 percent of Hispanics say they are “doing okay” financially versus 77 percent of whites.

The Fed and United Way findings suggest the U.S. economy isn’t nearly as strong as statistics such as the unemployment rate and the GDP growth rate suggest. Taken alone, these metrics mask the fact that some Americans are doing well and some are not.

"[...]

President Donald Trump and many Republicans in Congress are focused on getting people back to work with the belief that once people have jobs they will be able to lift themselves out of poverty. But a growing body of research like the Fed and United Way studies and anecdotes from people working on the front lines at food banks and shelters indicates that a job is no longer enough.

#emplois #précarité #Etats-Unis #modèle

This Refuge May Be the Most Contested Land in the U.S.
▻https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/06/arctic-national-wildlife-refuge-america-oil-risk

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/content/dam/magazine/rights-exempt/2018/06/future-of-ANWR/future-anwr-arctic-wildlife-refuge-5.ngsversion.1527566474550.adapt.1900.1.jpg

Congress voted to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. Here’s what’s at stake for America’s wild frontier.

#artcique #nature #cartographie #extractivisme #Alaska

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/interactive-assets/nggraphics/ngm-1806-anwr-map/build-2018-05-24_11-56-34/ngm-assets/img/ngm-1806-anwr-map_ai2html-desktop-medium.jpg

America’s opioid epidemic began more than a century ago – with the civil war | Science | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/dec/30/americas-opioid-epidemic-began-more-than-a-century-ago-with-the-civil-w

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An estimated two million people abused opiates during the war, after using drugs disseminated by healthcare providers, doctors and nurses to stem pain

For many Americans, it was the prescription of a well-meaning physician that sent them down the dark road.

Aggressive marketing and over-prescribing of painkillers touched off a scourge of opiate addiction and Congress, pushed by the destruction it had wrought, introduced a new law to reform painkiller prescribing.

It was 1915 and Congress was considering what would become the first law to criminalize drug use, the Harrison Narcotic Act. By this time, addiction had already touched middle-class housewives, immigrants, veterans and even physicians hoping to soothe their own aches and pains. Between the 1870s and 1880s, America’s per capita consumption of opiates had tripled.

More than a century later, Americans are fighting some of the same demons.

Since 1999, more than half a million Americans have died of drug overdoses. Recent data shows the trend accelerated in 2016, when 63,600 people were killed by overdoses and the rate of Americans dying increased by 21%.

“There was a massive opioid epidemic after the civil war,” said Robert Heimer, a professor of epidemiology and pharmacology at Yale University School of Public Health. “Except is wasn’t a black market – it was a perfectly legal market filled with patent medicines that contained not just cocaine and opiates, morphine mostly, but also alcohol.”

Laudanum, Heimer said, “was commonly taken as a relief of colds, coughs, and in stronger form was particularly good for lung diseases such as tuberculosis, which was common at the time, in addition to being widely used in combat situations to facilitate amputations”.

Where Purdue Pharma marketed Oxycontin to doctors as a “continuous around-the-clock analgesic” formulation of semi-synthetic oxycodone great for chronic pain, Mrs Winslow’s Soothing Syrup marketed morphine and alcohol to parents as a “perfectly harmless and pleasant” way to produce “quiet sleep, by relieving the child from pain”.

History, Courtwright said, offers some “grounds for optimism”. Beginning in the 1890s, physicians began to criticize colleagues who reached for the prescription pad when patients had aches and pains; pharmacists refused to sell heroin or cocaine (then both legal); and in 1906 muckraking journalists and campaigners successfully argued for reforms to end the sale of patent medicines.

By 1915, Courtwright argues in the New England Journal of Medicine, “the Harrison Act closed the barn door after the horse was back in”. Problematically, the Harrison Act also became the first law to criminalize drug use and opiate maintenance therapies, such as methadone and buprenorphine.

#Opioides #Histoire #Addiction #Laudanum

U.S. Navy’s Costliest Vessel Just Got Even Pricier - Bloomberg
▻https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-11/navy-busts-12-9-billion-cap-on-costliest-u-s-aircraft-carrier

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The Navy’s costliest vessel ever just got pricer, breaching a $12.9 billion cap set by Congress by $120 million, the service told lawmakers this week.

The extra money for the U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford built by Huntington Ingalls Industries Inc. is needed to replace faulty propulsion components damaged in a January failure, extend the vessel’s post-delivery repair phase to 12 months from the original eight months and correct deficiencies with the “Advanced Weapons Elevators” used to move munitions from deep in the ship to the deck.

The elevators on the ship, designated CVN 78, need to be fixed “to preclude any effect on the safety of the ship and personnel,” the Naval Sea Systems Command said in a statement to Bloomberg News on Friday. “Once the adjustment is executed, the cost for CVN 78 will stand at $13.027 billion”, the Navy said.
[…]
Navy officials didn’t disclose the propulsion failure or elevator problems during budget hearings before Congress in recent weeks, and House and Senate lawmakers didn’t ask about it.

Rappel des autres éléments du feuilleton USS General R. Ford :

The Ford’s propulsion system and elevator flaws are separate from reliability issues on its troubled aircraft launch and recovery systems.

After its delivery last May, the ship operated for 70 days and completed 747 shipboard aircraft launches and recoveries, exceeding the goal of about 400, the Navy said.

None of the 11 weapons elevators are operational but at least two are being used for testing “to identify many of the remaining developmental issues for this first-of-class system,” the Navy has said. The command said all 11 elevators “should have been complete and delivered with the ship delivery” in May 2017.

Catapulte, F-35, etc.

The Hidden War on Trans Rights
▻https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/the-hidden-war-on-trans-rights

In 2016, more than 50 bills were introduced in Congress targeting Trans people. Since Trump took office, dozens of pieces of landmark legislation have been cancelled, severely rolling back Trans...