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Banks Cooperating With Each Other and Police to Track Occupy Protesters
Max Abelson reports in the San Francisco Chronicle:
The world’s biggest banks are working with one another and police to gather intelligence as protesters try to rejuvenate the Occupy Wall Street movement with May demonstrations, industry security consultants aid.
Among 99 protest targets in midtown Manhattan on Tuesday are JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America offices, said Marisa Holmes, a member of Occupy’s May Day planning committee.
Events are scheduled in more than 115 cities, including an effort to shut down the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, where Wells Fargo investors relied on police to get past protests at their annual meeting this week. “Our goal is to kick off the spring offensive and go directly to where the financial elite play and plan,” she said.
After evictions and arrests from Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park to London that began last year, the movement against income inequality and corporate abuse will regain strength, said Brian…
U.S. Drones Killed 2,800 Civilians in Pakistan in 7 Years
Via Press TV:
A Pakistani human rights lawyer says over 2,800 of the 3,000 people killed over the past seven years in non-UN-sanctioned US assassination drone strikes in Pakistan were civilians, Press TV reports. Shahzad Akbar, the director of the Foundation for Fundamental Rights, told Press TV on Saturday that only 170 of the people killed in the aerial attacks on the northwestern tribal belt of Pakistan have been identified as militants.
That means that “over 2,800 people were civilians, whose identities are not known, and they have just been killed on suspicion of being militants,” he added. US President Barack Obama publicly confirmed for the first time in late January that drone aircraft have struck targets inside Pakistan. Obama said “a lot of these strikes have been in the FATA”, the acronym for Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas.
Pakistan contends that the drone strikes are counterproductive. “We are of the firm view…
4-Year Old Gets TSA Pat-Down Following Hug From Grandma
Chris Morran writes on the Consumerist:
Kids today. They say and do the darndest things, even under the watchful eye of the Transportation Security Administration. So who knows what happens when your 4-year-old daughter gives grandma a hug at the airport security checkpoint. In addition to that peck on the cheek, a deadly weapon may have been exchanged.
A few readers have pointed to a story on Facebook, posted by a Montana mom who was flying home from Kansas with her two young children and their grandmother.
According to the poster, she and her kids got through the checkpoint without trouble but grandma had triggered the alarm. She went through the scanner again, but the screener could not firmly ID what was setting off the alarm, and grandma was asked to have a seat and wait for a pat-down.
“If I Wanted America to Fail” (Video)
Pretty clever move from Americans for Limited Government to premiere this campaign on Earth Day and claim Twitter suspended their account:
One In Two College Graduates Are Jobless Or Underemployed
Illustration: lumaxart (CC)
Reports the AP via the Huffington Post:
The college class of 2012 is in for a rude welcome to the world of work.
A weak labor market already has left half of young college graduates either jobless or underemployed in positions that don’t fully use their skills and knowledge.
Young adults with bachelor’s degrees are increasingly scraping by in lower-wage jobs – waiter or waitress, bartender, retail clerk or receptionist, for example – and that’s confounding their hopes a degree would pay off despite higher tuition and mounting student loans.
An analysis of government data conducted for The Associated Press lays bare the highly uneven prospects for holders of bachelor’s degrees. While there’s strong demand in science, education and health fields, arts and humanities flounder. Median wages for those with bachelor’s degrees are down from 2000, hit by technological changes that are eliminating midlevel jobs such as bank tellers. Most future job…
Occupy Protesters Attempt To Crash Wells Fargo Shareholder Meeting in San Francisco
The police are ready for this. Good luck. Reports the AP via the Washington Post:
Police were guarding the entrance to the annual meeting of Wells Fargo shareholders on Tuesday as protesters associated with the Occupy Wall Street movement geared up to crash the gathering.
Dozens of officers were stationed around the Merchant’s Exchange Building in the city’s Financial District in advance of the 1 p.m. meeting. Bank stockholders were asked to show certificates or other proof of ownership before being corralled past gates erected in front of the doors.
Many of the early arrivals represented community groups from across the country that purchased Wells Fargo stock so they would have a say in the bank’s practices.
Shareholder Mark Richmond, a 59-year-old Portland member of the group We Are Oregon, said he hoped he could voice his concerns specifically about predatory lending and home foreclosures. He said he expected some raucousness inside and outside the meeting.
Free $10 Million Loans For All!
If you work on Wall Street it’s time to take Bill’s Hicks’ advice for advertising and marketers … because this will never happen. Sheila Bair writes in the Washington Post:
Are you concerned about growing income inequality in America? Are you resentful of all that wealth concentrated in the 1 percent? I’ve got the perfect solution, a modest proposal that involves just a small adjustment in the Federal Reserve’s easy monetary policy. Best of all, it will mean that none of us have to work for a living anymore.
For several years now, the Fed has been making money available to the financial sector at near-zero interest rates. Big banks and hedge funds, among others, have taken this cheap money and invested it in securities with high yields. This type of profit-making, called the “carry trade,” has been enormously profitable for them.
So why not let everyone participate? Under my plan, each American household…
The Rising Cost of Going (and Not Going!) to College
Derek Thompson writes in the Atlantic:
Have you heard about the dangerous, rising cost of not going to college? In the last 30 years, the typical college tuition has tripled. But over the exact same period, the earnings gap between college-educated adults and high school graduates has also tripled. In 1979, the wage difference was 75%. In 2003, it was 230%.
Over the last three decades, the cost of going to college has increased at nearly the exact same rate as the cost not going to college. How can the price of getting something and not getting something both rise at the same time?
That is the paradox of college costs…
The Creepiness Factor: How Obama and Romney Are Getting to Know You
Barack Romney or Mitt Obama?
Terrence McCoy writes in the Atlantic:
On a clear day in February 2001, a trim mid-career political analyst named Matthew Dowd landed in Washington, D.C., from Austin, Tex., and hurried into the White House for a meeting with Karl Rove. Inside a manila folder, he carried a sparsely-populated bar graph. The few numbers it had hit Rove like a bomb.
“Really?” Rove asked, snatching the document and glancing back at Dowd. “Man, this is a fundamental change.”
The truly independent voting bloc, Dowd’s data showed, had dissolved from one-fourth of the electorate in 1984 to just 7 percent. That meant the years of work leading up to the 2000 campaign and hundreds of millions of campaign dollars during it had focused on just 7 percent of voters — fewer than 8 million people. Everything next time, Dowd told Rove in his second-floor office, would have to be different. Forget independents.…
First U.S. Citizen Arrested With Drone Evidence Vows to Fight Case
Jason Koebler writes on U.S News & World Report:
The tiny town of Lakota, N.D., is quickly becoming a key testing ground for the legality of the use of unmanned drones by law enforcement after one of its residents became the first American citizen to be arrested with the help of a Predator surveillance drone.
The bizarre case started when six cows wandered onto Rodney Brossart’s 3,000 acre farm. Brossart, an alleged anti-government “sovereignist,” believed he should have been able to keep the cows, so he and two family members chased police off his land with high powered rifles.
After a 16-hour standoff, the Grand Forks police department SWAT team, armed with a search warrant, used an agreement they’ve had with Homeland Security for about three years, and called in an unmanned aerial vehicle to pinpoint Brossart’s location on the ranch. The SWAT team stormed in and arrested Brossart on charges of terrorizing a sheriff, theft, criminal mischief, and other charges, according to documents.
Portland Man Strips Naked To Protest TSA Search
Reports Cheryl Calm on KING 5 News:
Frequent flying businessman John Brennan set off an explosives wand at Portland International Airport Tuesday and stripped naked to show TSA screeners he was not carrying a bomb.
John Brennan stripped off his clothes at the TSA security station and stood there naked, as waiting passengers and their families looked on, took photos or looked away.
Brennan said as he left jail Tuesday night that removing all his clothes was not premeditated. The frequent traveler who had heard of many TSA issues while on prior business travels was just fed up as he set off the detector at PDX.
“And the machine went off, and I asked what it was and he said ‘nitrates’ which I know from Oklahoma City is one of the explosive ingredients,” said Brennan, “and I was not interested in being hassled so I took off my clothes to show them I was not carrying any explosives.”
Homeland Security’s ‘Pre-Crime’ Screening Will Never Work
Alexander Furnas writes in the Atlantic:
Pre-crime prevention is a terrible idea.
Here is a quiz for you. Is predicting crime before it happens: (a) something out of Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report; (b) the subject of of a Department of Homeland Security research project that has recently entered testing; (c) a terrible and dangerous idea which will inevitably be counter-productive and which will levy a high price in terms of civil liberties while providing little to no marginal security; or (d) all of the above.
If you picked (d) you are a winner!
The U.S. Department of Homeland security is working on a project called FAST, the Future Attribute Screening Technology, which is some crazy straight-out-of-sci-fi pre-crime detection and prevention software which may come to an airport security screening checkpoint near you someday soon. Yet again the threat of terrorism is being used to justify the introduction of super-creepy invasions of privacy, and lead us…
Secret Service Investigates Ted Nugent’s Remarks on President Obama
Reports Devin Dwye on ABC News:
The U.S. Secret Service is looking into the incendiary and potentially threatening remarks made by rocker and Mitt Romney-backer Ted Nugent at the National Rifle Association convention over the weekend. “We are aware of them and we are conducting the appropriate follow-up now,” Secret Service spokesman George Ogilvie told ABC News.
Nugent told a crowd of convention goers that “if Barack Obama becomes the president in November, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year.”
“If you can’t go home and get everybody in your lives to clean house in this vile, evil, America-hating administration, I don’t even know what you’re made of,” he said. The comments were caught on tape and posted online by the website Right Wing Watch.
U.S. Soldiers Pose With Bodies Of Suicide Bombers In Afghanistan
David Zucchino writes in the Los Angeles Times:
The paratroopers had their assignment: Check out reports that Afghan police had recovered the mangled remains of an insurgent suicide bomber. Try to get iris scans and fingerprints for identification.
The 82nd Airborne Division soldiers arrived at the police station in Afghanistan’s Zabol province in February 2010. They inspected the body parts. Then the mission turned macabre: The paratroopers posed for photos next to Afghan police, grinning while some held — and others squatted beside — the corpse’s severed legs.
A few months later, the same platoon was dispatched to investigate the remains of three insurgents who Afghan police said had accidentally blown themselves up. After obtaining a few fingerprints, they posed next to the remains, again grinning and mugging for photographs.
So How Many Americans Actually Pay No Taxes?
Informative article from NPR’s “All Things Considered”:
It’s that time of year again — tax week. With the deadline for Americans to file their income taxes looming, there’s a good chance you’ve heard or will hear from politicians, on cable news and on talk radio about those who pay little or no taxes.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has said that we “have a situation in this country where you’re nearing 50 percent of people who don’t even pay income taxes.” There are even those who say that there are nearly 50 percent of Americans who pay no taxes at all.
While it is true that about half of American households pay no federal income tax, the odds that half of Americans are paying no taxes at all are relatively low. Sales taxes, payroll taxes and state taxes make it difficult to avoid paying all taxes completely.
But is it possible? Weekends on All Things…
George Washington Named Britain’s Greatest Foe
Reports Jasper Copping in the Telegraph:
The American was voted the winner in a contest run by the National Army Museum to identify the country’s most outstanding military opponent.
He was one of a shortlist of five leaders who topped a public poll and on Saturday was selected as the ultimate winner by an audience of around 70 guests at a special event at the museum, in Chelsea, west London.
In second place was Michael Collins, the Irish leader, ahead of Napoleon Bonaparte, Erwin Rommel and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. At the event, each contender had their case made by a historian giving a 40 minute presentation. The audience, who had paid to attend the day, then voted in a secret ballot after all five presentations had been made.
Dr Stephen Brumwell, who had championed Washington, said: “As British officers conceded, he was a worthy opponent.”
CIA’s Secret Fear: High-Tech Border Checks Will Blow Spies’ Cover
The Watchmen’s tools working against the Watchers? Jeff Stein writes on WIRED’s Danger Room:
When Tom Cruise had to break into police headquarters in Minority Report, the futuristic crime thriller, he got past the iris scanners with ease: He just swapped out his eyeballs.
CIA agents may find that just a little beyond the call of duty. But meanwhile, they’ve got to come up with something else: The increasing deployment of iris scanners and biometric passports at worldwide airports, hotels and business headquarters, designed to catch terrorists and criminals, are playing havoc with operations that require CIA spies to travel under false identities.
Busy spy crossroads such as Dubai, Jordan, India and many EU points of entry are employing iris scanners to link eyeballs irrevocably to a particular name. Likewise, the increasing use of biometric passports, which are embedded with microchips containing a person’s face, sex, fingerprints, date and place of birth, and…
12 Secret Service Agents In Prostitution Scandal
Via CBS News:
Members of the president’s Secret Service detail, including a supervisor, are in what looks to be some pretty hot water. At least one United States Secret Service agent is alleged to have sought the services of a prostitute in Cartagena, Colombia, where President Obama is visiting for the Summit of the Americas. CBS News has learned that one of the agents allegedly involved with the prostitute is a supervisor of the Counter Terror Assault Team (CAT). The CAT team is responsible for advance planning and response and is not part of the president’s protective detail.
A source in the Secret Service tells CBS News that one or more of the officers were involved with prostitutes and that there was a dispute over payment. One prostitute went to the police, who notified the State Department. The agents stayed at Hotel Caribe, where the international press is staying. A former Secret…
Looking For A ‘Doomsday Date’?
Alice Bell writes in the Guardian:
“Doomsday dating” really does exist: websites designed to match those with particular skills and resources for dealing with disaster, be it nuclear attack, extreme weather or economic collapse. Only in the US, perhaps, but with the petrol panics of last week (not to mention that “well from hell” off the coast of Scotland) maybe we could do with a version for dear old Blighty.
If you prefer fictional romance to the point-and-click experience of internet dating, Daniel Kramb has a book about love and climate change activism out next month, complete with the tagline “They want the burning to stop. She wants hers to begin”. He’s not the first author to explore the new politics of love in a changing climate either. I’ve come across the issue in the course of my academic research on children’s science literature. Take, for example, Saci Lloyd’s Carbon Diaries; a teenager’s diary…
Glenn Beck Leads His Internet Network From His Own Oval Office
Megalomania? You can watch the address here. Nice touch that it was originally used in Oliver Stone’s JFK. Reports Bud Kennedy in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram:
Glenn Beck has been in Texas only a few months, and he’s already talking big. Now, he wants to address America from his own Oval Office. Lest anyone fear that something has suddenly gone drastically wrong in our country, Beck’s Oval Office is a movie set in Irving.
As part of moving into the largest broadcast studio in Texas, Beck will start delivering speeches from the White House set built 20 years ago for the Oliver Stone movie JFK and stored since then at the Studios at Las Colinas.
Saying he will “deliver the speeches the president should have delivered,” Beck promised to “activate the sleeping giant” of Christian conservatives in America with speeches from his new set on the Studios’ Stage A. Mainly, of course, Beck’s…
