• Just before 9-11, Bush ignored warnings of a coming Osama bin Laden terror attack, but it was Reagan who, as part of his campaign against the Soviets in Afghanistan, boosted fanatical jihadists and gave bin Laden his start.⁴¹⁴²⁴³

• Bush, on his first week in office, planned for carving up the oil fields after an Iraq invasion, but it was Reagan who took the solar panels off the White House and returned the nation to its oil-guzzling ways.⁴⁴⁴⁵

• To muster support for invading Iraq, Bush published phony intelligence reports, like those claiming that Iraq was working with al-Qaeda.⁴⁶ In that he followed the lead of Reagan, who, to gain support for aid to brutal regimes in Latin America, set up “The Office of Public Diplomacy” to use CIA propaganda techniques against the American people, and who, to gain support for his military build up, edited radio transcripts to give the false picture that the Soviets willfully shot down civilian flight KAL-007.⁴⁷⁴⁸

• Bush, in his “Global War on Terror”, pursued torture of captives and dragged the nation’s honor into the muck, but he was just bringing home the policy of Reagan, who supported torture by Latin American regimes fighting leftist rebellions.⁴⁹⁵⁰

• Bush broke laws with programs such as his domestic warrantless wiretapping, just like Reagan, with programs such as the Iran-Contra caper, which secretly bypassed Congress’s ban against aiding the brutal Contra rebels against the people of Nicaragua.⁵¹⁵²

• Bush pushed corporate deregulation and slowed anti-fraud enforcement during a time of massive Wall Street fraud, which helped bring about the Bush Economic Crash — putting millions out of work and causing trillions in bank bailouts, but he was riding out the deregulation wave started by Reagan, who signed the deregulation law that brought about the huge Savings and Loan Crash in the 80’s.^53545556

• Bush fiddled for eight years while global warming climate change mindlessly marched ahead, and, like Reagan, ignored and cut enforcement of environmental standards.⁵⁷⁵⁸

Now, President Obama has just signed a law to plan remembrances for Reagan on the 100th anniversary of his birth (on Feb 6, 2011).⁵⁹ Let’s take the occasion to do more than honor Reagan with a postage stamp — let’s honor our country by teaching a factual history of his regime and its effects to our children.

Sources

⁴⁰ ‘‘Bush’ sewage plant proposal makes ballot’ – AP, July 18, 2008

A measure seeking to commemorate President Bush’s years in office by slapping his name on a San Francisco sewage plant has qualified for the November ballot.

…

“We think that it’s important to remember our leaders in the right historical context,” said McConnell, a member of the group that was formed after friends came up with the renaming idea.

“In President Bush’s case, we think that we will be cleaning up a substantial mess for the next 10 or 20 years,” he said. “The sewage treatment facility’s job is to clean up a mess, so we think it’s a fitting tribute.”

⁴¹ ‘The Bush-Bin Laden Symbiosis’ By Robert Parry, August 11, 2006

The CIA tried to warn Bush about the threat with the hope that presidential action could energize government agencies and head off the attack. On Aug. 6, 2001, the CIA sent analysts to Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, to brief him and deliver a report entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.”

Bush was not pleased by the intrusion. He glared at the CIA briefer and snapped, “All right, you’ve covered your ass,” according to Suskind’s book.

Then, ordering no special response, Bush returned to a vacation of fishing, clearing brush and working on a speech about stem-cell research.

⁴² ‘Ronald Reagan: Worst President Ever?’ By Robert Parry, June 3, 2009

[The Afghanistan] war was dramatically ramped up under Reagan, who traded U.S. acquiescence toward Pakistan’s nuclear bomb for its help in shipping sophisticated weapons to the Afghan jihadists (including a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden).

⁴³ ‘Pakistan and the ‘Global War on Terrorism’‘ by Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, January 8, 2008

In December 1984, the Sharia Law (Islamic jurisprudence) was established in Pakistan following a rigged referendum launched by President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. Barely a few months later, in March 1985, President Ronald Reagan issued National Security Decision Directive 166 (NSDD 166), which authorized “stepped-up covert military aid to the Mujahideen” as well a support to religious indoctrination.

…

“ … the United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings, part of covert attempts to spur resistance to the Soviet occupation.

“The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system’s core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books, …” (Washington Post, 23 March 2002)

⁴⁴ ‘Bush’s Belated Accountability Moment’ By Nat Parry, ConsortiumNews.com, November 12, 2006

In Ron Suskind’s The Price of Loyalty, O’Neill described the first NSC meeting at the White House only a few days into Bush’s presidency. An invasion of Iraq was already on the agenda, O’Neill said. There was even a map for a post-war occupation, marking out how Iraq’s oil fields would be carved up.

O’Neill said even at that early date, the goal of invading Iraq was clear. The message from Bush was “find a way to do this,” according to O’Neill, who was forced out of the administration in December 2002.

⁴⁵ ‘Prodigal Sun’ – Mother Jones, March 2000

The [DOE’s Solar Energy Research Institute] study, a yearlong investigation by some of the nation’s leading scientists, provided a convincing blueprint for a solar future. It showed that alternative energy could easily meet 28 percent of the nation’s power needs by 2000. The only thing that solar and wind and other nonpolluting energy sources needed was a push, the study concluded — the same research funding and tax credits provided to other energy industries, and a government committed to lead the way to reduced reliance on fossil fuels. … [Reagan’s] Energy Secretary Jim Edwards killed the study, all right, but not before it had been published in the Congressional Record.

… The budget for the solar institute — which President Jimmy Carter had created to spearhead solar innovation — was slashed from $124 million in 1980 to $59 million in 1982. Scientists who had left tenured university jobs to work under Hayes were given two weeks notice and no severance pay. The squelching of the institute — later partly re-funded and renamed the National Renewable Energy Laboratory — marked the start of Reagan’s campaign against solar power. By the end of 1985, when Congress and the administration allowed tax credits for solar homes to lapse, the dream of a solar era had faded. The solar water heater President Carter had installed on the White House roof in 1979 was dismantled and junked. Solar water heating went from a billion-dollar industry to peanuts overnight; thousands of sun-minded businesses went bankrupt. “It died. It’s dead,” says Peter Barnes, whose San Francisco solar- installation business had 35 employees at its peak. “First the money dried up, then the spirit dried up,” says Jim Benson, another solar activist of the day.

⁴⁶ ‘Pentagon Officer Created Phony Intel on Iraq/al-Qaeda Link’ By Matt Renner, t r u t h o u t, Friday 06 April 2007

Newly released documents confirm that a Pentagon unit knowingly cooked up intelligence claiming a direct link between Iraq and al-Qaeda in order to win support for a preemptive strike against the country.

A report prepared by the Defense Department’s Inspector General for Carl Levin, the Democratic Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, explicitly shows how former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith used his Defense Department position to cook intelligence claiming a connection between the terrorist organization and Saddam Hussein’s regime.

…

But according to the IG’s declassified report, “a Senior Intelligence Analyst working in the Joint Intelligence Task Force-Combating Terrorism (JITF-CT) countered point-by-point, each instance of an alleged tie between Iraq and al-Qaida …”

⁴⁷ ‘Iran-Contra’s ‘Lost Chapter’‘ – By Robert Parry, June 30, 2008

That chapter — which we are publishing here for the first time — was “lost” because Republicans on the congressional Iran-Contra investigation waged a rear-guard fight that traded elimination of the chapter’s key findings for the votes of three moderate GOP senators, giving the final report a patina of bipartisanship.

…

The American people thus were spared the chapter’s troubling finding: that the Reagan administration had built a domestic covert propaganda apparatus managed by a CIA propaganda and disinformation specialist working out of the National Security Council.

“One of the CIA’s most senior covert action operators was sent to the NSC in 1983 by CIA Director [William] Casey where he participated in the creation of an inter-agency public diplomacy mechanism that included the use of seasoned intelligence specialists,” the chapter’s conclusion stated.

“This public/private network set out to accomplish what a covert CIA operation in a foreign country might attempt — to sway the media, the Congress, and American public opinion in the direction of the Reagan administration’s policies.”

However, with the chapter’s key findings deleted, the right-wing domestic propaganda operation not only survived the Iran-Contra fallout but thrived.

⁴⁸ ‘GOP & KAL-007: ‘The Key Is to Lie First’‘ By Robert Parry

One of the baldest — and now admitted — lies was the case of Korean Air Lines flight 007. On the night of Aug. 30, 1983, the KAL 747 jumbo jet strayed hundreds of miles off-course and penetrated some of the Soviet Union’s most sensitive air space, by flying over military facilities in Kamchatka and Sakhalin Island.

Over Sakhalin, KAL-007 was finally intercepted by a Soviet Sukhoi-15 fighter. The Soviet pilot tried to signal the plane to land, but the KAL pilots apparently did not see the repeated warnings. Amid confusion about the plane’s identity — a U.S. spy plane had been in the vicinity hours earlier — Soviet ground control ordered the pilot to fire. He did, blasting the plane out of the sky and killing all 269 people on board.

The Soviets soon realized they had made a horrendous mistake. U.S. intelligence also knew from sensitive intercepts that the tragedy had resulted from a blunder, not from a willful act of murder (much as on July 3, 1988, the USS Vincennes fired a missile that brought down an Iranian civilian airliner in the Persian Gulf, killing 290 people, an act which Reagan explained as an “understandable accident”).

But in 1983, the truth about KAL-007 didn’t fit Washington’s propaganda needs. The Reagan administration wanted to portray the Soviets as wanton murderers, so it brushed aside the judgment of the intelligence analysts. The administration then chose to release only snippets of the taped intercepts packaged in a way to suggest that the slaughter was intentional.

⁴⁹ ‘Report: Torture started with Bush’ By Mark Benjamin, Salon.com

“The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive (interrogation) techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.” That is one of the raw conclusions of a two-year Senate investigation into torture.

…

According to the report, the torture ball started rolling with the president and his Feb. 7, 2002, memorandum stating that the Geneva Conventions didn’t apply to al-Qaida or the Taliban. The CIA and the Department of Defense began scurrying to establish their brutal interrogation regimes, while the White House and top Bush administration officials brushed aside legal hurdles and approved specific, horrifying techniques.

⁵⁰ ‘Lost History: ‘Project X’ & School of Assassins’ By Robert Parry © 1996

For years, human rights activists have accused the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas of teaching torture and assassination techniques to military officers from around the Western Hemisphere. For just as long, the Pentagon has denied the charge.

Then, late on Friday afternoon, Sept. 20, the Pentagon released a report admitting that some of those concerns were well-founded. From 1982-91, the School of the Americas used seven U.S. Army intelligence training manuals, written in Spanish, which advocated executions, torture, blackmail and other forms of coercion, including the kidnapping of a target’s family members.

…

… In winning the election in 1980, President Reagan had publicly renounced President Carter’s strong emphasis on human rights.

In the months immediately after Reagan’s election, right-wing Salvadoran “death squads” went on a rampage of political slaughter, including the rape-murder of four American churchwomen. In 1981-82, the “death squads,” often consisting of plain-clothes soldiers, butchered thousands of perceived leftists with little criticism from a White House that was drawing a line against communism. In December 1981, a U.S.-trained Salvadoran battalion swept through the remote village of El Mozote and massacred about 800 men, women and children.

The Reagan administration also warmed up to the Guatemalan army as it launched extermination campaigns against suspected leftist strongholds among that country’s Indian population. Most controversial of all, the CIA began organizing the Nicaraguan contra rebel army to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government. The contras, too, gained a quick reputation for human rights atrocities during raids into northern Nicaragua.

⁵¹ ‘Spying on the Nation’ – Frontline, PBS

Although the president told the nation that his NSA eavesdropping program was limited to known Al Qaeda agents or supporters abroad making calls into the U.S., comments of other administration officials and intelligence veterans indicate that the NSA cast its net far more widely. AT&T technician Mark Klein inadvertently discovered that the whole flow of Internet traffic in several AT&T operations centers was being regularly diverted to the NSA, a charge indirectly substantiated by John Yoo, the Justice Department lawyer who wrote the official legal memos legitimizing the president’s warrantless wiretapping program. Yoo told FRONTLINE: “The government needs to have access to international communications so that it can try to find communications that are coming into the country where Al Qaeda’s trying to send messages to cell members in the country. In order to do that, it does have to have access to communication networks.

⁵² ‘Weinberger, Bushes & Iran-Contra’ By Robert Parry, March 29, 2006

In the early-to-mid 1980s, Ronald Reagan had sought to avoid a head-on clash with Congress by taking his foreign policy underground, using cutouts like Israel to ship missiles to Iran and White House aide Oliver North to funnel supplies to the contra rebels fighting in Nicaragua.

After those operations were exposed in 1986, Congress also tried to avert a constitutional showdown by papering over the illegal presidential actions and accepting the cover story that top officials, such as Reagan and Bush, were mostly out of the loop.

But those unresolved constitutional questions exploded back to the surface after Sept. 11, 2001, when George W. Bush asserted virtually unlimited presidential authority to override or ignore federal law as Commander in Chief. In effect, the younger George Bush was staking out power openly that Reagan and the elder George Bush had exercised only in secret.

⁵³ ‘Bush and Ken Lay: Slip Slidin’ Away’ By Sam Parry, February 6, 2002

Other parts of the Bush energy plan tracked closely to recommendations from Enron officials. Seventeen of the energy plan’s proposals were sought by and benefited Enron, according to Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., ranking minority member on the House Government Reform Committee. One proposal called for repeal of the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, which limits the activities of utilities and hindered Enron’s potential for acquisitions.

⁵⁴ ‘Bush II Slowed SEC During Financial Fraud Fury’ – The Paragraph, June 18th, 2009

⁵⁵ ‘An Inside Story of Wall Street Bank Crashes’ – The Paragraph, December 26th, 2008

⁵⁶ ‘Reagan Did It’ By PAUL KRUGMAN, May 31, 2009

“This bill is the most important legislation for financial institutions in the last 50 years. It provides a long-term solution for troubled thrift institutions. … All in all, I think we hit the jackpot.” So declared Ronald Reagan in 1982, as he signed the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act.

…

The immediate effect of Garn-St. Germain, as I said, was to turn the thrifts from a problem into a catastrophe. The S.& L. crisis has been written out of the Reagan hagiography, but the fact is that deregulation in effect gave the industry — whose deposits were federally insured — a license to gamble with taxpayers’ money, at best, or simply to loot it, at worst. By the time the government closed the books on the affair, taxpayers had lost $130 billion, back when that was a lot of money.

But there was also a longer-term effect. Reagan-era legislative changes essentially ended New Deal restrictions on mortgage lending — restrictions that, in particular, limited the ability of families to buy homes without putting a significant amount of money down.

These restrictions were put in place in the 1930s by political leaders who had just experienced a terrible financial crisis, and were trying to prevent another. But by 1980 the memory of the Depression had faded. Government, declared Reagan, is the problem, not the solution; the magic of the marketplace must be set free. And so the precautionary rules were scrapped.

⁵⁷ ‘The four global warming impact studies Bush tried to bury in his final days’ by Joseph Romm, Grist, 21 Jan 2009

… For eight years [the Bush administration] have avoided their statutory obligation to detail the impacts of climate change on this country. And they have systematically muzzled government climate scientists from discussing those impacts with the public or the media.

It was easier to find people in the Bush administration to talk about torture or warrantless wiretaps, than it was to get someone to speak on (or off) the record on the likely impact of Bush’s policy of unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions on Americans.

On Friday January 16, the U.S. Climate Change Science Program actually released four major Synthesis and Assessment reports. You may remember the last report the CCSP released — U.S. Geological Survey stunner: Sea-level rise in 2100 will likely “substantially exceed” IPCC projections, SW faces “permanent drying” by 2050. I was told by scientists knowledgeable about the CCSP process that all of the major impact reports were slowed down in the review process to make sure they came out after the election.

…

These are all substantive and comprehensive studies, almost on a par with the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment.

⁵⁸ ‘A look back at Reagan’s environmental record’ Grist, 10 Jun 2004

“The Reagan administration adopted an extraordinarily aggressive policy of issuing leases for oil, gas, and coal development on tens of millions of acres of national lands — more than any other administration in history, including the current one [Bush II],” said the Wilderness Society’s David Alberswerth.

Before delving further into Reagan’s track record, it’s worth recalling his infamous public statement that “trees cause more pollution than automobiles do,” and that if “you’ve seen one tree you’ve seen them all.” This is not, in other words, a president who demonstrated much ecological prowess.

…

The list of rollbacks attempted by these administrators is as sweeping as those of the current [Bush II] administration. Gorsuch tried to gut the Clean Air Act with proposals to weaken pollution standards “on everything from automobiles to furniture manufacturers — efforts which took Congress two years to defeat,” according to Clapp. Moves to weaken the Clean Water Act were equally aggressive, crescendoing in 1987 when Reagan vetoed a strong reauthorization of the act only to have his veto overwhelmingly overridden by Congress. Assaults on Superfund were so hideous that Rita Lavelle, director of the program, was thrown in jail for lying to Congress under oath about corruption in her agency division.

The gutting of funds for environmental protection was another part of Reagan’s legacy. “EPA budget cuts during Reagan’s first term were worse than they are today,” said Frank O’Donnell, director of Clean Air Trust, who reported on environmental policy for The Washington Monthly during the Reagan era. “The administration tried to cut EPA funding by more than 25 percent in its first budget proposal,” he said. And massive cuts to Carter-era renewable-energy programs “set solar back a decade,” said Clapp.

Topping it all off were efforts to slash the EPA enforcement program: “The enforcement slowdown was staggering,” said a staffer at the House Energy and Commerce Committee who helped investigate the Reagan administration’s enforcement of environmental laws during the early ’80s. “In the first year of the Reagan administration, there was a 79 percent decline in the number of enforcement cases filed from regional offices to EPA headquarters, and a 69 percent decline in the number of cases filed from the EPA to the Department of Justice.”

⁵⁹ ‘Obama designates day for Reagan’ By Michael Collins June 2, 2009

… [Nancy Reagan] stood with her hand on Obama’s shoulder as he signed the Ronald Reagan Centennial Commission Act into law.

The bill will create an 11-member panel that will recommend and carry out plans to celebrate Reagan’s 100th birthday, such as special stamps or commemorative coins. No federal money can be spent on the commission or its activities.

Sewage pipe image found HERE.

By Quinn Hungeski – Posted at G.N.N. & TheParagraph.com

George Washington warned against internal enemies who would try to separate one group of citizens from another, and the people from their government:

The unity of Government, which constitutes you one people, … is a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquillity at home, your peace abroad; of your safety; of your prosperity; of that very Liberty, which you so highly prize. But … it is easy to foresee, that … much pains will be taken, many artifices employed, to weaken in your minds the conviction of this truth; as this is the point in your political fortress against which the batteries of internal and external enemies will be most constantly and actively (though often covertly and insidiously) directed …x⁸⁵

Thomas Jefferson foresaw fraudulent banking:

[L]iable as [a bank’s] cash would be to be pilfered and robbed, and its paper to be fraudulently re-issued, or issued without deposit, it would require skilful and strict regulation.x⁸⁶

Abraham Lincoln believed that government “for the people” should include protecting workers’ wages:

[I]t has so happened in all ages of the world, that some have laboured, and others have, without labour, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits. This is wrong, and should not continue. To [secure] to each labourer the whole product of his labour, or as nearly as possible, is a most worthy object of any good government. x⁸⁷

Theodore Roosevelt warned of corporate bosses undermining government for the people:

The big trust magnates …, the big politicians of the old boss type …, stand against the people. They object to the government, to government being used primarily in the interest of the people themselves. Naturally, they will do all they can to breakdown the only real enemies that they have and the only real champions, the only real and efficient champions of popular right, and economic, social, and industrial justice.x⁸⁸

Now there is liberal talk — though not nearly on every radio dial. But where it exists, it serves to beat back the right-wing barrage, and to broadcast words like those from the Rushmore wind.

Liberal Talk Radio Links

XM 167 – America Left

Sirius 146 – Sirius Left

Ohio Majority Radio Listen (online only).

WCPT 820AM Chicago Listen.

WDTW 1310AM Detroit Listen.

KPOJ 620AM Portland Listen.

WWRL 1600AM New York City – Listen

KTLK 1150AM Los Angeles Listen.

Air America – Listen

Democracy Now! Listen and watch. (Hard news.)

LTR Has many more liberal talk radio links.

Sources

⁷⁰ ‘The US Media & Democracy in Crisis’ by Robert Parry, February 19, 2009

In the latter part of the 1970s, angry Republicans and right-wing ideologues began to team up under the leadership of Nixon’s former Treasury Secretary Bill Simon, who used his control of the Olin Foundation to pull together like-minded foundations (Smith-Richardson, Scaife, etc.) to inject money into a right-wing media infrastructure and anti-journalism attack groups.

This initiative gained momentum with the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, a former actor and ad man who surrounded himself with media savvy advisers. They, in turn, began collaborating with CIA propaganda experts in devising “perception management” tactics that could be directed against the American people as well as at troublesome mainstream journalists.

To get around legal prohibitions on the CIA influencing U.S. politics, CIA Director William Casey transferred Walter Raymond Jr., one of the CIA’s top propagandists, to Reagan’s National Security Council where Raymond headed up a government-wide task force on “public diplomacy.” [For details, see Robert Parry’s Lost History.]

The right-wing media infrastructure continued to grow with the influx of mysterious money from the likes of Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the Korean theocrat who launched the Washington Times in 1982. Later, Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch got into the act with purchases of U.S. newspapers and eventually the founding of the neoconservative Weekly Standard and right-wing Fox News.

By the late years of the Reagan-Bush-41 era, right-wing talk radio was taking off with Rush Limbaugh and other angry white men filling the AM dial with venomous attacks on liberals. When Bill Clinton managed to eke out a victory in 1992, he immediately came under sustained attack from this potent right-wing media machine.

Meanwhile, in the mainstream press, generally conservative (or neoconservative) owners began cracking down on independent-minded journalists as early as the mid-1970s. But that trend grew stronger in the 1980s when journalists found it harder and harder to challenge the propaganda and cover-ups of the Reagan administration.

As journalists with integrity were weeded out – and as the American Left largely stayed disengaged and silent – the MSM survivors came to understand that their livelihoods required them to tilt their stories right-ward. By the Clinton years, it made perfect sense to join the Right’s media in piling on regarding the trivial “Clinton scandals.”

After years of getting pounded as “liberal,” the MSM was determined to shed the liberal label by being tougher on a Democrat than on any Republican. That tilt contributed to the Republican Revolution of 1994 and eventually to Clinton’s impeachment in 1998 (though he managed to survive a Senate trial)

⁷¹ ‘Limbaugh wrong on minimum wage — again’ – Media Matters, 2004-08-13

LIMBAUGH: The minimum wage has gotten so high that it’s paying people that are not skilled to do anything. … It’s — whatever it is, six and a quarter, seven bucks an hour, an hour, going to be there soon. … No, thank you. I don’t want to be imprisoned by minimum wage. … Here, take the minimum wage. Vote for us, we’ll raise it in a couple years, as long as the rascally Republicans don’t stand in our way. They hate you. But we love you. Now go ahead, eat your rice.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, the value of the $5.15 minimum wage in real dollars was lower in 2003 than in all but three years since 1960 …

… Limbaugh claimed that “75 percent of the people earning minimum wage” are teenagers; in reality, only 32 percent are.

⁷² ‘Obama Plans to Implement FDR’s Socialist Second Bill of Rights’ – Rush Limbaugh Show transcript, October 29, 2008

How many are happy with your Social Security? How many of you think it’s what you thought it was going to be? Where is that second home down in the Bahamas that Social Security and FDR was going to get for you? Where is all this plentiful retirement and security? Where is all this freedom from economic insecurity that FDR promised you with Social Security? Every time I talk to a Social Security recipient and that’s all they’ve got, they don’t have any security about anything. They’re worried to hell it’s going to be cut. (Limbaugh is mocking Social Security, but to me it sounds like an argument for boosting benefits. – QH)

⁷³ ‘McCain Neck-Deep in K Street Sewer’ – The Paragraph 2008-08-23 Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX) pushed through the “Enron loophole”, and the “Commodity Futures Modernization Act” creating “the shadow banking system”.

⁷⁴ ‘The 2000 Campaign’ – Consortiumnews.com

⁷⁵ ‘Tax Cuts Offer Most for Very Rich, Study Says’ By EDMUND L. ANDREWS, The New York Times, January 8, 2007 “Families earning more than $1 million a year saw their federal tax rates drop more sharply than any group in the country as a result of President Bush’s tax cuts, according to a new Congressional [Budget Office] study.”

⁷⁶ ‘Let’s Have a Hanging Party’ by Jesse Eisinger, Slate.com, March 2, 2009

There were two kinds of governmental failure in the past several decades: One was active financial deregulation; the other was the purposeful malignant neglect of government’s regulatory role in overseeing the markets. Regulators were defanged.

I’ll mention just two examples. The first is when Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Fed, blocked Fed Gov. Ed Gramlich’s efforts to have the chief banking regulatory arm of the country take a more active role in subprime lending. The second is the SEC’s decision, which Obama’s new chairman, Mary Schapiro, is repealing, to require enforcement lawyers to get the OK from commissioners before moving on cases: This was an intentional roadblock to securities enforcement erected by ideologues and cronies in the Bush administration. After all, the first SEC chairman appointed by Bush was Harvey Pitt, a lawyer who had a long career defending companies from accusations by the SEC.

⁷⁷ ‘An Inside Story of Wall Street Bank Crashes’ – The Paragraph, 2008-12-26

⁸⁵ ‘Washington’s Farewell Address’ – George Washington, 1796

⁸⁶ Thomas Jefferson to John W. Eppes, 1813

⁸⁷ ‘Fragments of a Tariff Discussion’ – 1846 or 1847, Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln

⁸⁸ ‘Why The Trusts And Bosses Oppose The Progressive Party’ – Theodore Roosevelt, Emporia, Kansas, September 22, 1912

By Quinn Hungeski – Posted at G.N.N. & TheParagraph.com

The Boston Tea Party was a direct action against a corporate monopoly that led to the birth of the United States. The raiders of the Tea Party pledged silence for 50 years. One of them, George R. T. Hewes, lived that long and got his story published. He tells how the British government tried to give the East India Company, the biggest corporation of the day, a monopoly on tea, the biggest drug of the day:x⁷⁰

The [East India] Company … received permission to transport tea, free of all duty, from Great Britain to America … Hence it was no longer the small vessels of private merchants, who went to vend tea for their own account in the ports of the colonies, but, on the contrary, ships of an enormous burthen, that transported immense quantities of this commodity, which by the aid of the public authority, might, as they supposed, easily be landed, and amassed in suitable magazines.

The East India Company sent big loads of tea to American cities:

Accordingly the Company sent its agents at Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, six hundred chests of tea, and a proportionate number to Charleston, and other maritime cities of the American continent. The colonies were now arrived at the decisive moment when they must cast the dye, and determine their course …

Philadelphia and New York sent the tea back:

At Philadelphia, those to whom the teas of the [East India] Company were intended to be consigned, were induced by persuasion, or constrained by menaces, to promise, on no terms, to accept the proffered consignment.

At New-York, Captain Sears and McDougal, daring and enterprising men, effected a concert of will between the smugglers, the merchants, and the sons of liberty. Pamphlets suited to the conjecture, were daily distributed, and nothing was left unattempted by popular leaders, to obtain their purpose.

Among the pamphlets circulating was The Alarm by Rusticus, which warned that the American colonies could meet a fate like that of Bengal, which underwent famine while the East India Company had a monopoly on grain trade:x⁷¹

Are we in like Manner to be given up to the Disposal of the East India Company, who have now the Assurance, to step forth in Aid of the Minister, to execute his Plan, of enslaving America? Their Conduct in Asia, for some Years past, has given simple Proof, how little they regard the Laws of Nations, the Rights, Liberties, or Lives of Men. … Fifteen hundred Thousands, it is said, perished by Famine in one Year, not because the Earth denied its Fruits; but [because] this Company and their Servants engulfed all the Necessaries of Life, and set them at so high a Rate that the poor could not purchase them.

The public felt the moment of truth was near:

In Boston the general voice declared the time was come to face the storm. Why do we wait? they exclaimed; soon or late we must engage in conflict with England. Hundreds of years may roll away before the ministers can have perpetrated as many violations of our rights, as they have committed within a few years. The opposition is formed; it is general; it remains for us to seize the occasion. The more we delay the more strength is acquired by the ministers. Now is the time to prove our courage, or be disgraced with our brethren of the other colonies, who have their eyes fixed upon us, and will be prompt in their succor if we show ourselves faithful and firm.

On November 28th, 1773, the first of the tea-bearing ships docked in Boston Harbor, and the morning after, as Hewes recounts, a notice was published:

Friends, Brethren, Countrymen! That worst of plagues, the detested TEA, has arrived in this harbour. The hour of destruction, a manly opposition to the machinations of tyranny, stares you in the face. Every friend to his country, to himself, and to posterity, is now called upon to meet in Faneuil Hall, at nine o’clock, this day, at which time the bells will ring, to make a united and successful resistance to this last, worst, and most destructive measure of administration.”

Unlike in Philadelphia and New York, the governor and receiving agents in Boston would not send the tea back. So the Bostonians placed guards to watch the ships, and send an alarm should they start to unload.

The factors who were to be the consignees of the tea, were urged to renounce their agency, but they refused and took refuge in the fortress. A guard was placed on Griffin’s wharf, near where the tea ships were moored. It was agreed that a strict watch should be kept; that if any insult should be offered, the bell should be immediately rung; and some persons always ready to bear intelligence of what might happen, to the neighbouring towns, and to call in the assistance of the country people.”

After some days, the ship commanders declared that on December 17th they would unload the tea by force if needed:x⁷²

The tea … was contained in three ships, lying near each other at what was called at that time Griffin’s wharf, and were surrounded by armed ships of war, the commanders of which had publicly declared that if the rebels, as they were pleased to style the Bostonians, should not withdraw their opposition to the landing of the tea before a certain day, the 17th day of December, 1773, they should on that day force it on shore, under the cover of their cannon’s mouth.

On the day before the threatened day, a throng gathered — riled and ready to dump tea:

Things thus appeared to be hastening to a disastrous issue. The people of the country arrived in great numbers, the inhabitants of the town assembled. This assembly … was the most numerous ever known, there being more than 2000 from the country present.

… the public mind [was] already wrought up to a degree of desperation, and ready to break out into acts of violence, on every trivial occasion of offence….

Finding no measures were likely to be taken, either by the governor, or the commanders, or owners of the ships, to return their cargoes or prevent the landing of them, at 5 o’clock a vote was called for the dissolution of the meeting and obtained.

But cooler members got the crowd to stay and further consider the gravity of such action. One of them, Josiah Quiney, gave this warning:

… Greatly will he deceive himself, who shall think, that with cries, with exclamations, with popular resolutions, we can hope to triumph in the conflict, and vanquish our inveterate foes. Their malignity is implacable, their thirst for vengeance insatiable. They have their allies, their accomplices, even in the midst of us – even in the bosom of this innocent country; and who is ignorant of the power of those who have conspired our ruin? Who knows not their artifices? Imagine not therefore, that you can bring this controversy to a happy conclusion without the most strenuous, the most arduous, the most terrible conflict; consider attentively the difficulty of the enterprise, and the uncertainty of the issue. Reflict [sic] and ponder, even ponder well, before you embrace the measures, which are to involve this country in the most perilous enterprise the world has witnessed.

The crowd gave the governor one more chance, then ended the meeting and headed for the docks:

The question was then immediately put whether the landing of the tea should be opposed and carried in the affirmative unanimously. Rotch [a local tea seller], to whom the cargo of tea had been consigned, was then requested to demand of the governor to permit to pass the castle [return the ships to England]. The latter answered haughtily, that for the honor of the laws, and from duty towards the king, he could not grant the permit, until the vessel was regularly cleared. A violent commotion immediately ensued; and … a person disguised after the manner of the Indians, who was in the gallery, shouted at this juncture, the cry of war; and … the meeting dissolved in the twinkling of an eye, and the multitude rushed in a mass to Griffin’s wharf.

The raiders went in disguise:

It was now evening, and I immediately dressed myself in the costume of an Indian, equipped with a small hatchet, which I and my associates denominated the tomahawk, with which, and a club, after having painted my face and hands with coal dust in the shop of a blacksmith, I repaired to Griffin’s wharf, where the ships lay that contained the tea. When I first appeared in the street after being thus disguised, I fell in with many who were dressed, equipped and painted as I was, and who fell in with me and marched in order to the place of our destination.

The boarding parties acted deliberately, and did no damage except to the cargo:

We were immediately ordered by the respective commanders to board all the ships at the same time, which we promptly obeyed. The commander of the division to which I belonged, as soon as we were on board the ship appointed me boatswain, and ordered me to go to the captain and demand of him the keys to the hatches and a dozen candles. I made the demand accordingly, and the captain promptly replied, and delivered the articles; but requested me at the same time to do no damage to the ship or rigging.

We then were ordered by our commander to open the hatches and take out all the chests of tea and throw them overboard, and we immediately proceeded to execute his orders, first cutting and splitting the chests with our tomahawks, so as thoroughly to expose them to the effects of the water.

In about three hours from the time we went on board, we had thus broken and thrown overboard every tea chest to be found in the ship, while those in the other ships were disposing of the tea in the same way, at the same time. We were surrounded by British armed ships, but no attempt was made to resist us.

The raiders resolved that all of the tea be destroyed, and none be used:

… there were several attempts made by some of the citizens of Boston and its vicinity to carry off small quantities of [tea] for their family use. …

One … came on board for that purpose, and when he supposed he was not noticed, filled his pockets, and also the lining of his coat. But I had detected him and gave information to the captain of what he was doing. We were ordered to take him into custody, and just as he was stepping from the vessel, I seized him by the skirt of his coat, and in attempting to pull him back, I tore it off; but, springing forward, by a rapid effort he made his escape. He had, however, to run a gauntlet through the crowd upon the wharf nine each one, as he passed, giving him a kick or a stroke.

The raiders kept their identities secret, even among themselves:

We then quietly retired to our several places of residence, without having any conversation with each other, or taking any measures to discover who were our associates; nor do I recollect of our having had the knowledge of the name of a single individual concerned in that affair, except … the commander of my division … There appeared to be an understanding that each individual should volunteer his services, keep his own secret, and risk the consequence for himself. No disorder took place during that transaction, and it was observed at that time that the stillest night ensued that Boston had enjoyed for many months.

The Boston Tea Party led to the British blockade of Boston Harbor, the battles of Lexington & Concord, the American Revolutionary War, and the U.S. Constitution.x⁷³ Shortly after the Constitution was adopted in 1787, Thomas Jefferson tried to amend it to add a declaration of rights:x⁷⁴

By a declaration of rights, I mean one which shall stipulate freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of commerce against monopolies, trial by juries in all cases, no suspensions of the habeas corpus, no standing armies.

Jefferson got all but two of those into the Bill of Rights. One of the missing rights was the “freedom of commerce against monopolies” — the one that could today dampen the need for further “tea parties”.

(Boston Tea Party Historical Society)

Sources

⁷⁰ ‘America’s First Anti-Globalization Protest – The Boston Tea Party’ excerpt from Unequal Protection by Thom Hartmann

⁷¹ ‘Bengal famine of 1770’ – Wikipedia

About 10 million people, approximately one third of the population of the affected area, are estimated to have died in the famine. …

Fault for the famine is now often ascribed to the British East India Company policies in Bengal. According to others, however, the famine was not a direct fault of the British regime, but was only exacerbated by its policies. …

As lands came under company control, the land tax was typically raised by 5 times what it had been – from 10% to up to 50% of the value of the agricultural produce. … As the famine approached its height, in April of 1770, the Company announced that land tax for the following year was to be increased by a further 10%.

The company is also criticised for forbidding the “hoarding” of rice. This prevented traders and dealers from laying in reserves that in other times would have tided the population over lean periods, as well as ordering the farmers to plant indigo instead of rice.

By the time of the famine, monopolies in grain trading had been established by the Company and its agents. The Company had no plan for dealing with the grain shortage, and actions were only taken insofar as they affected the mercantile and trading classes. …

⁷² ‘Eyewitness Account by George Hewes’ – Boston Tea Party Historical Society

⁷³ ‘Timeline of Events Preceeding the Boston Tea Party’ – Boston Tea Party Historical Society

⁷⁴ ‘Jefferson’s Dream: The Bill of Rights’ – excerpt from Unequal Protection by Thom Hartmann

By Quinn Hungeski – Posted at G.N.N. & TheParagraph.com

Click HERE to urge your Congressman to sponser the Internet Freedom Preservation Act.

As the hearing began, paid attendees took a nap.

Stuffing seats

Sources

³⁰ ‘Comcast Blocking: First the Internet — Now the Public’ February 25th, 2008 by jstearns, SaveTheInternet.com

³¹ ‘Comcast Blocks Some Internet Traffic’ By Peter Svensson, Associated Press, October 18, 2007

³² ‘How the AP Tested Comcast’s File-Sharing Filter’ By Peter Svensson, Associated Press, October 19, 2007

³³ ‘In Boston: A Shot Heard ‘Round the Internet’ February 29th, 2008 by tkarr, SaveTheInternet.com

“There a single fact here that [Comcast] cannot deny,” explained Columbia Law Professor Tim Wu during Monday’s hearing. “Users of the Internet sought to use an application in a certain way, and they were blocked.”

This view was supported by David Reed of MIT’s Media Lab, who had also experimented with popular file-sharing applications and found that Comcast was duping users with forged network transmissions that cut off user connections. “Comcast’s secretive attempt to apply non-standard management practices creates serious problems,” he said before the FCC.

³⁴ ‘Net Neutrality Is a Civil Rights Issue’ February 22nd, 2008 by caaron, SaveTheInternet.com

Here’s what Comcast really doesn’t like about BitTorrent: It’s competition for their own video business. If we can pick and choose what we want to see for ourselves, we might be less inclined to keep paying Comcast an arm and a leg for all the channels we don’t watch.

³⁵ ‘FCC Policy Statement on Network Neutrality FCC 05-151’

³⁶ ‘Why Consumers Demand Internet Freedom — Network Neutrality: Fact vs. Fiction’ By: Ben Scott, Free Press; Mark Cooper, Consumer Federation of America; Jeannine Kenney, Consumers Union. May 2006 — pdf file

Almost 40 years ago, the Federal Communications Commission was confronted with the question of how to handle the transmission of data over the telephone network. In a series of proceedings beginning in 1968 known as the Computer Inquiries, the FCC decided that the companies providing communications services would not be allowed to interfere with or discriminate against information services. When a federal court broke up Ma Bell in 1982, it required the Baby Bells to provide nondiscriminatory interconnection and access to their networks. These decisions to require the communications network to treat information service in a nondiscriminatory manner established one of the key building blocks of the Internet.

The idea is simple. Under the law, the physical wires over which data and information flow are treated differently than the data and information themselves. The number of physical networks to transmit data and information is very small and non-competitive (at best, most consumers have a choice of only cable or DSL). Public policy keeps the owners of these networks from using their monopoly (or duopoly) market power over the wires to discriminate against the information providers on their networks.

If the network owners can’t mess with the content, the content market remains free and vigorously competitive. The separation of the physical communications layer from the content and applications layers is a cornerstone of telecommunications law. It established an “end-to-end” network, putting control of the Internet in the hands of the users at the edges.

But in the summer of 2005, the FCC removed the cornerstone. This decision was the culmination of several years of litigation. After years of bombardment by lobbyists and lawyers from the cable and telephone giants, the FCC first tried to take away nondiscrimination protections in 2002. The courts reversed them. But the cable companies and the FCC kept appealing, and eventually the Supreme Court heard the matter in July 2005. In the case of NCTA v. Brand X, the Court ruled simply that the FCC had the authority to make the decision, good or bad. They did not rule on the merits. So it happened that last August, in the midst of the Internet revolution, the FCC handed total control over to the telephone and cable companies to do as they please.

³⁷ ibid

Edward Whitacre, AT&T CEO: “… there’s going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they’re using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes? The Internet can’t be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!”

William Smith, BellSouth CTO: [Smith] told reporters and analysts that an Internet service provider such as his firm should be able, for example, to charge Yahoo Inc. for the opportunity to have its search site load faster than that of Google Inc. Or, Smith said, his company should be allowed to charge a rival voice-over-Internet firm so that its service can operate with the same quality as BellSouth’s offering.

Ivan Seidenberg, Verizon CEO: “We have to make sure they don’t sit on our network and chew up our capacity. We need to pay for the pipe.

But no one is using the “pipes” for free:

With Network Neutrality, [telecoms will] continue to generate revenues in the billions from monthly subscription fees, access rates from content producers (who already pay a fortune to get onto the network), and by competing in the free market with their own content and applications. Getting rid of Network Neutrality is just an attempt to extract monopoly rents from a new revenue stream.

³⁸ ‘Net Neutrality in Pictures: CNN & GNN’ – The Paragraph 2006-06-04

³⁹ Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008

SEC. 12. BROADBAND POLICY. ‘It is the policy of the United States—

to preserve and promote the open and interconnected nature of broadband networks that enable consumers to reach, and service providers to offer, lawful content, applications, and services of their choosing, using their selection of devices, as long as such devices do not harm the network; and

to safeguard the open marketplace of ideas on the Internet by adopting and enforcing baseline protections to guard against unreasonable discriminatory favoritism for, or degradation of, content by network operators based upon its source, ownership, or destination on the Internet.

The Government appears to argue here that, … particularly because the President is designated Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, he has been granted the inherent power to violate not only the laws of the Congress but the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution, itself. We must first note that the Office of the Chief Executive has itself been created, with its powers, by the Constitution. There are no hereditary Kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution. …

A catch-22 is a bureaucratic double-bind. The term comes from the title of a novel.x²² In Catch-22, the character Orr is a bomber pilot based in Italy during World War II. Orr is believed to be crazy. The rulebook says that a crazy person does not have to fly bombing missions. So Orr could ask not to fly. But, Catch-22 says that asking not to fly shows concern for one’s own safety, which is proof of sanity. So …

Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to.

The U.S. courts reason similarly: U.S. persons are being wiretapped without a warrant by the government. The Fourth Amendment says that a person cannot be wiretapped without a warrant. So persons can sue and stop the government from wiretapping them. But, Catch-22 says that only persons who can prove they are wiretapped can sue — yet a person cannot prove that, because the government keeps any such wiretap lists secret. So … If wiretapped persons sue to stop the wiretapping, they must prove they’re on a secret wiretap list, but they can’t prove it. If wiretapped persons don’t sue, then the government keeps wiretapping them.

While the lawsuit against the Bush regime has failed, lawsuits against AT&T and Verizon for aiding the government’s illegal spying are pending.x²³ These lawsuits could reveal details of reports that the Bush regime tapped into telecom data switches and sucked up communications, not just of certain persons, but of everyone, and that it began illegal wiretapping, not after September 11, 2001, but in February 2001, shortly after taking office.x²⁴ As the House now considers changes to the foreign intelligence surveillance law (FISA), Bush and House Republicans are pressing for retroactive immunity for telecoms — which would shut down the lawsuits.x²⁵ But the House Democratic leadership has so far held firm against such immunity.

Sources

²⁰ ‘Supreme Court rejects domestic wiretap appeal’ – by Anne Broache, C|Net News.com, February 19, 2008

²¹ ‘UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT EASTERN DISTRICT OF MICHIGAN SOUTHERN DIVISION, Case No. 06-CV-10204 opinion’ by Hon. Anna Diggs Taylor, pdf file

²² Catch-22 by Joseph Heller — borrow buy

²³ ‘NSA Spying’ – Electronic Frontier Foundation

²⁴ ‘Big Brother Bad Idea Still Breathing’ – The Paragraph, 2007-10-28 — source 23 source 24 source 25

²⁵ ‘Republicans Shun Wiretap and Telecom Amnesty Compromise Meeting’ By Ryan Singel, Wired, February 21, 2008

So what is the status of the surviving TIA core program? The data collection part of it could be going very well. Shortly after taking office, the Bush regime started another NSA program — the illegal warrantless wiretapping at telecommunications companies.x¹⁴x²³x²⁴ In that program the agency taps into the data switches of AT&T and Verizon to watch and gather telephone and internet communications.x¹⁵x²¹x²⁵ That information — who you call and email, the content of your calls and emails, what websites you visit, and so on — could be feeding the TIA database. But the terrorist identification part of TIA is likely going very poorly. Experts say the computer program would have to track 1000 false hits for one true hit — and would likely give many false positives.x¹⁶ Already, data from the NSA warrantless wiretapping has flooded the FBI with bum leads wasting agents’ time.x¹⁷ But, while it is hard to get a good terrorist suspect out of the database, it would be easy to identify a political opponent. The executive branch could use that capability to out-maneuver, embarrass, blackmail, harass or arrest such persons. The Bush executive has already used NSA data for spying on U.S. government officials, companies and news reporters.x¹⁸x¹⁹x²⁰ So, having the will and the way, the Bush regime seems to be building the “is watching” part of the Big Brother society.

image Electronic Frontier Foundation

Action

Petition your congressmen to stop warrantless wiretapping: click HERE.

Sources

¹⁰ ‘Bush’s Secret Spying on Americans’ By Robert Parry, August 2, 2007

Bush knows he could run into trouble if he doesn’t keep the American people in the dark. In 2002, for instance, when the Bush administration launched a project seeking “total information awareness” on virtually everyone on earth involved in the modern economy, the disclosure was met with public alarm.

The administration cited the terrorist threat to justify the program which involved applying advanced computer technology to analyze trillions of bytes of data on electronic transactions and communications. The goal was to study the electronic footprints left by every person in the developed world during the course of their everyday lives – from the innocuous to the embarrassing to the potentially significant.

The government could cross-check books borrowed from a library, fertilizer bought at a farm-supply outlet, X-rated movies rented at a video store, prescriptions filled at a pharmacy, sites visited on the Internet, tickets reserved for a plane, borders crossed while traveling, rooms rented at a motel, and countless other examples.

…

Despite the administration’s assurance that political abuses wouldn’t happen, the capability would be a huge temptation for political strategists like Karl Rove who have made clear that they view anyone not supporting Bush’s war on terror as a terrorist ally.

In 2002, the technological blueprint for this Orwellian-style project was on the drawing board at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon’s top research and development arm. DARPA commissioned a comprehensive plan for this electronic spying – and did so publicly.

“Transactional data” was to be gleaned from electronic data on every kind of activity – “financial, education, travel, medical, veterinary, country entry, place/event entry, transportation, housing, critical resources, government, communications,” according to the Web site for DARPA’s Information Awareness Office.

The program would then cross-reference this data with the “biometric signatures of humans,” data collected on individuals’ faces, fingerprints, gaits and irises. With this knowledge at its fingertips, the government would have what it called “total information awareness” about pretty much everyone.

The Information Awareness Office even boasted a logo that looked like some kind of clip art from George Orwell’s 1984. The logo showed the Masonic symbol of an all-seeing eye atop a pyramid peering over the globe, with the slogan, “scientia est potentia,” Latin for “knowledge is power.”

Though apparently unintentional, DARPA’s choice of a giant white pyramid eerily recalled Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, “an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air.” The all-seeing Masonic eye could be read as “Big Brother Is Watching.”

…

Besides the parallels to 1984, the administration’s assurances about respecting constitutional boundaries were undercut by its provocative choice of director for the Information Awareness Office. The project was headed by President Reagan’s former national security adviser John Poindexter, who was caught flouting constitutional safeguards and federal laws in the Iran-Contra scandal of the mid-1980s.

Poindexter was the White House official who approved the transfer of profits from the sale of missiles to Iran’s Islamic fundamentalist government to Nicaraguan contra rebels for the purchase of weapons, thus circumventing the Constitution’s grant of war-making power to Congress. Under U.S. law at the time, military aid was banned to both Iran and the contras.

In 1990, Poindexter was convicted of five felonies in connection with the Iran-Contra scheme and the cover-up. But his case was overturned by a conservative-dominated three-judge appeals court panel, which voted 2-1 that the conviction was tainted by congressional immunity given to Poindexter to compel his testimony to Congress in 1987.

¹¹ Amid furor, Pentagon kills terrorism futures market’ – CNN, Wednesday, July 30, 2003

¹² ‘Poindexter to Head Department of Bad Ideas’ – The Borowitz Report,

¹³ ‘TIA Lives On’ By Shane Harris, National Journal, Thursday, Feb. 23, 2006

¹⁴ ‘Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts’ by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, The New York Times, December 16, 2005

¹⁵ ‘NSA Whistleblower Alleges Illegal Spying’ By BRIAN ROSS, Jan. 10, 2006

President Bush has admitted that he gave orders that allowed the NSA to eavesdrop on a small number of Americans without the usual requisite warrants.

But [longtime insider at the National Security Agency, Russell] Tice disagrees. He says the number of Americans subject to eavesdropping by the NSA could be in the millions if the full range of secret NSA programs is used.

“That would mean for most Americans that if they conducted, or you know, placed an overseas communication, more than likely they were sucked into that vacuum,” Tice said.

¹⁶ Total Info System Totally Touchy’ by Ryan Singel, Wired, 12.02.02

“The kind of things they are looking for are hard to find,” said Herb Edelstein, president of data-mining company Two Crows. “Terrorism is an adaptive problem. It’s pretty unlikely the next terrorist attack will be people hijacking planes and crashing them into buildings.

“The project is not going to have near-term contributions to the war on terrorism. It’s not clear this is an economically valuable way to fight terrorism.”

Simson Garfinkel, author of Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century, also has doubts.

“Data mining is good for the purpose of increasing sales and figuring out where to place products in stores,” he said. “This is very different from figuring out if these products are going to be used for terrorist activities.”

“With meaningful pattern recognition, the order of magnitude of errors from inferences is huge, something like ten to the third (power),” said Paul Hawken, author of The Ecology of Commerce and the chairman of information mapping software company Groxis. “There would be an incalculable expense to monitor a thousand wrong hits for one correct inference.”

In fact, Hawken said, Groxis spurned, on principle, an offer from Poindexter’s group to get involved in the project.

“We make tools for people to make sense of the information in the world, not for the world to make more information out of people,” Hawken said.

Hawken is skeptical about the project’s ability to attract top industry names. He said he knows other people, including those who have worked for the National Security Agency, who refused to work on it for ethical reasons.

“I don’t know how you profile resentment and anger, but I don’t think you do it from how many times someone goes to Wal-Mart,” he said.

And the project faces other problems.

Database fields are not standardized, and the data they contain isn’t always reliable. Names get misspelled, digits are transposed, addresses are outdated or incorrect, and few names are unique.

“The data quality problem is enormous, but what’s alarming is the danger of false positives based on incorrect data,” Edelstein said. “Think of the number of people who get in trouble with the law because they have the same name as somebody else.”

¹⁷ Spy Agency Data After Sept. 11 Led F.B.I. to Dead Ends’ By LOWELL BERGMAN, ERIC LICHTBLAU, SCOTT SHANE and DON VAN NATTA Jr., The New York Times, January 17, 2006

But the results of the program looked very different to some officials charged with tracking terrorism in the United States. More than a dozen current and former law enforcement and counterterrorism officials, including some in the small circle who knew of the secret eavesdropping program and how it played out at the F.B.I., said the torrent of tips led them to few potential terrorists inside the country they did not know of from other sources and diverted agents from counterterrorism work they viewed as more productive.

¹⁸ ‘Bush Acts as Dictator During Endless “War”’ The Paragraph, 2006-01-09 source 11

¹⁹ ‘Bush Acts as Dictator During Endless “War”’ The Paragraph, 2006-01-09 source 12

²⁰ ‘First Fruits’ by Wayne Madsen, 2006-05-15

WMR has learned that the National Security Agency (NSA), on the orders of the Bush administration, eavesdropped on the private conversations and e-mail of its own employees, employees of other U.S. intelligence agencies — including the CIA and DIA — and their contacts in the media, Congress, and oversight agencies and offices.

²¹ ‘NSA has massive database of Americans’ phone calls’ By Leslie Cauley, USA TODAY, 5/11/2006

²² ‘Congress’s Orwellian Compromise’ By Nat Parry, Consortium News, August 15, 2007

Although public outrage and congressional opposition supposedly killed the TIA program in 2003, the National Journal revealed in February 2006 that the project was ended in name only, kept alive within NSA’s secret budget.

One TIA component, called the Information Awareness Prototype System, was renamed “Basketball” at NSA, but still provided the basic architecture tying together information extraction, analysis and dissemination tools developed under TIA.

Another part of TIA, called Genoa II, was shifted to NSA and re-titled “Topsail.” It builds information technologies to anticipate and pre-empt terrorist attacks.

Meanwhile, the NSA’s own data-mining program seeks to construct the largest database in the world, according to a report by USA Today. It ultimately would store the records of every phone call made in the United States and apply “social network” models to the calling patterns of Americans supposedly to match them up with patterns of known terrorists.

²³ ‘NSA Domestic Surveillance Began 7 Months Before 9/11, Convicted Qwest CEO Claims’ by Ryan Singel, Wired, October 11, 2007

²⁴ ‘Qwest CEO Not Alone in Alleging NSA Started Domestic Phone Record Program 7 Months Before 9/11’ By Ryan Singel, Wired, October 12, 2007

²⁵ ‘AT&T whistleblower: I was forced to connect ‘big brother machine’‘ by David Edwards and Jason Rhyne, Wednesday November 7, 2007’

Whistleblower Mark Klein told Keith Olbermann that a copy of all internet traffic passing over AT&T lines was copied into a locked room at the company’s San Francisco office — to which only employees with National Security Agency clearance had access — via a cable splitting device.

“My job was to connect circuits into the splitter device which was hard-wired to the secret room,” said Klein. “And effectively, the splitter copied the entire data stream of those internet cables into the secret room — and we’re talking about phone conversations, email web browsing, everything that goes across the internet.”

• In 2004, just before the election, [Petraeus] said there was “tangible progress“ in Iraq and that “Iraqi leaders are stepping forward.” (The ad did not bother to refute this one.)

• And last week Petraeus … said “We say we have achieved progress …” [But] every independent report on the ground situation in Iraq shows that the surge strategy has failed.

• … the General claims a reduction in violence. That’s because … the Pentagon has adopted a bizarre formula for keeping tabs on violence. For example, deaths by car bombs don’t count. … assassinations only count if you’re shot in the back of the head — not the front. … there have been more civilian deaths and more American soldier deaths in the past three months than in any other summer we’ve been there.

• We’ll hear of neighborhoods where violence has decreased. But we won’t hear that those neighborhoods have been ethnically cleansed.

• Most importantly, General Petraeus will not admit what everyone knows; Iraq is mired in an unwinnable religious civil war.

• We may hear of a plan to withdraw a few thousand American troops. But we won’t hear … a timetable for withdrawing all our troops. General Petraeus has actually said American troops will need to stay in Iraq for as long as ten years.

So we can see that this ad was not an attack on the U.S. military. And it is not a personal attack to dispute someone’s claims with facts.x⁰⁵ Are the Senate (all the Republicans and half the Democrats) and the President saying that someone wearing four stars should not get criticism for public comments? And why is a general making public comments in support of the President’s war policy anyway? We have a Defense Secretary for that.x⁰⁶ So to me, the Senate’s resolution and the President’s comments were “over the top”.

Sources

⁰¹ MoveOn ‘Betray Us’ Ad – copy with source links

⁰² “Over the top”:

Some Democrats (including John Kerry and Jack Reed) have publicly distanced themselves from the ad, saying it was over the top. (Both Kerry and Reed voted against the resolution. – hungeski) – MSNBC

‘Do you want to distance yourself from that ad?’ asked anchorman John Roberts (of Sen. Clinton). ‘Was that MoveOn.org ad over the top?’ – report on CNN interview

‘The personal attacks on General Petraeus were way over the top,’ said Michael Noonan, a defense scholar at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and an Army Reserve officer who served in Iraq. – The Seattle Times

“There’s room for reasonable people to disagree over Gen. David Petraeus’ take on Iraq. But MoveOn.org’s personal attacks on him go way over the top.” – Kansas City Star

Sen. Bob Corker and Rep. Zach Wamp on Monday denounced an ad taken out in the New York Times by MoveOn.org ad attacking Commanding General David Petraeus. … Rep. Wamp said, “… That they would do this the day before the sixth anniversary of 9/11, to me is outrageous. It is over the top and I think the American people should reject it.” – The Chatanoogan

⁰³ H.R.1585: Senate Amendment on Petraeus [¶]

⁰⁴ Bush: MoveOn.org ad on Petraeus ‘disgusting’ – CNN, September 18, 2007

⁰⁵ ‘Our ad on General Petraeus’ – MoveOn.org

As long as General Petraeus is “untouchable” the President can continue to hide behind him. That’s why the public needs to know that Petraeus is neither objective nor trustworthy when it comes to assessing progress in Iraq.

…

Moreover, every word of the ad was entirely accurate—the General has in fact cooked the books, and in doing so, he betrayed the public trust.

⁰⁶ ‘Corrupting the Military: Petraeus as Bush’s Political Spear-Carrier’ – Steven C. Clemons, The Washington Note, September 05, 2007

Quoted from article by By Bruce Ackerman in the Financial Times: President George W. Bush’s campaign to stay the course in Iraq is taking a new and constitutionally dangerous turn. When Senator John Warner recently called for a troop withdrawal by Christmas, the White House did not mount its usual counterattack. It allowed a surprising champion to take its place. Major General Rick Lynch, a field commander in Iraq, summoned reporters to condemn Mr Warner’s proposal as “a giant step backwards”.

It was Maj Gen Lynch who was making the giant step into forbidden territory. He had no business engaging in a public debate with a US senator. His remarks represent an assault on the principle of civilian control — the most blatant so far during the Iraq war.

Last week, almost five years to the day after Cheney’s speech to the V.F.W., Bush gave a speech to the American Legion laying out themes for an attack on Iran, which, like Iraq, is on Bush’s “axis of evil” list⁸⁰. Bush said that Iran could get a nuclear weapon that would put the region “under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust,” and that Iran is supporting “Shia extremists” to attack U.S. troops in Iraq. But, having made false claims before to sell a policy for war, Bush’s claims now carry no factual weight⁸¹. Even so, inside reports say that another marketing push for war is coming, but this time it is unlikely that the autocratic Bush would seek authority from Congress⁸²x⁸³x⁸⁴. Yet cold analysis shows that an attack on Iran would double the damage to U.S. security — creating even more enemies, further weakening the military and budget, and rallying the Iranian population around the most warlike and repressive of its leaders⁸⁵x⁸⁶. So, faced with signs that Bush would proceed on such a damaging course, what can the U.S. Congress do to protect the country? One idea is to bring to the House floor H.R.333, the bill to impeach Cheney, who has several times publicly threatened Iran — including once from an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf⁸⁷x⁸⁸. Such a bold move by Congress could knock the gust out of the campaign for the new war “product⁸⁹“.

Sources

⁷⁰ ‘Marketing Iraq: Why now?’ By William Schneider, CNN, September 12, 2002

“To those who say we want more evidence that there’s a real threat, the Administration says we can’t wait for a smoking gun to turn up, said National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice. “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,”

⁷¹ ‘Commentary: Bush Administration’s Marketing of the Possible War Against Iraq’, Morning Edition, NPR, September 17, 2002

⁷³ ‘Vice President Speaks at VFW 103rd National Convention’, The White House, August 26, 2002

It is a certainty that the al Qaeda network is pursuing such weapons, and has succeeded in acquiring at least a crude capability to use them.

…

… containment is not possible when dictators obtain weapons of mass destruction, and are prepared to share them with terrorists who intend to inflict catastrophic casualties on the United States.

…

But we now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. Among other sources, we’ve gotten this from the firsthand testimony of defectors — including Saddam’s own son-in-law, who was subsequently murdered at Saddam’s direction. Many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon.

(Actually, Saddam’s son-in-law, Hussein Kamel reported the contrary: “All weapons— biological, chemical, missile, nuclear, were destroyed.”)

…

Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.

⁷⁴ ‘Bush II Cooked Intelligence to Get Iraq War Powers’ – The Paragraph, September 29th, 2005

⁷⁵ Text of the Downing Street Memo a document containing meeting minutes transcribed during the British Prime Minister’s meeting on July 23, 2002

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

⁷⁶ ‘BUYING THE WAR’ – Bill Moyers’ Journal, PBS, April 25, 2007

… “What the conservative media did was easy to fathom; they had been cheerleaders for the White House from the beginning and were simply continuing to rally the public behind the President — no questions asked. How mainstream journalists suspended skepticism and scrutiny remains an issue of significance that the media has not satisfactorily explored,” says Moyers. “How the administration marketed the war to the American people has been well covered, but critical questions remain: How and why did the press buy it, and what does it say about the role of journalists in helping the public sort out fact from propaganda?”

⁷⁷ ‘Congressional Resolution on Iraq – Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF)’ Passed by House and Senate October 2002

⁷⁸ ‘Report: Iraq ‘cause celebre’ for jihadists’ BY TIMOTHY M. PHELPS, Newsday, September 27, 2006

“We assess that the Iraq jihad is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives … the Iraq conflict has become the ‘cause celebre’ for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.” – from declassified part of CIA National Intelligence Estimate

⁷⁹ ‘Cost of Iraq war nearly $2b a week’ By Bryan Bender, The Boston Globe, September 28, 2006

⁸⁰ ‘President Bush Addresses the 89th Annual National Convention of the American Legion’, Reno, August 28, 2007

… Iran’s active pursuit of technology that could lead to nuclear weapons threatens to put a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust.

…

Recently, coalition forces seized 240-millimeter rockets that had been manufactured in Iran this year and that had been provided to Iraqi extremist groups by Iranian agents. The attacks on our bases and our troops by Iranian-supplied munitions have increased in the last few months — despite pledges by Iran to help stabilize the security situation in Iraq.

… [Iran’s leaders] cannot escape responsibility for aiding attacks against coalition forces and the murder of innocent Iraqis. The Iranian regime must halt these actions. And until it does, I will take actions necessary to protect our troops. I have authorized our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran’s murderous activities.

⁸¹ ‘Do We Have The Courage To Stop War With Iran?’ by Ray McGovern, AfterDowningStreet.org, 2007-08-31

A “final” draft of the follow-up NIE mentioned above had been completed in Feb. 2007, and McConnell no doubt was briefed on its findings prior to his testimony. The fact that this draft has been sent back for revision every other month since February speaks volumes. Judging from McConnell’s testimony, the conclusions of the NIE draft of February are probably not alarmist enough for Vice President Dick Cheney. (Shades of Iraq.)

…

There they go again—those bureaucrats at the International Atomic Energy Agency. On August 28, the very day Bush was playing up the dangers from Iran, the IAEA released a note of understanding between the IAEA and Iran on the key issue of inspection. The IAEA announced:

“The agency has been able to verify the non-diversion of the declared nuclear materials at the enrichment facilities in Iran and has therefore concluded that it remains in peaceful use.”

The IAEA deputy director said the plan just agreed to by the IAEA and Iran will enable the two to reach closure by December on the nuclear issues that the IAEA began investigating in 2003. Other IAEA officials now express confidence that they will be able to detect any military diversion or any uranium enrichment above a low grade, as long as the Iran-IAEA safeguard agreement remains intact.

⁸² ‘Post Labor Day Product Rollout: War with Iran’ – Barnett R. Rubin, Informed Comment Global Affairs, August 29, 2007

According to this report, as in 2002, the rollout will start after Labor Day, with a big kickoff on September 11. My friend had spoken to someone in one of the leading neo-conservative institutions. He summarized what he was told this way:

They [the source’s institution] have “instructions” (yes, that was the word used) from the Office of the Vice-President to roll out a campaign for war with Iran in the week after Labor Day; it will be coordinated with the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Fox, and the usual suspects. It will be heavy sustained assault on the airwaves, designed to knock public sentiment into a position from which a war can be maintained. Evidently they don’t think they’ll ever get majority support for this—they want something like 35-40 percent support, which in their book is “plenty.”

⁸³ ‘Rollout to War with Iran: An Update’ – Barnett R. Rubin, Informed Comment Global Affairs, September 1, 2007

Update: Since I posted the original note on this topic Wednesday night, there have been several developments. Several more well-informed people have called to discuss it — all of them with confirming information. No one called to say I was wrong.

⁸⁴ ‘Bush Acts as Dictator During Endless “War”’ – The Paragraph, January 9th, 2006

⁸⁵ ‘IRAN:CONSEQUENCES OF A WAR’ by Paul Rogers, Oxford Research Group, February 2006

Although U.S. or Israeli attacks would severely damage Iranian nuclear and missile programmes, Iran would have many methods of responding in the months and years that followed. These would include disruption of Gulf oil production and exports, in spite of U.S. attempts at preemption, systematic support for insurgents in Iraq, and encouragement to associates in Southern Lebanon to stage attacks on Israel. There would be considerable national unity in Iran in the face of military action by the United States or Israel, including a revitalised Revolutionary Guard.

One key response from Iran would be a determination to reconstruct a nuclear programme and develop it rapidly into a nuclear weapons capability, with this accompanied by withdrawal from the Non-Proliferation Treaty. This would require further attacks. A military operation against Iran would not, therefore, be a short-term matter but would set in motion a complex and long-lasting confrontation. It follows that military action should be firmly ruled out and alternative strategies developed.

⁸⁶ ‘Experts Speak: No Good Military Options in Iran’, Think Progress, 2006-04-10

JOSEPH CIRINCIONE, CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT: “[A] military strike would be disastrous for the United States. It would rally the Iranian public around an otherwise unpopular regime, inflame anti-American anger around the Muslim world, and jeopardize the already fragile U.S. position in Iraq. And it would accelerate, not delay, the Iranian nuclear program. Hard-liners in Tehran would be proven right in their claim that the only thing that can deter the United States is a nuclear bomb. Iranian leaders could respond with a crash nuclear program that could produce a bomb in a few years.”

⁸⁷ ‘House Resolution 333 Impeaching Richard B. Cheney’ – pdf / Supporting Documentation

⁸⁸ ‘On Carrier in Gulf, Cheney Warns Iran’ By DAVID E. SANGER, New York Times, May 11, 2007

“With two carrier strike groups in the Gulf, we’re sending clear messages to friends and adversaries alike,” [Cheney] said. “We’ll continue … delivering justice to the enemies of freedom. And we’ll stand with others to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating this region.”

⁸⁹ ‘Four words Bush needs to hear’ by Devin, Daily Kos, Sep 04, 2007

Making the case against war with Iran after the machinery is rolling will be pointless. We need our leaders in Congress to get off the sidelines and declare that any expansion of U.S. aggression in the Middle East without explicit approval from Congress will be met with articles of impeachment, period, full stop.

Doing so will fundamentally change the debate; we would then be talking about whether or not Bush has the implicit authority to wage war with Iran simply because he chooses to, or because he thinks the 2002 AUMF gives him the authority, and that is a good thing.

Sources

⁹¹ ‘Schwarzenegger dismisses single-payer healthcare’ – The Washington Stakeout, 2007-02-25; video and transcript

⁹² ‘Edwards’ Mid-East policy doesn’t admit Israeli nukes’ – The Washington Stakeout, 2007-02-25; video and transcript

⁹³ ‘Condi Rice slides by on a slippery Sunday morning’ – The Washington Stakeout, 2007-02-25; video and transcript

⁹⁴ ‘Colin Powell said Iraq was not a threat’ – John Pilger, johnpilger.com, 22 Sept 2003

… On May 15 2001, Powell went further and said that Saddam Hussein had not been able to “build his military back up or to develop weapons of mass destruction” for “the last 10 years”. America, he said, had been successful in keeping him “in a box”.

Two months later, Condoleezza Rice also described a weak, divided and militarily defenceless Iraq. “Saddam does not control the northern part of the country,” she said. “We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt.”

⁹⁵ ‘Condoleezza Rice’ – SourceWatch.org

Beginning in 2002, Rice became one of the Bush administration’s most outspoken supporters of the 2003 war in Iraq, arguing that Saddam Hussein posed a nuclear danger to the world. As administration hard-liners worked to build support for war beginning in 2002, Rice often mentioned the fear that Hussein would develop a nuclear weapon.

In September 2002, Rice also insisted that Hussein was pursuing nuclear weapons. “We do know that he is actively pursuing a nuclear weapon,” she said on CNN’s Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer on September 8, 2002. “The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

After Iraq delivered its declaration of weapons of mass destruction to the United Nations on December 8, 2002, it was Rice who wrote and submitted a column to the New York Times claiming that it “fails to account for or explain Iraq’s efforts to get uranium from abroad, its manufacture of specific fuel for ballistic missiles it claims not to have, and the gaps previously identified by the United Nations in Iraq’s accounting for more than two tons of the raw materials needed to produce thousands of gallons of anthrax and other biological weapons.”

The first picture is the Internet with net neutrality, where no one’s data gets priority over another’s¹. This is the kind of Internet we have always had. In this picture CNN is the Cable News Network, a large news company, and GNN is the Guerrilla News Network, a small news company. For these examples, AT&T is the internet service provider for CNN and GNN. The two news companies pay AT&T to hook their host computers to the Internet². CNN pays more than GNN, because CNN has more traffic. At the other end of the picture are two Internet users, one watching a CNN news video and the other a GNN news video. AT&T is the only DSL provider in these users’ neighborhoods³, and each user pays AT&T for the service. Almost all parties are happy. CNN is happy because it has high traffic. GNN is happy because its traffic is growing. The DSL users are happy because they can watch the news reports they want without waiting very long. AT&T should be happy, because it is making money on both ends, but greed is gnawing at AT&T⁴. AT&T figures it could make more money without net neutrality, and is lobbying Congress to ban it⁵. But many citizens groups, Internet content providers and users⁶, and Congressmen are fighting to keep net neutrality and this picture of the free-flowing, democratic Internet⁷.

The second picture is the Internet without net neutrality. This is the future where AT&T and the other telecoms have lobbied Congress to do away with net neutrality. Here, AT&T has put in a filter to give priority to data packets from companies that have paid an extra ransom⁸. CNN pays the ransom to AT&T to keep up with the other large companies. GNN, as a small company, does not pay the ransom. The Internet user watching the CNN video finds that it runs fine, but the user watching the GNN video finds that it loads more slowly and stalls during play⁹. The GNN user is no longer happy because he has to wait. GNN is no longer happy, because its traffic is no longer growing, as users get tired of waiting and try another web site. AT&T is now happy because its Internet revenues are up 50%. This is the picture of the crippled Internet that squeezes the little Internet companies, and limits users’ choices.

The third picture also shows a future without net neutrality, but after GNN has posted negative reports about AT&T. In response, AT&T has programmed its filter to block GNN’s data packets and drop them in the “bit bucket¹⁰“. Here GNN and the GNN user are very unhappy – and angry. This is the picture of the death of the Internet where the big telecom companies control what can be seen.

Further Reading

‘Net Neutrality Reading Room’ – Center for Democracy & Technology More detailed diagrams.

SaveTheInternet.com

‘Telco Abuse Is a Problem with a Solution: Net Neutrality’ – SaveTheInternet.com Blog, 2 June 2006

Sources

¹ ‘FAQ: What is network neutrality?’ – SaveTheInternet.com Network Neutrality — or “Net Neutrality” for short — is the guiding principle that preserves the free and open Internet. Net Neutrality ensures that all users can access the content or run the applications and devices of their choice. With Net Neutrality, the network’s only job is to move data — not choose which data to privilege with higher quality service. Net Neutrality is the reason why the Internet has driven economic innovation, democratic participation, and free speech online. It’s why the Internet has become an unrivaled environment for open communications, civic involvement and free speech.

² ‘Net Neutrality Reading Room’ – Center for Democracy & Technology More detailed diagrams.

³ ‘FAQ: Won’t more regulations harm the free Internet? Shouldn’t we just let the market decide?’ – SaveTheInternet.com And when the network owners start abusing their control of the pipes, there’s nowhere else for consumers to turn. The cable and telephone companies already dominate 98 percent of the broadband market. Only 53 percent of Americans have a choice between cable and DSL at home. Everyone else has only one choice or no broadband options at all. That’s not what a truly free market looks like.

⁴ ‘FAQ: Who wants to get rid of Net Neutrality?’ – SaveTheInternet.com The nation’s largest telephone and cable companies — including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner — want to be Internet gatekeepers, deciding which Web sites go fast or slow and which won’t load at all. They want to tax content providers to guarantee speedy delivery of their data. They want to discriminate in favor of their own search engines, Internet phone services, and streaming video — while slowing down or blocking their competitors.

⁵ ‘FAQ: What’s happening in Congress?’ – SaveTheInternet.com The telephone and cable companies are filling up congressional campaign coffers and hiring high-priced lobbyists. They’ve set up “Astroturf” groups like “Hands Off the Internet” to confuse the issue and give the appearance of grassroots support.

⁶ ‘Momentum Tracker’ – SaveTheInternet.com

• Petition Signers: 760,436
• Coalition Groups: 437
• Blog Links: 5,315
• MySpace Friends: 9,144

⁷ ‘Guest post from Rep. Zoe Lofgren’ – SaveTheInternet.com Blog, 26 May 2006 Yesterday, the House Judiciary Committee passed H.R. 5417, the “Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act of 2006,” which I introduced with Committee Chairman Jim Sensenbrenner, Ranking Member John Conyers and Rep. Rick Boucher last week. This is the first bill with real protections for Net Neutrality that has passed any committee in Congress, and I am proud to be a part of it.

⁸ ‘Blocking Innovation’ – SaveTheInternet.com “William L. Smith, chief technology officer for Atlanta-based BellSouth Corp., told reporters and analysts that an Internet service provider such as his firm should be able, for example, to charge Yahoo Inc. for the opportunity to have its search site load faster than that of Google Inc.” – The Washington Post

⁹ ‘How does this threat to Internet freedom affect you?’ – SaveTheInternet.com A charity’s website could open at snail-speed, and online contributions could grind to a halt, if nonprofits can’t pay dominant Internet providers for access to “the fast lane” of Internet service.

¹⁰ ‘Blocking Innovation’ – SaveTheInternet.com In April, Time Warner’s AOL blocked all emails that mentioned www.dearaol.com — an advocacy campaign opposing the company’s pay-to-send e-mail scheme.