Sunday, January 15, 2017

15 January - Netvibes - oldephartteintraining

The Atlantic Wire

Why More Writers Should Talk About Money - Money makes people anxious—perhaps even more so with writers. The relationship between commerce and writing is commonly sketched out in caricatures: the starving artist, the hapless student, the privileged few who “make it.” More often, it’s not addressed at all. In the past few years, some writers have begun to more openly approach questions of class. The internet has seen a profusion of such pieces: A writer who is “sponsored” by her husband calls on other writers to be more transparent about where their money comes from. Another outlines the clear advantages that being born rich, connected, and able to attend expensive schools furnish to becoming a successful writer. In another case, a woman who wrote a well-received debut novel details how she went broke after a single advance. A new book of essays and interviews with writers on the topic of money, released earlier this month, aims to dig even deeper. Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living, edited by Manjula Martin, includes hard truths and thoughtful meditations on class and capitalism while also functioning as a survival guide. In one essay, Roxane Gay (Bad Feminist, Difficult Women) speaks frankly about her student debt, annual income, and past day jobs. In another, Martin herself explains the kind of code-switching by which writers conceal their class background in talking about their careers. By turns comforting, depressing, and illuminating, Scratch paints a fuller, more personal picture of what it’s like to make a living from—or while—writing. I spoke with Martin about the intersection of writing, money, and class, as well as the process of making Scratch. This conversation has been edited and condensed. Joseph Frankel : Some of the writers you spoke with for Scratch were very frank about their finances and their class backgrounds. Others were a little more reluctant. What accounts for these different levels of openness? Manjula Martin: In my experience working with writers on this topic, it’s often the people who have more money who don’t want to talk about money. Transparency is a really scary thing for a lot of people in any profession, and I think there are good reasons for that. But people who are excited to talk about the topic, even if they’re nervous, inherently understand ... that it takes transparency to change stuff. It’s the old saw of “knowledge is power,” and I think that extends to writers and money. There are a lot of barriers to access for people who come from low-income backgrounds, or maybe less traditional educational backgrounds, or who have had to deal with other types of prejudices in their life. If we want that to change, we need to start being honest about how this business actually works. Frankel: Essays in the collection call attention to the creative value of day jobs and, in the case of Leslie Jamison (The Empathy Exams), their impact on writers’ output. Others, particularly the piece by Alexander Chee (The Queen of the Night, Edinburgh), think that the discussion of day jobs helps to romanticize unfair pay for writers. How do you think about the relationship between other kinds of work and writing?   Martin: I think that some of the stuff Chee says in his essay is particularly valuable for younger writers who maybe haven’t been around in an era where folks were ever really compensated well. I’ve certainly written for free. I’d bet Chee has done it too, and I think he talks about that in his essay. But if you’re hiring me to do work, you need to pay me, is sort of his stance. And I agree with that 100 percent.   You mentioned romanticizing that relationship between work and craft. I think it’s very tricky because there is a lot of dangerous romanticization, and that can set writers up, particularly in the beginnings of their careers, to blunder in a business they know nothing about. Chee has a great quote in his essay where he talks about how any education in writing should include an education in how to make a living as a writer. There is a place for the romantic in the writer’s life, but there’s a difference between romance and being ignorant. Gay says that really nicely in her interview where she’s just like, “I don’t want to kill the dream of my students by being like, ‘it’s really hard to make a living!’” But it’s also the responsibility of older generations of writers to let folks know really what it’s like. It drives me equally crazy to read advice to writers on the internet that’s like, “Here’s how to write a bestseller in 7 steps” or “You are guaranteed to get a book deal.” I think that’s the flipside of the same coin. It’s crucial for writers who are talking about their struggles with money to be rigorous in examining their own narratives.Frankel: Going back to Chee, he recalls looking at the lives of his writing mentors—tenured academics and literary magazine writers—as models for his career. These models, he writes, have now become less attainable. How do you think the financial prospects of writing have changed over time, or affected the voices that get to be heard? Martin: I think anyone who is alive and of working age in even the 1990s has experienced in their lifetimes—and I’m including myself in this—a decline in the ability to make a living as a writer, whether you’re writing books or working as a journalist. Chee and I are around the same age, and I also worked in magazines in New York in the 1990s, and that part of his essay rang very true to me. There were people who were definitely making $2 or $3 a word to write profiles in GQ. And you can still write profiles for GQ, but it’s been 20 years and that rate has not gone up. If anything, it’s gone down. Particularly when it comes to journalism, that is a measurable truth. In the book industry, it’s a little harder to measure because the industry is so wacky about advances. But I do think that as it becomes more difficult to make a living as a writer, a narrower selection of voices are being heard. And that means a more limited pool of stories are being told. As we’re moving into an era where the freedom of press is going to be severely restricted if not entirely threatened, I think that question becomes even more urgent. Frankel: In your essay on your own writing and working life, you say, “It’s presumed my story is authentic when I speak about work and art and say I was once a seamstress.” You then introduce the idea of “writerly code-switching”—a way writers with a degree of class privilege reshape their stories about their own “day job struggles.” What shapes the way writers talk about their “struggles,” or relative lack thereof? Martin: Everybody has a story they tell about themselves to themselves, and then everyone has a version of that story they tell to the world. I don’t think writers are all that different—I think everybody does this. Maybe people don’t articulate it as well if they’re not people whose work it is to articulate things. What I was doing in that essay was to really call bullshit on my own story. I have this narrative of myself as a scrappy college dropout who made it, when in reality, my parents work in a university and have my whole childhood. I was middle-class growing up. I was definitely very poor for many years, but that was a poverty of choice. Cheryl Strayed (Tiny Beautiful Things, Wild) talks about this in her interview: She is a very educated person, and so she has chosen to go into debt in order to do her art and make her work. But she grew up very, very poor, as in like goes-hungry-sometimes poor, and so she’s very attuned to that difference. I think it’s crucial for writers who are talking about their struggles with money to be rigorous in examining their own narratives, and making sure that their narratives reflect reality. The legend of the “starving artist,” I think, on one hand can be very true, because we have always lived in a society and an economy that doesn’t value the arts monetarily in the same way that it values other things. On the other hand, let’s dig a little deeper than that, and if you’re not actually starving let’s talk about that. While it can be scary to confront so-called “real talk” about money, it’s essential.Frankel: Jamison argues that all art is shaped by outside forces, including money and the institutions that have it. How do you think the influence of these forces like universities and publishing houses plays out in the kinds of writing that see an audience? Martin: I think [those forces] entirely shape what gets seen. These multiple influences that Jamison talks so brilliantly about—money, institutions, the influence of other artists, your community or your cohort—are huge. It’s interesting because I think Jamison is arguing that rather than institutions destroying the integrity of work, they are actually what makes up the work, and I think that’s true to a certain extent. Frankel: Daniel José Older (Shadowshaper, the Bone Street Rumba series) writes that the language of economics—what “The Market” demands—is used to obscure barriers that are in place for writers of color in publishing. Are there other ways the language of economics covers up the obstacles writers face? Martin: The language of “quality” and “merit” also gets used to obscure things. There’s an idea by publishers and editors that “we only choose the ‘best’ stories to publish. That’s our only rubric. We’re looking at stories in a ‘pure’ way. And only judge them on their value.” That’s just not how humans work, and if you’re a person whose job it is to edit or publish, you have tastes and feelings and opinions, and that goes into what you’re choosing. Otherwise it would be boring. But I think that relying on the language of merit doesn’t acknowledge the types of barriers—the racism, the sexism, the economic privilege—that are inherent in our culture and our society and, obviously, also in publishing. And in fact there are studies that publishing is some crazy percentage white, right? (Editor: A study from January 2016 found that the publishing industry as a whole was 79 percent white.) That doesn’t happen because only white people write good books. Frankel: A lot of writers in this collection, including Jamison and Strayed, seem to be making a call for financial transparency from individual writers. How do you think that greater openness can shape the way people perceive writing as a career? Martin: The only people who benefit from nobody in an industry knowing what each other makes are the people at the very top, the people signing the paychecks. The people getting the paychecks never benefit from that. It’s my hope that this kind of open conversation can have an empowering effect both on writers and people who want to be writers. While it can be scary to confront so-called “real talk” about money, it’s essential. And it could hopefully allow writers to have greater control of the economics of our business. The whole thing with Scratch is writers are a part of the world, which means that we are part of the economy. And this project is the product of my belief that we can be better at our jobs, and also better at our lives and have better jobs and have better lives if we acknowledge that we live in the world like everyone else. Frankel: What should younger or aspiring writers take away from Scratch? Martin: If this book can help people understand what it is actually like to be a working writer, it’s done its job. There’s so much speculation, vagueness, and mystery around that, that just that existing on paper is important. When I told people about this project, overwhelmingly, they would say “Oh, good, it’s not just me who’s obsessed with this stuff.” A lot of people are curious about this. Money is intricately entwined with the type of work we do. We don’t have to like it, we maybe don’t even have to be good at the money side, but we have to acknowledge it and know that that’s okay. 06:00
Emo Nostalgia and Obama Lit: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing - The Rise of Emo Nostalgia Jia Tolentino | The New Yorker “A decade later, the emo teens are grown up, sort of, and they are re-immersing themselves in the sound of adolescence—that squeal of medical-grade angst and longing. There are emo nights in Los Angeles, Brooklyn, Portland, Denver, Tampa, Houston, Baltimore, and Boston, among other cities. They are oddly specific celebrations of near-term nostalgia in which music made to help teenagers flail their way to adulthood provides an opportunity for adults to succumb to the histrionics of teendom again.” Tom Hardy Makes Brooding an Art Shea Serrano | The Ringer “Tom Hardy is so good at brooding in his movies that he placed an understanding of the word ‘brooding’ in my heart. That’s a real thing, even if it doesn’t sound like it is. How many other actors are so good at a specific thing that they can make you understand the definition of a word without you even having to learn it? (Like: Miles Teller and ‘peacocking,’ or Vince Vaughn and ‘turbo salesmanship.’) You just feel it. Tom Hardy broods with such meaning and strength that it gives the dictionary a texture.” How Movies and TV Address Rape and Revenge Amanda Hess | The New York Times “Stories that hinge on avenging rape with killing risk sidestepping the complicated dynamics of recovery in favor of the easy resolution of the victim achieving simple physical dominance over her attacker ... But at their best, the violence works largely as metaphor, luring audiences into more complex and intriguing examinations of rape’s psychological consequences.” Human After All: On Janelle Monáe in Hidden Figures and Moonlight Emily J. Lordi | Pitchfork “What is surprising is not the fact that Monáe is acting, but the roles that she is playing—two characters that contrast dramatically with her musical persona as well as with each other. If Monáe sings about escaping a metaphorical ‘Cold War’ dystopia by spaceship, her character in Hidden Figures participates in the actual Cold War, helping to propel white men into space. Her role in Moonlight, where she plays surrogate mother to a black gay boy with few escape routes from loneliness and violence, brings both stories down to earth.” Considering the Novel in the Age of Obama Christian Lorentzen | Vulture “That we’ve been passing through an era that especially prizes authenticity in fiction is no coincidence. These were years when America was governed by someone who’d written a genuine literary self-portrait, whose identity was inscribed with the traumas of the age of colonialism and its unraveling, whose political appeal hinged on an aura of authenticity and whose opponents attacked him by casting doubt on the authenticity of that identity. Now, as he leaves the scene, we’re troubled by questions of fakeness.” From Split to Psycho: Why Cinema Fails Dissociative Personality Disorder Steve Rose | The Guardian “DID is a condition that lends itself to extremes of behavior, conflict, torment, secrets and mysteries—everything a juicy drama requires in one character. Unfortunately, those dramas have tended to be horror movies and psychological thrillers, which has not really helped us understand the condition.” What Meryl Streep and Donald Trump Share Josephine Livingstone | The New Republic “In contrast to Streep’s trustworthy, ’90s-style speechifying, Trump speaks the language of the time in which we actually live. His reactions are incoherent but delivered at lightning speed. He has no dignity to place in danger and his face is at home in our ridiculous newsfeeds. In the movies of late-20th-century America, he would play a risible villain … But today, he plays the president.” Ryan Gosling Is a Star After His Time Bim Adewunmi | BuzzFeed “While moving from unglamorous child actor to the upper echelons of the Hollywood pyramid, Ryan Gosling has occupied a unique space in the minds of audiences. Despite his male bulk, he exudes a distinct feminine energy (as is almost de rigueur for male actors of a certain age, he is close to his mother and sister; he was briefly home-schooled by the former, and performed dances with the latter). The dichotomy of his physicality and his sensibility gives viewers pause, and it interesting to note that his softly spoken, almost slurred speaking voice is no accident.” 14 Jan
The Atlantic's Week in Culture - Don’t Miss La La Land’s Double-Edged Nostalgia—David Sims analyzes the nature of time in Damien Chazelle’s film, which pays homage to Old Hollywood while portraying the limits of worshipping the past. Amazon Films / Bleecker StreetFilmPaterson Is a Quiet, Considered Masterpiece—David Sims watches Jim Jarmusch’s understated new film, starring Adam Driver as a bus-driving poet. In 1987, Arnold Schwarzenegger Helped to Predict 2017—Megan Garber reveals how the movie The Running Man anticipated some of the realities of the year we just entered. Patriots Day Is Best When It Digs Past the Heroism—David Sims reviews the new film from Peter Berg, a recreation of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing starring Mark Wahlberg. 20th Century Women Is an Ode to Female Resilience—Sophie Gilbert  enjoys Mike Mills’s nuanced, emotionally smart, and offbeat new movie starring Annette Bening. Live by Night Is Too Epic for Its Own Good—David Sims believes that the problem with Ben Affleck’s latest film lies in its overly ambitious scope.   What Sets the Smart Heroines of Hidden Figures Apart—Lenika Cruz praises the unique compassion and humanity of the new film’s protagonists. Paul Drinkwater / NBC / ReutersGolden Globes The Introverted Politics of the 2017 Golden Globes—Megan Garber unpacks Hollywood’s self-advocacy on display at the awards show. The Biggest Moments From the 2017 Golden Globes—The editors discuss all the significant awards, speeches, and highlights from the ceremony. The Golden Globes Anoint La La Land and Moonlight—David Sims recaps a record-breaking night for the Damien Chazelle film, which also saw Barry Jenkins’s movie take home the Best Picture trophy. Did Meryl Streep Misrepresent the MMA?—Spencer Kornhaber chats with the author of a book on mixed martial arts about the actress’s comments during her Golden Globes speech. FXTelevision Taboo: A Grim, Gruesome Costume Drama Starring Tom Hardy—Sophie Gilbert watches the new FX show starring the British actor as a kind of Regency-era Jason Bourne. What Conan O’Brien Means to Late-Night’s Future—David Sims predicts what may happen to the ever-evolving genre if the long-tenured host moves to a weekly or all-digital format in the coming years. Seth Meyers Questions Kellyanne Conway (and the Politics of Late-Night)—Megan Garber dissects the Late Night host’s contentious interview with Donald Trump’s campaign manager. The Mystery of Sherlock’s New Antagonist—Sophie Gilbert tries to make sense of Eurus, the show’s enigmatic new character. One Day at a Time Is a Sitcom That Doubles as a Civics Lesson—Megan Garber reviews the charming new Netflix revival. There Are No Happy Endings in A Series of Unfortunate Events—Lenika Cruz weighs in on Netflix’s adaptation of the beloved and dark children’s series. On The Tonight Show, Michelle Obama Cements a Legacy of Empathy—Megan Garber recaps the outgoing First Lady’s appearance on the talk show. About That Young Pope—Sophie Gilbert watches the bizarre and surreal new HBO show starring Jude Law. Black-ish’s ‘Lemons’ Is Art for the Age of Trump—Megan Garber explains how the latest episode of the ABC sitcom expresses anger at the election’s outcome while insisting on empathy. How Victoria Aims to Connect With Young Women—Nancy West looks forward to the new PBS series about an unlikely female ruler. Jonathan Ernst / ReutersBooks Obama’s Ingenious Mention of Atticus Finch—Spencer Kornhaber expounds upon the outgoing president’s farewell speech, which evoked a flawed American icon. Lucy Nicholson / ReutersMusic Waking Up to Coachella’s Conservative Tinge—Spencer Kornhaber delves into the politics of the popular California music festival, which is backed by a conservative billionaire. 13 Jan
What the Investigation Into the Chicago Police Department Found - The results of the investigation into the Chicago Police Department’s use of force released Friday by the U.S. Department of Justice shows the city’s police engaged in systemic practices that violated residents’ constitutional rights. Here are some of the key findings from the report, which you can read in full here. The findings come 13 months after the investigation began, and more than two years since the fatal police shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, whose death—which was captured by police dash-cam footage and withheld by Chicago authorities for more than a year—prompted the inquiry. The report’s release comes a month after the city announced that there were 762 were homicides in Chicago in 2016—more than Los Angeles and New York combined. Only 29 percent of these cases resulted in police identifying the suspected killer—a clearance rate less than half of the national average, the report pointed out. Here are some other key findings: Unlawful use of deadly force against individuals who pose no threat The investigation uncovered numerous incidents of police officers using deadly force against individuals who were unarmed or posed no immediate threat. Some of these incidents, the report notes, were initiated as foot pursuits “without any basis for believing the person had committed a serious crime.” View note Unlawful use of  less-lethal force In cases where less-lethal force, such as tasers, was used, the investigation also uncovered evidence of unlawful or retaliatory conduct, noting that some officers “resort to Tasers as a tool of convenience, with insufficient concern or cognizance that it s a weapon with inherent risks that inflict significant pain.” Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said the department will equip every officer with Tasers, though evidence does not suggest they reduce officer-involved shootings. View note Unlawful use of force in cases of health crises Though law enforcement is often the first to respond in cases of mental or behavioral health crises, the investigation found that officers use force against people in crisis in cases where force could be avoided. A “meaningful number” of these instances, according to the report, were deemed unconstitutional. View note Failure to address racially discriminatory behavior The investigation noted that some police officers disproportionately target minorities, citing statistics that show the department used force against black Chicagoans 10 times more frequently than their white counterparts. The report also noted the routine use of racially discriminatory language targeting blacks and Hispanics. View note Lack of sufficient officer training Underlying the systemic issues within the department, the reports finds, is a lack of sufficient training and supervision for the approximately 12,000-member strong force. This includes the use of outdated and inconsistent materials, as well as insufficient instruction by field training instructors. View note Lack of accountability The lack of sufficient training is supplemented by a lack of proper procedures to ensure that officers are held accountable for possible cases of misconduct. In the five years preceding the Justice Department’s investigation, it found that less than 2 percent of 30,000 police misconduct complaints were sustained, with the remaining 98 percent resulting in no discipline. The report cites a number of systemic factors precluding misconduct investigations, including an unwillingness to investigate anonymous complaints, provisions in union agreements, and officers’ “code of silence” aimed at covering up misconduct. View note Emanuel called the investigation’s findings “sobering” and pledged to negotiate an agreement with the Justice Department to achieve systemic reforms. It is unclear what impact such an agreement will have in the final days of President Obama’s administration. Jeff Sessions, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general, voiced concern over police oversight investigations during his Senate confirmation hearing Tuesday, testifying that federal lawsuits against local law enforcement could “undermine the respect for police officers and create an impression that the entire department is not doing their work consistent with fidelity to law and fairness.” 13 Jan
Waking Up to Coachella’s Conservative Tinge - Just as one right-leaning businessman takes command politically, another has become the focus of debate in rock and roll. Earlier in January, the music press suddenly seemed to realize that the parent company of Coachella, the iconic two-weekend Southern California festival, is owned by Philip Anschutz, a prominent Republican donor who has supported efforts hostile to LGBT rights. The fallout: calls for boycotts, accusations of “fake news,” and a petition asking headliners Beyonce, Radiohead, and Kendrick Lamar to donate their festival profits to the Human Rights Campaign. The situation that led to the brouhaha isn’t new. In fact, it’s one that is very familiar in American entertainment. A large corporation long ago acquired a cultural organization valued for its coolness, and left-leaning consumers and creators continued to patronize it in spite of the fact that large corporation owners don’t tend to lean left. Only by a quirk of the moment—some combination of the online media economy, shifting generational mores, the election, and this year’s particular headliners—have the politics behind Coachella become a factor. The festival’s operator Goldenvoice first made a name as an independent champion of underground sounds in Southern California in the ’80s and ’90s, but in 2001 Anschutz Entertainment Group bought it. “The deal … should give Anschutz’s concert division, Concerts West, added credibility in rock music circles,” the Los Angeles Times wrote back then. Coachella’s present national profile largely came about after the acquisition—as did its multi-weekend format, sister classic-rock and country-music festivals, and $375 general-admission price tag (up from $50 in 1999). Anschutz’s name really should be familiar: His holdings include the country’s second-biggest movies chain, Regal Entertainment, and AEG Live runs a number of prominent events venues, among other things. The man’s politics have never been a secret. In 2003, OC Weekly wrote about the Anschutz Foundation—the philanthropy founded by Anschutz that is the source of the current controversy—noting that it had given money to a group whose goal was to stop “the militant gay agenda” and who claimed that “pedophilia is a basic part of the homosexual lifestyle.” Over the years, news accounts have mentioned Anschutz or his foundation supporting the likes of Focus on the Family and Rick Santorum while he bankrolled conservative-leaning movies and The Weekly Standard. What ostensibly got it all started this time around was a (now deleted) blog post at Afropunk that praised the newly announced Coachella 2017 lineup but said that Anschutz’s “politics are icky, sticky with the slime of the swamp that folks like president-elect Trump loves to associate [with].” Uproxx aggregated the info about Anschutz’s donations to anti-LGBT groups and his ties to climate-change deniers, which then went viral to such an extent that AEG and Anschutz himself replied. The company said that “attempts to perpetuate and spread false news on a variety of topics are part of a long-running and coordinated attempt by our competitors to smear AEG” and touted “a supportive and inclusive environment that respects the rights of all employees, artists and fans, as well as promoting a philosophy of sustainability throughout the world.” Anschuntz’s denial was more colorful, bearing some rhetorical trademarks of the current political moment: Recent claims published in the media that I am anti-LGBTQ are nothing more than fake news—it is all garbage. I unequivocally support the rights of all people without regard to sexual orientation. We are fortunate to employ a wealth of diverse individuals throughout our family of companies, all of whom are important to us—the only criteria on which they are judged is the quality of their job performance; we do not tolerate discrimination in any form. Both The Anschutz Foundation and I contribute to numerous organizations that pursue a wide range of causes.  Neither I nor the Foundation fund any organization with the purpose or expectation that it would finance anti-LGBTQ initiatives, and when it has come to my attention or the attention of The Anschutz Foundation that certain organizations either the Foundation or I have funded have been supporting such causes, we have immediately ceased all contributions to such groups. It’s an odd reply because it can so easily be picked apart. Pitchfork quickly pulled financial disclosure documents showing that in the past five years the Anschutz Foundation has parceled out hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Family Research Council, and the National Christian Foundation. The first two organizations have clear histories of opposing gay rights; the National Christian Foundation provides significant funding for the Alliance Defending Freedom. Is it coincidence Trump’s inauguration month brings backlash to another conservative billionaire?The outrage is a sign that Coachella, like a lot of pop-culture events, is assumed to be associated with liberal ideology: Roger Waters famously blasted George W. Bush from the stage in 2008 and then blasted Donald Trump last year at a Coachella spin-off festival; 2017’s three headliners are all politically outspoken and to the left; flower crowns and MDMA don’t generally don’t scream Republicanism. Yet all along the festival has also drawn accusations of faux-hippiedom, troubling headware, and rank consumerism: The Daily Beast’s Marlow Stern described it as an “Oasis For Douchebags and Trust Fund Babies.” It might seem tempting to now single Coachella out as a uniquely corporate appropriation of indie aesthetics. But many alt-Coachellas in Southern California—L.A.’s FYF Fest and Camp Flog Gnaw Carnival—are also AEG Live productions. So are other significant fests like Seattle’s Bumbershoot. Major League Soccer is flush with Anschutz money, as are thousands of movie theaters. The issue at hand is, in reality, far more entrenched in the pop-cultural arena than just Coachella. It may not be a coincidence that new attention is being paid to this fact in the same month of Trump’s inauguration—after all, the Afropunk post that began the dustup compared Anschutz to Trump. In any case, the backlash—however belated it might seem—hasn’t quite been futile. When Pitchfork contacted the Anschutz Foundation about its donations, its lawyer reportedly said that anti-gay groups would get no money from the organization going forward. “Once it was explained to us that there was an issue, it stopped,” he said. It’s not a revolution, but it is the kind of thing a lot of people are clearly itching for lately: a change in the previously ignored status quo. 13 Jan
How Victoria Aims to Connect With Young Women - Victoria, a new miniseries charting the famous queen’s early reign, premieres Sunday on PBS’s Masterpiece—nearly 180 years after the monarch ascended the British throne and five days before Donald Trump assumes the American presidency. Here in Columbia, Missouri, the college town where I live and teach, we had a special preview of Victoria’s opening episode on December 5th. Over 500 people turned up, most of them women in their 40s through 60s. But college students, many of whom came into adulthood following the soapy adventures of Downton Abbey’s Lady Mary and Lady Edith, also attended. So did teenagers, who texted right up to the moment the lights went out. Judging by audience reactions and conversations I had with attendees, the older women enjoyed Victoria, but the younger ones devoured it. They oohed and aahed over the palaces. The gardens. The shot-silk gowns. Many gushed over Victoria’s lapdog. Some mooned over Rufus Sewell, who plays a smoldering Lord Melbourne. Most of all, they seemed to thrill at watching a feisty teenage girl running a country. Afterward, in the theater’s lobby, their comments entwined Victoria with the U.S. election. “Why can’t we live in England, where people are smart enough to put a female in charge?” one asked another. “I want a girl NOW for president!” declared a child of nine or ten, whose teenage sister replied, “America doesn’t want a woman in power.” Her words spoke to the value of shows like Victoria: In offering true stories about inspiring leaders, period dramas can speak to the politics of the present. And, in the case of Victoria, to  young women. The miniseries exemplifies a new turn in British television period drama, away from literary adaptations and toward political history. Within the last two years, over 20 such dramas have appeared, and, according to sources like IMDB, at least 20 more are in production. They include Wolf Hall; Rebellion; The Hollow Crown; Churchill’s Secret; Victoria; The Crown; and King Charles III. If we assume that period drama is always somehow about national identity, these series offer British audiences a way to think critically about nationhood in the wake of Brexit, the referendum whereby 52 percent of British citizens voted to leave the European Union. But in the months after the U.S. election, as Victoria illustrates, they also give Americans a means to reflect on leadership—its abuses and constraints, its symbols and privileges, its long history as an anxious and inconstant idea. Like Victoria, these series seek to engage young audiences. Many of the shows portray political leaders in their youth, casting popular actors like Matt Smith (who plays Prince Philip in The Crown) and Jenna Coleman (who plays Victoria). Collectively, they also seem to renounce nostalgia, that emotion so native to the genre and so appealing to, ahem, older audiences. With its understated tone and behind-the-scenes approach to the Windsor family, The Crown, for example, seems to studiously avoid sentimentality about the past. Wolf Hall’s portrait of Henry the VIII’s court, despite its stunningly beautiful camerawork, recalls scenes from The Godfather more than it does earlier period dramas about the king. It’s as if the past is no longer to be wistfully mourned but, rather, reconsidered. Hence, the surprises that lie in wait for many viewers, whether the discovery that Prince Philip was a radical reformer, or that Wolf Hall’s Thomas Cromwell wasn’t quite the nasty thug we thought him. Victoria, however, delivers the biggest surprise. Although scores of photographs exist of Victoria as a young woman in the 1830s and 40s, an image of her as a stout, jowly sourpuss garbed in widow’s weeds persists—as do certain myths about her monarchy. Myth #1: Victoria relinquished all political responsibility to her husband, Prince Albert, after they got married. Myth #2: Victoria stopped ruling once her beloved Albert died. Myth #3: Victoria remained a grieving widow, an incurable melancholic, up to the day she drew her last breath. These myths are, of course, “dead wrong,” Daisy Goodwin, the creator and writer of Victoria, told me. As a doctoral student at Cambridge University, Goodwin wrote her dissertation on Victoria, using the queen’s voluminous diaries to unearth a woman who reveled in the freedom the crown brought her, who loved sex and relished power. The reward of finding this Other Victoria has deeply influenced Goodwin, a novelist and TV producer who said she “loves filling in the female blanks of British history.” Victoria offers elemental truths about courage, love, justice, and kindness all through a female perspective.Projected to run for six seasons, Victoria spans the long life and career of the queen. For Goodwin, who wanted to try a “bigger, less solitary project” than novel-writing, it marks a foray into scriptwriting. But how do you begin the story of a woman who ruled for 64 years? Goodwin got her answer after having a fight with her teenage daughter, Lydia, about homework. Reflecting on how Victoria assumed world-historical power at roughly the same age, she wondered, “What would it be like if Lydia were the boss of me?”  And so Victoria took root. The first season, airing weekly through March 5, follows Victoria from the time she becomes Queen in 1837 through her courtship and marriage to Albert. It portrays Victoria as a bold, sparkling, and clever teenager possessed of an iron will. “The first thing she did was give herself a new name,” Goodwin tells me. The monarch’s real name was Alexandrina Victoria, but as Goodwin explains, “Nobody back then was called Victoria. It was ...  like calling yourself Beyonce.” Still, Victoria’s first season doesn’t seek to lionize its subject or sugarcoat her reign. “She makes tremendous mistakes,” Goodwin says, “because she doesn’t yet understand the world in which she is operating. She shows girls that you can make mistakes and move on.” For example, Victoria callously decides to have the unwed Flora Hastings, one of her ladies-in-waiting, medically examined when she suspects Hastings is pregnant. It turns out the devoutly religious woman had a tumor. She dies soon afterward. Humbled and ashamed, Victoria becomes a much less impulsive ruler after this event. As the series evolves, Victoria will also need to take into account those aspects of Victoria’s reign that cannot be written off as youthful “mistakes.” The British government’s response to the Irish potato famine during the 1840s and early 1850s, for example, was horrendously inadequate. Victoria often expressed pity for the plight of the Irish, but she took no action to address it. And so one million people starved to death over the course of seven years, thrown into the ground without ceremonies or coffins. During the Indian Mutiny of 1859, Victoria offered her support to those military leaders who punished troops for their revengeful actions against the Indian rebels. But during her reign, countless women in India, Africa, and elsewhere were raped or killed or widowed in the endless series of “little wars” that expanded her empire. Future Victoria episodes remain to be seen, but one hopes Goodwin will also address these more complex, more systemic failures; her audience needs to know about them too. For now, and in keeping with its youthful appeal, Victoria’s first season deploys conventions from romance, fairytale, and young-adult fiction but refashions them to offer a complex portrait of its female protagonist. The series makes Victoria the dominant character (she appears in every scene of all seven episodes). It romanticizes her relationship with Lord Melbourne, the older and wiser man, but underscores his shortcomings as well as hers. The show plays up Albert as Victoria’s Prince Charming but also portrays him as a buttoned-up nerd who’s far less appealing to watch. And as with all young-adult fiction, the series presents a protagonist who matures quickly and dramatically; by the end of the season, Victoria is far kinder and less impulsive than she was at the outset. Most notably, Victoria offers elemental truths about courage, love, justice, and kindness all through a female perspective. “Victoria had her own glass ceiling. She was surrounded by men who told her she couldn’t do the job.”No doubt, some critics will view Victoria’s portrait of the queen as naïve or simplistic. They’ll point out the inaccuracies or scoff at the show’s occasional use of caricature. But they’d be missing the point: Victoria aims to provide a political history that resonates with today’s young women. And, apparently, in Britain it  has. Victoria consistently dominated TV ratings with a consolidated average of seven million viewers, according to Goodwin. She added that many of the show’s viewers were females between 13 and 25, and that Victoria is the highest-rated period drama ever among this age group in the U.K. Some of these viewers tweet Goodwin about their new resolve to study history or post photos of themselves hugging their copy of Goodwin’s novel, Victoria. Hundreds of these women, calling themselves “Vicbournes,” have taken to writing fan fiction or creating mashups based on the series, imagining plots in which Victoria elopes with Lord Melbourne. “It’s a real phenomenon here,” Goodwin says. Like her, these girls are filling in the female blanks. But they also live in a country with a strong tradition of women holding top political positions, including the prime minister. And what of America’s young women—will they enjoy Victoria? The night of my hometown’s preview suggests the answer is yes, but with a caveat, a subtext. As that night conveyed, many young women in America remain devastated by the election. Recently, when I asked one of my college students to share her thoughts with me about Hillary Clinton’s defeat, she said, “The election told me that it doesn’t matter how smart you are, how qualified you are, how well you understand the system and can play the game—you will never win.” Comments like these raise questions about period drama’s relevance and responsibility to young women, especially now. As a story grounded in history, Victoria can give them hope coupled with truth. Young viewers can think, “This story happened and so, no matter what present history tells me, a woman can be in power.”   Rebecca Eaton, the executive producer of Masterpiece, tells me Victoria’s U.S. premiere wasn’t timed to coincide with the week of the presidential inauguration. But she says she hopes it will have a positive influence on America’s young women. Since Masterpiece’s rebranding in 2008, Eaton has aggressively sought period dramas that will capture a new audience of “smart girls,” girls in their teens and 20s who read good books, imagine big careers, and want to learn about history. Until this past year, Eaton had mainly been focused on providing them with good drama. But 2017 brings a slightly different agenda. “This is a very important time to present stories of strong, independent women,” says Eaton. “Victoria had her own glass ceiling. She was surrounded by men who told her she couldn’t do the job.” She adds, “I’m very pleased to have this story at a time when women’s issues, unfortunately, are back in play all over again.” On Sunday night, I’ll re-watch Victoria with my 15-year-old niece Sophie and her friends. I’ll take pleasure in seeing their reactions and sharing with them what I know about Victoria’s life: how she often performed small, individual acts of kindness to the poor; how, against the advice of her senior counselors, she pardoned under-age criminals; how she survived eight assassination attempts. It will be a different viewing party than those I had for Downton Abbey, a more earnest experience. We’ll watch Victoria not because it depicts an old-fashioned past, but because it portrays their imagined future. 13 Jan
20th Century Women Is an Ode to Female Resilience - In a scene early on in 20th Century Women, Dorothea (Annette Bening) helps her son construct a birthday cake in the kitchen, plugging candles into a mess of whipped cream and strawberries. “Wait a few seconds and then bring it in,” she says, heading into the living room. Then, dutifully, she feigns surprise as he places it in front of her, while all the assembled guests sing “Happy Birthday.” The nuances of Bening’s performance—in just a few seconds, she communicates both the requisite efficiency and the sharp loneliness of single motherhood—anchor 20th Century Women, Mike Mills’s paean to the women he grew up with. Set in Santa Barbara in 1979, it’s a charming, unfocused movie that acknowledges nostalgia but doesn’t wallow in it, capturing the emotional messiness of womanhood from the perspective of an outside observer, 15-year-old Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann). Over the course of two hours, Jamie considers three different women in his life, while Dorothea considers the fact that, in growing up, he is turning into a creature who’s increasingly alien to her. The film is based, loosely, on Mills’s own experiences being raised by his mother and sister. (He tends to draw on his own life for inspiration: 2005’s Thumbsucker follows an anxious 17-year-old coming of age, while 2010’s Beginners is about an adult man whose father comes out as gay late in life, as Mills’s father did.) Dorothea, feeling that she knows Jamie less each day, enlists the help of two women, Abbie (Greta Gerwig), a photographer immersed in the emerging punk scene, and Julie (Elle Fanning), a friend of Jamie’s whom he’s besotted with. Jamie narrates brief portraits of each woman, each very much a product of her time and place: the year they were born, the books they read, their hopes and dreams. And Dorothea, in turn, considers Jamie, how she can help him become a good man, and what that even means at a time when the strictures of masculinity are evolving so quickly. If that sounds yawningly idealistic, it’s buffeted by a wicked sense of humor and Mills’s distinctive visual approach, honed during his years making music videos and TV ads. Jamie describes characters as the camera glances through the detritus of their lives: Dorothea’s Birkenstocks and Salem cigarettes, Abbie’s birth-control pills and tattered red shoes, Julie’s Judy Blume novels and teen-therapy sessions. This approach adds depth to the characters that often bests simple description. While we learn a fair amount about William (Billy Crudup), Dorothea’s lodger, from her description of his history, we learn infinitely more in the moment where he professes to Abbie that he makes his own shampoo. The most surprising part of the movie is how well Mills writes his three women, and how accurately he pinpoints their very distinct anxieties, aided by three spectacular performers. As the fiercely independent Dorothea, who was raised in the Depression, Bening is magnificent and unflappable, accepting her son’s various experiments with indomitable spirit, but also revealing the loneliness that keeps her up at night. Gerwig, an endlessly versatile actor, shows Abbie’s toughness and vulnerability along with her frustration at being stifled by the limits of life in Santa Barbara. Fanning’s Julie is sweet and complex, mistaking the freedom to act out with freedom itself. But Zumann’s Jamie matches all three with his sensitivity and awkward attempts at masculinity, reading Abbie’s feminist manifestos and lecturing surly boys at the skate park on clitoral stimulation. He’s so emotionally intelligent and so curious that it’s hard to share Dorothea’s concerns for his future, which stunts the dramatic tension of the movie just a little. Mostly, it’s a pleasure to be in the company of the engaging misfits living in Dorothea’s vast, crumbling house, and to remember flashes of what it felt like to be encountering adulthood in all its perplexities. Mills creates a strong sense of the late ’70s via music (Black Flag and the Talking Heads), clothing, cars, and political flashpoints (Jimmy Carter’s “crisis of confidence” speech features in one scene), but the most nostalgic element of the movie might stem from how familiar his characters can feel: 20th-century women in all their adaptable, resilient glory. 13 Jan
Black-ish's “Lemons” Is Art for the Age of Trump - What will the Trump presidency mean for the nation’s artistic output? Will the United States’s new Commander in Chief, who has been by turns part of the entertainment industry and a mocker of it, inspire creators in their endeavors? Will he deter them? “In dark times,” David Foster Wallace mused, “the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness.” While these times, of course, are not dark for everyone, for those for whom they are—for the Americans who are confused and angry and fearful about the new course of the nation—it’s an open question: What will art look like in the years to come? Will it protest? Will it grapple? Will it retreat? Here’s an early entry in the canon of Trump-era art, one that might well offer a clue to all that: “Lemons,” the episode of Black-ish that aired on ABC on Wednesday night. The episode takes that humblest of things—the primetime TV sitcom—and uses it to find, per Wallace’s mandate, the human magic of this moment. “Lemons” (the title is both a reference to, and a rejection of, the old adage about making lemonade) is art that is supremely aware of its own ability not just to reflect the world, but to help people make sense of it. It is art that achieves the neatest of tricks: It expresses anger while also insisting on empathy. “Lemons” expresses anger while also insisting on empathy.“Lemons” is set two months after the 2016 election—which is to say, this episode of Black-ish is happening now-ish—and it finds the Johnsons each, in their own way, coping with the aftereffects of Trump’s upset victory. (“America has a love affair with upsets,” Dre notes in the episode’s opening monologue. But “what happens when the winners and losers are supposed to be on the same team?”) Dre, for his part, is trying to move on from the events of early November, focusing his attention—or, at any rate, trying to focus his attention—on a big pitch at work. Bow, on the other hand, is taking refuge in activism. (“Everything you’re wearing is from an NPR commercial!” Dre tells her, as he takes in his wife’s Black Lives Matter button, Habitat for Humanity sweatpants, and UNICEF flip-flops.) Jack is determined to be optimistic. (“I don’t see this glass as half-empty, I see it as half full!” he exclaims, while staring at a vessel that is actually 1) a bowl and 2) empty.) Junior, with the help of Pops, is working on a monologue that he will deliver at Valley Glen Prep’s appointed Healing Day—a recitation of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. (“Lemons,” fittingly, is airing directly before the national holiday that celebrates King’s legacy; the iconic speech runs like a refrain through the episode.) And then there’s Zoey, who busies herself making, yes, lemonade. Bow, confused and a bit dismayed by her daughter’s evident impulse toward escapism—she suggests that maybe Zoey should take a few minutes to make calls on behalf of Planned Parenthood instead—attempts to ascribe political meaning to Zoey’s beverage-brewing effort. “I get it—the country gave us lemons, and you make lemonade,” Bow says. Or maybe it’s more like Beyoncé, she says—how “she uses lemonade as a symbol for women, and their self-knowledge and healing.” Later, though, Zoey explains herself. “It’s not liberal lemonade, it’s not conservative lemonade,” she tells her mother. “It’s just lemonade—that I made with love. That’s what I want my contribution to be. Love.”   Related Story Black-ish and How to Talk to Kids About Police Brutality Lemonade, in other words, isn’t just the political power of things that can be shared, apolitically; it’s also the extremely varied ways people have of coping with the world and its surprises. Someone zigs. Another zags. It’s unpredictable. It’s chaotic. These characters, after all, are in mourning. And mourning is as individualized a thing as it is an unpredictable one. At Dre’s work, too, everyone is reacting to things just a little bit differently. People are distracted, but in slightly different ways. In one set piece, “there is no way we’re getting any work done today” gets repeated in the Stevens & Lido conference room as November 9 becomes December 9 becomes January 9. People are angry, and looking for someone else to blame. (On a whiteboard in the firm’s conference room is scrawled a question—“Whose fault is this?” under which is written, alternately, “THE GAYS / LATEEN-OHS / THE BLACKS / WHITE WOMEN.” Each blame-ee has been crossed out as the workers realize that fault cannot be neatly assigned.) At one particularly powerful moment, Lucy, the firm’s litigious employee, makes a confession: She voted for Trump. Not because she likes him or agreed with the claims and threats he made during the campaign, she says, but because she gave Obama a chance—twice—and hasn’t seen her life get much better. “It’s eight years later, my dad’s still out of work, my hometown is about to go under,” Lucy tells her colleagues, “and Hillary comes out saying she’s basically going to keep everything the same.” Lucy was conflicted about her vote. But she wanted to shake up the system. Her colleagues hear that. They don’t agree with her. But they hear her. “Lemons,” in general, takes for granted that its viewers will share the politics of its characters: The episode figures that, when Bow tells Zoey that “as a mom, it is my job to deliver a world where the values that I raised you to believe matter,” those are values that are, in broad ways as well as narrow ones, shared by Black-ish’s viewers. And yet this is a piece of TV that is acutely aware of the dangers of filter bubbles, and that isn’t satisfied with simply reflecting half of the country back to itself. “Lemons,” its glass-half-empty title notwithstanding, is trying to understand. It is giving someone like Lucy a voice, and a hearing. It is giving those things, too, to Dre, who finally loses his temper when Mr. Stevens accuses him of apathy: “I love this country,” Dre retorts—“even though, at times, it doesn’t love me back.” ‘I love this country—even though, at times, it doesn’t love me back.’And then Dre gives a summary of the civil rights movement, as archival images and footage fill the screen in a montage, and “Strange Fruit”—the song made especially powerful because it is Nina Simone’s achingly taut rendition—plays as a score. Dre talks about striving, in spite of injustice. He talks about hoping, in spite of history. He concludes, “I love this country, as much, if not more, than you do, and don’t you ever forget that.” It was a scene in a sitcom that was also a history lesson that was also a plea for empathy. It was a validation of what TV—particularly network TV, with its relative ability to summon wide and varied audiences—can accomplish, even as culture fragments, even as Americans threaten to self-sort themselves away from empathy. Kenya Barris, Black-ish’s creator and showrunner, has generally resisted, he has said, the soapboxery of the Very Special Episode vein. Black-ish may have had episodes that overtly doubled, like “Lemons,” as cultural commentary—“Hope,” “40 Acres and a Vote”—but “we don’t like to say ‘these are the topics,’” Barris told TV Guide in September. He and his co-creators preferred a more organic approach to merging their fictions with the truths of the world beyond. The 2016 election, however, changed that. “From Tuesday night to Wednesday morning, I think my show changed,” Barris told NPR’s Rachel Martin of the events that turned November 8 into November 9. In the aftermath of the election, Barris said, We sort of calmed down and we were like, you know what? We have to talk about things that people might not want to talk about openly. But we have to dig in deeper and stay later and have more real conversations and argue amongst ourselves more and really bring our emotions to the surface and really say things that people want to hear... We have to do that more. We have a responsibility. It’s not just TV for us anymore. It’s not just TV. It’s art. 13 Jan
Live by Night Is Too Epic for Its Own Good - Ben Affleck has a Ben Affleck problem. As a filmmaker, he long ago proved himself an interesting, versatile voice in Hollywood, an heir to the gritty crime-thriller directors of the ’70s who excelled at staging small-scale action and getting big, pulpy performances from well-selected ensembles. He keeps making a mistake, though. He keeps casting this stiff, uncomfortable-looking actor in his lead roles, a man who too often seems distracted and unhappy, lacking the movie-star charisma he’s shown in other projects. Sadly, that actor is also Ben Affleck, and his appearances in these films show no sign of abating. Live by Night, Affleck’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning smash Argo is a fascinating mess of a movie, but it’s undone in part by the charisma vacuum at its center. Why can’t Affleck direct himself to a good performance? In his two previous films, The Town and Argo, he played characters burdened with uninteresting arcs but who orchestrated the action around them—it’s almost as if Affleck can only imagine himself as a director within his own movies. In Live by Night, Affleck plays Joe Coughlin, a petty criminal in Prohibition-era Boston who robs card games and speakeasies with fellow hoods and hangers-on. Joe is intelligent, intimidating, and politically adept enough to eventually leave his hometown and rise to the top of the Tampa crime scene, playing the Italian and Irish mobs off of each other. Live by Night, adapted from a Dennis Lehane novel, has a fun time picking apart the web of alliances Joe builds, but it never manages to sell the man himself. Affleck is ridiculously stoic and unfunny throughout the film, an absurd choice given the freewheeling tale being told. Joe, the son of a respected Boston police captain (Brendan Gleeson), is ripping off the card games of Irish mobster Albert White (Robert Glenister) while secretly romancing White’s girlfriend Emma Gould (Sienna Miller). Affleck, now 44, struggles most with the youthful exuberance of the film’s first act, where Joe is an upstart in a crime world defined by ethnic conflict. Though Irish, he earns his stripes by allying with the Mafia and going to war with White. The film depicts Joe as the kind of leader who can win over his enemies with his charm, but there’s not much evidence of that in Affleck’s flat performance. After burning his bridges in Boston, Joe ends up running the Mafia’s emergent operation in Tampa, where he tries to untangle a net of power structures, including the immigrant Cuban rum operations and the insidious Ku Klux Klan, whose members occupy a slew of political positions across the state. Lehane’s more recent books are intrigued by the levels of government, legal and illegal, present in America’s early 20th century, and the systemic racism they usually enforced. Novels like The Given Day and Live by Night are not mere crime thrillers; they’re also attempts to flesh out what America’s underworld reflect in its legitimate political power structures. It’s easy to see why Affleck was drawn to the book (he wrote the screenplay himself, a first for him), but Live by Night might have been more suited to a blown-out television miniseries. There’s the constant feeling that captivating moments are being glossed over as Joe seizes control of the Florida rum industry. Affleck’s best film remains his feature debut, 2007’s fantastic neo-noir Gone Baby Gone, which was also adapted from a Lehane novel. But that was a much simpler potboiler—a pair of private eyes solving a straightforward mystery (it also featured Affleck’s brother Casey in the lead role, rather than Ben himself). Lehane’s interests have since deepened, as have Affleck’s, but Live by Night is hampered by a 129-minute running time; it feels choppy and abridged when it should linger in the details. For example, Zoe Saldana is given a plum role as Graciella Corrales, a Cuban rum lord whom Joe partners with and eventually marries. But she’s quickly relegated to the role of supportive love interest as the film pivots back to Joe’s battles with the KKK and the Irish mob, who resurface in Miami. There’s a real sense of missed opportunity in her performance. Elle Fanning plays a crucial role as Loretta Figgis, the Tampa sheriff’s daughter who falls into a life of prostitution, is reformed, and then begins to speak out against the legalization of gambling—a key prong in Joe’s takeover of Florida. It’s an arc that should dominate the second half of the film, but instead feels mildly irritating since Affleck doesn’t give her much screen time. The only member of the ensemble who really sticks out is Chris Messina as Joe’s right-hand man Dion, an avuncular, shrunken troll of a sidekick who gives the film a sense of humor its leading man sorely lacks. It’s understandable that, coming off a huge Oscar win that capped his comeback and his return to the Hollywood A-list, Affleck would tackle a project of such scope. But along with his own disaffected acting, it’s that scope that betrays him. Live by Night is illustrating a crime saga with the ambition of The Godfather, but it’s trying to do it so quickly that it ends up simply going through the motions of the genre. One of the film’s final set pieces, a chaotic shootout between warring mobs in an opulent Tampa hotel, is so wonderfully staged, its action crisp and easy to follow, that it reminds you what skill Affleck has with the camera. Next time, he should perhaps confine himself behind it. 13 Jan
Baltimore Police Agree to Stop Abusing Their Power - The U.S. Department of Justice and the city of Baltimore announced an agreement to reform the city’s troubled police department on Thursday. The 227-page document lays out a detailed plan for the Baltimore police to try to correct egregious violations of constitutional rights, racial disparities in their practices, excessive use of force, and a culture of retaliation against whistleblowers. The agreement could represent one of the last hurrahs for the police-reform movement before the Trump administration takes office. The agreement, which the city voted to fund Thursday morning, even before it had been made public, resolves a federal investigation that began with the death of Freddie Gray in police custody in April 2015. That death provoked widespread demonstrations in the streets of the Charm City, and some rioting, drawing the spotlight to a long history of racial division and unequal policing in Baltimore. While a prosecutor’s bid to convict officers for their role in Gray’s death failed, the Justice Department produced a stomach-churning report last August. Related Story The Horror of the Baltimore Police Department The report found, for example, that Baltimore police tended to make frequent stops and arrests, even when there was no useful law-enforcement reason for it, and often at the expense of community relations. But the problem ran much deeper: Police often made stops and arrests that fell afoul of constitutional protections. Many stops ended with no citation or arrest, and even when they did, booking officers often rejected charges as too flimsy—doing so 11,000 times between 2010 and 2015. Sometimes cops rounded up large numbers of people, then “unarrested” them when they determined they had no grounds for it. Justice also found that people were often arrested simply for exercising their First Amendment rights by criticizing or talking back to officers. But those most likely to be arrested were disproportionately African Americans and people in heavily African American neighborhoods. Blacks were more likely to be arrested for minor, apparently pretextual violations like throwing dice—for which 99 percent of arrestees were black. The problem was so bad that boilerplate language provided to officers for logging arrests assumed by default that suspects would be black males. African Americans were also more likely to be exposed to excessive use of force. Police were routinely mishandling cases with mentally disabled suspects, and they belittled or pressured victims of sexual assault. And when some officers tried to speak up, they were subject to reprisals from fellow officers. DOJ surmised that the numbers it received from BPD probably underestimated the problem, since there appeared to be many encounters that were not property logged. The agreement reached Thursday is 50 percent again as long as the initial report, and offers a series of detailed prescriptions intended to solve the problems that report had documented. Although “the City and BPD did not and do not admit or agree with the findings in the United States’ Report,” it says, they “recognized that the United States’ findings raised issues of importance to the City, BPD, and the community that should be addressed, and they committed to address each of the concerns raised.” Many of the clauses in the report are fairly standard—like a commitment to better training, or homage to the importance of community-oriented policing, today’s big buzzword in law-enforcement reform. But others are more specific. “BPD will ensure that it conducts all Investigatory Stops, Searches, and Arrests in accordance with the rights secured or protected by the Constitution, and state and federal law,” the agreement states. Officers will have to tell individuals stopped for voluntary interviews that providing ID is optional, and refusing to cooperate will not justify detention, arrest, search, or issuing a ticket. People who run from the police cannot be stopped or arrested simply for that fact, as Freddie Gray was. Moreover, an officer must have “specific and articulable facts, that a person has committed, is committing or is about to commit a crime” in order to detain them or conduct an investigatory stop. Police will have to document each of these stops, and they will not be allowed to use boilerplate language. An individual’s presence in a location, such as an area police deem to be high in crime or proximity to a crime, will not be enough to justify a stop or detention. Except in certain circumstances, police will also have to seek a superviser’s permission before arresting people for a range of crimes that might actually represent pretextual stops, including obstructing, hindering or resisting an officer; disorderly conduct; gambling; failure to obey an officer or making a false statement to an officer; and misdemeanor trespassing. Whenever police arrest someone but let them go without charging them, whether for lack of probable cause, an identity issue, or other reasons, the department will have to report that to monitors. Police face new restrictions on unholstering their service guns. They will be prohibited “from exhibiting or pointing a firearm unless the officer reasonably believes that the situation may escalate to create an imminent threat of serious bodily injury or death to the officer or another person.” There are new guidelines for dealing with people in mental-health crises. The procedure for dealing with victims of sexual assault is being overhauled. One set of new rules focuses on the central question in Gray’s death and the trial of officers. Gray was apparently healthy when he was arrested and placed in a police wagon, but by the time he was removed less than an hour later, his spinal cord was nearly severed. He died after a week in a coma. But the question of how Gray had been injured was never resolved. Contrary to department regulations, he was not seatbelted in, though officers said that was common. Reform advocates, and prosecutors, suggested that Gray had received a “rough ride” in the back of the van, a practice in which police drive erratically so as to bang a prisoner around. But they couldn’t prove that in court. New regulations are designed to avoid that sort of problem. Officers will be required to seatbelt prisoners in, and vans will be equipped with cameras to track what’s going on in the back. It is not a coincidence that the agreement between Baltimore and the Justice Department arrives in the final 10 days of the Obama administration. DOJ consent decrees have proven to be one of the most common, and most consistently effective, tools for forcing police departments to reform themselves and end abuses, particularly with regards to unfair police practices toward African Americans. (That is not to say that such consent decrees are a silver bullet: The Cleveland Police Department was under one in the mid-2000s, emerged from it, and then was placed under another in 2015.) In December, The Washington Post reported that the Justice Department was rushing to finish a consent decree with Baltimore and another with Chicago, another police department with a troubled relationship with African American citizens. The Trump Justice Department is not expected to be nearly as active as the Justice Department under Obama Attorneys General Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch. In his prepared remarks before a confirmation hearing this week, Attorney General-designate Jeff Sessions complained that “law enforcement as a whole has been unfairly maligned and blamed for the actions of a few bad actors and for allegations about police that were not true.” Last fall’s Justice Department report on Baltimore, as well as its earlier report on Ferguson, Missouri, show just how appalling and systemic the flaws in police departments can be. But starting on January 20, the push to fix those problems will no longer be able to rely so heavily on the investigative and punitive muscle of the federal government. 12 Jan

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Burmese ‘Stopped From Seeking Shelter’ in China - Al Jazeera reports that Chinese authorities have turned back thousands of Myanmar refugees fleeing heavy fighting between armed ethnic groups and government troops near the country’s northern border. The incident occurred in the country’s northern Kachin State on Wednesday, where fighting between the Burmese military and an ethnic armed group has displaced 23,000 people since the outbreak of the conflict several weeks ago, campaign group Fortify Rights said. “China should provide asylum seekers with sanctuary, not send them into the line of fire,” said Matthew Smith, chief executive officer of Fortify Rights. The organisation also said that Myanmar authorities were restricting humanitarian aid groups from operating in the affected region. The restrictions were resulting in “avoidable deprivations of food, healthcare, and other humanitarian provisions for displaced communities,” Fortify Rights said. [Source] Myanmar’s Kachin State has been besieged by conflict since 2011 after government troops broke a longstanding ceasefire agreement. Hundreds of thousands of civilians have been displaced since then. RFA has more on the plight of the refugees: Samson Hkalam, General Secretary of the Kachin Baptist Convention, a Myanmar Baptist denominational organization that assists refugees in the northern state, said the internal refugees from the Zai Awng and Hkau Shau camps are still on the road with no place to stay. They are afraid to return to their internal refugee camps near which mortar shells have exploded from fighting between government troops and ethnic armed soldiers from the autonomy-seeking Kachin Independence Army (KIA), he told RFA’s Myanmar Service. The KBC, which has its headquarters in the state capital Myitkyina, will discuss these refugees’ plight with officials from the Kachin state government as well as with Chinese authorities, he said. A Joint Strategy Team (JST) for Humanitarian Response in Kachin and Northern Shan States, which was formed by nine Kachin civil society organizations, including the KBC, to support the internally displaced persons (IDPs), released a statement on Wednesday saying that most of those who left the camps are women, children, and the elderly, who don’t have enough food. [Source] Hostilities between the military and the ethnic rebel group have continued to escalate, with heavy shelling claiming the lives of dozens of civilians in affected areas. AFP reports: Clashes between the army and ethnic minority militias in Myanmar’s borderlands have intensified in recent months, undercutting Aung San Suu Kyi’s vow to bring peace to the country since her party took power in March. Dozens have been killed and thousands displaced since fresh fighting erupted between the Myanmar military and the ethnic minority Kachin Independence Army (KIA) in November. The unrest has rippled across Shan and Kachin states, threatening the next round of peace talks between the government, military and ethnic groups scheduled for February. Dashi Naw Lawn, secretary of the Kachin Network Development Foundation, said the army launched airstrikes near the border town of Laiza on Tuesday. […] “The fighting is getting worse and worse.” [Source] Other ASEAN countries and China have responded to the conflict in Myanmar and the resulting human rights abuses with acquiescence. At Forbes, Anders Corr looks at why these countries have not have applied diplomatic pressure to moderate Myanmar’s behaviour, arguing that these foreign governments have upheld a “principle of noninterference” out of fear of establishing an unfavourable precedent that could lead to Western intervention in their own domestic human rights situations. The Asian diplomatic source to whom I spoke, alleges that China and most ASEAN countries are largely ignoring the Rohingya crisis, or supporting Myanmar behind the scenes, because they do not want to set a precedent for outside interference in domestic human rights issues. Such a precedent could then be used against them on human rights violations against their own minorities. Additionally, China sees human rights complaints as a potential avenue for U.S. influence in Asia, according to the source. China and most of the ASEAN countries have their own minorities that are discriminated against, or worse. China’s worst-treated minorities are in Xinjiang and Tibet, and precedents on the Rohingya are avoided in part to protect Chinese policies in those provinces. According to my source, Not taking a position is in [the] national interest of many countries. As for people of Chinese descent in Kachin and Shan, China may be quietly telling Myanmar that they would like to see people of Chinese descent to be considered better than now. At [the] same time, China has a different approach altogether [towards the Rohingya]. It is mostly silent. But, there is a dilemma. In [the] name of calling for treating minorities better, it may end up creating more space for Westerners to play a bigger role in Myanmar. [China] may link it to strategic considerations. China, like other countries, has its own problem with minorities. If Myanmar minorities were supported then the same could be expected for minorities in China. The source applied the same logic to ASEAN countries as a whole. “ASEAN has followed the principle of noninterference in member states,” he said. “They are not taking a position on the Rohingya because that suits them. Indonesia has [a] similar problem with some of its ethnic [minorities]. Malaysia has its own problem with a local Chinese community…. Thailand has Muslims in the South and some [people of Chinese origin] in the North. Vietnam has the same problem.” [Source] Elsewhere, Antoni Slodkowski and Yimou Lee report that China has been quietly extending its political reach into Myanmar via the unrecognized state of Wa, also known as Special Region 2, through establishing a large Chinese presence in both the Wa government and business communities. The “foreign policy” of the self-proclaimed Wa State is closely monitored by Beijing, senior officials in the administration run by the 30,000-strong United Wa State Army (UWSA) and its political wing said, with contact with Western governments, businesses or aid groups deemed particularly sensitive. […] “China has its ears and eyes everywhere, including in the government and business, and is wary of any deepening of ties with the West,” said one minister from the Wa government, speaking on condition of anonymity due the sensitivity of the matter. “We take this very seriously, and act so as not to anger China,” he said, adding that all dealings with Washington and Brussels, as well as every foreigner or NGO entering Wa territory, were scrupulously reported to China. China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in response to a question from Reuters that “as a friendly neighbor” it has “consistently respected Myanmar’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and not interfered with Myanmar’s internal affairs”. [Source] © cindyliuwenxin for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: armed conflict, ethnic conflict, Myanmar, refugeesDownload Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall14 Jan
Photo: Restaurant workers on break, by sodai gomi - Restaurant workers on break © josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall13 Jan
China to Ban Abuse of Children at Internet Detox Camps - China’s State Council introduced a new draft law today that will bring an end to the abusive treatment of minors at internet addiction boot camps, where parents send web-obsessed teenagers and young adults to undergo controversial physical punishment and military-style training in the hopes of weaning them off the net. According to the draft, organizations are banned from inflicting physical or mental harm on juvenile patients. The draft law also includes provisions that will limit the number of hours minors can spend online playing video games. Mike Ives at The New York Times report: “It’s a very important move for protecting young children,” said Tao Ran, the director of the Internet Addiction Clinic at Beijing Military General Hospital. He said he had seen several Chinese teenagers return from boot camps that treat internet addiction showing signs of psychological trauma. […] The draft law would ban abusive treatment like medical and electroshock therapy in the camps, as well as “physical punishments,” but it does not specify what those other punishments might include. The legislation also would limit how much time each day that minors could play online games at home or in internet bars. Providers of the games would be obliged to take technical measures to monitor and restrict use, such as requiring players to register under their real names. The legislation does not yet specify the total number of hours allowed, but minors would be barred from playing online games — at home and elsewhere — between midnight and 8 a.m. Game providers and internet bars that failed to enforce the law would be subject to fines and possible closure by the government. [Source] Related policy guidelines were first introduced in 2009 by the Chinese Health Ministry, which warned against the use of electroshock therapy for youths seeking treatment for their internet addiction. The new ban introduced today will put a permanent end to electro-shock therapy in treatment boot camps. Liu Caiyu at Global Times reports: China’s first draft regulation to protect minors’ rights in cyberspace will bring an end to the controversial electroshock therapy to cure Internet addiction which has caused physical and psychological damage, experts said Sunday. […] “Electroshock therapy, such as that used by the controversial Internet Addiction Treatment Center in Shandong Province will be banned if the draft is adopted,” Song Yinghui, deputy director of law school in Beijing Normal University, told the Global Times on Sunday. Electroconvulsive therapy is a legitimate medical technique for severe depression, but it has no role in addiction therapy, China Youth Daily reported in August. However, the Shandong center used it to “treat” more than 6,000 Internet addicts, mostly teenagers since 2006. Song said that electroshock therapy has caused physical and psychological damage to the “patients,” who are mostly juveniles. [Source] Last fall, a homicide in northern China invigorated debate about how families should deal with problems of internet addiction and the lasting impact of abuse at internet detox centers. From Kerry Allen and Helier Cheung at BBC: The teenager, from the northern province of Heilongjiang, had “tied the victim up in a chair until she died” on 16 September, local police say, without giving further details about the death. Local media say Chen Xin had been sent to an academy in Shandong, more than 1,000 km (600 miles) from her home, that specialised in “treating addictions and rebellious youths” – and which had a particular reputation for treating internet addictions. […] The incident has sparked outrage online about China’s youth treatment centres, and debate about how parents should raise their children.The Paper said it had interviewed several former students at the college who alleged abuse. Many said they were beaten for not following orders, with one saying they were beaten “black and blue” for being found with a cigarette. Others said they were sometimes forbidden to sleep, and forced to stand until the early hours of the morning. [Source] Click through to read more about internet addiction in China. © cindyliuwenxin for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: draft law, Internet, Internet addiction, Internet addicts, youthDownload Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall13 Jan
Photo: Under the dome, by Gauthier DELECROIX – 郭天 - Under the dome © Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: Gauthier DELECROIXDownload Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall12 Jan
Color of the Week: APEC Blue - The Word of the Week comes from the Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon, a glossary of terms created by Chinese netizens and encountered in online political discussions. These are the words of China’s online “resistance discourse,” used to mock and subvert the official language around censorship and political correctness. APEC lán APEC蓝 “Why is APEC blue so very blue?” (Source: Weibo)  Color of the skies over Beijing during the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in November 2014. In an effort to cut air pollution by 40% for the APEC summit, the city gave students and workers a bonus “Golden Week” holiday, halted factory and construction work, enacted alternate driving days for even- and odd-numbered license plates, and even put a temporary stop to barbecues and cremations. The skies were indeed bluer, but the extent of the improvement was tough to measure. Air quality data from the U.S. embassy, available to denizens on the China Air Quality Index app and considered more reliable than municipal reports, was censored. “APEC blue” thus describes a hue reserved for foreign dignitaries that cannot be quantified: Songyingjie (@宋英杰): It’s said that Beijing only had two cases of smog this year: once before APEC, and once after. (November 19, 2014) 据说，北京今年其实只有两次雾霾：一次APEC前，一次APEC后。 [Chinese] Caijingnüjizhebuluo (@财经女记者部落): #APECblue tells us: It’s not that the government can’t do it, it’s that you aren’t important! (November 6, 2014) #APEC蓝# 告诉我们：不是政府做不到，是你们不重要！[Chinese] Government efforts to temporarily clean up air pollution ahead of high-profile international events were prominently used during the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and have since been increasingly used in other cities across China. In December 2016, as many Chinese cities were experiencing toxic air pollution levels, a study showing that quick fixes are often followed by the intense deterioration of air qualitywas publicized by the South China Morning Post. See also Chai Jing blue and “smog the people.” Can’t get enough of subversive Chinese netspeak? Check out our latest ebook, “Decoding the Chinese Internet: A Glossary of Political Slang.” Includes dozens of new terms and classic catchphrases, presented in a new, image-rich format. Available for pay-what-you-want (including nothing). All proceeds support CDT. © josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: air pollution, apec, smog, word of the weekDownload Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall12 Jan
Rebel Pepper: Little Pinks, Ballpoint Pens, and Forced Demolitions - How about we tear down your house and assault your family in exchange for a ballpoint pen? To cartoonist Rebel Pepper (变态辣椒), the nationalist internet brigade known as the little pinks is happy with that exchange. Two little pinks have recently called for justice online after family members were maimed or killed in forced demolitions. On November 30, Weibo user Beitatatata (@北塔塔塔塔) posted shocking photos of her grandmother’s body laid out on a metal table, her head crushed. “In broad daylight, the Xuzhou village tyrant Zhang Shihong and his wife Wang Yan crushed my grandmother with their excavator! These murderers dig up state-owned minerals to sell at a profit and claim to be millionaires!” Beitatata’s earlier posts gush with nationalist pride and love for President Xi Jinping, and so notes of sympathy in the thousands of comments on Beitatata’s post commingled with cries of hypocrisy. “How tragic that a little pink’s family home was torn down and that people died. This splendid age is as you wished,” writes Kaweigreat (@卡位great) on Baidu Tieba. On January 10, a Weibo user who identifies herself as Chen Jie (Kaixindebenxiaohai666666 @开心的笨小孩666666) posted images of a bulldozed garden, trees uprooted by machine, and an old man bleeding out on the side of the road. In a long post, Chen Jie writes that her parents were attacked upon their return from Beijing, where they had lead a “petition brigade” to fight a development company eager to buy their land for a pittance. “Chen Genfu and his wife, both nearly 70 years old, were on their way to the police station when two white sedans with their license plates covered blocked their way. Three masked men got out and started slashing the old couple, chopping and screaming, ‘If you petition again we’ll come back for your lives.’” Sympathy for Chen Jie’s parents has been at best tempered by her nationalistic posts prior to the attack: Yueji7YJ (@悦己7YJ): Your country screwed you good! Now please go back and call out your friend for becoming a naturalized Australian citizen and burning his passport. [Chinese] Is the little pink community enraged by the violence exacted on the families of their fellows? Disillusioned by the party-state they so ardently support? Apparently not. This week, their attention turned to a “triumph” for China: state-owned enterprise Taiyuan Group’s announcement that it can now manufacture the tips of ballpoint pens. From Quartz’s Josh Horwitz: China produces an estimated 40 billion ballpoint pens annually, but many of them work poorly. Domestic manufacturers wanting to make higher-quality pens must import tip cases from Japan and Germany made of a specialized stainless steel. According to Taigang, an 83-year-old state-owned enterprise based in the Shanxi province, that’s because in better pens the cone-shaped case that holds the ball requires both special raw material and special machinery (link in Chinese). To fulfill demand, Chinese pen makers have been importing more than 1,000 tons (link in Chinese) of the needed steel annually. […] Taigang’s efforts didn’t come out of nowhere. A year ago in China a minor media frenzy erupted (link in Chinese) when premier Li Keqiang, a vocal proponent of bolstering technological innovation, lamented how China was producing 800 million tons of steel annually but still importing the specialized type of stainless steel needed to make the better tip cases. […] News of Taigang’s pen-tip “innovation” has made waves on China’s internet in the past few days. An article about the company from state media outlet People’s Daily has so far attracted over 10,000 comments and 20,000 shares on Weibo, China’s Twitter-esque social media platform. “Wow, it had never occurred to me that I had been using ballpoint pens relying on foreign technology!” wrote one user (link in Chinese) [sic]. [Source] “The high-tech monopoly has been terminated,” rejoices Shanxiguantianpeng (@山西关天棚). “China’s scientists are so damn lovable.” Rebel Pepper marvels at the juxtaposition of the ballpoint pen comments and the forced demolition deaths. “Please forgive my schadenfreude,” he wrote. © Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: Drawing the News, forced demolitions, little pinks, petitioners, political cartoons, Rebel PepperDownload Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall12 Jan
Seeking Transparency in Chinese Pollution Data - As it repositions itself as a potential leader in the global fight against climate change in response to the election of Donald Trump, the Chinese government has announced plans to invest $360 billion in renewable energy sources by 2020. But with another toxic wave of pollution inundating China’s cities this winter, some question whether China’s lack of transparency in reporting data will hinder its efforts to become a climate leader and promote the goals of the Paris Agreement. Edward Wong reports for The New York Times: At a summit meeting in Marrakesh, Morocco, in November, officials discussed a plan to establish standards and mechanisms for reporting emissions. Over the next two years, negotiators will engage in “the most technically complex and politically contentious issues,” said Li Shuo, a Beijing-based climate policy analyst at Greenpeace East Asia. China, he said, “still has a long way to improve its transparency system.” […] Another problem is that China has been reluctant to release its own calculations of emissions, so other nations rely on calculations made by foreign scientists. The Chinese government has submitted emissions estimates to the United Nations only twice, for 1994 and 2005. Most other developing nations have also submitted only two estimates, but some, including Brazil and Mexico, have submitted three or more. There is “no good reason” China is dragging its feet, said Mr. Li, the Greenpeace analyst. [Source] Data and news about air pollution is frequently censored inside China while the government also disallows international monitoring of its air quality. A popular app, Air Matters, which tracks air pollution levels, has been ordered by authorities to cap its reports at a certain number. The app was previously ordered not to use data provided by the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. Wang Lianzhang of Sixth Tone reports: Wang said that Air Matters had updated its app on Jan. 4 — a day before the phone call — to allow its AQI reading to go above this official cutoff point. “Our users wanted to know more about the exact number,” he said. The update came after a weekslong spell of heavy air pollution affecting large parts of China. In late December, the AQI for some cities in the country’s north stood at 500 for days at a time. With local governments facing pressure from citizens to clear the skies, air pollution data is sensitive information. “The next day [after the update], one of China’s provincial environment protection bureaus called and asked us to set the maximum numerical value back,” Wang said. Though he would not give the name of the province, he implied that it was one of the most polluted in China. They reverted the update after the phone call. [Source] Meanwhile, Beijing authorities have announced plans to “police” air pollution by focusing on such offenders as barbecues. From Al Jazeera: China has announced plans to set up an “environmental police” force responsible for enforcing pollution restrictions across the capital Beijing in a bid to improve the city’s notorious air quality. Cai Qi, who is both the deputy chief of the country’s ruling party and mayor of Beijing, promised to impose tougher measures in the city’s 16 districts to combat a long-standing and widespread toxic smog problem that has brought “harm” to people’s lives. “Open-air barbecues, garbage incineration, biomass burning, dust from roads – these acts of non-compliance with regulations are actually the result of lax supervision and weak law enforcement,” Cai was quoted by the Xinuhua news agency as saying. [Source] See also “The Age of Smog” by Tang Yinghong translated by CDT. © Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: air pollution, air quality, environmental data, pollutionDownload Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall11 Jan
Photo: Tower of Buddhist Incense, by piet theisohn - Tower of Buddhist Incense © josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: piet theisohnDownload Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall11 Jan
Photo: Xian to Beijing, by NViktor - Xian to Beijing © Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall11 Jan
Rhetoric vs. Reality in Trump’s Stance on China - During the long election campaign, Donald Trump consistently took a hard line on China, blaming the country for stealing American jobs and threatening to launch a trade war if elected. After the election, Trump further enflamed relations with Beijing by sharing a phone call with Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen and threatening to upend the carefully calibrated status quo in U.S.-China-Taiwan relations. After Tsai met with Republican politicians during a layover in Texas on her way to Central America, the state-run Global Times declared that China would “take revenge” if Trump reneged on the longstanding One-China Policy. On Wednesday morning their time, China sent its only aircraft carrier into the Taiwan Strait; in a subsequent press conference, Ma Xiaoguang, spokesman for the Taiwan Affairs Office, said that China would “resolutely safeguard its national sovereignty and territorial integrity.” Trump’s pick of China hawk Peter Navarro to head a new office overseeing trade further angered Beijing and stoked fears of impending conflicts between the two countries. But subsequent reports and statements by Trump have called into question how hard a line he will really take with China once in office. Revelations by The New York Times of financial ties between Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who has recently been named as a senior advisor to Trump, and the Anyang Insurance Group, have raised questions about conflicts of interest within the Trump team. The possibility of a trade war with China was cast into further doubt following a meeting this week between Trump and Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, which left both sides singing the other’s praises. Ma reportedly vowed to help create one million jobs in the U.S. by helping American small businesses get onto his internet platform to sell their products. From Deutsche Welle: About 7,000 US brands from Costco Wholesale to Levi’s currently sit on Alibaba’s Tmall platform, making $15 billion (14.2 billion euros) in sales to Chinese customers in the course of last year. Analysts pointed out that there was nothing to lose in talking about ways to get more US small and medium-sized companies interested in the scheme and stimulate demand in China. “Getting into a trade war and tariff-slinging with the second largest economy in the world, especially one that is growing at a pace three times that of the US economy, is not a smart move for either side,” Jay Somaney concluded. Alibaba did not mention, though, whether Trump and Ma spoke about an ongoing investigation by the US Securities and Exchange Commission into the Chinese company’s accounting practices. [Source] Some later questioned the sincerity of Ma’s offer, pointing out on CNBC that Alibaba’s Taobao online sales platform undercuts American businesses in a number of ways. Economists and business leaders interviewed in another report by CNBC expressed cautious optimism that Trump’s campaign rhetoric about China would not make the transition into policy: The president-elect is viewed by many Chinese as first and foremost a negotiator — someone who uses strong words up front but then follows with more mellow action. Chinese business leaders speaking the weekend after the election were confident that as a businessman, Trump would enact policies that are ultimately favorable for both China and the U.S. That sentiment remained the same at Thursday’s gathering of Chinese academics and finance professionals. “The U.S.-China relationship is vital,” said Huang Haizhou, managing director and management committee member at the China International Capital Corp. (CICC). They are “the number one and number two economies of the world.” […] Lu Feng, director of the China Macroeconomic Research Center at Peking University, was more cautious in his outlook on U.S.-China relations under the Trump administration. “I think it is an uncertainty since we don’t know what his policy will look like. The campaign language in terms of currency, in terms of a trade war, could be troublesome,” Feng said, adding that “a trade war is something I think we should try very hard to avoid.” [Source] Among Chinese citizens, Trump’s popularity has “plummeted” since the election, according to an essay by Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom for Project Syndicate, which puts the Chinese response in a historical context: The abrupt change in Chinese sentiment toward Trump is reminiscent of what happened to US President Woodrow Wilson after his reelection a century ago. At the time, many Chinese intellectuals, including the young Mao Zedong, admired Wilson, a political scientist and former president of Princeton University. Then, in 1919, Wilson backed the Treaty of Versailles, which transferred control of former German territories in Shandong Province to Japan, rather than return them to China. Wilson quickly lost his luster in China. The shift was similar – but the reasons are very different. A century ago, China was driven to support Wilson, and then to loathe him, by its own weakness. Today, it is China’s strength that is guiding its view of the US president. […] The China of 2016 is unimaginably different from the China of 1916. It has leap-frogged even advanced countries in the global economic hierarchy. It is unified under a strong and focused leadership. And it is very big, including nearly all the territories that were part of the Qing Empire at its peak. A rare exception is Taiwan, but the “one China” diplomatic fiction sustains the fantasy that someday, somehow, the democratic island and authoritarian mainland will be reintegrated. In short, China no longer needs US protection. Instead, it wants a US president who is occupied largely with domestic issues, and is not much concerned with constraining China’s rise, as Barack Obama was. That way, China could get to work reshuffling power relationships in Asia for its own benefit, without having to worry about American interference. [Source] © Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: alibaba, donald Trump, jack ma, tsai ing-wen, U.S. relations, U.S. tradeDownload Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall11 Jan

The Eyeopener from CBC Radio Calgary (Highlights)

Eyeopener Podcast for Jan. 13, 2017 - Today's podcast: Bringing back Calgary's downtown core; Banff RCMP shut down pot shop; the benefits of cursive writing.12 Jan
Eyeopener Podcast for Jan. 12, 2017 - Today's podcast: Premier Notley on Jane Fonda's oilsands tour; former Canadian ski racer Steve Podborski; the psychology of pet hoarding; two old friends reconnect for an organ donation.11 Jan
Eyeopener Podcast for Jan. 11, 2017 - Today's podcast: Woman charged with animal cruelty goes missing; Deborah Yedlin on Calgary’s grocery wars; Black Diamond gets a traffic light.10 Jan
Eyeopener Podcast for Jan. 10, 2017 - Today's podcast: Hotel group wants to see restrictions on short-term rentals; Mayor Nenshi on business tax changes; Minor Hockey Week in full swing; exploring the Danish concept of "hygge." 9 Jan
Eyeopener Podcast for Jan. 9, 2017 - Today's podcast: Two business owners comment on the economic climate in Calgary; Alzheimer's Awareness Month in Canada; we announce the final tally from our Food Bank Drive; looking back at last night's Golden Globes. 8 Jan
Eyeopener Podcast for Jan. 6, 2017 - Today's podcast: We introduce our new Eyeopener theme; Devonian Gardens remain closed for repairs; contemporary Canadian dance icon Louise Lecavalier. 5 Jan
Eyeopener Podcast for Jan. 5, 2017 - Today's podcast: New Leaf cancels routes after WestJet moves in; Bishop William McGrattan; Saying farewell to Urban Behaviours, the Eyeopener theme. 4 Jan
Eyeopener Podcast for Jan. 4, 2017 - Today's podcast: Energy Efficiency Alberta board chair; Banff fire chief on Mount Royal Hotel fire; Pilot accused of passing out in cockpit of passenger plane. 3 Jan
Eyeopener Podcast for Jan. 3, 2017 - Today's podcast: Peter Tertzakian's predictions for the oil and gas industry; Dr. Raj Bhardwaj explains strange medical maladies; Julie Van Rosendaal's 2017 food resolutions. 2 Jan
Eyeopener podcast for December 30 - On today's podcast: is it time to legalising all drugs to solve the phentanyl crisis; Emma Hunter tees up tonight's AirFarce TV special; John Gilchrist's top 12 best new restaurants in Calgary.29 Dec 16

di

Daily Kos

Trump calls NATO 'obsolete,' promises to reward Putin for invading Ukraine ... and whines about SNL - Taking time out of his busy schedule of insulting civil rights icons with racist tweets, popular vote loser and Putin puppet Donald Trump has shared a few thoughts on foreign policy: On Russia, he suggested he might use economic sanctions imposed for Vladimir Putin’s encroachment on Ukraine as leverage in nuclear-arms reduction talks, while NATO, he said, “has problems.” “It’s obsolete, first because it was designed many, many years ago,” Trump was quoted as saying about the trans-Atlantic military alliance.  So, Trump may reward Putin for invading Ukraine by lifting sanctions and reducing our nuclear arms? Is that’s what’s known as “the art of the deal”? And the military alliance with our allies is obsolete, mostly because it’s kind of old? Wonder what he thinks about the Constitution?  And, having finished giving Putin another public tongue bath, while terrifying the rest of the world, Trump got back to what really matters in his tiny, narcissistic brain. x.@NBCNews is bad but Saturday Night Live is the worst of NBC. Not funny, cast is terrible, always a complete hit job. Really bad television!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 15, 2017 Oy vey.  16:33
Democratic capitalism: Freeing people from the corporate special interest definition of 'corruption' - This week someone asked me if I’d heard any questions about IDEA, the federal law protecting students with disabilities (the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act), during Jeff Sessions’ confirmation hearings. I get these types of questions a lot because I write about politics. It’s kind of funny because I don’t think I know much about politics—at least not when it comes to policy details. I’ve had people tell me in response, “But I love listening to you talk. You know so much.”  Here’s a secret: It’s more important to know what you believe in—and how to talk about what you believe in. The problem is that corporate special interests “get” this, and all too often we don’t—especially many of us who come from academic backgrounds, where arguing is the accepted way to flesh out ideas and learn. Let me demonstrate by showing you how corporate special interests redefined “corruption,” why this is so important, and how you can help break people out of this trap.  16:20
The list of Democratic lawmakers planning to boycott Trump inauguration grows - On Saturday, there were 18 Democrats who had announced their intention to skip the ushering in of the Donald Trump regime, and as of Sunday evening, more have stepped up to the plate. Here’s a list of those that have chosen to stand with John Lewis instead of Putin’s popular vote-losing puppet: Rep. Earl Blumenaur of Oregon’s 3rd CD Rep. Judy Chu of California’s 27th CD Rep. Katherine Clark of Massachusetts 5th CD  Rep. Yvette Clarke of New York’s 9th CD Rep. Lacy Clay of Missouri’s 1st CD Rep. John Conyers of Michigan’s 13th CD Rep. Mark DeSaulnier of California’s 11th CD Rep. Adriano Espaillat of New York’s 13th CD Rep. Marcia Fudge of Ohio’s 11th CD Rep. Raúl Grijalva of Arizona’s 3rd CD Rep. Luis Gutiérrez of Illinois’ 5th CD Rep. Jared Huffman of California’s 2nd CD Rep. Barbara Lee of California’s 13th CDRep Rep. John Lewis of Georgia’s 5th CD Rep. Ted Lieu of California’s 33rd CD Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California’s 19th CD Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York’s 10th CD Rep. Mark Pocan of Wisconsin’s 2nd CD Rep. Kurt Schrader of Oregon’s 5th CD Rep. José Serrano of New York’s 15th CD Rep. Mark Takano of California’s 41st CD Rep. Nydia Velázquez of New York’s 7th CD Rep. Maxine Waters of California’s 43rd CD Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman of New Jersey’s 12th CD Gov. Gina Raimondo of Rhode Island   Rep. Nadler spoke for a lot of people when he tweeted: x.@realDonaldTrump stands with V. Putin. I stand with @repjohnlewis.— (((Rep. Nadler))) (@RepJerryNadler) January 14, 2017 Now, when will more Democrats—looking at you too, Senate Democrats—say where they stand?  15:47
A curious case of Archie Bunker Syndrome - On Jan. 12, 1971, the first episode of All in the Family aired on televisions across America. It was the first major American series to be videotaped before a live studio audience, and went on to top the Nielsen ratings for an unprecedented five consecutive seasons during its eight-year run. The show has since been ranked the fourth greatest of all time by TV Guide, and in 2013, the Writers Guild of America named it the fourth best-written TV series ever. Its protagonist, a cantankerous curmudgeon by the name of Archie Bunker, is widely and endearingly regarded as a “lovable bigot,” and his impassioned takes on the social issues of the day are widely credited for the show’s immense popularity. From Wiki: A World War II veteran, “Archie longs for better times when people sharing his viewpoint were in charge, as evidenced by the nostalgic theme song "Those Were the Days" (also the show's original title). Despite his bigotry, he is portrayed as loving and decent, as well as a man who is simply struggling to adapt to the changes in the world, rather than someone motivated by hateful racism or prejudice.” In this regard, the patriarch of the Bunker family is the prototypical Trump voter. Reading the above description, it’s easy to envision a disheveled Archie in his red, made in China “Make America Great Again” hat, shouting “build that wall” as he watches The O’Reilly Factor on his couch in 2016. It also isn’t a stretch to see how a nation once so enthralled by the musings of a white working-class bigot has now fallen prey to a movement and political season predicated on the fiery yet misplaced anger of the white working class. As we look ahead to the installation of a government by, for, and of the disgruntled, narrow-minded, gray-haired white men of the Republican party, there’s little doubt that Mr. Bunker would enthusiastically agree: the “good ole days” are here again. 15:00
Reince Priebus busted in child porn sting!!! Okay, not really, but 'that's not the point' - As noted earlier, Republicans are outraged—outraged!—that Democrats like civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis have dared to question the legitimacy Donald Trump’s election, and they want President Obama to “step up” and do something about it. But—ask Democrats across the spectrum—what about the fact that Donald Trump was the Birther-in-Chief long before he became the popular vote losing, puppet of Putin, president-elect? Not so, says Reince Priebus: Priebus said Sunday that questions about Obama’s birth have “been resolved for at least two years in Donald Trump’s mind” ... “This Week” host George Stephanopoulos corrected Priebus, noting that Trump continued to raise questions about Obama’s eligibility to serve well into his own presidential campaign. “But look, George, that’s not the point,” he replied. “The point is not where Barack Obama was born. The point is is that we’ve got congressmen on the Democratic side of the aisle that are questioning the legitimacy of President-elect Trump, who won in an electoral landslide. That’s the issue. That’s where the outrage should be, not old news ...” So, Priebus blatantly lies about Trump’s eight years of birther crap, Stephanopoulos corrects him, Priebus says “that’s not the point.” Uh, yes, it is the point. For eight years, Donald Trump publicly questioned the legitimacy of Barack Obama’s presidency based on a racist-fueled lie. And now he’s about to take the oath of office thanks to—among other things—interference by the Russian government, possibly while collaborating with the Trump campaign during the course of the presidential election. That’s where the outrage should be.  And for the record, Trump’s racism isn’t “old news,” as we saw on Saturday when Trump, during the course of his vile attack on John Lewis, assumed that Lewis represented a “falling apart,” “crime infested” slum, simply because he is black. Speaking of outrage ... 14:15
A snowflake can become a blizzard - This past week, I commented on a thread on Facebook. It was a pretty innocuous comment along the lines of, “I am going to miss President Obama.” Almost instantly I was attacked by right-wing trolls (a.k.a. friends of a friend). I was called a “snowflake.” The president was called, among other things, “Obummer” and “Nasty Ape.” I took the high road, wished them a nice life, and reminded them that while a single snowflake might not be much of a threat, a group of them can form blizzards, even avalanches, and overwhelm you. That is what political discourse in America has become. We have devolved to the lowest common denominator. It isn’t enough to just disagree with an opponent: we have gotten to the point where we treat politics as a blood sport. Those on the right seem to have cornered the market on the worst of it. Even the most innocent conversation turns into a political knife fight. Have a conversation about going to the doctor, and it will turn into a rant against the Affordable Care Act. How did we get here? Politically, I am in the same place I was in 1989, back when I was considered a moderate. Not a moderate liberal, not a moderate conservative. I was a moderate. In 1990 I voted for a Republican, Scott Klug, for Congress. Not because he was a Democrat or a Republican, but because we agreed on issues like the national drinking age of 21 being wrong. He also supported family leave. He was also pro-choice, and was one of the House members who cleaned up the House bank. He lost my support when he sided with Newt Gingrich in shutting down the government twice in the '90s. Today, Scott Klug could not get elected as a Republican if he held the same views as he did in the early '90s. 13:40
Watch a Republican Congressman run away from his own meeting after huge turnout from constituents - Republicans are finding out the hard way that the Affordable Care Act, while not perfect, is very popular with the 20 million people who have affordable insurance and the more than 100 million people with pre-existing conditions. Constituents in Republican districts are turning out in droves to demand answers about the deadly repeal of the Affordable Care Act and the magical plan to replace it that Republicans haven’t been able to produce despite seven long years to come up with an alternative.  Rep. Mike Coffman (CO-06) held a meeting in Aurora this week and was shocked when hundreds of people turned out. Constituents in attendance believed it was a town hall-style meeting in the library’s auditorium, but the Congressman’s staff refused to let them all in: "The Representative didn't have a plan. They expected just a small handful of people to show up," Siebert said. "We were under the understanding it was a town hall meeting and they were only allowing four people in at a time." Coffman's chief of staff, Ben Stein, sent a statement addressing what happened Saturday afternoon. The statement says the Congressman's community event was not a town hall. "Rep. Mike Coffman routinely hosts constituent one on one meetings across the district.  Constituents are invited to meet individually with the congressman to express their opinions, seek help with a range of issues, and discuss legislation. Given the volume of people who came, the Congressman met with four people at a time for five minutes each for a total of more than 70 constituents," the statement said. At least a hundred constituents were left crammed in the hallway, waiting for their turn, while Rep. Coffman slipped out the side door and didn’t even stay for the allotted time: xWhile more than 100 people were waiting to meet with him, Mike Coffman sneaks out early from his own community event. #9News pic.twitter.com/NAZlXTKgQm— Nelson Garcia (@9NewsEducation) January 14, 2017 13:12
International Elections Digest: Netherlands hosts 2017's first major battle against the far right - Welcome to the first International Elections Digest of 2017! In this month's edition, we preview all the major elections on tap for the coming year, worldwide. The Digest is compiled by Stephen Wolf and David Beard, with additional contributions from James Lambert, Daniel Nichanian, and Daniel Donner, and is edited by David Nir. Leading Off ● Netherlands – parliament (March) The Netherlands presents 2017's first major election battle against the tide of radical right-wing populism that has been sweeping Europe in recent years and culminated in the United Kingdom's vote to leave the European Union in 2016. Prime Minister Mark Rutte's center-right People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) currently forms a grand-coalition majority with the social democratic center-left Labour Party. However, polls have long found the two parties poised to suffer massive losses, with Labour near-certain to lose the vast majority of its seats. Those same surveys indicate that the Islamophobic far-right Party for Freedom (PVV) is set to take a possible plurality for the first time. Although establishment-oriented factions (ranging from social democrats to classical liberals to Christian democrats) once long dominated the Dutch political landscape, the last few elections have seen a huge increase in party fragmentation. The mainstream parties have shed significant ground to anti-establishment populists such as the far-right PVV, the left-wing Socialist Party, and the pensioners'-advocacy 50Plus in the center. The Dutch electoral system of proportional representation, which makes it easy for small parties to enter parliament, combined with major pockets of public dissatisfaction with the status quo, could see an astounding dozen or more parties win seats. Several new minor parties could even win a couple of seats each, and it might take four—or more—parties working together to establish a governing majority. Consequently, forming a stable coalition could prove extremely difficult. Right-of-center parties are poised to win a commanding majority of seats, but the mainstream center-right parties are adamantly opposed to inflammatory far-right PVV leader Geert Wilders' Islamophobia, hostility toward immigrants, and his call for the Netherlands to leave the EU. Indeed, Rutte and Wilders are attempting to cast the election as a two-man race between themselves, but there is no rule that requires the leader of the largest party to become prime minister or even a participant in the government. An anti-Wilders coalition could require the current grand coalition to add several more major parties like the Christian Democrats, the neoliberal D66, and possibly even others, making it highly difficult for the several factions to overcome their ideological differences. However, PVV and VVD will likely wind up as the two largest parties, and if PVV finishes first, it might simply be too big for the mainstream parties not to at least include as a junior partner. Even together, though, PVV and VVD would probably fall well short of a majority. The Netherlands could be in for protracted negotiations with the resulting government highly uncertain. And if Wilders winds up as part of a ruling coalition, that could have profound consequences for the country's policies toward European integration, immigration, and multiculturalism in one of the continent's most stalwart bastions of social liberalism. 12:00
Trump team warns ethics chief to 'be careful' about criticizing Trump - Vladimir Putin would approve this message, delivered to the masses via Reince Priebus: Donald Trump's incoming White House chief of staff warned the director of the Office of Government Ethics on Sunday to "be careful" about criticizing Trump's handling of his business conflicts. [...] Priebus suggested that Shaub, who was appointed by President Obama, was supportive of Hillary Clinton during the campaign. [...] Priebus added that he supports the move by House Oversight Committee chairman Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz's proposing an investigation of Shaub. Putin would approve this message? Probably should have read, “Putin approved this message.”  11:52
Be courageous or be complicit - Got plans for later this week? Like maybe a root canal? Or perhaps just a thorough house cleaning? There must be something better to do than spend time watching the final normalization of that which should never have happened—but did, thanks in large part to the machinations of a foreign power and FBI Director James Comey.  The good news is that there is plenty to do this week that is far less painful than oral surgery and less tedious than cleaning toilets. Kossacks around the country are organizing and participating in acts of protest. Check the daily diary from the folks at Connect! Unite! Act! for events near you. Washington, D.C., will be hosting not just the inauguration of the most despicable character to ever claim the title of president, but thousands of Americans who are intent on voicing their resistance to him. What follows is a brief look at a few of the movements behind those protesters. 11:00

Democracy Now!

"Back of the Bus": 3 Black Members of Congress Testified at End of Sessions's Confirmation Hearing - On Wednesday, at the second day of confirmation hearings for President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Justice Department, Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions faced unprecedented criticism. But only one Republican on the committee remained to listen. If the others had stayed, they would have heard the voices we bring you today. New Jersey Democrat Cory Booker’s testimony marked the first time a United States senator has opposed a fellow senator’s nomination for a presidential Cabinet post. He was joined by Congressmember Cedric Richmond (D-Louisiana), head of the Congressional Black Caucus, who said the decision to have three black members of Congress testify at the end of the hearing was the equivalent of being sent to the "back of the bus." We play the full comments made by civil rights legend Congressmember John Lewis (D-Georgia), who also testified Wednesday against Senator Jeff Sessions’s confirmation for attorney general.13 Jan
Trump's Pick for Defense Sec'y Made Millions in Defense Industry After His 2013 Retirement - During the confirmation hearing for retired General James "Mad Dog" Mattis, several senators asked whether he would support Defense Department projects in their home states, including Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts). Mattis had a 41-year military career before he retired in 2013, and Politico reports his financial disclosure statement says that he is worth more than $10 million. Some of his wealth was garnered after he retired when he worked for General Dynamics, among other companies. We speak with retired Colonel Andrew Bacevich and Aaron Glantz, a senior reporter at Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.13 Jan
Defense Secretary Nominee James Mattis Pledges to Enforce Iran Nuclear Deal Criticized by Trump - Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary, retired General James "Mad Dog" Mattis, testified at his confirmation hearing that Russia remains the "principal threat" faced by the United States, taking a much harder line than the president-elect. He also said he supports the Iran nuclear deal, which Trump has repeatedly criticized. We get response from Trita Parsi, founder and president of the National Iranian American Council whose forthcoming book is titled "Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran, and the Legacy of Diplomacy," and from Andrew Bacevich, retired colonel and Vietnam War veteran.13 Jan
James Mattis Calls for U.S. Military to Be More Lethal at Defense Secretary Confirmation Hearing - President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, retired General James "Mad Dog" Mattis, testified Thursday at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Mattis’s 41-year career in the Marine Corps included field commands in the Persian Gulf War, Iraq and Afghanistan. He led U.S. troops during the 2004 battle of Fallujah, earning himself the nickname "Mad Dog" Mattis. In May 2004, Mattis ordered an attack on a small Iraqi village that ended up killing about 42 people attending a wedding ceremony. He went on to lead United States Central Command from 2010 to 2013, but the Obama administration cut short his tour over concerns he was too hawkish on Iran. We host a roundtable discussion, starting with retired Colonel Andrew Bacevich, author of "America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History," and Aaron Glantz, a senior reporter at Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting whose latest investigation is headlined "Did defense secretary nominee James Mattis commit war crimes in Iraq?"13 Jan
Headlines for January 13, 2017 - House Poised to Vote to Repeal Affordable Care ActHouse Vote on Healthcare Repeal Follows Narrow Senate PassageSenate Votes Down Amendment to Allow Sale of Cheaper Canadian DrugsDefense Secretary Nominee James Mattis Calls Russia Biggest ThreatDr. Ben Carson Won't Rule Out HUD Money for Trump BusinessesCIA Nominee Mike Pompeo Reverses Position on TortureNSA to Share Vast Data Trove with All U.S. Intelligence AgenciesChristopher Steele, Author of Trump-Russia Dossier, Goes into HidingDOJ Inspector General to Probe FBI over Clinton Email InvestigationTrump Names Rudy Giuliani to Cybersecurity Post Despite ConflictsTrump Taps Two More Former Goldman Sachs EmployeesHuman Rights Watch: Trump Among Authoritarian Populists Posing ThreatU.S. to End "Wet Foot, Dry Foot" Cuban Immigration PolicyNeskonlith First Nations Leader and Activist Art Manuel Dies at 6613 Jan
Investigation: Did Trump's Defense Secretary Nominee James Mattis Commit War Crimes in Iraq? - Today, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary, James "Mad Dog" Mattis, faces his Senate confirmation hearing. Mattis reportedly received his nickname "Mad Dog" after leading U.S. troops during the 2004 battle of Fallujah in Iraq, where he is accused of carrying out war crimes by our guest, Aaron Glantz, a senior reporter at Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.12 Jan
Do Exxon's Climate Denial & "Trail of Carnage" on Human Rights Make Tillerson Unfit for State Dept? - At the Senate confirmation hearing for secretary of state nominee and former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, he refused to answer questions about the oil giant’s long history of denying the science of climate change, telling Senators that scientific literature on climate change is "inconclusive."During the hearing, human rights concerns were also raised repeatedly. Tillerson refused to label Saudi Arabia a human rights violator, and avoided condemning Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte over thousands of extrajudicial killings carried out under Duterte’s so-called "war on drugs." We are joined from San Francisco by oil and energy journalist Antonia Juhasz.12 Jan
Committee to Protect Journalists: Watch Out for "Leak Investigations" Targeting Journos Under Trump - During his press conference on Wednesday, President-elect Donald Trump lashed out at reporters. He slammed CNN as "fake news," called BuzzFeed a "failing piece of garbage" and refused to answer questions from CNN’s Jim Acosta after his outlet reported that top intelligence officials had briefed Trump, President Obama and top lawmakers over claims that Trump representatives met repeatedly with Russian officials during the 2016 campaign and discussed the hacking of the DNC and the email of Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. BuzzFeed later published a dossier, prepared by British former intelligence officer Christopher Steele, which contains unverified allegations, including a charge that Russian officials have a sex tape from 2013 involving Trump and hired sex workers. For more on the incoming Trump administration’s relationship with the press, we are joined by Joel Simon, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists.12 Jan
Trump Ignores Ethics Experts Urging Him to Divest from His Businesses & Puts Sons In Charge Instead - At his first press conference since July, President-elect Donald Trump addressed questions about his business interests and asserted that, as president, he would be exempt from possible conflicts of interest. The Trump Organization is an umbrella company for his hundreds of investments in real estate, brands and other businesses. But Trump said he would not follow advice from ethics experts to divest or create a completely blind trust, and instead announced he will hand over management of the Trump Organization to his sons. The head of the Office of Government Ethics slammed President-elect Trump’s plan to separate himself from his business, calling it "wholly inadequate." We get response from John Wonderlich, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation.12 Jan
Headlines for January 12, 2017 - Secretary of State Nominee Rex Tillerson Questioned on Climate DenialAttorney General Nominee Jeff Sessions Opposed by Senate ColleagueTrump Assails Journalists in First Press Conference Since JulyEthics Chief: Trump's Plan "Wholly Inadequate" to Prevent ConflictsTrump to Name Supreme Court Nominee Within Two Weeks of InaugurationTransportation Secretary Pick Elaine Chao Breezes Toward ConfirmationProtest in Senate Office Building Marks 15 Years of Guantánamo PrisonPentagon Chief Nominee James Mattis Faces Opposition over WaiverTrump Taps Non-Veteran to Head Veterans AdministrationFBI Chief Won't Comment on Trump Inquiry, Weeks After Revealing Clinton ProbeTurkey: Parliamentarians Brawl over Presidential Power AmendmentsVolkswagen Executives Indicted as Company Ordered to Pay $4.3 BillionChelsea Manning Reportedly on "Short List" for Presidential CommutationSlain Civil Rights Leader Medgar Evers Honored with Historic Landmark12 Jan

John Perkins

What Will 2017 Bring? - It’s a question on many minds as we begin this new year. It is perhaps asked more now than ever before in my life-time – and that spans 7 decades. All we can say for sure is that we are in for big changes . . . on many fronts. Each of us is faced with the decision: Will we sit back and accept changes imposed by Washington, Moscow, Beijing, and Big Business? Or will we take actions that guide humanity to a saner world? I’ve had the opportunity to travel across this magnificent planet, speaking at a wide variety of events and talking with individuals from a multitude of jobs and lifestyles. Everywhere, I encounter more and more people who are committed to taking actions that will change consciousness. They realize that consciousness change is the key to altering what we call objective reality. They know that the big events in this world are molded by the ways we perceive ourselves and our relationship to all that is around us. By changing perceptions, we change the world. In a few days, I leave for a two-month journey that will take me to venues in the United States, Guatemala, Costa Rica, the Bahamas, and Ecuador. I will be speaking at the Conscious Life Expo, the Heartbeat Summit, and many other places. Every one of these is oriented toward using changes in our perceived reality to influence the way human beings impact each other and the world. What will 2017 bring? That depends on you. I encourage each and every one of you to make a New Year’s resolution right now that will commit you to taking the path that leads to action. The events of this past year, including those in the Middle East, Europe, Latin America, and the US serve as wakeup calls. One of the facts we awaken to is that business is the driving force behind politics and governments. Whether a leader’s name is Trump or Putin, Merkel or Xi Jinping, he or she serves at the pleasure of banks and other global corporations. And those banks and corporations depend on us – you and me – to buy their goods and services, work for, manage, and invest in them. Without us, they go the way of Woolworth’s, Polaroid, Pan Am, Bethlehem Steel, and so many others that have become corporate dinosaurs. However you feel about the new Oval Office occupant, know that his power base is the business community. However you feel about climate change, pipelines, vanishing forests, urban violence, wars, and just about every other issue, know that the twists and turns of that issue are shaped by business. However you feel about Monsanto, Exxon, Nike or any other business know that that business depends on its customers, workers, managers, and investors – us. Consumer movements work. They ended apartheid, installed seat belts, cleaned up polluted rivers, labelled fats, sugars, calories, and proteins in our foods, opened corporate doors wider to women and minorities, and so much more. In each of these areas we need to go further and we also need to expend these movements. We must insist that every company we support in any way be committed to serving us, the public, the world, future generations – not simply the bottom line. We must change the perception of what it means to be successful. That is our job and our pleasure. You have the power. Social networking makes it easier – and more fun – than ever to launch campaigns that will change the perception of what it means to be “successful.” It’s time for you and me to use all the tools at our disposal to show those who would drive us down a path of distraction, lethargy, depression, and mayhem that we simply will not stand for it. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for and we are here now. 2017 is our year! It will bring what we demand. Best wishes, John The Love Summit organized by the nonprofit Dream Change that John founded nearly 30 years ago is a powerful example of a movement that is going global to change businesses. 1 Jan
Message from the Legendary Elder Siblings - I write this in-flight, returning from a magical trip to the Kogi of Colombia. I write this having seen and heard the airport TV reports of the trauma that continues to dominate US politics, as well as those in many other countries. Last year my Ecuadorian partner, Daniel Koupermann, and I took a group to the amazing lands of the Kogi – people who have a message for us all. They came down from their mountain hideaways to meet us and to spread their message of the need for change. They were so impressed by the deep spirituality and commitment of that 2015 group that they invited us to bring another similar group – and this time to be the first ever to live among them, to sleep in their community, and to sit in their sacred ceremonial lodges. For the 19 of us it was a life-changing trip. We were surrounded by breathtaking scenes: the emerald Caribbean and palm-fringed beaches, the Sierra Nevada mountains that rise 18,000 feet up from the ocean to glacier-covered peaks, the rain forests, and the sparkling rivers that cascade from the glaciers into the Caribbean. But most of all it was the Kogi who impressed us! I have to admit that I was shocked – ecstatically – by the extent to which the Kogi invited us to share their lives and ceremonies. These up-til-now illusive people totally opened the doors to their homes and hearts to us. They invited us to come and learn from their Mamos (wise elders/teachers/shamans/spiritual leaders), to answer a call that dates back to a time when their forefathers retreated from the onslaught of Spanish conquistadors and the destructive nature of European cultures. Their Mamos told us of how their ancestors had fled up the valleys of the glacial rivers into the mountains. Choosing to remain isolated for centuries, they developed a new dream of the Earth, a revelation that balances the brilliant potential of the human mind, heart and spirit with all the forces of nature. To this day they remain true to their ancient laws and traditions—the moral, ecological, and spiritual dictates of a force they identify as “the Mother”—and are still led by sacred rituals. In the late 1900s, their Mamos understood that they are the Elder Siblings and that they had to come down and share that powerful message with the modern world, the people they call the Younger Siblings – us. They have shared their history with others. What was unique this time was their enthusiasm for embracing this group on very personal levels. I write this while flying home and it is all too close to me to be able to express in detail at this moment (a book to come, I think!) but I will say that the bonding we all felt is symbolized by a ceremony when a Mamo and his wife in whose community we had spent the night invited us to witness their 5-year-old son training to become a Mamo. We traveled many miles down from their community and stood with them on the bank of a glacial river where it meets the Caribbean while the young man gently offered the river the commitments we had all made and blown into tiny pieces of cotton from a local plant. The Kogi message, although similar to the one I received more than 40 years ago when I was a Peace Corps volunteer living with the Shuar in the Amazon and then again 20 years later from the Achuar, is more urgent now than ever. It is the message that birthed nonprofits, including Dream Change and the Pachamama Alliance. It is the message of the North American indigenous people and all those who join them at Standing Rock. It is a message that now has issued forth from indigenous cultures and organizations around the world. It is a message of hope, one that says we can transformer ourselves from societies that adhere to systems that threaten to destroy us to ones that will sustain us and future generations. I’ve written many times about the necessity to move from a Death Economy, based on warfare and ravaging the very resources upon which it depends, to a Life Economy, based on cleaning up pollution, regenerating destroyed environments, and developing new technologies that recycle and life-styles that give back more than they take from our Living Earth. Now, flying back from the Kogi, I feel rejuvenated and recommitted to spreading the message that is the underlying principle behind that economic shapeshift that needs to happen. We know we are facing severe crises. We know the climate is changing and that we humans are devastating the air, water, and land that support all life on this planet. We know that our government is incapable or unwilling to turn things around. It is easy to be discouraged. EXCEPT we also now know what our Elder Siblings understood long ago, that We the People must transform ourselves and our institutions. That is the message of the Kogi. It is the message of the Shuar, the Achuar, the people at Standing Rock and all our brothers and sisters around the globe. It is the message of the rising oceans, flooding rivers, melting glaciers, the hurricanes, the political traumas, and all the other crises. We are blessed to be hearing this message, to be inhabitants of this incredible organism that is our Living Earth and to be able to understand that the crises are themselves the message that it is time for us to come out of our isolation and create the change we want and know in our hearts, minds, and souls is necessary.13 Dec 16
JFK’s Advice for this Hour of Change and Challenge - As I travel around the world speaking at venues that range from corporate summits to rock festivals and from consumer groups to universities, I hear deep dissatisfaction with the current global political/economic system. This is reflected in Brexit, and in movements sweeping Iceland, Italy, Greece, and so many other countries. And it was reflected, perhaps most strongly, in the US elections. People everywhere understand that although the system that’s been in place for roughly a century has created amazing science, technology, medicine, and arts, it has run its course. It is not serving We the People. Not on any continent. It is broken. And it can’t be fixed with old tools. Perhaps more than any other message to take away from the 2016 US presidential election – as well as movements around the globe – is that people are discouraged and are demanding something different. Those on the right look for a conservative, authoritarian government while those on the left favor a progressive, socialistic one. Bernie’s popularity and Trump’s victory symbolize these two opposite ends of the spectrum. Hillary stood in the middle and symbolized the status quo. When I finish giving speeches, during the question-and-answer period, people often ask if I don’t think things have to fall apart before we can move into a new phase. I believe we would be wise to accept the recent events as symbols that things have fallen apart. People are waking up to the fact that our space station is headed for disaster and we must change course. Those who feel discouraged by the results of the recent election and those who are euphoric share a motivation to change our space station’s navigational system. This new administration and Congress will have impacts. The Supreme Court, health care, regulations governing Wall Street, energy, transportation, education, and the environment, as well as international relations: all of these will change. But let us understand that these are symptoms. The illness is much bigger. It is a systemic disease. And we must heal it. We must ask: how do we pull back from the brink of disaster? How do we maneuver human societies in ways that will direct us away from systems that are obviously failing, to ones that are themselves renewable resources? Since the illness is the political/economic system itself, we must change it. Regardless of policies implemented by national governments, we all need to dedicate ourselves to converting a Death Economy, based on militarism and excessive consumption, into a Life Economy, based on cleaning up pollution, regenerating environments, and developing sustainable non-extractive technologies. When the US felt threatened by the Soviet domination of space, President John Kennedy in September 1962 said, “We meet in an hour of change and challenge, in a decade of hope and fear, in an age of both knowledge and ignorance.” He then announced his intention to beat the Soviets by being the first nation to send men to the moon. “And,” he added with an optimistic statement that seemed almost beyond possibility, “it will be done before the end of this decade.” Although he did not live to see it, the President’s promise was fulfilled; Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon in July 1969. We are at such a time now. This hour of change and challenge, hope and fear, knowledge and ignorance, demands our involvement. It is imperative for each of us to be creative, to take actions, to understand that democracy truly is based on all of us participating in the great adventure that is the next ten years. John Kennedy’s promise is a promise for each of us to make now: It will be done before the end of the decade.10 Nov 16

Channel NewsAsia Singapore News

Veteran Singaporean journalist Seah Chiang Nee dies - He had been hospitalised at the Singapore General Hospital since July when he was admitted for shingles and diarrhoea.09:37
New town square in Punggol for community activities - Residents in Punggol have a new community space that offers vantage views of Punggol Waterway.08:14
Chinese New Year-themed train to run on NEL for a month - From Jan 15 until Feb 11, commuters will be able to hop on this train decorated with rooster motifs, along with traditional Chinese couplets expressing well wishes for the new year.06:40
Indonesian traveller wins S$1 million in Changi Airport lucky draw - All it took for Ade Iskandar Roni to qualify for the draw was a S$50 T-shirt that he had bought for a friend, during his first visit to Singapore in October 2016.05:10
First batch of students receives new Edusave award - The new Edusave Skills Award is open to students in specialised schools, Institutes of Technical Education and polytechnics. It recognises those who showed excellent application of soft skills based on performance in internships, final year projects.01:20
New town square in Punggol for community activities - Residents in Punggol have a new community space that offers vantage views of Punggol Waterway.14 Jan
New community space in Punggol - Residents in Punggol can look forward to a new community space that offers vantage views of Punggol Waterway.14 Jan
Little India’s chaos: Conservation that 'keeps it real' - Calls for Little India to be “spruced up” has observers on Talking Point cautioning against development for tourism’s sake, and drawing comparisons with Chinatown.14 Jan
Turning a hobby into a career - why some do it - Attitudes toward work and life have evolved, and definitions of what makes the good life are being challenged, say local human resource academics. Channel NewsAsia profiles some Singaporeans who are finding their way.14 Jan
Singapore firms should seize first-mover advantage in Cambodia, Laos: President Tan - Speaking to the media on Saturday (Jan 14) towards the end of his state visit to Cambodia and Laos, President Tan urged SMEs to enter emerging markets early in order to carve out niche areas for themselves. 14 Jan

Channel NewsAsia Front Page News

Luxottica, Essilor in 45-billion euro merger deal to create eyewear giant: source - Italy's Luxottica and France's Essilor have agreed a 45-billion euro merger deal to create a global powerhouse in the eyewear industry, a source with knowledge of the matter said.29 min
World's eight richest as wealthy as half humanity, Oxfam tells Davos - Just eight individuals, all men, own as much wealth as the poorest half of the world's population, Oxfam said on Monday in a report calling for action to curtail rewards for those at the top.34 min
Obama says UN vote didn't rupture US-Israel relations - U.S. President Barack Obama played down fallout from a U.S. abstention on a United Nations resolution last month demanding an end to Israeli settlements in occupied territory, saying it did not trigger a significant break in relations with Israel.34 min
Trump labels NATO 'obsolete' in newspaper interview - President-elect Donald Trump, in remarks likely to rattle US allies, described NATO as "obsolete" in an interview published in Monday editions of two European newspapers.35 min
Football: Guardiola concedes defeat in Premier League title race - City were beaten for the fourth time in their last eight league games as former Barcelona and Bayern Munich Guardiola boss suffered the largest league defeat of his glittering managerial career.39 min
Luxottica and Essilor to merge in US$53 billion deal: FT - Italian eyewear maker Luxottica and French corrective eye lens maker Essilor have agreed on a 50 billion euros (US$53.16 billion) merger, the Financial Times reported, citing people familiar with the matter.44 min
Job cuts, fewer flights? Hong Kong airline Cathay set for overhaul - Cathay Pacific Airways is expected to announce job cuts, cost reductions and to shift flights to its short-haul arm when it unveils the results of a key review this week, as it grapples with growing competition from Chinese carriers.46 min
Amazon's Gandhi flip-flops spark anger in India - Flip-flops bearing the face of India's independence icon Mahatma Gandhi for sale on Amazon triggered fresh outrage on Sunday (Jan 15), days after the e-retail giant was forced to stop selling Indian flag doormats.16:30
Philip Morris jolted by Indian proposal to ban foreign tobacco investment - Philip Morris International is fighting to keep a toehold in India's US$11 billion tobacco market, as the government considers further tightening foreign investment rules in the sector, according to documents seen by Reuters.16:27
Trump hails 'great' Brexit and backs speedy UK trade deal - US President-elect Donald Trump on Sunday hailed Britain's exit from the European Union and backed a speedy trade deal, in an interview with the Times newspaper.16:21

Channel NewsAsia World News

Trump says Brexit to be 'a great thing', wants quick trade deal with UK - U.S. President-elect Donald Trump said that Brexit would turn out to be a great thing and other countries would follow Britain out of the European Union but promised to strike a swift bilateral trade deal with the United Kingdom.24 min
World's eight richest as wealthy as half humanity, Oxfam tells Davos - Just eight individuals, all men, own as much wealth as the poorest half of the world's population, Oxfam said on Monday in a report calling for action to curtail rewards for those at the top.34 min
Obama says UN vote didn't rupture US-Israel relations - U.S. President Barack Obama played down fallout from a U.S. abstention on a United Nations resolution last month demanding an end to Israeli settlements in occupied territory, saying it did not trigger a significant break in relations with Israel.34 min
Trump labels NATO 'obsolete' in newspaper interview - President-elect Donald Trump, in remarks likely to rattle US allies, described NATO as "obsolete" in an interview published in Monday editions of two European newspapers.35 min
Trump says Merkel made 'catastrophic mistake' with refugee policy - U.S. President-elect Donald Trump said in a newspaper interview published on Sunday that German Chancellor Angela Merkel had made a "catastrophic mistake" with a policy that let a wave of more than one million migrants into her country.16:30
Trump hails 'great' Brexit and backs speedy UK trade deal - US President-elect Donald Trump on Sunday hailed Britain's exit from the European Union and backed a speedy trade deal, in an interview with the Times newspaper.16:21
Trump accuses Merkel of 'catastrophic mistake' over migrants - Chancellor Angela Merkel made a "catastrophic mistake" in letting migrants flood into Germany, US President-elect Donald Trump said in a newspaper interview on Sunday.16:21
Spanish aid worker freed in Afghanistan: Red Cross - A Spanish employee of the International Committee of the Red Cross has been released less than a month after he was kidnapped by gunmen in northern Afghanistan, the aid group said on Sunday.16:06
Trump accuses Merkel of 'catastrophic mistake' over migrants - German Chancellor Angela Merkel made a "catastrophic mistake" in allowing undocumented migrants to enter the country, US President-elect Donald Trump said on Sunday in an interview with The Times of London and Germany's Bild.15:49
Trump says Brexit to be 'a great thing', wants very substantial cut in nuclear weapons - US President-elect Donald Trump also says he will work hard to get a trade deal with the United Kingdom done quickly. 15:47

Channel NewsAsia Asia Pacific News

Job cuts, fewer flights? Hong Kong airline Cathay set for overhaul - Cathay Pacific Airways is expected to announce job cuts, cost reductions and to shift flights to its short-haul arm when it unveils the results of a key review this week, as it grapples with growing competition from Chinese carriers.46 min
Amazon's Gandhi flip-flops spark anger in India - Flip-flops bearing the face of India's independence icon Mahatma Gandhi for sale on Amazon triggered fresh outrage on Sunday (Jan 15), days after the e-retail giant was forced to stop selling Indian flag doormats.16:30
South Korea prosecutor weighs economic impact of arrest of Samsung chief - South Korea's special prosecutor said on Sunday it will take into account the economic impact of whether to arrest Samsung Group leader Jay Y. Lee in connection with an influence-peddling investigation involving the president.16:16
Veteran Singaporean journalist Seah Chiang Nee dies - He had been hospitalised at the Singapore General Hospital since July when he was admitted for shingles and diarrhoea.16:01
Indonesia, Japan discuss high-speed rail project - The project was among issues discussed during Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's meeting with Indonesian President Joko Widodo on Sunday (Jan 15).15:56
Sea Shepherd finds Japanese ship 'with slaughtered whale' - A Japanese ship has been caught with a slaughtered whale in the Antarctic in defiance of an international court decision against Tokyo's hunts, activist group Sea Shepherd said Sunday.13:40
Taiwan president says Latam trip put island on global stage - Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen said on Sunday her trip to Central American allies and transit stops in the United States had elevated the island's international profile, as China hit back at US President-elect Donald Trump for his remarks on the "one China" policy.13:36
Swiss police detain Tibet protesters as Xi arrives - Swiss police on Sunday detained 32 people protesting conditions in Tibet as Chinese President Xi Jinping began a state visit in the wealthy Alpine nation.13:00
Indonesia and Japan agree to step up maritime security - Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe - in Indonesia on a regional tour that has taken in Australia and the Philippines and will include Vietnam - said their two island nations gave maritime cooperation the "highest priority".11:34
Veteran Singaporean journalist Seah Chiang Nee dies - He had been hospitalised at the Singapore General Hospital since July when he was admitted for shingles and diarrhoea.09:37

Media Monarchy

#PumpUpThaVolume: January 13, 2017 - Media Monarchy plays Qiet, Tim Kasher, Hazel English and more on #PumpUpThaVolume for January 13, 2017. ♬13 Jan
#MorningMonarchy: January 13, 2017 - Interrupted broadcast, war reporting and "Suddenly" Sinatra + this day in history w/Donny Hathaway's death and our song of the day by Slowdive on your Morning Monarchy for January 13, 2017.13 Jan
#DeepFocus: “Suddenly,” Sinatra’s Original Assassination Film - With the inauguration coming up next week and threats of riots in the news, we want to take a look at a 1954 film that fell into public domain so it's available everywhere: "Suddenly".13 Jan
#PumpUpThaVolume: January 12, 2017 - Media Monarchy plays Mogwai, Simian, Slayer and more on #PumpUpThaVolume for January 12, 2017. ♬12 Jan
#MorningMonarchy: January 12, 2017 - Mass hysteria, corporate mediums and a Trump "Trackdown" + this day in history w/the Harrisburg Seven and our song of the day by Active Bird Community on your Morning Monarchy for January 12, 2017.12 Jan
#PumpUpThaVolume: January 11, 2017 - Media Monarchy plays Merchandise, Wiretree, La Sera and more on #PumpUpThaVolume for January 11, 2017. ♬11 Jan
#MorningMonarchy: January 11, 2017 - Vaccine reviews, fluoride reclassified and chemtrails coverage + this day in history w/the Grand Canyon and our song of the day by Skye & Ross on your Morning Monarchy for January 11, 2017.11 Jan
#PumpUpThaVolume: January 10, 2017 - Media Monarchy plays Bastards Of Fate, Desperate Journalist, Lucy Dacus and more on #PumpUpThaVolume for January 10, 2017. ♬10 Jan
#MorningMonarchy: January 10, 2017 - Welcome to the dollhouse, the coming backlash and distant galaxies + this day in history w/the League of nations and our song of the day by Chemtrails on your Morning Monarchy for January 10, 2017.10 Jan
#GoodNewsNextWeek: Free Hot Soup, Soaring BitCoin, Building BitChute (Audio) - This week on #GoodNewsNextWeek: 2017 starts out with a whole new year's worth of ways we're winning w/space not spikes, free hot soup, p2p video and much more. 9 Jan

NATO Latest News

NCI Agency Industry Conference and AFCEA TechNet International (NITEC17) - Bringing together more than 800 high-level defence experts from across NATO, the Allied militaries, Industry and academia, NITEC17 will offer a unique opportunity to act on NATO's innovation agenda through strategic dialogue with partners. 4 Jan
Holiday greetings to the troops - In his end of the year message to the forces working under NATO command, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg thanks the troops for their hard work in dangerous and demanding places, such as training recruits in Afghanistan, patrolling the Baltic airspace and the Mediterranean Sea, and keeping the peace in Kosovo.21 Dec 16
KFOR CIMIC donation in Zubin Potok - Zubin Potok, December 20th , 2016. This afternoon, the Joint Regional Detachment - North (JRD-N) conducted a donation of professional boots, helmets and gloves in favour of the Firefighters Station of Zubin Potok.21 Dec 16
Statement19 Dec 16
Mongolia achieves major milestone in its partnership with NATO - Mongolia graduated its second Staff Officers Course class and declared a new capacity for the faculty of the Mongolian National Defence University at a ceremony held on 13 December 2016 at the Ministry of Defence in Ulaanbaatar.19 Dec 16
Emerging security risks for energy flows across South Caucasus - Energy security is high on the political agendas of both NATO member states and partner countries. At the NATO Summit in Warsaw in July 2016, Allied leaders highlighted that energy developments can have significant political and security implications. Stable and reliable energy supplies, the diversification of import routes, suppliers and energy resources, and the interconnectivity of energy networks are of critical importance and increase resilience against political and economic pressure.15 Dec 16
Secretary General stresses importance of NATO-EU cooperation - NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg met with EU leaders on Thursday (15 December 2016) for talks on European defence and closer NATO-EU cooperation. Mr. Stoltenberg stressed that closer cooperation between NATO and the EU is important today because of new security threats, efforts to strengthen European defence and to build the partnership between Europe and North America.15 Dec 16
NATO Allies and Partners condemn North Korea’s nuclear programme - The North Atlantic Council on Thursday (15 December 2016) strongly condemned North Korea's continued development of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles and its inflammatory rhetoric, saying North Korea’s actions are breaching relevant UN Security Council resolutions and posing an increasing threat to international peace and security. NATO Allies were joined in session by the Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Korea, Mr. AHN Chong-ghee, and by representatives from Australia, Japan, and New Zealand.15 Dec 16
Chairman of the NATO Military Committee thanks Germany for its leading role in international security and stability - The Chairman of the NATO Military Committee General Petr Pavel visited Germany on 8-9 December 2016, where he met with Chief of Defence, General Volker Wieker, the Ministry of Defence Director-General for Strategy and Operation, Lieutenant General Dieter Warnecke and other high level political and military officials.15 Dec 16
Group of Allies sign off on initial multinational Precision Guided Munitions order - Today (15 December 2016) the NATO Support and Procurement Agency signed an agreement with the United States to acquire Precision Guided Munitions (PGMs) on behalf of a multinational cooperation framework that brings together eight NATO Allies - Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Greece, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and Spain.15 Dec 16

National Post

Greg Palast

I get the Blues too… - A note to all who’ve made a donation to our Investigative Fund You are not only keeping us alive financially, but emotionally. Eventually, our stories make national news, but, in those months while the mainstream resists, your encouragement really means a lot. People ask me how I keep my sense of humor when I see all these horrors, from lost votes to lost lives. The truth is, I get the blues too. Support, good wishes, and remembering the tough world I came from are what gets me back on track. And here’s something they can’t steal from us:  a Happy New Year, from my family to yours. Thank you, Greg Palast, reporting Make a tax-deductible donation to our Stolen Election Investigation *  *  *  *  * Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie.Rent or buy the film from Amazon or Vimeo. Support The Palast Investigative Fund and keep our work alive. Or support us by shopping with Amazon Smile.AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Sustainable Markets Foundation for the benefit of The Palast Investigative Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info.   The post I get the Blues too… appeared first on Greg Palast.30 Dec 16
A note in the snow - Last week, I flew to Detroit with my team at the request of a major west coast publication. When I landed, they got cold feet; assignment cancelled. Without funding to continue, I should have headed home. But I was getting tips of nasty doings with the ballots in Motown. I could get the evidence that Trump’s victory was as real as his tan. So I tucked my long-johns under my suit, put on my fedora, and headed out to meet the witnesses, see the evidence and film an investigative report on the Theft of Michigan. With almost no sleep (and no pay), my producer David Ambrose and I put together an investigative film—and donated it, no charge, to Democracy Now! and several other outlets. As to the airfares, hotels, cars, camera batteries, sound equipment, local assistants and the rest, the bills have piled high as the snow and uncounted ballots. So, here I was, literally out in the cold, hoping you'd see the value of top-flight investigative reporting. So, buddy, can you spare a dime? Or $100 or so? For that, I’ll send you my new film, the one that, back in September, told you exactly how Trump would steal it. Or a signed copy of the book that goes with it: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, a tale of billionaires and ballot bandits. I want to thank all of you who donated to get me to Washington DC to testify at the ad hoc Congressional hearing and to speak with the Justice Department about the suppression of minority votes. (On Monday, I was joined at the Washington Press Club by the nation’s top voting rights attorney, Barbara Arnwine; civil rights legend Ruby Sales; Muslim activist Sameera Khan. They announced plans to take legal and political action against Crosscheck, the Trumpistas’ latest Jim Crow tactic, the one our team uncovered for Rolling Stone. Khan joined me at Justice to present them 50,000 signatures (we unloaded reams of paper on them) gathered by 18 Million Rising, the Asian American advocacy group, to light a fire under Justice. On Tuesday, I joined the presidents of the NAACP chapters of Michigan and Wisconsin and other front-line voting rights leaders, to plan next steps for this week, for this year, for this decade. My presentation to Justice, to Congressmen and rights advocates, to the press, was so much more powerful because I arrived in DC with the goods, the evidence, the film, the facts from Michigan, from the scene of the electoral crime. So, in the end, my assignment wasn’t cancelled: I went to work for YOU. Because I have faith that my readers agree that this work is important, that I’m not on some fool’s errand. The US media doesn’t want to cover the vote theft—because, hey, the count is over—and we should get over it. I am not over it. I am standing my ground. Let me know if you think I’ve made the right decision. Feed the team. I have nothing to offer you in return except some signed discs and books (or the Combo)— and the facts. Continue Supporting the 2016 Stolen Election Investigation because it ain’t over and we’re not done. – Greg Palast   * * * * * Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie. Rent or buy the film from Amazon or Vimeo. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!  Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info. GregPalast.com   The post A note in the snow appeared first on Greg Palast.18 Dec 16
The Republican Sabotage of the Vote Recounts in Michigan and Wisconsin - By Greg Palast for Truthout Photo of Michigan ballot with bubble. (Image courtesy of Palast Investigative Fund, 2016)Michigan officials declared in late November that Trump won the state's count by 10,704 votes. But hold on – a record 75,355 ballots were not counted. The uncounted ballots came mostly from Detroit and Flint, majority-Black cities that vote Democratic. According to the machines that read their ballots, these voters waited in line, sometimes for hours, yet did not choose a president. Really? This week, I drove through a snowstorm to Lansing to hear the official explanation from Ruth Johnson, the Republican secretary of state. I was directed to official flack-catcher Fred Woodhams who told me, "You know, I think when you look at the unfavorability ratings that were reported for both major-party candidates, it's probably not that surprising." Sleuthing about in Detroit, I found another explanation: bubbles. Bubbles? Michigan votes on paper ballots. If you don't fill the bubble completely, the machine records that you didn't vote for president. Susan, a systems analyst who took part in the hand recount initiated by Jill Stein, told me, "I saw a lot of red ink. I saw a lot of checkmarks. We saw a lot of ballots that weren't originally counted, because those don't scan into the machine." (I can only use her first name because she's terrified of retribution from Trump followers in the white suburb where she lives.) Other ballots were not counted because the machines thought the voter chose two presidential candidates. How come more ballots were uncounted in Detroit and Flint than in the white 'burbs and rural counties? Are the machines themselves racist? No, but they are old, and in some cases, busted. An astonishing 87 machines broke down in Detroit, responsible for counting tens of thousands of ballots. Many more were simply faulty and uncalibrated. I met with Carlos Garcia, University of Michigan multimedia specialist, who, on Election Day, joined a crowd waiting over two hours for the busted machine to be fixed. Some voters left; others filled out ballots that were chucked, uncounted, into the bottom of machine. When the machine was fixed, Carlos explained, "Any new scanned ballots were falling in on top of the old ones." It would not be possible to recount those dumped ballots. This is not an unheard of phenomenon: I know two voters who lost their vote in another state (California) because they didn't fill in the bubble – my parents! Meet mom and dad in my film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: How did Detroit end up with the crap machines? Detroit is bankrupt, so every expenditure must be approved by "emergency" overlords appointed by the Republican governor. The GOP operatives refused the city's pre-election pleas to fix and replace the busted machines. "We had the rollout [of new machines] in our budget," Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey said. "No money was appropriated by the state." Same in Flint. GOP state officials cut the budget for water service there, resulting in the contamination of the city's water supply with lead. The budget cuts also poisoned the presidential race. The Human Eye Count There is, however, an extraordinary machine that can read the ballots, whether the bubbles are filled or checked, whether in black ink or red, to determine the voters' intent: the human eye. That's why Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, paid millions of dollars for a human eyeball count of the uncounted votes. While labeled a "recount," its real purpose is to count the 75,355 votes never counted in the first place. Count those ballots, mostly in Detroit and Flint, and Trump's victory could vanish. Adding to the pile of uncounted ballots are the large numbers of invalidated straight-ticket votes in Detroit. In Michigan, you can choose to make one mark that casts your vote for every Democrat (or Republican) for every office. Voters know that they can vote the Democratic ballot but write in a protest name – popular were "Bernie Sanders" and "Mickey Mouse" – but their ballot, they knew, would count for Clinton. However, the Detroit machines simply invalidated the ballots with protest write-ins because the old Opti-Scans wrongly tallied these as "over-votes" (i.e., voting for two candidates). The human eye would catch this mistake. But Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette stymied Stein's human eye count. The Republican pol issued an order saying that no one could look at the ballots cast in precincts where the number of votes and voters did not match – exactly the places where you'd want to look for the missing votes. He also ordered a ban on counting ballots from precincts where the seals on the machines had been broken – in other words, where there is evidence of tampering. Again, those are the machines that most need investigating. The result: The recount crews were denied access to more than half of all Detroit precincts (59 percent). I met with Stein, who told me she was stunned by this overt sabotage of the recount. "It's shocking to think that the discounting of these votes may be making the critical difference in the outcome of the election," she said. This story was repeated in Wisconsin, which uses the same Opti-Scan system as Michigan. There, the uncounted votes, sometimes called "spoiled" or "invalidated" ballots, were concentrated in Black-majority Milwaukee. Stein put up over $3 million of donated funds for the human eye review in Wisconsin, but GOP state officials authorized Milwaukee County to recount simply by running the ballots through the same blind machines. Not surprisingly, this instant replay produced the same questionable result. Adding Un-Votes to the Uncounted Stein was also disturbed by the number of voters who never got to cast ballots. "Whether it's because of the chaos [because] some polling centers are closed, and then some are moved, and there's all kinds of mix-ups," she said. "So, a lot of people are filling out provisional ballots, or they were being tossed off the voter rolls by Interstate Crosscheck." Interstate Crosscheck is a list that was created by Donald Trump supporter and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach to hunt down and imprison voters who illegally voted or registered in two states in one election. An eye-popping 449,092 Michiganders are on the Crosscheck suspect list. The list, which my team uncovered in an investigation for Rolling Stone, cost at least 50,000 of the state's voters their registrations. Disproportionately, the purged voters were Blacks, Latinos and that other solid Democratic demographic, Muslim Americans. (Dearborn, Michigan, has the highest concentration of Arab Americans in the US.) The Michigan Secretary of State's spokesman Woodhams told me the purpose of the mass purge was, "to clean our voter lists and ensure that there's no vulnerability for fraud. We've been very aggressive in closing vulnerabilities and loopholes to fraud." While Woodhams did not know of a single conviction for double-voting in Michigan, the "aggression" in purging the lists was clear. I showed him part of the Michigan purge list that he thought was confidential. The "double voters" are found by simply matching first and last names. Michael Bernard Brown is supposed to be the same voter as Michael Anthony Brown. Michael Timothy Brown is supposed to be the same voter as Michael Johnnie Brown. Woodhams assured me the GOP used the Trump-Kobach list with care, more or less. He said, "I'm sure that there are some false positives. But we go through it thoroughly, and we're not just canceling people." As to the racial profiling inherent in the list? Did he agree with our experts that by tagging thousands of voters named Jose Garcia and Michael Brown there would be a bias in his purge list? The GOP spokesman replied, "I've known a lot of white Browns." Jill Stein didn't buy it. Responding to both Michigan's and Trump's claim that voter rolls are loaded with fraudulent double voters, Stein said, "It's the opposite of what he is saying: not people who are voting fraudulently and illegally, but actually legitimate voters who have had their right to vote taken away from them by Kris Kobach and by Donald Trump." Crosscheck likely cost tens of thousands their vote in Pennsylvania as well. "It is a Jim Crow system, and it all needs to be fixed," Stein concluded. "It's not rocket science. This is just plain, basic democracy." * * * * * Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie. Support the 2016 Stolen Election Investigation After investigating the REAL story of the recount, we stopped by the Department of Justice and handed them our Crosscheck petition, signed by 50,000 people. We have a lot more work to do and thankfully, our efforts are starting to get notice. We're not done... Join us bySupporting the Stolen Election Investigation Rent or buy the film from Amazon or Vimeo. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!  Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info. GregPalast.com   The post The Republican Sabotage of the Vote Recounts in Michigan and Wisconsin appeared first on Greg Palast.18 Dec 16
Palast Report for Democracy Now!:By Rejecting Recount, Is Michigan Covering up 75,000 Ballots Never Counted? - Investigative reporter Greg Palast has just returned from Michigan, where he went to probe the state’s closely contested election. Trump won Michigan by fewer than 11,000 votes out of nearly 4.8 million votes cast. Green Party presidential contender Dr. Jill Stein attempted to force Michigan to hold a recount, but a federal judge ordered Michigan’s Board of Elections to stop the state’s electoral recount. One big question remains: Why did 75,335 ballots go uncounted? Support the 2016 Stolen Election Investigation My team and I just returned from Michigan to report the REAL story of the recount. I’ve also been responding to urgent requests in the recount states for our technical files and analysis. We're in Washington and stopped by the Department of Justice yesterday and handed them our Crosscheck petition, signed by 50,000 people. Join us by Supporting the Stolen Election Investigation Last stop for Democracy • PLEASE, say, "Count me in to count the votes" by supporting the 2016 Stolen Election Investigation for a donation of any size no matter how small or large • Stay informed and get a signed DVD of my film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, a signed copy of the book with the same title or better still - get the Book & DVD combo  • Be listed as a producer ($1,000) or co-producer ($500) in the credits of the broadcast version of the updated, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy:  THE THEFT OF 2016. * * * * * Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie. Donate to the Palast Investigative Fund and get the signed DVD. Download the FREE Movie Comic Book. Rent or buy the film from Amazon or Vimeo. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!  Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info. GregPalast.com   The post Palast Report for Democracy Now!:By Rejecting Recount, Is Michigan Covering up 75,000 Ballots Never Counted? appeared first on Greg Palast.13 Dec 16
Crosscheck Is Not Just Crooked, It’s Criminal - After reading my report on the Kobach/Koch/Trump operation, which has removed tens of thousands of minority voters from the rolls in the swing states that surprisingly shifted to Trump, former federal judge (and now Congressman) Alcee Hastings told me Crosscheck is a criminal violation of federal law. Hastings has called for criminal indictments and written an official Congressional member letter to ask for investigation. hastings-crosscheck-letter-to-ag-lynch Hastings’ demand for justice is backed by a petition to expose and end Crosscheck’s racist attacks on voting rights. So far it's been signed by 50,000 people, including 29,507 members of 18 Million Rising, the Asian-American rights group. The group is joined by co-signers Rep. Keith Ellison, Bill Gallegos of Climate Justice, Martin Luther King III and others. On Tuesday, December 13 I will join the leaders of 18 Million rising in Washington, D.C. to present the petition to Attorney General Loretta Lynch. Stopping Crosscheck is the Standing Rock of racist vote suppression.  If we don’t open the investigations now, by January 21, Kris Kobach will be Homeland Security chief and Jeff Sessions Attorney General. Demand an investigation into Crosscheck, sign our petition — and then share it! For the full story, see the film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, the story of my investigation of Crosscheck. * * * * * Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie. Donate to the Palast Investigative Fund and get the signed DVD. Download the FREE Movie Comic Book. Rent or buy the film from Amazon or Vimeo. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!  Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info. The post Crosscheck Is Not Just Crooked, It’s Criminal appeared first on Greg Palast. 5 Dec 16
The No-BS Inside Guide to the Presidential RecountSorry, no Russian hacker hunt - by Greg Palast for Truthout There's been so much complete nonsense since I first broke the news that the Green Party would file for a recount of the presidential vote, I am compelled to write a short guide to flush out the BS and get to just the facts, ma'am. Nope, they’re not hunting for Russian hackers To begin with, the main work of the recount hasn't a damn thing to do with finding out if the software programs for the voting machines have been hacked, whether by Putin’s agents or some guy in a cave flipping your vote from Hillary to The Donald. The Green team does not yet even have the right to get into the codes. But that's just not the core of the work. The ballots in the electoral “dumpster” The nasty little secret of US elections, is that we don't count all the votes. In Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania—and all over America—there were a massive number of votes that were simply rejected, invalidated, and spoiled. They were simply, not counted.  Officially, in a typical presidential election, at least three million votes end up rejected, often for picayune, absurd reasons. The rejects fall into three big categories:  provisional ballots rejected, absentee and mail-in ballots invalidated and in-precinct votes “spoiled,” spit out by a machine or thrown out by a human reader as unreadable or mis-marked. So, as Robert Fitrakis, lead lawyer for the recount tells me, their first job is to pull the votes out of the electoral dumpster—and, one by one, make the case for counting a rejected provisional, absentee or “spoiled” ballot. Spoiled:  over-votes and under-votes How does a vote spoil? Most fall in the categories of “over-votes” and “under-votes.” In Michigan, the Green team has found a whole lot of people who voted for TWO candidates for President.  These are the “over-vote”—votes that will count for neither candidate. How odd.  While the schools in Detroit are not stellar, its graduates do know that they can only have one president. Then, some folks didn’t vote at all.  They are the “under-voter.” But, Fitrakis and team suspect, many of these under- and over-voters meant to vote for a candidate but the robot reader couldn’t understand their choice. Here’s how it happens.  Voters in Michigan and Wisconsin fill in bubbles next to their choice.  The cards, filled up with darkened bubbles for each race, are gathered and fed through an “optical scanner.” These robotic eyeballs mess up all the time. This is what Fitrakis, an old hand at vote-machine failures (both deliberate and benign), calls “the calibration problem.” Are machines calibrated with a Republican or Democratic bias? No, that's not how it works. But just as poor areas get the worst schools and hospitals, they also get the worst voting machines. The key is an ugly statistic not taught in third grade civics class:  According to the US Civil Rights Commission, the chance your vote will be disqualified as “spoiled” is 900% more likely if you’re Black than if you’re white. So the Green Party intends to review every single one of the six million bubble-filled cards. They’ll use the one instrument that can easily tell one bubble from two, or one bubble from none: the human eye. As you can imagine, This will require several thousand eyes.  The good news is, Fitrakis reports, that well over a thousand volunteers have already signed up.  Training by Skype begins Tuesday morning. Support the 2016 Stolen Election Investigation The team and I are off to Ground Zero:  Michigan. Wisconsin. Pennsylvania. To report the REAL story of the recount. I’m also responding to urgent requests in the recount states for our technical files and analysis. And then it’s on to Washington—to the Department of Justice—while there’s a bit of Justice left. Join us by Supporting the Stolen Election Investigation Last stop for Democracy Provisional or “placebo” ballots According to the US Elections Assistance Commission (EAC), Americans cast 2.7 million provisional ballots in the last presidential election.  About a million were simply discarded.  What?! Yes.  Discarded, not counted.  You show up at your normal polling station and they can’t find your name, or they don’t like your ID, or you’re supposed to vote in another precinct.  Instead of letting you vote on a regular ballot, you fill out a “provisional” ballot and place it in an envelope, sign your name, and under penalty of jail time for lying, affirm you’re a properly registered voter. The polls close—then the magic begins.  It’s up to highly partisan election officials to decide if your vote counts.  Hillary Clinton only won one swing state, Virginia, notably, the only one where the vote count was controlled by Democrats.  She lost all swing states—Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Arizona, North Carolina and Florida—where the GOP set the rules for counting these ballots and their hacks acted as the judge and jury on whether a ballot should be counted. Wisconsin generally rejects votes cast in the wrong precinct, even if they’re legal voters—and, says Fitrakis, “even if their official precinct was just another table in the same high school gym—and they were mis-directed by poll workers.” (That’s why I sometimes call “provisional” ballots “placebo” ballots.  They let you feel you’ve voted, even if you haven’t.) In Wisconsin, provisional ballots were handed to voters—mostly, it appears, students—who didn’t have the form of ID required under new Wisconsin law. These ballots were disqualified despite zero evidence even one voter was an identity thief. Fitrakis says the Stein campaign will fight for each of these provisional votes where this is clearly no evidence the vote is fraudulent. Mail-in, Early and Absentee Ballots go Absent If you’ve gone postal in this election, good luck!  According to EAC data, at least half a million absentee ballots go absent, that is, just don’t get counted.  The cause: everything from postage due to “suspect signature.” Fitrakis told me that in his home state of Ohio, you need to put your driver’s license number on the envelope, “and if you don’t have a driver’s license and leave the line blank—instead of writing ‘no driver’s license’—they toss your ballot. From Palast's book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: A Tale of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits by Ted Rall It’s a “gotcha!” system meant to knock out the ballots the officials don’t want to count.  (Remember, your mail-in ballot is anything but secret.)  Team Green will try to fight for each absentee ballot rejected for cockamamie reasons. If the recount doesn’t change the outcome, can we feel assured the election was honest? Sadly, no.  As Fitrakis says, “If a student is given a provisional ballot because they didn’t have the right ID, or the state simply lost their registration, we can fight for the ballot to be counted.  But most students who voted off campus didn’t know their right to get a provisional ballot and most probably didn’t get offered one. Students and others were discouraged from voting because they lacked the proper ID (300,000 by the estimate of the experts with the ACLU—that’s thirty times Trump’s plurality).  But if you didn’t cast any ballot, provisional or otherwise, no one can fight for it. And final decisions may come down to the vote of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, God forbid.  As Norman Stockwell, the editor of Madison-based The Progressive explained to me, formerly, elections law adjudications were made by a panel of non-partisan judges.  These were replaced by this new commission of partisan shills appointed by GOP Governor Scott Walker. Trump says millions voted illegally. Is he crazy? Crazy like a fox.  There’s a method in his madness that affects the recount. While the media dismisses Trump’s claim that there are "millions of people that voted illegally," they have not paid attention to the details of his claim.  Trump explains that millions of people are “voting many, many times,” that is, voting in two states in the same election. Trump’s claim is based on a list of “potential duplicate voters” created by his operative, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach.  Kobach (a top dog in Trump’s transition team)  directs a program for hunting down fraudulent voters using a computer system called, “Crosscheck.” It’s quite a computer:  Crosscheck identified a breathtaking 449,922 Michiganders who are suspected of voting or registering in a second state, a felony crime, as are 371,923 in Pennsylvania. I spent two years investigating the Trump/Kobach claim for Rolling Stone.  We obtained the “confidential” suspect list of several million citizens accused of voting twice.  In fact, it was no more than a list of common names—Maria Hernandez, James Brown, David Lee—that is, common to voters of color.  Read: Democrats.  A true and typical example: Michael James Brown of Michigan is supposed to be the same voter as Michael Kendrick Brown of Georgia. Page from The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (FREE) Comic book penned by Keith Tucker About 54,000 voters in Michigan, five times Trump’s plurality, lost their right to vote based on this nutty double-voter accusation.  In Pennsylvania, about 45,000 were purged. The problem for Fitrakis:  While he eventually plans to file suit against Crosscheck purges, in the meantime, it’s not clear he can challenge someone whose lost their vote because of a false accusation of double voting.  And those who found their names missing and didn’t demand a provisional ballot—there’s no hope at all of recovering their vote. Is Jill Stein going to get rich? Fitrakis laughs at this one.  “The FEC [Federal Elections Commission] has very strict rules on recounts. The donations for the recount are sequestered in a specially designated account and all spending is restricted to the recount.” The big problem is that the cost is somewhat out of Stein’s control.  Each state will bill the campaign for the “pro-rated salaries and benefits” of its county and state officials working on the recount. To add to the cost and just plain drive the Green team crazy, the Wisconsin Election Board announced on Monday that each separate county elections clerk will decide if they’ll even let the Green volunteers directly view the ballots.  Fitrakis and partners will have to get a court order to get into each county.  How does one recount ballots without seeing them?  (Hmm, is the Wisconsin board, stooges appointed by the GOP Governor, fearful that the viewing the ballots will expose the game?) Hillary joins the fray What will the Clinton camp add to the recount? “Lawyers,” said Fitrakis, though he’s yet to see them.  The Clinton campaign is apparently helping find one voter in each Pennsylvania county, as one is required in each jurisdiction to file for a recount of that state. And what about that hack job? While Fitrakis is not looking for Russkies in the computer code, he says, “We’re more concerned with the private companies that control the keys to the kingdom—to match what’s on paper to the official count.”  The “keys” are the little machines, memory cards and other electronic gewgaws that are used to suck the data from the voting machine—which are carried off to another state for tabulation by a private contractor.  Will these tabulations at each step match what the volunteers find in the on-the-ground recount? One problem is that the tabulation software is “proprietary.”  A private company owns the code to the count—and the privateers will fight fiercely, with GOP help, to keep the ballot counting code their commercial secret. Push and Pray Pennsylvania In the end, the single biggest impediment to a full and fair recount is that 70 percent of Pennsylvania voters used what are called, “Push and Pray” voting machines—Direct Recording Electronic touch-screens.  Push the screen next to your choice and pray it gets recorded. Pennsylvania is one of the only states that has yet to require some form of VVPAT (“vee-pat”) or voter-verified paper audit trail that creates an ATM-style receipt. Therefore, the Keystone State recount will have to rely on hopes of access to the code, statistical comparisons to counties that used paper ballots—and prayer. Maybe it IS the Russians The possibility that a Putin pal hacked the machines was championed by University of Michigan computer sciences professor J. Alex Halderman who proposed, “The attackers would probe election offices well in advance in order to find ways to break into their computers…and spread malware into voting machines.” I imagine some squat, middle-pay-scale civil servant in chinos and a pocket protector who works in the Michigan Secretary of State’s office approached, one late overtime night, by some FSB agent in high heels and a slinky dress split halfway up her thigh. The svelte spy would lean against the bureaucrat provocatively and whisper, “My handsome dahling, would you mind sticking this little thumb drive into that big old computer of yours?” Professor Halderman, if you want to help the recount, put down the James Bond novels and pick up some Opti-Scan ballots.  We’ve got a lot of bubbles to read.  End PLEASE, say, "Count me in to count the votes" by supporting the 2016 Stolen Election Investigation for a donation of any size no matter how small or large Stay informed and get a signed DVD of my film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, a signed copy of the book with the same title or better still - get the Book & DVD combo Be listed as a producer ($1,000) or co-producer ($500) in the credits of the broadcast version of the updated, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy:  THE THEFT OF 2016. * * * * * Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie. Donate to the Palast Investigative Fund and get the signed DVD. Download the FREE Movie Comic Book. Rent or buy the film from Amazon or Vimeo. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!  Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info. GregPalast.com   The post The No-BS Inside Guide to the Presidential RecountSorry, no Russian hacker hunt appeared first on Greg Palast.30 Nov 16
Exclusive: Jill Stein just called, Green Party filing for recount in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania - by Greg Palast Jill Stein just called to say that I am the first one to be informed that the Green Party is formally petitioning for a recount in 3 states, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Trump’s margin is less than 11,600 in Michigan, 27,200 in Wisconsin and 68,000 in Pennsylvania. If just a few thousand votes are found in Wisconsin and Michigan, Hillary Clinton becomes president by 276 electoral votes verses 264 for Trump. Support the 2016 Stolen Election Investigation Stein told me “We’re filing in Wisconsin Friday because the votes were cast on proven hack-prone machines. This has been a hack-ridden election.” She said that it will be most difficult to recount the machines in Pennsylvania. When asked why the democrats are not bringing this action, Stein told this reporter that “Democrats do not act to protect the vote even when there is dramatic evidence” of tampering. The Green Party told us that Stein will be represented by experienced voting rights attorney’s John Bonifaz, Boston, MA and Robert Fitrakis, Columbus, OH. Stein said, “our voting system is on life support.” The presidential candidate also said, “The Green Party will continue to be the go to advocate for voting rights. That includes fighting vote suppression tactics such as the Interstate Crosscheck system.” Interstate Crosscheck is the program which wrongly purged hundreds of thousand of minority voters in this election, according to the investigation this reporter fro Rolling Stone Magazine. Stein received 50,700 votes in Michigan, five times Trump’s winning plurality, and 30,980 in Wisconsin, more than Trump’s margin. When asked the "Nader" question, "Isn’t it true that your votes in Wisconsin and Michigan, if they went to Clinton, would have blocked Trump?", Stein answered, "Not at all. Our polls showed that 61% of our voters would have simply sat out the election, and one-third of the remaining voters would have voted Trump." The candidate insisted, "We are the ‘un-spoilers.’" Stein said she acted when Clinton turned silent because, "Only candidates may formally demand a re-count and we have standing." * * * * * Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie. Donate to the Palast Investigative Fund and get the signed DVD. Download the FREE Movie Comic Book. Rent or buy the film from Amazon or Vimeo. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!  Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info. GregPalast.com   The post Exclusive: Jill Stein just called, Green Party filing for recount in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania appeared first on Greg Palast.23 Nov 16
Here’s what we do now A personal note by Greg Palast - Being right never felt so horrid. “This is the story of the theft of the 2016 election. It’s a crime still in progress.” So opens my film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. And on Election night I waited for the returns to make a fool of me. Instead, the returns made the fool a President. And so, my vacation’s cancelled. My life’s cancelled; that is, a life of anything but sleuthing and exposing the details of the heist of our democracy. What’s at stake? No way around it, this is one frightening moment. Decades of progress created with sweat and determination face destruction.  Within the next six months, we may see the Voting Rights Act repealed—and civil rights set back 50 years; the entirety of our environmental protection laws burnt in a coal pit; police cruelty made our urban policy; the Education Department closed to give billionaires a tax holiday; and a howling anti-Semite as White House Senior Counselor. But the horror we face is countered by this one hard and hopeful fact:  Donald Trump did NOT win this election. Trump not only lost the popular vote by millions — he did not legitimately win the swing states of the Electoral College. Michigan, Florida, North Carolina, Arizona, Ohio:  every one was stolen through sophisticated, and sickeningly racist vote suppression tactics. If you saw my report for Democracy Now! on election morning, it revealed that Ohio GOP officials turned off anti-hacking software on voting machines, forced Black voters to wait hours in line (while whites had no wait). And, crucially, I confirmed that purged tens of thousands of minority voters on fake accusations they’d voted twice.  I first exposed this bogus double-voter blacklist called Crosscheck, in Rolling Stone. It’s the sick excrescence crafted by Kris Kobach, the Trump transition team's maven who also created the Muslim-tracker software he’s bringing to the Trump administration. What can we do now? I have been INUNDATED with requests for my factual reports and findings by media and, most important, the front-line activist groups preparing for the fierce fight to protect our votes. Some examples: Rev. William Barber of the NAACP filed a suit based in North Carolina,  hoping to overturn the Trump "victory" — and protect the tiny margin of the Democrat’s win of the Governor’s mansion.  The NAACP cites my discovery of "Crosscheck" — in which North Carolina removed upwards of 190,000 voters on false charges they voted twice. They now need my facts. Congressmen Keith Ellison and Alcee Hastings of the Congressional Black Caucus, personally presented Attorney General Loretta Lynch with my investigative reports and demanded investigation — "and indictments."  That investigation must kick off immediately. They now need my facts. The Asian-American civil rights group 18 Million Rising has gathered 50,000 signatures to push the Justice Department to investigate my evidence of a massive attack on the Asian-American vote. They now need my facts. In Michigan, the ACLU is ready to take action on the purge scheme I uncovered, "Crosscheck," that wrongly gave the state to Trump. In Ohio, voting rights attorney Robert Fitrakis is going into court with evidence, much that I uncovered, of racist voting games — from 5-hour-long lines in Black precincts to shutting off ballot security measures on the voting machines. The team need my facts. I expect to be in Washington at the Justice Dept and meeting with civil rights groups in December before the Electoral College meets. Information—plus film, video, investigative reports And beyond the voluminous files and confidential documents my team has uncovered that is sought by activists, we are deluged with requests for our film, videos, writings and more. And now we have US networks, even major comedy shows, asking for our material and, of course, new investigative findings. Information and facts make a difference With our investigative reports, with our hard and unassailable evidence, we can challenge the legitimacy of the Trump "election."  Most important, we must begin the difficult but necessary work of protecting and restoring voting rights.  The 2018 Election — and the threat of more stolen elections — is upon us. What we need to keep going...  Your extraordinary support and faith in our work funded my film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, which is now more relevant than ever and being seen by ever more audiences. Now we need your financial support again to keep this fight going. We just did not budget for the GOP's in-your-face steal of the Congress and White House.  All our resources went into raising the alarm before the election. So, now, I have to re-hire the staff, hit the road again. Ohio, North Carolina, Washington DC and who knows where, retain attorneys—and retain our team of technicians from cameramen to outreach organizers. Can this new work be done? Is there any choice? Honestly and personally, I was hoping for some rest and time off. But a lifetime of your work and mine is now in the balance. ● PLEASE, say, "Count me in to count the votes" by supporting the 2016 Stolen Election Investigation for a donation of any size no matter how small or large ● Be listed as a producer ($1,000) or co-producer ($500) in the credits of the broadcast version of my film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy ● Stay informed and get a signed DVD of my film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, a signed copy of the book with the same title or better still - get the Book & DVD combo. And does an angel have the $8K needed for our Washington work and filming?  If so, flap your wings. I can't thank you enough for all the years of support. Alas... our work is not done. Greg Palast and the Palast Investigations Team * * * * * Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie. Donate to the Palast Investigative Fund and get the signed DVD. Download the FREE Movie Comic Book. Rent or buy the film from Amazon or Vimeo. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!  Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info. GregPalast.com   The post Here’s what we do now A personal note by Greg Palast appeared first on Greg Palast.20 Nov 16
Ethnic Votes Stolen in Crucial States Help Fix US Election For Trump Reveals Greg Palast - By Ben Gelblum | The London Economic Throughout the US election campaign one of The Donald’s main refrains was “this election is rigged.” Turns out this particular Trump election rallying cry wasn’t a lie… Well, not entirely. Veteran election investigator Greg Palast has uncovered the sickening truth. I spoke to Palast about evidence of widespread systemic election rigging, robbing black, hispanic and asian American voters of their right to vote in crucial states. – Enough votes to swing the election away from the Hillary Clinton victory predicted in polls – explaining suspicious exit polls inconsistencies – and towards a shock result for Trump and Republican victory in the Senate. “Before a single vote was even cast, the election was already fixed by Trump operatives,” explains Palast. “This country is violently divided. There simply aren’t enough white guys to elect Trump nor a Republican Senate. The only way they could win was to eliminate the votes of non-white guys—and they did so by tossing black provisional ballots into the dumpster, new strict voter ID laws that saw students and low income voters turned away—the list goes on.” Palast has spent the past decade and a half investigating and identifying several techniques used to suppress ethnic minority and young votes – the voters that statistically vote Democrat. And this is surely the biggest and most unreported scandal of the most bizarre election any of us can recall. According to The Guardian, Palast is the “most important investigative reporter of our time – up there with Woodward and Bernstein.” The fast-talking fedora-topped reporter has investigated election irregularities for publications such as The Guardian, Rolling Stone, and BBC’s Newsnight, ever since the controversial Bush v Gore election in 2000. The 2000 election was too close to call without Florida, where votes were counted and recounted for weeks before George W Bush won the state by a margin of just 537 votes out of almost 6 million, and as a result the presidency. Palast uncovered the purge of 56,000 black voters in Florida – wrongly deleted from voter rolls as ex-felons. Now Palast’s investigative team are certain that vote suppression techniques were instrumental in last week’s Republican presidential and Senate victory. “For years I have been following the American election process which is nothing like in England,” says Palast. “Election manipulation is a very big factor in US elections. I found we had a massive problem in Florida in 2000, similarly in 2004 in Ohio with tens of thousands of invalidated votes. And now we are back at it again.” So why were Trump and his acolytes constantly drawing attention to vote rigging during the campaign? Trump was constantly banging on about debunked claims of large scale voter fraud, urging supporters to volunteer to monitor the polls, and creating an atmosphere where hysteria and conspiracy theories abounded. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, talked about busloads of people voting numerous times in some big cities. He also quipped that “dead people generally vote for Democrats, rather than Republicans.” Yet truly, you are more likely to be struck by lightning in the next year (a one in 1,042,000 chance, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) than to find a case of voter fraud by impersonation (31 in over a billion ballots cast from 2000 to 2014, according to Loyola law school’s research). Trump allies often cited the fact that Mitt Romney failed to win a single vote in 59 out of 1,687 Philadelphia precincts that happened to be almost entirely black. But with their demographic make up it’s no surprise why and investigations by Philadelphia’s Republican Party and the Philadelphia Inquirer found nothing untoward. Nationwide, 93% of black voters voted for Barack Obama that year. In 2012, an Arizona State University study concluded: “while fraud has occurred, the rate is infinitesimal, and in-person voter impersonation on Election Day, which prompted 37 state legislatures to enact or consider tough voter ID laws, is virtually non-existent.” Yet despite the lack of evidence or convictions for the crime of multiple voting, certain Republican figures devised draconian systems to prevent it, which have also served to deny electorally significant sections of the population of their right to vote. – Disproportionately ethnic votes, which are way more likely to be Democrats. And now the election is over, according to Palast, Trump’s increasing hysteria about vote rigging served as the ultimate smokescreen for a systematic denial of hundreds of thousands of crucial votes in the name of preventing fraud. – A ‘bigly’ enough scam to win Trump the Whitehouse. Palast started investigating Donald Trump’s increasingly hysterical claims that the election was rigged by people voting many times for Rolling Stone Magazine, and made some shocking discoveries in his report last August: The GOP’s Stealth War Against Voters. As a response to constant paranoia about voter fraud, 30 mainly Republican states have adopted a system called the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program (Crosscheck), according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. This system was devised in 2005 by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, better known as the anti-immigration fanatic responsible for Trump’s idea of building a wall on the US / Mexico border and getting Mexico to pay for it. Kobach, like Trump, has given lip service to conspiracy theories, especially ones that bolster fears of the growing influence of racial and ethnic minorities in the U.S. And now, interestingly he has been rewarded by Trump with a job on his Transition Team as adviser on immigration. Kobach convinced other states, including crucial swing states such as Michigan and North Carolina, to share their voter lists to look for the same name potentially registered to vote in more than one state. Crosscheck supposedly matches first, middle and last name, plus birth date, and provides the last four digits of a Social Security number for additional verification. Seems like a sensible method to stop people voting more than once in separate states. Only it soon became clear that Crosschecking was neither accurate nor fair and was not being used as it should. Some states including Florida dropped out of the program due to doubts about the reliability of its data — though others joined despite them. Palast’s team discovered Crosscheck had amassed a list of 7.2 million voters accused of being potential double voters.  Yet despite such an enormous list of suspects, there has only been four arrests. “It is a crime to deliberately register to vote twice,” says Palast. “You go to jail for five years. And to organise double voting on a significant scale is practically impossible. They are basically arresting no one – about four arrests out of a list which identified around seven million potential double voters, and I doubt these arrests are even due to the list.” Palast’s team managed (legally) to get hold of over 2 million names identified as potential double voters and soon began to spot obvious mistakes. The failsafes of National Insurance number and date of birth meant to make the system foolproof were not attached and appeared to have been ignored. “The most common name in the world is Mohamed Mohamed,” explains Palast, scanning through the list of names, “so for example under this Trump hit list, Mohamed Said Mohamed is supposed to be the same voter as Mohamed Osman Mohamed – in fact about one out of four middle names don’t match and Jr and Sr don’t match – so for example with James Brown a very common black name – they are matching James Brown Sr to James Brown Jr and saying it’s the same voter and then the middle names don’t even match.” U.S. Census data shows that minorities are overrepresented in 85 of 100 of the most common last names. “If your name is Washington, there’s an 89 percent chance you’re African-American,” says Palast. “If your last name is Hernandez, there’s a 94 percent chance you’re Hispanic.” This inherent bias results in an astonishing one in six Hispanics, one in seven Asian-Americans and one in nine African-Americans in Crosscheck states landing on what Palast dubs “Trump’s hit list.”  Potential double registrants were sent a postcard and asked to verify their address by mailing it back. “The junk mail experts we spoke to said this postcard is meant not to be returned. It’s inscrutable small print, doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t even say you’re accused of voting twice. It just says, please confirm your voting address,” explains Palast, “and most people of colour, poor voters don’t respond to this sort of mailing and they know that.” According to the Census Bureau, white voters are 21 percent more likely than blacks or Hispanics to respond to official requests; homeowners are 32 percent more likely to respond than renters; and the young are 74 percent less likely than the old to respond. Those on the move – students and the poor, who often shift apartments while hunting for work – might not get the mail in the first place. So if a few older white people, more likely to vote Republican were caught up in the mainly ethnic hit list, they were more likely to return the card and retain their right to vote. If you do not reply to the missive, state officials have discretion over what to do next, and the process varies from state to state. What Palast’s investigation made clear is ethnic voters were disproportionately likely to be targeted and purged from voter lists. All this despite other states choosing a more reliable system to prevent double voting: the Electronic Registration Information Center, (ERIC) – adopted by 20 member states plus the District of Columbia, according to its website. A 2013 report found ERIC actually boosted voter registration and turnout and eliminated errors in voter files. Palast’s investigators calculated 1.1 million people, many spread over crucial swing states were deprived of their right to vote last Tuesday.  According to the exit polls last Tuesday, 88% of black voters voted for Hillary Clinton, as well as  65% of hispanic and asian American voters. “The list is loaded overwhelmingly with voters of colour and the poor,” says Palast. “Many didn’t discover that their vote was stolen until they turned up last Tuesday and found their name missing. In the US they are given something called a provisional ballot, but if your name is not on the voter roll, you can fill out all the provisional votes you like they’re not going to count your vote. – They can’t even if you’re wrongly removed. “Trump’s victory margin in Michigan was 13,107 and the Michigan Crosscheck purge list was 449,922. Trump’s victory margin in Arizona- 85,257, Arizona Crosscheck purge list- 270,824;. Trump’s victory margin in North Carolina was 177,008 and the North Carolina Crosscheck purge list had 589,393 people on it.” Crosscheck was by no means the only method that came to light to disenfranchise voters more likely to vote Democrat. Palast also cites statistics on vote spoilage – “In the UK, glitches, spoiled or empty ballots are random,  but here, the US Civil Rights Commission found in Florida you are 900% more likely to lose your vote to spoilage if you are black than if you are white.” Statistician Philip Clinker author of the study, has said that this is typical nationwide, and according to Palast, if anything, the situation has got worse since the 2000 study. In 2013, the Supreme Court overturned part of the Voting Rights Act enacted in 1965 at the heart of the Civil Right Movement to prohibit racial discrimination in voting. This allowed all kinds of shenanigans in the lead up to last week that previously could have been challenged by the Department of Justice. In North Carolina, for example, Republicans even bragged: “African American Early Voting is Down.” – This after a federal court federal court found their voting restrictions “target African-Americans with almost surgical precision.” States, particularly those controlled by Republicans, made several changes this year, such as stricter voter ID laws and restricting polling booths, to make voting harder in a way that targeted generally Democrat-voting ethnic minority voters. There were reports of ridiculously long queues. As this is not the first election this has happened in, it appears to be a deliberate tactic. Harvard’s Stephen Pettigrew who studies polling lines found that ethnic minority voters were six times more likely to have to stand in line for over an hour. And losing out on work from disproportionately long queues costs people in ethnic minority areas proportionately more in lost income, which also puts them off voting next time. Pettigrew estimated that 200,000 people did not vote in 2014 because of queues encountered in 2012. “Election day was marred by long lines due to cuts in early voting and 868 fewer polling places,” adds Palast, “to say nothing of the untold millions who were unable to vote due to restrictive voter ID and felon disenfranchisement laws.” During the election last week, Palast also made a shocking discovery about voting machines in Ohio – one of the states in which he found many black voters were disenfranchised by a mixture of the Crosscheck and other systems, and exit polls differed markedly from the counted votes. “In the state of Ohio they have fancy new machines which can record an image of your vote and an anti-hacking function. They were turned off,” explains Palast. “I went to court with Bob Fitrakis a law professor in Ohio to have this overturned. I went into the judge’s chamber, and there the Republicans did not deny that it was turned off but they said to turn it back on would create havoc. – This after the FBI had issued a warning that they feared the machines would be hacked. “If you get such a warning, why would you turn off the anti-hacking mechanism? All this means we will never know if the machines were hacked and how many votes were lost if there was a challenge as there was no image of the vote recorded.” Greg Palast’s documentary and book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy  further details his warnings about voter suppression techniques we haven’t even mentioned in this article. “I stuck my neck out last year, saying they would steal this election, and I really hoped I would be left looking like an idiot.  “Turns out I was right though,” he adds. “The problem with the electoral college is a few thousand votes in tiny states can flip an election.” – An election President Elect Donald J Trump won despite still trailing nationwide in the popular vote. – A problem Donald Trump railed about too in the past, calling it “a disaster for democracy.” Civil rights organisation NAACP, which nine times managed to see off voter suppression of hundreds of thousands of votes in the federal courts over the past few months, is now mounting a legal battle to reinstate fully the Voter Registration Act. Palast and his team are certain that the chicanery they and others uncovered more than explains the difference between the outcome polls predicted and the result of the presidential and senate elections – especially when it comes to the exit polls taken as people had just voted. “Crosscheck does not account for all the shoplifting, but if you put it together with the other nine methods to steal votes that I identified, there’s little question that the exit polls were correct and Hillary Clinton won, or at least more voters voted for her in the swing states. Obviously she won the popular vote, but we have an electoral college system. If they counted all the votes in all the swing states the traditionally highly accurate exit polls would have been accurate,” adds Palast. Electoral Integrity blogger Theodore de Macedo Soares drew attention to the bizarre discrepancy between computer counted official vote counts and exit polls last week, writing: “According to the exit polls conducted by Edison Research, Clinton won four key battleground states (NC, PA, WI, and FL) in the 2016 Presidential Election that she went on to lose in the computerized vote counts.  With these states Clinton wins the Electoral College with a count of 302 versus 205 for Trump.  Clinton also won the national exit poll by 3.2% and holds a narrow lead in the national vote count still in progress. Exit polls were conducted in 28 states. In 23 states the discrepancies between the exit polls and the vote count favored Trump. In 13 of these states the discrepancies favoring Trump exceeded the margin of error of the state.” Palast believes such discrepancies, some far greater than any acceptable margin of error are indicative of systematic electoral rigging to steal Democrat votes: “The bane of pre-election polling is that pollsters must adjust for the likelihood of a person voting.  Exit polls solve the problem. The US State Department uses exit polling to determine whether you accept the outcome of a foreign election. The Brexit exit polls were extremely accurate. Yet in the Ukraine the US does not accept the result of the 2004 election because of the exit poll mismatch with the final official count. “And here for example in North Carolina we have the exit poll raw data at 2.1% favouring victory by Clinton, yet she loses by 3.8% in the final count. In Pennsylvania 4.4% victory suddenly became a 1.2 % loss; Wisconsin: 3.9% victory becomes a 1% loss; Florida: 1.1% victory becomes a 1% loss. “In the swing States we have this massive red shift because when people come out of the votes, exit pollsters can only ask, “How did you vote?” What they don’t ask, and can’t, is, “Was your vote counted?”” Kris Kobach did not give us a comment, but a statement from Kris Kobach’s office on the Crosscheck program said the Crosscheck program had been used for over a decade, and insisted “merely appearing as a potential match does not subject a voter to removal from a participating states’ voter registration roll/record.  Ineligible and/or unqualified persons who are registered voters are only removed from a states’ voter registration roll/record if the person is subject to removal pursuant to applicable state and federal elections provisions.”           The post Ethnic Votes Stolen in Crucial States Help Fix US Election For Trump Reveals Greg Palast appeared first on Greg Palast.15 Nov 16
The Election was Stolen – Here’s How… - Before a single vote was cast, the election was fixed by GOP and Trump operatives. Starting in 2013 – just as the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act – a coterie of Trump operatives, under the direction of Kris Kobach, Kansas Secretary of State, created a system to purge 1.1 million Americans of color from the voter rolls of GOP–controlled states. The system, called Crosscheck, is detailed in my Rolling Stone report, “The GOP’s Stealth War on Voters,” 8/24/2016. Crosscheck in action:   Trump victory margin in Michigan:                    13,107 Michigan Crosscheck purge list:                       449,922 Trump victory margin in Arizona:                       85,257 Arizona Crosscheck purge list:                           270,824 Trump victory margin in North Carolina:        177,008 North Carolina Crosscheck purge list:              589,393 On Tuesday, we saw Crosscheck elect a Republican Senate and as President, Donald Trump.  The electoral putsch was aided by nine other methods of attacking the right to vote of Black, Latino and Asian-American voters, methods detailed in my book and film, including “Caging,” “purging,” blocking legitimate registrations, and wrongly shunting millions to “provisional” ballots that will never be counted. Trump signaled the use of “Crosscheck” when he claimed the election is “rigged” because “people are voting many, many times.”  His operative Kobach, who also advised Trump on building a wall on the southern border, devised a list of 7.2 million “potential” double voters—1.1 million of which were removed from the voter rolls by Tuesday. The list is loaded overwhelmingly with voters of color and the poor. Here's a sample of the listThose accused of criminal double voting include, for example, Donald Alexander Webster Jr. of Ohio who is accused of voting a second time in Virginia as Donald EUGENE Webster SR. Note: Watch the four-minute video summary of Crosscheck. The investigation and explanation of these methods of fixing the vote can be found in my book and film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: a Tale of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits (2016). No, not everyone on the list loses their vote.  But this was not the only racially poisonous tactic that accounted for this purloined victory by Trump and GOP candidates. For example, in the swing state of North Carolina, it was reported that 6,700 Black folk lost their registrations because their registrations had been challenged by a group called Voter Integrity Project (VIP). VIP sent letters to households in Black communities “do not forward.”  If the voter had moved within the same building, or somehow did not get their mail (e.g. if their name was not on a mail box), they were challenged as “ghost” voters.  GOP voting officials happily complied with VIP with instant cancellation of registrations. The 6,700 identified in two counties were returned to the rolls through a lawsuit.  However, there was not one mention in the press that VIP was also behind Crosscheck in North Carolina; nor that its leader, Col. Jay Delancy, whom I’ve tracked for years has previously used this vote thievery, known as “caging,” for years.  Doubtless the caging game was wider and deeper than reported.  And by the way, caging, as my Rolling Stone co-author, attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr., tells me, is “a felony, it’s illegal, and punishable by high fines and even jail time.” There is still much investigation to do.  For example, there are millions of “provisional” ballots, “spoiled” (invalidated) ballots and ballots rejected from the approximately 30 million mailed in.  Unlike reporting in Britain, US media does not report the ballots that are rejected and tossed out—because, after all, as Joe Biden says, “Our elections are the envy of the world.”  Only in Kazakhstan, Joe. While there is a great deal of work to do, much documentation still to analyze, we’ll have to pry it from partisan voting chiefs who stamp the scrub lists, Crosscheck lists and ballot records, “confidential.” But, the evidence already in our hands makes me sadly confident in saying, Jim Crow, not the voters, elected Mr. Trump. What about those exit polls? Exit polls are the standard by which the US State Department measures the honesty of foreign elections.  Exit polling is, historically, deadly accurate. The bane of pre-election polling is that pollsters must adjust for the likelihood of a person voting.  Exit polls solve the problem. But three times in US history, pollsters have had to publicly flagellate themselves for their “errors.”  In 2000, exit polls gave Al Gore the win in Florida; in 2004, exit polls gave Kerry the win in Ohio, and now, in swing states, exit polls gave the presidency to Hillary Clinton. So how could these multi-million-dollar Ph.d-directed statisticians with decades of experience get exit polls so wrong? Answer:  they didn’t.  The polls in Florida in 2000 were accurate.  That’s because exit pollsters can only ask, “How did you vote?”  What they don’t ask, and can’t, is, “Was your vote counted.” In 2000, in Florida, GOP Secretary of State Katherine Harris officially rejected 181,173 ballots, as “spoiled” because their chads were hung and other nonsense excuses.  Those ballots overwhelmingly were marked for Al Gore.  The exit polls included those 181,173 people who thought they had voted – but their vote didn’t count.  In other words, the exit polls accurately reflected whom the voters chose, not what Katherine Harris chose. In 2004, a similar number of votes were invalidated (including an enormous pile of “provisional” ballots) by Ohio’s GOP Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell.  Again, the polls reflected that Kerry was the choice of 51% of the voters.  But the exit polls were “wrong” because they didn’t reflect the ballots invalidated by Blackwell. Notably, two weeks after the 2004 US election, the US State Department refused the recognize the Ukraine election results because the official polls contradicted the exit polls. And here we go again. 2016: Hillary wins among those queried as they exit the polling station—yet Trump is declared winner in GOP-controlled swings states. And, once again, the expert pollsters are forced to apologize—when they should be screaming, “Fraud!  Here’s the evidence the vote was fixed!” Now there’s a new trope to explain away the exit polls that gave Clinton the win.  Supposedly, Trump voters were ashamed to say they voted for Trump.  Really?  ON WHAT PLANET?  For Democracy Now! and Rolling Stone I was out in several swing states.  In Ohio, yes, a Black voter may have been reluctant to state support for Trump. But a white voter in the exurbs of Dayton, where the Trump signs grew on lawns like weeds, and the pews of the evangelical mega churches were slathered with Trump and GOP brochures, risked getting spat on if they even whispered, “Hillary.” This country is violently divided, but in the end, there simply aren’t enough white guys to elect Trump nor a Republican Senate.  The only way they could win was to eliminate the votes of non-white guys—and they did so by tossing Black provisional ballots into the dumpster, ID laws that turn away students—the list goes on.  It’s a web of complex obstacles to voting by citizens of color topped by that lying spider, Crosscheck. ***** Rent it or buy Greg Palast's movie from Amazon or Vimeo. Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie. Donate to the Palast Investigative Fund and get the signed DVD. Download the FREE Movie Comic Book. Rent or buy the film from Amazon or Vimeo. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!  Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info. GregPalast.com   The post The Election was Stolen – Here’s How… appeared first on Greg Palast.11 Nov 16

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(U//LES) Homeland Security Investigations Presentation: Criminal Exploitation of Digital Currencies - What is a Virtual Currency? • An alternative financial value system involving the exchange of funds to purchase precious metals or other value base which can later be used in exchange for products and services. • Is not registered anywhere and it is not governed by any law other than arbitration private forums. • Personal data is not required. • The system focuses strictly on activities of the forum. • Information stored for two months and then permanently deleted. Types of Virtual Currencies E-Currency / E-Wallets Digital Gold Virtual World Virtual Games Merchants (FB, Amazon) Crypto-Currencies ** … 13 Jan
(U//FOUO) U.K. Ministry of Defence Guide: Understanding the Arab People - The Arab World is a vast area which is home to people from diverse cultures. The way in which people behave and interact with you will therefore vary greatly across the region. This guide discusses aspects of Arab culture that you might experience in Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, the Palestinian Territories, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Yemen. Further reading on individual countries is recommended before you deploy. Most Arabs are Sunni Muslims who speak Arabic. However, there are many different religions, ethnic and social groups in the Arab world, among them Christians, Jews, Shi’a and Sunni Muslims, Kurds, Turks and Berbers. Some of these groups have suffered oppression in their countries, but many live happily as Arabs and as part of Arab society. While some Arab countries are very conservative and have strict rules about the role of women, others are more permissive in their approach to issues like alcohol, religion and education. The familiar stereotype of the Bedouin Arab with his camel, tent, robes and blood feuds is only a small part of Arab identity and history. In fact, this traditional way of life has died out in many parts of the Arab world, and is not significant today in areas like North Africa. With the improvement in technology and social media in recent years, people across the Arab World have been exposed to other cultures to a much greater degree than previous generations. Approximately 70% of the Arab World are under the age of 30 and so the entire region is undergoing a transformation as people try to find ways to integrate their traditional cultures into the modern world. … Religious Practice. Islam affects almost every aspect of life as a Muslim Arab. People use Islamic symbols to decorate their homes and cars, carry miniature Qur’ans with them, and go on pilgrimage to various holy shrines around the Arab world. Most Arabs follow a pattern of daily prayer, celebrate Islamic festivals and holidays, and adhere to the rules of Islam. Verses from the Qur’an are memorised. In most Arab countries, Islam also affects politics and law, influencing marriage, inheritance and divorce law, as well as many aspects of business and banking. It is common to see a copy of the qu’ran on car dashboards in Muslim countries. Sharia. Sharia is the law as revealed by God and based on the philosophy laid out in the Qur’an and Hadith (the sayings of the Prophet Muhammed). It provides the legal basis for all public rituals but also guides an individual in their personal life, such as how to wash and how to behave in relationships. Sharia is interpreted for the people by religious scholars (collectively known as an Ulema). In Saudi Arabia and Sudan, sharia is interpreted very strictly and encompasses all aspects of domestic and civil law. In other countries it is integrated with other influences. For example, Tunisia is a former French colony and during that period French civil law applied. Since gaining independence the law has developed and evolved to incorporate sharia into the existing framework, resulting in a more liberal interpretation. Christians. There are an estimated 12-16 million Christians in the Arab world, representing 5-7% of the total population. Larger communities are located in Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Sudan, Jordan and Iraq. The Coptic church is the most important Christian denomination in the Middle East, and suffers from discrimination in Egypt and elsewhere. A significant minority of these Christians do not consider themselves Arabs. … 8 Jan
(U//LES) ATF Chemical Analysis of Exploding Targets - Over the past few months, ATF Agents have contacted the Forensic Lab to inquire about the chemical components of various exploding targets. To assist Agents with their inquiry, exploding targets were purchased (September 2012 to October 2012) from numerous distributors and chemically analyzed. All exploding targets contain an oxidizer and a fuel (catalyst). When these two components are properly mixed, the resulting mixture becomes a shock sensitive explosive. The exploding target oxidizers and fuels were analyzed using Infrared Spectroscopy, Scanning Electron Microscope / Electron Dispersive Spectroscopy (SEM/EDS), and X-Ray Diffraction. All analysis was supervised by Forensic Chemist John Jermain. For additional questions and information, contact John at 925.280.3607. Additional studies dealing with exploding targets will be conducted by Forensic Chemist Brittany Crane and will be published at a later date. … 7 Jan
Office of the Director of National Intelligence Background Report: Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections - “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections” is a declassified version of a highly classified assessment that has been provided to the President and to recipients approved by the President. The Intelligence Community rarely can publicly reveal the full extent of its knowledge or the precise bases for its assessments, as the release of such information would reveal sensitive sources or methods and imperil the ability to collect critical foreign intelligence in the future. Thus, while the conclusions in the report are all reflected in the classified assessment, the declassified report does not and cannot include the full supporting information, including specific intelligence and sources and methods. The Analytic Process The mission of the Intelligence Community is to seek to reduce the uncertainty surrounding foreign activities, capabilities, or leaders’ intentions. This objective is difficult to achieve when seeking to understand complex issues on which foreign actors go to extraordinary lengths to hide or obfuscate their activities. On these issues of great importance to US national security, the goal of intelligence analysis is to provide assessments to decisionmakers that are intellectually rigorous, objective, timely, and useful, and that adhere to tradecraft standards. The tradecraft standards for analytic products have been refined over the past ten years. These standards include describing sources (including their reliability and access to the information they provide), clearly expressing uncertainty, distinguishing between underlying information and analysts’ judgments and assumptions, exploring alternatives, demonstrating relevance to the customer, using strong and transparent logic, and explaining change or consistency in judgments over time. Applying these standards helps ensure that the Intelligence Community provides US policymakers, warfighters, and operators with the best and most accurate insight, warning, and context, as well as potential opportunities to advance US national security. Intelligence Community analysts integrate information from a wide range of sources, including human sources, technical collection, and open source information, and apply specialized skills and structured analytic tools to draw inferences informed by the data available, relevant past activity, and logic and reasoning to provide insight into what is happening and the prospects for the future. A critical part of the analyst’s task is to explain uncertainties associated with major judgments based on the quantity and quality of the source material, information gaps, and the complexity of the issue. When Intelligence Community analysts use words such as “we assess” or “we judge,” they are conveying an analytic assessment or judgment. Some analytic judgments are based directly on collected information; others rest on previous judgments, which serve as building blocks in rigorous analysis. In either type of judgment, the tradecraft standards outlined above ensure that analysts have an appropriate basis for the judgment. Intelligence Community judgments often include two important elements: judgments of how likely it is that something has happened or will happen (using terms such as “likely” or “unlikely”) and confidence levels in those judgments (low, moderate, and high) that refer to the evidentiary basis, logic and reasoning, and precedents that underpin the judgments. Determining Attribution in Cyber Incidents The nature of cyberspace makes attribution of cyber operations difficult but not impossible. Every kind of cyber operation—malicious or not—leaves a trail. US Intelligence Community analysts use this information, their constantly growing knowledge base of previous events and known malicious actors, and their knowledge of how these malicious actors work and the tools that they use, to attempt to trace these operations back to their source. In every case, they apply the same tradecraft standards described in the Analytic Process above. Analysts consider a series of questions to assess how the information compares with existing knowledge and adjust their confidence in their judgments as appropriate to account for any alternative hypotheses and ambiguities. An assessment of attribution usually is not a simple statement of who conducted an operation, but rather a series of judgments that describe whether it was an isolated incident, who was the likely perpetrator, that perpetrator’s possible motivations, and whether a foreign government had a role in ordering or leading the operation. … 6 Jan
U.S. National Electric Grid Security and Resilience Action Plan - The Joint United States-Canada Electric Grid Security and Resilience Strategy (Strategy) is a collaborative effort between the Federal Governments of the United States and Canada and is intended to strengthen the security and resilience of the U.S. and Canadian electric grid from all adversarial, technological, and natural hazards and threats. The Strategy, released concurrently with this National Electric Grid Security and Resilience Action Plan (Action Plan), details bilateral goals to address the vulnerabilities of the respective and shared electric grid infrastructure of the United States and Canada, not only as an energy security concern, but for reasons of national security. The implementation of the Strategy requires continued action of a nationwide network of governments, departments and agencies (agencies), and private sector partners. This Action Plan details the activities, deliverables, and timelines that will be undertaken primarily by U.S. Federal agencies for the United States to make progress toward the Strategy’s goals. The security and resilience of the integrated U.S. and Canadian electric grid is dynamic. New threats, hazards, and vulnerabilities emerge even as the two countries work to prevent, protect against, and mitigate their potential consequences and to improve their ability to respond to, and recover from, disruptive incidents. Secure and reliable electricity is essential for safe and continued operation of infrastructure owned by businesses, governments, schools, hospitals, and other organizations. Structure of the Action Plan The Strategy defines three strategic goals to reduce the systemic risk to the electric grid through combined and aligned organizational, technical, and policy efforts across the public and private sectors. This Action Plan is organized around the same three strategic goals: 1. Protect Today’s Electric Grid and Enhance Preparedness 2. Manage Contingencies and Enhance Response and Recovery Efforts 3. Build a More Secure and Resilient Future Electric Grid Implementation of the Strategy and Action Plan The Secretaries of Energy and Homeland Security, in coordination with other agencies and stakeholders, will lead the implementation of the Strategy and Action Plan. The Secretaries of Energy and Homeland Security will report annually to the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism and the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology on progress made in implementing the Strategy and Action Plan in coordination with other agencies. Agencies are also expected to take steps to increase the security and resilience of the electric grid that are not explicitly included in either the Strategy or Action Plan. These efforts will also be included in the progress report to the President. This Action Plan is not intended to, nor does it, create any binding obligations under international law. The Action Plan focuses on U.S. Federal actions that may be taken within current statutory authorities and resources. Implementation of these actions will occur in consultation with State and provincial governments, regulators, and utilities, where applicable, and will require the sustained, coordinated, and complementary efforts of individuals and groups from both the United States and Canada, including many who contributed to the development of the Strategy, such as private sector partners, policy makers, and the public. Agencies will engage with private sector partners to the extent permitted by and consistent with applicable law and policy, including, but not limited to, the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), 5 U.S.C. App. 2. Iterations and future developments of this effort will be guided by each country’s Action Plan to pursue the goals of the Strategy. The Strategy sets the groundwork upon which to build future activity, just as multiple prior executive branch efforts informed the Strategy: •• Presidential Policy Directive (PPD) 8, “National Preparedness” (2011), PPD 21, “Critical Infrastructure Security and Resilience” (2013), and PPD 41, “United States Cyber Incident Coordination” (2016); •• Executive Order 13636, “Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity,” Executive Order 13653, “Preparing the United States for the Impacts of Climate Change” (2013), and Executive Order 13744, “Coordinating Efforts to Prepare the Nation for Space Weather Events” (2016); •• Presidential Memorandum, “Climate Change and National Security” (2016); •• National Space Weather Strategy and National Space Weather Action Plan (2015). 2 Jan
Joint United States-Canada Electric Grid Security and Resilience Strategy - This Joint United States-Canada Electric Grid Security and Resilience Strategy (Strategy) is a collaborative effort between the Federal Governments of the United States and Canada and is intended to strengthen the security and resilience of the U.S. and Canadian electric grid from all adversarial, technological, and natural hazards and threats. The Strategy addresses the vulnerabilities of the two countries’ respective and shared electric grid infrastructure, not only as an energy security concern, but for reasons of national security. This joint Strategy relies on the existing strong bilateral collaboration between the United States and Canada, and reflects a joint commitment to enhance a shared approach to risk management for the electric grid. It also articulates a common vision of the future electric grid that depends on effective and expanded collaboration among those who own, operate, protect, and rely on the electric grid. Because the electric grid is complex, vital to the functioning of modern society, and dependent on other infrastructure for its function, the United States and Canada developed the Strategy under the shared principle that security and resilience require increasingly collaborative efforts and shared approaches to risk management. The Strategy envisions a secure and resilient electric grid that is able to withstand hazards and recover efficiently from disruptions. In pursuit of this goal, the Strategy organizes joint approaches to protect today’s electric grid, manage contingencies by enhancing response and recovery capabilities, and cultivate a more secure and resilient future electric grid. As an expression of shared intent and approach, the Strategy organizes joint efforts to manage current and future security challenges. Three strategic goals underpin the effort to strengthen the security and resilience of the electric grid: •• Protect Today’s Electric Grid and Enhance Preparedness: A secure and resilient electric grid that protects system assets and critical functions and is able to withstand and recover rapidly from disruptions is a priority for the governments of both the United States and Canada. •• Manage Contingencies and Enhance Response and Recovery Efforts: The Strategy sets out a shared approach for enhancing continuity and response capabilities, supporting mutual aid arrangements such as cyber mutual assistance across a diverse set of stakeholders, understanding interdependencies, and expanding available tools for recovery and rebuilding. •• Build a More Secure and Resilient Future Electric Grid: The United States and Canada are working to build a more secure and resilient electric grid that is responsive to a variety of threats, hazards, and vulnerabilities. To achieve this, the electric grid will need to be more flexible and agile, with an architecture into which new technologies may be readily incorporated. The Strategy will be implemented in accordance with forthcoming U.S. and Canadian Action Plans, which will each detail specific steps and milestones for achieving the Strategy’s goals within their respective countries. These documents are intended to guide future activity within areas of Federal jurisdiction, with full respect for the different jurisdictional authorities in both countries. The Strategy is not intended to, nor does it, create any binding obligations under international law. Implementation will occur in consultation with state and provincial governments, regulators, and utilities, where applicable, and will require the sustained, coordinated, and complementary efforts of individuals and groups from both countries, including many who contributed to the development of the Strategy, such as private sector partners, policy makers, and the public. The two countries’ common effort to strengthen the security and resilience of the electric grid is imperative for both governments and all who depend on this critical asset. 2 Jan
DHS-FBI Joint Analysis Report on GRIZZLY STEPPE Russian Malicious Cyber Activity - This Joint Analysis Report (JAR) is the result of analytic efforts between the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). This document provides technical details regarding the tools and infrastructure used by the Russian civilian and military intelligence Services (RIS) to compromise and exploit networks and endpoints associated with the U.S. election, as well as a range of U.S. Government, political, and private sector entities. The U.S. Government is referring to this malicious cyber activity by RIS as GRIZZLY STEPPE. Previous JARs have not attributed malicious cyber activity to specific countries or threat actors. However, public attribution of these activities to RIS is supported by technical indicators from the U.S. Intelligence Community, DHS, FBI, the private sector, and other entities. This determination expands upon the Joint Statement released October 7, 2016, from the Department of Homeland Security and the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security. This activity by RIS is part of an ongoing campaign of cyber-enabled operations directed at the U.S. government and its citizens. These cyber operations have included spearphishing campaigns targeting government organizations, critical infrastructure entities, think tanks, universities, political organizations, and corporations leading to the theft of information. In foreign countries, RIS actors conducted damaging and/or disruptive cyber-attacks, including attacks on critical infrastructure networks. In some cases, RIS actors masqueraded as third parties, hiding behind false online personas designed to cause the victim to misattribute the source of the attack. This JAR provides technical indicators related to many of these operations, recommended mitigations, suggested actions to take in response to the indicators provided, and information on how to report such incidents to the U.S. Government. … Description The U.S. Government confirms that two different RIS actors participated in the intrusion into a U.S. political party. The first actor group, known as Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) 29, entered into the party’s systems in summer 2015, while the second, known as APT28, entered in spring 2016. Both groups have historically targeted government organizations, think tanks, universities, and corporations around the world. APT29 has been observed crafting targeted spearphishing campaigns leveraging web links to a malicious dropper; once executed, the code delivers Remote Access Tools (RATs) and evades detection using a range of techniques. APT28 is known for leveraging domains that closely mimic those of targeted organizations and tricking potential victims into entering legitimate credentials. APT28 actors relied heavily on shortened URLs in their spearphishing email campaigns. Once APT28 and APT29 have access to victims, both groups exfiltrate and analyze information to gain intelligence value. These groups use this information to craft highly targeted spearphishing campaigns. These actors set up operational infrastructure to obfuscate their source infrastructure, host domains and malware for targeting organizations, establish command and control nodes, and harvest credentials and other valuable information from their targets. In summer 2015, an APT29 spearphishing campaign directed emails containing a malicious link to over 1,000 recipients, including multiple U.S. Government victims. APT29 used legitimate domains, to include domains associated with U.S. organizations and educational institutions, to host malware and send spearphishing emails. In the course of that campaign, APT29 successfully compromised a U.S. political party. At least one targeted individual activated links to malware hosted on operational infrastructure of opened attachments containing malware. APT29 delivered malware to the political party’s systems, established persistence, escalated privileges, enumerated active directory accounts, and exfiltrated email from several accounts through encrypted connections back through operational infrastructure. In spring 2016, APT28 compromised the same political party, again via targeted spearphishing. This time, the spearphishing email tricked recipients into changing their passwords through a fake webmail domain hosted on APT28 operational infrastructure. Using the harvested credentials, APT28 was able to gain access and steal content, likely leading to the exfiltration of information from multiple senior party members. The U.S. Government assesses that information was leaked to the press and publicly disclosed. … Reported Russian Military and Civilian Intelligence Services (RIS) Alternate Names APT28 APT29 Agent.btz BlackEnergy V3 BlackEnergy2 APT CakeDuke Carberp CHOPSTICK CloudDuke CORESHELL CosmicDuke COZYBEAR COZYCAR COZYDUKE CrouchingYeti DIONIS Dragonfly Energetic Bear EVILTOSS Fancy Bear GeminiDuke GREY CLOUD HammerDuke HAMMERTOSS Havex MiniDionis MiniDuke OLDBAIT OnionDuke Operation Pawn Storm PinchDuke Powershell backdoor Quedagh Sandworm SEADADDY Seaduke SEDKIT SEDNIT Skipper Sofacy SOURFACE SYNful Knock Tiny Baron Tsar Team twain_64.dll (64-bit X-Agent implant) VmUpgradeHelper.exe (X-Tunnel implant) Waterbug X-Agent29 Dec 16
(U//FOUO) DHS Cyber Threats to the Homeland Presentation - 28 Dec 16
U.S. House Encryption Working Group Year-End Report 2016 - On February 16, 2016, a federal magistrate judge in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California issued an order requiring Apple, Inc. to assist the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in obtaining encrypted data off of an iPhone related to a 2015 shooting in San Bernardino, California. Apple resisted the order. This particular case was resolved when the FBI pursued a different method to access the data stored on the device. But the case, and the heated rhetoric exchanged by parties on all sides, reignited a decades-old debate about government access to encrypted data. The law enforcement community often refers to their challenge in this context as “going dark.” In essence, “going dark” refers to advancements in technology that leave law enforcement and the national security community unable to obtain certain forms of evidence. In recent years, it has become synonymous with the growing use of strong default encryption available to consumers that makes it increasingly difficult for law enforcement agencies to access both real-time communications and stored information. The FBI has been a leading critic of this trend, arguing that law enforcement may no longer be able “to access the evidence we need to prosecute crime and prevent terrorism, even with lawful authority.” As a result, the law enforcement community has historically advocated for legislation to “ensure that we can continue to obtain electronic information and evidence pursuant to the legal authority that Congress has provided to keep America safe.” Technology companies, civil society advocates, a number of federal agencies, and some members of the academic community argue that encryption protects hundreds of millions of people against theft, fraud, and other criminal acts. Cryptography experts and information security professionals believe that it is exceedingly difficult and impractical, if not impossible, to devise and implement a system that gives law enforcement exceptional access to encrypted data without also compromising security against hackers, industrial spies, and other malicious actors. Further, requiring exceptional access to encrypted data would, by definition, prohibit some encryption design best practices, such as “forward secrecy,” from being implemented. These two outlooks are not mutually exclusive. The widespread adoption of encryption poses a real challenge to the law enforcement community and strong encryption is essential to both individual privacy and national security. A narrative that sets government agencies against private industry, or security interests against individual privacy, does not accurately reflect the complexity of the issue. … Compelled Disclosure by Individuals Although much of the debate has focused on requiring third party companies to decrypt information for the government, an alternative approach might involve compelling decryption by the individual consumers of these products. On a case-by-case basis, with proper court process, requiring an individual to provide a passcode or thumbprint to unlock a device could assist law enforcement in obtaining critical evidence without undermining the security or privacy of the broader population. Given evolving technologies and the trend towards using biometrics—like a fingerprint or facial recognition software—to decrypt data, Congress might consider the following questions: § Can the government compel an individual to unlock his phone without violating the protection against self-incrimination guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution? § With respect to the Fifth Amendment, is there a substantive or legal difference between unlocking a device with a passcode and unlocking the device with a biometric identifier? Is entering a passcode a “testimonial act,” as some courts have held? Is a fingerprint different in any way? § What is the proper legal standard for compelling an individual to unlock a device? § Are there other circumstances that would enable the government to compel production of a passcode without undermining the Fifth Amendment?24 Dec 16
U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Declassified Report on Snowden Disclosures - In June 2013, former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden perpetrated the largest and most damaging public release of classified information in U.S. intelligence history. In August 2014, the Chairman and Ranking Member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) directed Committee staff to carry out a comprehensive review of the unauthorized disclosures. The aim of the review was to allow the Committee to explain to other Members of Congress–and, where possible, the American people–how this breach occurred, what the U.S. Government knows about the man who committed it, and whether the security shortfalls it highlighted had been remedied. Over the next two years, Committee staff requested hundreds of documents from the Intelligence Community (IC), participated in dozens of briefings and meetings with IC personnel, conducted several interviews with key individuals with knowledge of Snowden’s background and actions, and traveled to NSA Hawaii to visit Snowden’s last two work locations. The review focused on Snowden’s background, how he was able to remove more than 1.5 million classified documents from secure NSA networks, what the 1.5 million documents contained, and the damage their removal caused to national security. The Committee’s review was careful not to disturb any criminal investigation or future prosecution of Snowden, who has remained in Russia since he fled there on June 23, 2013. Accordingly) the Committee did not interview individuals whom the Department of Justice identified as possible witnesses at Snowden’s trial, including Snowden himself, nor did the Committee request any matters that may have occurred before a grand jury. Instead, the IC provided the Committee with access to other individuals who possessed substantively similar knowledge as the possible witnesses. Similarly, rather than interview Snowden’s NSA coworkers and supervisors directly, Committee staff interviewed IC personnel who had reviewed reports of interviews with Snowden’s co-workers and supervisors. The Committee remains hopeful that Snowden will return to the United States to face justice. The bulk of the Committee’s 36-page review, which includes 230 footnotes, must remain classified to avoid causing further harm to national security; however, the Committee has made a number of unclassified findings. These findings demonstrate that the public narrative popularized by Snowden and his allies is rife with falsehoods, exaggerations, and crucial omissions, a pattern that began before he stole 1.5 million sensitive documents. First, Snowden caused tremendous damage to national security, and the vast majority of the documents he stole have nothing to do with programs impacting individual privacy interests-they instead pertain to military, defense? and intelligence programs of great interest to America,s adversaries. A review of the materials Snowden compromised makes clear that he handed over secrets that protect American troops overseas and secrets that provide vital defenses against terrorists and nation-states. Some of Snowden’s disclosures exacerbated and accelerated existing trends that diminished the IC’s capabilities to collect against legitimate foreign intelligence targets, while others resulted in the loss of intelligence streams that had saved American lives. Snowden insists he has not shared the full cache of 1.5 million classified documents with anyone; however, in June 2016, the deputy chairman of the Russian parliaments defense and security committee publicly conceded that “Snowden did share intelligence” with his government. Additionally, although Snowden’s professed objective may have been to inform the general public, the information he released is also available to Russian, Chinese, Iranian, and North Korean govemment intelligence services; any terrorist with Internet access; and many others who wish to do harm to the United States.23 Dec 16

Sunlight Foundation Blog

Congress makes the role of U.S. chief technology officer permanent - On January 6, 2017, President Barack Obama quietly signed a bill that codified the role of the chief technology officer (CTO) of the United States into law. Congress made the US CTO permanent in the American Innovation and Competitiveness Act, which passed the Senate on December 10 and the House on December 16. In doing so, our legislators recognized a reality that’s clear around the globe: technology is now part of every facet of society, including government itself. In the 21st century, it’s critical that the President of the United States have a technologist advising him or her on policy decisions. Congress codifying the role of the CTO in U.S. government is an important, unheralded action that institutionalizes one of the promises that President Obama made before entering office. Notably, the US CTO is now a Senate-confirmed position, however, which will place appropriate scrutiny on the background and qualifications of the person nominated to serve. Unfortunately, the legislation that President Obama signed into law does not put the US CTO at the cabinet table. In Section 604 of the American Innovation and Competitiveness Act, Congress designates the US CTO as an associate director in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), reporting to the Director. To put it another way, the US CTO is now officially the “T” in OSTP. What this means in practice is that there is a layer between the nation’s top technologist and the president. President-elect Trump can and should address this by designating his US CTO as an assistant to the president, as President Obama has done for the three people who served in the position in his administration. We hope that he does so, given the importance of the president receiving the best possible advice about technology at the earliest possible time in decision-making processes. President Obama’s choices for US CTO offer three different models for Trump to consider. Aneesh Chopra had a technology policy background prior to the White House, rising out of Virginia state government, and focused on “government as a convener,” working within the constraints of a position that had no statutory authority and little budget. His focus on healthcare technology, standards, and open data laid the groundwork for the progress that is followed. Todd Park, the nation’s second CTO, was a successful serial entrepreneur in the private sector, bringing a relentless energy to government as the Department of Health and Human Services first chief technology officer before ascending to the White House. Park played a crucial role in turning around healthcare.gov after its disastrous launch in the fall of 2013, working himself to exhaustion to fix the ailing online marketplace for health insurance. He champion open data as well, expanding the successful model that he had pioneered at HHS. The third US CTO, Megan Smith, built upon the legacy of her predecessors and made the role her own as the first US CTO with a technical background. Smith, a MIT-trained mechanical engineer who worked at Google for nearly a decade before entering government, has focused upon hey host of policy and technical initiatives, for open government to increasing the diversity of the nation’s technologists. Her relentless optimism and inspiring vision for the use of technology to improve how government works, from open source to open data, leaves big shoes to fill. In thinking through this decision and finding the right candidate, President-elect Trump may will turn to Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who has deep connections in Silicon Valley. Whether Thiel himself would be willing to answer public service is anyone’s guess, but his networks are likely to be tapped to find someone with both the expertise required for the role and the gravitas to influence President-elect Trump’s decisions. Whomever is tapped to serve will inherit and extraordinary legacy of policy achievements, programs, and initiatives from the current White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the largest in the nation’s history. We hope that the President-elect chooses wisely, given how high the stakes are for delivering digital services and implementing new laws and regulations, and select a US CTO who will uphold and expand the legacy of opening government through technology from the past decade. Our wishlist for the US CTO today, however, starts with the same qualifications as it did in 2009: “A small-d democratic visionary: The CTO should be someone who has a vision of how the Internet and related technological advances can involve Americans in their government again, improve the effectiveness of government, and make the democratic process more engaging and participatory.” Sunlight called for the rapid appointment a US CTO eight years ago and hopes to see one soon in 2017.12 Jan
Trump to enter White House with unprecedented conflicts of interest - Today’s announcement by President-elect Donald J. Trump failed to address the unprecedented conflicts of interest he brings to Presidency. Trump is putting his business interests ahead of the interests of the country by failing to live up to well-established practices for addressing financial conflicts. Trump’s plan leaves the Presidency vulnerable to self-dealing, constitutional crisis, the appearance of corruption, and other abuses of power. Trump’s approach to governance and ethics repudiates decades of accepted norms for modern democratic accountability. Trump’s trust is not blind. His brand will conflict with his Presidency. His taxes remain secret, despite decades of precedent. The Trump Presidency will be mired in litigation, doubt, scandal, and crisis. Congress needs to act. The press corps needs public support as we all prepare for an unprecedented conflict between private interests and the office of the American President.11 Jan
Open Contracting: What Works for American Cities - (Photo credit: Jen Gallardo/Flickr)Through the What Works Cities Initiative, Sunlight Foundation is working with mid-sized cities to support the development of open-data reforms. Connecting a citywide commitment to open data to the challenges faced by city departments is essential to the success of this work. Few challenges present a greater opportunity than opening contracting data. In 2013, we launched a procurement-focused initiative that resulted in our Open Procurement Data Guidelines and uncovered trends in local procurement specifically. Several months ago, we announced that we were picking this research back up with the help of our friends at the Open Contracting Partnership (OCP), to improve the open data support that we provide to cities and to better support our What Works Cities partners at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Government Performance Lab in their work on results-driven contracting. This guest post by OCP’s Sierra Ramirez explains the results of this work. Have you ever wondered how much your city spends on school lunches? What about services for the homeless? Cities spend billions of dollars every year on goods and services that residents care about, and yet sometimes they are left in the dark when it comes to important questions about who is being paid, what is being procured, and how much is being spent. Together with the Sunlight Foundation, we’ve looked at  best practices in making this contract data more open and transparent to help reduce corruption in the procurement process, improve government effectiveness, and allow for more accountability and oversight in the process. Nowhere is this more important than in municipal procurement. Cities opening and sharing information about their acquisition needs, contract process, and the performance of their vendors will help to improve their communities by building greater trust in government spending. It will also increase opportunities for potential vendors by lowering barriers to identify relevant bids and understanding the government’s decision-making in contract awards. Finally, it makes the internal planning and preparation process more effective as well by having access to timely information across government agencies. Based on this research and other previous work, we have produced a set of simple, practical guidelines for city procurement officials and a comprehensive research report to consider as they develop their own contracting data release programs. Real world cases highlight best practices from the 22 North American cities included in the research, drawing on interviews conducted with municipal staff, by phone and in person, across the U.S., Mexico City and Montreal. Here are 5 innovations we have identified: Planning data in New York CityThe earlier a municipality gives vendors a sense of its future needs, the more preliminary planning they can do. In 2011 the New York City Council passed a law that requires the mayor to coordinate all executive departments to share upcoming contracting opportunities for the coming year, at least five months in advance. By 31 July, each agency’s plan for the year ahead must be published online and include detailed information on when the contract opportunity will be released, the contract vehicle, and the number of staff needed and their qualifications. This level of specificity gives vendors time to identify key personnel and research the best method to provide the goods and services. Solicitation data in Montgomery County, MDInformation about new contract offers should be shared about with potential vendors, including information about the good/service to be purchased, the value of the procurement, and any accompanying documents that justify or explain exemptions from regular procedures and requirements (such as sole source contracts). Montgomery County, MD releases a wide variety of procurement datasets as part of its comprehensive OpenMontgomery initiative. MoCo publishes a variety of solicitations, including potential contracts small enough that they are not subject to its “formal” procurement process, and even calls attention to existing contracts whose terms will be expiring soon. By doing so, it provides other vendors opportunities to compete, and ensures for itself a better deal. Award data in Miami-Dade, FLDetails about the government’s decisions should be published, stipulating the winner, price, and reasons for contracting with a particular vendor. Before selecting a vendor, Miami-Dade publishes interim recommendations online and provides a period of time for challenges to be filed. This ensures competitors who have been ruled out can examine the proposed decision before it becomes irrevocable. Miami-Dade is also unique in highlighting contracts being issued on a sole-source basis to give other potential vendors a chance to offer equivalent services at competitive rates. Contract data in Cincinnati, OHThe full text of signed contracts including all amendments should be published including structured data about key details such as awardee, amount, date etc. Cincinnati’s open data portal includes procurement datasets. The primary contracts dataset contains links to a variety of contract-related documents, including the signed contract itself. The records are updated to reflect any amendments to a contract. Implementation data in Austin, TXInformation on the implementation of contracts should be disclosed, including information such as implementation milestones, actual completion date, and information on funding extensions outside the scope of the original agreement. Austin, like many cities, publishes a list of currently active contracts. What is unusual is that Austin releases details for each contract about the maximum expenditure for the contract, the amount currently ordered, and the amount actually spent up to this point. These details provide some insight into the progress of each contract over time. It also displays a list of current contracts for each vendor. While that information can be assembled from the published data of other cities, doing so automatically makes the data more accessible to less technically savvy stakeholders. How does open contracting help? Open contracting transforms public spending by making documents and data ‘open by default’ across the entire chain of public contracting and using this information to engage business and citizens to shape better outcomes. One resource, the Open Contracting Data Standard, describes what to publish and how to make this information useful and practical. This technical schema provides for structured, machine-readable information on all relevant documents in municipal procurement such as budgets, bid proposals, bidder information, contracts, and invoices. Using the guidelines, research and resources, procurement professionals can work with stakeholders to identify objectives, develop policies, and implement changes. We find that engagement with relevant stakeholders from the policy development stage, all the way through day-to-day disclosure is critical to ensuring results. In fact, each step in the contracting phase represents a unique opportunity for publishing open data. At a minimum, there should be timely, accessible, affirmative disclosure of open data about procurement plans, solicitation notices and bidding documents, award notices, full contracts, and implementation details. Final thoughts Open contracting is one of the few policies available to municipal governments that can simultaneously save cities money and save staff time, increase the public’s trust, and improve public services. While real effort needs to be invested to solidly implement and engage with stakeholders, once done this reform touches on virtually every program a government may undertake. In cities that open up public contracting, you can take look at that contract for school lunches — worth almost 200 million dollars in New York City last year. You can understand how your city’s homeless services vendor spending adds up (over 30 million dollars in Los Angeles in 2016, up 10 million from the previous year). Imagine this data being accessible for cities far beyond LA or New York, and the possible benefits that could result. That’s what we at Sunlight and the Open Contracting Partnership are working on, and we hope you’ll join us. Sierra Ramirez is a Program Analyst at the Open Contracting Partnership. She is an monitoring, evaluation and learning specialist with Latin America and Middle East field experience in organizational learning and development. In her work, she emphasizes reflective and collaborative strategies to integrate meaningful Monitoring Evaluation and Learning (MEL) across all our program interventions, as well as providing general program support. Email Sierra at sramirez@open-contracting.org. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and do not reflect the opinions of the Sunlight Foundation. Interested in writing a guest blog for Sunlight? Email us at guestblog@sunlightfoundation.com11 Jan
Cabinet nominees should be held to historical ethics and transparency standards - [Senator Jeff Sessions testifies at the confirmation hearing for his nomination as U.S. Attorney General]Last week, Sunlight joined a coalition of open government advocates in a letter to Senate leadership calling on the U.S. Senate to establish disclosure standards for the Committees before which presidential appointees appear. We have been disappointed to see no action since. Historically low trust in US government remains an important issue in the USA. Rushing confirmations would erode it. As the New York Times reported, billionaires pose a significant challenge to the Office of Government Ethics, particularly given evidence that the Presidential Transition fell out of contact with the agency after the election. The quality of vetting and background checks may come back to haunt the new administration, as hidden conflicts of interest become clear in office. Until the Office of Government Ethics certifies the financial disclosures of a nominee, the FBI completes background checks and the relevant committee informs the public using its website, the U.S. Senate should delay holding hearings for President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet nominations. We are not alone in this view. Writing in the Guardian, former Bush and Obama White House ethics lawyers Richard Painter and Norm Eisen argue that President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet nominations must be delayed. “Completion of the ethics review process prior to Senate confirmation hearings ensures that all parties have a detailed understanding of the nominee’s commitments prior to taking office, offers full transparency to the Senate, and mitigates the opportunity for undue influence on the independent ethics review process.” There is recent precedent to call for this standard. The 7 Obama nominees confirmed on January 20, 2009 had all obtained certified Office of Government Ethics ethics agreements 6 days to 3 weeks in advance of that hearing. By not leading on disclosure and divestment from conflicts of interest, the President-elect has set a dangerous ethical bar. We hope to see meaningful action from him to resolve them in the press conference has promised tomorrow, his first since July 27, 2016. We have been heartened to see that the Senate leadership has delayed some nomination hearings on one day, but the standards for disclosure that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called for in 2009 remain important to uphold today. As of noon on Tuesday, the Office of Government Ethics has published ethics agreements and financial disclosures for six nominees up for Senate confirmation hearings this week: Elaine Chao, Rep. Mike Pompeo, Senator Jeff Sessions, Rex Tillerson, Mike Kelly and General James Mattis. OGE has not published papers for Wilbur Ross, Dr. Ben Carson or Betsy DeVos. Notably, DeVos’s hearing has now been delayed until next week. That’s the right move: rushing nominees through without full vetting increases the risk of hidden conflicts of interest and other problems coming to light that will hinder the ability of the Trump administration to serve the public in crucial areas, from national security to criminal justice. No presidential nominee should receive a hearing in the U.S. Senate until he or she has finished review with Office of Government Ethics. If you agree, we encourage you to contact your Senators and tell them that ethics and disclosure matter to you as a citizen. It’s in no one’s interest to confirm presidential nominees and then see them resign because they violated the law.10 Jan
Federal agencies subject to CFO Act near full compliance with Open Government Directive - Almost 8 years ago, President Obama’s commitment to transparent and open government on first day in office led to the Open Government Directive (OGD) of December 2009, directing agencies to publish plans about improving transparency, accountability and participation. The same model was expanded to the Open Government Partnership, where nations publish action plans. Examining its progress, success and failures is an important part of understanding President Obama’s legacy – and the prognosis for similar efforts around the world. Last September, Sunlight found that half of U.S. Cabinet agencies had not complied with President Barack Obama’s Open Government Directive by publishing a 2016 Open Government plan, as directed by the White House. By the end of 2016, 13 of the 15 cabinet agencies had published plans, with the Department of Veterans Affairs promising to publish one and Interior referring our inquiry onwards without outcome to date. At the beginning of 2017, Sunlight completed a second audit of federal agencies, starting with the 44 on the White House’s list of senior accountable officials for the Open Government Directive and adding the Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade Commission. We’ve asked agencies when they will comply with the president’s executive orders using the opengov emails they’ve published and will update this spreadsheet and post if and when that occurs. Our audit, which is a living document that we update over time, is embedded below. What we found on January 4, 2017 was relatively good news: along with the 13 cabinet agencies that we’d previously audited, all 9 of the CFO Act agencies had 2016 open government plans. That’s a 92% compliance rate. Of the 23 non-CFO Act agencies we audited, however, 17 did not have a 2016 plan. As we said in July 2016, “if the result of the self-evaluation are weak or incomplete plans that highlight how agencies have fallen short in achieving their goals, that will be a useful outcome for building upon those lessons. If the results show meaningful progress, it will be a useful indicator of whether this approach to making government more transparent and accountable is worth preserving, extending and strengthening. If agencies do not provide any plan at all, that will serve as its own answer for the priority the Open Government Directive has occupied in their governance.” Our most recent findings, however, must be contextualized: according to White House counsels that briefed Sunlight in 2009, federal agencies subject to the Chief Financial Officers Act are mandated to comply with the executive order. Federal agencies that are not subject to the Act were encouraged but not required to comply. While the public can and should question the quality and frequency of open government commitments or achievements, the basic requirements of the OGD were for agencies to set up a /open webpage, put three “high value data sets” online, and publish a plan. Where agencies were not required to comply with the OGD, those requirements were often not met. Other agencies published a plan in 2010 and never returned. Other asked for feedback promised a plan but never published one. A few don’t even have a /open page. The National Archives and Records Administration, however, produced an impressive open government plan that reflects commitments to transparency, accountability, participation and collaboration that the public can and should expect of federal agencies in the United States of America. By way of contrast, unfortunately, the White House’s own Office of National Drug Control Policy has failed to publish a new plan since 2010, during the expansion of the opioid epidemic in the USA. Despite the importance of their roles as regulators and disclosure agencies, the Federal Communications Commission, Securities and Exchange Commission, and Federal Election Commission never published an Open Government Plan during the Obama administration at all. It’s not that the FCC or FEC haven’t made progress using technology to govern better — just look at Open.FEC.gov — or honored sunshine laws, but the absence of a plan at these agencies means there is no progress report, self-assessment nor activities to use as a baselines the next administration comes into power. That’s a poor foundation for open government in a Trump administration and another data point for President Obama’s mixed record. We hope that the transition team will use all of the 2016 plans as a baseline for open government in the Trump administration, extending and improving the progress that has been made since 2009 towards making our agencies more transparent, accountable, and responsive to the public. 4 Jan
When the public speaks, Congress still listens - Today was a good day for open government in the United States. This morning, the U.S. House of Representatives was set to vote on rules for the 115th Congress that would have undermined the independence of the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE), the ethics watchdog created in 2009 in the wake of scandals. On Monday, Rep. Robert Goodlatte added an amendment to the rules package with no advance notice nor opportunity for debate. The House Republican Conference then voted for the amendment in secret, 119-74, with no advance public notice nor disclosure of the amendment for debate. Despite the opposition of Sunlight and our allies, it appeared that one of the first actions of the 115th Congress was going to be to weaken independent oversight at a time when it’s more important than ever. The public knows about Members of Congress taking secret trips overseas funded by foreign governments because of OCE. When we asked you to pick up the phone and call your Representative in Congress to ask about his or her vote on this issue, you did, filling out a “public whip count” to provide some accountability for who voted to weaken Congress’ ethics watchdog. Picking up the phone, however, led to something unexpected: after a public outcry, House Republicans backed down on gutting the independent ethics office. The public’s role is not the full story, however: House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy was involved in calling an emergency meeting this morning, which led both to removing the amendment by Rep. Goodlatte from the rules package and introducing a measure suggesting draft changes to OCE that would be delivered by the August recess that was accepted by acclamation. Thank you to each and every one of you who spoke up and called Congress today. Journalist Robert Costa reported that most Members told him a blizzard of angry constituent calls was the most important factor in getting the House to sideline the amendment. As New America fellow Lee Drutman (and former Sunlighter) highlighted, the preservation of OCE is a promising sign. Effective reporting that reminds politicians that the public still cares about ethics standards and credible institutions is a wonderful start to 2017. Special thanks go to Daniel Schuman, policy director at Demand Progress (and former Sunlighter) who raised alarm bells about the efforts to weaken OCE last night, the subsequent secret vote on the rules, and worked with Fordham law professor Zephyr Teachout to build the public whip count. While it’s important to celebrate a victory today, however, it does not mean that anyone should rest on these laurels. Keep in mind that the President-Elect and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy objected only to the timing of this effort to weaken what Trump termed an “unfair” institution, not its intent. Today’s outcome is likely to be followed with another “reform” effort that could reduce the independence or authority of OCE later this year, perhaps as early as April. While OCE has been preserved for now, we’re continuing our Public Whip Count on whether Members of Congress voted to weaken OCE. Your voice in Washington mattered today, however, demonstrating that the public does care about ethics in Congress if watchdogs and media can work together to inform and activate people to be civically involved.  Please stay engaged. 3 Jan
OpenGov Voices: Telling open data stories about military history with data.mil - Earlier this month, the Department of Defense launched a new open government data platform, data.mil. Above, you can see a visualization of some of the data on the site that tells one aspect of the history of the Vietnam war : the number of aerial bombardments conducted by military forces from 1965-1975. To learn more about the thinking behind the website and how this experiment in open data differs from previous efforts, Sunlight interviewed data.mil’s co-creators, Mary Lazzeri, at U.S. Digital Services, and Maj. Aaron Capizzi, program manager at United States Air Force. Our discussion follows, including a postscript regarding what open data may tell us about newly discovered blockbuster bomb in Germany. How long has data.mil been online? Where did the idea come from and how has it evolved? Mary: The site launched on December 15th. Major Aaron Capizzi, USAF had the idea to use open data principles to solve Department of Defense (DoD) problems after attending a panel discussion at the Harvard Kennedy School sponsored by former Deputy CTO, Nick Sinai. In addition, I had been looking to seed an open data effort at DoD. Aaron’s idea, coupled with the opportunity to present the Theater History of Operations (THOR) bombing data in a new and interesting way, provided a perfect opportunity to put energy behind the effort. We’re looking to use this pilot to jumpstart a larger open data effort at DoD. The beta site is a working proof-of-concept. The next step is to show the larger DoD community that open data merits investment. How does the approach to this site differ from previous attempts, in terms of use, re-use or presentation? Aaron: Our approach is unique in two ways.  First, Data.mil will test various ways of sharing defense-related information, gauging public interest and potential value, while protecting security and privacy. We will quickly iterate and improve the data offerings on data.mil, using public feedback and internal department discussions to best unlock the value of defense data. Our goal is to provide all data with enough context that users, both the public and defense employees, can understand the potential value and get started using data quickly. Second, Data.mil will prioritize opening data using a demand-driven model, focusing on quality rather than standard quantity metrics.  The Department of Defense regularly reports on the significant challenges we face in defending the nation, which range from attracting talented recruits to developing game-changing technology within constrained budgets.  Most of these aspects of defense business generate large amounts of unclassified data which, if released, can encourage collaboration and innovation with public and private sector partners. What tech is data.mil built on? How is it different than other sites? Mary: The site is built using an open data storytelling platform, LiveStories. Rather than simply posting a list of datasets, the goal of Data.mil is to tell stories with data. The site provides narratives to complement the data so users can more quickly understand and begin using it. LiveStories was selected for its visualization and data analysis features allowing us to present an engaging site for its users. In addition, it’s easy to use. Non-technical staff can use the platform to share their data and tell their stories. We want to compel collaboration from military components, industry partners and the public. The partnership with data.world enables that collaboration providing the social media tools to support exploration and a community discussion of the data. How much data is on data.mil now? How much is new? How much should we expect to be there by the end of 2017? Aaron: The site’s first offering, Theater History of Operations (THOR), is a painstakingly cultivated database of historic aerial bombings from World War I through Vietnam. THOR has already proven useful in finding unexploded ordinance in Southeast Asia and improving Air Force combat tactics. This is the first time that the THOR WWI, WWII, and Vietnam datasets have been released as flat tabular data files that can be easily analyzed and visualized with the accompanying data dictionary. Additionally, the site published the Korean War data for the first time ever on December 18th. We hope to feature data from the Gulf War in the near future. The next featured dataset will be military casualty data, set to be released in February 2017. The working target is to release a compelling data story each month. The story may have one or multiple datasets. What is the most important data set on the site? What are the most important insights? Aaron and Mary: The THOR data on the site can be used for a variety of purposes. The public can look up a relative’s call-sign and see what missions he flew. The data has been useful in uncovering unexploded ordinance in Southeast Asia. It’s also been used in air power history and strategy classes at Air Force professional education schools. Its value to historians is immense. The data provides bomb damage assessments in the pilot’s own words dating back as far as 1918. Of course, we plan to expand the data offering in the coming weeks and months by targeting and releasing data that can help solve defense problems and increase the public’s understanding of their military. Open government data about the military carries obvious security concerns. How did the DoD approach decided what to disclose and how? Aaron & Mary: All datasets are thoroughly vetted using the military’s well-established public release processes. While protecting national security and privacy remains the top priority of all defense employees, many aspects of the military’s daily business and operations are unclassified. By following best practices, information ranging from personnel diversity to contracting opportunities and open source software can be shared broadly without posing risk to national security objectives or operations security. In this initial experimental stage, we are targeting public release of information with low sensitivity and risk for security implications.  As the Defense Department gains more experience in providing open data sources to target specific problems, from logistics costs to scientific innovation, we will refine our understanding of where the balance between value and security lies. What’s the most significant impact that could come out of this site? What could prevent it from happening? Mary: Data.mil was launched for less than $10,000 and as a 20% project for Mary and Aaron in partnership with LiveStories and data.world. We want to collect feedback from the public and use that feedback to chart the site’s expansion. Data.mil is a working proof-of-concept and seeks to make the case that open data is a low-risk investment for DoD with immense potential value. Eventually, we hope to make a significant impact on looming defense issues, some of which are summarized in the Department’s 2015 Performance Report.  But to be successful, we need participation both from our public and private industry partners, and internal defense data owners. To expand, we need partners throughout the military who are looking to share their data. Potential partners and anyone with feedback on the pilot should reach out to data@dds.mil. POSTSCRIPT Ian Greenleigh, a digital strategist currently working as the head of brand at data.world, emailed Sunlight to share a discovery in the data. I came across this story the other day, about an unexploded Royal Air Force “blockbuster” bomb they just found at a worksite in Augsburg, Germany. I found a few things to cross-reference in other articles, then asked my colleague to query the dataset to find the mission responsible for the bomb. I think we found it. I’ve attached a CSV with what the query returns, and a screenshot of the query results on data.world. It’s a new sort of experience, for me at least, to learn of a story and then find it within a dataset. I think we’ll be seeing a lot of this in the future. If you find more stories at data.mil or have other feedback, please share in the comments!29 Dec 16
A “release to one, release to all” policy for FOIA will serve the public interest - Today, the Sunlight Foundation commented on a “release to one, release to all” policy for the Freedom of Information Act proposed by the Department of Justice’s Office of Information Policy promulgated in a Request for Comments, including an description of the “release to all presumption” and a draft memorandum for federal agencies. Our comment, which will be available to the public at Regulations.gov, follows. Dear Director Pustay, We welcome the opportunity to comment upon the Department’s proposed “release-to-one, release-to-all” policy for fulfilling requests made under the Freedom of Information Act. The Sunlight Foundation strongly supports the proposal overall, with some specific concerns regarding individual components in the draft regarding overly broad exemptions and exceptions. As a decade-old nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to using journalism, advocacy and technology to improving the transparency and accountability of our politics and government, we see great potential for this approach to improve public knowledge of the operations of government, reduce the costs of administering one of the core sunshine laws of the nation, and reduce asynchronies in the disclosure of government data that are providing an unintended subsidy to industry. As we have argued in the past, this policy represents a significant change in the nation’s information disclosure policies that would not only complement recent updates to how the federal government protects, structures and publishes public records but could, in the long run, increase public knowledge of what is being done in our name. Governments everywhere should use the demand signal of FOIA requests to prioritize proactive disclosures online. Structuring and publishing the datasets that commercial interests repeatedly, frequently request should increase the capacity of FOIA officers to respond to more complex public interest requests. We hope that agency CIOs will work directly with the nation’s FOIA officers to apply Project Open Data’s resources to proactive disclosure of records online in machine-readable format. Should the proactive disclosure of records as open government data be directly tied to the demand expressed by inbound FOIA requests in 2017, we expect to see significant improvements in government transparency and accountability to not only occur in the U.S. federal government but secondary effects in other states and countries that learn from our example. On Exceptions and Exemptions While we acknowledge that combining open government data sets and analyzing them can lead to insight that may implicate the privacy of individuals or security of states, we are concerned about OIP embracing “mosaic theory” in its guidance to agencies on FOIA. The “foreseeable harm standard” in the statute is sufficient for officers to consider. In 2017, we expect the potential impact of OPEN Government Data Act on the default disclosure approach of the nation to be significant. As it currently stands, mosaic theory is functioning as an abstract risk, rather than a strategy for weighing potential risks. The Department of Justice should help agencies weigh risks and public benefits. Invoking the mosaic theory often serves as an abstract gesture toward complex risk, rather than an empirical assessment of public harm. We also are concerned about the “Good Cause” language in the draft OIP guidance. The FOIA statute provides ample leeway for officers to redact or withhold responsive documents. OIP should avoid adding justifications for no disclosure where existing justifications are already sufficient. On a Delay in Release As the White House Office of Management and Budget moves forward on a building new FOIA.gov next year, we hope to see the “release-to-one, release-to-all policy” explicitly connect the data and demand collected from the nation’s revamped FOIA request portal to the disclosures flowing through Data.gov. We anticipate that proactive, periodic disclosure of structured open data that’s subject to frequent FOIA requests will, in fact, reduce costs and the backlog caseload at many agencies, freeing up FOIA processors to work on the more complicated public interest requests submitted by journalists that contribute to the accountability the public deserves. Over the decades since FOIA was passed, the question of whether the public receives public records provided to publishers has been a longstanding question of significant public interest. Historically, publishers have not always published records that they receive. Over the past two decades, more journalists and editors have adopted the laudable practice of publishing source documents and data online that underpins the reporting stories rely upon. New storytelling formats, like the news apps, visualizations and open source tools that the Sunlight Foundation has supported and contributed to have demonstrated how powerful sharing the original documents can be informing the public and connecting them to their elected representatives. As we wrote in July, we understand the concerns that investigative journalists have about how a “release to one, release to all policy“ could affect their work. The feedback from the initial pilots suggests that many journalists want government transparency and accountability, but fear that a policy that mandates immediate release of responsive documents to all could harm their journalism. Moreover, the surveys conducted by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press confirm that only a small minority of journalists support immediate release of records due to concerns about the impact on their investigations. In considering the two options for disclosure that OIP laid out — immediate or a five day delay, Sunlight is mindful for the Hippocratic Oath that doctors observe: first, do no harm. We do not want to see the Department of Justice create a disincentive for journalists to make FOIA requests or for publishers to allot budget and spend money to file lawsuits for records under the statute. Public records frequently provide a backbone for crucial public interest reporting that holds agencies accountable for fraud, waste, abuse or other forms of corruption. On the other hand, we are also mindful of the concerns regarding the state of compliance with the FOIA in the United States. To delay the release of documents or databases to the general public after release to an individual requester gives us pause. As OIP highlights, the FOIA statute includes a limited exemption for fee waivers in situations in which a given requester can demonstrate that “disclosing the requested information is in the public interest because it is likely to contribute significantly to public understanding of the operations and activities of the government and is not primarily in the commercial interest of the requester.” This is an important signal from Congress that agencies should not create monetary disincentives for journalists and citizens. Congress has not formally weighed in, however, on whether such a public interest exception should be considered in how records are disclosed. Effectively creating a separate class of requesters who receive documents and data under an embargo public interest exception without clear guidance from lawmakers is not ideal. We therefore recommend that there be no delay in releasing documents or databases to all online in an open, machine-readable format. We also recommend that agencies formally ask for feedback from the original requesters regarding the impact of such disclosure on their investigations. This feedback should be cataloged and published in a report by OIP next December and used to revisit whether the policy is having any demonstrated harm upon investigative journalism or the public interest. Creating and formalized an ongoing feedback loop with the requester community regarding the quality, frequency and outcomes of disclosures is in of itself a desirable dynamic, and we hope that the Department of Justice works with the Office of Government Information Services at the National Archives in developing improvements in this area. As a practical matter, we anticipate that agencies may not publish all responsive documents online immediately upon disclosure to an individual. As IT modernization improves the capacity of agencies to manage their information as an asset, however, we see a future where agencies responding to FOIA requests for data, documents and software code will be able to conduct searches, redact the results and disclose them online much more quickly. If news organizations show that this policy has caused issues for investigations, OIP should reform it. We look forward to participating in that conversation. Respectfully, The Sunlight Foundation23 Dec 16
Today in OpenGov: How you can help preserve open government data in 2017 - ARCHIVE ALL THE THINGS. Over the last month, many of you have asked what will happen with open government data under a Trump administration or with government transparency writ large. The honest answer is that we don’t know, but there’s sufficient reason for concern and cause for action now, as FreeGovInfo explains: Here at FGI, we’ve been tracking the disappearance of government information for quite some time (and librarians have been doing it for longer than we have; see ALA’s long running series published from 1981 until 1998 called “Less Access to Less Information By and About the U.S. Government.”). We’ve recently written about the targeting of NASA’s climate research site and the Department of Energy’s carbon dioxide analysis center for closure. But ever since the NY Times last week wrote a story “Harvesting Government History, One Web Page at a Time”, there has been renewed worry and interest from the library- and scientific communities as well as the public in archiving government information. And there’s been increased interest in the End of Term (EOT) crawl project — though there’s increased worry about the loss of government information with the incoming Trump administration, it’s important to note that the End of Term crawl has been going on since 2008, with both Republican and Democratic administrations, and will go on past 2016. EOT is working to capture as much of the .gov/.mil domains as we can, and we’re also casting our ‘net to harvest social media content and government information hosted on non-.gov domains (e.g., the St Louis Federal Reserve Bank at www.stlouisfed.org). We’re running several big crawls right now (you can see all of the seeds we have here as well as all of the seeds that have been nominated so far) and will continue to run crawls up to and after the Inauguration as well. We strongly encourage the public to nominate seeds of government sites so that we can be as thorough in our crawling as possible. Scientists and researchers around the United States and beyond are now crawling and archiving data. For more information about this effort, and ways you can help, read FreeGovInfo and participate in the End of Term Crawl. [READ MORE] GOOD NEWS: New Jersey passed what looks to us like a landmark open data law. If you agree or disagree, please let us know. SPRECHEN SIE DEUTSCH? Germany has published a draft of a proposed open data law. Keep an eye on this one. TO WATCH: A privatized security force employed directly by a President would be a threat to public accountability, as John Wonderlich warns: “Is Trump’s security team going to be paid through a government contract? Or is this a private arrangement that contradicts Secret Service roles? Trump’s security team is presumably paid through one of Trump’s corporate vehicles, not his personal account, no? Privatized POTUS security is Presidential security that lives further from public protections, FOIA, and the rule of law. Trump’s failure to divest is also an assertion that he can act unilaterally outside the law. Like with a private security force.” WEIGH IN: As we highlighted in August, the Office of Information Policy asked for feedback on a proposed “release to one, release to all” policy for the Freedom of Information Act. This month, the Justice Department published an official Request for Comments on the draft, including an description of the “release to all presumption” and a draft memorandum for federal agencies. The Project on Government Oversight supports the proposed “release-to-one, release-to-all” policy for the Freedom of Information Act, with caveats. So do we, as you’ll read tomorrow. We encourage you to comment — but don’t wait: the deadline is tomorrow. [Federal Register] EDITOR’S NOTE: This will be the last Today in OpenGov of 2016, as Sunlight staff takes time off to rest, travel and spend time with family over the holiday break. As the year comes to a close, we are also saddened about remarkable colleagues are moving on after making extraordinary contributions to Sunlight and to open government in the United States. We are deeply grateful to them and you, our community. Thank you for reading, commenting, corresponding and holding us accountable, too. We hope you will consider making a tax-deductible donation as part of your year-end giving. We will see you in the new year. –Alex TRANSITION 2017 Christmas @ Mar-a-Lago: @realDonaldTrump, relaxed and chatty, hosts press for drinks — off-record but pics OK @axios pic.twitter.com/lysW7FHzIl — Mike Allen (@mikeallen) December 19, 2016 148 days. The last press conference President-elect Donald J. Trump held was on July 27. He has held none since Election Day. News organizations are starting to respond appropriately by highlighting the violation of this fundamental democratic norm but are still not adjusting, as Poynter’s report that White House correspondents are fretting over their dinner suggests. The deeper problem is what the White House Correspondents Association (WHCA) dinner — aka “nerd prom” — “looks like” now, and has for years: journalists too cozy with power and worried about losing access. A majority of the public doesn’t trust the press. Reporters should worry about Trump’s lack of press conferences. “Engaging with the press” is not a sufficient commitment by the President-elect or his team. Our suggestion to media organizations and the WHCA: suspend the dinner until Trump holds press conference and commits to the holding them in office. Billionaire investor Peter Thiel is involved in filling health, technology and science appointments in the transition, including roles that would have conflicts of interest with some of his investments. [Stat News] Activist investor Carl Icahn is to play a role in choosing new SEC chairman, who oversees regulation of investors. [New York Times] Vetting billionaires nominated for public service takes time. Process shouldn’t be rushed, nor disclosure diminished. [New York Times] The National Archives and Records Administration proactive published the transition materials it prepared for the transition team. This is a commendable open government bar for all federal agencies! Looking back through the history of the United States, former Sunlighter Zephyr Teachout, a law professor ran for governor and Congress in New York, concludes that Trump could be the “most corruptible President ever.”   [Politico Mag] The Trumps are taking steps to address conflicts of interest. [New York Times] The President-elect is going to have to decide whether he will put the people’s business or his business interests first. [Diane Rehm Show] A piecemeal approach to resolving conflicts of interest journalists report won’t work. A “discretionary blind trust” won’t work. A President of the United States should disclose his tax returns, divest from his businesses, invest the proceeds into a blind trust, and hold a press conference to discuss it all. NATIONAL The Obama administration is “dismantling a dormant national registry program for visitors from countries with active terrorist groups — a program that President-elect Donald J. Trump has suggested he is considering resurrecting.” Read the Federal Register. [New York Times] In a new report, the House Judiciary Committee concluded that “Any measure that weakens encryption works against the national interest.” Notable conclusion, that. In a historic moment of progress for Americans with disabilities, The FCC voted 5-0 to require US wireless carriers & device manufacturers to support RTT: real-time text messaging. [Motherboard] The White House announced iOS and Android apps for regulatory information. While we’re glad to see improvements in making the regulatory process more easy to understand to smartphone-toting nation, should government agencies focus on shiny apps or making .gov websites mobile-friendly and responsive first? [WhiteHouse.gov] Separately, the White House shared an update on “We the People,” its e-petition platform. As U.S. chief digital officer Jason Goldman notes, “While we’ve taken every step possible to make it easy for future administrations to carry on this tradition, it’s ultimately up to the incoming team.” Please let Sunlight know if you think this is a platform worth defending. [Medium] Oh yeah! Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute is officially the co-owner of oyez.org, the wonderful website that publishes audio and context for oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court. [InfoDocket] Despite data problems and oversight, the IT Dashboard continues to give us some sense of how long federal IT projects take and how much they cost. A new analysis by Federal News Radio digs into that data to come up with some averages across agencies, documenting continued challenges in delivery. [FedNewsRadio] Price transparency will bring down health care costs if and when the data finds the public through tools and platforms when and where they make decisions. Today, far too many people don’t know where to go to compare or find data. [New York Times] Speaking of transparency, the Department of Veterans Affairs is now releasing health care quality data. [USA Today] STATE AND LOCAL A federal monitor found multiple problems with the Cleveland Police Department’s bodycam program. [Cleveland.com] As the City of Chicago settles a public records lawsuit, Mayor Rahm Emanuel acknowledged that he hid city business using personal email accounts. [Chicago Tribune] Civic Hall will be the anchor tenant of a new $250 million “innovation hub” in New York City’s Union Square, set to break ground in 2018. Congratulations to former Sunlight advisors Micah Sifry and Andrew Rasiej on this further validation of their vision. [Fast Company] INTERNATIONAL The United States reached the biggest settlement ever – by far – under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, penalizing two Brazilian companies. “On December 21st America’s Department of Justice (DoJ) reached a $3.5bn settlement with Odebrecht, Brazil’s biggest builder, and with Braskem, a petrochemical joint venture between that firm and Petrobras. The DoJ alleges that since 2001 Odebrecht and Braskem paid $788m in bribes to officials and political parties in Brazil and in 11 other countries. Most of these are in Latin America. They include Venezuela, Mexico, Argentina and the Dominican Republic (see chart). Two Portuguese-speaking African countries—Angola and Mozambique—are also on the list.” [The Economist] Researcher Jonathan Gray published a new paper on “datafication” and democracy. [IPPR] The World Bank published a new post on their work to determine the cost of open government reforms: “Once finished, the costing framework will be made freely available for governments and other interested parties to cost out specific open government reforms under consideration. It will also position this framework as an accessible, “do-it-yourself” (DIY) tool that can be utilized by generalists — including officials in low and middle-income country governments — seeking to understand the full costs of starting and sustaining open government reforms over time.” [World Bank] The lingering feeling from the Anti-Corruption Summit and Open Government Partnership Summit was that “the usual responses are inadequate,” writes Tom King. [GIJN] 22 Dec 16
Today in OpenGov: The Sunlight Foundation will endure - SUNLIGHT WILL ENDURE. No need to bury the lede today, as you should have heard this in a separate email from us: The Sunlight Foundation will be an independent, nonpartisan advocate for open government in 2017 under the leadership of Executive Director John Wonderlich. Your correspondent is stepping up to be the new Deputy Director. We’ll have more to share in the weeks and months ahead about what’s next, but the work continues. We hope that the second decade of our work will honor the contributions of the hundreds of our alumni and the tens of thousands of members of our communities. We trust that you will continue to support Sunlight through donations of your time, funds, attention and goodwill.  Thank you all for your messages of support and encouragement. [READ MORE] 141 days. President Barack Obama held what is likely to be his last press conference of 2016 today. The last press conference President-elect Donald J. Trump held was on July 27. He has held none since Election Day. Why does it matter? Tamara Keith is spot on: “Unlike other ways of getting messages out, press conferences hold public officials more accountable to the American people because they have to answer questions in an uncontrolled environment.” [NPR] News organizations are starting to respond appropriately by highlighting the violation of this fundamental democratic norm. (And yes, maintaining democratic norms really matters.) The “number of days since” should start to lead the morning shows and evening news. TRANSITION 2017 In a letter responding to Senator Tom Carper, the U.S. Office of Government Ethics recommended that President-elect Trump divest from his businesses, stating that  transferring a business to your children isn’t a blind trust nor removes conflicts of interest. [NPR] Divestiture addresses conflicts of interest in a way that transferring control does not. [GovExec] Every day, more conflicts of interest emerge and are catalogued by the media. [The Atlantic] According to The Wall Street Journal, however, Trump is not going to divest from his businesses to address the conflicts, unlike Presidents have over the past 4 decades, just as he did not disclose his tax returns. This decision is one that members of the Electoral College will have to weigh.  [Quartz] The Washington Post has launched a genuinely innovative approach to covering the President-elect’s post-factual tweets: a Chrome Web browser plug-in that adds much-needed fact-checking and context to @RealDonaldTrump on Twitter.com.  [Washington Post] Every nominee to lead a federal agency receives serous scrutiny in a Senate hearing — and in focusing on assembling a cabinet quickly, as compared to past years, the transition team may have set itself up for major headaches in 2017. The Wall Street Journal reports that “picks have been named without extensive reviews of their background and financial records, people familiar with the process say.” Stay tuned. [WSJ] NATIONAL The inspector general of the National Security Agency received a termination notice for retaliation against a whistleblower. The Project on Government Oversight reported the outcome, including something important: it’s the result of reform. “It was reached by following new whistleblower protections set forth by President Obama in an executive order, Presidential Policy Directive 19. (A President Trump could, in theory, eliminate the order.) Following PPD-19 procedures, a first-ever External Review Panel (ERP) composed of three of the most experienced watchdogs in the US government was convened to examine the issue. The trio — IG’s of the Justice Department, Treasury, and CIA – overturned an earlier finding of the Department of Defense IG, which investigated Ellard but was unable to substantiate his alleged retaliation. “The finding against Ellard is extraordinary and unprecedented,” notes Stephen Aftergood, Director of the Secrecy Program at the Federation of American Scientists. “This is the first real test drive for a new process of protecting intelligence whistleblowers. Until now, they’ve been at the mercy of their own agencies, and dependent on the whims of their superiors. This process is supposed to provide them security and a procedural foothold.” [POGO] Related: Congress passed legislation that will empower inspectors general. [Daily Caller] Surveillance reform include the need for Congress to affirm that there’s no place for secret law in our democracy. [Access Now] The Department of Defense has launched a new open data platform, data.mil. [Meritalk] Speaking of open data, fears are rising that a Trump administration would remove data from federal websites, or, worse yet, delete it altogether. [Politico] The ways that Trump administration handles open government data, however, may be more subtle than that, as we and others told 538. “What does have observers worried are two things in particular: budget cuts that could significantly impact data collection and quality, particularly within the government’s statistical agencies — those that produce key economic indicators like the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of Economic Analysis; and the willful miscommunication of scientific research that proves politically inconvenient to the White House.” [FiveThirtyEight] We’ll see. In the meantime, the SEC may issue a rule on open data before the next administration comes into power. [FCW] STATE AND LOCAL Want to get an amazing download of insight about how open data can help cities and communities around the United States? Watch the video embedded above, in which Sunlight’s Stephen Larrick and Kate Rabinowitz of DataLensDC talk with Michael A. Shea from Arlington Independent Media. Lawmakers in New Jersey are considering a bill that would change a “state law that requires governments, businesses, and individuals to publish legal notices in printed newspapers.” Moving all government notices completely online would leave seniors and poor in data poverty. Every state must get everyone online before leaving print entirely. [NJ.com] Civic technology and engagement can and should reach into county-level government. [TechCrunch] INTERNATIONAL Mor Rubenstein reflected on the good, bad and ugly from the Open Government Partnership Summit. [OKFN] We were glad to see press freedom on the agenda at OGP16, given the rise of authoritarianism around the world. [CPJ] 16 Dec 16
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