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Wednesday, 09 January 2013 20:03

Missouri Lawmaker Wants Drone Use To Require A Warrant

Kansas City Rep. Casey Guernsey (R), who works in the Missouri House of Representatives, claims that the domestic use of drones is a defilement of American freedom. The state legislator this week introduced the ‘Preserving Freedom from Unwarranted Surveillance Act’, which would require law enforcement officers to obtain a warrant in order to use UAV surveillance to gather criminal activity. The bill would also protect agriculture businesses and farmers from being spied on without their knowledge.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones, have in recent years been employed throughout the US to capture criminals and monitor illegal immigrants. Homeland security claims to use the UAVs to protect US citizens from terrorism and crime, while the drones are also used for “disaster relief, immigration control and environmental monitoring,” according to the Congressional Research Service (CRS). The National Guard claims to use unmanned drones for wildfire surveillance.

Few drones are currently employed in the US, but the Federal Aviation Administration predicts that 30,000 UAVs will fly over the US in less than 20 years. The surveillance capabilities of the watchful machines has been a cause of concern for privacy advocates, with some claiming that the drones are a violation of the Fourth Amendment, which protects against ‘unreasonable searches.’

“As drones become less expensive, our fear is that police and other agencies could use them for fishing expeditions that infringe on individual’s right to privacy,” Gary Brunk, executive director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas and Western Missouri, tells the Kansas City Star.

Rep. Guernsey has already become alarmed over the use of drones in Missouri and believes that unless their use is restricted, it won’t be long until the government spies on individuals inside their homes.

“It isn’t far-fetched that we could see government agencies deploy drones to spy on individuals and businesses around the state,” he says.

When it comes to the use of surveillance drones, California is facing similar privacy concerns as Missouri. Alameda County Sheriff Gregory Ahern has made a request to purchase a drone for overhead surveillance above his county. Using $31,646 of a $1.2 million grant dispersed by the California Emergency Management Agency, the sheriff wants to purchase the UAV for “search and rescue, pursuing violent felons, pursuing people evading law enforcement and having the air support during a natural disaster to see the safest routes for people to travel in and out of an area,” Ahern said.

Privacy advocates have called for a public discussion about the sheriff’s request, which Ahern postponed, claiming that his drone request is unrelated to the issue of privacy.

Nationwide, about a dozen law enforcement agencies have or are using a drone for surveillance purposes, which the CRS claims is a rising problem.

“Some members of Congress and the public fear there are insufficient safeguards in place to ensure that drones are not used to spy on American citizens and unduly infringe upon their fundamental policy,” the CRS reports.

Friday, 11 January 2013 13:41

Obama Nominates Jack Lew, White House Chief Of Staff, As New Secretary Of Treasury

Written by Ajorlo

Lew, 57, is slated to replace current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and become the principal economic advisor to the executive branch during Pres. Obama’s second term in office. A former director of the Office of Management and Budget, Lew is expected to be confirmed by the Senate for his new role in the coming days and will eventually take on the position after the commander-of-chief retakes the oath of office in less than two weeks.

Announcing his nomination, Pres. Obama said Thursday he could not think of a better person to oversee the Treasury during his second term than Lew.

Previously, Lew worked as an aide to the late House Speaker Tip O’Neill in the 1980s and twice served as the director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), once under former President Bill Clinton and once under President Obama. He began serving as the president’s chief of staff in January 2012.

As OMB director under Clinton, the Harvard and Georgetown University grad made financial decisions between 1998 and 2001 that led to a budget surplus. In 2011, Lew played a significant role in spearheading talks with congressional leaders that led to an increase in the US debt ceiling during a time of heated partisan debates.

(AFP)

Wednesday, 09 January 2013 20:06

US Banks Win Mortgage Fraud Settlement, Borrowers Lose

Bank of America sold bad mortgages that led to numerous foreclosures via subprime mortgage lenders Countrywide Financial Corporation and Countrywide Home Loans, Inc. that it acquired in 2008. “Through a program aptly named ‘the Hustle,’ Countrywide and Bank of America made disastrously bad loans and stuck taxpayers with the bill,” said Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York when he sued the company for $1 billion on behalf of the government last October.

Under the new settlement Bank of America will buy back $6.75 billion in residential mortgage loans sold to the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and give the government an additional $3.6 billion in cash. The other banks - which include Citigroup Inc, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo - will pay out $3.3 billion in direct payments to people who lost their homes plus another $5.2 billion to others who are threatened with possible eviction for not being able to pay their loans. This is in addition to the $26 billion that many of the same banks agreed to pay out last February under a separate deal with 49 state attorneys general, the Justice Department and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Despite the large sums involved, most consumer advocates say that the settlements are far too little for those who lost the most. “Communities of color were particularly hard hit by abusive mortgage practices,” said Debby Goldberg, special project director at the National Fair Housing Alliance. "The $8.5 billion and other settlements are not comparable to the trillions of dollars in wealth sucked from communities," added Sasha Werblin, senior program manager at the Greenlining Institute.

The two new settlements were drawn up after the effective failure of the Independent Foreclosure Review – a 2011 program set up by the banks to review bad mortgages and compensate those who were eligible. Only about one in ten of the potential 3.8 million beneficiaries signed up for the program because they were skeptical of the effort that was widely perceived as biased towards the lenders. They were probably not wrong – the consultants running the program was billing as much as $250 an hour for 20 hours for each case, according to the New York Times.

"It has become clear that carrying the process through to its conclusion would divert money away from the impacted homeowners and also needlessly delay the dispensation of compensation to affected borrowers," said Thomas Curry, the federal Comptroller of the Currency. "Our new course of action will get more money to more people more quickly."

But the activists say that the government had bungled the whole process. “If the reviews had been done right the first time, banks would have been on the hook to pay far more to homeowners,” said Alys Cohen, staff attorney for the National Consumer Law Center.

David Lazarus of the Los Angeles Times put the numbers in context – he estimates that the average amount that most borrowers will get is just $2,000. On the other hand, Lazarus notes that the banks have done quite a bit better in 2011 - the year covered by the settlement: “Citigroup pocketed $11.3 billion in profit. JPMorgan Chase saw record profit of $19 billion. Wells Fargo posted almost $16 billion in profit. (Bank of America) was the poor relation of the family. It earned only $1.4 billion in profit.” (By Pratap Chatterjee, the author of two books about the war on terror: Halliburton's Army: How a Well-Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War and Iraq, Inc.; CorpWatch)

Wednesday, 09 January 2013 20:00

The Gun that Can’t be Used if Stolen

But the industry and its supporters in Congress are not interested in this solution.

“Smart guns” can come equipped with biometrics and grip pattern detection that allow only the registered owner of a gun to fire it. The iGun, made by Mossberg Group, requires the owner to wear a special chip-implanted ring that activates the gun.

Another company, TriggerSmart in Ireland, makes a childproof smart-gun that can’t be fired near schools that have the requisite technology installed on campus.

Some smart gun technology does allow multiple users to share a firearm, such as members of a police department or the military.

Such solutions aren’t likely to be adopted by Congress anytime soon, according to Robert J. Spitzer, a professor of political science at SUNY Cortland and the author of four books on gun policy.

“The gun industry has no interest in making smart-guns,” Spitzer told The New York Times. “There is no incentive for them.…There is also no appetite by the government to press ahead with any kind of regulation requiring smart-guns.”

About 600 people a year are killed in the United States because of accidental shootings alone.

(By Noel Brinkerhoff; AllGov)

Friday, 11 January 2013 13:44

Over A Quarter Of US Kids On Food Stamps, Under-50s Dying Young – Reports

Almost 20 million children out of 73.9 million under the age of 18 were in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamps, in 2011, according to data from the United States Department of Agriculture and US Census Bureau.

Moreover, children accounted for 45 per cent of aid receivers.

The number of people using the food stamp program has been on a rise, since 2009 about 15.5 million more individuals have been added to SNAP.

Latest data released for the month of October 2012 shows the drastic increase with one in 6.5 Americans using SNAP, while in the 1970s only one in 50 were part of the program.

Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions argues that US is not working towards any real solutions for the problem.

“It has become sadly clear that Agriculture Secretary Vilsack wishes to make welfare part of the normal American experience, with no regard for social or economic consequences,” Sessions told The Daily Caller.

Thursday, 06 December 2012 17:01

Ten reasons Iran does not want a nuclear bomb

Written by Ajorlo

“The West should enter into a genuine, face-saving and realistic solution, rather than continuing to push aggressively and ineffectively against Iranian nuclear development,” Seyyed Hossein Mousavian wrote in an article published on the National Interest website.

The scholar referred to “religious obligations” as the first reason why Iran does not seek to build a nuclear bomb, saying that based on the fatwa by the Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei “the use of nuclear weapons and all other types of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) is forbidden…constituting a sin.”

He mentioned “lack of long-term advantage” in the possession of nuclear weapons as the second reason, saying that based on Iran’s assessment the possession of a nuclear bomb will have no long-term regional advantage and would trigger a regional nuclear arms race.

He added that, Iran’s “technology choices” is the third reason why the country is not after nukes. “The technical configurations Iran has chosen for its nuclear program, demonstrate a preference for a robust enrichment capability rather than for a rapid nuclear weapons breakout capability.”

Mousavian said possible “isolation” of Iran is the fourth reason dissuading Tehran from developing a bomb, stating, “Iran recognizes that by becoming a nuclear weapons state, it will compel Russia and China to join the US and implement devastating sanctions that would paralyze the Iranian economy.”

The scholar then argued that Iran’s prominent politicians believe that possessing nuclear weapons would be an obstacle in the long-term for Iran’s access to vast technological cooperation with developed countries and this is the fifth reason why they do not want a bomb.

Mousavian further stated that Iran does not want to develop a bomb in order to prove its “goodwill” to international community.

As for the seventh reason, he stated that Iran has never tried to stockpile enough enriched uranium to make a bomb because it “…requires 27 tons of uranium enriched at 3.5 percent level annually to provide fuel for its only nuclear power plant in Bushehr. Up to now, Iran has produced about 7 tons and needs an additional 20 tons.”

The scholar said Iran's offers on uranium enrichment during talks with world powers is the eighth reason proving that Tehran has no plan to develop a nuclear bomb.

Mousavian stated that Iran does not need the bomb as “deterrence” against US and the Zionist regime, while it does not need it to prevent efforts aimed at “regime change” by the United States and the West either.

Friday, 11 January 2013 14:09

A Voice for Peace in Afghanistan: 'Stop This Criminal War'

'Get out' of her country, she tells those from the US and other western nations. And to the warlords, the Taliban, and the fundamentalists represented in the ruling government, she says 'get out of the way' of a peaceful and prosperous future for regular Afghans.

As Afghan President Hamid Karzai prepares to meet with Barack Obama on Friday and speculation swirls about the future US role as 2014 slowly approaches, one of Afghanistan's leading peace advocates has a message that those in the US—increasingly cited for their war-weariness—rarely hear: Afghans themselves, caught between an occupying power and a corrupt government, are "fed up" with war, death and the destruction of their rights and aspirations.

"We are fed up with the so-called 'helping hand' of the US and NATO that is used to justify occupation," Joya said in an extensive interview with journalist Elsa Rassbach and published by Common Dreams Thursday.

Joya, who rose to international prominence as the youngest female member of the Afghan parliament in 2005, says the US-led war in Afghanistan—"waged under a fake banner of human rights and democracy"—has gone on far too long, and what most Afghans want is the complete withdrawal of US troops so that regular Afghans can reclaim their dignity and solve their own problems.

Responding to the Obama and Karzai meeting, Joya explained to Rassbach that agreements made in Washington between the two will do nothing to improve the lives of most Afghans.

"Karzai and Obama are working on an outline of an agreement for legalizing permanent military bases in Afghanistan," she said. "But as long as we have foreign military bases in our country, we have no independence. And when we have no independence, we have nothing, and all talk of democracy, human rights and women's rights is a joke."

As far as the US government is concerned, Joya added, the "wellbeing of the Afghan people has no value at all."

"The U.S. elites just want relative stability in order to continue the occupation and maintain military bases in Afghanistan without much trouble. If 'stability' can be achieved by empowering the worst enemies of Afghan people, they are ready to do this. After all, the U.S. schemes to interfere with and control Afghanistan did not begin with 9/11. They go back for decades."

To the extent that a narrative exists in the US and elsewhere that Afghanistan would descend into chaos if US and NATO forces left completely, Joya rejects the premise outright. When asked about the threat of a civil war, she explained:

"There is already a civil war, a dangerous civil war. Whether the foreign troops stay or leave, war is going on. The presence of foreign troops only makes our struggle for justice harder, because the occupiers empower reactionary warlords -- and now also empower Taliban."

As many experts contend, it is the occupation itself that helps fuels and supports an otherwise beleaguered Taliban force.

"If the troops honestly leave, the backbone of these terrorists will break," Joya said. "We are fed up with the so-called helping hand of the U.S. and NATO that is used to justify occupation. The mother and father of all these tragedies is the occupation itself and the U.S./NATO support of the killers of my people. When the occupation leaves, these fundamentalists will get weak. They have no roots in the heart of the people, and their backbone will break. If the U.S. stops helping terrorists and killers, then they may not be in a position to wage a civil war and destroy Afghanistan like they did in 90’s."

Her deepest message, however, is perhaps the simplest. Regular people are simply fed up with the war and the death and the destruction. As she tells Rassbach:

The Afghan people are fed up. Fundamentalism and occupation are no longer accepted among the common people because of the brutalities and savagery they have experienced over the past decade. There is more openness, now, to progressive and democratic organizations and ideas. With the passage of time, I hope for the emergence of a powerful justice-loving alternative in Afghanistan. The U.S. is the main obstacle towards the development of such democratic forces.

(By Jon Queally; Common Dreams)

Wednesday, 09 January 2013 20:04

White House Weighing Full Withdrawal From Afghanistan Next Year

It was the first time Washington had publicly said it was weighing a zero-troop presence in Afghanistan any time in the near future, and goes against statements by Pentagon officials, who advocate leaving a thousands-strong American force in the country to train local army and law enforcement and keep Al-Qaeda under control.

At different points in time, the Obama administration has made various estimates regarding what it might do following the end of the NATO mission in Afghanistan. One option was to leave a residual troop presence as small as 3,000, with another option leaving as many as 15,000 depending on various factors and military goals.

“The US does not have an inherent objective of ‘X’ number of troops in Afghanistan,” said deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes.

There are currently 66,000 US troops in Afghanistan, down from the all-time high of roughly 100,000 in 2010.

In response to a journalist's question over whether zero troops would be an option, Rhodes said it was something the Obama administration "would consider."

The statement comes three days before Afghan President Hamid Karzai is set to visit the White House to meet with US President Barack Obama. The leaders are expected to discuss their partnership following troop withdrawals in 2014, but they are known to disagree over several other issues likely to come to the table. One is the American demand that US troops remaining in Afghanistan after combat comes to a close would be immune to prosecution there. With Karzai resisting this demand, the White House has been trying to trade troop immunity for a stabilizing post-2014 US presence.

White House military advisor Doug Lute told reporters Tuesday that Kabul would have no choice but to allow US forces certain "authorities" if it wanted them to stay and help law enforcement. The comment was taken to be referring to the immunity issue.

“As we know from our Iraq experience, if there are no authorities granted by the sovereign state, then there’s not room for a follow-on US military mission,” he continued, referring to Iraq's 2011 refusal to grant US troops immunity from the law that resulted in a full American pull-out from that country.

Serious harm to the country: 77 percent of Americans strongly disapprove of Congress

The overwhelming majority of Democrats, Republicans and Independents all believe that Washington politicians are damaging the United States, according to a Dec. 14-17 USA Today/Gallup poll, which was conducted while the 112th Congress was attempting to avert the looming fiscal cliff.

While 77 percent of Americans admitted having no faith in their elected representatives to do good, only 19 percent believed Washington is doing no harm.

Republicans had the most negative opinion, with 87 percent of GOP respondents indicating that Washington is harming the country, while only 68 Democrats and 79 Independents believed the same.

The poll reinforced the consistently low approval ratings of the 112th Congress, which were frequently below 20 percent. A separate poll conducted during the same time period found that Congress’ approval rating remained at 18 percent during the fiscal cliff debate, which is also where it stood a month prior, in mid-November.

“The finding that most Americans think politics are hurting the country fits with a number of additional measures showing that Americans hold the federal government in general and Congress in particular – the main instruments of how American politics work – in low-regard,” Gallup’s Frank Newport says in a press release that accompanies the report.

“The 19 percent of Americans who do not feel negatively about the way politics are being handled is quite close to Congress’ current 18 percent job approval rating,” he adds. “Confidence in Congress as an institution – the percentage with a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in it – is at 13 percent, and 10 percent and 14 percent of Americans rate the honesty and ethics of members of Congress and senators, respectively, as high or very high.”