suburbs - designed to keep the poor out - pure hell for the newly poor within

HuffPo | EDGEWATER, Colo. -- Before the unraveling, Selena Blanco and her family felt secure in their hold on middle class life in this bedroom community just west of Denver. She and her husband both held professional jobs in industries that seemed sheltered from trouble, his in technology, hers in health care. Together they brought home $100,000 a year, enough to allay concerns about paying the bills, let alone having to ask for help.

But over the last two years, both have lost their jobs. Her unemployment check ran out in the spring, leaving them to subsist on his jobless benefits alone, about $1,500 a month.

The Blanco's shattered fortunes have supplied them an unwanted new status, one they share with millions of suburban households in a nation previously accustomed to thinking of suburbia in upwardly mobile terms: They are poor.

They are officially so according to the federal government's definition, which sets the poverty line for a family of five at an annual income of $26,023 or less. It is viscerally true when one sees how Blanco, 28, now spends her day. She takes her four-year-old son to a county-operated Headstart program, free preschool for the poor. She forages for clothes at thrift stores. She scrounges for coupons to keep her family fed.

"We were doing well," Blanco says, dabbing at reddening eyes with a tissue, trying to make sense of events that contradict her understanding of what is supposed to happen to people who work, save and provide for their children. "My husband and I would go out to eat without even thinking about it. We bought shoes. When I needed a bra, I went to Victoria's Secret. Now we're like, 'Which Goodwill is having a sale?'"

They have applied for food stamps and the cash assistance program familiarly known as welfare, crossing a previously unimaginable threshold: For the first time in her life, Blanco -- a self-possessed, confident, intelligent woman who still carries herself like someone who used to work in an office -- has entered the ranks of those in need of public assistance.

"It's a horrible feeling," she says, tears staining her face. "There's pride. I don't show my kids that we're hurting, but it hurts me. It makes me feel like I'm failing as a parent. It's embarrassing."

Despite the typically urban associations evoked by talk of poverty in America, Blanco is the face of an emerging segment of the nation's poor now growing faster than any other. Though cities still have nearly double the rate of poverty as suburban areas, the number of people living in poverty in the suburbs of major metropolitan areas increased by 53 percent between 2000 and 2010, as compared to an increase of 23 percent among city-dwellers, according to a Brookings Institution analysis of recently released census data. In 16 metropolitan areas, including Atlanta, Dallas and Milwaukee, the suburban poor has more than doubled over the last decade.

The swift growth of suburban poverty is reshaping the sociological landscape, while leaving millions of struggling households without the support that might ameliorate their plight: Compared to cities, suburban communities lack facilities and programs to help the poor, owing to a lag in awareness that large numbers of indigent people are in their midst. Some communities are wary of providing services out of fear they will make themselves magnets for the poor.

In the suburbs, getting to county offices to apply for aid or to food banks generally requires a car or reliance on a typically minimal public transportation network. The same transportation constraints limit working opportunities, with many jobs potentially beyond reach and would-be employers reluctant to hire people who lack their own vehicles.

america is being extracted...,

Video - Dylan Ratigan detonates 100 megatons of truth on teevee

chalmers johnson on american hegemony

Speaking Freely - Chalmers Johnson on American Hegemony from Ice Goldberg on Vimeo.

Author of Blowback, The Sorrows Of Empire and Nemesis: The Last Days Of The American Empire, Chalmers Johnson has literally written the book on the concept of American Hegemony. A former naval officer and consultant of the C.I.A., he now serves as professor Emeritus at UC San Diego. As co-founder and President of the Japan Policy Research Institute, Mr. Johnson also continues to promote public education about Asia's role in the international community.

In this exclusive interview, you will find out why the practice of empire building is, by no means, a thing of the past. As the United States continues to expand its military forces around the globe, the consequences are being suffered by each and every one of us.

ex-CIA: u.s. making up stoopid stuff about iran...,

Video - Iran Assassination plot is an obvious hoax.

ABC | ELEANOR HALL: Now to the United States where a former intelligence analyst is warning the Obama administration to step back from blaming Iran for the foiled assassination plot against the Saudi ambassador in Washington. Listen to MP3 of this story

The US attorney-general says Iran is behind what would have been a blatant act of international terrorism and which investigating authorities said was intended to be a prelude to other attacks.

The Iranian regime is denying any involvement in the plot and says the allegations are US propaganda.

At a press conference announcing the plot and the charging of two Iranians, attorney-general Eric Holder said that the US would "hold Iran accountable for its actions".

The US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton also warned that the US will consider ways to isolate Iran from the international community.

HILLARY CLINTON: This kind of action which violates international norms must be ended and other areas where we can cooperate more closely in order to send a strong message to Iran and further isolate it from the international community will also be considered.

ELEANOR HALL: That's the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton.

But a former CIA analyst with decades of experience studying Iran, says the US may have got this dangerously wrong.

Robert Baer spent 21 years working as a CIA case officer in the Middle East.

When he spoke to me this morning, he said this plot does not appear to him to be driven by the Iranian government and he says the US administration must now step back from its comments and open a direct diplomatic channel with the Iranian regime or risk igniting an uncontrollable war.

Robert Baer, were you surprised when you heard about this assassination plot?

ROBERT BAER: Oh absolutely. I mean right now is not the time for Iran to provoke the United States. We're on edge already vis-à-vis Iran and it came as a total surprise to me.

ELEANOR HALL: The Iranian authorities have dismissed this as US propaganda; is it credible that the Iranian government is behind it?

ROBERT BAER: I don't think it's credible, not the central government, there may be a rogue element behind it. This doesn't fit their modus operandi at all. It's completely out of character, they're much better than this. They wouldn't be sending money through an American bank, they wouldn't be going to the cartels in Mexico to do this. It's just not the way they work.

I've followed them for 30 years and they're much more careful. And they always use a proxy between them and the operation, and in this case they didn't. I mean it's the, either they're shooting themselves in the foot or there's pieces of the story, I don't know what they are.

the peak oil crisis: contagion

FCNP | With every passing day it is becoming more apparent that the crisis of the depletion of cheap oil has become deeply enmeshed in the European debt crises.

The sequence of events is well known. Greece's economy is imploding; the government can no longer pay its bills without continuing bailouts from the EU; at some point Greece will have to default on at least part of the $430 billion it owes to mostly European banks. Such a default would in turn do severe damage to the viability of many major European Banks which are already suffering a liquidity shortage from the slowing global economy. It is widely believed that these problems quickly would spread to Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and now Belgium which are too large to ever be bailed out by France and Germany. Credit Default Swaps would kick in and, taken to the extreme, the world could conceivably not have much of a banking system left.

What is most disconcerting is that many believe that unless all this is settled in the next few weeks, the deluge will begin. Obviously the Europeans do not want to see their financial system collapse and are scrambling to find a solution. EU leaders have given themselves a deadline of October 23rd to come up with a plan to settle the Greek debt question and then recapitalize the European banks that will have to take heavy losses on Greek and possibly other nations' sovereign debts. One of the many issues involved in this crisis, of course, is how much of these heavy losses will be absorbed by the banks making the loans, and how much will be absorbed by the taxpayers of the better-off Eurozone states. London and Washington are putting heavy pressure on the EU to settle this issue, realizing the havoc that would ensue should there be even a partial meltdown of the EU banking system.

There is a big systemic problem going on here. So long as 17 sovereign states and their parliaments have to approve major actions the likelihood that there will be quick and decisive solution to all this seems remote. As we have seen with the Greek situation over the last two years, there is very little the Eurozone as a collective can do to enforce new and highly unpopular economic and social policies on the members, short of kicking them out of the Eurozone and suffering the consequences of a hard default. Despite all the optimism in the financial press and rising equity prices, it seem that in reality there is very little the EU can do to effect a long-term solution.

africom slipping further into darkness...,

WaPo | President Obama will send about 100 U.S. troops to Uganda and nearby countries to combat the Lord’s Resistance Army and kill or capture its leader, Joseph Kony, who has been charged with war crimes for a decades-long campaign against civilians in Central Africa.

In a letter to Congress on Friday, Obama outlined a strictly advisory role for U.S. forces, whom he said would engage in combat only in self-defense. The initial military contingent numbering about a dozen troops arrived in Uganda on Wednesday, and will grow to full strength in the coming weeks.

The decision follows more than a year of study within the White House on how to support the intent of a bill passed by Congress to help several Central African nations defeat a destabilizing guerrilla movement.

Human rights officials have urged Obama to deploy troops against the Lord’s Resistance Army, arguing that it would be a justified use of force to resolve a humanitarian crisis. The International Criminal Court indicted Kony and four other commanders in 2005 on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

But the deployment comes as the Obama administration is withdrawing from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, where long wars have tested the patience of the American public and consumed resources the president has argued are needed at home. White House officials said that this troop deployment — the most substantial to an African conflict zone since Marines landed in Liberia in 2003 — is modest in number and in the scope.

“This is an advise and assist mission,” said Tommy Vietor, spokesman for the National Security Council. “It’s an indication of our support for the ongoing regional effort to confront this threat.”

is occupy wall st. the tea party of the left?

Slate | Time has a blog post pondering whether the two anti-elite, anti-corruption movements could ever unite. “It’s not that far-fetched,” Roya Wolverson writes. “In some ways, the tea party and OWS are like doppelganagers… Both groups are repulsed by their taxpayer dollars funding Wall Street’s bailout. Both are disenchanted by the death of the American dream. And both feel left out of a system that seems less like a democracy than a cavalier plutocracy.” The post links to a Venn diagram by blogger James Sinclair showing where the two movements’ grievances overlap.

Not so fast, tea partiers say. Politico reports that major Tea Party groups are mounting an assault intended to delegitimize the Occupy Wall Street protests. They’re “hunting for evidence of union ties, fringe rhetoric and bad behavior — ranging from news of arrests, to recordings of incendiary speeches, to tales of littering, drug use and debauchery,” Politico writes. “They’re posting what they find online, like a photograph of a demonstrator apparently defecating on a cop car that has circulated widely, and are accusing the mainstream media of ignoring extremist elements.”

The conservative columnist George Will argues in the Washington Post that the two groups aren’t comparable because Occupy Wall Street is much smaller and its tactics more radical. And a campaign director for the Tea Party-aligned group FreedomWorks argues in the Politico article that tea partiers are “cheerful, happy warriors” while the Occupy Wall Street crowds are unhappy and angry. He compares the Tea Party to Martin Luther King Jr. and Occupy Wall Street to Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael.

One sign that the comparison might be flawed: A new Time poll shows that Occupy Wall Street is twice as popular with Americans as the Tea Party. Fifty-four percent of Americans view the “Occupy” movement favorably, compared to just 27 percent for the Tea Party. Slate’s David Weigel has a brief blog post examining the numbers.

we demand the restoration of the rule of law!

Video - Chris Hedges eviscerates a Canadian Broadcast blowhard.

Dailybail | O'Leary : So what exactly is everyone complaining about? And also give me a sense of how much momentum this movement has because it's pretty nothing burgers so far - just a few guys, guitars. Nobody knows what they want - they can't even name the names of the firms that they're protesting against - very weak, low budget.

Hedges : I wouldn't agree with that assessment at all. They pulled thousands of people into the street last night and here in Washington when everyone marched past the Bank of America, they were shouting Shame! Shame! Shame! They know the names of these firms and they know what these firms have done not only to the American economy but to the global economy, and the criminal class who runs them.

Fill-in for Lang : Well Kevin made this point that nobody knows what they want. What do you say to that? We know that this is a very diverse group, there are many different agendas at play ... what is the sense you have of what this movement would like to see happen?

Hedges : They know precisely what they want ; they want to reverse the corporate coup that's taken place in the US and rendered the citizenry impotent and they won't stop until that happens and frankly if we don't break the back of corporations, we're all finished anyway since we're rapidly trashing the ecosystem on which the human species depends for survival. This is literally a fight for life - it's that grave, it's that serious. Corporations, unfettered capitalism, as Karl Marx understood, is a revolutionary force - it commodifies everything - human beings, the natural world which it exploits for profit until exhaustion and collapse. The bottom line is we don't have much time left - we are on the cusp of perhaps another major banking crisis in Europe, defaults in Greece, followed by Spain, Portugal. There's been no restrictions, no regulations on Wall Street - they've looted the US Treasury, they've played all the games that they were playing before and we're about to pay for it all over again.

O'Leary : Listen don't take this the wrong way but you sound like a left wing nutbar. If you want to shut down every corporation, every bank, where are you going to get a job? Where are you gonna work? Where's the economy gonna go?

power structure research

uoregon.edu | Power structure research is an approach to the study of power that highlights the unequal distribution of resources upon which power is based (e.g., wealth, political office, control of the mass media) and the importance of formal and informal social networks as the means by which power is concentrated and institutionalized.

Modern power structure research has its roots in the radical social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Building upon the pioneering work of sociologists like Floyd Hunter and C. Wright Mills, radical scholars of the era sought to debunk the prevailing myths about American democracy and to advance an alternative view of power in America. Not content merely to criticize the system, they took up the tools of empirical social science and used them to document the domination of big corporations and the upper class over American political life and to analyze the mechanisms by which that domination was maintained.

The most important and widely read early work of power structure research was Who Rules America?, published by G. William Domhoff in 1967. The book has gone through five subsequent editions and the current edition, Who Rules America? Challenges to Corporate and Class Dominance (6th ed.), remains the best and most complete introduction to power structure research available today. (Click here to connect to the Who Rules America? website that accompanies the book.)

Much power structure research is conducted by academic social scientists, although similar studies are often undertaken by independent scholars, investigative journalists, trade union researchers, and social movement activists. Until recently, most of the information needed to trace the webs of power in American society could be obtained only through extensive library and archival research, close monitoring of the press, searches of government records and documents, and interviews with knowledgeable insiders. These remain important sources of data for power structure research, but today much of the information previously obtained in these ways can now be acquired more quickly and easily on the Internet.

This site provides a guide to resources for doing power structure research, including both those available on the Internet and those found elsewhere. Using these resources, you should be able to do such things as:

• research the backgrounds, economic interests, and social connections of individual members of the power elite
• disclose the internal power structure of major corporations and the political activities in which they are engaged
• trace the flow of money from corporations and wealthy capitalists to political candidates and parties
• monitor the role of special interests in lobbying congress and shaping legislation
• investigate the role of foundations, think tanks, and business associations in creating public policy

A few of the resources cited here are proprietary databases that are licensed to the University of Oregon. Online access to these resources is limited to students, faculty, and staff at the University of Oregon. However, identical or similar proprietary databases can be found at most college and university libraries as well as many public libraries.

occupy the hood includes all 99%

aljazeera | Just one week into the Occupy Wall Street movement, some activists identified what they considered a major flaw in the organising process, saying that people of colour in the United States were left out of the initial mobilisation.

From the start, the Occupy movement has prided itself on representing "99 per cent" of the population, meaning they have vastly different experiences from the highest earning one per cent, who have a much stronger ability to control and affect both the financial system and the government.

But some activists view the 99 per cent claim critically, saying that they were not included, and therefore the claim is problematic.

As soon as Malik Rhaasan began to use Facebook and Twitter for his idea of "Occupy the Hood", an Occupy sub-organisation that would aim to bring people of colour into the organising process, it began to catch on.

Between the two outreach tools, the group has more than 7,000 followers from around the world, and at least five major US cities have organised their own chapters.

Al Jazeera spoke with Ife Johari Uhuru, a mother and activist in Detroit, Michigan, who signed onto Rhasaan’s idea early on, and began coordinating outreach for the group.

AJE: What is Occupy The Hood and why is there a need for it?

IJU: When Occupy Wall Street started it just focused on capitalism and classism, and I think that some social issues were not brought up. You can't separate capitalism from racism - even if we did away with capitalism there would still be racism - so I posed this question to people of colour on Twitter and Facebook: Do you think more people would be involved if racism was included in this movement along with capitalism? And the overwhelming consensus was yes.Occupy The Hood was born out of a need that we saw to try to get people of colour involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement - not just in New York, but all around the world - to get involved in the general assemblies where decisions are made.

Without everybody, it's not a true representation of the 99 per cent. I don't know if the doors are being closed to people of colour, but this does involve us - come out and get involved in it. It's not a white fight, it's a people's fight. We can't be counted if we're not there - if we're not present to be counted.

2nd time fighting for the u.s., 1st time knowing the enemy....,

Video - Marine veteran 99% interviewed.

ahem 1%, remember the guillotine?

Video - Max Kaiser reminds the 1% of a little history.

the forbidden fruit...,

Salon | It’s fascinating to juxtapose America’s reverence for Steve Jobs’ accomplishments and its draconian drug policy with this, from the New York Times‘ obituary of Jobs:

[Jobs] told a reporter that taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life. He said there were things about him that people who had not tried psychedelics — even people who knew him well, including his wife — could never understand.

Unlike many people who have enjoyed success, Jobs is not saying that he was able to succeed despite his illegal drug use; he’s saying his success is in part — in substantial part — because of those illegal drugs (he added that Bill Gates would “be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once”). These quotes (first published by a New York Times reporter) have been around for some time but have been only rarely discussed in the recent hagiographies of Jobs: a notable omission given that he himself praised those experiences as an integral part of his identity and one of the most important things he ever did. A surprisingly good Time Magazine article elaborates on this Jobs-LSD connection further:

The paradoxes of love have perhaps never been clearer than in our relationships with Apple products — the warm, fleshy desire we feel for such cold, hard, glassy objects. But Jobs knew how to inspire material lust. He knew that consumers want something that not only sparkles and awes, but also feels accessible, easy to use, an object with which we want to merge and to feel one and the same. . . .

Not coincidentally, that’s how people describe the experience of taking psychedelic drugs. It feels profoundly artificial yet deeply real, both high-tech and earthy-crunchy, human and mystically divine — in a word, transcendent. Jobs had this experience. . . . As attested by the nearly spiritual devotion so many consumers have to Jobs’ creations, the former Apple chief (and indeed many other top technology pioneers) appeared to have found enduring inspiration in LSD. Research shows that the psychedelic experience is, in fact, long lasting: a new study published last week found that people who took magic mushrooms (psilocybin) had long-term personality changes, becoming more open, more curious, more intellectually engaged and more creative. These personality shifts persisted more than a year after taking the drugs.

America’s harsh prohibitionist drug policies are grounded in the premise that the prohibited substances have little or no redeeming value and cannot be used without life-destroying consequences. Yet the evidence of its falsity is undeniable. Here is one of the most admired men in America, its greatest contemporary industrialist, hailing one of the most scorned of these substances as integral to his success and intellectual and personal growth. The current President commendably acknowledged cocaine and marijuana use while there is evidence suggesting the prior President also used those substances. One of America’s most accomplished athletes was caught using marijuana at the peak of his athletic achievements. And millions upon millions of American adults have consumed some or many of those criminally prohibited substances, and themselves will say (like Jobs) that they had important and constructive experiences with those drugs or know someone who did.

why the elites are in trouble

TruthDig | Even now, three weeks later, elites, and their mouthpieces in the press, continue to puzzle over what people like Ketchup want. Where is the list of demands? Why don’t they present us with specific goals? Why can’t they articulate an agenda?

The goal to people like Ketchup is very, very clear. It can be articulated in one word—REBELLION. These protesters have not come to work within the system. They are not pleading with Congress for electoral reform. They know electoral politics is a farce and have found another way to be heard and exercise power. They have no faith, nor should they, in the political system or the two major political parties. They know the press will not amplify their voices, and so they created a press of their own. They know the economy serves the oligarchs, so they formed their own communal system. This movement is an effort to take our country back.

This is a goal the power elite cannot comprehend. They cannot envision a day when they will not be in charge of our lives. The elites believe, and seek to make us believe, that globalization and unfettered capitalism are natural law, some kind of permanent and eternal dynamic that can never be altered. What the elites fail to realize is that rebellion will not stop until the corporate state is extinguished. It will not stop until there is an end to the corporate abuse of the poor, the working class, the elderly, the sick, children, those being slaughtered in our imperial wars and tortured in our black sites. It will not stop until foreclosures and bank repossessions stop. It will not stop until students no longer have to go into debt to be educated, and families no longer have to plunge into bankruptcy to pay medical bills. It will not stop until the corporate destruction of the ecosystem stops, and our relationships with each other and the planet are radically reconfigured. And that is why the elites, and the rotted and degenerate system of corporate power they sustain, are in trouble. That is why they keep asking what the demands are. They don’t understand what is happening. They are deaf, dumb and blind.

“The world can’t continue on its current path and survive,” Ketchup told me. “That idea is selfish and blind. It’s not sustainable. People all over the globe are suffering needlessly at our hands.”

The occupation of Wall Street has formed an alternative community that defies the profit-driven hierarchical structures of corporate capitalism. If the police shut down the encampment in New York tonight, the power elite will still lose, for this vision and structure have been imprinted into the thousands of people who have passed through park, renamed Liberty Plaza by the protesters. The greatest gift the occupation has given us is a blueprint for how to fight back. And this blueprint is being transferred to cities and parks across the country.

“We get to the park,” Ketchup says of the first day. “There’s madness for a little while. There were a lot of people. They were using megaphones at first. Nobody could hear. Then someone says we should get into circles and talk about what needed to happen, what we thought we could accomplish. And so that’s what we did. There was a note-taker in each circle. I don’t know what happened with those notes, probably nothing, but it was a good start. One person at a time, airing your ideas. There was one person saying that he wasn’t very hopeful about what we could accomplish here, that he wasn’t very optimistic. And then my response was that, well, we have to be optimistic, because if anybody’s going to get anything done, it’s going be us here. People said different things about what our priorities should be. People were talking about the one-demand idea. Someone called for AIG executives to be prosecuted. There was someone who had come from Spain to be there, saying that she was here to help us avoid the mistakes that were made in Spain. It was a wide spectrum. Some had come because of their own personal suffering or what they saw in the world.”

the real cause of the urban school problem

Chicago Tribune | America's urban public schools are in trouble: Student test scores are low and dropout rates are high. Recent remedies proposed include everything from reducing the power of teachers unions and opening more charter schools to ending test-based accountability. But what if education critics are focused on the wrong problem?

Implicit in these very different proposals is the assumption that urban schools are failing because they are run badly, and that the solution lies in improving their management. Over the last five years, we have been involved in a wide-ranging research project that provides compelling evidence to the contrary. Our findings show that the root of the problems facing urban schools can be found in gradual but extremely powerful changes in the nation's economy — not the least of which is the increasingly unequal distribution of family incomes. Policies that address the consequences of these changes, which recent poverty figures show have worsened, are more likely to improve the life chances of the children from low-income families.

For the first three-quarters of the 20th century, economic growth, fueled in large part by the increasing educational attainments of successive generations of Americans, was a rising tide that lifted the boats of the rich and poor alike. During the most recent three decades, by contrast, the fruits of economic growth have not been widely shared and the gap between the incomes of the nation's rich and poor families has grown enormously.

Little noticed, but vital for our nation's future prosperity, is the equally dramatic widening of the gap between the educational attainments of children growing up in rich and poor families. Between 1978 and 2008, the gap between the average mathematics and reading test scores of children from high- and low-income families grew by a third. This growing test score gap has been reflected in a growing gap in completed schooling. Over the last 20 years, the rate of affluent children who completed college increased by 21 percentage points, while the graduation rate of children from low-income families increased by only 4 percentage points.

Growing economic inequality contributes in a multitude of ways to a widening gulf between the educational outcomes of rich and poor children. In the early 1970s, the gap between what parents in the top and bottom quintiles spent on enrichment activities such as music lessons, travel and summer camps was approximately $2,700 per year (in 2008 dollars). By 2005-2006, the difference had increased to $7,500. Between birth and age 6, children from high-income families spend an average of 1,300 more hours than children from low-income families in "novel" places — other than at home or school, or in the care of another parent or a day care facility. This matters, because when children are asked to read science and social studies texts in the upper elementary school grades, background knowledge is critical to comprehension and academic success.

Historically, we have relied on our public schools to level the playing field for children born into different circumstances, but in recent years, the gaps in achievement and behavior between high- and low-income children have only grown wider. Why? For one thing, residential segregation by income has meant that poor children are concentrated in the same schools to a much greater extent today than 40 years ago. As a result, children from low-income families are far more likely to have classmates with low achievement and behavior problems, which have a negative effect on their own learning. Children from poor families are also especially likely to attend schools with high rates of student turnover during the school year, and there is clear evidence that students learn less under such circumstances. In Chicago's public schools, 10 percent of students change school every year and it is not uncommon for some classrooms to have five new students arrive during the year. Research shows that students learn less if they attend schools with high student turnover during the school year.

occupy wall st. and the decline of the west

WaPo | This piece is part of an On Leadership roundtable on the Occupy Wall Street protests.

“Money is overthrown and abolished by blood.” Oswald Spengler wrote these words more than a century ago in The Decline of the West. And while the imagery here may be a bit much, there’s something of it in the Occupy Wall Street protests.

This movement profoundly threatens the legitimacy of the system on which corporate power is based, and boards of directors should be concerned.

Corporations are creatures of statute. There is no Common Law of corporations, they are instruments licensed by the state originally in aid of certain public objectives. But few of these objectives are left. With the passage of time, corporate charters have lost any power to keep corporations in check. What is left? Only the pursuit of wealth. As Baron Thurlow reportedly said, “Corporations have no soul to save and no body to incarcerate.” Their charter is in the gift of the public. They have no inherent right to exist.

Amidst the welter of information about executive pay, only one simple conclusion is possible: Pay is not correlated in any way with the value these leaders create for shareholders, society or any other corporate constituency. CEOs largely pay themselves, notwithstanding a raft of misnomers such as “independent compensation committee member” and “independent compensation consultant.” The system imbalances are there for all to see.

Recent protests—Occupy Wall Street, of course, but also the Tea Party movement as it first began—rise out of a profound rage over unfairness in this country. The scale of this unfairness and inequity makes it hard to know where to direct that rage, to know what to do. Occupy Wall Street has the right target; but where their rage will go, nobody today knows. I am certain, though, that any alert board should be instructing their managers to do three things: admit the problem exists, take positive steps to make the corporation function fairly, and consider what other steps would address the concerns of the protests.

Simple? Not quite. But necessary? You bet.

If the present Occupy Wall Street protests do not create an unignorable threat, they certainly raise the prospect of one in the near future. Rage at unfairness is not easily quenched and once started can be hard to curtail. We’ve seen this time and again throughout history. Shareholders may think of themselves as victims of CEO power, as innocent shareholders, but we need only look to the Russian and French Revolutions to see that everyone having anything to do with fallen power, or in this case “guilty corporations”, may be attacked and injured—even if, like shareholders, their only crime is doing nothing.

NYSE site has slowness on day of planned hack

Video - Operation Wall Street was a media scare tactic

WSJ | The New York Stock Exchange's website experienced slowness for a brief period of time Monday afternoon, on the same day that the hacker group "Anonymous" called for an attack against the Big Board operator's site.

There was some intermittent bandwidth saturation that prompted slowness on the site, according to a person familiar with the matter. But this person said the NYSE's internal systems weren't intruded upon and the site didn't experience an outage.

The slowness comes after Anonymous, a name used by an amorphous group of hackers, last week posted a YouTube video threatening to "erase" the stock exchange from the Internet. It claimed a denial-of-service-attack would occur on Oct. 10.

The call was made as a part of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in New York, which have been going on for weeks.

News reports said the NYSE's site had been interrupted between 3:35 p.m. EDT and 3:37 p.m.

A NYSE spokesman said trading wasn't affected. "We don't comment on security matters," he added. The spokesman said earlier Monday, before the opening bell, that NYSE was fully operational and ready for business as usual.

virus infects drone network

NPR | A few weeks ago, at Creech Air Force base in Nevada, computer security experts came upon a virus in their network. The virus was recording every keystroke made by Air Force pilots who remotely operate Predator and Reaper drones that fly over war zones. And so far, they can't seem to wipe the virus from the system. Guy Raz talks to Noah Shachtman, contributing editor at Wired magazine, who first reported the story.

remember, dark market was an FBI sting...,

NPR | Keith Mularski doesn't look like someone with a lot of secrets. He has this aw-shucks demeanor, like an overgrown kid in a business suit.

But back in 2005, his first assignment with the cybercrime division at the FBI was to hang out on the underground sites where stolen credit cards are bought and sold. By 2006, he would be running one of the biggest underground sites on the Internet.

The first thing Mularski had to do was come up with his hacker handle. He chose Master Splyntr, after the name of an underground rat in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.


Mularkski had to create an entire backstory for Master Splyntr to get the criminals on the sites to trust him. So he contacted an anti-spam organization and got it to list his name as a Polish spam king. If you Googled his nickname, he would come up as a notorious spammer, known for buying stolen credit card information.

Master Splyntr was wheeling and dealing on the underground at a moment of particular upheaval in the credit card black market.

There were about four or five major sites where criminals bought and sold stolen credit cards, according to Kevin Poulsen, the author of Kingpin, a new book on cybercrime. Each site had about 1,500 users.

The websites battled for control of the market, much like everyday firms do in the corporate world. Some of the sites suffered hostile takeovers. Finally, two sites emerged as the dominant players: Carders Market and Dark Market.

Mularski was working undercover as an ordinary user on Dark Market when the hostile takeovers happened. At this point, he had already developed a friendship with the head of the site, a British hacker called Jlsi. One night, when Dark Market was under spam bombardment by Carder's Market, Mularski made his move:

I said: "You know my reputation as a spammer. I'm very good at setting up websites. I can hide them from law enforcement. I have my site ready. I have my servers ready." And he said: "Let's move it, bro."

And so one October night in 2006, as we were watching Saturday Night Live, Mularski moved Dark Market to his servers and the FBI took control of one of the biggest criminal sites for stolen credit card information on the Web.

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