State GOP Attack Public Unions Dues Checkoff Rights

Republicans Attack Public Unions' Dues Check Off Rights

The Latest Attack on Public Sector Unions: Paycheck Protection in Pennsylvania and Missouri

Tuesday, 11 February 2014 10:06 By John Logan, Truthout | Op-Ed

Wisconsin workers rally, March 6, 2011. (Photo: Karen Hickey for wisaflcio / Flickr)

The GOP offensive against public sector unions at the state level that began in earnest in Wisconsin and Ohio in early 2011 is far from over. In its more recent manifestation, Republican politicians in Missouri and Pennsylvania are once again promoting so-called "paycheck protection" legislation, which they claim will protect the interests of ordinary workers. Nothing could be further from the truth. In common with similar legislation that right-wing groups have promoted for the past two decades, the goal of this legislation is to silence the political voice of working people and ensure that the wealthy dominate state elections.

Paycheck "Protection" Has Always Been a Partisan Right-Wing Ploy
Along with legislation restricting public sector bargaining and right-to-work laws, paycheck protection legislation - which either restricts unions' ability to raise or spend money on politics - has been one of the main anti-union initiatives that conservative activists have promoted at the state level.

Starting with the very first legislation in Washington State in 1992, a state-level network of right-wing organizations promoted paycheck legislation through ballot initiatives and bills. Paycheck legislation has always been a cynical attempt to tilt the balance of political power in favor of right-wing politicians who promote that legislation, not an effort to protect individual union members and non-union employees. In 1998, President Clinton explained that paycheck is a partisan power solution in search of an imaginary problem: "This is an attempt to create the impression that workers are being put upon when they aren't. And it's being done to alter the balance of power in the political debate."

Union members and non-members already enjoy a well-established legal right not to contribute to union political spending. Unions cannot force employees to have money for representation or political activities automatically deducted from their paycheck without authorization. Paycheck-protection legislation does not provide workers' with any rights they do not currently enjoy, but it deprives choice from workers who want a union with an effective political voice. In the name of solicitude for workers, disingenuous paycheck measures aim to take working people out of politics. In common with earlier paycheck measures, current paycheck bills in Pennsylvania and Missouri are based on model legislation devised by the ultra-conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

In the past few years, right-wing organizations and activists have promoted bills targeting automatic dues deduction in well over a dozen states. They have succeeded in enacting legislation in Wisconsin, North Carolina (for school employees), Michigan (for school employees and child care providers) and have had partial successes in other states. Whenever they are put to the electorate, however, paycheck measures almost always lose - they have lost three times in California in the past 15 years - because voters recognize that they are a cynical ploy. In a 2013 campaign for protection legislation in Kansas, a right-wing lobbyist explained that he "needed this bill passed so we can get rid of public sector unions."

Corporate Political Money Is the Real Problem
The battle over political spending has intensified after the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision, which stated that corporations and unions have a constitutional right to make unlimited independent expenditures, so long as they are not coordinated with candidates' campaigns. Although they are vastly outspent, unions are the only organized group whose political expenditures are anywhere near the level of spending by powerful corporations and conservative billionaires, which is why right-wing groups target them.

Moreover, unions are the most transparent organizations in the country when it comes to spending on politics. Unions file detailed reports with the Labor Department that disclose a broad range of activities related to politics, including polling fees, money spent on internal political communications, and even the cost of bratwursts used to feed workers protesting Wisconsin's controversial law eliminating public sector bargaining at the state capitol in early 2011. Powerful corporations, in contrast, do not disclose a broad range of their political spending activities. Unlike union members and non-union employees - whose right to opt out of political spending is protected by law - employees, customers, and shareholders have no legal right to opt out of paying for corporate political expenditures. The same groups that have promoted paycheck protection measures have opposed giving shareholders opt-out rights when it comes to corporate spending on politics.

As Harvard Law Professor Ben Sachs has pointed out, most public employees, who have no legal right to opt out, help fund corporate political speech. Public sector employees are forced to subsidize corporate political speech through pension contributions - they "cannot choose stock or avoid compelled speech associated with stock choices" - but no employee is ever forced to subsidize union political speech. In addition, corporations spend most of their political funds on external lobbying, while unions spend more on internal political communications with their members. This lack of transparency is especially significant because in recent years, corporations and conservative billionaires have vastly outspent unions in both state and national politics.

In the past, right-wing supporters of paycheck protection have stated that this type of legislation will "enable us to break the unions" and "crush labor unions as a political entity." Paycheck bills are part of a nationwide assault on public sector unions and a nationwide strategy to diminish the political voice of working people. Paycheck protection is bad for Missouri and bad for Pennsylvania and should be rejected.

John Logan is a Professor of Labor at San Francisco State College.

UK NSA Attacks Anonymous Rebels

The New Snowden Revelation Is Dangerous for Anonymous - And for All of Us

By Gabriella Coleman, Wired

08 February 14

he latest Snowden-related revelation is that Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) proactively targeted the communications infrastructure used by the online activist collective known as Anonymous.

Specifically, they implemented distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on the internet relay chat (IRC) rooms used by Anonymous. They also implanted malware to out the personal identity details of specific participants. And while we only know for sure that the U.K.'s GCHQ and secret spy unit known as the "Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group" (JTRIG) launched these attacks in an operation called "Rolling Thunder," the U.S.' NSA was likely aware of what they were doing because the British intelligence agents presented their program interventions at the NSA conference SIGDEV in 2012. (Not to mention the two agencies sharing close ties in general.)

Whether you agree with the activities of Anonymous or not - which have included everything from supporting the Arab Spring protests to DDoSing copyright organizations to doxing child pornography site users - the salient point is that democratic governments now seem to be using their very tactics against them.

The key difference, however, is that while those involved in Anonymous can and have faced their day in court for those tactics, the British government has not. When Anonymous engages in lawbreaking, they are always taking a huge risk in doing so. But with unlimited resources and no oversight, organizations like the GCHQ (and theoretically the NSA) can do as they please. And it's this power differential that makes all the difference.

There are many shades of gray around using denial-of-service attacks as a protest tactic. Unlike a hack, which involves accessing or damaging data, a DDoS attack renders a web page inaccessible due to an excessive flood of traffic. As an anthropologist who has studied hacker culture, hacktivism, and Anonymous in particular, I struggled to find some black-and-white moral certitude for such activities. But as one member of Anonymous told me: "Trying to find a sure fire ethical defense for Anonymous DDoSing is going to twist you into moral pretzels."

Judging the "moral pretzel" of DDoS attacks requires understanding the nuances of how they are carried out, and DDoS attacks tend to be problematic no matter what the motivation. Still, they've been a worthwhile exercise in experimenting with a new form of protest in an increasingly digital era. In the case of Anonymous, this form of protest came about because of the banking blockade against WikiLeaks. While the protest was rooted in deceit (they used botnets and many of their participants did not know that), it was certainly not destructive (especially since it was leveled against a large organization that could withstand it). The whole point was to get media attention, which they did.

But here's the thing: You don't even need to believe in or support DDoS as a protest tactic to find the latest Snowden revelations troubling. There are clearly defined laws and processes that a democratic government is supposed to follow. Yet here, the British government is apparently throwing out due process and essentially proceeding straight to the punishment - using a method that is considered illegal and punishable by years in prison. Even if DDoS attacks would do more damage upstream (than to IRC), it's a surprising revelation.

 

The real concern here is a shotgun approach to justice that sprays its punishment over thousands of people who are engaged in their democratic right to protest simply because a small handful of people committed digital vandalism. This is the kind of overreaction that usually occurs when a government is trying to squash dissent; it's not unlike what happens in other, more oppressive countries.

Since 2008, activists around the world have rallied around the name 'Anonymous' to take collective action and voice political discontent. The last two years in particular have been a watershed moment in the history of hacktivism: Never before have so many geeks and hackers wielded their keyboards for the sake of political expression, dissent, and direct action.

Even though some Anonymous participants did engage in actions that were illegal, the ensemble itself poses no threat to national security. The GCHQ has no business infecting activists' systems with malware and thwarting their communications. And if we're going to prosecute activists and put them in jail for large amounts of time for making a website unavailable for 10 minutes, then that same limitation should apply to anyone who breaks the law - be they a hacker, our next door neighbor, or the GCHQ.

As it is, the small subset of Anonymous activists who engaged in illegal civil disobedience face serious consequences. These activists - on both sides of the Atlantic - are currently paying a steep price for breaking the law, because the current form of the laws under which they're charged (the Computer Misuse Act in the U.K., and the CFAA in the U.S.) tend to mete out more excessive and often disproportionate punishments compared to analogous offline ones. For instance, physical tactics such as trespass or vandalism of property rarely result in serious criminal consequences for participants and tend to be minor civil infractions instead of federal crimes. Yet that same nuance - which fundamentally recognizes the intention and the consequences of such protest actions - is rarely extended to online activities. Criminal punishments for such acts can stretch out to years, disrupt lives, lead to felony charges on employment records, and result in excessively high fines.

To put this in perspective: In Wisconsin alone a man was fined for running an automated DDoS tool against the Koch Industries website for 60 seconds. (He was protesting the billionaire Koch brothers' role in supporting the Wisconsin governor's effort to reduce the power of unions and public employees' right to engage in collective bargaining.) The actual financial losses were less than $5,000, but he was charged a fine of $183,000 - even though a far worse physical crime in the same state was only fined $6400.

In the U.K., Chris Weatherhead - who didn't directly contribute to a DDoS campaign but ran the communication hub where the protests were coordinated - received a whopping 18-month sentence. This is even more time than was given to hackers who broke into computer systems, stole data, and dumped it on the internet.

Based on these and other sentences already handed out, it's clear that judges consider Anonymous' actions to be serious and punishable. Scores of Anonymous hacktivists have already been arrested or jailed.

Meanwhile, agencies like the GCHQ face no such risks, deterrents, consequences, oversight, or accountability. This scenario is all the more alarming given that some of Anonymous' actions may be illegal and might warrant attention from some law enforcement agencies - but do not even come close to constituting a terrorist threat. And that means we're inching into the same territory as the dictatorial regimes criticized by democratic governments for not respecting internet freedoms.

 

Warren Calls for Postal Savings Accounts

by GleninCAFollow for GleninCA

• 

A few days ago, a diary was posted explaining that the US Inspector General had recently endorsed the idea of the United States Post Office offering simple banking services in addition to its normal mail delivery service. While this idea might seem foreign to many Americans, in the past the post office actually offered banking services for over 50 years. Per The New Republic, beginning in 1911:

"...the Postal Savings System allowed Americans to deposit cash with certain branch post offices, at 2 percent interest. By 1947, the system held deposits for over four million customers. Though dismantled in 1967 (after banks offered higher interest rates and eroded its market share), the post office continues to issue domestic and international money orders, including $22.4 billion worth in 2011, as well as prepaid debit cards through a deal with American Express."

Putting aside the sad fact that banks once offered 2% interest rates (and you would now be lucky to get even half a percent), today post offices could offer basic banking services such as check-cashing, saving accounts, and even small-dollar loans similar to payday lenders, yet at much lower interest rates which could potentially save low-income Americans thousands of dollars per household per year. The idea is so good that Senator Elizabeth Warren has now endorsed the idea.

In an op-ed for The Huffington Post, Senator Warren explains that because of the exorbitant fees that payday lenders charge, low-income Americans spend roughly 10% of their income on things like checking cashing and short term loans, which is roughly the same amount that the average American spends on food.

Having grown up in a low-income family myself, I've experienced far too many times to recall when my single mother would go to one of these payday lenders for a short-term loan just to keep the lights at home from being shut off or to pay the rent and would quickly find herself in a vicious cycle of more loans, fees, and high interest rates.

Fortunately in my adult life I haven't had to endure that same hardship, but in today's world of stagnant wages and an increasing cost of living, many Americans still turn to these payday lenders as they struggle to stay in the middle class.

As Elizabeth Warren points out, this idea has been done in other countries around the world and has been proven successful. Furthermore, not only could it help millions of Americans but it could also prove beneficial to the postal service's bottom line at a time when USPS - which employs over half a million people - desperately needs it.

This idea could easily be adopted by the Postmaster General and begin without Congressional approval, but so far he has declined to endorse the Inspector General's recommendation. But hopefully now with people like Senator Warren endorsing the idea,  public pressure will mount for this idea to become a reality.

Internet Corps Release NSA Orders

Microsoft, Facebook, Google and Yahoo release US surveillance requests

• Tech giants turn over data from tens of thousands of accounts
• Limited disclosure part of transparency deal made last month

• Spencer Ackerman

Microsoft, Twitter, Google and Facebook all participate in the NSA's Prism effort. Photograph: Pichi Chuang/Reuters

Tens of thousands of accounts associated with customers of Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Yahoo have their data turned over to US government authorities every six months as the result of secret court orders, the tech giants disclosed for the first time on Monday.

As part of a transparency deal reached last week with the Justice Department, four of the tech firms that participate in the National Security Agency’s Prism effort, which collects largely overseas internet communications, released more information about the volume of data the US demands they provide than they have ever previously been permitted to disclose.

But the terms of the deal prevent the companies from itemising the collection, beyond bands of thousands of data requests served on them by a secret surveillance court. The companies must also delay by six months disclosing information on the most recent requests – terms the Justice Department negotiated to end a transparency lawsuit before the so-called FISA court that was brought by the companies.

In announcing the updated data figures, the companies appeared concerned by the lack of precision over the depth of their compelled participation in government surveillance.

“We still believe more transparency is needed so everyone can better understand how surveillance laws work and decide whether or not they serve the public interest,” said Google’s legal director for law enforcement and information security, Richard Salgado, in a post on the company’s official blog.
“Specifically, we want to disclose the precise numbers and types of requests we receive, as well as the number of users they affect in a timely way.”

In the most recent period for which data is available, January to June 2013 – a period ended by the beginning of whistleblower Edward Snowden’s landmark surveillance disclosures – Google gave the government the internet metadata of up to 999 customer accounts, and the content of communications from between 9,000 and 9,999 customers.

Microsoft received fewer than 1,000 orders from the FISA court for communications content during the same period, related to between 15,000 and 15,999 “accounts or individual identifiers”.
The company, which owns the internet video calling service Skype, also disclosed that it received fewer than 1,000 orders for metadata – which reveals communications patterns rather than individual message content – related to fewer than 1,000 accounts or identifiers.

Yahoo disclosed that it gave the government communications content from between 30,000 and 30,999 accounts over the first six months of 2013, and fewer than 1,000 customer accounts that were subject to Fisa court orders for metadata.

Facebook disclosed that during the first half of 2013, it turned over content data from between 5000 and 5999 accounts – a rise of about 1000 from the previous six month period – and customer metadata associated with up to 999 accounts.

Microsoft, Facebook and Yahoo also gave the FBI certain customer records – not content – under a type of non-judicial subpoena called a national security letter. Since disclosure of national security letters is not subject to a six-month delay under last week’s deal, Microsoft revealed that it received up to 999 such subpoenas between June and December 2013, affecting up to 999 user accounts. Facebook’s National Security Letter total was the same.

Yahoo received up to 999 national security letters during the same period, affecting 1,000 to 1,999 accounts. Google received the same total, and disclosed that since 2009, national security letters have compelled the handover of customer records from as many as 1999 accounts every six months. Last week Apple disclosed that between 1 January and 30 June 2013 it had received less than 250 national security orders – including national security letters and other requests – relating to less than 250 accounts.

LinkedIn, the professional networking service, disclosed on Monday that it received the same total of generic “national security requests.”

Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, posted on the company’s blog that “only a fraction of a percent of users are affected by these orders”, and argued that “we have not received the type of bulk data requests that are commonly discussed publicly regarding telephone records.”

But the disclosures only apply to data requests turned over to the NSA and FBI as the result of FISA court orders.

Documents that Snowden disclosed to the Guardian, Washington Post and other outlets show that the NSA also siphons communications and associated data from information in transit across the global communications infrastructure – without court orders, under authority claimed under a seminal executive order known as executive order 12,333.

“Nothing in today's report minimises the significance of efforts by Governments to obtain customer information outside legal process,” Smith said, affirming that the company remained concerned about reports of clandestine government hacking and would continue to press for more transparency from the US government and others.

Google data shows a significant growth in internet content collection from its products by the NSA. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The data from Google shows a significant growth in internet content collection from its products by the NSA. In the first six months of 2009, the company gave the government data from up to 2,999 customer accounts, a figure that grew to between 12,000 and 12,999 customer accounts by the second half of 2012 before dipping to under 10,000 accounts in the first half of 2013.
But the data does not provide any indication of what accounted for the rise, beyond the growth in popularity of Google email and other internet products.

Similarly, Microsoft revealed that it gave the US government content information on more than 12,000 customer accounts in the second half of 2011, a figure that grew to over 16,000 customer accounts in late 2012 before dropping to more than 15,000 in the first six months of 2013.
Kevin Bankston, the policy director for the Open Technology Institute in Washington, said the amount of information the companies were able to detail about their roles in US surveillance was “far less than what we need for adequate accountability from the government”.

“Lumping all of the different types of surveillance orders together into one number, then adding obscurity on top of obscurity by requiring that number to be reported in ranges of one thousand, is not enough to educate the American public or reassure the international community that the NSA is using its surveillance authorities responsibly," said Bankston, who like Google’s Salgado advocated legislation permitting the additional disclosure of “specific number of requests issued under specific legal authorities and the number of people affected by each”.

Nate Cardozo, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the new information in the transparency reports was “a good first step” but added that large questions remained. Cardozo said the national security letters had all been “lumped together” and it was impossible to see what legal framework had been used to compel the companies to hand over information.

“It makes you question the government’s repeated assertions that it welcomes this debate,” he said.
Microsoft’s Smith lamented that “despite the President's reform efforts and our ability to publish more information, there has not yet been any public commitment by either the US or other governments to renounce the attempted hacking of internet companies.

“We believe the constitution requires that our government seek information from American companies within the rule of law. We'll therefore continue to press for more on this point, in collaboration with others across our industry.”

• An earlier version of this story stated in error that Google did not disclose the number of national security letters it had received. This has been corrected.

 It was further revised to remove an unsubstantiated description of Microsoft being a "major surveillance partner for the US government".

FDR Works Projects 1932-1939

FDR Arts Programs 1932-1939

Federal Theatre Project

Flanagan’s Federal Theatre, and ‘living newspapers’

Federal Arts Project

200,000 art works, including, murals by Diego Rivera

Federal Writers Project

Launched careers of J. Steinbeck & Richard Wright

Federal Music Project

Mr. Sokoloff created 36 Orchestras in cities all over

America.  In 1934, only 11 Cities had Orchestras.____

Works Progress Administration (WPA) invested $1.4 Billion in liveable Jobs.
1935 dollars = $20-$25 Billion today.

“Frances Perkins”, "Harry Hopkins Minister of Relief" "New Deal" by Michael Hiltzik, Free Press, 2011

Unions United       Progressive Democratic Workers   2-4-2014

PEW Poll on Dems vs. GOP

PEW POLL  Late January 2014:

Obama's Bouquet of Roses for NSA Traitors

Obama's NSA Speech Makes Orwellian Surveillance Patriotic

  By Michael Ratner, Truthout | Op-Ed

President Barack Obama while speaking about the government’s surveillance practices during a news conference at the Department of Justice in Washington, Jan. 17, 2014. (Photo: Stephen Crowley / The New York Times)

 

When considering the revolutionary history of the United States, most would think of fighting for freedom, the enshrinement of basic human and civil rights in a constitutional government of the people, by the people and for the people.
But in his speech on reforms to the NSA and the United States' intelligence gathering systems last week, President Obama had a creative new addition to the legacy of the American Revolution: surveillance.
"At the dawn of our Republic, a small, secret surveillance committee borne out of the Sons of Liberty was established in Boston," said the president. "And the group's members included Paul Revere. At night, they would patrol the streets, reporting back any signs that the British were preparing raids against America's early Patriots."

Collecting the meta-data of billions of phone calls and 200 million text messages a day, as well as gathering data through the government's PRISM program and placing bugs in 100,000 computers all over the world seems significantly more extensive than monitoring British troop movement via horseback and candlestick - especially when you consider that the data being collected is in large part that of the American people, not a foreign enemy during war time. Such metadata information would still be collected and stored in President Obama's "reformed" NSA.

The reforms proposed by the President's speech amount to nothing short of a bouquet of roses for American intelligence agencies. The changes detailed in the speech do almost nothing to actually rein in the growing national surveillance state. Billions of phone calls by Americans would still be collected and retained every single day - too much information for even the NSA to wade through properly. We're creating a massive database that could be used at basically any time to determine peoples' associates and behaviors.

While no cause would be necessary to collect this information, the president recommended requiring a court order for analysis of the retained data. This court order is far from a warrant under the Fourth Amendment, but is instead a rubber stamp from a secret court with a tendency to never say no. Considering that the definition of terrorism has sometimes included civil disobedience at demonstrations, the loose standard for issuing a court order for retained data is not a strong enough protection. Warrantless surveillance should be stopped altogether, and metadata should only be collected and retained on an individual basis by a court order under the Fourth Amendment, with a standard of probable cause.

Then there's the continued question of national security letters.

And when "legal standards" do exist in the realm of government spying, they prove very different than the constitutional measures American citizens should be able to expect.

The president left the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court alone, despite its horrendous track record of authorizing a massive spying operation on all of us. This secret court has authorized wide-scale surveillance, issuing 35 opinions upholding metadata collection and consistently granting secret warrant requests. Rather than opening up the court, limiting its powers or changing the method of judge selection (as of now, all FISA judges are handpicked by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts), the president instead suggested that Congress establish a panel of advocates to argue in these secret courts on behalf of civil liberties and privacy. Again, with no timetable or guarantee of Congressional action, it's unclear whether or when this change would be enacted.

But even with a set of privacy and civil liberties advocates, these secret courts operate on a corrupted base. What good is someone arguing on behalf of privacy and civil liberties when the law allows for the unlimited collection of metadata and wiretapping on Americans without probable cause?
In and of itself, disappointment in the president's proposed reforms isn't surprising - in some way it was expected, as the purpose of the speech was most likely to take the pressure off the president to make real change. What is shocking is that speech did not even do that. Instead, it told all of us, both here and abroad, that massive, Orwellian surveillance is somehow patriotic.

President Obama's assertion that our nation was formed as a result of a heroic history of surveillance, and that such surveillance is among the only things keeping us safe, is not only a striking misappropriation of the facts, but a misleading scare tactic clearly aimed at making Americans comfortable with the far-reaching government spying he seems bent to protect. The American Revolution was fought to prevent more than just taxes on tea. The British Empire's use of general warrants - including "writs of assistance" that allowed agents of the king to search and seize colonial property, including letters and papers - was an abuse of power that the writers of our Constitution specifically sought to address and protect against in the newly formed government they had fought so hard for.

The American people should never accept the collection and retention of millions of records by a government calling for our trust. Because, as President Obama said himself, "History has too many examples when that trust has been breached."