All posts by alternativefreepress

Corporate Welfare

Why are US taxpayers subsidizing Brazilian granite?

Megan Stiles
Campaign For Liberty: May 19, 2014

A few weeks ago, the House reauthorized the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) which is a federal agency that subsidizes U.S corporations who set up shop outside the United States. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor celebrated the passage of corporate welfare despite a majority of House Republicans being against the measure.

According to The Washington Examiner, OPIC is now subsidizing Brazilian granite at the expense of granite manufactured in the United States:

In 2012, OPIC approved a $6 million taxpayer-backed loan to support a U.S. company expanding its Brazilian operation that extracts granite and cuts it into slabs for countertops to ship to the U.S. and other countries.

The OPIC subsidy obviously helps the recipient — Wisenbaker Building Supply — but it hurts American companies that excavate granite or shape granite blocks into countertops in the U.S.

U.S. rock quarries have pared back operations over recent decades. In Barre, Vt., jobs in the industry amount to one-third of the1960s peak, Barre Granite Association’s Executive Director Ed Larson told a local newspaper last summer. “Mainly because of foreign competition,” the paper said.

(Read the full article at Campaign for Liberty)

Privacy

Police arrest 100 people in global raids on ‘BlackShades’ malware hackers

Agence France-Presse: May 19, 2014

Police have arrested around 100 people in global raids against a notorious malware being sold complete with “ransom notes” to extort money after taking control of computers.

“During the course of a worldwide investigation, creators, sellers and users of BlackShades malware were targeted by judicial and law enforcement authorities in 16 different countries,” Europe-wide police and justice bodies Europol and Eurojust said in a statement.

Thousands of people around the world have bought BlackShades RAT (Remote Access Tools) malicious software or malware, which can be used to secretly take control of a user’s webcam or entire computer, as well as encrypt its contents and hold them to ransom

The malware could also be used to carry out distributed denial-of-service cyberattacks to bring down websites.

Over two days, police and the FBI raided 359 houses, arrested 97 people and seized “substantial quantities” of cash, illegal guns and drugs, as well as over 1,000 data storage devices, the statement said.

“A recent case in the Netherlands of BlackShades malware being used for criminal purposes was that of an 18-year-old man who infected at least 2,000 computers, controlling the victim’s webcams to take pictures of women and girls,” Eurojust said.

Among the countries raided were the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, the UK, Italy, the US, Canada, Chile and Switzerland.

The Dutch public prosecutor’s office said that police raided 34 properties in the Netherlands and made no arrests.

Hacker websites began reporting three days ago that police were raiding people suspected of buying or using BlackShades, which is reportedly available on the so-called “darknet” network of trusted peers for under $100 (70 euros).

Chatrooms suggested police were using records from the PayPal payment site to identify those who bought the malware.

(Read the full article on Raw Story)

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Geopolitics/War, Privacy

U.S. Charges China With Cyber-Spying on American Firms

Pete Williams
NBC News: May 19, 2014

The Justice Department filed criminal charges against five hackers in the Chinese military Monday, accusing them of stealing American trade secrets through cyber-espionage.

The efforts were directed at six American victim companies in the nuclear power, metals and solar products industries: Westinghouse Electric, U.S. subsidiaries of SolarWorld AG, U.S. Steel, Allegheny Technologies and Alcoa. The United Steel Workers union was also targeted.

“This is a case alleging economic espionage by members of the Chinese military and represents the first-ever charges against a state actor for this type of hacking,” Attorney General Eric Holder said.
[…]
The FBI tracked the computer attacks to Unit 61398 of the Third Department of the People’s Liberation Army, headquartered in a building in Shanghai, officials said.

Authorities said what amounted to “21st century burglary” benefited the Chinese competitors of the U.S. victims, including state-run enterprises, and led to the loss of American jobs.

As one example, the hackers stole cost, pricing and strategy information from SolarWorld at the very time the company was losing market share to Chinese rivals, officials said.

“These victims are tired of being raided,” said Assistant Attorney General John Carlin.

He said that in the past, when the U.S. has complained about the hacking to China, “they repsonded by publicly challenging us to provide hard evidence of their hacking that could cstand up in court.

“Well, today we are,” Carlin said.

It’s unclear how the hackers would be brought to justice in the United States. The feds also have charged the makers of the malicious software the Chinese allegedly used to steal information from the American firms.

(read the full article at NBC News)

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Geopolitics/War, Privacy

Israeli Spying on USA; Snowden Document Confirms

The Latest Document From the Snowden Trove Highlights Israeli Spying

By Jeff Stein
May 16, 2014

Israel had a few triumphs, this week, in its campaign to rebut charges that it spies in the U.S. It got a hearing with the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, it saw the removal of a roadblock to long-delayed legislation that would strengthen strategic cooperation between Israel and the U.S., and at a press conference in Tel Aviv, U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said he was “not aware of any facts that would substantiate” Newsweek’s reports on Israeli spying against the United States.

But as always the case in the complex relationship between the two, closely allied nations, Israel did not get everything it wanted. Senator Dianne Feinstein, who chairs the Intelligence Committee, stopped short of dismissing allegations of Israeli espionage, a charge buttressed by the publication Wednesday of yet another highly classified National Security Agency document from the vast archive stolen by fugitive whistle-blower Edward Snowden that says Israel has been spying on the United States. And while a Senate bill to lower Israeli visa restrictions was toughened to satisfy critics, some U.S. national security officials still oppose loosening restrictions on Israeli citizens who want to visit the U.S. Some of the concerns not yet addressed: regular reporting by Israel of stolen or lost passports, a faster conversion to biometric passports, and less Israeli hassling of Arab- and Muslim-Americans landing at Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion airport.

The latest NSA document, revealed by journalist Glenn Greenwald in concert with the publication of his memoir, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the U.S. Surveillance State, sums up the complicated security relationship between Israel and Washington in a single paragraph.

“The Israelis are extraordinarily good [Signals Intelligence] partners for us,” the NSA observed, referencing joint electronic spying programs against foreign targets, “but on the other [hand], they target us to learn our positions on Middle East problems.” It added that a CIA-led National Intelligence Estimate on cyberthreats in 2013 “ranked Israel the third most aggressive intelligence service against the U.S.,” behind only China and Russia.

(read the full article at Newsweek)

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Banksters

Chilean activist destroys student debt papers worth $500m

Neela Debnath
The Independent: 18 May 2014

An activist in Chile has burnt documents representing $500 million (£300 million) worth of student debt during a protest at Universidad del Mar.

Francisco Tapia, who is also known as “Papas Fritas”, claimed that he had “freed” the students by setting fire to the debt papers or “pagarés”.

Mr Tapia has justified his actions in a video he posted on YouTube on Monday 12 May, which has since gone viral and garnered over 55,000 views.

In the five-minute video the artist and activist, translated by the Chilean news site Santiago Times, he passionately says: “You don’t have to pay another peso [of your student loan debt]. We have to lose our fear, our fear of being thought of as criminals because we’re poor. I am just like you, living a s**tty life, and I live it day by day — this is my act of love for you.”

He confessed he destroyed the papers without the knowledge of the students during a takeover at the university demanding free higher education.

According to the video’s description, Mr Tapia was at the protests when he hatched the plan to wipe the student debt by stealing the papers. It goes on to say that he wanted to create a work of art to reflect the problem of student debt plaguing the nation.

(read the full article at The Independent)

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Banksters

Bankers killing bankers for the insurance money and another look at 9/11

Max Keiser
RT: May 14, 2014

Two big, macabre stories came out of Wall Street recently: the rash of banker deaths by apparent murder and/or suicide, and speculation that bank CEOs themselves are behind the trend to cash in on the insurance.

It turns out that banks take out life insurance policies on their employees, and those policies pay out death benefits to the banks – not the families. In other words, to add to the banks’ other crimes, they appear to also be involved in the “suicides” and deaths of their own, as a way to fatten their bottom line and bonuses.

Should we be surprised by this banker-on-banker death scam? After all, wasn’t this what 9/11 was all about?

A new book by James Rickards, ‘The Death of Money’ (read: ‘Death of Bankers’), opens with a timeline starting three days before the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers and describes them from a first-person account from inside the CIA, which was monitoring trading on airline stocks (specifically ‘put options’), from traders who were profiting from the 9/11 disaster.

Jim Rickards is both a Washington insider and a Wall Street insider. He’s a hedge fund manager and a lawyer who, amongst other roles, advised the government during the collapse of Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), as well as during the release of the hostages during the Iran Hostage Crisis of 1981. If anyone has the inside track on the Wall Street-Washington corridor of corruption, it’s Mr. Rickards. And in his new book, he provides an eyewitness account of 9/11 insider ‘terror trading’ that was missing from the government’s own report. Rickards is an unimpeachable source, and he has done a great service by blowing the whistle on this scandal, at least partially.

I’ve interviewed Jim Rickards on my show ‘Keiser Report’ many times and spent time with him personally comparing notes from our Wall Street days. One topic that often comes up is ‘Drexel.’ We were both working on Wall Street during the collapse of Drexel Burnham Lambert and the Ivan Boesky scandal – a seminal moment in establishing the modern, post-regulatory environment on Wall Street, where virtually anything goes and laws are either ignored, rewritten, or created on the spot to manage and profit from the avalanche of insider trading, market manipulation, back room dealing, larceny, forgery, extortion, and other crimes that are the hallmarks of American finance today. When talking about finance scandals, all roads lead back to Drexel and it provides common ground to start a conversation amongst Wall Street veterans.

Both Rickards and I agree that judging by the price action and volume in the options market ahead of the 9/11 attacks, it was clear we were witnessing insider trading. I was one of the biggest producing option brokers when I worked on Wall Street, keep in mind, so I am very familiar with that market. The put options before the disaster were trading like you would expect them to do after a disaster, not before. It was very obvious that advanced knowledge of the attacks was circulating amongst traders. The options market was in fact screaming insider trading, and brokers and bankers were talking about it in the days leading up to the attacks.

Rickards’ information timeline in his book almost exactly mirrors the stories I was hearing at the time, when talking to brokers who had heard of, and in some cases were trading, based on this rumor of an impending airline disaster.

Rickards quotes Buzzy Krongard in his book, deputy chairman of the CIA, who was also the former head of Alex Brown – a firm that factors significantly in the story. I used to work for Buzzy at Alex Brown and I still keep in touch with my former colleagues, some of whom were ‘buzzing’ about the action in airline puts. Additionally, a company I started in Los Angeles, a dot-com, had been sold to a Wall Street broker just a few months before the attacks and the company had relocated their acquisition to the top floor of the World Trade Center. I was in touch with employees who were also ‘buzzing’ about the put option frenzy in airline stocks, and they cited Alex Brown as the source of the rumors. (They were ironically speculating on their own demise, as we were to find out later).

Coyly, Rickards wants us to believe that the original ‘terror traders’ – the original airline put option buyers – started buying put options somewhere other than Washington DC or Wall Street. Without much by way of explanation, he suggests that there is no way of knowing for sure where these trades originated, who did the trades, or how to track them. This of course is wrong. All trades are cleared via the OCC (Option Clearing Corporation) and are routed in ways that leave a paper trail that is easily examined and reconstructed. Why is Rickards evasive on these points? Take a close look again at his resume; he is not going to point the finger at the CIA even though there is overwhelming evidence to suggest the trades originated there. So be it. We can read between the lines. To highlight just one obvious point missing in his narrative: millions of dollars worth of profits from 9/11 insider trading still sit uncollected in an Alex Brown account (now owned by Deutsche Bank) in Baltimore, just down the road from the CIA’s HQ at Langley.

Rickards claims these trades originated “by unknown traders working overseas somewhere,” and this is clearly a dodge. But let’s focus on the fact that Rickards at least has repudiated the government’s claim that there was no insider trading at all. For this I take my hat off to him.

For some, the 9/11 story has faded into history and they consider it not terribly interesting anymore, but I think it’s important to keep in mind the ruthlessness of bankers on Wall Street today who are now apparently killing each other for the insurance money and who, we can now say with some certainty, were trading options to cash in on their own deaths on 9/11.

(read the full article at RT)

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Privacy

It’s time for real cell phone privacy in Canada

Your cellphone is not your castle. But it should be

The Globe and Mail: May 15, 2014

Is a Canadian’s cellphone account his or her castle? It isn’t now. But it should be.

Under long-standing laws, if police enter a dwelling without a search warrant, or wiretap a landline telephone conversation without judicial authorization, there are serious legal consequences. Most Canadians would expect similar penalties to be imposed if their privacy is invaded through their wireless phones.

But a bill that a House of Commons committee began studying this week actually includes a clause that grants protection and immunity to those who take and hold on to information that has been illegally obtained from people’s cellphones and cellphone accounts.

Bill C-13 is called the Protecting Canadians from Online Crime Act. The name is intended to refer to cyberbullying, though Carol Todd, the mother of a well-known teenage victim of cyberbullying, Amanda Todd, said on Wednesday that she did not want a bill dealing with that social ill to also contain elements touching on the unrelated matter of electronic surveillance by government agencies. She’s right.

Much of Bill C-13 is the federal government’s latest stab at what is known as “lawful access” legislation – in other words, creating new terms for government access to people’s electronic communications or documents that otherwise would be unlawful.

One overreaching change in the bill is the terms on which police can ask someone – a wireless carrier, for example – to hand documents over voluntarily. Among other things, the bill says that “a person who preserves data or provides a document … does not incur any criminal or civil liability for doing so.”

Canada’s wireless carriers, as this newspaper was shocked to discover last year, have quietly had built into their CRTC licences a document called the Solicitor-General’s Enforcement Standards. It essentially obliges the carriers to hand over information about their customers to the authorities, on request – no judicial warrant required.

9read the full article at Globe & Mail)

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Health/Environment

Pipeline rupture spews 50,000 gallons of crude oil in Los Angeles

Pipeline rupture spews 50,000 gallons of crude oil in Atwater Village

Jason Wells
LA Times: May 15, 2014

A 20-inch pipeline ruptured in Atwater Village early Thursday, spewing more than 50,000 gallons of crude oil over an approximately half-square-mile area, authorities said.

In some places, the oil was knee-high, affecting several businesses near the line rupture in the 5100 block of West San Fernando Road, according to the Los Angeles Fire Department.

The above-ground pipeline, which ruptured shortly after 1 a.m., was shut off remotely as fire crews worked throughout the morning to contain the runoff, the department said.

(read full article at LA Times)

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Privacy

Glenn Greenwald says NSA bugs tech hardware en route to global customers

Routers and servers implanted with beacons by NSA, says journalist who broke Edward Snowden story

CBC: May 13, 2014

American journalist Glenn Greenwald is accusing the U.S. National Security Agency of breaking into tech hardware to install surveillance bugs before the products are shipped to unsuspecting global customers, in a new book about the NSA’s mass surveillance practices.

Greenwald, who broke the story of intelligence whistleblower Edward Snowden, sat down with CBC’s chief correspondent Peter Mansbridge to discuss previously unseen documents in an interview airing Tuesday night on The National.

Greenwald’s new book, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the U.S. Surveillance State, comes out on Tuesday.

The NSA practice is called supply-chain interdiction, in which the agency intercepts U.S.-made products such as routers and servers manufactured by companies such as Cisco. The hardware is physically implanted with beacons before being factory repackaged and shipped to unaware consumers around the world.

The U.S. has warned companies about the dangers of buying Chinese products for this very reason, Greenwald says in No Place to Hide.

“While American companies were being warned away from supposedly untrustworthy Chinese routers, foreign organizations would have been well advised to beware of American-made ones,” Greenwald says. “A June 2010 report from the head of the NSA’s Access and Target Development department is shockingly explicit. The document gleefully observes that some ‘SIGINT [signals intelligence] tradecraft … is very hands-on (literally!).”

Other revelations include a collect-it-all doctrine and extending surveillance to include airplane communications.

“If the quantity of collection revealed was already stupefying, the NSA’s mission to collect all the signals all the time has driven the agency to expand and conquer more and more ground,” Greenwald writes. “The amount of data it captures is so vast, in fact, that the principal challenge the agency complains about is storing the heaps of information accumulated from around the globe.”

(read the full article at CBC)

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Health/Environment

Nutritionists Learning GMOs & McDonalds Are Healthy; Gain Education Credits For Listening To Corporate Brainwashing

Our national nutrition experts are in bed with Big Food. And we wonder why we’re fat.

I Went to the Nutritionists’ Annual Confab. It Was Catered by McDonald’s.

Kiera Butler
Mother Jones: May 12, 2014

One recent Friday afternoon, in a Mariott Hotel ballroom in Pomona, California, I watched two women skeptically evaluate their McDonald’s lunches. One peered into a plastic bowl containing a salad of lettuce, bacon, chicken, cheese, and ranch dressing. The other arranged two chocolate chip cookies and a yogurt parfait on a napkin. “Eww,” she said, gingerly stirring the layers of yogurt and pink strawberry goop. The woman with the salad nodded in agreement, poking at a wan chicken strip with her plastic fork.

When I asked how they were liking their lunches, both women grimaced and assured me that they “never” go to McDonald’s. So why were they eating it today? Well, they didn’t really have a choice. The women were registered dietitians halfway through day two of the annual conference of the California Dietetic Association (CDA). They were hoping to rack up some of the continuing education credits they needed to maintain their certification. McDonald’s, the conference’s featured sponsor, was the sole provider of lunch. “I guess it’s good to know that they have healthier options now,” said the woman with the salad.

As I wandered the exhibition hall, I saw that McDonald’s wasn’t the only food company giving away freebies. Cheerful reps at the Hershey’s booth passed out miniature cartons of chocolate and strawberry milk. Butter Buds offered packets of fake butter crystals. The California Beef Council guy gave me a pamphlet on how to lose weight by eating steak. Amy’s Naturals had microwave brownies. The night before, Sizzler, California Pizza Kitchen, Boston Market, and other chain restaurants had hosted a free evening buffet for conference-goers: “Local Restaurant Samplings for Your Pleasure.”

And that wasn’t all. The sessions—the real meat and potatoes of the conference—had food industry sponsors as well. The Wheat Council hosted a presentation about how gluten intolerance was just a fad, not a real medical problem. The International Food Information Council—whose supporters include Coca-Cola, Hershey, Yum Brands, Kraft, and McDonald’s—presented a discussion in which the panelists assured audience members that genetically modified foods were safe and environmentally sustainable. In “Bringing Affordable Healthier Food to Communities,” Walmart spokespeople sang the praises of (what else?) Walmart.

After lunch, I attended “Sweeteners in Schools: Keeping Science First in a Controversial Discussion.” Sponsored by the Corn Refiners Association, whose members produce and sell high-fructose corn syrup, it included a panel composed of three of the trade group’s representatives. The panelists bemoaned some schools’ decision to remove chocolate milk from their cafeteria menus. Later, one panelist said that she’d been dismayed to learn that some schools had banned sugary treats from classroom Valentine’s Day parties, which “could be a teachable moment for kids about moderation.” The moderator nodded in agreement, and added, “The bottom line is that all sugars contain the same calories, so you can’t say that there is one ingredient causing the obesity crisis.” The claim was presented as fact, despite mounting scientific evidence that high-fructose corn syrup prompts more weight gain than other sugars.

The School Nutrition Association has asked Congress to lift the rule that students must take fruits and vegetables on the lunch line.

Later, I asked conference spokeswoman Pat Smith whether she thought it was fair to present such a one-sided discussion. She claimed that the sponsors did not influence any of the content in the program. “We like to think that our dietitians have a thought process and that we are presenting them with what is out there,” she said. “They need to make their own decisions on what they have listened to and apply that to their client base.”

“But it’s hard to make a decision if you’re only hearing one side of the story,” I countered.

She told me that she hadn’t known beforehand that the Corn Refiners panel would be composed entirely of its own representatives. And yet, when I asked her how the panel was chosen, she explained that it was approved by a committee. She also confirmed that the Corn Refiners had paid for the panel, but she declined to say how much. (She had previously declined me press credentials for the conference, explaining that the CDA would have its own journalists covering the event.)

With 75,000 members, the CDA’s parent organization, the national Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (AND), is the world’s largest professional association for nutritionists and dietitians. It accredits undergraduate and graduate programs in nutrition science and awards credentials to dietitian degree candidates who pass its exam. In Washington, its lobbying arm is active on issues including childhood obesity, Medicare, and the farm bill.

It also has strong ties to the food industry. In 2013, Michele Simon, a public health lawyer and food politics blogger, launched an investigation (PDF) into the academy’s sponsorship policies. Simon found that its corporate support has increased dramatically over the past decade: In 2001, the academy listed just 10 sponsors. By 2011, there were 38, including Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestlé, National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, Mars, and many others. Corporate contributions are its largest source of income, generating nearly 40 percent of its total revenue.

Simon also learned that in 2012, Nestlé paid $47,200 for its 2,500-square-foot display in the exhibition hall at the annual AND conference, and PepsiCo paid $38,000 for 1,600 square feet. The academy’s position papers, she noted, state that its sponsors do not influence its positions on controversial issues. And yet it often takes a pro-industry stance. When New York City was considering a ban on sales of oversized sodas, for example, the academy opposed it.

“No wonder Americans are overweight and diabetic. The gatekeepers for our information about food are getting their information from junk-food companies.”

AND is not the only powerful nutritionists’ group with strong corporate ties. The sponsors of the School Nutrition Association‘s 2013 annual conference included PepsiCo, Domino’s Pizza, and Sara Lee. SNA made headlines recently when it asked Congress to lift the rule that students must take fruits and vegetables on the lunch line, and to ease the rules around sodium and whole grains.

Marion Nestle, a New York University nutritionist, wrote about nutritionists and corporate sponsorships in her 2007 book, Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health. “I worry a lot about food industry co-optation of my profession,” she wrote to me in an email. “Food companies are smart. They know that if they can make friends and help inform dietitians and nutritionists that the people they are supporting or helping will be reluctant to suggest eating less of their products.”

Andy Bellatti, a dietitian and member of AND, recalls his shock the first time he attended the organization’s national conference, in 2008. “I could get continuing education credits for literally sitting in a room and listening to Frito-Lay tell me that Sun Chips are a good way to meet my fiber needs,” he says. “I thought, ‘No wonder Americans are overweight and diabetic. The gatekeepers for our information about food are getting their information from junk-food companies.'”

(Read the full article at Mother Jones)

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