The Big Coup
The State Dept. and Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton are finally being credited with masterminding the Arab Spring in the middle east earlier this year. (Did anyone really believe a group of tweeters in Tahrir Square were able to put together a massive “spontaneous” movement?) They had been working on it for years. In fact, everything was already planned before Obama even took office in 2008. The State Dept. just had to wait for the right time to implement the plan.
The leader of the Egyptian “April 6″ uprising, Ahmed Maher, was able to utilize the skills he learned in NYC at the 2008 State Dept. sponsored event – Alliance of Youth Movements Summit. For those of us who don’t always check out the Federal Government’s website, here is what was posted on the America.gov website on November 20, 2008:
From December 3 to 5, leaders of pioneering youth movements will launch a global network that seeks to empower young people to mobilize against violence and oppression.
Brought together by Howcast, Facebook, Google, YouTube, MTV, the U.S. Department of State, Columbia Law School and Access 360 Media, leaders of the organizations will travel to New York City with the mission of crafting a field manual on how to effect social change using online tools.
This field manual will form the cornerstone of a much larger online “hub,” where emerging youth organizations can access and share “how-to” guides and tips on using social-networking and other technologies to further their causes.
We all know what happened in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya but we haven’t heard much about the new leadership of those countries – until now.
According to the Washington Post’s Nov. 3 Foreign Policy Magazine:
The State Department is assisting Egypt in helping to train its political parties of all ideologies for the upcoming elections — even Islamic parties that may have anti-Western agendas.
“We don’t do party support. What we do is party training…. And we do it to whoever comes,” William Taylor, the State Department’s director of its new office for Middle East Transitions, said in a briefing with reporters today. ”Sometimes, Islamist parties show up, sometimes they don’t. But it has been provided on a nonpartisan basis, not to individual parties.”
The programs, contracted through the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI), include helping political parties in Egypt conduct polling, provide constituent services, and prepare for election season. NDI’s chairwoman is former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. IRI’s chairman is Sen. John McCain (R-AZ)
What could go wrong with those two intellectual giants in the lead? Read the whole story.
From Tahrir Square to Occupy Wall Street
Is the State Department also behind Occupy Wall Street? Who knows. But it’s interesting that US State Department-funded, trained, and equipped Egyptian revolutionary, Ahmed Maher was spotted at Occupy D.C.
Lobbyists waiting for politicians outside lawmaker's offices
Bills are Paid For and Written by Lobbyists
Stories of California politicians partying with lobbyists, dating lobbyists and taking money from lobbyists have been printed for years. When are we going to put controls on lobbying? Another great in-depth reports from the San Jose Mercury News published last year:
How California Laws are Really Made
By Karen de Sá – Mercury News 07/10/2010
SACRAMENTO — Imagine: At a time when California is lurching from crisis to crisis, a legislator has an idea to make life better. He puts together a bill, gathers support and shepherds it into law.
If only Sacramento worked like that. Instead, it often works like this:
A lobbyist has an idea to make life better — but only for his client. The lobbyist writes the bill, shops for a willing lawmaker to introduce it and lines up the support. The legislator? He has to do little more than show up and vote.
This is the path of the “sponsored bill,” a method of lawmaking little noticed outside California’s capital but long favored on the inside. In many states lobbyists influence legislators; in
California, they have — quite baldly — taken center stage in lawmaking.
Although lawmakers in recent years have routinely failed to grapple with health care, the state budget and other matters of public interest, they’ve managed to do the bidding of the private interests who tout sponsored bills at an impressive clip.
A Mercury News analysis found that in 2007-08, the most recent complete two-year legislative session, more than 1,800 bills — about 39 percent of the total — were sponsored by outside interests. And those sponsored bills made up 60 percent of the legislation that was passed into law.
This is how plumbing manufacturers ensured that industry-friendly labs — and not state regulators — would conduct the testing that determines whether drinking faucets sold in California are lead-free. This is how a Los Angeles County billionaire crushed a legal challenge over whether his plans for a new football stadium violated the state’s long-standing environmental protection law.
Recalling his first encounters with lobbyists seeking legislative backing for their bills, former Assemblyman Joe Canciamilla said, “It’s like being in a Middle Eastern bazaar. You are surrounded by hawkers saying, ‘Take this one, no, take this one, no, I’ve got a better one over here.’ The openness of that — the ‘oh yeah, that’s the way things are done’ attitude — was the most shocking.”
Legislators, continued Pittsburg funeral home director Canciamilla, “are supposed to be the buffer between the interest groups and the public — and that buffer no longer exists. Now, they’re a direct conduit.”
The Mercury News analysis, the first ever undertaken of sponsored bills in California, revealed:
Sponsored bills swamp the Legislature. They amounted to 42 percent of the bills introduced in the Assembly and a third of the Senate bills.
Profit-seeking bills abound. While advocacy groups, trade associations and government agencies also sponsor legislation, more than 500 of the sponsored bills introduced in the 2007-08 session came from private industries and industry trade groups, often seeking to increase market share, repel regulations or limit lawsuits.
Sponsored bills succeed. Almost half of the 1,883 bills that were sponsored in the last session became law; about one in five of the 2,982 bills that had no listed sponsor became law.
Everybody does it. Out of 122 legislators who served at least partial terms in 2007-08, just one — Sen. Tom McClintock, R-Thousand Oaks — refused to introduce any sponsored bills. Democrats introduced more sponsored bills than Republicans, but Republicans introduced a larger percentage of bills sponsored by private interests.
Lobbyists have long been known in California as the Third House, referring to their entrenched status alongside the Legislature’s two official houses, the Assembly and Senate. But through interviews with current and former legislators and aides, as well as lobbyists and outside government experts, the Mercury News documented a changed pattern: Today, lobbyists function almost as a shadow legislature, pulling the strings at every turn for short-term lawmakers who have become accustomed to letting private interests monopolize the public debate. At the center of this reality is the sponsored bill.
“You don’t learn this in American civics class,” said Derek Cressman, a regional director for the nonpartisan group Common Cause. “You don’t learn that some interest group drafts this and gives it to a legislator along with a contribution and says, ‘We would like a law introduced.’ “
Cressman said the result is that “organizations with deep financial pockets can present their issues to the Legislature, and those that don’t are in essence invisible.”
James Wedick goes further. Now retired, Wedick was the lead undercover FBI agent who established a phony shrimp processing company in California in 1985, then documented
lawmakers taking bribes to support a sponsored bill crafted to help his fake business.
The FBI’s sting operation known as Shrimpscam landed five legislators in prison but — he concedes — had little long-term effect. “It’s been going on forever and it lends itself to corrupting the whole process,” Wedick said of sponsored bills. “The whole process has been hijacked.”
Maneuvers at midnight
Here’s one example of how sponsored bills hijack the process of lawmaking — allowing private agendas to overwhelm the public interest.
In 2007, the Legislature took up a bill to authorize the spending of a $2.8 billion affordable housing bond approved in a voter referendum. The bill initially sought to ensure that projects would be efficient and geographically diverse, and that they would reduce homelessness.
But at the urging of a lobbyist for the sports and entertainment giant Anschutz Entertainment Group, a different, sponsored version of the bill suddenly appeared — amid a flurry of bills on the last days of the legislative session. Several legislators whose names were attached to the bill dropped off, leaving only Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez, D-Los Angeles, as legislative backer of the amended bill. It cleared the Senate after midnight, and the Assembly at 3:26 a.m.
Hugh Bower, the lead staff member of the Assembly Committee on Housing and Community Development, was stunned when the bill came up that night; he had been told the issue was dead. There was such chaos, Bower recalls, that one committee member still thought the next day that the amended bill had died.
What was Anschutz’s interest? Its version of the bill allowed some affordable housing funds to be used for parks, landscaping and fancy sidewalks in the neighborhood around the company-owned Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles.
Anschutz insisted its changes would let any “Business Improvement District” — a specially created association of property owners and government agencies — apply for the funds. But only the district near the Staples Center did, receiving the maximum award of $30 million, according to state housing officials.
Christine Minnehan, director of legislative advocacy for the Western Center on Law and Poverty, lamented the award, saying many affordable housing projects were awarded less than half that amount. She called the outcome “a theft of public funds, and a deception of the voters.”
A California tradition
For as long as anyone now in Sacramento can remember, the California Legislature has identified outside parties pushing bills.
Legislative historians asked by the Mercury News to research the practice say it dates to at least the 1940s.
Officials in some other states, told of California’s practice, greeted it as an admirable form of public disclosure.
In Mississippi “there is no mention of groups who support the bill, even if they drafted the bill and requested a legislator to sponsor it,” said Barbara Powell, lobbyist for Common Cause Mississippi. Jane Pinsky, director of the North Carolina Coalition for Lobbying & Government Reform, said, “We really have no transparency on who is behind legislation in North Carolina.”
But in California, it is quite clear that full disclosure has reinforced the system of sponsorship, legitimizing the influence of special interests.
Where other states, and the U.S. Congress, use the term “sponsor” to mean the legislators who carry the bill, in California the term refers to the outside party; the legislator who introduces the bill is called the “author.”
“Author is really a misnomer because the real author is the special interest group,” said Keith Richman, a health care executive and former Republican assemblyman from Granada Hills. “Essentially, the legislators are simply prostituting.”
Many legislators say they take only ideas and guidance from sponsors, but maintain control over the bill. “Our job is to be deliberative and have our legislative hat on so we can make good judgments,” insisted Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, one of the leading authors of privately sponsored bills.
But dozens of interviews inside and outside the capital reveal that legislators have often surrendered their role
.
Lobbyists working on behalf of sponsors craft original bill language.
They write fact sheets for legislators and their staff.
They even write the speeches lawmakers deliver on the floor extolling bills. “It’s common knowledge that the floor statements are written by lobbyists,” said lobbyist Jackson Gualco, previously a special assistant to former Assembly Speaker Willie Brown. “Some staff members change it, other times it’s word for word.”
Lobbyists solicit votes, suggest and evaluate amendments, and seek to win support from the governor’s office.
When the legislator who introduced the bill goes to committee hearings to present and defend the proposed legislation, the lobbyists and sponsors typically sit alongside, and often commandeer the proceedings.
The legislator “may get a question that he’s not prepared for because he’s not as knowledgeable about the issue as I am,” said one lobbyist who represents many private interests. “I may nudge his knee a bit or lift my left hand up on the table rather than having him answer a question incorrectly.”
Commonly, the lobbyist added, he lets the legislator know “I’d like to answer the questions.”
Help for the 49ers
The Mercury News analysis identified outside sponsors for 39 percent of bills introduced in the last session. But that does not capture the complete number.
Official disclosure of the sponsors is left to the legislative committees and their staffs. Most committee analyses explicitly list the sponsors, but some, like the Senate Local Government Committee, do not. And sometimes — even when a bill clearly benefits a private party — legislators describe the ideas as their own.
That was the case with Senate Bill 43, introduced last July by Sen. Elaine Alquist, D-Santa Clara, to assist the San Francisco 49ers in their effort to build a $937 million publicly subsidized football stadium in Santa Clara.
The team was frustrated that the city’s charter required them to put the contract to build the stadium out for competitive bid. Alquist’s bill exempted the stadium from the bid mandate.
Alquist said she came up with the idea herself. That surprised some local officials: “It’s hard for me to believe the 49ers didn’t go in and ask for this bill,” said Santa Clara Councilman William Kennedy, a stadium opponent. What’s more, city staff said the team had mentioned during negotiations that it might turn to the Legislature for help.
“I have no idea what the 49ers said to people at City Hall,” Alquist said, explaining that she simply wanted to help expedite the process. “I had nothing to do with that.”
Whatever the bill’s origin, the 49ers became the driving force. The team spent $73,779 on lobbyists who schmoozed the governor and the Legislature on the bill, according to reports filed with the secretary of state. The bill sailed through both houses, although legislative staffers cautioned of “a bad precedent,” noting that 125-year-old “competitive bidding requirements exist to prevent favoritism, corruption and waste of public money.”
Bills for profit
Outside sponsorship breeds success; sponsored bills are far more likely than bills without sponsors to become law.
The Mercury News analysis shows that success was especially likely when the bills were sponsored by businesses and industry groups. Almost half of those bills ended up signed by the governor — a far higher percentage than bills that had no sponsor.
For the 2007-08 legislative session, 177 of the 347 bills sponsored by private interests that were introduced in the Assembly — 51 percent — were passed into law. In contrast, 326 of 1,793 bills introduced in the Assembly that had no sponsor — or 18 percent — became law.
On the Senate side, the disparity was modestly smaller. About 43 percent of the bills introduced on behalf of private-interest sponsors in the last session became law; 24 percent of Senate bills that were introduced without a sponsor became law.
Peter Detwiler, who as the longtime staff director of the Senate Local Government Committee is one of Sacramento’s most seasoned bill analysts, said the findings demonstrate the power outsiders have gained as legislators arrive in office facing a ticking clock on their terms in office.
“In a term-limited legislative environment, the attention goes to those who can focus attention narrowly on a topic or interest,” Detwiler said.
Private vs. public
The narrow purpose of a sponsored bill is rarely a secret in the Capitol; the committee analyses make sure of that.
Those analyses, written by legislative staff, often bluntly note that the legislation has a private rather than public benefit. And while at times those warnings help to defeat the bills, other times the legislators approve them — and insist they have done the right thing.
Consider these examples from the 2007-08 session.
When the PowerFlare Corporation of Atherton sponsored a bill to require that electronic roadside beacons replace all standard flares now in use by the state Highway Patrol, the bill was pitched as a way to enhance motorists’ safety. But the bill analysis noted that it would “significantly increase demand for electronic beacons, which are manufactured by the sponsor of the bill,” and that the cost to the taxpayers of replacing flares with beacons would be high. The bill died in committee.
When MySpace sponsored a bill bolstering its ability to prevent individuals with certain criminal records from using its site, it extolled the legislation as a way to keep children safe from sexual predators on the Internet. But nestled in the bill was a provision that would have given the online social networking site broad immunity from lawsuits as a result of its efforts to restrict access.
A committee analyst wrote that the bill “raises troubling issues of manipulation of the legislative process to protect the financial and business interests of corporate entities, under the thin guise of providing additional tools to law enforcement.” The bill passed the Assembly, but later died in the Senate.
And when the Plumbing Manufacturers Institute sponsored a bill giving labs reliant on industry funding the authority to test drinking faucets and fountains, it promised the system would better protect Californians from lead in their drinking water. But a committee consultant characterized the plumbing group’s intention as “a not-so-subtle process for subverting what legislators thought they were enacting” — a way to protect the public from a harmful substance.
Despite protests from more than 50 public health and consumer organizations, the bill was signed into law in September 2008.
Sen. Ron Calderon, D-Montebello, who introduced the bill, said in an interview that he has “no concerns” with the industry overseeing testing. “As a matter of fact, I believe the problem with regulatory boards in general is that they don’t recruit or appoint enough people from the industry that they regulate.”
Calderon received $13,900 from the institute and member faucet makers during the 2007-08 term.
Some observers argue these private interest bills do, ultimately, benefit at least a portion of the public. Thad Kousser, associate professor of political science at UC San Diego, said legislators who introduce sponsored bills on behalf of industries are doing exactly what they are sent to Sacramento to do: represent the interests of their district. “What better way,” he asked, to help “the employers of their constituents?”
But former state senator McClintock, the sole legislator who did not introduce a single sponsored bill in the last session, argues that constituents’ interests have little to do with it. McClintock, now a congressman, said: “It’s a general rule that sponsors are bureaucracies seeking more power, or companies seeking more money.”
In a system where more bills fail than succeed, critics complain that many of the proposed laws are harmful even when they fail because they further clog an overloaded Legislature.
Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg said in a speech this session that the state has become a “bill factory,” with too many unnecessary bills proposed and too little analysis of the impact of bills already passed. Treasurer Bill Lockyer, a former legislator, put it more bluntly at one recent hearing: “There’s too much junk.”
Everyone’s a sponsor
As the influence of lobbyists has grown, plenty of groups, in addition to private companies and industry organizations, have taken up sponsoring bills.
Unions do it. Government agencies do it. Environmental groups do it. “We sponsor bills and I’m very proud of them,” said Sierra Club California director Bill Magavern. The Sierra Club, for instance, was co-sponsor of a bill that revamped the process for recycling and disposing of mercury-tainted thermostats.
“There’s nothing wrong with sponsored bills conceptually,” said Assemblyman Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael, who introduced 25 sponsored bills last session, seven of them sponsored by private interests. “There are lots of sponsors from the Sierra Club to the oil and gas industry — and everyone in between who think up good ideas and bring them to legislators every year.”
Huffman is one of many legislators who argue that not all sponsored bills are created evil. But even if liberals might applaud sponsored environmental legislation, and conservatives might cheer bills from the California District Attorneys Association, government experts say these efforts have the same problems as the more brazen pursuits of the Anschutz Entertainment Group.
Lawmaking is supposed to involve a balancing of competing interests in the public good: Make the regulation tight enough to protect the environment, for example, but not so tight that it squelches economic activity. But when an interest group writes a bill, there is no such balance. Only its interest is represented.
“It’s undemocratic to have interest groups writing legislation,” said Dorie Apollonio, assistant professor at UC San Francisco’s School of Pharmacy and an expert on influence peddling. “If we’re unhappy with what legislators are doing, we throw the bums out,” she said, in contrast to lobbyists who do not answer to the public.
But in Sacramento today, some legislators say they’ve become dependent upon the role assumed by lobbyists.
When state Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, carried a bill last year to ban the use of toxic flame retardants in children’s products, he faced opposition from the powerful American Chemical Council. The help of bill sponsor Friends of the Earth was critical, he said.
“The chemical industry lobbyists can be in 10 member offices simultaneously while I’m going to offices one at a time,” he said. “So a lot of it comes down to math — a good sponsor is of value.”
Other legislators depend on sponsors for technical support as well as political skills.
And so the Sierra Club’s Magavern finds himself crafting bill language, providing legislators’ talking points and cajoling support for votes — not out of preference, but out of necessity.
“There still are some staffers that do some of that, but that number has declined,” Magavern added. “More and more, sponsors are expected to do most of the work.”
Now You See it – Now You Don’t
Funding triggers and money transfers that add up to $105 billion are hidden in the 2,074 page healthcare bill. We all remember when Nancy Pelosi famously told the then-Democratic majority, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.”
This money was divided into dozens of smaller amounts so the big total would not be apparent. For example, Section 2953 of ObamaCare included a pre-funded appropriation of $75 million a year for five years to “educate adolescents” in “adult preparation subjects” such as “stress management” and “the development of healthy attitudes and values about adolescent growth and development, body image, racial and ethnic diversity, and other related subjects.”
What Pelosi did was like setting up online a way to pay your monthly utility bills out of your bank checking account. Each new date triggers the bank to pay the bill out of your bank account.
ObamaCare is very similar. The law Congress passed without reading it lists the dates up to 2019 on which payments totaling $105 billion are to be paid out of the U.S. Treasury.
Read the full article here.
Italy Declares Humanitarian Emergency Over Refugee Influx
If you listen to the mainstream media you would believe that the people of Tunisia are happily on their way to a new democratic government and everything will be just fine.
The truth is, the radical Islamists have taken over since the recent protests and thousand of Tunisian people are fleeing for their lives – mostly landing on the Sicilian island of Lampedusa. If they are deported back to Tunisia they will be arrested.
From Deutsche Welle:
The Italian cabinet on Saturday “proclaimed a state of humanitarian emergency following the influx of the large number of citizens from North Africa,” the government said in a statement.
Rome said the decision would enable authorities “to take immediate action needed to control this phenomenon and assist citizens who have fled from North Africa.”
Interior Minister Robert Maroni said on Sunday he would formally ask Tunisia for permission to deploy Italian police within the North African country to block further immigrants from leaving for Italy.
“The Tunisian system is collapsing,” Maroni said on television.
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Nuclear Disarmament Treaty Signed Behind Closed Doors
On Wednesday, President Obama signed the START nuclear disarmament treaty with Russia. From Jake Trapper at ABC news:
Despite the great attention the president has devoted to this treaty — and the vast coverage of the treaty negotiations by the media — the White House refused to allow reporters or TV cameras in the room. Still photographers were the only representatives of the free press permitted to record the historic moment.
Those cameras captured President Obama signing the documents, seated at the Resolute Desk. Behind him stood Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., Dick Lugar, R-Ind., Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Thad Cochran, R-Miss., and Vice President Biden.
The White House Correspondents Association protested the White House’s decision to refuse to permit reporters access to the event, in addition to the dearth of press briefings since the crisis in Egypt began to unfold, a crisis in which President Obama continues to celebrate the great freedoms and openness enjoyed in this country.
Maybe Obama didn’t want to face the press after the WikiLeaks cables released the information that he sold old our closest allies by agreeing to give the Russians the serial numbers of all of Britain’s Trident missiles supplied by the US.
If our President will use British nuclear secrets as a bargaining chip, who knows what else he has promised the Kremlin.
The Bonnie and Clyde of Islamic Terrorists
Posing with a gun in her hand and her husband is 17 year old Dzhanet Abdurakhmanova. The couple were part of a group called the Caucasus Emirate, a loosely affiliated group that wants to liberate the entire North Caucasus region from Russian rule so they can establish an Islamic caliphate in the region.
Dzhanet was one of two female suicide bombers who killed 40 people in the Moscow metro last year. Is the same group responsible for yesterday’s attack at the airport?
Read the rest of the story here.
Duvalier returns to Haiti
The Duvaliers ruled Haiti with an iron fist for 28 years. Jean-Claude and his father, “Papa Doc”, tortured and killed their political opponents and ruled in an atmosphere of fear and repression by using the sinister secret police force know as the Tonton Macoute.
After an uprising in 1986, Duvalier fled to France, where lived in exile for 25 years.
Today “Baby Doc” returned to Haiti catching the nation off guard is it still struggles with the aftermath of last year’s devastating earthquake.
From The Associated Press:
“He is happy to be back in this country, back in his home,” said Mona Beruaveau, a candidate for Senate in a Duvalierist party who spoke to the former dictator inside the immigration office. “He is tired after a long trip.
She didn’t say why he has returned but that he would hold a news conference on Monday.
A handful of loyalists have been campaigning to bring Duvalier home from exile in France, launching a foundation to improve the dictatorship’s image and reviving Duvalier’s political party in the hopes that one day he can return to power democratically.
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Genocide as Entertainment
News about the genocide in Darfur began in 2003. For anyone who has delved a little into the problem, they’ll quickly learn it goes back a lot further.
Anyway, during the past eight years many government and non-government agencies have engaged, debated and sent bushels of money to Darfur to try and stop the death spiral there with little success.
George Clooney, bless his heart, is a caring man who, like most of us, wants to help. That’s a good thing. Over the past couple of years George has done as much as any individual can possibly do to help – but the genocide continues.
I have no way of knowing how or when Mr. Clooney decided to team up with a huge Wall Street media player to try and help the people in Darfur, but it’s clear he took the wrong direction. We now have media conglomerate, Viacom, turning a tragic genocide into entertainment.
Viacom owns MTV Networks. MTV produces mtvU – a 24-hour television channel that is available on more than 750 college and university campuses across the United States.
mtvU provides a more targeted alternative to MTV, and gives advertisers and music promotion companies access to college-age viewers. According to their website, mtvU promotes “college music, activism, shows and activities on campus.” They even have an online video game “which provides a window into the experience of the 2.4 million refugees in the Darfur region of Sudan. ” See website.
Now Mr. Clooney, with the help of MTV, wants to launch a satellite that will monitor potential hot spots in Darfur. Interestingly enough, Amnesty International already has a satellite project in Sudan called “Eyes on Darfur.”
If MTV, by teaming up with George Clooney, believes it can do more with it’s own Satellite Sentinel Project and the catchy little message “the world is watching”, more power to them. If Viacom/MTV is using Mr. Clooney and this tragedy to get into the satellite business, let’s hope all the executives rot in hell.
U.S. Manipulated Climate Accord in Copenhagen
From the Guardian by Damian Carrington
December 3, 2010
Hidden behind the save-the-world rhetoric of the global climate change negotiations lies the mucky realpolitik: money and threats buy political support; spying and cyberwarfare are used to seek out leverage.
The U.S. diplomatic cables reveal how the US seeks dirt on nations opposed to its approach to tackling global warming; how financial and other aid is used by countries to gain political backing; how distrust, broken promises and creative accounting dog negotiations; and how the US mounted a secret global diplomatic offensive to overwhelm opposition to the controversial “Copenhagen accord”, the unofficial document that emerged from the ruins of the Copenhagen climate change summit in 2009.
Negotiating a climate treaty is a high-stakes game, not just because of the danger warming poses to civilisation but also because re-engineering the global economy to a low-carbon model will see the flow of billions of dollars redirected.
Seeking negotiating chips, the U.S. state department sent a secret cable on 31 July 2009 seeking human intelligence from U.N. diplomats. The request originated with the CIA. As well as countries’ negotiating positions for Copenhagen, diplomats were asked to provide evidence of U.N. environmental “treaty circumvention” and deals between nations.
But intelligence gathering was not just one way. On 19 June 2009, the state department sent a cable detailing a “spear phishing” attack on the office of the U.S. climate change envoy, Todd Stern, while talks with China on emissions took place in Beijing. Five people received emails, personalised to look as though they came from the National Journal. An attached file contained malicious code that would give complete control of the recipient’s computer to a hacker. While the attack was unsuccessful, the department’s cyber threat analysis division noted: “It is probable intrusion attempts such as this will persist.” The Beijing talks failed to lead to a global deal at Copenhagen. But the U.S., had something to cling to. The Copenhagen accord, hammered out in the dying hours but not adopted into the U.N. process, offered to solve many U.S. problems.
The accord turns the U.N.’s top-down, unanimous approach upside down, with each nation choosing palatable targets for greenhouse gas cuts. It presents a far easier way to bind in China and other rapidly growing countries than the U.N. process. But the accord cannot guarantee the global greenhouse gas cuts needed to avoid dangerous warming.
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If You See Something, Say Something
Government intrusion into our lives is at an all time high. A few days ago, it was reported that the Fed’s are tracking law abiding citizens in real-time using credit cards, loyalty cards and travel reservations, all done without a court order. But that’s just the beginning!
Now, as if the Department of Homeland Security doesn’t have enough on its plate over the issues caused by the Full Body Scans and the groping pat-downs; you may now be greeted by DHS Secretary, Janet Napolitano on a video screen in your favorite Walmart store!
Yesterday, Napolitano announced the expansion of the Department of Homeland Security’s “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign, which is supposedly a DHS campaign to help reduce the threat of terrorism in the U.S. Napolitano said that by launching a new partnership between DHS and Walmart that we, as Americans will have a role to play in the safety of our nation.
According to Napolitano, more than 230 Walmart stores nationwide launched the “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign today, with a total of 588 Walmart stores in 27 states joining in the coming weeks. You can see the short video message that is now shown in many Walmart stores to the left of this article. Yes, Secretary Napolitano is the one who delivers the message in the video where she tells the viewer to report suspicious activity to the police or seek the help of a Walmart Manager.
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On Politics…
Suppose you were an idiot... And suppose
you were a member of Congress...
But I repeat myself.
-Mark Twain
