Gov’t & Trade – Page 8

20151011

Big banks force FBI to take down warning about chip’d credit cards

The FBI wanted America to know that the new chip-enabled credit cards are open to security vulnerabilities and should routinely be used with a PIN, which is a pretty safe method of protection against fraud. PINS probably provide greater user safety than signatures do.

They posted a advisory online but the next day, the advisory had vanished. The American Bankers Association had objected to the FBI posting it, because its member banks prefer signatures to be used instead of PINs.

This is your American shopping dollars at work: being used by Big Money against you and your interests. read more

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Would you believe ‘prison consultant’ is a career?

prison consulting course ad — From jailtimeconsulting.com

I was intrigued by the article title in my LinkedIn feed: Why use a Personal Crisis Manager / Prison Consultant? It never occurred to me that some people would be making a living helping others cope with life behind bars but a search on ‘prison consultant’ turned up plenty of results.

I guess with between 1% of the United States population living behind bars and privatized prisons getting 95% occupancy guarantees from state governments … this new career track kind of makes sense. In a very strange way. read more

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1% of US population in prison and they have 70-100% occupancy guarantees

This is totally bizarre and should be unbelievable: about 1% (1 in 100) of the US population is in prison at any given time these days … and a growing number of prisons have contracts with state governments guaranteeing them occupancy rates as high as 100%. When inmate populations drop below the contracted rate, private prison contractors get their money by threatening to sue. Huffpost explains:

Arizona’s contractually obligated promise to fill prison beds is a common provision in a majority of America’s private prison contracts, according to a public records analysis released today by the advocacy group In the Public Interest. The group reviewed more than 60 contracts between private prison companies and state and local governments across the country, and found language mentioning quotas for prisoners in nearly two-thirds of those analyzed. read more

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SCOTUS to hear free speech case of Paterson PO demoted over political sign

first amendment for everyone — Art courtesy of My First Freedoms website

Paterson Police Officer Jeffrey Heffernan’s discipline case is going to the Supreme Court. The 1st Amendment provides for employees to support the political candidates of their choosing, but lower courts found that Heffernan couldn’t invoke this legal protection because he had no intention of participating in a campaign when he picked up a fallen sign that his mother wanted. He also isn’t a Paterson resident.

But still, Heffernan was demoted because city officials perceived him to be engaged in “overt involvement in a political election”. So, the heart of this matter remains free speech rights. NorthJersey.com reports: read more

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Don’t let the door smack you too hard on the way out, Traitor Duncan

Arne Duncan cartoon — Caricature Credit: DonkeyHotey

Good news today for people who care about students and the state of public education in America. As HuffPost put it: Arne Duncan Resigns Amid Legacy-Threatening Student Debt Crisis. And this summer, the Center for Media and Democracy wrote this about Duncan’s failed initiative to replace public schools with charters: Charter Program Expansion Looms Despite Probes into Mismanagement and Closed Schools.

Developer-owned charter schools are publicly funded but managed privately, without the obligation to provide any public accountability for either their teaching methods or financial expenditures. Not surprising that they’re a virtual breeding ground for a level of corruption so exaggerated that it turned GW Bush’s former Assistant Secretary of Education, Diane Ravitch, into one of the country’s leading public education advocates. read more

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Kafkaesque police capture boy & grill him for not saying his clock is a bomb

Ahmed and his clock — Photo composite courtesy wtvr.com

In a Kafka novel, a man is accused by the police of a crime that’s too top-secret for them to discuss or reveal which government department has brought charges against him – and that’s the whole novel. In a similar circumstance, 14 year old Ahmed Mohammed from Irving, Texas brings a home-made clock to school to show his engineering teacher and she accused him of making a bomb to threaten her. The police arrive to handcuff, arrest and then grill him for hours because Ahmed wouldn’t say that his clock was something other than a clock. Because it’s a clock. read more

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Biden helped put millions in prison & tightened noose on student loans

Highest student debt is in Biden’s home state of Delaware

All I can tell my fellow Dems is: if you want a true democracy in the United States, vote for Bernie Sanders because the competition ain’t looking so good. I’m sorry to report some disturbing facts I’ve learned about our Vice President, Joe Biden, who seems not to be the egalitarian playing-field leveler that his media image portrays him to be.

Along with Bill Clinton, Biden helped drastically increase the United States prison population. According to the ACLU 1 in 99 US adults are living in prison and, “One in 31 adults are under some form of correctional control, counting prison, jail, parole and probation populations.” read more

20150916

New York Times calls for firing of brutal officer & systemic change to NYPD

Not being exactly known as the champion of the average New Yorker makes the New York Times’ scathing editorial calling out the NYPD for brutality all the more remarkable. In an uncommon act of public representation, the NYT Editorial Board calls for the dismissal of the latest officer caught in a brutal and illegal act of racism and demands that systemic changes be made to the police department’s operating policies.

…the New York City police officer who jumped and assaulted an innocent man, James Blake, in Manhattan last Wednesday, has disgraced the department. Commissioner William Bratton and Mayor Bill de Blasio should make an example of him. They should make it clear that his unprovoked aggression — caught by a security camera, so there is no doubt about what he did — reflects everything that causes people to distrust and hate the N.Y.P.D. The officer’s further transgressions — not identifying himself to Mr. Blake, not apologizing, failing to void the arrest in follow-up paperwork — speak to an appalling lack of judgment by someone unfit for the job. read more

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Viral! Foto of breastfeeding military moms in uniform

military moms breastfeeding — Photo credit: Tara Ruby Photography

Photographer Tara Ruby share a photo of military moms in uniform breastfeeding their kids on Facebook and it’s gone viral even though Facebook deleted it from her page the first time Tara posted it. When she reposted, here’s what Tara said:

I posted this on here last night at 11:59pm. It has since disappeared from my feed and my wall. So we are posting this here again. 🙂

Today I believe we made history. To my knowledge a group photo to show support of active duty military mommies nursing their little’s has never been done. It is so nice to see support for this here at Fort Bliss. read more

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Join the #PeoplesClimateMovement in demanding #climateaction

#PeoplesClimateMovement in demanding #climateactionI’m joining the #PeoplesClimate Movement on Oct 14 to demand bold #climateaction from our leaders. Will you join me?

#PeoplesClimateMovement
#climateaction

20150912

Bernie Sanders to reporters: do some real reporting for a change

Bernie Sanders in top form when he confronts reporters and tells them to stop making it look like presidential candidates are in a mud-wrestling contest with each other and do some real reporting – on the issues people care about. Because, “People are fed up.”

Truly.
#feelthebern

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Are New Jersey gentrifiers taking us for a ride?

1934 school bus — 1934 Chevrolet Schoolbus by DBerry2006 via Flickr

Believers in gentrification understand neither fairness, nor justice. Yet, since Christie signed bill A-355 into law in 2010, they’ve been provided with yet another powerful arrow in the arsenal of neighborhood destruction and running the vulnerable out of town. This is a racial issue in New Jersey, since our poor are mostly urban Blacks and Latinos.

Christie’s education voucher law allows public school students to attend schools in another district, with your tax dollars paying the receiving school’s tuition fees and the complete bill to, “provide and pay for students’ transportation to new schools up to 20 miles away.” Sounds a bit like specially chartered buses and other things extraordinarily expensive, doesn’t it? Wowza! read more

20150908

The cost of “tough on crime” is $1B each year of your taxpayer money

vlogbrothers has created a sobering video about the “massive $75 BILLION per year failed experiment” we’re living in – which is what it costs American taxpayers each year to keep almost 1% of our neighbors in prison.

The video’s done in a light-hearted animation style and is under 4 minutes long, but pay attention to the scary statistics:

By age 23, 41% of our country’s juveniles and young adults have been arrested.
Our prisons violate international standards.
Solitary confinement is considered torture under international law but in the United States it is a not governed or monitored by anyone except prison officials.
This massive system costs taxpayers $75 Billion dollars each year.
Private prison contractors have occupancy guarantees that mandate their prisons remain between 80 and 90 percent full.

Video brought to you courtesy of Natalie Hussein Wells‘ link to attn:‘s informative article. And remember, if you don’t want to support and pay for this crazy system, vote for politicians that favor reducing our incarceration rate, like 2016 presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. read more

20150907

Play about Central Park’s land 1825 Black Village showing at Kean U through 9/20.

Stephen Van Cleef, a fictional Seneca Village resident played by Billy Eugene Jones (left), meets a New York City police officer, played by Andy Truschinski, in The People Before the Park at Premiere Stages at Kean University in Union, NJ Foto: Mike Peters/Premiere Stages

In the middle of Central Park between 82nd and 89th Streets, heading east from its Western border on Central Park West, sat a village in 1825 with a population of about 300 mostly free Blacks. Cynthia Copeland of the Institute for the Exploration of Seneca Village History spoke to NPR about the smear campaign the press ran against the villagers in order to

…help justify destroying people’s homes and cemeteries, using eminent domain to make way for what would become the most visited city park in the country. The village was leveled in 1857, the same year construction began on Central Park. read more

20150906

Big Brands making a killing from inmate labor, a slavery replacement

Very neatly written exposition of how prisons have replaced slavery as a means of augmenting the wealthy of the wealthy – on the backs of society’s most vulnerable.

“Insourcing,” as prison labor is often called, is an even cheaper alternative to outsourcing. Instead of sending labor over to China or Bangladesh, manufacturers have chosen to forcibly employ the 2.4 million incarcerated people in the United States. Chances are high that if a product you’re holding says it is “American Made,” it was made in an American prison. read more