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Penguin: Why Obama’s Jobs Act Is a Scam Legalizing More Crime

Commerce, Corruption, Government
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Who, Me?

Why Obama's JOBS Act Couldn't Suck Worse

Sidebar: Steve Case is evil.

Matt Taibbi

Rolling Stone, 9 April 2012

Boy, do I feel like an idiot. I've been out there on radio and TV in the last few months saying that I thought there was a chance Barack Obama was listening to the popular anger against Wall Street that drove the Occupy movement, that decisions like putting a for-real law enforcement guy like New York AG Eric Schneiderman in charge of a mortgage fraud task force meant he was at least willing to pay lip service to public outrage against the banks.

Then the JOBS Act happened.

The “Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act” (in addition to everything else, the Act has an annoying, redundant title) will very nearly legalize fraud in the stock market.

In fact, one could say this law is not just a sweeping piece of deregulation that will have an increase in securities fraud as an accidental, ancillary consequence. No, this law actually appears to have been specifically written to encourage fraud in the stock markets.

Ostensibly, the law makes it easier for startup companies (particularly tech companies, whose lobbyists were a driving force behind its passage) to attract capital by, among other things, exempting them from independent accounting requirements for up to five years after they first begin selling shares in the stock market.

The law also rolls back rules designed to prevent bank analysts from talking up a stock just to win business, a practice that was so pervasive in the tech-boom years as to be almost industry standard.

Even worse, the JOBS Act, incredibly, will allow executives to give “pre-prospectus” presentations to investors using PowerPoint and other tools in which they will not be held liable for misrepresentations. These firms will still be obligated to submit prospectuses before their IPOs, and they'll still be held liable for what's in those. But it'll be up to the investor to check and make sure that the prospectus matches the “pre-presentation.”

The JOBS Act also loosens a whole range of other reporting requirements, and expands stock investment beyond “accredited investors,” giving official sanction to the internet-based fundraising activity known as “crowdfunding.”

But the big one, to me, is the bit about exempting firms from real independent tests of internal controls for five years.

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Owl: The DHS Cybersecurity Logjam [aka Goat-Fest Scam]

Corruption, Government, IO Impotency
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Who? Who?

Global Insights: The DHS' Cybersecurity Logjam

By Richard Weitz

World Politics Review | 10 Apr 2012

When the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was established in March 2003, one of the new department’s primary goals was to enhance U.S. cybersecurity. But after several years passed without major DHS initiatives in this area, observers concluded that the department was insufficiently prepared or resourced to address cyber emergencies. Indeed, prior to the 2008 presidential election, the influential think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Commission on Cybersecurity recommended that the next occupant of the White House formally revoke DHS’ limited authority to coordinate cybersecurity because the department, having never had authority over the U.S. military, intelligence community and law enforcement agencies, could not perform this coordination role effectively.

When the Obama administration assumed office, it followed many of the commission’s recommendations, but it ignored this one. With White House encouragement, DHS has made it a higher priority to address the security of U.S. civilian cyber networks and has earned greater support in Congress for remaining the lead civilian agency in this area. For example, DHS made cybersecurity one of its five most important mission areas in the first-ever Quadrennial Homeland Security Review (QHSR) released in 2010, 74 percent higher than in the 2012 budget.

DHS currently has the lead role in securing federal civilian network systems, sometimes described as the “dot.gov” domain. Through its National Infrastructure Protection Plan, DHS works with private- and public-sector owners and operators of critical infrastructure and key resources to bolster their cybersecurity preparedness, risk mitigation and incident-response capabilities. The fundamental problem the department faces is that, at present, it has responsibility to protect all nondefense public- and private-sector networks from cyberattack, but lacks sufficient authority to accomplish this mission.

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Paul Craig Roberts: ObamaCare — and TSA Searching Traffic on Easter Sunday

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, DHS, Government
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Paul Craig Roberts

What is ObamaCare?

Growing up in the post-war era (after the Second World War), I never expected to live in the strange Kafkaesque world that exists today. The US government can assassinate any US citizen that the executive branch thinks could possibly be a “threat” to the US government, or throw the hapless citizen into a dungeon for the rest of his or her life without presenting any evidence to a court or obtaining a conviction of any crime, or send the “threat” to a puppet foreign state to be tortured until the “threat” confesses to a crime that never occurred or dies at the hands of “freedom and democracy” while professing innocence.

It has never been revealed how a single citizen, or any number thereof, could possibly comprise a threat to a government that has a trillion plus dollars to spend each year on security and weapons, the world’s largest navy and air force, 700 plus military bases across the world, large numbers of nuclear weapons, 16 intelligence agencies plus the intelligence agencies of its NATO puppet states and the intelligence service of Israel.

Nevertheless, air travelers are subjected to porno-scanning and sexual groping. Cars traveling on Interstate highways can expect to be stopped, with traffic backed up for miles, while Homeland Security and the federalized state or local police conduct searches.

I witnessed one such warrantless search on Easter Sunday. The south bound lanes of I-185 heading into Columbus, Georgia, were at a standstill while black SUV and police car lights flashed. US citizens were treated by “security” forces that they finance as if they were “terrorists” or “domestic extremists,” another undefined class of Americans devoid of constitutional protections.

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Mini-Me: 40 Million in USA Employed by Federal, State, Local Governments?

Corruption, Government
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Who? Mini-Me?

Huh?

Tax Burden: 40 Million Government Workers

Gary North drawing on Iaian Murray

How many people work for governments in the United States. Let’s look at the numbers.

The usual estimate of the number of employees of the U.S. government is 2.8 million. The estimate is fake. This does not count military personnel. But most important, it does not count contract workers paid by the federal government.

The Office of Personnel Management does not keep track of these workers. That would give the game away.

One man has estimated the total: Prof. Paul Light of New York University.

[The federal government] uses contracts, grants, and mandates to state and local governments to hide its true size, thereby creating the illusion that it is smaller than it actually is, and give its departments and agencies much greater flexibility in hiring labor, thereby creating the illusion that the civil-service system is somehow working effectively. . . .

Contractors and grantees do not keep count of their employees, in part because doing so would allow the federal government . . . to estimate actual labor costs.

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2012 Reality Sandwich: The Battle for the Soul of the Republic

Articles & Chapters, Culture
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The Battle for the Soul of the Republic

Reality Sandwich, 10 April 2012

steele1.jpg

The National Security Agency (NSA) mega-data center, combined with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) special relationship with Google, and the federalization of local police using Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funds to pay for monitoring both the locations and the conversations of anyone they wish — without a warrant –suggest that the government of the United States of America (USA)-from local to national-is no longer in friendly hands.

As a professional intelligence officer and a retired Marine Corps officer, I am deeply offended, personally threatened, and patriotically alarmed.  Evil has triumphed across the United States of America.  Every single institution — from academies to civil society to commerce to the government and law enforcement at all levels, the media, the out of control military-industrial complex, and the bottom-feeding non-governmental and non-profit organizations that suck at the federal government tits gorged with printed money — has failed to respect the Constitution.  There is neither intelligence nor integrity at the highest levels of all of our institutions.

2012 is a year of confrontation and convergence.  On the confrontation side, we have a federal government that dismisses the Constitution across all three branches — a Court that believes corporations are citizens and strip-searches for parking tickets are “okay”; a Congress that abdicates its Article 1 responsibilities, instead serving as foot-soldiers to the corrupt two-party tyranny that excludes the majority from the ballot and the vote; and an Executive that borrows a trillion a year in our name, wastes two trillion a year, and has claimed the right to kill US citizens without due process, and to lie to the Courts when it deems it necessary for “national security.”

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Michel Bauwens: Evolving Toward a Partner State in an Ethical Economy

Communities of Practice, Policies
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Michel Bauwens

Evolving Towards a Partner State in an Ethical Economy

Reality Sandwich, 4 April 2012

In the  emerging institutional model of peer production, most visibly in the free software industry, we can distinguish an interplay between three partners, i.e.

1) a community of contributors that create a commons of knowledge, software or design;

2) an enterpreneurial coalition that creates market value on top of that commons;  and

3) a set of “for-benefit institutions' which manage the ‘infrastructure of cooperation'.

There is a clear institutional division of labour between these three players.

The contributors create the use value that is deposited in the shared innovation commons of knowledge, design and code.

The for-benefit institution enables and defends the general infrastructure of cooperation which makes the project ‘collectively' sustainable. For example the Wikimedia Foundation collects the funds to support the server space without which access to the Wikipedia would become impossible.

The enterpreneurial coalition makes the individual contributors ‘sustainable', by providing an income, and very often they provide means for the continued existence of the for-benefit associations as well.

Can we also learn something about the politics of this new mode of value creation, something that would be useful not just for these particular communities, but to society in general? Is there perhaps a new model of power and democracy co-evolving out of these new social practices, that may be an answer to the contemporary crisis of democracy? My answer will be an emphatic yes, and stronger yet, I will argue that we are witnessing a new model for the state. A ‘P2P' state, if you will.

Let's look at the mechanics of power and the politics of commons-oriented peer production by looking at the three players involved in this new institutional set-up.

Headlines Only:

1. The post-democratic logic of community

2. The relation between the community and the enterpreneurial coalition

3. The democratic logic of the for-benefit institutions

4. Towards a Partner State

5. A value crisis of the capitalist economy

6. The prefiguration of a new social model

7. Towards a civilization based on economies of scope, not scale

. . . . . . .

The only thing left to do is to have an answer to the crucial question: how does global governance look like in P2P civilization? How can we transform  the global material Empire which at present dominates world affairs for the benefit of a few,  and replace the ineffectual global institutions that are present inadequate to deal with global challenges?

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota:  Those of us committed to a prosperous world at peace, in which governance is characterized by intelligence and integrity, all see the insanity of artificial scarcity and embedded corruption.  What is emergent and increasingly visible (i.e. comprehensible) to the public at large is the alternative model of Open Source Everything, a Non-Zero approach to both the material and the intangible.  The above can be readily expanded to embrace the eight communities (academic, civil society, commerce, government, law enforcement, media, military, and non-governmental/non-profit)–all of them have vital resources and perspectives that must be integrated if we are to achieve Panarchy–self-governance with intelligence and integrity at all levels on all issues.

See Also:

2012 PREPRINT FOR COMMENT: The Craft of Intelligence

THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth & Trust

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David Brin: Solar cells thinner than a thread of spider silk

05 Energy
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David Brin

Solar cells thinner than a thread of spider silk created by scientists

Solar cells thinner than a thread of spider silk and so flexible they can be wrapped around a single human hair have been created by scientists.

By Danielle Demetriou, Tokyo

The Telegraph, 09 Apr 2012

The ultra-thin film consists of electrodes on a plastic foil and measures only 1.9 micrometres in thickness – a tenth of the thinnest solar cells currently available, according to researchers in Austria and Japan.

The fact it is extremely thin, light and flexible paves the way for a number of new future uses, including portable electrical charging devices or electronic textiles worn on clothing.

Unveiling the research in a report published by the on-line science journal Nature Communications, the researchers said: “The total thickness of this device is less than a typical thread of spider silk.”

Tsuyoshi Sekitani, from the University of Tokyo, added: “Being ultra-thin means you don’t feel its weight and it is elastic.

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