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Tue, 19 Nov 2013 10:07

OPINIE - Hala Naoum N(C)hm(C), Eddy Terstall en Gert-jan Segers. '' 19/11/13, 06:00

(C) anp. Een prostituee aan het werk in een van de prostitutieboten aan het Zandpad. De bestuursrechter heeft bepaald dat de boten moeten sluiten.

Raamprostitutie is geen symbool van ruimdenkendheid, maar van vernedering van vrouwen, schrijven Hala Naoum N(C)hm(C), Eddy Terstall en Gert-jan Segers. En het kn anders. 'Het laten tentoonstellen van vrouwen is geen noodlot, maar een vrije keus van beleidsmakers.'

Wat we jongens in opvoeding en onderwijs proberen te leren over respect voor vrouwen, kan zomaar ongedaan worden gemaakt met (C)(C)n wandeling door 'de vleescarrousel'.

De vrouwen staan er een paar maanden, een paar jaar misschien. Totdat ze te oud worden en hun lichaam niet meer genoeg opbrengt. Daarna worden er weer nieuwe, jonge vrouwen geworven. Die gaan er ook weer staan, in hun naakte kwetsbaarheid, achter een raam aan een straat. Daarop paraderen hordes mannen om te kijken voor welk lichaam ze een paar tientjes over hebben. En als het tot de daad komt, is het meestal ook nog eens een mannelijke pooier en mannelijke exploitant die hier het meeste geld van opstrijkt.

Door een tragisch misverstand is deze publieke vrouwenmarkt lang als een kroonjuweel van Nederlandse ruimdenkendheid beschouwd. En is die nog altijd een toeristische attractie. Maar het wordt tijd dat we zien wat raamprostitutie werkelijk is. Want het is geen onschuldige folklore en al helemaal geen reclamebord van een vrijgevochten wereldbeeld.

'De vleescarrousel'Op de Amsterdamse Wallen is er een steegje met kleine kamertjes die de veelzeggende bijnaam heeft van 'de vleescarrousel'. Er zijn twee categorien buitenlandse bezoekers die ons kunnen helpen om met andere ogen naar raamprostitutie te kijken. Er is de groep van buitenlandse die hier komen doen wat thuis verboden is. De vrouwen achter de ramen moeten hun blikken en opmerkingen voor lief nemen en na betaling nog wel meer dan dat. De tweede categorie is de groep bezoekers die zich na een wandeling over de Wallen geschokt afvraagt hoe wij Nederlanders in hemelsnaam vaak kwetsbare, buitenlandse vrouwen als vleeswaar in een etalage kunnen laten staan.

Goede vraag. Beide groepen bezoekers laten ons iets zien van wat deze 'vleescarrousel' is. Een vernedering van vrouwen.

Nederland heeft het VN Vrouwenverdrag ondertekend. Dat geeft ons iets in handen om bijvoorbeeld islamitische landen aan te spreken op de vaak beroerde positie die vrouwen daar hebben. Nederland brengt vrouwenrechten ook internationaal onder de aandacht. Onze overheid is er terecht trots op dat we, samen met Canada, leidend zijn op dit punt.

Maar dan moeten we ons ook zelf door dit VN-verdrag laten aanspreken. Artikel vijf verplicht lidstaten alles uit te bannen wat kan leiden tot de gedachte dat het ene geslacht minderwaardig is ten opzichte van het andere. En raamprostitutie heeft weinig met gelijkwaardigheid te maken. Wat we jongens in opvoeding en onderwijs proberen te leren over respect voor vrouwen, kan zomaar ongedaan worden gemaakt met (C)(C)n wandeling door 'de vleescarrousel'. Als de verdedigers van raamprostitutie dit vijfde artikel serieus nemen, zouden ze er op zijn minst voor moeten zorgen dat er straten komen waarin bijna naakte mannen in de etalage staan zodat er hier een gelijk speelveld ontstaat.

Zeggenschap over het eigen lichaamHet verdrag benadrukt ook dat vrouwen de zeggenschap over hun eigen lichaam hebben. Artikel zes verplicht de lidstaten om alles te doen wat mogelijk is 'ter bestrijding van alle vormen van handel in vrouwen en van het exploiteren van prostitutie van vrouwen'. In de praktijk hebben bijna alle vrouwen een pooier die winsten opstrijkt en hen vaak tot hoge omzet dwingt. In haar onlangs verschenen boek Prostitutie, de waarheid achter de Wallen laat Renate van der Zee een mensenhandelrechercheur aan het woord. Hij vertelt dat er in Groningen honderdvijftig ramen zijn 'en je weet dat er achter minstens honderd daarvan dingen gebeuren die niet kloppen'.

Uit onderzoeken blijkt dat minimaal de helft van de prostituees onvrijwillig achter het raam staat. Burgemeester Van der Laan sprak onlangs bezorgd over honderden 'verkrachtingen' die iedere dag in de Amsterdamse prostitutie plaatsvinden. Ook die rauwe werkelijkheid maakt duidelijk dat raamprostitutie in Nederland haaks staat op letter en geest van het VN Vrouwenverdrag. En dan is het criterium niet dat er een minderheid van prostituees is die nooit iets merkt van vernedering en uitbuiting, maarde meerderheid bij wie daar wel sprake van is. De rechten van deze vrouwen gaan v""r het pleziertje van een hoerenloper of het verdienmodel van een pooier.

Vrije keusWaarschijnlijk is prostitutie nooit helemaal uit te bannen. Wellicht zullen er voor sommige vrouwen altijd redenen zijn om geld te verdienen met sekswerk. Ongetwijfeld zullen er altijd mannen zijn die willen betalen voor seks. Het gesprek daarover moeten we maar voor later bewaren. Want ook al accepteer je prostitutie als werkelijkheid, dat betekent nog niet dat raamprostitutie ook een noodzakelijk kwaad is. Zo heeft Rotterdam besloten wel clubs, maar geen raamprostitutie toe te staan. Het laten tentoonstellen van vrouwen is dus geen noodlot, maar een vrije keus van beleidsmakers.

Het is de keus van een samenleving die nog altijd wegkijkt bij veel ellende voor en achter de ramen. Een keus van mensen die nooit zouden willen dat een geliefde van henzelf daar in haar naakte kwetsbaarheid zou staan. De keus is aan ons.

Hala Naoum N(C)hm(C) is politiek econoom en VVD-lid, Eddy Terstall is filmmaker, Gert-jan Segers is Tweede Kamerlid voor de ChristenUnie.

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Source: White House.gov Press Office Feed

Mon, 18 Nov 2013 23:51

The White House

Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release

November 15, 2013

AMERICAN EDUCATION WEEK, 2013

- - - - - - -

BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

A PROCLAMATION

Education is both a pillar of democracy and a cornerstone of American opportunity. In an increasingly competitive world, it gives our children the tools to thrive and our Nation the talent to lead. During American Education Week, we reaffirm our commitment to the next generation, and we celebrate everyone who is striving to help America's young people realize their full potential.

Every day throughout America, our children mark the many milestones of learning -- from scribbling their first attempts at the alphabet to conducting their first science experiment to crossing the stage at commencement. The educators who guide them deserve our highest admiration, respect, and support for investing in young people's futures. We all have a stake in public education, and we all have a role to play -- from parents and mentors to community leaders and business owners. Through programs focused on tutoring, sports, the arts, and vocational training, we can inspire children to learn both inside and outside the classroom.

A great education is a ticket into the middle class, and it should be available to everyone willing to work for it. My Administration is committed to reining in college costs and reducing the burden student loans place on young people. We are also moving forward on a plan to connect 99 percent of America's students to high-speed internet within 5 years; pushing to make high-quality early education accessible to every child in America; and working to strengthen programs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Because none of these plans will succeed without outstanding teachers, we must support these professionals as they perform their vital work.

As we move toward Thanksgiving, American Education Week offers a chance to express our gratitude to educators across our Nation. Let us do so with a renewed commitment to giving every young American the opportunities a world-class education affords.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim November 17 to November 23, 2013, as American Education Week. I call upon all Americans to observe this week by supporting their local schools through appropriate activities, events, and programs designed to help create opportunities for every school and student in America.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this fifteenth day of November, in the year of our Lord two thousand thirteen, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-eighth.

BARACK OBAMA

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Source: White House.gov Press Office Feed

Thu, 21 Nov 2013 09:19

The White House

Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release

November 19, 2013

NATIONAL CHILD'S DAY, 2013

- - - - - - -

BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

A PROCLAMATION

Each year on National Child's Day, America takes time to celebrate our most precious resource. We reaffirm our commitment to giving our next generation the tools to lead, innovate, and pursue their own measure of happiness.

In the United States of America, no matter where you come from, who you are, or how you look, you should have a chance to succeed. That is why we must build ladders of opportunity for all children -- including high-quality preschool, strong education in key fields like math and science, and nutritious meals that give young people the energy to focus. Through First Lady Michelle Obama's Let's Move! initiative, my Administration is helping children develop habits that will let them lead healthier lives, and we are partnering with businesses, local governments, and non-profit organizations to ensure families have the information they need to give our children the happy, healthy futures they deserve.

Yet equal opportunity cannot exist while some parents are forced to choose between buying groceries, paying the rent, or taking their children to the doctor. Under the Affordable Care Act, new health insurance options are now available to millions of Americans. Millions of families will gain access to affordable coverage options through the new Health Insurance Marketplace, including through Medicaid in those States that have chosen to expand coverage. Thanks to this law, children can no longer be denied coverage because they have a pre-existing condition. And most health plans are covering recommended preventive services for children, including developmental screenings and immunizations, without cost-sharing.

With the support of a Nation and the guidance of parents and mentors, our children can lead America into a bright new age. Today, let us strengthen our resolve to provide the opportunities their energy and creativity demand.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim November 20, 2013, as National Child's Day. I call upon all citizens to observe this day with appropriate activities, programs, and ceremonies, and to rededicate ourselves to creating the bright future we want for our Nation's children.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this nineteenth day of November, in the year of our Lord two thousand thirteen, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-eighth.

BARACK OBAMA

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Tue, 19 Nov 2013 10:10

Link to video: #Thinkfluencer episode 1: SelfiesSelfie '' "a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website" '' has been named word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries editors, after the frequency of its usage increased by 17,000% over the past 12 months.

Editorial director Judy Pearsall said: "Using the Oxford Dictionaries language research programme, which collects around 150m words of current English in use each month, we can see a phenomenal upward trend in the use of selfie in 2013, and this helped to cement its selection."

The word can be traced back to a post on an Australian online forum in 2002: "Um, drunk at a mates 21st, I tripped ofer [sic] and landed lip first (with front teeth coming a very close second) on a set of steps. I had a hole about 1cm long right through my bottom lip. And sorry about the focus, it was a selfie."

It has since produced an array of spinoffs, including helfie (hairstyle self), belfie (bum selfie), welfie (workout selfie), drelfie (drunken selfie), and even bookshelfie '' a snap taken for the purposes of literary self-promotion.

Judy Pearsall explained its evolution: "The hashtag #selfie appeared on the photo-sharing website Flickr as early as 2004, but usage wasn't widespread until around 2012.

"In early examples, the word was often spelled with a -y, but the -ie form is more common today and has become the accepted spelling. The use of the diminutive -ie suffix is notable, as it helps to turn an essentially narcissistic enterprise into something rather more endearing. Australian English has something of a penchant for -ie words '... so this helps to support the evidence for selfie having originated in Australia."

Selfie promotion '... graphic shows the ascent of selfie in common usage. Photograph: Oxford English DictionariesOED's Word of the Year shortlistbedroom tax, noun, informal:

(in the UK) a reduction in the amount of housing benefit paid to a claimant if the property they are renting is judged to have more bedrooms than is necessary for the number of the people in the household, according to criteria set down by the government.

The Welfare Reform Act 2012 proposed various changes to the rules governing social security benefits in the UK, including an "under-occupancy penalty" to be imposed on households that were receiving housing benefit and that were judged to have bedrooms surplus to their requirements. Critics and opponents soon began to refer to the new penalty as the "bedroom tax". The first references to the bedroom tax in our corpus appear in 2011 but usage increased dramatically around the time this new provision came into force, in April 2013.

binge-watch, verb:

to watch multiple episodes of a television programme in rapid succession, typically by means of DVDs or digital streaming. [ORIGIN 1990s: from BINGE + WATCH, after BINGE-EAT, BINGE-DRINK.]

The word binge-watch has been used in the circles of television fandom since the late 1990s, but it has exploded into mainstream use in 2013. The word has come into its own with the advent of on-demand viewing and online streaming. In 2013, binge-watching got a further boost when the video-streaming company Netflix began releasing episodes of its serial programming all at once. In the past year, binge-watching chalked up almost as much evidence on our corpus as binge-eating. (Binge-drinking remains unchallenged in the top position.)

bitcoin, noun:

a digital currency in which transactions can be performed without the need for a central bank. Also, a unit of bitcoin. [ORIGIN early 21st century: from BIT, in the computing sense of "a unit of information" and COIN.]

The term first appeared in late 2008 in a research paper, and the first bitcoins were created in 2009. By 2012, the virtual currency was attracting wider attention and we began to see its steadily increasing use. A spike in usage was apparent in March''May 2013, which may be due in part to the market crash around that time.

olinguito, noun:

a small furry mammal found in mountain forests in Colombia and Ecuador, the smallest member of the raccoon family. [ORIGIN 2013: diminutive form of OLINGO, a South American mammal resembling the kinkajou.]

The discovery of the olinguito was announced by the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in August: it represented the first identification of a new species of mammalian carnivore in the western hemisphere in 35 years. Extensive coverage of the story in the world's media was guaranteed by the animal's appearance '' it was described as looking like a cross between a teddy bear and a domestic cat.

schmeat, noun, informal:

a form of meat produced synthetically from biological tissue. [ORIGIN early 21st century: perhaps from SYNTHETIC and MEAT, influenced by the use of "- -, schm - -" as a disparaging or dismissive exclamation.]

Man-made meat is more commonly (and neutrally) known as "in-vitro meat" or "cultured meat". This word remains very rare, largely because the phenomenon it refers to is still in its infancy. However, in August 2013, the world's first hamburger made with in-vitro meat was served up by Dutch scientists, raising the possibility that the general public may have more occasion to use this word in the not-too-distant future.

showrooming, noun:

the practice of visiting a shop or shops in order to examine a product before buying it online at a lower price. [ORIGIN early 21st century: from SHOWROOM, "a room used to display goods for sale".]

Before 2013, there were just a handful of examples of this on our corpus. We've seen this figure increase significantly, along with use of the related verb "to showroom" and the noun "showroomer".

twerk, verb:

dance to popular music in a sexually provocative manner involving thrusting hip movements and a low, squatting stance. [ORIGIN 1990s: probably an alteration of WORK.]

Twerk seems to have arisen in the early 1990s, in the context of the bounce music scene in New Orleans. By the mid-1990s, we see evidence of twerk being used online in newsgroups to describe a specific type of dancing. The most likely theory about the origin of this word is that it is an alteration of work, because that word has a history of being used in similar ways, with dancers being encouraged to "work it". The "t" could be a result of blending with another word such as twist or twitch. Its association with Miley Cyrus this summer created a huge spike of usage in the media, especially social media.

Previous words of the year2012 Omnishambles2011 squeezed middle2010 big society2009 simples2008 credit crunch2007 carbon footprint2006 bovvered2005 sudoku2004 chav

' This article was amended on 19 November changing Oxford English Dictionary to Oxford Dictionaries.

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Source: UN Agenda 21

Thu, 21 Nov 2013 07:52

Exposing the comprehensive UN plan to bring about an authoritarian world government via international regulations and treaties under the guise of environmentalism and social equity.

Remember, a lot of this is heavy doublespeak. I.E. "Commuter Friendly" = Commuter hell, at the mercy of public transportation, unfriendly-to-cars, no leaving the area etc., "Walkable" = car unfriendly, literally poverty infrastructure

New UrbanismTriple Bottom LineSustainability/Sustainable DevelopmentSocial EquityEconomic EmpowermentSocial Responsibility"Smart" i.e. Smart GrowthEconomic/Environmental JusticeCorporate Social Responsibility(CSR)Liveable/WalkableNew NormalComplete StreetsMixed-Use (property)"Green"Commuter Friendly"Well-Being"Community ActionResilience/Resilient CommunitiesTransition TownNext/New EconomySECTION I. SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS: Chapter 2.1.

In order to meet the challenges of environment and development, States have decided to establish a new global partnership. This partnership commits all States to engage in a continuous and constructive dialogue, inspired by the need to achieve a more efficient and equitable world economy, keeping in view the increasing interdependence of the community of nations and that sustainable development should become a priority item on the agenda of the international community. It is recognized that, for the success of this new partnership, it is important to overcome confrontation and to foster a climate of genuine cooperation and solidarity. It is equally important to strengthen national and international policies and multinational cooperation to adapt to the new realities.

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Source: Reuters: World News

Mon, 18 Nov 2013 12:11

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Thu, 21 Nov 2013 10:05

BRUSSELS '' Seven EU countries have formed what France calls a ''club'' to produce military drones from 2020 onward.

The scheme was agreed in Brussels on Tuesday (19 November) at a meeting of the European Defence Agency (EDA), the EU's defence think tank, by France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain.

The group-of-seven's defence ministers signed a ''letter of intent'' tasking the EDA to draw up a study on joint production of Medium Altitude Long Endurance (Male) craft, which can be used to strike military targets or for surveillance of migrant boats in the Mediterranean Sea.

The EDA said in a press release that ''the objective of this community is to exchange information as well as to identify and facilitate co-operation among member states which currently operate or plan to operate RPAS [Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems].''

The think tank's director, Claude-France Arnould, noted: ''In view of today's constrained financial situation, this effort for defence must be fully efficient which implies co-operation and searching for synergies.''

Another EDA official, Peter Round, told media: ''This is the starting pistol for us to be able to start work on a European RPAS.''

The French defence minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, said: ''If Europe hopes to maintain a strategic capability, countries must pool their capacities and actions in a pragmatic way.''

He called the group of seven a ''club of drone-using countries.''

'...

It also comes amid a raft of existing European drone projects.

Three European arms firms '' France's Dassualt, Franco-German firm Eads and Italy's Finmeccanica '' agreed in June to launch their own European drone programme.

France, Greece, Italy, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland are working on what they call a ''euro-Ucav,'' or unmanned combat air vehicle, the Neuron, which made a test flight in December 2012.

France and the UK are working on a ''stealth'' drone called Telemos to fly in 2018.

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Thu, 21 Nov 2013 10:04

PARIS: France said Thursday the suspect arrested over this week's shootings in Paris is a man previously jailed for his role in a "Bonnie-and-Clyde" style multiple murder that gripped the country 20 years ago.

Abdelhakim Dekhar was arrested on Wednesday after a major manhunt following a shooting at the left-wing newspaper Liberation and at the headquarters of the Societe Generale bank.

His DNA matched samples from the scenes of the attacks, officials said.

"All the evidence today points to his involvement in the events that he has been charged with," Interior Minister Manuel Valls said in a late-night press conference.

Dekhar, who is in his late 40s, was convicted in 1998 of buying a gun used in an October 1994 shooting attack by student Florence Rey and her lover Audry Maupin. Three policemen and a taxi driver were killed in a case that shook France.

He served four years in jail for his role in the killings.

Dekhar was arrested Wednesday evening in a vehicle in an underground parking lot in the northwestern Paris suburb of Bois-Colombes, after apparently trying to commit suicide.

Valls said that "everything appears to point to a suicide attempt", and sources told AFP Dekhar was semi-conscious when he was found.

The head of the Paris criminal police department, Christian Flaesch, said he was in custody in a "medical environment" and was not in a fit state to speak to investigators.

Police tested Dekhar's DNA against samples taken at the sites of this week's shootings and announced early Thursday that the samples matched.

Earlier DNA tests confirmed that a single person was responsible for the series of incidents across Paris in the last week, which also included the hijacking of a car on the famed Champs Elysees and threats to staff at a 24-hour television station.

Valls said investigators would need more information about the suspect's past to be able to "understand his motivation".

'I've made a stupid mistake' The arrest came after a witness statement to police, who had on Tuesday released a new photograph of the suspect and received hundreds of calls from potential witnesses.

One of them was a man who had housed the suspect, said a source connected with the investigation.

The witness quoted the suspect as saying about the shooter case: "I've made a stupid mistake."

The shooter opened fire with a 12-gauge shotgun at the offices of Liberation early on Monday, hitting a 23-year-old photographer's assistant as he hauled gear in the lobby, then firing another blast that hit the roof before leaving within seconds.

He then crossed the city to the La Defense business district on its western edge, where he fired several shots outside the main office of the Societe Generale bank, hitting no one.

He hijacked a car and forced the driver to drop him off near the Champs Elysees in the centre of the French capital, before disappearing.

Police say he was the same man who last Friday stormed into the Paris headquarters of a 24-hour TV news channel, BFMTV, briefly threatening staff with a gun before hurrying out.

Suspect 'probably went abroad' Dekhar was suspected of being the third man in the so-called Rey-Maupin affair in 1994, which shocked France.

Investigators at the time compared the young couple to the infamous American outlaws Bonnie and Clyde.

Witnesses at the trial in 1998 described him as a mentor to the couple and accused him of exploiting their youth to manipulate them.

He argued that he had been a secret agent in the pay of Algerian security services, charged with infiltrating the radical left in France in search of those acting in coordination with Islamists in Algeria.

In the early 1990s Dekhar was known to hang out at squats used by left-wing radicals and which were often under police surveillance.

Maupin died of injuries sustained during a shootout with police and Rey, a middle-class student hitherto unknown to the police, was tried and sentenced to 20 years in jail. She was released in 2009.

Dekhar was acquitted of armed assault but found guilty of procuring the weapon and sentenced to four years. He was released soon afterwards, having already served his time in pre-trial detention.

Valls said that Dekhar had "probably gone abroad" for several years after serving his sentence and did not appear in official records for that period.

This week's attacks set off a major manhunt and raised concerns about violence against media outlets.

The photographer, who suffered wounds to the chest and stomach, appeared to be in better condition on Wednesday.

Hospital officials said he had regained consciousness and was no longer on an artificial respirator.

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Tue, 19 Nov 2013 11:07

Bitcoin is the currency of the Internet: a distributed, worldwide, decentralized digital money. Unlike traditional currencies such as dollars, bitcoins are issued and managed without any central authority whatsoever: there is no government, company, or bank in charge of Bitcoin. As such, it is more resistant to wild inflation and corrupt banks. With Bitcoin, you can be your own bank.

If you are new to Bitcoin, check out We Use Coins and Bitcoin.org. You can also explore the Bitcoin Wiki:

How to buy bitcoinsBuy Reddit Gold using bitcoins!

Will I earn money by mining?Security guide

Community rulesDo not use URL shortening services: always submit the real link.Begging/asking for bitcoins is absolutely not allowed, no matter how badly you need the bitcoins. Only requests for donations to large, recognized charities are allowed, and only if there is good reason to believe that the person accepting bitcoins on behalf of the charity is trustworthy.News articles that do not contain the word "Bitcoin" are usually off-topic. This subreddit is not about general financial news.Submissions that are mostly about some other cryptocurrency belong elsewhere.No referral links in submissions.No compilations of free Bitcoin sites.Trades should usually not be advertised here. For example, submissions like "Buying 100 BTC" or "Selling my computer for bitcoins" do not belong here. /r/Bitcoin is primarily for news and discussion.Please avoid repetition '-- /r/bitcoin is a subreddit devoted to new information and discussion about Bitcoin and its ecosystem. New merchants are welcome to announce their services for Bitcoin, but after those have been announced they are no longer news and should not be re-posted. Aside from new merchant announcements, those interested in advertising to our audience should consider Reddit's self-serve advertising system.Related communities(Sorted roughly by decreasing popularity.)

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Ad campaignBitcoins sent here will eventually be used for a Reddit advertising campaign with the goal of promoting Bitcoin and /r/Bitcoin: 16KaCJB7fVuT6hvA7wzgzVjAnHz28bNvvh (1.878 BTC spent so far)

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Mon, 18 Nov 2013 23:08

REUTERS/ Tim Chong

The beautiful thing about Bitcoin, digital currency enthusiasts will tell you, is that it doesn't have a central bank.So with eyes on today's Bitcoin Senate hearing, where does the world's most powerful central banker stand on the elusive cryptocurrency?

Now we know. Ahead of the meeting, U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernankehas released a letter to help guide the senate. Quartz's Zachary Seward called it a "cautious blessing," with Bernanke acknowledging the Fed doesn't have the authority to supervise virtual currencies, but that they "may hold long-term promise, particularly if the innovations promote a faster, more secure and more efficient payment system.''

Here's Bernanke's full letter (via Quartz):

Dear Senators:Thank you for your recent inquiry regarding virtual currencies. As you noted, virtual currencies have been receiving increased attention from U.S. authorities over the past several months.

Historically, virtual currencies have been viewed as a form of ''electronic money'' or area of payment system technology that has been evolving over the past 20 years. Over time, these types of innovations have received attention from Congress as well as U.S. regulators. For example, in 1995, the U.S. House of Representatives held hearings on ''the future of money'' at which early versions of virtual currencies and other innovations were discussed. Vice Chairman Alan Blinder's testimony at that time made the key point that while these types of innovations may pose risks related to law enforcement and supervisory matters, there are also areas in which they may hold long-term promise, particularly if the innovations promote a faster, more secure and more efficient payment system.

Although the Federal Reserve generally monitors developments in virtual currencies and other payments system innovations, it does not necessarily have authority to directly supervise or regulate these innovations or the entities that provide them to the market. In general, the Federal Reserve would only have authority to regulate a virtual currency product if it is issued by, or cleared or settled through, a banking organization that we supervise. Given the Federal Reserve''s authority and the manner in which virtual currencies have developed, the Federal Reserve has focused primarily on a supervised banking organization's role in the products' sale and distribution, as well as the applicable regulations, such as Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) /anti-money laundering (AML) requirements.

Policies, Procedures, Guidance or Advisories

In March 2013, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network issued guidance to clarify that an administrator or exchanger of virtual currency is generally considered a money transmitter under definitions and therefore subject to BSA requirements?' The Federal Reserve's supervisory expectations and guidance related to compliance for bank transactions using virtual currencies have been incorporated into the Electronic Cash section of the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) Examination Manual. The overall objective of the guidance and examination procedures provided in this section is to assess the adequacy of a bank's systems to manage the risks associated with electronic cash and management's ability to implement effective monitoring and reporting systems. The section further lists applicable risk factors and risk mitigation steps for banks to consider. The Federal Reserve supervision staff has on''going initiatives with the FFIEC member agencies to identify additional areas of concern that require heightened attention by the banking organizations we supervise.

Ongoing Coordination

In May 2013, the US. Department of the Treasury (Treasury) named Liberty Reserve S.A. as a financial institution of primary money laundering concern under Section 311 of the USA PATRIOT Act (Section 31l).4 'According to the announcement, Liberty Reserve, a web''based money transfer system or ''virtual currency,'' was specifically designed and frequently used to facilitate money laundering in cyber space. This action also marked the first use of Section 311 authorities against a virtual currency provider.

The statutory language of Section 311 requires Treasury to consult with the Federal Reserve Board when these special measures are being developed and proposed. Therefore, Federal Reserve Board staff participated in coordination and consultation efforts leading up to the designation of the virtual currency provider, Liberty Reserve, under Section 311.

Specific Plans or Strategies

As noted above, the Federal Reserve plans to work with other FFIEC member agencies on electronic cash and related issues such as virtual currencies, as needed, for banking organizations. The Federal Reserve will continue to monitor developments as part of its broad interest in the safety and efficiency of the payment system. We also stand ready to cooperate with other agencies in fulfilling their mandates, as appropriate.

I hope you find this information helpful.

Sincerely,

[Ben Bernanke]

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Source: Crikey

Mon, 18 Nov 2013 03:48

The price of virtual currency bitcoin is continuing to surge, as countries such as Georgia and Argentina take it up as an alternative to official currencies.

Decentralised virtual currency bitcoin hit a record high overnight, breaking through the $US500 barrier. At 9.20 AEST, it had climbed to $US520.

The surge comes despite a recent FBI crackdown on online marketplace Silk Road, which many people speculated would have lessened the demand for bitcoin.

However, bitcoin has soared 35% since the start of November.

(Price in US$)

Market strategist from IG Markets Evan Lucas says it's very hard to predict or explain why bitcoin has spiked, as the digital currency does not have the liquidity of traditional financial assets.

''It's an online phenomenon, constantly affected by the possibility of regulation, that's not very free-flowing.

''How do you value something with such low liquidity? It's very hard. That low liquidity is why you can see it pop up so quickly, so fast. If there's a surge of people entering the market, it can really have an outsized effect on the price.''

In April, IG Markets began offering a grey market for bitcoin on its platform. This allowed people to place bets on where bitcoin was likely to move.

However, the currency trader has since closed the market. Lucas says the volatility of bitcoin made it too difficult to keep up with.

''It was too hard for our clients to gauge where it was going,'' he says.

''There was a burst of interest initially, but that waned pretty quickly because of that volatility. We're keeping an eye on it, and we may offer a market again once we see a bit more stability.''

Many start-ups and entrepreneurs are pinning their hopes on bitcoin taking off. But most of the current demand for bitcoin comes from countries like Argentina, Russia, Belarus, Georgia'‰'--'‰hardly Silicon Valley. Lucas says this is because bitcoin is most useful in countries where it's hard to exchange local currency into US dollars.

''It allows traders to buy and exchange products much faster than going through official channels,'' he said.

''You have people in countries like Georgia setting up bitcoin shops in cafes, becoming currency dealers in effect. The exchange spreads they offer are massive, and people take it.''

''Once bitcoin hit mainstream media earlier this year, a bit more investigation into who was using it occurred. And you can see its being used to circumvent what are, often, draconian currency controls.''

Still, Lucas isn't game to bet on bitcoin's future prospects.

''It is not a free-flowing market, so guessing where it's headed is almost impossible. I wouldn't make a call.''

*This article was originally published at SmartCompany

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Mon, 18 Nov 2013 16:30

The Department of Justice andSecurities and Exchange Commission are telling a U.S. Senatecommittee that Bitcoins are legitimate financial instruments,boosting prospects for wider acceptance of the virtual currency.

Representatives from the agencies told the U.S. SenateCommittee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs ahead ofa hearing tomorrow that the digital money offers benefits andcarries risks, like any other online-payment system, according toletters they released before the meeting.

The committee scheduled the hearing "to explore potentialpromises and risks related to virtual currency for the federalgovernment and society at large" after the Silk Road HiddenWebsite was shut down in October. The closing of themarketplace, where people could obtain drugs, guns and otherillicit goods using Bitcoins, is helping fuel a rally in thevirtual currency as speculators bet that the digital money willgain more mainstream acceptance.

"The FBI's approach to virtual currencies is guided by arecognition that online payment systems, both centralized anddecentralized, offer legitimate financial services," Peter Kadzik, principal deputy assistant attorney general, wrote in aletter. "Like any financial service, virtual currency system ofeither type can be exploited by malicious actors, butcentralized and decentralized online payment systems can varysignificantly in the types and degrees of illicit financial riskthey pose."

Virtual Money Introduced in 2008 by a programmer or group of programmersgoing under the name of Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin is being usedto pay for everything from gourmet coffee to smartphones on theInternet. There are almost 12 million Bitcoins in circulation,according to Bitcoincharts, a website that tracks activityacross various exchanges.

Bitcoins were trading for $460 apiece today on Bitstamp,one of the more active online exchanges, where the digital moneyis traded for dollars, euros and other currencies. The virtualcurrency reached a record of $473 earlier today, and is up morethan 30-fold so far this year.

"Two years ago it was alarm when Silk Road first came onthe scene," said Jerry Brito, senior research fellow at theMercatus Center at George Mason University who is alsotestifying in front of the committee tomorrow. "Since then,Congress has been educating itself and understands that thereare great potential benefits, and like any new technology thereare going to be some challenges. But they see there is a balanceto be struck here and they are generally positive on thetechnology."

Gaining Acceptance Since the virtual currency exists as software that'sdesigned to be untraceable, it's an attractive tender for thoseseeking to transact anonymously via the Web. While the closingof Silk Road initially caused the digital money to lose a thirdof its value within days, Bitcoins have recovered and rallied torecord levels as speculators and investors bet that the currencywill be less of a fad and gain more mainstream acceptance.

Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, is alsoweighing in on the hearing, saying that it has no plans toregulate the currency.

"Although the Federal Reserve generally monitorsdevelopments in virtual currencies and other payments systeminnovations, it does not necessarily have authority to directlysupervise or regulate these innovations or the entities thatprovide them to the market," Bernanke wrote in a letter to thecommittee.

The hearings will bolster the view that Bitcoins are anacceptable alternate means of conducting transactions, and thattheir use will grow, said Brito.

"These hearings means Bitcoin is finally coming into itsown; it's a real thing and it's not going anywhere and thesehearings highlight that," he said.

To contact the reporter on this story:Max Raskin in New York at mraskin5@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:Pui-Wing Tam at ptam13@bloomberg.net

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Internet & Networking Technologyvirtual currencyBitcoins

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Source: Reuters: Technology News

Mon, 18 Nov 2013 16:37

click here to continue to articlecliquez ici pour lire l'articleweiter zum Artikelclicca qui per visualizzare l'articoloweiter zum Artikelir a la noticiaklik hier om door te gaan naar het artikelYazıya devam etmek i§in tıklayın>>ПеÑейти к статье>>ç>>§ç>>­é…è¯>>æ–‡ç ¼Œè¯·ç‚¹å‡>>è里Tovbb a cikkre

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Source: EconomicPolicyJournal.com

Mon, 18 Nov 2013 16:40

The Verge reports:On Friday, the New York State Department of Financial Services announced it will be holding a public hearing on virtual currency regulation, specifically considering whether a certification called "BitLicense" might help manage the spread of online currencies like Bitcoin. The new license would require consumer protection services, as well as anti-money laundering requirements, designed to make the currency less useful in cases of fraud and criminal activity.[...]the Department of Finance put it, "it is in the long-term interest of the virtual currency industry to put in place appropriate guardrails that protect consumers, root out illegal activity, and safeguard our national security."

Goodbye anonymizing programs, as I have warned before, they are going to be ruled money laundering tools and banned. Bitcoin is going to end up the most trackable financial instrument ever---which will make it pretty useless/Current Bitcoin price: $589.00

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Tue, 19 Nov 2013 10:17

In the home stretch of the 2012 presidential campaign, from August to September, the unemployment rate fell sharply '-- raising eyebrows from Wall Street to Washington.

The decline '-- from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent in September '-- might not have been all it seemed. The numbers, according to a reliable source, were manipulated.

And the Census Bureau, which does the unemployment survey, knew it.

Just two years before the presidential election, the Census Bureau had caught an employee fabricating data that went into the unemployment report, which is one of the most closely watched measures of the economy.

And a knowledgeable source says the deception went beyond that one employee '-- that it escalated at the time President Obama was seeking reelection in 2012 and continues today.

''He's not the only one,'' said the source, who asked to remain anonymous for now but is willing to talk with the Labor Department and Congress if asked.

The Census employee caught faking the results is Julius Buckmon, according to confidential Census documents obtained by The Post. Buckmon told me in an interview this past weekend that he was told to make up information by higher-ups at Census.

Ironically, it was Labor's demanding standards that left the door open to manipulation.

Labor requires Census to achieve a 90 percent success rate on its interviews '-- meaning it needed to reach 9 out of 10 households targeted and report back on their jobs status.

Census currently has six regions from which surveys are conducted. The New York and Philadelphia regions, I'm told, had been coming up short of the 90 percent.

Philadelphia filled the gap with fake interviews.

''It was a phone conversation '-- I forget the exact words '-- but it was, 'Go ahead and fabricate it' to make it what it was,'' Buckmon told me.

Census, under contract from the Labor Department, conducts the household survey used to tabulate the unemployment rate.

Interviews with some 60,000 household go into each month's jobless number, which currently stands at 7.3 percent. Since this is considered a scientific poll, each one of the households interviewed represents 5,000 homes in the US.

Buckmon, it turns out, was a very ambitious employee. He conducted three times as many household interviews as his peers, my source said.

By making up survey results '-- and, essentially, creating people out of thin air and giving them jobs '-- Buckmon's actions could have lowered the jobless rate.

Buckmon said he filled out surveys for people he couldn't reach by phone or who didn't answer their doors.

But, Buckmon says, he was never told how to answer the questions about whether these nonexistent people were employed or not, looking for work, or have given up.

But people who know how the survey works say that simply by creating people and filling out surveys in their name would boost the number of folks reported as employed.

Census never publicly disclosed the falsification. Nor did it inform Labor that its data was tainted.

''Yes, absolutely they should have told us,'' said a Labor spokesman. ''It would be normal procedure to notify us if there is a problem with data collection.''

Census appears to have looked into only a handful of instances of falsification by Buckmon, although more than a dozen instances were reported, according to internal documents.

In one document from the probe, Program Coordinator Joal Crosby was ask in 2010, ''Why was the suspected '... possible data falsification on all (underscored) other survey work for which data falsification was suspected not investigated by the region?''

On one document seen by The Post, Crosby hand-wrote the answer: ''Unable to determine why an investigation was not done for CPS,'' or the Current Population Survey '-- the official name for the unemployment report.

With regard to the Consumer Expenditure survey, only four instances of falsification were looked into, while 14 were reported.

I've been suspicious of the Census Bureau for a long time.

During the 2010 Census report '-- an enormous and costly survey of the entire country that goes on for a full year '-- I suspected (and wrote in a number of columns) that Census was inexplicably hiring and firing temporary workers.

I suspected that this turnover of employees was being done purposely to boost the number of new jobs being report each month. (The Labor Department does not use the Census Bureau for its other monthly survey of new jobs '-- commonly referred to as the Establishment Survey.)

Last week I offered to give all the information I have, including names, dates and charges to Labor's inspector general.

I'm waiting to hear back from Labor.

I hope the next stop will be Congress, since manipulation of data like this not only gives voters the wrong impression of the economy but also leads lawmakers, the Federal Reserve and companies to make uninformed decisions.

To cite just one instance, the Fed is targeting the curtailment of its so-called quantitative easing money-printing/bond-buying fiasco to the unemployment rate for which Census provided the false information.

So falsifying this would, in essence, have dire consequences for the country.

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Thu, 21 Nov 2013 08:23

Education Secretary Arne Duncan tried Monday to quell the outrage sparked by his comments that injected race and class into the debate about the Common Core academic standards taking root in classrooms across the country.

Duncan said Friday that he was fascinated by the fact that some opposition to the standards was coming from ''white suburban moms'' who fear that ''their child isn't as brilliant as they thought they were.''

The remark lit up social-media sites, prompting pointed responses from bloggers, an open letter from a school superintendent, digital images of Duncan's official federal portrait with the word ''bigot'' emblazoned across it, and one congressman's call for Duncan's firing.

Duncan, whose office declined interview requests Monday, posted a statement late in the day on his agency's Web site.

''I used some clumsy phrasing that I regret '-- particularly because it distracted from an important conversation about how to better prepare all of America's students for success,'' he wrote. ''I want to encourage a difficult conversation and challenge the underlying assumption that when we talk about the need to improve our nation's schools, we are talking only about poor minority students in inner cities. This is simply not true. Research demonstrates that as a country, every demographic group has room for improvement.''

At a gathering of state school superintendents Friday, Duncan spoke about the opposition to the Common Core standards, which are being implemented in 45 states and the District of Columbia with the aim of creating a national baseline for education.

''It's fascinating to me that some of the pushback is coming from, sort of, white suburban moms who '-- all of a sudden '-- their child isn't as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn't quite as good as they thought they were, and that's pretty scary,'' Duncan said, according to media reports. ''You've bet your house and where you live and everything on 'My child's going to be prepared.' That can be a punch in the gut.''

Chris Minnich, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers, was interviewing Duncan at Friday's event and said that Duncan's larger point vanished amid the outcry.

''He was actually saying that these standards are harder than what many states had in the past and fewer kids are going to be passing,'' Minnich said.

Written by a group of governors and state education officials, with endorsements from the federal government and funding from the Gates Foundation, the Common Core standards are designed to prepare students for an eventual career or college.

Increasingly, high school graduates have not been ready for college; recent studies have found that up to 40 percent of first-time undergraduates need at least one remedial course in English or math.

In a country with a long history of local control over education, the Common Core standards mark the first time that nearly every state has agreed to a common set of skills and knowledge. The idea is that all students should possess certain skills by the end of each grade, so that a first-grader in Maryland will learn the same skills as a first-grader in Maine or Montana.

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Wed, 20 Nov 2013 13:01

Elle Lucero has been tracked since birth.

For the first 10 months of her life, her mother, Yasmin, kept detailed records of Elle's sleep patterns, feedings, and diaper changes, noting the data points with a pencil and paper on a clipboard. A few months in, she digitized the logs, graphed the data, and became a more knowledgeable parent.

"It helped me feel confident," she told Fast Company.

Elle wasn't a very good sleeper, even for a baby. The pediatrician told Yasmin she needed to let her daughter "cry it out" until she fell asleep, but that never worked. For the sake of her sanity (and sleep), Yasmin took problem solving into her own hands. She wanted answers: Did she put Elle to bed too early? Too late? Give her too many naps? Parsing data, she thought, would help her figure it out. "That was the kind of stuff we were looking for," she said.

Unfortunately for the Lucero family's sleeping habits, Yasmin never found a definitive answer. Per the data, Elle was just fussy.

The results suggested Yasmin couldn't engineer better naps, as she'd hoped. Just knowing that, however, made her feel better. "If you come to the conclusion that you have no control, then it's okay to relax and just do whatever is convenient for you at the moment," she explained. (Of course, many parents come to this conclusion at the moment of birth, without all that tedious data tracking.) But for Lucero, a conclusion--any conclusion at all--was all she wanted.

You can't see them breathing; your first thought is: 'Oh my God, something is wrong.'Many new and sleep-deprived parents crave that peace of mind and would kill for a data set that helped them determine if putting little Emma down an hour earlier would mean a restful night for the whole family. But unlike Yasmin, most people aren't trained statisticians. Tired moms and dads with no mathematical background aren't about to write down hundreds of data points, and might not know how to analyze that information anyway. Twenty-two months into Elle's life, even Yasmin has semi-abandoned the project, and keeps much less rigorous records now.

In the imminent future, though, any curious parent with an iPhone will have access to helpful analytics, thanks to the rise of wearable gadgets for babies. Following the success of self-trackers for grown-ups, like Jawbone and Fitbit, companies like Sproutling, Owlet, and Mimo want to quantify your infants.

Mimo OnesieThese devices connect to a baby via boot, anklet, or onesie, and record his or her heart rate, breathing patterns, temperature, body position, as well as the ambient conditions of the room. They aim to replace baby monitors, which give an incomplete picture of a sleeping child. There's also the nascent "smart diaper" market, led by Pixie Scientific, which scans dirty diapers for signs of infection.

In addition to alerting parents of any concerning findings, these companies encourage a big-data approach to parenting. By gathering information on your kid's poop, sleep, and eating schedules, the idea goes, you can engineer a happier, healthier baby. The accompanying app for the Sproutling monitor, for example, looks at patterns specific to your child and its environment to offer insights--the kind that Yasmin craved--that might help the child sleep better. It might find that little Jake naps better in complete dark, for example.

The Sproutling monitorIn theory, all this data will lead to more rested, relaxed parents and healthier kids. As of now, parents do a lot of this in the dark. "There's no owner's manual," Sproutling CEO Chris Bruce told Fast Company. His company hopes to change that. "It's smart technology that helps raise the parenting IQ."

When Bruce talks about "parenting IQ," he doesn't just mean his customers. Sproutling and its cohorts want to use their arsenals of data to better inform research. "The promise of big data is that we can monitor every single environmental parameter and we can find correlations and detect patterns," added Bruce, calling big data the "holy grail" of his business. Both Owlet and Sproutling indicated that they will offer up their intel--anonymously!--to researchers so that all future parents can better understand babies.

Parents like Yasmin, who haven't had a full night of sleep in months, are desperate to have that information. She didn't want to know average sleep patterns--information available in baby books--she wanted bell curves. Yasmin knew her baby wasn't normal, but she didn't know how abnormal and her own analyses couldn't clarify that, either. "I wasn't finding the exact data I wanted to see," Yasmin said, after scouring the Internet for answers.

An aggregation of Yasmins, however, can provide those insights. At least that's the hope.

What sounds like a lot of progress for parenting also means handing a digital record of your baby over to an iPhone app. Are the benefits worth that?

While these apps could improve infant health by telling a parent the exact right nap or changing time, the app in large part benefits parents. Anxious first time moms and dads who worry about every little movement (or non-movement) can monitor their children more closely than ever. "You see your baby lying there and you don't see them moving," Bruce, who has two young daughters, said of his experience with old-school video monitors. "You can't see them breathing; your first thought is: 'Oh my God, something is wrong.'"

Unlike a basic $35 baby-monitor, the $250 Owlet bootie and accompanying app can alert parents if anything serious has gone wrong, like if a kid stops breathing, or if his heart stops beating. That means no more unnecessary freakouts for the over-protective and inexperienced dad like Bruce, which leaves more time for him to do other dad things.

But, to an extent, these apps take advantage of parent anxieties. "SIDS is the number one cause of infant death. That's really scary to parents," Jordan Monroe, a cofounder of Owlet, told Fast Company. Monroe has no kids, but while talking to friends and friends of friends with babies, he found that to be a common worry.

Those fears don't come from a place of reality, though. According to the Center for Disease Control, 4,000 infants die each year from Sudden Unexpected Infant Death. Only a fraction of those deaths occur because of "accidental suffocation and strangulation in bed," according to the CDC report. And even SIDS--which causes about 2,000 deaths a year--might stem from underlying brain issues, according to recent research. Monitoring a child's breathing with a high-tech bootie won't cure SIDS.

As anyone who has ever had any contact with a hypochondriac knows, those facts don't really matter. Parents will continue to worry. And, as we saw with Yasmin, certainty has a lot of value. A certain type of parent, like TechCrunch's Leean Rao, thinks that $250 for Owlet or $200 for Mimo's version--Sproutling hasn't yet announced pricing--is a reasonable price to pay to worry about one less thing. In her review of Sproutling, she writes:

As a relatively new parent myself, I would have loved to be able to use some of the data from a wearable to help determine optimal sleep patterns for my child. I'm not sure if it would have helped my daughter sleep through the night earlier in her development, but to me as a fledgling parent, knowledge is power.

Of course, the dollar amount is only a part of the price parents pay with these apps. They give up their children's data and possibly privacy. "We're creating the largest data set of infant health data," Monroe said--a chilling statement in certain contexts. Trackers could turn around and sell their troves to insurers or be forced to hand them over to the government. The information is also vulnerable to hackers.

These companies say they take security issues seriously. "Security encryption has been designed in our system from the get-go," said Bruce. Anonymous sharing with researchers is both opt-in and anonymous for Sproutling users. But, even Bruce admits that our cultural acceptance of privacy changes every day. What seems innocuous today might feel invasive tomorrow (or vice versa).

Is that risk worth the stated benefits? At this point, it's not clear these monitors offer many health solutions. The breathing and sleeping alerts will calm (and draw) a lot of parents. But, none of these companies see that as the "holy grail." The main sell is the tracking. And what does that do for parents and babies?

Arguably, it means finding those little tweaks that make life easier. But, as Yasmin discovered, sometimes babies fuss just because. Numbers don't always offer solutions, as technical theorist and staunch critic of the self-quantified movement Evgeny Morozov wrote in his book To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism. "Self-trackers gain too much respect for the numbers and forget that other ways of telling the story--and generating action out of it--are possible."

While pediatricians typically ask new parents to chart and report feedings and bowel movements for a few weeks after bringing babies home to make sure all systems are go, obsessive tracking beyond that could get in the way of parenting, some doctors say. "Often, when babies have regained their birthweight and are 10-14 days old, I instruct families to dial the tracking down," Dr. Wendy Sue Swanson wrote on her blog. She adds:

I want new parents to gain confidence and appreciate the homeostasis with following a baby's natural routine. Relying only on the numbers may cause parents to miss out on the nearly unspeakable experience of parenting a new baby and all that a baby intimately communicates from the beginning. It's better to look up at the sky to know if it's raining than to consult the weather report on your iPhone.

After all, do you really want to treat your child like a Tamagotchi?

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Wed, 20 Nov 2013 13:02

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Source: UN Agenda 21

Thu, 21 Nov 2013 07:53

Exposing the comprehensive UN plan to bring about an authoritarian world government via international regulations and treaties under the guise of environmentalism and social equity.

Remember, a lot of this is heavy doublespeak. I.E. "Commuter Friendly" = Commuter hell, at the mercy of public transportation, unfriendly-to-cars, no leaving the area etc., "Walkable" = car unfriendly, literally poverty infrastructure

New UrbanismTriple Bottom LineSustainability/Sustainable DevelopmentSocial EquityEconomic EmpowermentSocial Responsibility"Smart" i.e. Smart GrowthEconomic/Environmental JusticeCorporate Social Responsibility(CSR)Liveable/WalkableNew NormalComplete StreetsMixed-Use (property)"Green"Commuter Friendly"Well-Being"Community ActionResilience/Resilient CommunitiesTransition TownNext/New EconomySECTION I. SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS: Chapter 2.1.

In order to meet the challenges of environment and development, States have decided to establish a new global partnership. This partnership commits all States to engage in a continuous and constructive dialogue, inspired by the need to achieve a more efficient and equitable world economy, keeping in view the increasing interdependence of the community of nations and that sustainable development should become a priority item on the agenda of the international community. It is recognized that, for the success of this new partnership, it is important to overcome confrontation and to foster a climate of genuine cooperation and solidarity. It is equally important to strengthen national and international policies and multinational cooperation to adapt to the new realities.

No Racism

No Abusive/threatening language.

Any posts that attack the sub, the users or the mods can be removed. Breaking this rule more than once can earn a ban.

We are all different here, and you may find that have different beliefs, but please be respectful of each other.

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Wed, 20 Nov 2013 12:39

A long post that is worth a read here on the rise and influence of Pearson and corporate influence in education reform. Take pause, friends. Take pause but feel free to share and post comments here. Thoughts?

The Pearson Monopoly Jennifer Job, UNC Chapel Hill

If you haven't heard of Pearson, perhaps you have heard of one of the publishers they own, like Adobe, Scott Foresman, Penguin, Longman, Wharton, Harcourt, Puffin, Prentice Hall, or Allyn & Bacon (among others). If you haven't heard of Pearson, perhaps you have heard of one of their tests, like the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the Stanford Achievement Test, the Millar Analogy Test, or the G.E.D. Or their data systems, like PowerSchool and SASI. [1]

In a little over a decade, Pearson has practically taken over education as we know it. Currently, it is the largest educational assessment company in the U.S. Twenty-five states use them as their only source of large-scale testing, and they give and mark over a billion multiple choicetests every year.[2] They are one of the largest suppliers of textbooks, especially as they look to acquire Random House this year. Their British imprint EdExcel is the largest examination board in the UK to be held in non-government hands.[3]

Pearson has realized that education is big business. Last year, they did 2.6 billion pounds of business, with a profit of 500 million pounds (close to a billion dollars).[4] And business is looking up, which I will return to in a minute. First, I want to talk about the vicious cycle that Pearson drives through education.

Pearson's first big jump was acquiring Harcourt's testing arm in 2008, taking Harcourt's 40% market share and parlaying it into controlling more than half of all assessments taking place that year.[5] At this point, Pearson began to coordinate all of the textbook imprints it owns (as one of the three biggest textbook publishers in the U.S.) with its tests, completing its own equation ofcurriculum and assessment. It was just a matter of locking down their territory and growing it.

To grow into the multibillion-dollar corporation they are today, Pearson blurs every line among for profit, nonprofit, and government systems. They have prominently partnered with University of Phoenix, whose parent company's CEO also sits on the board of Teach for America. They acquiredAmerica's Choice, which partners with the Lumina, Broad, and Walton Foundations. The Chief Education Advisor for Pearson is Sir Michael Barber, a lobbyist who pushes for free-marketreforms to education. And the list of executives and partnerships goes on.[6]

What are some of the benefits of these partnerships? Pearson's advocates for education reform were instrumental in the development of the Race to the Top initiative, from which they have benefittedin numerous ways. For example, Race to the Top requires significant data accumulation, and thus Pearson partnered with the Gates Foundation to be the ones to store the data.[7] Pearson also is a key partner of the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State Schools Officers. When the plan for the Common Core Standards was hatched, Pearson paid to fly the policymakers to Singapore for luxurious ''education'' trips to promote the educational methods they promote. [8]

As a result of their work with the NGA, the Common Core Standards and Race to the Top assessment requirements for those standards work heavily in Pearson's favor. It doesn't matter that StephenKrashen found that 53% of educators oppose the Common Core'--nearly every state has adopted it anyway, and they encourage a 20-fold increase in the number of tests given every age from preschool to grade 12. [9] Tests that will be administered by Pearson.

And despite the emphasis of Race To the Top and Common Core on state-led education initiatives,in reality, Pearson does not produce different texts and tests for different states. As Texas is one of its oldest and largest customers, and many of the states that are adopting Pearson materials are ''red states,'' they make sure that the materials they provide will pass muster with those particular school boards. Then they recycle the same material for other states. [10] This tilts curriculum in obviously ways, with US History coverage leaning decidedly right wing, but also in less obvious ways. Light was shed on these changes with a recent Pearson reading comprehension test administered to eighth graders. This was the first such test for several states that had recently adopted Pearson's materials, including New York, which was previously known for its rigorous reading comprehension topic. This year, the passage was a story called ''The Pineapple and the Hare,'' which was an adaptation of another story that went so awry the original author disavowed the new version. Students complained that the story was childish and that it was confusing what the test makers were trying to conveyby using it. Parents in other states lodged the same complaints. But New York state doesn't seem to care'--not only will Pearson continue to provide a large portion of New York's tests, but they are contracted to run New York's teacher licensure process beginning in 2014.[11]

How Pearson got into New York's teacher licensure program can probably be attributed to another one of its higher-powered partners'--Susan Fuhrman, president of Teachers College. Not only is Fuhrman the head of one of the most prestigious teacher education schools in America, but she nowholds the title of ''Non-Executive Independent Director of Pearson PLC'' and has received almost one million dollars in stock and fees to date.[12] So it is really not surprising that Pearson has its foot in the door to make decisions about who will hold NY Teaching Licenses.

Stanford was responsible for designing the edTPA (Teacher Performance Assessment), but they did so with, quote, considerable seed money from Pearson from the beginning of the project. The edTPArelies on evaluation of two ten-minute videos of the candidate's teaching and the responses to a written examination. Supposedly, the scorers are retired teachers who receive $75 per evaluation (although, many of us applied to Pearson to be scorers, and not one person from UNC was chosen to my knowledge). And to prove validity of the edTPA, the Education Development Center, a non-profit in Waltham, Mass, performed a field test across five states. The Education Development Center is funded by Pearson.[13]

The insidiousness of Pearson's tentacles' reaching across education would be enough to set off alarms in the community. Huge corporations and conglomerates own stock in Pearson, including the LibyanInvestment Authority, owned by Gaddafi's son Seif al-Islam, who owns 3% of the company. The Koch brothers have connection to Pearson, as does Teach For America. And the more Pearson acts, the fewer choices we have over education in our towns and cities. Pearson just bought a large online charter school consortium that opened across America, and they now own the G.E.D. for students who drop out altogether.[14] And when a company called Boundless Learning tried to offer free and alternative textbooks to create a choice for students, Pearson partnered with Cengage and MacMillan to not only sue the company out of existence, but also the venture capitalists that funded it.[15]

States are beginning to rely on Pearson not only for materials, but also for the actual data that drives them to make crucial decisions in student learning and teacher retention. There is an assumed validity to these materials that is never proven and now, never challenged. Ironically, the free-market argument has paved the way for a system with no competition. Scores from Pearson tests are used in value-added measurements. Scores from the edTPA are used in hiring and firing decisions.[16] As Rob Lytle, an education consultant, said,''If new standards are as rigorous as advertised, a huge number of schools will suddenly look really bad'...they'll want help, quick. And private, for-profit vendors selling lesson plans, educational software, and student assessments will be right thereto provide it.''[17] It is no longer a piece of the puzzle we can afford to ignore.

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Mon, 18 Nov 2013 02:39

Mission & PurposeBuilding on the legacy of founding chairman, General Colin Powell, we are a strong and effective partnership alliance committed to ensuring children experience the fundamental resources they need to succeed.

The Five PromisesThe Five Promises are the fundamental resources that young people need to succeed: Caring Adults, Safe Places, A Healthy Start, Effective Education, and Opportunities to Help Others

LeadershipAmerica's Promise Alliance is guided by leaders from all sectors of American life: The business community; nonprofits, community groups, policymakers, experts in children's and youth issues, concerned individuals and young people.

Our HistoryAmerica's Promise grew out of the Presidents' Summit for America's Future in 1997. Presidents Clinton, Bush, Carter and Ford, along with Nancy Reagan, challenged America to make youth a national priority.

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Wed, 20 Nov 2013 13:24

Stephan TurnipseedChair

President, LEGO Education North America

Dr. Lizabeth FogelVice Chair, Lead - 21st Century Citizenship

Director of Education, The Walt Disney Company

Dzana HomanTreasurer, Audit & Finance Committee

Chief Operating Officer, Goddard Systems, Inc.

Rob LippincottSecretary

Senior Vice President, Education Strategy & Partnerships, PBS

Frank GallagherImmediate PastChair, Leadership Development Committee Lead

Executive Director, Cable in the Classroom

Chuck Cadle

Chief Executive Officer, Destination Imagination

Donna Harris-Aikens

Director of National Education Policy and Practice, National Education Association

Kathy Hurley

Executive Vice President, Education Alliances, Pearson Foundation

Lillian Kellogg,

Vice President, Client Services, Education Networks of America

Ryan Lefton

Director of Digital Strategy, Schools Division, Gale Cengage Learning

Cheri Sterman

Director of Content and Consumer Relations, Crayola

Ron ThorpePresident and CEO

National Board for Professional Teaching Standards

Strategic Council Members:

Kate Berseth

Executive Vice President for EF Education First, North America

David ByerLead - National Policy Working Group

Senior Manager, Education Leadership and Policy, Apple, Inc.

Diane Fromm

Program, Administrator, Project Management Institute Educational Foundation

Scott Hirschfeld

Director of Education, U.S. Fund for UNICEF

Paige Johnson

Education Strategist, Intel

Mike Lorion

General Manager of Education, Common Sense Media

Alyson NielsonAudit & Finance Committee

COO, EdLeader21

Tom Rudin

Senior VP, Career Readiness, College Board

Jorge S CoutoLead - International Policy Working Group

Chairman, JP - Inspiring Knowledge

Mike Schmidt

Director of Education, Ford Motor Company Fund

David Young

VIF International Education

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Wed, 20 Nov 2013 13:23

WASHINGTON, Aug. 9, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- With government and business leaders now emphasizing creativity as an essential 21st century skill for every student, Crayola is launching an initiative to inspire creativity in the next generation of Edisons, Armstrongs and Zuckerbergs.

Crayola has teamed up with the National Association of Elementary School Principals (NAESP), the National Art Education Association (NAEA) and the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) to create the "Champion Creatively Alive Children" program. The professional development program emphasizes creativity as a 21st century skill and addresses the need for arts-infused education in schools. It empowers art teachers to become the "chief creative officers" in their schools and ensures that principals have the tools to lead their faculty to develop the originality in every child.

The U.S. Department of Education is hosting a professional development event based on this program at its national headquarters to put Department staff, who work on behalf of students every day, in touch with teachers and principals, their counterparts in the classroom. All participants, including principals and teachers from the Northeast, were told "don't come as you are, come as you were" with a child-like spirit. Hands-on activities led by Cheri Sterman, Crayola Director of Education and Child Development, will draw out each participant's creativity to show how art activities build critical thinking and collaboration skills in students.

"We're hosting this event today because Secretary Duncan and the Department recognize the importance of integrating the arts into teaching and learning from cradle to career," said Suzanne Immerman, Director of Strategic Partnerships for the U.S. Department of Education. "Our students today really need more than knowledge and skills to succeed. They need ingenuity and imagination, and arts education is the ideal way to infuse creativity and critical thinking in their efforts to be productive citizens in a global workforce."

At the session, Rachel Goslins, Executive Director of the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, will present key findings from the Committee's newly-released report, "Reinvesting in Arts Education: Winning America's Future Through Creative Schools." She will emphasize the critical role arts education plays in closing the achievement gap and building students' innovative thinking skills.

"Creativity and innovative thinking are essential skills for success in school and in the 21st century workforce," said Ms. Goslins. "It is not enough merely to graduate more students from school; we must engage and inspire them while they are there, and prepare them for successful careers afterwards. All of our research points to the power of the arts in schools to increase academic achievement in reading and math, engage more students in learning and build creative thinking skills. Programs like "Champion Creatively Alive Children" are crucial in giving principals and teachers the tools they need to ignite the potential in all of their students."

Other education thought leaders who will present include: Suzanne Immerman, Director of Strategic Partnership for the U.S. Department of Education, Gail Connelly, Executive Director of NAESP, Deborah Reeve, Executive Director of NAEA, Tim Magner, Executive Director of P21, and Victoria Lozano, Vice President of Crayola. Sharon Hartley, Crayola Executive Vice President, will deliver 36 pieces of children's artwork to be on permanent display at the Department of Education. The artwork was inspired by children's vision of the theme "what creativity means to me."

"Creativity is a skill that every child needs," said Mike Perry, Crayola President and Chief Executive Officer. "We started this program asking ourselves 'What if every principal and teacher championed creatively alive children in their schools?' Imagine how ready these children will be to face 21st century challenges with a strong foundation in creative thinking."

The "Champion Creatively Alive Children" professional development program includes videos showcasing how arts-infused education builds the 4Cs '' critical thinking, collaboration, creativity, communication. A fifth video devoted to arts-infused education advocacy helps art teachers become the chief creative officer in their schools. Each video tells the story of a school that was awarded one of 20 "Champion Creatively Alive Children" mini-grants from Crayola and NAESP for the innovative ways they are integrating art across the curriculum. Five facilitator guides accompany the video series to enable principals and teachers to lead workshops and staff and parents' meetings around art as a way to building 21st century skills. The entire series is available at no charge on Crayola.com.

SOURCE Crayola

RELATED LINKShttp://www.Crayola.com

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Wed, 20 Nov 2013 13:22

EASTON, Penn. '' Crayola joins the list of big name education companies who have sold out our children and America to the United Nations' global agenda.Teaching children 'to take action as global citizens' in an 'interdependent world' and to 'think about the world more holistically' are the focus of several Crayola lessons provided in partnership with the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), one of the organizations responsible for the creation and implementation of the national Common Core State Standards.

Crayola, Lego Education, Apple, and Disney (among others), as members of P21 (Partnership for 21st Century Skills) entered into a 'strategic partnership' with the Council of Chief State School Officers in 2010.

According to P21'²s Executive Chair, Kathy Hurley, CCSSO and P21 work very closely on Common Core, as well as CCSSO's Next Generation Learner program, and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act re-authorization.

Hurley is also Senior Vice President of Strategic Partnerships for Pearson Education. Pearson, in partnership with CCSSO, has been instrumental in implementing Common Core in many states by creating and providing resources and employing educators to provide professional development training.

The U.S. Department of Education hosted the launching of P21 and Crayola's Champion Creatively Alive Children program in 2011.

Crayola lessons, like other Common Core material, are designed to create, in children's minds, a biased perspective of the world '-- globalization over national sovereignty, interdependence over self-reliance, and social and economic equity governed by a few over social and economic freedom governed by self.

Crayola recommended resources that promote social justice, globalization, and the theory of global warming are listed here along with writings by humanist and Common Core assessment creator, Linda Darling-Hammond, and progressive Howard Gardner.

Another Crayola recommended book, An Attainable Global Perspective, provides a glowing report on Maoism as an alternative to capitalism.

From Robert Hanvey's An Attainable Global Perspective:

''Maoists believe that while a principal aim of nations should be to raise the level of material welfare of the population, this should be done only within the context of the development of human beings, encouraging them to realize fully their manifold creative powers. And it should be done only on a egalitarian basis'--that is, on the basis that development is not worth much unless everyone rises together; no one is to be left behind, either economically or culturally. Indeed, Maoists believe that rapid economic development's not likely to occur unless everyone rises together . . .''

Despite Education Secretary Arne Duncan's continued tactless denial that Common Core purposes a political agenda, the lessons created by CCSSO partners continue to prove otherwise '-- that these standards have everything to do with the political and social agenda of those who created them, and nothing to do with a sound education for America's children.

Authored by Dannette Clark

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Mon, 18 Nov 2013 03:00

A new study found that most states are working with colleges to transition to Common Core, but many are also facing challenges.

Although most states say they have begun working with higher education institutions to implement the Common Core State Standards, nearly the same amount say they are facing major or minor challenges in working with colleges and universities in the transition, according to a new report from George Washington University's Center on Education Policy.

The role of higher education in implementing the standards is twofold, according to the report: colleges and universities need to help ensure that teachers, new and old, are prepared to teach the more challenging standards and evaluate how well those standards and assessments prepare students for entry-level college courses.

A large majority of the 40 state education agencies that responded to the survey said they have established formal partnerships to implement the standards with postsecondary representatives, and 31 states said these institutions have reviewed or plan to review the standards to determine if their mastery indicates college readiness.

[READ: Majority of Teachers Support Common Core, Poll Finds]

Still, 35 states said working with higher education institutions is a major (16) or minor (19) challenge. In another question, 27 also said working with higher education institutions to align teacher preparation programs with the standards also proved challenging. Only two states said neither of these has been a challenge.

But Jacqueline King, director of higher education at the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, one of two groups helping states design Common Core-aligned assessments, says the challenges stem from different ways of thinking.

"Common Core really requires K-12 and higher ed to work together at a level that in many cases hasn't occurred in states. The cultures of K-12 and higher education are very different," King says. "I don't think it's so much a concern around the standards themselves, but it's the issue of trying to get a more seamless pathway between the two, and really getting some clarity together about what college readiness means."

[ALSO: States Lack Funds, Resources to Implement Common Core]

Additionally, differences in how states govern their colleges and universities could explain challenges in aligning teacher preparation programs with the CCSS, King says. In some states, a board makes decisions for policy initiatives statewide, whereas in others, those decisions are made by individual campuses.

Aside from teacher preparation and training, higher education's role in implementing the new standards can affect students and how well they will fare in first-year college courses, according to King.

Just as schools and teachers are adjusting their curricula and instruction to ensure students are "college- and career-ready," colleges are evaluating how well those standards and assessments match up to the expectations of entry-level college courses.

[MORE: Minnesota Reading Scores Plummet in Common Core Assessments]

"Colleges are looking at how well their first-year courses align and if there are gaps, or if they are assuming things would be covered in high school that might not be covered," King said during a previous interview. "The goal is to make sure there's a smooth pathway between high school and college."

Establishing that connection can also help reduce the number of college freshmen forced to enroll in remedial classes '' "refresher" courses usually required when students score low on placement exams. According to the CEP's survey, 21 states said they are considering using Common Core assessment scores in making course placement decisions and exempting students from remedial courses.

But as it stands, "it's not until usually the week before classes that students take placement exams and all of a sudden find out they're not ready," King said. "That can be so demoralizing for students."

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Source: UN Agenda 21

Mon, 18 Nov 2013 12:09

Exposing the comprehensive UN plan to bring about an authoritarian world government via international regulations and treaties under the guise of environmentalism and social equity.

Remember, a lot of this is heavy doublespeak. I.E. "Commuter Friendly" = Commuter hell, at the mercy of public transportation, unfriendly-to-cars, no leaving the area etc., "Walkable" = car unfriendly, literally poverty infrastructure

New UrbanismTriple Bottom LineSustainability/Sustainable DevelopmentSocial EquityEconomic EmpowermentSocial Responsibility"Smart" i.e. Smart GrowthEconomic/Environmental JusticeCorporate Social Responsibility(CSR)Liveable/WalkableNew NormalComplete StreetsMixed-Use (property)"Green"Commuter Friendly"Well-Being"Community ActionResilience/Resilient CommunitiesTransition TownNext/New EconomySECTION I. SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS: Chapter 2.1.

In order to meet the challenges of environment and development, States have decided to establish a new global partnership. This partnership commits all States to engage in a continuous and constructive dialogue, inspired by the need to achieve a more efficient and equitable world economy, keeping in view the increasing interdependence of the community of nations and that sustainable development should become a priority item on the agenda of the international community. It is recognized that, for the success of this new partnership, it is important to overcome confrontation and to foster a climate of genuine cooperation and solidarity. It is equally important to strengthen national and international policies and multinational cooperation to adapt to the new realities.

No Racism

No Abusive/threatening language.

Any posts that attack the sub, the users or the mods can be removed. Breaking this rule more than once can earn a ban.

We are all different here, and you may find that have different beliefs, but please be respectful of each other.

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Source: UN Agenda 21

Mon, 18 Nov 2013 16:34

Exposing the comprehensive UN plan to bring about an authoritarian world government via international regulations and treaties under the guise of environmentalism and social equity.

Remember, a lot of this is heavy doublespeak. I.E. "Commuter Friendly" = Commuter hell, at the mercy of public transportation, unfriendly-to-cars, no leaving the area etc., "Walkable" = car unfriendly, literally poverty infrastructure

New UrbanismTriple Bottom LineSustainability/Sustainable DevelopmentSocial EquityEconomic EmpowermentSocial Responsibility"Smart" i.e. Smart GrowthEconomic/Environmental JusticeCorporate Social Responsibility(CSR)Liveable/WalkableNew NormalComplete StreetsMixed-Use (property)"Green"Commuter Friendly"Well-Being"Community ActionResilience/Resilient CommunitiesTransition TownNext/New EconomySECTION I. SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS: Chapter 2.1.

In order to meet the challenges of environment and development, States have decided to establish a new global partnership. This partnership commits all States to engage in a continuous and constructive dialogue, inspired by the need to achieve a more efficient and equitable world economy, keeping in view the increasing interdependence of the community of nations and that sustainable development should become a priority item on the agenda of the international community. It is recognized that, for the success of this new partnership, it is important to overcome confrontation and to foster a climate of genuine cooperation and solidarity. It is equally important to strengthen national and international policies and multinational cooperation to adapt to the new realities.

No Racism

No Abusive/threatening language.

Any posts that attack the sub, the users or the mods can be removed. Breaking this rule more than once can earn a ban.

We are all different here, and you may find that have different beliefs, but please be respectful of each other.

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Wed, 20 Nov 2013 12:04

Nadat de Inspectie onlangs een rapport publiceerde waaruit blijkt dat de rekenprestaties van kinderen gedaald zijn, kondigt de pas opgerichte Stichting Goed Rekenonderwijs aan voorjaar 2009 met een `nieuwe´ rekenmethode te komen, gebaseerd op klassiekers als de staartdeling, het rekenen met breuken en het metrieke stelsel.

De vorige maand opgerichte Stichting Goed Rekenonderwijs brengt het tegenoffensief op het huidige realistisch rekenen (waarbij sommen bijvoorbeeld verpakt zijn in praktische situaties) in eerste instantie op internet uit, in afwachting van concrete belangstelling van educatieve uitgevers. In het comit(C) van aanbeveling van de stichting zitten tal van hooggeleerden, onder wie VNO-NCW-voorzitter Bernard Wientjes, Nobelprijswinnaar Gerard `t Hooft, hoogleraar Henk Barendregt en nog een tiental professoren. De `nieuwe´ traditionele methode is ontwikkeld door twee ervaren basisschoolleerkrachten. De Universiteit van Tilburg (UvT) en de Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (TU/e) stellen de stichting in staat een nieuwe rekenmethode te ontwikkelen en op de markt te brengen. De beide universiteiten willen de stichting met hun financile steun helpen bij het beschikbaar maken van een alternatieve methode voor het rekenonderwijs.

Niet iedereen vindt, zoals het groepje critici, dat alle problemen in het huidige rekenonderwijs alleen aan het realistisch rekenen te wijten zijn; deze mening zou veel te veel gebaseerd zijn op het schetsen van extremen in het huidige rekenonderwijs. Op veel scholen is er wel degelijk aandacht voor de onderliggende regels bij berekeningen. De verantwoordelijkheid voor rekenproblemen ligt ook voor een belangrijk deel bij scholen en leerkrachten (tijdsinvestering, sturend optreden, taakgerichtheid, uitleg, toetsing van de resultaten ten behoeve van verbetering, extra hulp voor rekenzwakke leerlingen, niet alleen de focus op taal) en wordt niet alleen bepaald door de methode. Tot slot moeten scholen ongeveer tien jaar met een methode vooruit, voordat er weer geld is om een nieuwe aan te schaffen. Volgens een woordvoerder van Thieme Meulenhoff hoeven scholen zich niet ongerust te maken of hun huidige methode vervroegd te vervangen.

Overigens blijkt uit een onderzoek van Uitgeverij Zwijsen dat bijna de helft van de leerkrachten en schoolleiders uit het primair onderwijs vindt dat leerlingen de basisschool onvoldoende `gecijferd´ verlaten. 90 procent van de genquªteerden vindt dat ook in het voortgezet onderwijs rekenles gegeven zou moeten worden.

Staatssecretaris Dijksma laat momenteel onderzoek doen naar rekenlesmethoden - volgens de critici dertig jaar te laat - en is gestart met rekenverbetertrajecten. Ze sluit niet uit dat de rekenles gecontinueerd wordt op de middelbare school, maar dat de politiek dit niet moet opleggen.

Meer informatie: www.goedrekenonderwijs.nl, www.schoolaanzet.nl en www.kinderenlerenrekenen.nlIn een volgende Kader Primair zal dieper ingegaan worden op de rekendiscussie.

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Mon, 18 Nov 2013 23:41

More VideoToronto tailors claim suit will stop a bullet

Tabloid Talk: Did Katie Holmes have a fling with Jamie Foxx?

James Stewart is a calculus rock star.

When he goes on book tours in China, they ask for his autograph. In Toronto, the city's movers and shakers gather at his home for concerts. People have drunkenly stumbled into his infinity pool.

Stewart's 18,000-square-foot home, named Integral House, is an architectural marvel. It has five floors, a concert space and a stairwell ensconced in handblown blue glass, his favourite colour. The house is filled with gadgets. Stewart delights in showing them off, including the wall to wall blinds that block out the sun with a push of a button in his treetop bedroom.

''I don't like to wake up too early,'' he says.

Rosedale is a neighbourhood of riches, but Stewart's are of a peculiar design. In 1987 he published his first calculus text book. Today, 90 per cent of Canadian university students use his books, and 70 per cent of U.S. students do the same. The bestselling books have been translated into 12 languages. He's a bit like John Grisham, if Grisham knew how to write good sigma notation.

''I would not have predicted it,'' says the fair-haired Stewart, ever the mathematician.

Stewart is from Toronto. His brother and sister aren't mathematical at all. His father was an engineer. His mother was an artist.

As a boy, Stewart loved music and math. At the University of Toronto, he almost switched into music during second year university. But he stuck with math and played the violin on the side.

In the 80s, Stewart split his time between playing violin in the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra and trying to make calculus digestible for undergrads at McMaster. One day, some of his students told him he should write a book, since his blackboard lesson made more sense than the text they were using.

Stewart spent the next seven years in exile and wrote the kind of book he'd like to use. When it was finished, the book stood out for being easy to understand. It was a bestseller by 1992.

''There are no brochures in guidance offices for textbook writers,'' he says as his feet rest on the heated limestone floors.

With money pouring in with each new edition, Stewart renovated homes in Hamilton, and later, in Toronto. He wanted his final home to be his masterpiece.

He travelled the world to interview architects, including Frank Gehry. He chose Howard Sutcliffe and Brigitte Shim of Shim-Sutcliffe Architects in Toronto, and told them he wanted curves and performance space. He let them imagine the rest.

There are some numbers Stewart doesn't like to talk about. One is his age. Another is the cost of his home. Estimates have pegged it at $30 million.

Stewart bought a $5.4 million house that backs on to the ravine in Rosedale in 2002 and tore it down a year later. Integral House took six years to build, on account of its curves.

From the street, only two stories are visible. The main living space was built one floor below street level so it feels like you're descending into the ravine. The back half of the house is glass mixed with oak fins. The house has minimal interior decoration '-- the trees outside are the real focal point. They are visible from all five floors.

''The aspiration is that the project feels timeless,'' architect Brigitte Shim said.

The director of New York's Museum of Modern Art called Stewart's home one of the ''most important private houses'' in North America.

The floors are made of limestone from France. Before installing the floor, the architects tested the limestone with red wine, coffee and cola. It came off no problem, but when it was installed, the seal wasn't as strong.

''At the first fundraiser held here, guests dropped their glasses of red wine, I said, 'Not to worry, these tests prove it will come off,' but it didn't.'' Red wine is now outlawed at receptions.

Although it's just Stewart who lives there, with the occasional friend staying in the house's two-bedroom apartment, Toronto's arts community is also a de facto inhabitant.

The concert space was built for Stewart to host 150-person concerts, but he did not anticipate his house would become the darling of fundraising circles.

''I turn down more requests than I get,'' he said. ''I usually put on eight events per year. I choose the causes that resonate with me.''

Small theatre groups, music festivals, dance companies, and fashion entrepreneurs have all used the house for benefits. Stewart has been thrilled to meet some of his heroes along the way.

American composer Steve Reich has played here, and Phillip Glass, a renowned composer whose work has been nominated for Academy Awards, is expected to stop by this year.

Shim, who attends many of the events, is continually impressed.

''He's just a really lovely guy, the nicest person you ever want to meet,'' she said of Stewart.

The house may have catapulted Stewart into circles most mathletes don't travel in, but he's still a professor at heart. When he came home from a walk to find two architecture students peering into his windows, he gave them a tour.

After all, this is the house that math built, and calculus is a beautiful thing to share.

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Archived Version

Source: White House.gov Press Office Feed

Thu, 21 Nov 2013 07:54

The White House

Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release

November 19, 2013

Since Typhoon Haiyan struck the Philippines on November 8, U.S. disaster relief experts and military personnel have worked around the clock to deliver food, water, medicine, and shelter to help those hit hardest by the storm. In support of the Philippines' relief effort, the United States is providing more than $37 million in humanitarian aid to those in need.

U.S. Assistance at a Glance

U.S. humanitarian assistance in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan includes:

USAID / Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance (USAID/OFDA)$20,000,000USAID / Office of Food for Peace (USAID/FFP)$10,000,000$7,230,302In the days following the storm, U.S. assistance has included:

Emergency shelter materials for 20,000 families (100,000 people)Hygiene kits for 20,000 families (100,000 people)55 metric tons of food assistance benefitting 19,800 families (99,000 people)Water containers for 14,400 families (72,000 people)Restored functionality of the Tacloban municipal water system, benefiting 200,000 people.There are currently 15 USAID disaster response specialists and approximately 9,500 U.S. military personnel responding to the crisis.

U.S. military aircraft have logged some 945 flight hours, delivered more than 750,000 pounds of relief supplies and equipment, moved more than 1,200 relief workers into Tacloban, and airlifted nearly 5,640 survivors from storm affected areas.

A significant amount of U.S. assistance has also supported logistical operations, including helping get airports up and running, providing communications support, expanding transportation capacity, and establishing aid distribution centers.

A Coordinated Response

Even before the storm reached land, the United States began coordinating potential support to the Philippines' response effort. Departments and agencies in Washington and our Embassy in Manila were in close communication in the days before the storm. Our Embassy put out a warning message for American citizens and USAID deployed a Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART) to the area.

The DART was the first government assessment team to arrive in Leyte province, and continues to play a critical role in leading the U.S. response effort, assessing storm damage, advising on critical humanitarian needs, coordinating relief efforts in support of the Philippine government, and working with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and UN agencies. Five USAID airlifts have delivered needed emergency supplies like plastic sheeting, hygiene kits, water containers, and nutrition-dense food items. Of the more than $37 million in U.S. assistance, we provided $10 million to the World Food Programme to enable, in part, the purchase of 2,500 metric tons of rice being distributed by the Philippines' Department of Social Welfare and Development.

U.S. Marines on the ground in the Philippines were among the first to respond, using C-130s and MV-22 Ospreys to airlift relief supplies to Tacloban and other hard hit areas. The USS George Washington Carrier Strike Group arrived in the Philippines on November 14, and has helped expand search and rescue operations, provide medical care, and deliver supplies using its 21 helicopters. In addition, U.S. Pacific Command has established a Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief-certified Joint Task Force at Camp Aguinaldo. A joint contingent of more than 850 military personnel is currently ashore in the Philippines. Two U.S. amphibious ships '' the USS Ashland and USS Germantown -- are currently en route to the Philippines after loading elements of the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit at Okinawa, Japan and will bring with them heavy engineering equipment like backhoes, dump trucks and wreckers needed to support the response.

Our Philippine ally is responding to one of the largest disasters its country has ever faced, and we have been coordinating closely with them at every step. Thus far, our cooperation has been excellent. Our military personnel are in close touch, as are our development and disaster relief experts. The Philippine government has moved quickly to facilitate humanitarian assistance provided by the United States and international community, and has provided quick clearance for U.S. aircraft, ships, and personnel, enabling us to rapidly begin to deliver assistance to affected areas.

How Americans Can Help

As President Obama said last week, when friends are in trouble, America helps. The United States will continue to offer whatever assistance we can to the people of the Philippines, but this is more than just a government effort. Learn more about how you can help at http://www.whitehouse.gov/typhoon.

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Thu, 21 Nov 2013 10:28

Report Presented at UN Climate Summit in Warsaw, Poland on November 19, 2013 By Marc MoranoUN head Ban Ki-moon says Typhoon Haiyan due to climate change - 'We have seen now what has happened in the Philippines. It is an urgent warning. An example of changed weather and how climate change is affecting all of us on Earth.'Philippines lead negotiator Yeb Sano at UN climate summit in Warsaw 'announces he will not eat during the conference, until a meaningful agreement has been achieved'Jeffrey Sachs Special Advisor to UN Sec.-General Ban Ki-moon, 'Climate liars like Rupert Murdoch & Koch Brothers have more & more blood on their hands as climate disasters claim lives across the world.'Typhoon Fuels Call for Global Warming Compensation Funds At UN Climate Summit '' Poor nations 'blame countries that industrialized 200 years ago for damaging the atmosphere'Scientific Reality Check: As Scientists Reject Climate Link '' Claim of 'strongest storm ever' refutedStorm expert Brian McNoldy of U. of Miami: 'We don't get to pick and choose which storms are enhanced by a warmer climate and which ones aren't'Meteorologist Dr. Ryan Maue: 'Over past 1,000 years, Philippines have been hit by 10-20 thousand tropical cyclones. Don't be so arrogant to believe man caused Haiyan.' Maue demolishes claims that Typhoon Haiyan was 'strongest storm ever' '' 'Fact: Haiyan is 58th Super Typhoon since 1950 to reach central pressure of 900 mb or lower from historical records' -- Maue: '50 of 58 Super Typhoons with pressure of 900 mb or lower occurred from 1950-1987 -- only 8 in past 25 years'Strongest storm ever? 'Haiyan ranks at number 7 among the strongest storms ever to have hit the Philippines'UN IPCC: 'There is low confidence in any observed long-term (40 years or more) increases in tropical cyclone activity (ie intensity, frequency, duration).' Its authoritative Fifth Assessment Report added in September 2013 there have been 'no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century'.Prof. Roger Pielke Jr.: 'The scientific evidence does not presently support claims of attribution of the effects of greenhouse gas emissions on tropical cyclone behavior with respect to century-long trends 'much less the behavior of individual storms' - "In practical terms, on timescales of decision making a signal that cannot be seen is indistinguishable from a signal that does not exist - 'I am not convinced that 3 mm/year of sea level rise is a big issue in the magnitude of disaster losses'Gabe Vecchi, a research oceanographer with NOAA, said that if global warming altered Haiyan, it did not do so to a significant extent. 'I expect that the contribution of global warming to Haiyan's extreme intensity is likely to have been small, relative to other factors like weather fluctuations and climate variability.'Pielke Jr.: 'Given this data, substantial research on it and a strong IPCC consensus does anyone really want to debate that typhoon disasters have become more common?'Bjorn Lomborg: 'Facts don't support climate-change-caused-typhoon-Haiyan. Strong typhoons declining 1950-10.Real Science website: 'There have been 35 cyclones in the last 800 years that have killed more than 10,000 people. Thirty-three occurred with CO2 below 350 PPM. The deadliest one in 1970 was blamed on global cooling at the time'http://www.climatedepot.com/2013/11/19/climate-depot-special-report-on-typhoon-haiyan-presented-at-un-climate-summit-in-warsaw/

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Source: Lame Cherry

Tue, 19 Nov 2013 13:36

As a note from Lame Cherry to the Filipinos of the southern islands..........

In the Spanish American War, the Americans saved you from Spanish Imperialism. The Americans educated you, employed you and treated you to advance your society.

In World War II, Americans once again defended you, to the extent that General Douglas MacArthur bucked President Franklin Roosevelt who wanted to leave you a Japanese enclave as not worth liberating.

For that, in the 1980's you booted out dictator Ferdinand Marcos, a national hero of World War II. For that, you had installed for you that blithering idiot, Corazon Aquino in your "people power".For that, you booted Americans out of our base in Subic Bay, in being the worst sort of ungrateful people of the New World anti American Order.

For that, you passed laws prohibiting American bases on your islands, to which America has been operating covert bases as grande as ever, which do little to employ or help the Filipino people.

Now I watch you with a typhoon, that has flooded your southern Muslim areas, and listen to you bitch about your worthless government is not saving you or assisting you. Well welcome to the adult world, in you chose that regime, but yet I see you flocking around with signs in English begging American military transports to feed, clothe, water and shelter you for hundreds of millions of dollars.

You chose this path much to the humiliation of America and Americans. I remind you of that little matter of the bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in Terry Nichols traveled to the Philippines to learn how to be a terrorist from your terrorists.I remind you that it was the Philippines which had aerial connections to the 9 11 terror attack on America.I remind you, that is it your outlaw militant Isalm in the southern islands which is a festering sore upon the Philippines, the Pacific and America.

You caused this, all of this. Now after all your misbehavior you come begging to Americans for help after pissing on America, and teaching terrorists to murder Americans.

I have no compassion on you. You should have all been washed out to sea and the world would have been a better situation for the ingrates you are.

In that, the Continentalist Party is not about giving free aid to people like yourselves in the massive Obama debt. Oh yes, then there is your boy Birther Hussein Obama Chin, whose mother was imported from the Philippines for Barack Obama sr. as an anchor wife in Hawaii, whereby she birthed this foreign agent known as Obama which has brought America to utter ruin.

So the Continentalist Party now places the Philippines on alert. You have proven you are incapable of governing yourselves. You can not even respond to a typhoon you were warned was coming. For the American response, the bill to you now is the passing of laws bringing about the military governorship of the Philippines again, with full military access and Filipino assistance.Furthermore, our Subic Bay and Clark Field, along with anything else of property Americans desire to reclaim is the cost of this American assistance.

This is the Continentalist Policy response. You will be chastised for kicking America out after all Americans did for you. You will be made to disciplined to respect your keepers. You will be kept in managed freedom whereby when storms come, you will be evacuated and supplies will be on hand to assist you, along with rebuilding your homes on elevated ground so you do not all become drown rats again.

You have behaved badly. The Continentalist Party will neither forgive nor forget. You owe a debt and will be made to pay it. The Continentalist Party is the Sons and Daughters of the Revolution who will require back Theodore Roosevelt's Panama Canal, payment of the Iraqi and Afghanistan people for those wars in their liberation in oil and resources, and, the list will expand upon every region, including the western Europeans in that immense Cold War debt owed to America for providing defense and that matter of trillions which your Birther Hussein looted from America and then dumped in the European banks.

You do not deserve respect, but deserve exactly the above. You have a choice in either paying the bills due or being turned over to the Peking regime, where your women will be turned over to be marriage raped by the millions of available Chicom males, while your male are turned into production slaves.

So ends this policy statement of the Continentalist Party in America.

agtG

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Thu, 21 Nov 2013 09:56

The death toll in the central Philippines continues to mount in the wake of the devastation caused by Typhoon Haiyan. The current official count of the Philippine government National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC) was 4,881 dead as of noon, November 18. This number will continue to increase sharply, as mass casualties in more remote areas begin to be processed.

An estimated 2 million people are homeless, while a total of 11 million are reported to have been affected by the damage. Vast portions of the islands of Samar and Leyte have been laid waste by the storm, and the city of Tacloban is in ruins.

The islands are in the grip of an immense humanitarian crisis. Hundreds of thousands are without access to food, potable water, medicine, or sanitation. Roads throughout the islands remain impassible, and entire communities are completely isolated.

Washington has deployed a massive military force to the region. The nuclear powered aircraft carrier USS George Washington, with 5,000 sailors and 80 aircraft, is in the Leyte Gulf, along with its strike group of two guided-missile cruisers, two guided-missile destroyers, a cargo ship, an oceanographic survey ship and a submarine tender. These are to be joined by 3 amphibious warfare ships and 2 littoral combat ships. Some 850 US troops are on the ground in Leyte and are to be joined by an additional 1,000 US Marines in the next two days.

Joint Task Force 505, under the command of Marine Corps Lt. Gen. John E. Wissler, has set up headquarters for the US forces in Camp Aguinaldo, the military headquarters of the Philippine Army.

While this build-up is referred to as ''providing assistance,'' it is clear that the US military is just not ''assisting'' their Philippine counterparts, but commanding them. US forces are operating the air traffic control tower at the Tacloban airport, controlling which flights are allowed to land and take off there.

''We are controlling 250 ops (operations) per day,'' U.S. Air Force Master Sgt. Clinton Dykes told the US military publication Stars and Stripes on November 15. The number of operations has increased significantly since then.

The Philippine military is being deployed as armed crowd control in the city of Tacloban, implementing a de facto system of martial law, with an 8 pm''6 am curfew. The hundreds of armed military and police patrolling streets are further supplemented by the armed private guards who defend the homes and property of the wealthy.

The chapel and museum in Tacloban constructed by, and dedicated to, Imelda Marcos still stand. In the immediate aftermath of the storm, as tens of thousands desperately sought shelter, armed guards threatened to kill anyone who attempted to enter the locked museum, whose 21 rooms housed countless treasures including Ming dynasty vases and gifts from Mao Zedong.

The International Labor Organization (ILO) announced on Tuesday that 5 million workers, roughly a quarter of all those employed in the Philippines, have been affected by Typhoon Haiyan. The United Nations World Food Program stated that, as of November 19, around 600,000 residents of the Eastern Visayas region had not yet received aid packages.

Reports from volunteer workers surfaced in social media over the past two days, revealing that one of the reasons for the Philippine government's delayed delivery of food supplies was that international aid packages containing bottled water, canned goods and powdered milk were being individually opened and repackaged with labels from the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD).

Other aid packages were labeled with the names of individual local politicians; many bags went out labeled as being from the Vice President Jejomar Binay.

The population in Tacloban is now being subjected to a ''food for work'' program. The distribution of food aid to the residents of Tacloban has been made contingent upon their completing a certain amount of unpaid work for the city.

What aid has been made available to the Eastern Visayas by the Philippine government is allocated on the basis of the National Disaster Relief Law. The portion of the emergency disaster relief budget allocated to any particular local government unit (LGU), such as a town or city, is based on a percentage of the LGU's revenue.

Thus, a wealthy city will automatically have greater aid allocated to it, while a poorer town or city will receive a significantly smaller amount.

No money had been set aside to prepare for natural disasters. In 2011, President Aquino vetoed the allocation of any funds for so-called ''pre-disaster preparations,'' including the construction and stocking of evacuation centers. Aquino declared at the time that any allocated funds should be used for ''actual calamities and not for the preparation of relocation sites/facilities, and training personnel engaged in direct disaster.''

With its massive deployment of armed force, Washington is seizing the opportunity afforded it by the catastrophe to stage an immense photo op. It is using the devastation in the central Philippines to demonstrate the capacity of its armed forces in the region and to open the door for its military build-up throughout the region directed against China.

The irrationality of capitalism is laid starkly bare by the fact that in order for aid to be delivered to a humanitarian crisis affecting millions of people, it is the military that is deployed, as rescue operations and infrastructure are absent. Despite the construction of huge numbers of cargo ships in the region, warships are the only vessels made available to deliver food aid, and amphibious assault vessels carry basic medical supplies.

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Thu, 21 Nov 2013 13:41

China's Foreign Ministry said Wednesday that the Chinese military will deploy a medical-relief ship to aid in humanitarian efforts in the Philippines, and that it will soon deploy an initial batch of relief workers to the country following a green light from Manila.

A statement posted to the Foreign Ministry website gave no specifics on what the military ship, known as the ''peace ark,'' would be doing in the Philippines, or on where it would anchor once it arrived. China's Defense Ministry didn't immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday morning.

The announcement by China follows earlier commitments by both Japan and the U.S. to deploy military ships to aid relief in the Philippines, where the death toll from Typhoon Haiyan is at nearly 4,000.

Beijing took criticism early on for what many viewed as a meager commitment of aid, at first announcing only $100,000 in relief through the Red Cross Society of China. The U.S., meanwhile, was gearing up an aircraft carrier to help. Some experts said Beijing had stumbled on the public relations front, as its heated territorial dispute with Manila in the South China Sea made it reluctant to do more.

China later upped its aid to the Philippines, and in recent days has said it was willing to send relief personnel to disaster-stricken areas, but indicated that it hadn't yet received permission to take part from the Philippine government.

The Foreign Ministry defended China's response to the typhoon in its statement on Wednesday.

''The Chinese side has always been highly concerned about the typhoon disaster in the Philippines,'' the statement read.

Strategic analysts describe the Chinese navy's medical-relief ship as a way for China to exude soft power through its growing hard-power military assets, and has previously made ports of call in India, Myanmar and elsewhere.

U.S. officials have repeatedly said they want to build trust with the Chinese military and see greater cooperation on humanitarian issues as one area to achieve it.

''Brian Spegele. Follow him on Twitter @bspegele.

Like China Real Time on Facebook and follow us Twitter for the latest updates.

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Thu, 21 Nov 2013 13:41

TOKYOTue Nov 12, 2013 3:57am EST

TOKYO Nov 12 (Reuters) - Japan is to send troops to the Philippines to help with relief efforts after a super typhoon killed thousands, with 40 people set to leave as soon as possible, the government said on Tuesday.

The dispatch of the Self-Defense Forces emergency relief team comes as the government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is pushing to ease limits on the military imposed by its post-war, pacifist constitution.

Japan invaded the Philippines in World War Two and scattered fighting continued until Tokyo's surrender in 1945, but Philippine officials have said their nation does not share the concerns of others in Asia, notably China and South Korea, about Japan's military past.

The Philippines, like Japan a strong ally of the United States, has also said it views Japan as a counterweight to the increasing regional role of China.

Chief cabinet secretary Yoshihide Suga said the decision to send the troops followed a request from Manila. He also said Tokyo would provide $10 million in emergency aid.

"We hope to make every effort to get the aid to the people who need it as soon as possible," he told a news conference, adding that the number of troops will be increased if the situation on the ground warrants it.

Timing of the dispatch was being coordinated with the Philippines, but the troops were ready, Suga added. A team of 25 people, mainly medical workers, left for the Philippines on Monday.

Disaster relief activities both at home and abroad by the Self-Defense Forces have gone a long way to improve the military's domestic image. About 1,000 soldiers and other personnel took part in relief efforts in Aceh after the 2004 tsunami, and troops went to Haiti following a devastating earthquake in 2010.

Expanding such non-combat activities is a key part of Abe's campaign for a more proactive role for the military overseas.

He is pushing for lifting a self-imposed ban on exercising the right of collective self-defense, or aiding an ally under attack, a much more controversial move. He has pledged to bolster the military to cope with what Japan sees as an increasingly threatening security environment, including an assertive China and an unpredictable North Korea.

"Japan's dispatch of its self-defense forces is strictly confined," said Shinichi Kitaoka, who heads an advisory panel expected to recommend at least a partial lifting of the ban on collective self-defense.

"We have started to go to many places nowadays, Haiti and other places. So to me, Japan's expansion to the more active participation in peace maintenance is a natural trend." (Reporting by Elaine Lies and Linda Sieg; Editing by Nick Macfie)

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Source: RT - News

Thu, 21 Nov 2013 04:23

Published time: November 21, 2013 02:42Delegates attend the Convention on Climate Change COP19 conference at the National Stadium in Warsaw November 19, 2013.(Reuters / Kacper Pempel)

The G77+ China group of 133 countries walked out of the United Nations climate change conference in Warsaw on the Loss and Damage mechanism after developed nations refused to agree to terms.

In Wednesday's session, G77+ China negotiator Juan Hoffmeister walked out of a closed-door meeting when delegations from the industrial block refused to agree that the mechanism for such compensation is needed now and not after 2015 when a new climate change agreement is expected to be signed in Paris.

Hoffmeister said that key elements of the mechanism were missing from a weak draft.''We want the draft to be strong. We are with G77. We support very strong steps for loss and damage, and anything that does not fulfill that should be highlighted,'' Indian Environment Minister Jayanthi Natarajan said after the walk out.

As part of the demands, the developing countries want developed nations to honor a 2009 Copenhagen pledge to provide up to $100 billion by 2020 for environmental damage."The 100 billion is a goal we need to establish a very clear roadmap," said Natarajan. "Unless that is provided for, it will be impossible for us to take forward any meaningful discussion and we feel the negotiations will be rendered completely meaningless," she told journalists.

Representatives of the poorer nations argued that the financial burden associated with global warming is out of reach for them.

Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete said while his country is trying to allocate funds for climate change, the costs are "just too high".

Poland's envoy Marcin Korolec, chairing negotiations, commented saying that the discussion was "challenging".

"We could not have predicted the economic darkness that we have all lived through for the past five years."

Another stumbling block in the negotiations is sharing the future emissions curbs, as developing nations want to create a UN body charged with compensating for environmental damage.

"Developed countries need to do more... now, and not transfer all the burden of climate change to the poor of the world after 2020," said Natarajan.

Washington has opposed the position saying that a deal under which "the developed countries would be treated in one way, in one section of the agreement, and developing countries in a different part of the agreement" was a "non-starter", US negotiator Todd Stern said.

Stern also explained that Washington had contributed about $2.7 billion in 2013, "the highest number that we have had in the last four years".

Russia's climate envoy and presidential advisor Alexander Bedritsky argued that a separate loss and damage mechanism is not needed and that the new deal should be based on the principles of the Framework Convention on Climate Change.

''We believe that in the medium term, efforts should be directed at improving the efficiency of existing adaptation, technology and financing mechanisms to strengthen the capacity of developing countries, including loss and damages claims, rather than creating new mechanisms,'' Bedritsky said, reiterating Russia's earlier position on climate change.

Last week at the start of the conference Russia's Representative Oleg Shamanov told reporters that ''the issues of loss and damage from climate change should be discussed in the framework of existing adaptation mechanisms, technological and financial assistance and capacity building.''

The EU representative Connie Hedegaard said that 1.7 billion euros will be allocated for the year 2014-2015. "The EU understands that the issue is incredibly important for developing countries. But they should be careful about '... creating a new institution. This is not [what] this process needs," said Hedegaard, as quoted by the Guardian.

"We cannot have a system where we have automatic compensation when severe events happen around the world. That is not feasible."Last week at the start of the 12 day conference in Poland, the G77+China group was discussing a Brazilian proposal that called for the creation of historical responsibility for global warming.''Our proposal is meant to make available for countries a metric of their historical responsibility in terms of temperature rise. It would be one of the elements in the future agreement,'' Brazil's Ambassador Jose Antonio Marcondes de Carvalho explained last week.

Under such framework the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change would be tasked with creating a methodology to calculate countries total output of greenhouse gases since 1850 in determining each nation's historical responsibility for global warming.

The US, EU, Canada, Norway, Israel, Switzerland, Australia and New Zealand opposed Brazil's plan with the US delegation arguing that such an approach is flawed.''Temperature is a lagging indicator and does not show up until well after emissions have occurred,'' Kim Carnahan said on November 11. ''Such an approach would provide some countries with cover to act in a manner that is much less ambitious than their current capabilities.''

Meanwhile, the US and Australia argued that there is no necessity in a "loss and damage" mechanism to be separate from existing systems of mitigation and adaptation.

''USA, EU, Australia and Norway remain blind to the climate reality that's hitting us all and poor people and countries much harder. They continue to derail negotiations in Warsaw that can create a new system to deal with new types of loss and damage such as sea level rise, loss of territory, biodiversity and other non-economic losses more systematically," Harjeet Singh of ActionAid International said as quoted by the Hindu.

The UN chief Ban Ki Moon has urged the negotiators to come to an agreement. "Climate change is the greatest single threat to peace, prosperity and sustainable development," Moon said in Warsaw.

In an effort to keep global temperature from rising beyond 2 degree Celsius the UN chief stressed that a greater funding for clean-energy development is needed.

''Our primary focus needs to be on launching and scaling up mainstream solutions that will attract hundreds of billions of dollars annually. The bulk of institutional investors' assets are in high-carbon investments.''

According to a report by the World Resource Institute, developed nations have spent $35 billion in international climate finance through the ''fast-start finance'' period between 2010 '' 2012, exceeding the initial target of US$30 billion.

Five countries - Germany, Japan, Norway, Britain, and the US gave a combined sum of $27 billion, adaptation funding received $5 billion, while mitigation received $22.1 billion.

The report also found that ''a continued commitment to scaling up climate finance is needed for both political and practical reasons.''

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Source: UN Agenda 21

Thu, 21 Nov 2013 07:55

Exposing the comprehensive UN plan to bring about an authoritarian world government via international regulations and treaties under the guise of environmentalism and social equity.

Remember, a lot of this is heavy doublespeak. I.E. "Commuter Friendly" = Commuter hell, at the mercy of public transportation, unfriendly-to-cars, no leaving the area etc., "Walkable" = car unfriendly, literally poverty infrastructure

New UrbanismTriple Bottom LineSustainability/Sustainable DevelopmentSocial EquityEconomic EmpowermentSocial Responsibility"Smart" i.e. Smart GrowthEconomic/Environmental JusticeCorporate Social Responsibility(CSR)Liveable/WalkableNew NormalComplete StreetsMixed-Use (property)"Green"Commuter Friendly"Well-Being"Community ActionResilience/Resilient CommunitiesTransition TownNext/New EconomySECTION I. SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS: Chapter 2.1.

In order to meet the challenges of environment and development, States have decided to establish a new global partnership. This partnership commits all States to engage in a continuous and constructive dialogue, inspired by the need to achieve a more efficient and equitable world economy, keeping in view the increasing interdependence of the community of nations and that sustainable development should become a priority item on the agenda of the international community. It is recognized that, for the success of this new partnership, it is important to overcome confrontation and to foster a climate of genuine cooperation and solidarity. It is equally important to strengthen national and international policies and multinational cooperation to adapt to the new realities.

No Racism

No Abusive/threatening language.

Any posts that attack the sub, the users or the mods can be removed. Breaking this rule more than once can earn a ban.

We are all different here, and you may find that have different beliefs, but please be respectful of each other.

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Thu, 21 Nov 2013 10:14

The New Americanby Alex Newman

Photo of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon speaking at the UN Climate Conference in Warsaw, Poland, Nov. 19: AP Images

With United Nations theories about alleged man-made global warming imploding on the world stage, regimes oppressing populations in poorer nations are demanding that taxpayers in wealthier countries start promptly handing over trillions of dollars '-- supposedly to deal with ''climate change.'' Gathered in Warsaw, Poland, at the latest UN ''climate'' summit, and facing massive public protests against the extortion effort, governments are hoping to quickly and quietly lay the foundations for a new global treaty rationing carbon dioxide.

Multiple nations and populations are becoming increasingly suspicious as the UN's discredited theories are ridiculed by top scientists and experts worldwide, so ''climate dignitaries'' know they must act fast. Indeed, if what countless scientists refer to as the global-warming ''scam'' crumbles entirely before 2015, the effort to foist a planetary ''carbon budget'' on humanity to replace the Kyoto Protocol may be doomed. The hundreds of billions spent on ''climate'' schemes every year would inevitably start drying up, too, bankrupting countless special interests that now depend on global-warming alarmism and hysteria.

Already, the new Australian government has vowed to reject UN ''socialism masquerading as environmentalism'' as it works to dismantle wildly unpopular ''carbon taxes'' and ''climate'' machinations imposed under Labor Party rule. It also vowed not to adopt any more taxes or spend any more taxpayer funds on UN wealth-redistribution schemes orchestrated under the bogus guise of fighting discredited notions of ''man-made global warming.'' Of course, alarmists are throwing a temper tantrum, but around the world and among Australians, the new conservative-leaning coalition has been hailed for its bold stance against the hysteria. Analysts even say Australia is leading the way ''back to sanity.''

Japanese authorities, meanwhile, recently announced that instead of working to drastically cut carbon dioxide emissions, as previously promised, Japan will actually be increasing its CO2 output. As UN global-warming theories increasingly morph into a global laughing stock, even Russian and Canadian officials are reportedly putting up some tepid resistance to the UN's grandiose ''climate'' plans. The climate-hysteria movement is literally in a meltdown over the growing defections, but the wheels are quickly coming off the ''climate'' bandwagon.

According to the almost comically alarmist U.K. Guardian, the ''climate'' extortion demands from third-world dictators and governments have ''become the most explosive issue'' at the UN global-warming summit. Apparently the negotiators have not been reading the news from the real world. The increasingly discredited British paper, which boasts of support from the controversial Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, represents among the last remaining ''media'' outlets still uncritically parroting the UN alarmism. Still, its ''reporting'' offers some insight into the ongoing climate machinations underway in Warsaw.

Now, the Guardianreported, the regimes ruling poorer nations are even threatening to ''walk out'' of the Warsaw talks if Western governments refuse to hand over more wealth extracted from their already-struggling taxpayers. The so-called ''Least Developed Countries'' (LDC), an alliance of 49 regimes '-- including the mass-murdering despot ruling over Sudan and myriad other unsavory rulers whose despotism has kept their populations in perpetual poverty '-- are demanding huge sums of loot from Western taxpayers in exchange for supporting the UN ''climate'' efforts.

''This is a red line for us,'' threatened Munjural Khan, a spokesman for the 49-government outfit, referring to the obscene demand that taxpayers in more-developed counties start funneling even greater amounts of cash to oppressive third-world regimes. ''We have been thinking of ways to harden our position, to the point of walking out of the negotiations.'' In other words, Western governments better fork over the money '-- at least $100 billion per year to start with '-- or possibly lose their chance to foist a global carbon regime on the planet by 2015.

Meanwhile, the communist dictatorship ruling over mainland China is also ramping up its demands '-- seeking at least $100 billion in climate booty per year by 2020, to be extracted from Western taxpayers. As Reuters reported in an article headlined ''Rich nations must pay up if U.N. climate talks to succeed: China,'' the ruthless regime is making threats that are similar to those made by the LDC coalition. According to the communist autocracy's ''chief climate negotiator,'' Su Wei, if Western governments fail to hand over trillions of dollars to oppressive governments to deal with ''climate change,'' the UN scheme will not advance.

''We want to see a very clear roadmap '... we want to see the actual and real provision of financial sources,'' Su whined, demanding more money while calling on Western governments to continue gutting the economy by imposing ever-more draconian limits on economic activity under the guise of reducing CO2 emissions. A mere $100 billion per year ''would be a very important starting point and key to the successful conclusion of the negotiation of a (post-)2020 agreement,'' the Chinese Communist ''climate'' chief claimed.

In essence, the extortion threats mean governments in developed countries hoping to expand their powers and impose radical international treaties on their populations must pay up quickly. U.S. State Department documents released by WikiLeaks revealed that the U.S. government and the European Union super-state have long been bribing and bullying third-world regimes with taxpayer funds. It appears to have worked, but now the poorer governments are demanding even more.

The embarrassing schemes exposed by WikiLeaks were aimed at prodding reluctant governments into foisting ''climate'' shenanigans on their populations while securing support for a far-reaching global treaty covering every human on the planet. It remains to be seen whether the phony ''battle'' in Warsaw will result in Western powers capitulating to third-world despots, but resistance to the machinations is growing fast.

Of course, if the third-world regimes made good on their threats and walked out of the UN summit, perhaps permanently killing the prospect of a global ''climate'' treaty, it would represent a huge blessing to the world. An estimated $360 billion was squandered on global-warming schemes last year alone '-- funds that could have been used for productive purposes in the market, for example, or to deal with real problems like hunger and healthcare. It remains unclear where all of the funds were wasted.

However, the prospect of dictators, power-hungry Western powers, and the UN all giving up on their ''climate'' schemes now '-- even despite the implosion of the alleged ''science'' '-- remains very slim. Instead, as typically happens at UN conferences, the climate dignitaries will work into the night pretending to develop some sort of hard-won ''compromise'' that benefits all of the governments involved, at the expense of taxpayers and humanity at large. Then they will get back in their CO2-spewing limos and jets to go home.

With third-world despots emitting increasingly ridiculous demands for hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars for ''climate change,'' Western governments can pretend like they worked hard to protect their taxpayers '-- all while fleecing them. The climate, meanwhile, will continue to change, just as it always has. But rulers of developed nations can then seize more power over their populations while funding tyranny in poorer countries by handing huge sums to the ruling tyrants and their cronies. It works out well for everyone involved, except humanity as a whole and those paying the bills, of course.

The Obama administration has been more than happy to play along even as credible polls consistently show that a sizeable majority of Americans do not even believe the UN's discredited man-made global warming theories. ''Our task now is to fashion a new agreement that will be ambitious, effective and durable,'' claimed U.S. ''special envoy for climate change'' Todd Stern in a recent speech as the EPA was emitting lawless ''climate'' decrees set to further ravage America's economy. ''And the only way to do that is to make it broadly inclusive, sensitive to the needs and constraints of parties with a wide range of national circumstances and capabilities, and designed to promote increasingly robust action.''

Human emissions of the essential, life-giving gas CO2, which is exhaled by people and required for plants, continue to be blamed by the UN for alleged ''global warming'' '-- despite the fact that temperatures have not risen in almost two decades, debunking 73 out of 73 UN ''climate'' models. Man's CO2 output, meanwhile, represents a mere fraction of one percent of the greenhouse gases naturally in the atmosphere. However, with so much riding on the UN's climate theories '-- including the global body's shattered credibility '-- alarmists are still maniacally hyping the discredited notions.

The end goal, according to the UN, is to foist a so-called ''carbon budget'' on humanity to ration CO2 emissions and to secure a ''complete transformation of the economic structure of the world,'' devastating the poor as well as the global economy. To grease the process along, however, advanced-nation governments and regimes ruling undeveloped nations are plotting together to transfer ever-greater sums of taxpayer funds from the citizens of richer nations to the oppressive governments impoverishing poorer nations.

Of course, letting the would-be extortionists walk out of the Warsaw summit and turn their backs on the whole scam for failure to deliver enough ''climate'' loot would be ideal. It will not happen, though, unless people and scientists speak out loudly and forcefully against the ongoing swindle. The climate emperor still has no clothes, but the UN and its member governments, operating in a sort of bubble, will continue refusing to acknowledge that fact unless humanity yells it from the rooftops.

The New American

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Thu, 21 Nov 2013 10:29

The top United Nations official today called on foreign ministers to prioritize the environment in domestic politics and contribute to climate financing as a way of moving towards a new global climate change agreement by 2015.

"This can do more than anything to unlock the huge investment necessary for climate change adaptation and mitigation," Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told a ministerial-level meeting on the margins of the UN-led climate change talks under way in the Polish capital, Warsaw.

"We must send the right policy signals," Mr. Ban said, adding that the development of high-impact opportunities would unlock clean energy investments, close the viability gap between green and fossil fuel-based projects and de-risk renewable energy and low-carbon investments.

He called for public finance, private finance, and support to the Green Climate Fund as three areas for common action.

"Smart public financing can encourage local and international private investments," the UN chief said, urging investors and companies to join forces with the public sector.

Mr. Ban today was scheduled to meet with chief executives and senior representatives attending the inaugural Caring for Climate Business Forum being held in Warsaw alongside the UN Climate Change Conference.

The Forum was launched by UN Global Compact, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) secretariat, and UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

"The bulk of institutional investors' assets are in high0carbon investments," noted Mr. Ban.

"These investors have the power - and I believe the responsibility - to do their part in transforming the global economy and settling us on a safer path."

Mr. Ban also called for support to the recently established Green Climate Fund, which functions under the guidance of the Conference of the Parties (COP), and supports projects, programmes, policies and other activities in developing countries.

In addition, the Fund also aims to strengthen national ownership and enable countries to develop the capability and institutions needed to use climate finance effectively.

The UN chief described the current state of the new entity as "an empty shell" and called for it to be brought into full operation "as soon as possible" so support could be provided to developing countries' adaptation and mitigation efforts.

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Mon, 18 Nov 2013 16:46

Stupidest idea of wealth redistribution ever

Via Bloomberg:

The typhoon that killed thousands of people in the Philippines has energized debate about whether rich nations should compensate poor ones for climate-related losses, a proposal the U.S. and European Union are resisting.

Some 130 countries, including islands concerned they'll disappear with rising sea levels, are pushing for reparations as part of a ''loss and damage'' mechanism at United Nations climate talks in Warsaw this week. They blame countries that industrialized 200 years ago for damaging the atmosphere.

''Many countries around the world are already incurring losses and damages from the impacts of climate change,'' Yeb Sano, the Philippine lead negotiator whose hometown was flattened by the storm, said in an interview in Warsaw. ''We'd like to make clear the difference between humanitarian aid and climate change compensation in the context of historical responsibility.''

Keep reading'...

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Tue, 19 Nov 2013 10:53

Door: Maarten Keulemans '' 19/11/13, 05:47

(C) afp.

Tot hun verbazing hebben Nederlandse en Ierse wetenschappers gezien hoe in een computermodel dat het klimaat nabootst, spontaan een mini-ijstijd uitbrak. Een aanwijzing dat 'er onverwachte elementen in het klimaatsysteem zitten', zegt hoofdonderzoeker Sybren Drijfhout van het KNMI en het Britse National Oceanography Center.

Op weg naar een warmer klimaat kan het systeem zijsprongen maken die we niet hadden verwacht.

Sybren DrijfhoutDe spontane ijstijd leek enigszins op de Kleine IJstijd die tussen ongeveer 1300 en 1850 op het noordelijk halfrond zorgde voor barre winters en koele zomers. Ook in de computerversie, zomaar uit het niets ontstaan in het gedetailleerde Europese klimaatmodel EC-Earth, werd het gemiddeld 1 tot 2 graden kouder. Dat was in ons land destijds genoeg voor de winterlandschappen waarmee Hollandse meesters als Jacob van Ruysdael en Hendrick Avercamp wereldberoemd werden.

Uiterst zeldzaam fenomeenEen uiterst zeldzaam fenomeen, dat wel. Drijfhout en collega's speelden met hun modellen zeven maal eeuwen van klimaatgeschiedenis na, schrijven ze in vakblad PNAS, en daarbij zagen ze de koudeperiode slechts (C)(C)n keer ontstaan. Bovendien lijkt de kans op de gebeurtenis in een opwarmende wereld zoals de onze eerder kleiner dan groter. 'Maar toch is dit ook in de toekomst niet uitgesloten', zegt Drijfhout. 'Op weg naar zo'n warmer klimaat kan het systeem zijsprongen maken die we niet hadden verwacht.'

In het computermodel ontstond de koudedip doordat in het hoge noorden hogedrukgebieden en zee-ijs 'met een soort klik aan elkaar gekoppeld raakten', zoals Drijfhout zegt. Boven zee-ijs ontstaan eerder hogedrukgebieden, omdat afgekoelde lucht boven het ijs naar beneden zakt. En noordelijke hogedrukgebieden kunnen op hun beurt de vorming van zee-ijs uitlokken, omdat ze koude windstromingen op gang brengen. In het model ontstond die 'klik' tussen zee-ijs en luchtstromingen in een paar jaar tijd, nadat hogedrukgebieden zestig jaar lang steeds vaker de overheersende westelijke luchtstroming blokkeerden.

Bij de Kleine IJstijd speelden waarschijnlijk ook variaties in de zonnestraling en vulkaanuitbarstingen mee

Zonnestraling en vulkaanuitbarstingenUiteindelijk zorgde de aangroei van het zee-ijs voor een verstoring van de warme golfstroom, die normaal gesproken warm water vanaf de evenaar naar het noorden brengt. De kou eindigde na ongeveer een eeuw abrupt, toen meer zuidelijke winden weer vat kregen op het systeem.

Drijfhout benadrukt dat daarmee niet is gezegd dat het in de echte Kleine IJstijd ook zo is gegaan. Destijds speelden waarschijnlijk ook variaties in de zonnestraling en vulkaanuitbarstingen. 'Wij laten alleen maar zien dat het spontaan kan gebeuren. Maar ik denk wel dat de kans op dit soort gebeurtenissen groter wordt naar mate je meer triggers in het systeem stopt. Er zit een versterker in het systeem die kleine veranderingen enorm kan uitvergroten.'

Plotse afkoelingenAan de Universiteit Wageningen wijst hoogleraar klimaatdynamica Wilco Hazeleger erop dat plotse afkoelingen al eerder in andere klimaatmodellen zijn gezien. 'Het kan blijkbaar uit zichzelf opeens kouder worden.'

Niet, zo benadrukt ook Hazeleger, dat zo'n mini-ijstijd morgen uitbreekt. 'Maar aan de andere kant: de blokkerende hogedrukgebieden die Sybren beschrijft, komen ook vandaag de dag gewoon voor. Het wordt dan wel moeilijker, maar onmogelijk is het niet.'

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Tue, 19 Nov 2013 10:52

Sybren Drijfhouta,b,1,Emily Gleesonc,Henk A. Dijkstrad, andValerie LivinaeaDepartment of Climate Research, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, 3730AE, De Bilt, The Netherlands;bSchool of Ocean and Earth Sciences, National Oceanography Centre, Southampton SO14 3TB, United Kingdom;cResearch, Environment and Applications Division, Met ‰ireann, Dublin 9, Ireland;dInstitute for Marine and Atmospheric Research Utrecht, Utrecht University, 3584 CC Utrecht, The Netherlands; andeNational Physical Laboratory, Teddington TW11 0LW, United KingdomEdited by Mark H. Thiemens, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, CA, and approved October 18, 2013 (received for review March 15, 2013)

SignificanceThere is a long-standing debate about whether climate models are able to simulate large, abrupt events that characterized past climates. Here, we document a large, spontaneously occurring cold event in a preindustrial control run of a new climate model. The event is comparable to the Little Ice Age both in amplitude and duration; it is abrupt in its onset and termination, and it is characterized by a long period in which the atmospheric circulation over the North Atlantic is locked into a state with enhanced blocking. To simulate this type of abrupt climate change, climate models should possess sufficient resolution to correctly represent atmospheric blocking and a sufficiently sensitive sea-ice model.

AbstractAbrupt climate change is abundant in geological records, but climate models rarely have been able to simulate such events in response to realistic forcing. Here we report on a spontaneous abrupt cooling event, lasting for more than a century, with a temperature anomaly similar to that of the Little Ice Age. The event was simulated in the preindustrial control run of a high-resolution climate model, without imposing external perturbations. Initial cooling started with a period of enhanced atmospheric blocking over the eastern subpolar gyre. In response, a southward progression of the sea-ice margin occurred, and the sea-level pressure anomaly was locked to the sea-ice margin through thermal forcing. The cold-core high steered more cold air to the area, reinforcing the sea-ice concentration anomaly east of Greenland. The sea-ice surplus was carried southward by ocean currents around the tip of Greenland. South of 70°N, sea ice already started melting and the associated freshwater anomaly was carried to the Labrador Sea, shutting off deep convection. There, surface waters were exposed longer to atmospheric cooling and sea surface temperature dropped, causing an even larger thermally forced high above the Labrador Sea. In consequence, east of Greenland, anomalous winds changed from north to south, terminating the event with similar abruptness to its onset. Our results imply that only climate models that possess sufficient resolution to correctly represent atmospheric blocking, in combination with a sensitive sea-ice model, are able to simulate this kind of abrupt climate change.

FootnotesAuthor contributions: S.D. and E.G. performed research; S.D., E.G., H.A.D., and V.L. analyzed data; and S.D., E.G., H.A.D., and V.L. wrote the paper.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.

This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1304912110/-/DCSupplemental.

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Thu, 21 Nov 2013 09:59

The climate crisis of the 21st century has been caused largely by just 90 companies, which between them produced nearly two-thirds of the greenhouse gas emissions generated since the dawning of the industrial age, new research suggests.

The companies range from investor-owned firms '' household names such as Chevron, Exxon and BP '' to state-owned and government-run firms.

The analysis, which was welcomed by the former vice-president Al Gore as a "crucial step forward" found that the vast majority of the firms were in the business of producing oil, gas or coal, found the analysis, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Climatic Change.

"There are thousands of oil, gas and coal producers in the world," climate researcher and author Richard Heede at the Climate Accountability Institute in Colorado said. "But the decision makers, the CEOs, or the ministers of coal and oil if you narrow it down to just one person, they could all fit on a Greyhound bus or two."

Half of the estimated emissions were produced just in the past 25 years '' well past the date when governments and corporations became aware that rising greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of coal and oil were causing dangerous climate change.

Many of the same companies are also sitting on substantial reserves of fossil fuel which '' if they are burned '' puts the world at even greater risk of dangerous climate change.

Climate change experts said the data set was the most ambitious effort so far to hold individual carbon producers, rather than governments, to account.

The United Nations climate change panel, the IPCC, warned in September that at current rates the world stood within 30 years of exhausting its "carbon budget" '' the amount of carbon dioxide it could emit without going into the danger zone above 2C warming. The former US vice-president and environmental champion, Al Gore, said the new carbon accounting could re-set the debate about allocating blame for the climate crisis.

Leaders meeting in Warsaw for the UN climate talks this week clashed repeatedly over which countries bore the burden for solving the climate crisis '' historic emitters such as America or Europe or the rising economies of India and China.

Gore in his comments said the analysis underlined that it should not fall to governments alone to act on climate change.

"This study is a crucial step forward in our understanding of the evolution of the climate crisis. The public and private sectors alike must do what is necessary to stop global warming," Gore told the Guardian. "Those who are historically responsible for polluting our atmosphere have a clear obligation to be part of the solution."

Between them, the 90 companies on the list of top emitters produced 63% of the cumulative global emissions of industrial carbon dioxide and methane between 1751 to 2010, amounting to about 914 gigatonne CO2 emissions, according to the research. All but seven of the 90 were energy companies producing oil, gas and coal. The remaining seven were cement manufacturers.

The list of 90 companies included 50 investor-owned firms '' mainly oil companies with widely recognised names such as Chevron, Exxon, BP , and Royal Dutch Shell and coal producers such as British Coal Corp, Peabody Energy and BHP Billiton.

Some 31 of the companies that made the list were state-owned companies such as Saudi Arabia's Saudi Aramco, Russia's Gazprom and Norway's Statoil.

Nine were government run industries, producing mainly coal in countries such as China, the former Soviet Union, North Korea and Poland, the host of this week's talks.

Experts familiar with Heede's research and the politics of climate change said they hoped the analysis could help break the deadlock in international climate talks.

"It seemed like maybe this could break the logjam," said Naomi Oreskes, professor of the history of science at Harvard. "There are all kinds of countries that have produced a tremendous amount of historical emissions that we do not normally talk about. We do not normally talk about Mexico or Poland or Venezuela. So then it's not just rich v poor, it is also producers v consumers, and resource rich v resource poor."

Michael Mann, the climate scientist, said he hoped the list would bring greater scrutiny to oil and coal companies' deployment of their remaining reserves. "What I think could be a game changer here is the potential for clearly fingerprinting the sources of those future emissions," he said. "It increases the accountability for fossil fuel burning. You can't burn fossil fuels without the rest of the world knowing about it."

Others were less optimistic that a more comprehensive accounting of the sources of greenhouse gas emissions would make it easier to achieve the emissions reductions needed to avoid catastrophic climate change.

John Ashton, who served as UK's chief climate change negotiator for six years, suggested that the findings reaffirmed the central role of fossil fuel producing entities in the economy.

"The challenge we face is to move in the space of not much more than a generation from a carbon-intensive energy system to a carbonneutral energy system. If we don't do that we stand no chance of keeping climate change within the 2C threshold," Ashton said.

"By highlighting the way in which a relatively small number of large companies are at the heart of the current carbon-intensive growth model, this report highlights that fundamental challenge."

Meanwhile, Oreskes, who has written extensively about corporate-funded climate denial, noted that several of the top companies on the list had funded the climate denial movement.

"For me one of the most interesting things to think about was the overlap of large scale producers and the funding of disinformation campaigns, and how that has delayed action," she said.

The data represents eight years of exhaustive research into carbon emissions over time, as well as the ownership history of the major emitters.

The companies' operations spanned the globe, with company headquarters in 43 different countries. "These entities extract resources from every oil, natural gas and coal province in the world, and process the fuels into marketable products that are sold to consumers on every nation on Earth," Heede writes in the paper.

The largest of the investor-owned companies were responsible for an outsized share of emissions. Nearly 30% of emissions were produced just by the top 20 companies, the research found.

By Heede's calculation, government-run oil and coal companies in the former Soviet Union produced more greenhouse gas emissions than any other entity '' just under 8.9% of the total produced over time. China came a close second with its government-run entities accounting for 8.6% of total global emissions.

ChevronTexaco was the leading emitter among investor-owned companies, causing 3.5% of greenhouse gas emissions to date, with Exxon not far behind at 3.2%. In third place, BP caused 2.5% of global emissions to date.

The historic emissions record was constructed using public records and data from the US department of energy's Carbon Dioxide Information and Analysis Centre, and took account of emissions all along the supply chain.

The centre put global industrial emissions since 1751 at 1,450 gigatonnes.

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Wed, 20 Nov 2013 08:30

Chris Busby

19th November 2013

The Fukushima catastrophe has been dismissed as a potential cause of health effects even in Japan, let alone as far away as California.

A new study of the effects of tiny quantities of radioactive fallout from Fukushima on the health of babies born in California shows a significant excess of hypothyroidism caused by the radioactive contamination travelling 5,000 miles across the Pacific. The article will be published next week in the peer-reviewed journal Open Journal of Pediatrics.

Congenital hypothyroidism is a rare but serious condition normally affecting about one child in 2,000, and one that demands clinical intervention - the growth of children suffering from the condition is affected if they are left untreated. All babies born in California are monitored at birth for Thyroid Stimulating Hormone (TSH) levels in blood, since high levels indicate hypothyroidism.

Joe Mangano and Janette Sherman of the Radiation and Public Health Project in New York, and Christopher Busby, guest researcher at Jacobs University, Bremen, examined congenital hypothyroidism (CH) rates in newborns using data obtained from the State of California over the period of the Fukushima explosions.

Their results are published in their paper Changes in confirmed plus borderline cases of congenital hypothyroidism in California as a function of environmental fallout from the Fukushima nuclear meltdown. The researchers compared data for babies exposed to radioactive Iodine-131 and born between March 17th and Dec 31st 2011 with unexposed babies born in 2011 before the exposures plus those born in 2012.

Confirmed cases of hypothyroidism, defined as those with TSH level greater than 29 units increased by 21% in the group of babies that were exposed to excess radioactive Iodine in the womb [*]. The same group of children had a 27% increase in 'borderline cases' [**].

Contrary to many reports, the explosion of the reactors and spent fuel pools at Fukushima produced levels of radioactive contamination which were comparable with the Chernobyl releases in 1986. Using estimates made by the Norwegian Air Laboratory it is possible to estimate that more than 250PBq (200 x 1015) Bq of Iodine-131 (half life 8 days) were released at Fukushima.

This is also predicted by comparing the Caesium-137 estimates with I-131 releases from Chernobyl, quantities which caused the thyroid cancer epidemic in Byelarus, the Ukraine and parts of the Russian Republic.

More on this later. At Fukushima, the winds generally blew the radioactive iodine and other volatile radionuclides out to sea, to the Pacific Ocean. The journey 5,000 miles to the West Coast of the USA leaves a lot of time for dispersal and dilution. Nevertheless, small amounts of I-131 were measured in milk causing widespread concern.

The authorities downplayed any risk on the basis that the "doses" were very low; far lower than the natural background radiation. The University of Berkeley measured I-131 in rainwater from 18th to 28th March 2011 after which levels fell. If we assume that mothers drank 1 litre of rainwater a day for this period (of course they didn't) the current radiation risk model of the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) calculates an absorbed dose to the adult thyroid of 23 microSieverts, less than 1/100th the annual background "dose". The foetus is more sensitive (by a factor of about 10 according to ICRP) but is exposed to less as it is perhaps 100 times smaller.

So this finding is one more instance of the fact that the current radiation risk model, employed by the governments of every nation, is massively insecure for predicting harm from internal radionuclide exposures or explaining the clear observations.

The Fukushima catastrophe has been dismissed as a potential cause of health effects even in Japan, let alone as far away as California. And on what basis? Because the "dose" is too low.

This is the mantra chanted by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the World Health Organization (WHO, largely the same outfit), and the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR). And let's not forget all the nuclear scientists who swooped down on Fukushima with their International Conferences and placatory soothing presentations.

This chant was heard after Chernobyl, after the nuclear site child leukemias; in the nuclear atmospheric test veterans cases; and in all the other clear situations which in any unbiased scientific arena would long ago have blown away the belief that low level internal exposures are safe.

But this one-size-fits-all concept of "dose" is the nuclear industry's sinking ship. It provides essential cover for the use of uranium weapons, whether fission bombs or depleted uranium munitions; for the development of nuclear power stations like Hinkley Point; the burying of radioactive waste in landfills in middle England; releases of plutonium to the Irish Sea from Sellafield (where it drifts ashore and causes increases in cancer on the coasts of Wales and Ireland); and most recently, for the British Governments denial of excess cancers among nuclear test veterans.

This new study is not the first to draw attention to the sensitivity of the unborn baby to internal fission products. In 2009 I used data supplied to me when I was a member of the UK government Committee Examining Radiation Risks from Internal Emitters (CERRIE) to carry out a meta-analysis of infant leukemia rates in five countries in Europe: England and Wales, Germany, Greece, and Byelarus.

There had been an unexpected and statistically significant increase in infant leukemia (age 0-1) in those children who were in the womb during the (whole body monitored) increased levels of Caesium-137 from Chernobyl. The beauty of this study (like the TSH study) is that, unlike the Sellafield child leukemias, there is really no possible alternative explanation.

It was the low "dose" of Caesium-137 that caused the leukemias. And the dose response trend was not a straight line: The effect at the very low "dose" was greater than at the very high "dose". Presumably because at the high doses the babies perished in the womb and could not, therefore, develop leukemia. I published the results and drew attention to the failure of the ICRP model in the International Journal of Environment and Public Health in 2009.

I had published a paper on this infant leukemia proof of the failure of the risk model in Energy and Environment in 2000, and also presented it in the same year at the World Health Organisation conference in Kiev. It was there that I first really came up against the inversion of science deployed by the chiefs of the IAEA and UNSCEAR. The conference was videofilmed by Wladimir Tchertkoff and you can see his excellent documentary, which made it to Swiss TV, Atomic Lies, re-released in 2004 as Nuclear Controversies (link to youtube, 51 minutes).

For what is done by these people is to dismiss any evidence of increased rates of cancer or any other disease by shouting at it: "the doses were too low". In this way, reality is airbrushed away. What is this quantity "dose"? It is a simple physics-based quantity which represents the absorption of energy from radiation. One Sievert of gamma radiation is one Joule per kilogram of living tissue.

This might work for external radiation. But it doesn't work for internal exposures to radioactive elements which can produce huge effects on cellular DNA at low average "doses". It is like comparing warming yourself in front of the fire with eating a hot coal. Or comparing a punch to stabbing. Same dose, same energy. Very different effects.

This "dose" scam has been used to dismiss real effects since it was invented in 1952 to deal with the exposures from nuclear weapons development and testing. For those who want to dig deeper into the science there is a recent book chapter I wrote in the book New Research Directions in DNS Repair.

The most scary instances of the sensitivity of the foetus to radiation are the sex ratio studies of Hagen Scherb, a German biostatician and member of the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR). With his colleague Christina Voigt he has published a series of papers showing a sudden change in the sex ratio of newborns after various radiation exposure incidents.

Sex ratio, the number of boys born to 1,000 girls is a well accepted indicator of genetic damage and perturbations in the normal ratio of 1,050 (boys to 100 girls) are due to the deaths before birth of radiation damaged individuals of one sex or the other depending on whether the father (sperm) or mother (egg) was most exposed.

We found such an effect (more girls) in our study of Fallujah, Iraq, where there was exposure to Uranium weapons. But Scherb and Voigt have looked at the major catastrophes, Chernobyl, the weapons tests fallout, near nuclear sites in data from many countries of the world. Huge datasets.

They estimate that millions have babies have been killed by these subtle internal radiation exposures. The nuclear military project is responsible for an awful lot of deaths. In years to come I believe this will eventually be seen as the greatest public health scandal in human history.

Of course, the exposure to radio-Iodine is associated with thyroid cancer in children. There was a big rise of thyroid cancer in Byelarus, the Ukraine and the Russian Republic after Chernobyl. The situation at Fukushima seems set to echo this, despite the reassurances from the authorities that there will be no effects.

Our paper reports 44 confirmed thyroid cancer cases in 0-18 year olds in Fukushima prefecture in the last six months (a figure that has since risen to 53). In the hypothyroidism paper we discuss the 44 cases relative to the population and calculate that this represents an 80-fold excess based on national data prior to the Fukushima Iodine releases.

This presents a severe challenge to Dr Wolfgang Weiss of the UN and WHO, who stated last year that no thyroid cancers could result from the Fukushima disaster as the "doses were too low". How does he explain the 80-fold increase in this normally rare condition?

Or rather, when will he admit that the entire scientific model that underpins his views is fraudulent? And that nuclear radiation is - roughly speaking - 1,000 times more dangerous to human health than he is letting on?

Chris Busby is the Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk. For details and current CV see www.chrisbusbyexposed.org. For accounts of his work see www.greeenaudit.org, www.llrc.org and www.nuclearjustice.org

For statisticians:* RR 1.21, 95% CI 1.04-1.42; p = .013** RR 1.27, 95% CI 1.2-1.35; p = .00000001.

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Thu, 21 Nov 2013 08:42

USA overv¥ket 33 millioner norske mobilsamtaler - Dagbladet PlussÄ

I l¸pet av 30 dager, if¸lge nye Snowden-dokumenter som Dagbladet er i besittelse av.

Dette er en forh¥ndsvisning av artikkelen. Hele historien er tilgjengelig for deg med Dagbladet Pluss.

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Du er ikke logget inn. Leseliste-funksjonen krever at du logger inn med din DBiD-profil. Har du ikke en profil kan du komme i gang her.

Ä Logg innUleste saker ()AlleLeselisten er tom. Legg til artikler i leselisten for ¥ fylle denne listen.

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Thu, 21 Nov 2013 08:30

A Norwegian armoured vehicle guards the Shuaiba oil refinery on March 28, 2004A Norwegian armoured vehicle guards the Shuaiba oil refinery on March 28, 2004

AFP - The Norwegian military said Tuesday it plans to put its troops on a vegetarian diet once a week in a bid to fight a new kind of enemy -- climate change.

The army said its new meatless Mondays are meant to cut its consumption of ecologically unfriendly foods whose production contributes heavily to global warming.

"It's a step to protect our climate. The idea is to serve food that's respectful of the environment," spokesman Eystein Kvarving told AFP.

The diet has already been introduced at one of Norway's main bases and will soon be rolled out to all units, including those serving overseas, said the army, estimating it would cut its meat consumption by 150 tonnes per year.

"It's not about saving money," said Kvarving. "It's about being more concerned for our climate, more ecologically friendly and also healthier."

A Norwegian environmental group that campaigns for meatless Mondays nationwide, The Future in Our Hands, welcomed the army announcement.

"The defence ministry deserves a lot of praise because it's taking climate and environmental issues seriously," said the group's director, Arild Hermstad.

According to the organisation, the average Norwegian eats more than 1,200 animals over the course of their life, including 1,147 chickens, 22 sheep, six cattle and 2.6 deer.

Livestock farming accounts for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation.

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Wed, 20 Nov 2013 08:32

by Marissa Mayer, Yahoo CEO

We've worked hard over the years to earn our users' trust and we fight hard to preserve it.

As you know, there have been a number of reports over the last six months about the U.S. government secretly accessing user data without the knowledge of tech companies, including Yahoo. I want to reiterate what we have said in the past: Yahoo has never given access to our data centers to the NSA or to any other government agency. Ever.

There is nothing more important to us than protecting our users' privacy. To that end, we recently announced that we will make Yahoo Mail even more secure by introducing https (SSL - Secure Sockets Layer) encryption with a 2048-bit key across our network by January 8, 2014.

Today we are announcing that we will extend that effort across all Yahoo products. More specifically this means we will:

Encrypt all information that moves between our data centers by the end of Q1 2014;Offer users an option to encrypt all data flow to/from Yahoo by the end of Q1 2014;Work closely with our international Mail partners to ensure that Yahoo co-branded Mail accounts are https-enabled.As we have said before, we will continue to evaluate how we can protect our users' privacy and their data. We appreciate, and certainly do not take for granted, the trust our users place in us.

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Mon, 18 Nov 2013 03:40

Nov.17

I have a personal announcement.I am joining up with the new venture in news that Pierre Omidyar, Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill are creating, along with Liliana Segura, Dan Froomkin, Eric Bates and others who are coming on board to give shape to this thing, which we are calling NewCo until we are ready to release the name.

Because it doesn't exist yet, NewCo could take many forms. Only a handful of those possible paths will lead to a strong and sustainable company that meets a public need. Figuring that out is a hard problem, to which I am deeply attracted. So I signed up to be part of the launch team. This post explains why I made that decision and what I hope to contribute.

One voice at the table

About a month ago, I told readers of PressThink about Pierre Omidyar's plans for a new venture in news, based on my interview with him and an earlier consultation when he was gathering advice. These, I thought, were the key points:

Omidyar believes that if independent, ferocious, investigative journalism isn't brought to the attention of general audiences it can never have the effect that actually creates a check on power. Therefore the new entity '-- they have a name but they're not releasing it, so I will just call it NewCo '-- will have to serve the interest of all kinds of news consumers. It cannot be a niche product. It will have to cover sports, business, entertainment, technology: everything that users demand.

At the core of Newco will be a different plan for how to build a large news organization. It resembles what I called in an earlier post ''the personal franchise model'' in news. You start with individual journalists who have their own reputations, deep subject matter expertise, clear points of view, an independent and outsider spirit, a dedicated online following, and their own way of working. The idea is to attract these people to NewCo, or find young journalists capable of working in this way, and then support them well.

''Support'' means a powerful publishing platform that talented journalists can bend to their will. It means an up-to-date technology company resting inside the news company. It means editors to save writers from their errors, and maintain high standards. It means first class security and encryption for reporting on sensitive stories. A legal team for when trouble calls. Training and development for young journalists who are learning the NewCo style. Ownership that has pledged to invest it all in the journalism if and when revenues exceed expenses.

''Support'' also means: ''when you have a big story we bring a large audience to it.'' Perhaps the most challenging part of the plan is this: Not a niche product. Has to serve a more general market for news.

''And how are they going to do that?'...'' is the one question I got more than any other in talking to people after my first post on Omidyar's plan. Runner-up: what's going to make this different from other ways to get news online? Those are good questions. So good that when Dan Froomkin and Glenn Greenwald called to ask me if I wanted to help create NewCo, I had to listen.

I also had to ask myself: what could I contribute? I don't have credentials as an editor or a reporter and I have never started a business. Instead, I've been watching journalism evolve with the web since 2003. I've been trying to explain what makes it different in the digital era, paying close attention to problems of trust, shifts in authority and the pro-am or participatory forms that have slowly emerged since the rise of blogging around 2000. To put it another way, I have been all over this discussion: ''Is Glenn Greenwald the Future of News?'' I've also been advising media companies on adapting to the web and teaching young journalists '-- my graduate students at NYU '-- how to contribute to innovation in their craft.

Nobody has titles at NewCo yet. The agreement I have with Pierre Omidyar is that I will advise on building the company and participate in planning discussions as NewCo takes shape. One voice at the table, in other words. I will also explain its approach to journalism in written pieces that resemble my essays for PressThink. I am especially interested in the civic engagement and user participation puzzle, which is one part of '...And how are they going to do that?

Also important: building a learning culture within the organization. (NewCo has to be its own J-school or it cannot succeed.) The contract I signed '-- yes, I am getting paid '-- is part time for the remainder of 2013. By luck I am on leave from NYU for the spring 2014 term. After the new year I can devote much more time to this venture, which I intend to do.

NYU, where I have made my home since 1986, is a research university. The purpose of that institution is to produce new knowledge. For me and the things I write and care about, NewCo is the most exciting project in journalism today. To be involved from the beginning in the birth of a company based on these ideas is the best test of my learning that I could devise. And I'm sure it will produce new knowledge, which I will share.

Things are going to change around here.

A simpler way to put it: This is PressThink come to life. The second part of this post (which is for the most interested readers'...) explains what I mean by that. But first: my involvement in NewCo changes things between me and you, meaning: the people who read my writing and follow me on Twitter or Facebook.

Up to this point, I have observed upon '-- and criticized! '-- the press from a position outside and independent of it. The only exceptions to that are these (previously disclosed) positions: Advisory board, Digital First Media; consultant, Post Media Network of Canada; director, Gazette Company of Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Today's announcement is different. From here on, I am a player in NewCo. I'm not just giving advice to a company that pre-dated my involvement. I am involved in the effort to create something. I am being paid $ for my participation. Unlike an ''advisory'' position there is no real separation between me and the people who are building NewCo from scratch. Therefore I have to publicly abandon any position as an observer or independent analyst of Pierre Omidyar's new venture in news. Out of the press box and onto the field.

And so when I speak about it you are entitled to apply whatever discount rate you find appropriate. About the intentions of Pierre Omidyar, the journalism of Glenn Greenwald and the eventual product of NewCo I am no longer an independent analyst rendering judgment. Criticism will have to come from others. And I am sure it will.

I cannot say ''Can't wait to get started'' because I have already started. And I don't want to hear anything about ''saving journalism'' (a phrase I detest) because it doesn't need saving and anyway that is not the plan. The plan is to build something that can sustain itself and produce excellent work.

Part Two: PressThink come to life.

Here are some posts I've written, selected from hundreds, that will meet their test as NewCo comes to life.

The View from Nowhere: Questions and Answers. (2010)

The View from Nowhere is a bid for trust that advertises the viewlessness of the news producer. Frequently it places the journalist between polarized extremes, and calls that neither-nor position ''impartial.'' Second, it's a means of defense against a style of criticism that is fully anticipated: charges of bias originating in partisan politics and the two-party system. Third: it's an attempt to secure a kind of universal legitimacy that is implicitly denied to those who stake out positions or betray a point of view. American journalists have almost a lust for the View from Nowhere because they think it has more authority than any other possible stance

The View from Nowhere won't be a requirement for our journalists. Nor will a single ideology prevail. NewCo itself will have a view of the world: Accountability journalism, exposing abuses of power, revealing injustices will no doubt be part of it. Under that banner many ''views from somewhere'' can fit.

Politics: some / Politics: none. Two ways to excel in political journalism. (2013)

If you want to appear equally sympathetic to all potential sources, politics: none is the way to go. If you want to avoid pissing off the maximum number of users, politics: none gets it done. (This has commercial implications. They are obvious.) But: if you're persuaded that transparency is the better route to trust, politics: some is the better choice. And if you want to attract sources who themselves have a political commitment or have come to a conclusion about matters contested within the political community, being open about your politics can be an advantage. That is the lesson that Glenn Greenwald has been teaching the profession of journalism for the last week. Edward Snowden went to him because of his commitments. This has implications for reporters committed to the ''no commitments'' style.

Just as we wouldn't force a point of view on people or expect them to fall in line, NewCo is not going to insist that everyone follow Greenwald's lead. That's not the point of a View from Somewhere approach. Rather: we think the way to stand out in a crowded marketplace is to let individual journalists shine in a way that works for them.

The rise of the personal franchise site in news. (2013)

Features of the personal franchise site:

* Star journalist at the center with a large online following and cross-platform presence.* Editorial control rests largely or entirely with the founder and personality at the center.* Part of a larger media company with a negotiated balance of power between the two states.* Identifiable niche or niches; no attempt to be comprehensive.* Plenty of voice, attitude and personal expression allowed.* Mix of news, opinion, analysis without a lot of fuss about categorizing each.

Authority in journalism is shifting to the individual with a voice, subject matter expertise, and a following online. The structure and operating style of the company will attempt to solve for that. We don't know exactly how yet but that is part of the adventure.

The People Formerly Known as the Audience. (2006)

The people formerly known as the audience are those who were on the receiving end of a media system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and a few firms competing to speak very loudly while the rest of the population listened in isolation from one another'-- and who today are not in a situation like that at all.

We haven't talked about this much yet, but one of my goals as an adviser is to have built into the platform a more active role for the people formerly known as the audience. Something more than comment threads and share buttons.

From ''write us a post'' to ''fill out this form:'' Progress in pro-am journalism. (2011)

It took me a while to understand this myself, but I want to isolate an important fact at the outset.Professional journalism has been optimized for low participation. Up until a few years ago, the ''job'' of the user was simply to receive the news and maybe send a letter to the editor. There was a logic to this. Journalists built their practices on top of a one-way, one-to-many, broadcasting system. Most of us understand that by now. What we haven't quite appreciated is how the logic of the one way, one-to-many pipes sunk deeply, not only into professional practice, but into professional selves.

What if you optimized for three possibilities: high participation, light involvement and none'-- just consumption? That would be the lesson of the one percent rule of online life, which says that if 100 people gather at your site, 90 will just use the product, ten will occasionally interact and one will become a core contributor. I want to see if we can build systems for that.

When I explained this move to my 12 year-old son, he said: Are you having a mid-life crisis? Nooooo, I replied, but as you get older (I'm 57) you have to find new challenges. ''That's cool,'' he said, and went back to his waffles.

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Nov.10

It happened in 2004 with the Air National Guard story that ended Dan Rather's career. There too the network refused to concede that there were genuine problems with the story until it was forced to by others.''Whenever legitimate questions are raised about our reporting, we check them out. That is what we are doing in this case. When we know more, we will tell you.''

Tell me: What is so hard about that? It's 30 words CBS News never managed to say in its week from hell that will peak during '60 Minutes' tonight with an on-air apology for getting duped by a source who gave CBS viewers an eyewitness account of the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, even though he told the FBI and his employer that he wasn't on scene that night.

I will be watching. Let me tell you what I will be watching for. CBS will no doubt apologize for inadequate vetting of ''Morgan Jones,'' whose story should not have been trusted. It will say that it should have viewed his story more skeptically and done more reporting. It will say that it should have been clearer that its book division had given the same source a contract and paid an advance.

But will CBS apologize for its reckless denials from Oct. 31 to the day the story collapsed? It should, but probably it won't. I don't make a lot of predictions, but I will here: Tonight's apology by CBS will not deal in any serious way with its misguided response to the very legitimate questions that were raised about its Benghazi report. If I am wrong, that will be good news for journalism at CBS and I will happily report it in an update here. (I was not wrong. Update here.)

Meanwhile, here is what I see.

1. Start with the timeline Poynter put together. On October 31 Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post reports this:

But in a written account that Jones, whose real name was confirmed as Dylan Davies by several officials who worked with him in Benghazi, provided to his employer three days after the attack, he told a different story of his experiences that night.

Immediately, the CBS report is in deep trouble. And anyone with a clear mind can see that. Except the people at CBS. When your key source tells two different stories, something is seriously amiss. The next day, the network should have said: ''Whenever legitimate questions are raised about our reporting, we investigate.'' Instead, Kevin Tedesco, a spokesman for 60 Minutes, tells the Post: ''We stand firmly by the story we broadcast last Sunday.'' Why?

2. On November 1, Media Matters asks journalism observers with no known hostility to CBS or any political stance on the Benghazi events to comment. They state the obvious. ''I don't see any way that 60 Minutes would not need to offer an explanation,'' says Alex S. Jones, former media beat reporter for the New York Times, now director of the Shorenstein Center on The Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University. ''This definitely needs explaining.'' In a letter to CBS, Media Matters calls for a retraction of the report.

3. On November 2, the Daily Beast reports on its interview with Dylan Davies, in which he claims that a first-person incident report written in his voice is not his work. He's never seen that document, he says. He also says that he lied to his employer ''because he did not want his supervisor to know he had disobeyed his orders to stay at his villa.''

So now the key source in the CBS report has admitted to lying about the events in question, but we are supposed to believe that to CBS he told the truth and he told the truth in the book for which he was paid an undisclosed sum by a CBS subsidiary. Also we know from an earlier report on Fox News that a Fox reporter had stopped talking to the same source when he asked for money. (Also see this on Fox News and Benghazi.) All of these facts are clear warning signs, making ''We stand firmly by the story we broadcast last Sunday'' appear unwise in the extreme.

3. What CBS says in response to the Daily Beast report is'... nothing. As if there was nothing to address. This was false. Huffington Post reporter Michael Calderone was trying to get answers to some extremely pertinent questions:

Did ''60 Minutes'' know Davies had told his employer that he wasn't at the compound during the attack? And if ''60 Minutes'' was aware of Davies' previous statement, how did the program vet his new account, given that no other witnesses saw him there? Does ''60 Minutes'' have evidence to be confident that Davies' dramatic second account is accurate?

4. CBS stays silent about those issues for two more days. Then it decides to speak. But instead of answering Calderone's questions, or at least saying, ''When legitimate questions are raised about our reporting, we check them out'...'' which would have been the cautious, responsible and sane thing to do, it decides to raise the stakes by defending its work. Thus Lara Logan tells the New York Times: ''If you read the book, you would know he never had two stories. He only had one story.'' This is bizarrely at odds with what Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post uncovered. Logan then attributes the criticism of her reporting to the intensely politicized atmosphere surrounding the events in Benghazi. But again: this does not address what Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post uncovered. Logan and CBS do admit to one mistake: not acknowledging that a division of CBS, Simon and Schuster, was publishing the ''Morgan Jones'' book.

Their story is in deep trouble from the existence of two conflicting accounts from the same source, who is an admitted liar, but CBS people are acting like none of this happened, or that no one knows about it, or that only partisan critics care. Why?

5. The next day things get stranger and more denialist. The executive producer of 60 Minutes, Jeff Fager, who is also the chairman of CBS News '-- two roles that in this instance conflict, though no one at CBS notices '-- tells the Huffington Post that he is a.) proud of the network's reporting on the controversy and b.) confident that it will hold up.

''We spent more than a year reporting our story about the attack on Benghazi, which aired on Oct. 27, speaking with close to 100 sources in the process,'' Fager says, seemingly unaware that these facts make his situation worse. (You spent a year on the story and never learned that your key source either lied to you or lied to his employer?) Like Lara Logan's comments to the Times, Fager's words are completely unresponsive to the actual trouble the story is in. Why? (On that, see Calderone's report from Nov. 8.)

6. The next day, Nov. 7, the denialism falls apart, as the New York Times reports this:

Dylan Davies, a security officer hired to help protect the United States Special Mission in Benghazi, Libya, gave the F.B.I. an account of the night that terrorists attacked the mission on Sept. 11, 2012 that contradicts a version of events he provided in a recently published book and in an interview with the CBS News program ''60 Minutes.''

This forces CBS News to say on its website what it should have said on October 31. ''We are currently looking into this serious matter to determine if he misled us, and if so, we will make a correction.''

7. Finally forced by other news organizations to confront what they did not want to see, CBS starts caving. On November 8, Lara Logan appears on the CBS morning news show to apologize. (Video.) ''So here's what we know,'' writes Kevin Drum of Mother Jones.

Davies never told Logan about the incident report. He never told the co-author of his memoir about the incident report. When the content of the report was revealed, he invented an entirely implausible story about lying to his supervisor in the report because he respected him so highly and didn't want him to know that he'd disobeyed orders not to approach the compound. And yet, in a story that should have set off all sorts of alarms in the first place, this still didn't set off any alarms for Logan. She continued to defend Davies and her reporting until news emerged yesterday that the incident report matched what Davies had told the FBI in a debriefing shortly after the attack.

Exactly. On the same day CBS takes down the video of the Benghazi story, leaving only an error message where the clip had been. Helpful! And Simon and Schuster announces that it is withdrawing the book from stores.

8. Then yesterday the conflict of interest that Jeff Fager has as 1.) the executive in charge who would have approved the final cut of the Benghazi story and 2.) the head of the CBS news division, who is supposed to worry about the entire news organization's reputation more than any individual or show'... that conflict comes through in startling fashion via this story in the Washington Post. Give a listen:

CBS News's chairman expressed disappointment and contrition Friday for a mistaken ''60 Minutes'' report about the Benghazi, Libya, terrorist attacks, but he suggested the program and his network intended to move past the flawed story.

''Credibility is really the most important thing we have,'' Jeff Fager, the head of the network's news division and executive producer of the weekly newsmagazine, said in an interview. ''Did we let people down? Yes. Do people expect us to get it right? Of course they do. Do they expect us to be perfect? I don't think so. When you come forward and admit a mistake, people will understand.''

Notice: He did not say ''we're going to get to the bottom of this, and find out how it could happen.'' Rather, they're moving on. And as the Post's Paul Farhi wrote: ''There were no indications Friday that anyone at CBS would be fired for the Benghazi report.'' When you come forward and admit a mistake: is that what CBS did? Nope. It did exactly the opposite. It admitted there was a problem only after other news organizations brought the story forward. That statement alone should be enough to remove Jeff Fager from further decision-making about who is accountable for this debacle.

9. CBS was not just wrong, it was wrong about an explosive and highly contentious story in which extra care should have been taken because of the risk that a faulty report will be instantly politicized. This is exactly what happened, adding an extra layer of gravity to the situation. As the New York Times wrote on November 8:

The day after the CBS report, several Republican senators held a news conference, demanding that the administration allow congressional investigators to interview survivors of the Benghazi attack. In particular, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said that he would block all administration nominations until it met the Republicans' demands.

An update on this part of the story.10. Consider:

If Folkenflik is correct, this is worse because the ''partisan'' label is irrelevant to whether the questions that critics are raising deserve answers. Still, Media Matters is well aware of this discounting practice, and that is why they get the likes of Alex Jones and Marvin Kalb '-- figures they know journalists at CBS respect as ''non-partisan'' '-- to comment.

11. Threshold is the imprint of Simon and Schuster that signed ''Morgan Jones'' to a book contract. (''Threshold Editions is an imprint of Simon & Schuster that specializes in conservative non-fiction.'') Threshold is the imprint where Mary Matalin is an editor-at-large. Mary Matalin is a partisan political operative and Republican talking head'-- and now a book editor. If she was involved in the book deal, then she is mixed up with CBS's collapsed story. Will this be a part of the on-air apology?

12. Lara Logan is not a View from Nowhere journalist. She has opinions on the Benghazi issue. She has spoken about them. In my view, that is not a crime. But it is certainly relevant in evaluating her performance on this story. (See Digby's post for clips of Logan displaying her world view.) Will this be a part of tonight's show? Will CBS say something like, ''Viewers should have been told that correspondent Lara Logan has expressed strong opinions on the Benghazi story and what the United State should do in its aftermath'...''? My prediction: no.

13. CBS has been through this before. It happened in 2004 with the Air National Guard story that ended Dan Rather's career. There too the network refused to concede that there were problems with the story until it was forced to by others. There too it allowed its people to issue foolish statements of bravado as the story was crumbling. There too it blamed a partisan atmosphere for questions that any clear headed journalist would ask. (See my open letter to CBS News from 2005.) It did not learn enough from that debacle to avoid repeating the pattern. The signs are that it will not learn from this one.

Watch what CBS apologizes for Sunday night, and what it ignores in making a show of coming clean.

UPDATE, 8:45 PM, Nov. 10. My prediction proved accurate. In a very brief note at the end of '60 Minutes,' CBS said it has been misled by its source, apologized for putting him on the air and that was about it. No mention of the book contract, even. Lara Logan, who read the apology, went nowhere near an accounting for the reckless denials I wrote about. Nor did she explain how any of this could have happened. (See Dylan Byers in Politico for more on that.)

Here is how it went: ''We end our broadcast tonight with a correction,'' Logan said. She then summarized the Oct. 27 story and Davies role in it. ''After our report aired, questions arose about whether his account was true when an incident report surfaced. It told a different story about what he did the night of the attack.'' Logan said that Davies denied he had written that report, and insisted the story he told '60 Minutes' was accurate'-- and the same story he told the FBI. ''On Thursday night, when we discovered the account he gave the FBI was different than what he told us, we realized we had been misled and it was a mistake to include him in our report. For that we are very sorry. The most important thing to every person at '60 minutes' is the truth, and the truth is we made a mistake.'' The end. The video:

Final note for the night. Two things stand out for me about this correction, besides its basic inadequacy for being so minimal. One is the passive voice: ''questions arose,'' ''an incident report surfaced.'' This wording allows CBS to erase the role played by other news organizations in forcing it to face the problems with its reporting. Attention now turns to Jeff Fager, as the person at CBS (executive producer of '60 Minutes') who approved the final cut of a deeply flawed report starring a source CBS knew to have lied to his employer, and the executive at CBS, boss of the news division, who decided that it was time to move on from that mistake. Can that conflict of interest stand? So far it looks like it will.

UPDATE, NOV. 11. Last night the New York Times reported this:

The CBS News chairman, Jeff Fager, who is also the executive producer of ''60 Minutes,'' has not ordered an investigation, and on Sunday a spokesman indicated that the program was going to let its televised apology be its last word on the issue.

Well, there you have it. A thin and inadequate response '-- according to many critics and journalists and even people who used to work at CBS '-- will be the ''last word.'' Or will it? The pressures are still there. Witness:

''In the short term, this will confirm the worst suspicions of people who don't trust CBS News,'' said Paul Friedman, CBS's executive vice president for news until 2011. ''In the long term, a lot will depend on how tough and transparent CBS can be in finding out how this happened '-- especially when there were not the kind of tight deadline pressures that sometimes result in errors.''

'''60 Minutes' doesn't need to apologize anymore. It needs to fully explain what went wrong.'' Right. Michael Calderone of the Huffington Post goes through all the the unanswered questions in his excellent piece out this morning. ''Sunday's brief acknowledgment didn't resemble a news program seriously trying to get to the bottom of how it got duped.''

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo asks a question that shows how inexplicable the decision-making was:

When are you more likely to embellish or lie? In an immediate after action report when there's little reason to believe that your own role will ever be a matter of consequence or that the incident itself will become a topic of immense controversy? Or a year later when you write a tell-all book chronicling your exploits for a conservative book publisher and there's fame and lots of money at stake?

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Nov.3

''Each form can spur the other, keep it honest.''This is the sketch I am going to present in a few hours to the Public Knowledge Forum at the Sydney Opera House in Sydney, Australia. Because it is only a sketch, it leaves out a lot of detail and of course over-simplifies in the interest of avoiding another boring conference presentation.

The free press gods initially gave us the old testament. Then the news testament rose and took over for about 90 years. Recently the old testament has roared back to life and now we have something close to parity or d(C)tente, in which it is recognized that we need both. ''Each form can spur the other, keep it honest,'' as New York Times columnist Roger Cohen recently put it.

The old

In old testament journalism, ''the public'' is the people who gather around the news to talk about it. Political argument and the informational goods delivered by journalism '-- ''what's happening'' and how we should think about it '-- are so intertwined that it makes little sense to separate the two. A representative figure from the eighteen century would be the great pamphleteer Tom Paine, the trouble-making democrat who tried to rouse public opinion against arbitrary power.

Today Glenn Greenwald, recently of The Guardian, works the same way. He's a trouble-maker who tries to rouse public opinion against the misuse of power. In his journalism there is no natural separation between political argument and information about what's happening. Roger Cohen spoke of colleagues like former Times editor Bill Keller as ''old school journalists'' who observe the ''traditional'' claims to impartiality but in my view this incorrect. Greenwald's is the old school, and New York Times journalism is the more recent tradition.

The events by which Edward Snowden came to trust Greenwald over the New York Times tell us a great deal about the return of old testament influence amid the problems with new testament journalism. But we are getting ahead our story.

In old testament journalism financial support is difficult to obtain, opposition is intense, competition is fierce, the authorities are frequently upset with the trouble-makers in the press, popularity balloons and contracts with events and revelations. It is a wild ride and a precarious way of life.

Old testament journalism began in the U.S. with the campaign to unite the colonies against British rule. A close cousin to freedom of speech, the old testament was memorialized in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution'-- which of course protects other forms, as well. It had a diminished presence in the 20th century as new testament journalism rose to power and the old became a sub-current. But it never stopped flowing and today it draws new life from the internet.

The new

In new testament journalism, ''the public'' is the people who are outsiders to political events'-- and to power. They are busy, preoccupied with making a living, raising their kids and attending to other spectacles, and so they need to be kept informed by specialists in news.

Salvation, in new testament journalism, is achieved by separating facts and values, symbolized of course by the division between the news and opinion pages in American newspapers, and by the imperative of ''impartiality'' encoded into the BBC in Britain and the ABC in Australia. Who is the Tom Paine of the BBC? There is none and there never has been. It's against their religion.

New testament journalism is a 20th century thing. It is associated with the doctrine of ''objectivity'' but even more with the rise of professionalism in the press, which began with the first movements toward schools of journalism around 1908, followed by professional associations in the 1920s and 1930s.

In new testament journalism, the media's financial security is the norm, made possible by high barriers to entry and large capital costs required to deliver news. The new testament style is risk-adverse because the news delivery franchise is so valuable. The mission is not to move public opinion but to maintain trust or, to put it another way, to protect the brand. Audiences tend to be stable. The authorities learn to regularize their relationship with the journalists. Professionalism in journalism and broadcasting interlocks well with professionalism in politics and other knowledge fields. Thus, the rolodex of reliable experts.

New testament journalism also has its heroic forms, especially investigative journalism. Its representative figure is Bob Woodward of the Washington Post (or, in the mythic version, Robert Redford) and the symbolic high point is the resignation of Richard Nixon in August 1974, in part because of the Post's relentless reporting. Recalling those events, new testament sages talk of ''shoe leather reporting'' when they want to explain what virtue in journalism is.

Comparisons

Old testament journalism treats everyone as a participant in the great conversation of democracy. New testament recognizes that there are insiders and outsiders, players and spectators. It tries to mediate between them.

In new testament pressthink, people need the facts first. After they are informed by facts they can develop opinions and ''make up their own minds.'' In old testament logic, people first need to join the argument. Then they will feel the need to keep themselves informed.

New testament journalism is strong on reliability, predictability, civility, professionalism and the maintenance of reputation over time, which has obvious benefits for advertisers and for political coalitions expected to vote to maintain taxpayer subsidies to the BBC and the ABC. Old testament journalism is strong on participation and mobilization. It is more risk-tolerant, less likely to censor itself to avoid giving offense. It gives the individual journalist a voice and identity.

Old testament journalism has vices too. It is financially precarious and so it can often be bought off. It goes to extremes more often and may distort the picture by neglecting the inconvenient fact. In old testament journalism the constant danger is that the truthtelling will decay into propaganda and news will become comfort food for loyalists. In the new testament style, the danger is that truthtelling will decay into ''he said, she said'' and the dialect of insiders that I have called ''the savvy.''

D(C)tente

Today, well-known troubles with the business model have weakened new testament journalism by eroding monopolies and opening the field to lower-cost competitors. The internet solves the distribution-of-news problem for all players. As my colleague Clay Shirky has said, it changes publishing from an industry or a job to a button. This has allowed the old testament forms to gain new life. Other weaknesses in new testament traditions have been exposed, as well, such as the intimidation of the press after September 11 and the failure to detect a faulty case for war in Iraq in 2003.

A kind of new testament fundamentalism common in journalism from the 1970s to the 1990s held form through the early years of blogging in this century. It felt scorn for the more opinionated style and ridiculed its followers as ''echo chambers.'' It defined itself as ''the traditional'' and dismissed everyone else as marginal. This was arrogance born of monopoly.

But then new testament journalists started blogging themselves and more recently they have taken to social media with genuine enthusiasm. Today they are not as confident that they have all the answers. They know that their business model is broken. They can see the advantages in personal voice and persuasive power that accrues to the Glenn Greenwalds and other practitioners of the personal franchise model in news. They understand that the people formerly known as the audience want to participate more in the news and that the insiders are less trusted than ever.

All of these forces are pushing new testament journalism toward reconciliation and d(C)tente with the old, a symptom of which is this exchange between former New York Times editor Bill Keller and Greenwald. Keller says:

I find much to admire in America's history of crusading journalists, from the pamphleteers to the muckrakers to the New Journalism of the '60s to the best of today's activist bloggers. At their best, their fortitude and passion have stimulated genuine reforms (often, as in the Progressive Era, thanks to the journalists' ''political relationships with governments''). I hope the coverage you led of the National Security Agency's hyperactive surveillance will lead to some overdue accountability.

But the kind of journalism The Times and other mainstream news organizations practice '-- at their best '-- includes an awful lot to be proud of'...

True. Neither form has a monopoly on virtue. Great journalism, as Greenwald often says, can come from both traditions. I'm Jewish, and so more of an old testament guy. But I too think we need both, plus future forms that combine the two in novel fashion. The messiah hasn't come yet.

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Oct.16

Yesterday word leaked out that Glenn Greenwald would be leaving the Guardian to help create some new thing backed by Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay. I just got off the phone with Omidyar. So I can report more details about what the new thing is and how it came to be.Here's the story he told me:

In the spring of this year, Pierre Omidyar was one of the people approached by the Washington Post Company about buying the Post. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, wound up with the prize. But as a result of exploring that transaction, Omidyar started thinking seriously about investing in a news property. He began to ask himself what could be done with the same investment if he decided to build something from the ground up.

As he was contemplating the Post purchase, he began to get more alarmed about the pressures coming down on journalists with the various leak investigations in Washington.

Pierre Omidyar

Then the surveillance stories started appearing and the full scope of the threat to independent journalism became clear. His interest in launching a new kind of news organization '-- capable of sustaining investigative work and having an effect with it '-- intensified throughout the summer as news from the Snowden files continued to pour forth.

Attempts to meet with Greenwald to discuss these plans and to find out more about how he operates were unsuccessful until this month. When they finally were able to talk, Omidyar learned that Greenwald, his collaborator Laura Poitras, and The Nation magazine's Jeremy Scahill had been planning to form their own journalism venture. Their ideas and Omidyar's ideas tracked so well with each other that on October 5 they decided to ''join forces'' (his term.) This is the news that leaked yesterday. But there is more.

Omidyar believes that if independent, ferocious, investigative journalism isn't brought to the attention of general audiences it can never have the effect that actually creates a check on power. Therefore the new entity '-- they have a name but they're not releasing it, so I will just call it NewCo '-- will have to serve the interest of all kinds of news consumers. It cannot be a niche product. It will have to cover sports, business, entertainment, technology: everything that users demand.

At the core of Newco will be a different plan for how to build a large news organization. It resembles what I called in an earlier post ''the personal franchise model'' in news. You start with individual journalists who have their own reputations, deep subject matter expertise, clear points of view, an independent and outsider spirit, a dedicated online following, and their own way of working. The idea is to attract these people to NewCo, or find young journalists capable of working in this way, and then support them well.

By ''support'' Omidyar means many things. The first and most important is really good editors. (Omidyar used the phrase ''high standards of editing'' several times during our talk.) Also included: strong back end technology. Powerful publishing tools. Research assistance. And of course a strong legal team because the kind of journalism NewCo intends to practice is the kind that is capable of challenging some of the most powerful people in the world. Omidyar said NewCo will look for ''independent journalists with expertise, and a voice and a following.'' He suggested that putting together a team of such people means understanding how each of them does his or her best work, and supporting that, rather than forcing everyone into the same structure.

Part of the reason he thinks he can succeed with a general news product, where there is a lot of competition, is by finding the proper midpoint between voicey blogging and traditional journalism, in which the best of both are combined. The trick will then be to combine that with the things technology companies are good at.

''Companies in Silicon Valley invest a lot in understanding their users and what drives user engagement,'' he said, mentioning Netflix as a clear example. NewCo will have to serve users of news in the same personalized way, he said. He didn't want to reveal too much at this stage, but as the founder of eBay he clearly has ideas about how a next generation news company can be built from the ground up.

NewCo is a new venture'-- a company not a charity. It is not a project of Omidyar Network. It is separate from his philanthropy, he said. He said he will be putting a good deal of his time, as well as his capital, into it. I asked how large a commitment he was prepared to make in dollars. For starters: the $250 million it would have taken to buy the Washington Post.

I asked him if Greenwald was closer to a lead writer or an executive editor. He said the agreement to join forces was so new that they had not discussed roles and responsibilities. All they know is that they want to work together to create NewCo. Poitras will bring expertise in video and documentary. Scahill is a somewhat similar figure to Greenwald: an independent national security journalist with editorial obsessions in which he has become expert.

Why is Omidyar doing this? He said that his involvement in Civil Beat (a news site he started in Hawaii) stoked his appetite to try something larger in news. ''I have always been of the opinion that the right kind of journalism is a critical part of our democracy.'' He said he had watched closely over the last 15 years as the business model in journalism collapsed but he had not ''found a way to engage directly.'' But then when the idea of buying the Washington Post came up he started to think about it more seriously. ''It brings together some of my interests in civic engagement and building conversations and of course technology, but in a very creative way.''

A final factor. His ''rising concern about press freedoms in the United States and around the world.'' The U.S. has the First Amendment. When the freedom to practice hard-hitting investigative journalism comes under threat here, he said, that's not only a problem for our democracy but for the chances that democracy can work anywhere. NewCo will be designed to withstand that threat.

Now for the disclosure: As Omidyar was making the rounds to talk to people about his plans I was one of those he consulted with. That happened in September. So he knew I was familiar with his thinking and that's probably why he chose to talk to me. That's my initial report. I may have more to say as I sift through my notes and think about what he told me.

UPDATE, 1:00 PM Oct 16: An additional detail that I should have mentioned: the business model isn't fully worked out yet, but this much is known: all proceeds from NewCo will be reinvested in the journalism. Also: there is no print product planned. This is all-digital.

Some additional thoughts after processing the news: I think it's highly significant that Omidyar is coming to this project after his adventure in creating Civil Beat. (For more on that, see this account at Nieman Lab.) Civil Beat started off as a pay site with a high price tag ($20 per month) and then sought a partnership with Huffington Post Hawaii, so as to combine the benefits of the high traffic, advertising model with the smaller-reach, paid subscriber system. That shows the kind of tinkering necessary to get to sustainability.

But note: What Omidyar learned from trying to create a serious, civic good with online journalism in Hawaii did not discourage him from attempting something larger. On the contrary, his appetite only grew. Thus, the chances that he is heading into this with a naivet(C) about the economy of digital news production seem to me quite slim. Many of the illusions he started with '-- we could also call them hunches '-- have already been modified by experience. And out of that experience has come this much bigger gamble, with a quarter billion dollars behind it. That says a lot.

After Matter: Notes, Reactions & LinksFrom Omidyar's own statement at his foundation's site, My Next Adventure in Journalism.

I explored purchasing The Washington Post over the summer. [Through that] I developed an interest in supporting independent journalists in a way that leverages their work to the greatest extent possible, all in support of the public interest. And, I want to find ways to convert mainstream readers into engaged citizens. I think there's more that can be done in this space, and I'm eager to explore the possibilities.

Right now, I'm in the very early stages of creating a new mass media organization. I don't yet know how or when it will be rolled out, or what it will look like.

What I can tell you is that the endeavor will be independent of my other organizations, and that it will cover general interest news, with a core mission around supporting and empowering independent journalists across many sectors and beats. The team will build a media platform that elevates and supports these journalists and allows them to pursue the truth in their fields. This doesn't just mean investigative reporting, but all news.

This NPR interview with Omidyar puts more detail to that statement. Best if you listen to it.

Adrienne LaFrance worked at Civil Beat, Omidyar's news site in Hawaii. She writes about the experience:

Earlier this year, Omidyar opened the Civil Beat Law Center, an organization that helps people better access government information. The center is available to anyone, including individuals and reporters from other news organizations, in the hopes that it will lead to more open government.

That decision offers as much of a window as to his venture with Greenwald, Poitras, and Scahill as his three-and-a-half years at the helm of Civil Beat does. Omidyar identified a problem '' that agencies routinely reject requests for reports, documents and other information that should be readily available '' and created something of his own to find a solution.

At Poynter, John Temple, who was editor of Omidyar's Civil Beat when it launched, says: ''He's got a journalist's sensibility. He enjoyed the hunt for a story, and he's very open to experimenting with how to tell the story and using contemporary approaches.'' That said, Omidyar ''gives you the space to do your job.''

Reacting to the news of Omidyar's investment, Dave Winer writes: ''Key idea: News orgs not only have expertise at creating news, they are great at consuming it too. Use that to help define the news reading experience of the future.''

The Huffington Post account has a bit more detail and some comments from Omidyar:

''The role of the press, in particular, the role of the press in a democracy is extremely important, extremely critical, and it's something that I think we often take for granted in the U.S,'' Omidyar said. ''But we've seen attacks on press freedoms and the fundamentals of newsgathering operations when you have these leak investigations that really put a chill on reporting, as well as, surveillance now also a puts a significant chill on reporting.''

''Even in a country that has such strong laws, the First Amendment, we see some weakening, some attacks on press freedoms,'' he continued. ''So this an opportunity for me to engage in something I care deeply about and do it operationally '-- not simply as a philanthropist.''

In a sense, then, Omidyar's new venture is further blowback from the surveillance state's overreach, which I have been writing about since June. When you think about how much trouble Greenwald and Poitras have caused for the NSA and its sister agencies, and then contemplate an entire news organization founded to make that kind of reporting more likely '-- with pro-publish lawyers! '-- it puts new gloss on the notion of unintended consequences.

NPR's ''On the Media'' interviewed me about this story. You can listen here.

Jack Shafer of Reuters: ''As welcome as Omidyar's money is, his commitment to the investigative form and an open society is what I'm grateful for.''

A devil's advocate view of billionaires funding investigative journalism.

More: Billionaires won't save journalism!

For those who want more, you can find a excellent, linky round-up of all that's been written about this news here.

Here's an nine-minute interview with Jeremy Scahill about the new venture with Omidyar. It has a few more details about the ''horizontal'' operating style the founders envision.

Over at Metafilter, some of the commenters are pretty hostile to the new venture. One says: ''I love Greenwald and think he is one of the most important journalists working today, maybe the most important. But the whole project smacks of dot-com/'TED talk' blinkered arrogance'-- thinking they can reinvent an industry and instantly do better than people with hundreds of years of experience. Like those people who think Tesla is better qualified to build an electric car than Honda or Toyota or Nissan because the founder is a 'genius.'''

The Economist on the method of Omidyar's philanthropy. ''With the non-profits it backs, ranging from Kiva, a microfinance website, to the Sunlight Foundation, which promotes open government, Omidyar Network practises 'venture philanthropy-'-- developing a non-profit start-up in the same way as a new business venture, except for not expecting it to make money one day.''

To wrap this up, two from the New York Times media columnist, David Carr. His interview with Omidyar here, and his column on a larger trend: ''Quality news has become, if not sexy, suddenly attractive to smart digital money.'' More:

''Technologists have a view, perhaps inflated, that they can make the world better,'' Mr. Omidyar said in an interview over the weekend. ''There may be limits to doing it only through technology, or perhaps you get tired of doing it only through technology. So getting into content and broad communication is appealing.''

It would also be a mistake to believe that the only thing digitally enriched players bring is money. The investment of intellectual capital will be just as important. If ever an industry was in need of innovation '-- of big ideas from uncommon thinkers '-- it is the news business.

I agree with that.

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Oct.4

Hey, that was a tough interview! No, not really.This week Glenn Greenwald was interviewed on the BBC for the first time since the revelations from Edward Snowden began to flow. The program on which he appeared, Newsnight, is one of the BBC's premiere productions. The interviewer was Kirsty Wark. Here's the clip:

Below I have listed the 16 questions asked in this interview. These are my paraphrases but they are very close paraphrases.

1. Why should you be the arbiter of what is in the public interest and what is vital to national security?

2. 58,000 documents! GCHQ says this is a car crash coming. [No question.]

3. Metadata connections are often used to track terrorists. By revealing them, you may have caused would-be terrorists to change their tactics. So it's possible you've made it easier for terrorists to evade detection. [No question.]

4. How can you be sure that your actions have not made it easier for the terrorists. You can't prove a negative, can you?

5. Is it shocking that spy agencies spy? Don't you think a majority of people would be reassured by that and feel safer because of it?

6. You still have a vast cache of materials from Snowden. Is it in your bedroom in Rio? People want to know: how can you guarantee that it's being kept secure?

7. When David Miranda was stopped at the airport he was carrying a password on a piece of paper. For a lot of people that doesn't inspire confidence in your methods. [No question.]

8. After Miranda's detention you said you would be far more aggressive in publishing things about the UK government and they will be sorry for what they did. That was months ago: is something coming down the pipeline?

9. Can you see why those statements were seen as you, Glenn Greenwald, acting as a campaigner and an activist?

10. Do you fear for your safety?

11. Do you feel you could travel to the US or Britain?

12. Are you still in touch with Edward Snowden?

13. How do you know he hasn't been forced to give up secrets if he's under Russian protection? You can't be sure that he hasn't had to give up something, can you?

14. Given the precariousness of his position, does Snowden really feel all that safe?

15. This is in some ways like a spy film. How did you identify him when you first met him?

16. Do you think he might end up in an American prison?

I've been talking about this interview on Twitter today because to me this is a weak form of journalism. It takes common criticisms made of the subject and simply thrusts them at him one after the other to see how he handles it. The basic format is: ''People say this about you. What is your response?'' Questions 1-7, 9 and 13 are all of that type.

Defenders of this style always say the same thing: Hey, that was a tough interview! People in the public eye should be made to answer their doubters. You may not like it, especially if you're a fan of the person in question, but that's our job as journalists: to be tough but fair.

No, your job as a journalist is to decide which of the common criticisms have merit, and ask about those, leaving the meritless to chatrooms. It is also to synthesize new criticisms, and ask about those. It is to advance the conversation, not just replay it. People say these bad things about you'' what is your response? is outsourcing the work to other interested parties. It doesn't make for a tough interview; it makes for a predictable one, easier for the subject to handle. It's also the cheapest and simplest way to manufacture an ''adversarial'' atmosphere.

Greenwald's reaction is here. As he notes, it's a strange decision to make the interview about the various charges against Greenwald and not what his journalism has uncovered.

UPDATE, OCT. 5. The BBC has now posted to YouTube the video of the entire program on surveillance, which, according to Ian Katz, the editor of BBC Newsnight, is necessary context for understanding the Greenwald interview, which was a part of it. Also, Katz replies to my criticisms here.

In the comments, the former head of BBC Global News, Richard Sambrook, weighs in. ''I agree it was an ill-thought through interview and consequently weak.''

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Oct.2

''What those involved in it fail to acknowledge is their own investment in a permanent and unyielding image of political symmetry. But I think the high point has passed for this kind of reporting.''For a certain class of journalists in the United States '-- a dwindling class, I think '-- the following holds true:

Alongside the production of news and commentary about American politics they feel compelled to reproduce their own innocence. What I mean by ''innocence'' is a public showing by professional journalists that they have no politics themselves, no views of their own, no side, no stake, no ideology and therefore no one can accuse them of '-- and here we enter the realm of dread '-- political bias.

I have written about the production of innocence before'...

The quest for innocence in political journalism means the desire to be manifestly agenda-less and thus ''prove'' in the way you describe things that journalism is not an ideological trade. But this can get in the way of describing things!

I think it is proper that we call this quest an agenda, even though ''agenda'' is a loaded and abused term. The innocence agenda undermines the product. News and commentary, the picture we get of what is happening in the nation, can be fatally distorted by the journalist's need to demonstrate even-handedness. But there's another problem. In the self image of the professional journalist, nothing can ever come before truthtelling, almost by definition. Because it violates this sacred and absolute rule, the production of innocence is shrouded in denial, defensiveness and mystification. We cannot have a rational conversation with the people who practice it because to admit that they practice it would be, in effect, to resign from their profession. This they refuse to do.

And so silence is the sea on which the entire subject floats. The practitioners don't defend their practices, but that is the least of it. They won't identify themselves as practitioners in the first place. They are tenacious in holding to the pattern, but they cannot describe, illuminate or justify the pattern because this would be to concede that ''telling it the way it is'' is a priority modified by other and greater priorities'-- like ''making it super clear that we take no side.'' To admit that is to admit that you are a shill, a mouthpiece.

But here comes the confusing part. For in the production of innocence you are not a shill or mouthpiece for someone else: a company, a political party, a powerful interest'... but for a certain image of yourself as ''above'' all that. You are a propagandist for a personal conceit. The conceit is that you can report and comment on politics truthfully while always and forever splitting the difference between the two sides so as to advertise your own status as perpetually non-aligned.

What if that is not even possible? What if you have to risk the appearance of being partisan in order to describe accurately what is going on in a hyper-partisan situation? And what if you are risk adverse? As in the case of Time magazine, the PBS Newshour, NPR and CNN, just to name a few homes for the style I am describing. In a situation like that, you are going to fall back on the easy production of innocence, but you are not going to recognize that this is what you are doing.

I bring up this messy and confusing subject for reasons that are probably obvious to anyone paying attention to political news this week. The shutdown of the Federal government is one of those events where the temptation to advertise your own innocence is almost overwhelming'... for a certain kind of journalist.

For more on this problem see James Fallows in the Atlantic: Your False-Equivalence Guide to the Days Ahead.

Also see Dan Froomkin: Shutdown coverage fails Americans.

The quest for innocence in political journalism means the desire to be manifestly agenda-less'...

The Washington Post feels that desire. Here are some of the results:

In The inability to come together to do the right thing, Democrats and Republicans united: It's the other side's fault

Even before much of the federal government shut down at midnight Monday, the players were already staking out their positions in the battle to come: the fight over who was at fault.

President Obama argued that Republicans were to blame, for using a budget bill as a means of extortion to roll back health-care reform. No, the GOP shot back, it was Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) who were responsible, for refusing to negotiate.

The Post really feels it, part two:

Shutdown crisis shows Washington breakdown

Washington once again stands at a moment of crisis '-- only this time, Democrats and Republicans are not negotiating a way to avoid it. They are not even speaking to one another.

The cumulative effect of almost three years of governing by near-death experience is becoming clear.

Instead of bringing a resolution, each close call has left the parties further apart. These wrenching standoffs have only made them more entrenched. Their focus now rests almost exclusively on what cannot be reconciled and on scores to be settled, rather than on areas where they might actually find common ground.

Cokie Roberts of NPR feels it, as well. Here is her analysis of the situation:

I think that we're seeing a real breakdown of government operations in Washington. The inability to come together to do the right thing in terms of the country is really dramatic now. And we've seen this before in our history, but this is a period that is very rough.

At Time magazine agendalessness is always on the agenda. Their take:

Shutdown: Obama and Republicans Trade Blame as Deadline Is Crossed

Federal agencies were ordered to beginning shutting down late Monday evening amid finger-pointing between Democrats and Republicans as to who was responsible for the United States' first government stoppage in 17 years.

What unites these treatments is the eagerness to blame both sides. The emphasis is on things like ''the inability to come together to do the right thing'' and other hyper-symmetrical images like the ''shutdown blame game'' and ''finger-pointing between Democrats and Republicans.''

That is the innocence agenda at work. What those involved in it fail to acknowledge is their own investment in a permanent and unyielding image of political symmetry. But I think the high point has passed for this kind of reporting. It still exists, and deserves to be called out, but with the critique of ''false equivalence'' now a part of the journalist's daily life and the rise of point-of-view reporting to normal status online, the artifice is shakier than ever. New entrants like the Guardian's U.S. edition and aggressive newsrooms like ProPublica and McClatchy's Washington bureau simply don't treat the production of innocence as important. Eventually it will be seen as dragging the quality of news down, and the best people will be embarrassed to practice it.

So let Cokie Robetts wax on about ''the inability to come together to do the right thing.'' Meanwhile, the AP's David Espo described the situation fairly without resorting to claptrap like that.

Time running short, the Democratic-controlled Senate passed urgent legislation Friday to avert a government shutdown early next week, and President Barack Obama lectured House Republicans to stop ''appeasing the tea party'' and quickly follow suit. Despite the presidential plea '' and the urgings of their own leaders '' House GOP rebels showed no sign of retreat in their drive to use the threat of a shutdown to uproot the nation's three-year-old health care law. (Hat tip, Media Matters.)

When you know what you're talking about, you don't need to advertise your own innocence.

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Aug.28

Your turn: so who are you and what do you do and what interests you enough to show up here occasionally and read these posts? Tell us.It was ten years ago this week that I was writing test posts and putting final touches on the site that would officially launch as PressThink on September 1, 2003. It started with this introduction. The key lines:

I am a press critic, an observer of journalism's habits, and also a writer trying to make sense of the world. I am interested in the ideas about journalism that journalists work within, and those they feel they can work without. I try to discover the consequences in the world that result from having the kind of press we do.

I call this blog PressThink because that's the kind of work I do. The title points to forms of thought that identify ''journalism'' to itself'-- but also to the habit of not thinking about certain things. The subatomic force that holds the pack of reporters together as they swarm around a story, there's an example of pressthink. Without it there could be no pack; the pieces would come flying apart.

So that's who I am, and what I do, and what interests me. But who are you and what do you do and what interests you enough to show up here occasionally and read these posts? I am borrowing this idea from the excellent science blogger, Ed Yong, who once a year asks readers of his site to de-lurk'-- that is, introduce themselves, and perhaps say a bit about why the come back. So if you're willing, hit the comment button and de-lurk yourself.

Meanwhile, over the next few days I am going to post some reflections on ten years of blogging as they occur to me, which means I will also be able to answer questions posted in the comments if you have them. The first one is below:

1. How has doing this blog affected your career? Last night on Twitter, after I mentioned it had been ten years, Joey Baker asked me how blogging has affected my academic and writing careers. I had never asked myself that, though I always knew that starting PressThink was a huge, life-changing plus. But once Joey asked me of course I started thinking about it.

The biggest effect comes down to the language I find myself within. Everyone is shaped by the language they habitually speak; but with writers it is a lot more so. Blogging forced me to find a language '-- a writing style '-- that would include (meaning: not repel) any of the following because blogging showed me that all of the following were possibly interested.

* Working journalists, any kind. (Like, say, Janine Gibson, but there are many more)* Peers in the press commentary game. (Like, say, Margaret Sullivan, but there are many more'...)* Bloggers whose blogging verges on journalism or comments on the news. (Like Marcy Wheeler)* Academics interested in the press and its behavior, whatever their discipline. (Like Brad Delong)* Journalism students or others hoping to make a career of it. (Like Peter Sterne)* Non-journalists who have to deal with the press as part of their job. (Like Shel Israel)* People deeply engaged in politics who have to contend with the power of the media. (Like Anne Marie Slaughter)* Heavy users of journalism, simultaneously fascinated and dissatisfied with the product. (Like Stuart Zechman)* Ordinary readers who sense that something is amiss. (Like'... you!)* The denizens of digital culture '-- geeks '-- who recognize what is shifting in news production. (Like Jillian York)* Publishers, any kind. (Like Tim O'Reilly)* Office-holders who have occasion to reflect on the powers of the press (like Tom Watson)* People in other countries who feel their press is influenced by the American press (Like Mark Colvin.)

All of those people follow me on Twitter, by the way, and vice versa.

Blogging forced me to speak in a language that would always include all of them and never repel any of them. But at the same time, a blog is ''the unedited voice of a person,'' as Dave Winer, a huge influence on me, once said. The demands of trying to include, not necessarily ''everyone,'' but certainly everyone on the above list, and at the same time express myself, in an unedited (uncensored) way, the discovery of a language '-- an intellectual style '-- that could accomplish all of those things: that is how blogging affected my career, Joey Baker. It forced me to find my way within the limits of a vernacular, which meant keeping in touch with what matters about the press to all of the people in the categories I have listed.

2. Did you know this blog has a theme song?Here it is. That song, more than any other totem I can find, expresses the attitude I try to write with. I'm not saying that my posts are equal to it, only that they are influenced by it.

What about you? Who are you and what do you do and what interests you enough to show up here occasionally and read these posts? Hit the comment button and speak.

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Aug.26

That's what the surveillance state is trying to do. It has the means, the will and the latitude to go after journalism the way it went after terrorism. Only a more activist press, working together, stands a chance of resisting this.Last week, the novelist and former CIA operative Barry Eisler published one of the most important posts I have read about what's happening to the press since the Snowden revelations began in early June. In it, he tries to explain why authorities in the UK detained Brazilian national David Miranda for nine hours at Heathrow airport and confiscated all the technology he had on him. (Miranda, as everyone following the story knows, is the spouse of The Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald. He had been acting as a courier, bringing documents on encrypted thumb drives back and forth between Greenwald in Brazil and his collaborator, Laura Poitras, in Germany.)

Eisler's explanation of this pivotal event is the most persuasive I have seen.

1. Sand in the gears

''Put yourself in the shoes of the National Surveillance State,'' he writes. You've already commandeered the internet for state use and you have most of the world's communications monitored and stored. Journalists are beginning to realize than none of their means is secure, so they're retreating to face to face meetings, traveling backwards in technological time to evade your reach. But you find out about one of these meetings: Greenwald's spouse is visiting Berlin. Eisler explains:

The purpose was to demonstrate to journalists that what they thought was a secure secondary means of communication '-- a courier, possibly to ferry encrypted thumb drives from one air-gapped computer to another '-- can be compromised, and thereby to make the journalists' efforts harder and slower.

Recognizing that you can't bring journalism to a complete halt, you try to throw sand in the gears. David Miranda was detained and questioned under a terrorism statute in Britain. What's the connection? As Eisler says, ''Part of the value in targeting the electronic communications of actual terrorists is that the terrorists are forced to use far slower means of plotting. The NSA has learned this lesson well, and is now applying it to journalists.'' He writes:

To achieve the ability to monitor all human communication, broadly speaking the National Surveillance State must do two things: first, button up the primary means of human communication '-- today meaning the Internet, telephone, and snail mail; second, clamp down on backup systems, meaning face-to-face communication, which is, after all, all that's left to the population when everything else has been bugged. Miranda's detention was part of the second prong of attack. So, incidentally, was the destruction of Guardian computers containing some of Snowden's leaks. The authorities knew there were copies, so destroying the information itself wasn't the point of the exercise. The point was to make the Guardian spend time and energy developing suboptimal backup options '-- that is, to make journalism harder, slower, and less secure.

2. Working together

The day after Eisler's post appeared, Ben Smith of Buzzfeed found out '-- and the Guardian then announced '-- that some of the Snowden documents had been shared with the New York Times, which will report in partnership with the Guardian on some NSA stories. Britain's equivalent of the NSA, the GCHQ, had forced the Guardian editors to halt work in London on the Snowden leaks. But'...

Journalists in America are protected by the first amendment which guarantees free speech and in practice prevents the state seeking pre-publication injunctions or ''prior restraint''.

It is intended that the collaboration with the New York Times will allow the Guardian to continue exposing mass surveillance by putting the Snowden documents on GCHQ beyond government reach. Snowden is aware of the arrangement.

Sunday night, Ben Smith broke more news: another skilled newsroom, the investigative non-profit site, ProPublica, is also working on Snowden stories with The Guardian. This is the right move. They are trying to make journalism harder, slower and less secure by working together against you. You have to work together against them to publish anyway and put the necessary materials beyond their reach.

As I wrote in my last post, the surveillance state is global, so the struggle to report on its overreach has to move about the globe, as well. Another good sign:

In an open letter to David Cameron published in today's Observer, the editors of Denmark's Politiken, Sweden's Dagens Nyheter, Norway's Aftenposten and Finland's Helsingin Sanomat describe the detention of David Miranda, the partner of the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald, as harassment.

They say that the ''events in Great Britain over the past week give rise to deep concern'' and call on the British prime minister to ''reinstall your government among the leading defenders of the free press''.

The World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers wrote a similar letter to Cameron. They understand this is a global fight. The rest of the British press is only beginning to wake up to it.

3. ''Give me the box you will allow me to operate in.''

In an appearance last month on Charlie Rose, former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden was asked about the ''appropriate balance'' between secrecy and transparency.

Hayden said that if it were up to him, he would ''keep it all secret'' because NSA could best operate that way. But: ''I know I live in a modern democracy,'' which won't allow anyone to operate for long without a ''national consensus'' underpinning the program. You can't have a national consensus without a national discussion, he admitted. And you can't have such a discussion ''without a significant portion of the citizenry'' knowing something about what you're doing. And so, Hayden said, he had come to accept that the NSA had to ''shave points off of our operational effectiveness'' in order to become ''a bit more transparent to the American people.''

As a former head of the CIA and the NSA, Hayden said he understood that he would be constrained by what American democracy thought acceptable. All he wanted from Congress was clear guidance. ''Tell me the box,'' he said, making a square with his hands as he talked. ''Give me the box you will allow me to operate in. I'm going to play to the very edges of that box.'' He said he would be ''very aggressive,'' and probably ''get chalk dust on my cleats'' but still:

You, the American people, through your elected representatives, give me the field of play and I will play very aggressively in it. As long as you understand what risk you are embracing by keeping me and my colleagues in this box, Charlie, we are good to go. We understand. We follow the guidance of the American people.

Hayden's sketch of a surveillance state properly constrained by a wary public left a few things out, of course. When the Director of National Intelligence can lie to Congress in open session and keep his job, Hayden's system has broken down. When United States senators, alarmed about what they are told, cannot alert the American people because of secrecy requirements, Hayden's ''through your elected representatives'' becomes a hollow phrase. Over-classification makes ''national consensus'' impossible on its face. A ''secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans'' is not likely to generate much discussion'... is it? Hayden's descriptions sound reasonable '-- reasonable enough that Charlie Rose didn't push back on them '-- but the behavior of the surveillance state doesn't match up with his soothing words.

WHICH IS WHY WE NEED JOURNALISTS! In fact, we can go further. Without including in the picture an aggressive press that is free to operate without fear or coercion, the surveillance state cannot be made compatible with representative democracy. Even then, it may be impossible.

4. The establishment press is beginning to get it

Barry Eisler concluded his compelling post with this:

The authorities want you to understand they can do it to you, too. Whether they've miscalculated depends on how well they've gauged the passivity of the public.

Making journalism harder, slower and less secure, throwing sand in the gears, is fully within the capacity of the surveillance state. It has the means, the will and the latitude to go after journalism the way it went after terrorism. News stories alone are not going to make it stop. There are signs that the establishment press is beginning to get it. Sharing the work of turning the Snowden documents into news is one. David Carr's column in today's New York Times is another. ''It is true that Mr. Assange and Mr. Greenwald are activists with the kind of clearly defined political agendas that would be frowned upon in a traditional newsroom,'' Carr wrote. ''But they are acting in a more transparent age '-- they are their own newsrooms in a sense '-- and their political beliefs haven't precluded other news organizations from following their leads.''

Only if they can turn a mostly passive public into a more active one can journalists come out ahead in this fight. I know they don't think of mobilization as their job, and there are good reasons for that, but they didn't think editors would be destroying hard drives under the gaze of the authorities, either! Journalism almost has to be brought closer to activism to stand a chance of prevailing in its current struggle with the state.

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Aug.20

''If sunlight coalitions are to succeed, they won't succeed by outwitting surveillance. Not better technology, but greater legitimacy is their edge.''The mood toughened just over a month ago, when I received a phone call from the centre of government telling me: ''You've had your fun. Now we want the stuff back.'' There followed further meetings with shadowy Whitehall figures. The demand was the same: hand the Snowden material back or destroy it. I explained that we could not research and report on this subject if we complied with this request. The man from Whitehall looked mystified. ''You've had your debate. There's no need to write any more.''

'--Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian

That's the government telling the editor of a national newspaper: Time's up, no more of that journalism stuff! We'll decide when there's been enough debate. Stop now or we'll make you stop. Rusbridger's response: We will continue our careful reporting of the Snowden material. ''We just won't do it from London.'' (The Guardian has a U.S. operation based in New York.) From Reuters:

The Guardian's decision to publicize the government threat '' and the newspaper's assertion that it can continue reporting on the Snowden revelations from outside of Britain '' appears to be the latest step in an escalating battle between the news media and governments over reporting of secret surveillance programs.

This battle is global. Just as the surveillance state is an international actor '-- not one government, but many working together '-- and just as the surveillance net stretches worldwide because the communications network does too, the struggle to report on the secret system's overreach is global, as well. It's the collect-it-all coalition against an expanded Fourth Estate, worldwide.

When Wikileaks first exploded onto the political scene in 2010, I wrote this about it:

If you go to the Wikileaks Twitter profile, next to ''location'' it says: Everywhere. Which is one of the most striking things about it: the world's first stateless news organization. I can't think of any prior examples of that. (Dave Winer in the comments: ''The blogosphere is a stateless news organization.'')

Wikileaks was modeling the concept. Now we are seeing different expressions of it every day. ''We just won't do it from London'' is one. The collaboration among Edward Snowden, an American exile living in Russia, filmmaker Laura Poitras, an American living in Berlin, and Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald, an American living in Brazil'-- that's another. A few days ago, when Greenwald's spouse, David Miranda, was detained at Heathrow airport by the UK branch of the surveillance state, Greenwald naturally alerted The Guardian's lawyers in the UK, but he also alerted officials in the Brazilian government, who brought pressure to bear through the foreign ministry.

This tells us something. The battle I referred to is not a simple matter of the state vs. civilians. It's not government vs. the press, either. It's the surveillance-over-everything forces within governments (plus the politicians and journalists who identify with them) vs. everyone who opposes their overreach: investigative journalists and sources, especially, but also couriers (like David Miranda), cryptographers and technologists, free speech lawyers, funders, brave advertisers, online activists, sympathetic actors inside a given government, civil society groups like Amnesty International, bloggers to amplify the signal and, of course, readers. Lots of readers, the noisy kind, who share and help distribute the work.

This type of sunlight coalition '-- large and small pieces, loosely joined '-- is a countervailing power to the security forces, the people who are utterly serious when they say: ''You've had your debate. There's no need to write any more,'' the same people who, as Bruce Schneier has written, ''commandeered the internet'' for their use because, viewed from a certain angle, it's the best machine ever made for spying on the population.

If sunlight coalitions are to succeed, it won't be by outwitting surveillance. Not better technology, but greater legitimacy is their edge. This attitude was perfectly captured by Ladar Levison, founder of Lavabit, who shut down his email service when the surveillance state demanded his submission. ''I think if the American public knew what our government was doing, they wouldn't be allowed to do it anymore,'' he said.

Sunlight wins when the deeds exposed turn out to lack legitimacy under the greater scrutiny they receive because of the exposure. That can only happen through open argument over known facts. The argument is always about the same thing: what is truly in the public interest, and what violates justice, decency, common sense, national conscience, the requirements of a democracy. As Rusbridger told the BBC:

''If they were to arrest David Miranda in Heathrow car park they would have to use bits of the law which have checks and balances to protect journalistic material, among other things, but by doing it in a transit lounge they are operating in a kind of stateless way where they can interrogate someone for nine hours, seize whatever they want, under rules that are about terrorism. Once you start conflating terrorism and journalism, as a country I think you're in some trouble.''

A conspiracy to commit journalism has to operate in the open. Its methods go beyond investigation, careful editing, truth and accuracy, telling a good story that brings complex issues home. There is inescapably a political element. Release-the-information coalitions can only form around broadly shared goals. People who disagree on other things are likely to agree on the need for sunlight. Those who would expose the misdeeds of an agency like the NSA need good arguments, not just good sources and good lawyers. Not the reach but the overreach of the surveillance state should be the object of their critique. It's not enough that your story be right on the facts. Your thinking has to be right on the money. It has to speak to ends that are almost as universal as the emotion of fear, an always-on power source for the ''collect it all'' consortium.

Those who would expose and oppose the security state also need good judgment. What to hold back, when not to publish, how not to react when provoked, what not to say in your own defense: alongside the forensic, the demands of the prudential. All day today, people have been asking me: why did The Guardian wait a month to tell us about, ''You've had your fun. Now we want the stuff back?'' Michael Calderone of the Huffington Post asked Rusbridger about that. His answer:

''Having been through this and not written about it on the day for operational reasons, I was sort of waiting for a moment when the government's attitude to journalism ''- when there was an issue that made this relevant,'' Rusbridger said.

That moment came after Sunday's nine-hour airport detainment of David Miranda, partner of Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist at the center of the NSA surveillance story.

''The fact that David Miranda had been detained under this slightly obscure schedule of the terrorism act seemed a useful moment to write about the background to the government's attitude to this in general,'' Rusbridger said.

Hear it? The holding back. The sensation of a political opening, through which the story can be driven. The alignment of argument with information. The clear contrast between a terror anyone can identify with '-- being detained for nine hours while transiting through a foreign country '-- and the state's obscure use of terrorism law. These are political skills, indistinguishable from editorial acumen. In a conspiracy to commit journalism we must persuade as well as inform.

After Matter: Notes, Reactions & LinksYou can find all the pieces I've written on Snowden, the press and the surveillance state here.

Public radio's The World interviewed me about this post. Listen here. (It's 5:41.)

John Naughton in the UK reacts to this post: Democracy as a 'game.'

The big question, to my mind, is whether the kind of comprehensive surveillance deemed essential by the national security state is compatible with democracy.

The answer I'm heading towards is ''No''.

Former CIA agent turned novelist Barry Eisler tries to explain why David Miranda got stopped at Heathrow by the UK authorities. His answer: to make further journalism about the Snowden material more difficult. I think he's got it.

The purpose was to demonstrate to journalists that what they thought was a secure secondary means of communication '-- a courier, possibly to ferry encrypted thumb drives from one air-gapped computer to another '-- can be compromised, and thereby to make the journalists' efforts harder and slower.

Does this sort of ''deny and disrupt'' campaign sound familiar? It should: you've seen it before, deployed against terror networks. That's because part of the value in targeting the electronic communications of actual terrorists is that the terrorists are forced to use far slower means of plotting. The NSA has learned this lesson well, and is now applying it to journalists.

''If you support a free press publishing leaked state secrets you are apparently condoning terrorism. If you don't object to his detention loudly, you are condoning the secret state.'' On CNN.com, former BBC executive Richard Sambrook reflects on the hardening of positions.

Social media, advocacy journalism, the need to define and claim the narrative and to be heard leaves little room for middle ground, but it is there that this conflict will be resolved. In that gray area, the ethical bridge between these positions will have to be rebuilt.

My contribution to Sambrook's bridging project in this post: ''Not the reach but the overreach of the surveillance state should be the object of their critique.''

Mark Ambinder, national security reporter and columnist, explains his reasons to be troubled the NSA, and, in a separate column, why concerns about it are overblown: 5 reasons the NSA scandal ain't all that. ''I really do think tribal feelings determine how you view the significance of Edward Snowden's revelations,'' he writes. Conor Friedersdorf isn't buying it.

The Press Gazette in Britain asks why newspapers in the UK are largely letting The Guardian go it alone, and not jumping fully into the fray.

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Aug.15

As things stand today, the Fourth Estate is a state of mind. Some in the press have it, some do not. Some who have it are part of the institutional press. Some, like Ladar Levison and Edward Snowden, are not.''I think if the American public knew what our government was doing, they wouldn't be allowed to do it anymore.''

Those are the poignant words of Ladar Levison, founder of Lavabit, a secure email service that he voluntarily shut down when faced with some sort of demand from the U.S. government to reveal user information. The precise nature of that demand he cannot talk about for fear of being thrown in jail, perhaps the best example we now have for how the surveillance state undoes the First Amendment. But we know that Lavabit was used by Edward Snowden to communicate with the outside world when he was stuck in the Moscow airport. So use your imagination!

If the public knew what the government was doing, the government wouldn't be allowed to do it anymore'... is a perfect description of a ''Fourth Estate situation.'' That's when we need a journalist to put hidden facts to light and bring public opinion into play, which then changes the equation for people in power operating behind the veil. If it doesn't happen, an illegitimate state action will persist. ''My hope is that, you know, the media can uncover what's going on, without my assistance,'' Levison said. He's like a whistleblower who will go to jail if he actually uses his whistle. All he can do is give truncated interviews that stop short of describing the pressure he is under.

At least one thing is clear: Snowden's determination ''to embolden others to step forward,'' which I wrote about in my last post, is starting to work. Ladar Levison is proof.

This week the New York Times magazine published an amazing account of the Fourth Estate situation that Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald found themselves in, once they were contacted by Edward Snowden. The author, Peter Maass, included this:

Poitras and Greenwald are an especially dramatic example of what outsider reporting looks like in 2013. They do not work in a newsroom, and they personally want to be in control of what gets published and when. When The Guardian didn't move as quickly as they wanted with the first article on Verizon, Greenwald discussed taking it elsewhere, sending an encrypted draft to a colleague at another publication. He also considered creating a Web site on which they would publish everything, which he planned to call NSADisclosures. In the end, The Guardian moved ahead with their articles. But Poitras and Greenwald have created their own publishing network as well, placing articles with other outlets in Germany and Brazil and planning more for the future. They have not shared the full set of documents with anyone.

The idea of the press as the ''fourth estate'' is usually traced to English historian Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881.) Here he is, writing at a time when journalists were newly arrived on the political stage:

Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important than they all. It is not a figure of speech, or a witty saying; it is a literal fact. Printing, which comes necessarily out of Writing, I say often, is equivalent to Democracy: invent Writing, Democracy is inevitable. Whoever can speak, speaking now to the whole nation, becomes a power, a branch of government, with inalienable weight in law-making, in all acts of authority. It matters not what rank he has, what revenues or garnitures: the requisite thing is that he have a tongue which others will listen to; this and nothing more is requisite.

Whoever can speak to the whole nation becomes a power. It used to be that the only way to ''speak to the whole nation'' was through the major media channels that reached everyone. The Fourth Estate became the editors and reporters who worked in Big Media newsrooms. But as Peter Maass pointed out, Poitras and Greenwald don't operate that way. They make alliances with the press establishment to get their stories out. If necessary, they will go it alone. Greenwald raises his own money from readers who support what he does, as he explained in a June 4th column in The Guardian:

Ever since I began political writing, I've relied on annual reader donations to enable me to do the journalism I want to do: first when I wrote at my own Blogspot page and then at Salon. Far and away, that has been the primary factor enabling me to remain independent '' to be unconstrained in what I can say and do '' because it means I'm ultimately accountable to my readers, who don't have an agenda other than demanding that I write what I actually think, that the work I produce be unconstrained by institutional orthodoxies and without fear of negative reaction from anyone. It is also reader support that has directly funded much of the work I do, from being able to have research assistants and other needed resources to avoiding having to do the kind of inconsequential work that distracts from that which I think is most necessary and valuable.

For that reason, when I moved my blog from Salon to the Guardian, the Guardian and I agreed that I would continue to rely in part on reader support. Having this be part of the arrangement, rather than exclusively relying on the Guardian paying to publish the column, was vital to me. It's the model I really believe in.

This was the last thing he wrote for the Guardian before the Snowden story took over his life, but he dropped a hint of what was coming. ''I've spent all of this week extensively traveling and working continuously on what will be a huge story: something made possible by being at the Guardian but also by my ability to devote all of my time and efforts to projects like this one.''

The point I'm driving at is not that the institutionalized press is no longer needed, or no longer powerful. Greenwald clearly benefits from being a Guardian journalist. The Guardian has other reporters it can put on the story. It has editors to save writers from errors and misjudgments. It pays for plane tickets and lawyers. It has global reach. These are huge advantages.

But people who find themselves in a Fourth Estate situation '-- ''If the public knew what power was doing, power would not be allowed to do it anymore'' '-- have power themselves now. If they have the goods, if they have the will, if they have ''a tongue which others will listen to,'' they can speak to the nation. And some will! The Fourth Estate is really a state of mind. Some in the press have it, some don't. Some who have it are part of the press. Some, like Ladar Levison and Edward Snowden, are not.

A Fourth Estate situation has its own strange and radiating power. People caught up in one will take enormous risks. They will sacrifice their freedom. They will crash the company they spent years building. They will defy the state. They will do a lot to bring the hidden facts to light. Working together, sources, journalists and readers may soon publish a blockbuster story without the institutional press being involved at all.

Again, I'm not saying we don't need The Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Der Spiegel, El Pa­s, O Globo, the BBC, the CBC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. We definitely do. But they are not the Fourth Estate. If the public knew what the government was doing, the government wouldn't be allowed to do it anymore. Everyone who tries to act on that tense situation: they, together, are the Fourth Estate. (Senator Ron Wyden, for example.)

I believe Bruce Schneier was correct when he wrote in the Atlantic this week that the U.S. government has ''commandeered the internet.'' He urged the big technology companies to fight back. But even if they don't, others will. And when they make that decision, they will pick up the tools of journalism and try to alert the public. If the press won't help them, they will go it alone. Wise professionals in journalism will understand this, and select accordingly.

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Source: Omidyar Group

Mon, 18 Nov 2013 03:35

I have a personal announcement. I am joining up with the new venture in news that Pierre Omidyar, Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill are creating, along with Liliana Segura, Dan Froomkin, Eric Bates and others who are coming on board to give shape to this thing, which we are calling NewCo until we are ready to release the name.

Because it doesn't exist yet, NewCo could take many forms. Only a handful of those possible paths will lead to a strong and sustainable company that meets a public need. Figuring that out is a hard problem, to which I am deeply attracted. So I signed up to be part of the launch team. This post explains why I made that decision and what I hope to contribute. Continue reading at pressthink.org.

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Source: The Rancid Honeytrap

Mon, 18 Nov 2013 23:53

On news last night that NYU Journalism Professor and 'media critic' Jay Rosen was the latest pick up for the Omidyar/Greenwald News thingy, 'left' journalisty Twitter erupted in the usual orgy of sycophancy that lately so characterizes this whole affair. Still there were some discouraging words, like this from NSFWCorp boss Paul Carr.

If Greenwald/Omidyar really wanted to create something new, they'd have hired Rosen as an independent ombudsman, specifically to criticize'--Paul Carr (@paulcarr) November 18, 2013

It's axiomatic now that in any part of the left where there is even any meagre influence, there will be, at most, two sides to each question and both of them will be mostly wrong. So Carr's quaint idea that Rosen would have been more critical as Omidyar's ombud, or that Omidyar and Greenwald are buying Rosen's silence, is every bit as ridiculous as the many virtues with which careerist sycophants now ostentatiously imbue him.

Where the establishment 'left' is concerned '-- that is that huge range of professional opinion-shaping between the partisan shillery of, say, MSNBC and the starry-eyed declinist reformism of Greenwald's showboaty frothing '' Rosen is distinguished less by savvy criticism than prolonged acts of sycophancy and elitism. I went over this ground before, here, in my piece on Rosen's 'Snowden Effect':

Rosen will happily tweet out some shit written by a shill of shills like Josh Marshall, and even have robust friendly discussions with him online, without once mentioning that Marshall literally gets his talking points straight from the White House.

Or he'll look at Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger's trivializing, weird confession of acquiescence to government repression, without even a hint of mystification, let alone disparagement, at how long Rusbridger suppressed this story. To the contrary, in Rosen's piece about it, Rusbridger's capitulation to government thugs and his failure to immediately disclose it to his readers, metamorphoses into heroism and prudence, as Rosen extols the overwhelming importance of knowledgeable, responsible journalism elites like Rusbridger to opposing mass surveillance.

Here he is acting as Omidyar's mouthpiece, a day after announcement of the new unnamed venture, which Rosen christened NewCo with his customary verve. With or without pay, he is the perfect complement to Greenwald, for whom sycophancy is clearly like blood to a vampire, and who unsurprisingly considers him ''one of the best advisers any new media organization could have.''

Happily, Rosen is so irredeemably awful to anyone whose ass he's not kissing '-- or who's not kissing his '-- that his words speak entirely for themselves. There is no better demonstration of that than Rosen's risible 'Late Night with PressThink' videos, in which he drinks whiskey and makes soul-crushingly banal observations with the clueless self-importance of the privileged grind who has been rewarded all his life for deference and assumed it was for talent.

The video he did on Maddow, in which he imparts insights that would be right at home in an MSNBC press packet, belongs in a time capsule to demonstrate to future enlightened societies how things like stupid and smart, critique and sycophancy become inverted in societies characterized by one hundred flavors of inequality.

I've embedded the video at the end of this post, which is best viewed in small doses. This remark from a friend encapsulates the effect: 'I started off laughing, but slowly it began to weigh on me.' Because I love my readers, I have transcribed most of the video, so that you can get the full benefit of Rosen's insights, at minimal emotional cost, though you will miss out on some laughs if you don't sample the video at least a little.

''This is the third of my late night with PressThink videos. The first one was powered by Johnny Walker Black, the second by Macallan 12. Tonight I've gone downmarket and it's Dewar's on the rocks. [takes drink]. My subject tonight is why I loooove watching Rachel Maddow.

''When I say I love Rachel Maddow I love her performance, her presentation on television as one of the masters of political television which I really think she is.

''Rachel's a nerd. She has a serious interest in public policy and politics as problem-solving and Truth, Justice and the American Way as she sees it. She was a public policy major at Stanford, she studied for a PhD in political science at Oxford, she was an activist before she got involved in the media at all. It's this interest in politics and policy and the consequences of American policy that saves her from another kind of interest which is very common among people who do what she does and that is a fascination with the game of politics the way Chris Mathews or Chuck Todd exhibit it.

''And of course she's fortunate because MSNBC allows her political commitments to show and it's precisely that the fact that she can declare herself and take a stand and have a stake that she doesn't have to resort to this minute fascination with who's up and who's down, who won and who lost, how they're trying to manipulate us.

''She has no interest in seeing things in politics from the same angle as the professional operatives and manipulators, which is what Chuck Todd is so good at. And this alone endears me to her. She has no interest in the game, even though she is realistic about how the game is played.

''There's plenty of information in her show. She's very interested in what happened. She wants to inform her listeners, her viewers, but she does that by first engaging in passionate argument and she constructs her arguments with care and that style is just a very different style than what had come to dominate in political television which you might see in somebody like Candy Crowley or John King on CNN, who never tell you what they think but who are more than willing to assess in a savvy way the state of the game or who's up or who's down.

''Rachel Maddow has an apartment in The Village in New York and I have an apartment in the Village in New York and she wears goofy sneakers and she loves cities and she's a cosmopolitan person and all those things endear her to me.

[lengthy, tedious description of Overton Window]

''Maddow is just about the only one I can count on to notice when the Overton Window is in play and to point it out, and to draw attention to it today, this week! She'll say Did you see that??? Did you see what just happened???

''I also love the fact that perhaps like comics, Maddow believes that the way to succeed on television is in great writing. Until she has the writing right, until every word counts and is the right word she's not ready to do her show. This idea that the key to succeeding on television is actually the written word, not visual presentation or being chummy on the air, or smoothness of manner or being a classically sort of cool, perfectly put-together anchor person but writing, that really impresses me.

''I also love the way when she has somebody on who she wants to argue with or with whom there might be some tension, she will prepare a lead-in, a report to introduce this person and then say first question 'Did I get anything wrong?' 'Is there anything you would like to correct?' Which is not only an act of fairness but an act of confidence because you would only do that if you think you've really nailed the facts as well as the arguments in your presentation. Maybe there's other people in television who do that but I can't recall seeing it.

''Another thing I love about Maddow is she seems to understand that if I know how you think because I've really studied your mind but you don't really know how I think, because you haven't been playing close attention I have the advantage over you. And I love watching her work that advantage on the air. Maybe, intuitively a lot of her guests from the opposite party'...maybe they intuitively grasp this and this is why they're reluctant to go on the air but she's constantly inviting people who disagree with her on, and I think she's genuine that she really wants them to come on and she has a sense of fairness that coexists with her sense of passionate commitment to arguments and positions and that takes a certain talent as well.

''Rachel Maddow is an obsessive, like all good bloggers are obsessives, in fact even though she's never distinguished herself as a blogger, and we don't know her as that, I think it's more or less correct to say she is the first blogger type who ever got her own show on television. who ever got to anchor and host a show on network television. For that matter she is the first openly gay person to have her own show and she's the first intellectual to be a host of political television and all of those things are important milestones in commercial tv.

''Finally the thing that I love the most about Rachel Maddow is deep down she's a dork who learned how to be graceful not because it came naturally to her or she was born for it..but .simply through hard work and determination and tremendous focus. There's something extremely inspiring about that.''

'---

There you have it, folks, media criticism in 2013, now informing the journalist/billionaire alliance that's going to change everything.

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Wed, 20 Nov 2013 12:18

11:51 a.m. November 15, 2013

"We ought to be looking at business as a force for good." - Pierre Omidyar

"Like eBay, Omidyar Network harnesses the power of markets to enable people to tap their true potential." - Omidyar Network, "Frequently Asked Questions"

* *

Update: Glenn Greenwald responds to this piece on Twitter: "The idea that someone would build a pro-business, neoliberal outlet around Scahill, Poitras, Segura, Bates etc is just dumb." When asked about Omidyar Network's investment history, he said "I have no idea what you're talking about there. I don't speak for Omidyar Networks. You should ask them that."

* *

The world knows very little about the political motivations of Pierre Omidyar, the eBay billionaire who is founding (and funding) a quarter-billion-dollar journalism venture with Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill. What we do know is this: Pierre Omidyar is a very special kind of technology billionaire.

We know this because America's sharpest journalism critics have told us.

In a piece headlined "The Extraordinary Promise of the New Greenwald-Omidyar Venture", The Columbia Journalism Review gushed over the announcement of Omidyar's project. And just in case their point wasn't clear, they added the amazing subhead, "Adversarial muckrakers + civic-minded billionaire = a whole new world."

Ah yes, the fabled "civic-minded billionaire"'--you'll find him two doors down from the tooth fairy.

But seriously folks, CJR really, really wants you to know that Omidyar is a breed apart: nothing like the Randian Silicon Valley libertarian we've become used to seeing.

"...billionaires don't tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo. Billionaires tend to have a finger in every pie: powerful friends they don't want annoyed and business interests they don't want looked at.

"By hiring Greenwald & Co., Omidyar is making a clear statement that he's the billionaire exception....It's like Izzy Stone running into a civic-minded plastics billionaire determined to take I.F. Stone's Weekly large back in the day."

Later, the CJR "UPDATED" the piece with this missing bit of "oops":

"(UPDATE: I should disclose that the Omidyar Network helps fund CJR, something I didn't know until shortly after I published this post.)"

No biggie. Honest mistake. And anyway, plenty of others rushed to agree with CJR's assessment. Media critic Jack Shafer at Reuters described Omidyar's politics and ideology as "close to being a clean slate," repeatedly praising the journalism venture's and Omidyar's "idealism." The "NewCo" venture with Greenwald "harkens back to the techno-idealism of the 1980s and 1990s, when the first impulse of computer scientists, programmers, and other techies was to change the world, not make more money," Shafer wrote, ending his piece:

"As welcome as Omidyar's money is, his commitment to the investigative form and an open society is what I'm grateful for this afternoon. You can never uphold the correct verdict too often."

What all of these orgasmic accounts of Omidyar's "idealism" have in common is a total absence of skepticism. America's smartest media minds simply assume that Omidyar is an "exceptional" billionaire, a "civic-minded billionaire" driven by "idealism" rather than by profits. The evidence for this view is Pierre Omidyar's massive nonprofit venture, Omidyar Network, which has distributed hundreds of millions of dollars to causes all across the world.

And yet what no one seems able to specify is exactly what ideology Omidyar Network promotes. What does Omidyar's "idealism" mean in practice, and is it really so different from the non-idealism of other, presumably bad, billionaires? It's almost as if journalists can't answer those questions because they haven't bothered asking them.

So let's go ahead and do that now.

Since its founding in 2004, Omidyar Network has committed nearly $300 million to a range of nonprofit and for-profit "charity" outfits. An examination of the ideas behind the Omidyar Network and of the investments it has made suggests that its founder is anything but a "different" sort of billionaire. Instead, what emerges is almost a caricature of neoliberal ideology, complete with the trail of destruction that ensues when that ideology is put into practice. The generous support of the Omidyar Network goes toward "fighting poverty" through micro-lending, reducing third-world illiteracy rates by privatizing education and protecting human rights by expanding property titles ("private property rights") into slums and villages across the developing world.

In short, Omidyar Network's philanthropy reveals Omidyar as a free-market zealot with an almost mystical faith in the power of "markets" to transform the world, end poverty, and improve lives'--one micro-individual at a time.

All the neoliberal guru cant about solving the world's poverty problems by unlocking the hidden "micro-entrepreneurial" spirit of every starving Third Worlder is put into practice by Omidyar Network's investments. Charity without profit motive is considered suspect at best, subject to the laws of unintended consequences; good can only come from markets unleashed, and that translates into an ideology inherently hostile to government, democracy, public politics, redistribution of land and wealth, and anything smacking of social welfare or social justice.

In literature published by Omidyar Network, the assumption is that technology is an end in itself, that it naturally creates beneficial progress, and that the world's problems can be solved most effectively with for-profit business solutions.

The most charitable thing one can say about Omidyar's nonprofit network is that it reflects all the worst clich(C)s of contemporary neoliberal faith. In reality, it's much worse than that. In many regions, Omidyar Network investments have helped fund programs that create worsening conditions for the world's underclass, widening inequalities, enhancing exploitation, pushing millions of people into crippling debt and supporting anti-poverty programs that, in some cases, resulted in mass-suicide by the rural poor.

* *

Pierre Omidyar was one of the biggest early backers of the for-profit micro-lending industry. Through Omidyar Network, as well as personal gifts and investments, he has funnelled around $200 million into various micro-lending companies and projects over the past decade, with the goal of establishing an investment-grade microfinance sector that would be plugged into Wall Street and global finance. The neoliberal theory promised to unleash billions of new micro-entrepreneurs; the stark reality is that it saddled untold numbers with crushing debt and despair.

One of his first major investments into micro-lending came in 2005, when Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam gave Tufts University, their alma mater, $100 million to create the "Omidyar-Tufts Microfinance Fund," a managed for-profit fund dedicated to jump-starting the growth of the micro-finance industry. At the time, Tufts announced that Omidyar's gift was the "largest private allocation of capital to microfinance by an individual or family."

With the Tufts fund, Omidyar wanted to go beyond mere charitable donations to specific micro-lending organizations that targeted the developing world's poorest. At the same time, he wanted to create a whole new environment in which for-profit micro-lending companies could be self-sustaining and generate big enough profits to attract serious global investors.

This idea was at the core of Omidyar's vision of philanthropy: he believed that microfinance would eradicate poverty faster and better if it was run on a for-profit basis, and not like a charity.

"If you want to reach global scale -- and we're talking about hundreds of millions of people who need this -- you can't do it with philanthropy capital. There's not enough charity capital out there. By connecting with an institutional investor like a university, we would like to increase the level of professional investor involvement in this sector to try to stimulate more commercially viable investment products," Pierre Omidyar said in an interview at the time. "We ought to be looking at business as a force for good."

The idea behind micro-loans is very simple and seductive. It goes something like this: the only thing that prevents the hundreds of millions of people living in extreme poverty from achieving financial success is their lack of access to credit. Give them access to micro-loans'--referred to in Silicon Valley as "seed capital"'--and these would-be successful business-peasants and illiterate shantytown entrepreneurs would pluck themselves out of the muck by their own homemade sandal straps. Just think of it: hundreds of millions of peasants working as micro-individuals, taking out micro-loans, making micro-rational investments into their micro-businesses, dutifully paying their micro-loan payments on time and working in concert to harness the deregulated power of the markets to collectively lift society out of poverty. It's a grand neoliberal vision.

To that end, Omidyar has directed about a third of the Omidyar Network investment fund'--or about $100 million'--to support the micro-lending industry. The foundation calls this initiative "financial inclusion."

Shockingly, micro-loans aren't all that they've cracked up to be. After years of observation and multiplestudies, it turns out that the people benefiting most from micro-loans are the big global financial players: hedge funds, banks and the usual Wall Street hucksters. Meanwhile, the majority of the world's micro-debtors are either no better off or have been sucked into a morass of crippling debt and even deeper poverty, which offers no escape but death.

Take SKS Microfinance, an Omidyar-backed Indian micro-lender whose predatory lending practices and aggressive collection tactics have caused a rash of suicides across India.

Omidyar funded SKS through Unitus, a microfinance private equity fund bankrolled by the Omidyar Network to the tune of at least $11.7 million. ON boosted SKS in its promotional materials as a micro-lender that's "serving the rural poor in India" and that exemplifies a company that's providing "people with the means to address their needs and improve their lives."

In 2010, SKS made headlines and stirred up bitter controversy about the role that profits should play in anti-poverty initiatives when the company went public with an IPO that generated about $358 million, giving SKS a market valuation of more than $1.6 billion. The IPO made millions for its wealthy investors, including the Omidyar-backed Unitus fund, which earned a cool $5 million profit from the SKS IPO, according to the Puget Sound Business Journal.

Some were bothered, but others saw it as proof that the power of the markets could be harnessed to succeed where traditional charity programs supposedly hadn't. The New York Times reported:

"An Indian company with rich American backers is about to raise up to $350 million in a stock offering closely watched by philanthropists around the world, showing that big profits can be made from small helping-hand loans to poor cowherds and basket weavers."

Controversy or not, SKS embodied Omidyar's vision of philanthropy: it was a for-profit corporation that fought poverty while generating lucrative returns for its investors. Here would be proof-positive that the profit motive makes everyone a winner.

And then reality set in.

In 2012, it emerged that while the SKS IPO was making millions for its wealthy investors, hundreds of heavily indebted residents of India's Andhra Pradesh state were driven to despair and suicide by the company's cruel and aggressive debt-collection practices. The rash of suicides soared right at the peak of a large micro-lending bubble in Andhra Pradesh, in which many of the poor were taking out multiple micro-loans to cover previous loans that they could no longer pay. It was subprime lending fraud taken to the poorest regions of the world, stripping them of what little they had to live on. It got to the point where the Chief Minister of Andrah Pradesh publicly appealed to the state's youth and young women not to commit suicide, telling them, "Your lives are valuable."

The AP conducted a stunning in-depth investigation of the SKS suicides, and their reporting needs to be quoted at length to understand just how evil this program is. The article begins:

"First they were stripped of their utensils, furniture, mobile phones, televisions, ration cards and heirloom gold jewelry. Then, some of them drank pesticide. One woman threw herself in a pond. Another jumped into a well with her children.

"Sometimes, the debt collectors watched nearby."

What prompted the AP investigation was the gulf between the reported rash of suicides linked to SKS debt collectors, and SKS's public statements denying it had knowledge of or any role in the predatory lending abuses. However, the AP got a hold of internal SKS documents that contradicted their public denials:

"More than 200 poor, debt-ridden residents of Andhra Pradesh killed themselves in late 2010, according to media reports compiled by the government of the south Indian state. The state blamed microfinance companies - which give small loans intended to lift up the very poor - for fueling a frenzy of overindebtedness and then pressuring borrowers so relentlessly that some took their own lives.

"The companies, including market leader SKS Microfinance, denied it.

"However, internal documents obtained by The Associated Press, as well as interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees, independent researchers and videotaped testimony from the families of the dead, show top SKS officials had information implicating company employees in some of the suicides."

The AP investigation and internal reports showed just how brutal the SKS microfinancing program was, how women were particularly targeted because of their heightened sense of shame and community responsibility'--here is the brutal reality of financial capitalism compared to the utopian blather mouthed at Davos conferences, or in the slick pamphlets issued by the Omidyar Network:

"Both reports said SKS employees had verbally harassed over-indebted borrowers, forced them to pawn valuable items, incited other borrowers to humiliate them and orchestrated sit-ins outside their homes to publicly shame them. In some cases, the SKS staff physically harassed defaulters, according to the report commissioned by the company. Only in death would the debts be forgiven.

"The videos and reports tell stark stories:

"One woman drank pesticide and died a day after an SKS loan agent told her to prostitute her daughters to pay off her debt. She had been given 150,000 rupees ($3,000) in loans but only made 600 rupees ($12) a week.

"Another SKS debt collector told a delinquent borrower to drown herself in a pond if she wanted her loan waived. The next day, she did. She left behind four children.

"One agent blocked a woman from bringing her young son, weak with diarrhea, to the hospital, demanding payment first. Other borrowers, who could not get any new loans until she paid, told her that if she wanted to die, they would bring her pesticide. An SKS staff member was there when she drank the poison. She survived.

"An 18-year-old girl, pressured until she handed over 150 rupees ($3)'--meant for a school examination fee'--also drank pesticide. She left a suicide note: 'Work hard and earn money. Do not take loans.'"

As a result of the bad press this scandal caused, the Omidyar Network deleted its Unitus investment from its website'--nor does Omidyar boast of its investments in SKS Microfinance any longer. Meanwhile, Unitus mysteriously dissolved itself and laid off all of its employees right around the time of the IPO, under a cloud of suspicion that Unitus insiders made huge personal profits from the venture, profits that in theory were supposed to be reinvested into expanding micro-lending for the poor.

Thus spoke the profit motive.

Curiously, in the aftermath of the SKS micro-lending scandal, Omidyar Network was dragged into another political scandal in India when it was revealed that Omidyar and the Ford Foundation were placing their own paid researchers onto the staffs of India's MPs. The program, called Legislative Assistants to MPs (LAMPs), was funded with $1 million from Omidyar Network and $855,000 from the Ford Foundation. It was shut down last year after India's Ministry of Home Affairs complained about foreign lobbying influencing Indian MPs, and promised to investigate how Omidyar-funded research for India's parliament may have been "colored" by an agenda.

But SKS is not the only microfinancing investment gone bad. The biggest and most reputable micro-lenders, including those funded by the Omidyar Network, have come under serious and sustained criticism for predatory interest rates and their aggressive debt-collection techniques.

Take BRAC, another big beneficiary of Omidyar's efforts to boost "financial inclusion."

Started in the early 1970s as a war relief organization, BRAC has grown into the largest non-governmental organization in the world. It employs over 100,000 people in countries across the globe. While BRAC is known mostly for its micro-lending operation activities, the outfit is a diversified nonprofit business operation. It is involved in education, healthcare and even develops its own hybrid seed varieties. Much of BRAC's operations are financed by its micro-lending activities.

Omidyar Network praises BRAC for its work to "empower the poor to improve their own lives," and has given at least $8 million to help BRAC set up micro-lending banking infrastructure in Liberia and Sierra Leone.

But BRAC seems to worry more about its own bottom line than it does about the well-being of its impoverished borrowers, the majority of whom are women and who pay an average annual interest rate of 40 percent.

This twisted sense of priority could be seen after one of the worst cyclones in the history of Bangladesh left thousands dead in 2007, destroying entire villages and towns in its path. In the cyclone's wake, the Omidyar-funded BRAC micro-lending debt collectors showed up at the disaster zone along with other micro-lenders, and went to work aggressively shaking down borrowers, forcing some victims (mostly women) to go so far as to sell their relief/aid materials, or to take out secondary loans to pay off the first loans.

According to a study about micro-lenders in the aftermath of Cyclone Sidr:

"Sidr victims who lost almost everything in the cyclone, experienced pressure and harassment from non­governmental organisations (NGOs) for repayment of microcredit instalments. Such intense pressure led some of the Sidr­affected borrowers to sell out the relief materials they received from different sources. Such pressure for loan recovery came from large organisations such as BRAC, ASA and even the Nobel Prize winning organisation Grameen Bank.

"Even the most severely affected people are expected to pay back in a weekly basis, with the prevailing interest rate. No system of 'break' or 'holiday' period is available in the banks' current charter. No exceptions are made during a time of natural calamity. The harsh rules practised by the microcredit lender organisations led the disaster affected people even selling their relief assistance. Some even had to sell their leftover belongings to pay back their weekly instalments."

These tactics may be harsh, but they pay off for micro-lenders. And it's a lucrative operation: BRAC primarily targets women, offers loans with predatory interest rates and uses traditional values and close village relationships to shame and pressure borrowers into selling and doing whatever they can to make their weekly payments. It works. Loan recovery rates for the industry average between 95 and 98 percent. For BRAC, that rate was a comfy 99.3 percent.

So do predatory micro-loans really help lift the world's poorest people out of poverty? Neoliberal ideology says they do '-- and the Omidyar Network represents one of the purest distillations of that ideology put into practice in the poorest and most vulnerable parts of the world.

As Cambridge University economics professor Ha-Joon Chang argued, saying of micro-lending:

"[It] constitutes a powerful institutional and political barrier to sustainable economic and social development, and so also to poverty reduction. Finally, we suggest that continued support for microfinance in international development policy circles cannot be divorced from its supreme serviceability to the neoliberal/globalization agenda."

Omidyar Network has followed the same disastrous neoliberal script in other areas of investment, particularly its investments into privatizing public schools in the US and in poor regions of Africa.

One of the earliest Omidyar investments went to an online private charity website for needy public schools here in the US. As David Sirota wrote, huge billionaire foundations and corporations have been holding children hostage by starving public-school funding and replacing it with "charity" money from the likes of the Wal-Mart Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Broad Foundation. We can add the Omidyar Network to this list as well.

Omidyar's foundation invested in the same idea, but with a web 2.0 crowd-source twist: DonorsChoose.org allows individuals to pledge amounts as small as $10, and allows school teachers to get online asking for small sums to help their classrooms. The end result, of course, is that it normalizes the continued strangling of public schools and the sense that only private funding can save education.

Omidyar poured millions into DonorsChoose and organized donations from other Silicon Valley donors. At first, most public school teachers didn't see the angle; many used the resource to raise funds for their own classrooms.

It wasn't until DonorsChoose announced its partnership with the anti-public-education film "Waiting For Superman" that teachers realized they'd been duped. The movie promoted the myth that education could only be saved by the likes of Tea Party-backed school "reform" advocate Michelle Rhee. Teachers organized a boycott of DonorsChoose after the Omidyar-funded group announced it was essentially bribing its members with a $15 gift certificate to anyone who bought tickets for "Waiting for Superman."

Two years later, DonorsChoose partnered and promoted yet another right-wing teacher-bashing propaganda film, "Won't Back Down."

Overseas, the Omidyar Network is embarking on a school privatization program that will make DonorsChoose look like Mother Theresa's handiwork. Omidyar provided seed capital for a new Africa-based for-profit private school enterprise for the poor called Bridge International. In 2009, ON gave Bridge a total of $1.8 million; Matt Bannick, the top figure (managing partner) in the Omidyar Network, sits on Bridge International's board of directors.

Bridge International's first schools are being built in Kenya, and are slated to expand across the sub-Sahara, hoping to rope millions of poor African kids into its schools. Bridge's strategic partner is the for-profit education giant, Pearson. Diane Ravitch, former US Assistant Secretary of Education and critic of school "reform" efforts, has warned about Pearson's near-monopolistic power influencing the privatization of American education (see Ravitch's article"The Pearsonization of the American Mind.")

The idea behind Bridge International is to provide a franchised "school in a box" model under which each school teaches the exact same curriculum at the exact same time to every student. Teachers are given minimal training'--they're merely required to teach according to the script given to them and read out to their students, scripts delivered through Nook tablets. Students pay $5 a month'--a lot for each student in areas as poor as sub-Saharan Africa. Currently one new Bridge International school is opening every 2.5 days around Kenya, overtaking public education'--with plans to expand further.

It sounds like a good idea, but the problem is that Bridge's business model has a very narrow set of supporters, namely: free-market think-tanks, the global for-profit education industry and proponents of a neoliberal utopia who want to defund public education and replace it with private schooling. Bridge is only a few years old, but criticism of its educational model is already piling up'--even from centrist pro-business thinktanks like the Brookings Institution. Even at $4 or $5 a month, Bridge's "low cost" education is too expensive for many in the developing world, forcing children to go to work and making families choose between buying food and paying for education. Naturally, food wins out. And that simply means that many children can't afford to go school, which only increases and reinforces stratification and inequality.

The fight against illiteracy requires free, quality education that's available to all children. What it doesn't need is a bunch of neoliberal techno-disruptors who want to turn education into a for-profit industry that provides schooling only to those who can afford it. And anyway, the very notion that you can squeeze enough profit from millions of the poorest children in the world to attract mega venture capital, while providing quality education is absurd. That profit money is extracted from the very people Bridge is supposedly trying to help.

Still think that Pierre Omidyar is a "different" type of billionaire? Still convinced he's a one-of-a-kind "civic-minded" idealist?

Then you might want to ask yourself why Omidyar is so smitten by the ideas of an economist known as "The Friedrich Hayek of Latin America." His name is Hernando de Soto and he's been adored by everyone from Milton Friedman to Margaret Thatcher to the Koch brothers. Omidyar Network poured millions of nonprofit dollars into subsidizing his ideas, helping put them into practice in poor slums around the developing world.

In February 2011, the Omidyar Network announced a hefty $4.96 million grant to a Peru-based free-market think tank, the Institute for Liberty & Democracy (ILD).

Perhaps no single investment by Omidyar more clearly reveals his orthodox neoliberal vision for the world'--and what constitutes "civic-mindedness"'--than his support for the ILD and its founder and president, Hernando De Soto, whom the ON has tapped to participate in other Omidyar-sponsored events.

De Soto is a celebrity in the world of neoliberal/libertarian gurus. He and his Institute for Liberty & Democracy are credited with popularizing a free-market version of Third World land reform and turning it into policy in city slums all across the developing world. Whereas "land reform" in countries like Peru'--dominated by a tiny handful of landowning families'--used to mean land redistribution, Hernando De Soto came up with a counter-idea more amenable to the Haves: give property title to the country's poor masses, so that they'd have a secure and legal title to their shanties, shacks, and whatever land they might claim to live on or own.

De Soto's pitch essentially comes down to this: Give the poor masses a legal "stake" in whatever meager property they live in, and that will "unleash" their inner entrepreneurial spirit and all the national "hidden capital" lying dormant beneath their shanty floors. De Soto claimed that if the poor living in Lima's vast shantytowns were given legal title ownership over their shacks, they could then use that legal title as collateral to take out microfinance loans, which would then be used to launch their micro-entrepreneurial careers. Newly-created property holders would also have a "stake" in the ruling political and economic system. It's the sort of cant that makes perfect sense to the Davos set (where De Soto is a star) but that has absolutely zero relevance to problems of entrenched poverty around the world.

Since the Omidyar Network names "property rights" as one of the five areas of focus, it's no surprise that Omidyar money would eventually find its way into Hernando De Soto's free-market ideas mill. In 2011, Omidyar not only gave De Soto $5 million to advance his ideas'--he also tapped De Soto to serve as a judge in an Omidyar-sponsored competition for projects focused on improving property rights for the poor. The more you know about Hernando De Soto, the harder it is to see Omidyar's financial backing as "idealistic" or "civic-minded."

For one thing, De Soto is the favorite of the very same billionaire brothers who play villains to Omidyar's supposed hero'--yes, the reviled Koch brothers. In 2004, the libertarian Cato Institute (ne(C) "The Charles Koch Foundation") awarded Hernando De Soto its biannual "Milton Friedman Prize"'--which comes with a hefty $500,000 check'--for "empowering the poor" and "advancing the cause of liberty." De Soto was chosen by a prize jury consisting of such notable humanitarians as former Pinochet labor minister Jose Pi±era, Vladimir Putin's economic advisor Andrei Illarionov, Washington Post neoconservative columnist Anne Applebaum, FedEx CEO Fred Smith, and Milton Friedman's wife Rosie. Milton was in the audience during the awards ceremony; he heartily approved.

Indeed, Hernando De Soto is de facto royalty in the world of neoliberal-libertarian gurus'--he's been called "The Friedrich von Hayek of Latin America," not least because Hayek launched De Soto's career as a guru more than three decades ago.

So who is Hernando De Soto, where do his ideas come from, and why might Pierre Omidyar think him deserving of five million dollars '-- ten times the amount the Koch Brothers awarded him?

De Soto was born into an elite "white European" family in Peru, who fled into exile in the West following Peru's 1948 coup'--his father was the secretary to the deposed president. Hernando spent most of the next 30 years in Switzerland, getting his education at elite schools, working his way up various international institutions based in Geneva, serving as the president of a Geneva-based copper cartel outfit, the International Council of Copper Exporting Countries, and working as an official in GATT (General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs).

De Soto didn't return to live in Peru until the end of the 1970s, to oversee a new gold placer mining company he'd formed with a group of foreign investors. The mining company's profits suffered due to Peru's weak property laws and almost non-existent cultural appreciation of property title, especially among the country's poor masses'--De Soto's investors pulled out of the mining venture after visiting the company's gold mines and seeing hundreds of peasants panning on the company's concessions. That experience inspired De Soto to change Peruvians' political assumptions regarding property rights. Rather than start off by trying to convince them that foreign mining firms should have exclusive rights to gold from traditionally communal Peruvian lands, De Soto came up with a clever end-around idea: giving property title to the masses of Peru's poor living in the vast shanties and shacks in the slums of Lima and cities beyond. It was a long-term strategy to alter cultural expectations about property and ownership, thereby improving the investment climate for mining companies and other investors. The point was to align the masses' assumptions about property ownership with those of the banana republic's handful of rich landowning families.

In 1979, De Soto organized a conference in Peru's capital Lima, featuring Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek as speakers and guests. At the time, both Friedman and Hayek were serving as key advisors to General Augusto Pinochet's "shock therapy" program in nearby Chile, an economic experiment that combined libertarian market policies with concentration camp terror.

Two years after De Soto's successful conference in Lima, in 1981, Hayek helped De Soto set up his own free-market think tank in Lima, the "Institute for Liberty and Democracy" (ILD). The ILD became the first of a large international network of right-wing neoliberal think tanks connected to the Mother Ships'--Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, and Britain's Institute for Economic Affairs, Margaret Thatcher's go-to think tank. By 1983, De Soto's Institute was also receiving heavy funding from Reagan's Cold War front group, the National Endowment for Democracy, which promoted free-market think tanks and programs around the world, and by the end of Reagan decade, De Soto produced his first manifesto, "The Other Path"'--a play on the name of Peru's Maoist guerrilla group, Shining Path, then fighting a bloody war for power. But whereas the Shining Path's political program called for nationalizing and redistributing property, most of which was in the hands of a few rich families, De Soto's "Other Path" called for maintaining property distribution as it was, and legalizing its current structure by democratizing property titles, the pieces of paper with the stamps. Everyone would become a micro-oligarch and micro-landowner under this scheme...

With help and funding from US and international institutions, De Soto quickly became a powerful political force behind the scenes. In 1990, De Soto insinuated himself into the inner circle of newly-elected president Alberto Fujimori, who quickly turned into a brutal dictator, and is currently serving a 25-year prison sentence for crimes against humanity, murder, kidnapping, and illegal wiretapping.

Under De Soto's influence, Fujimori's politics suddenly changed; almost overnight, the populist Keynsian candidate became the free-market authoritarian "Chinochet" he governed as. As Fujimori's top advisor, Hernando De Soto was the architect of so-called "Fujishock" therapy applied to Peru's economy. Officially, De Soto served as Fujimori's drug czar from 1990-1992, an unusual role for an economist given the fact that Peru's army was fighting a brutal war with Peru's powerful cocaine drug lords. At the time Peru was the world's largest cocaine producer; as drug czar, Hernando De Soto therefore positioned himself as the point-man between Peru's military and security services, America's DEA and drug czar under the first President Bush, and Peru's president Alberto Fujimori. It's the sort of position that you'd want to have if you wanted "deep state" power rather than mere ministerial power.

During those first two years when De Soto served under Fujimori, human rights abuses were rampant. Fujimori death squads'--with names like the "Grupo Colina"'--targeted labor unions and government critics and their families. Two of the worst massacres committed under Fujimori's reign, and for which he was later jailed, took place while De Soto served as his advisor and drug czar.

The harsh free-market shock-therapy program that De Soto convinced Fujimori to implement resulted in mass misery for Peru. During the two years De Soto served as Fujimori's advisor, real wages plunged 40%, the poverty rate rose to over 54% of the population, and the percentage of the workforce that was either unemployed or underemployed soared to 87.3%.

But while the country suffered, De Soto's Institute for Liberty and Democracy'--the outfit that Omidyar gave $5 million to in 2011'--thrived: its staff grew to over 100 as funds poured in. A World Bank staffer who worked with the ILD described it as,

"a kind of school for the country. Most of the important ministers, lawyers, journalists, and economists in Peru are ILD alumni."

In 1992, Fujimori orchestrated a constitutional coup, disbanding Peru's Congress and its courts, and imposing emergency rule-by-decree. It was another variation of the same Pinochet blueprint.

Just before Fujimori's coup, De Soto indemnified himself by officially resigning from the cabinet. However in the weeks and months after the coup, De Soto provided crucial PR cover, downplaying the coup to the foreign press. For instance, De Soto told the Los Angeles Times that the public should temper their judgment of Fujimori's coup:

"You've got to see this as the trial and error of a president who's trying to find his way."

In the New York Times, De Soto spun the coup as willed by the people, the ultimate democratic politics:

"People are fed up, fed up...[Fujimori] has attacked two hated institutions at just the right time. There is an enormous need to believe in him."

Years later, Fujimori's notorious spy chief Vladimiro Montesinos testified to Peru's Congress that De Soto helped mastermind the 1992 coup. De Soto denied involvement; but in 2011, two years after Fujimori was jailed for crimes against humanity, De Soto joined the presidential campaign for Keiko Fujimori, the jailed dictator's daughter and leader of Fujimori's right-wing party. Keiko Fujimori ran on a platform promising to free her father from prison if she won; De Soto spent much of the campaign red-baiting her opponent as a Communist. That led Peru's Nobel Prize-winning author Mario Vargas Llosa to denounce De Soto as a "fujimontesenista" with "few democratic credentials."

So in the same year that De Soto was trying to put the daughter of Peru's Pinochet in power and to spring the dictator from prison, Omidyar Network awarded him $5 million.

It was during Fujimori's dictatorial emergency rule, from 1992-94, that De Soto rolled out a property-title pilot program in Lima, in which 200,000 households were given formal title. In 1996, Fujimori implemented De Soto's property-titling program on a national scale, with help from the World Bank and a new government property agency staffed by people from De Soto's Institute for Liberty and Democracy. By 2000, the magical promise of an explosion in bank credits to all the new micro-property owners never materialized; in fact, there was no noticeable difference in bank lending to the poor whatsoever, whether they had property title or not.

The World Bank and the project's neoliberal supporters led by Hernando De Soto were not happy with data showing no uptick in lending, which threatened to unravel the entire happy theory behind property titling as the answer to Third World poverty. De Soto was in the process of peddling the same property-titling program to countries around the world; data was needed to justify the program. So the World Bank funded a new study in Peru in the early 2000s, and discovered something startling: In homes that had formal property titles, the parents in those homes spent up to 40% more time outside of their homes than they did before they were given title. De Soto took that statistic and argued that it was a good thing because it proved giving property title to homeowners made them feel secure enough to leave their shanties and shacks. The assumption was that in the dark days before shanty dwellers had legal titles, they were too scared to leave their shacks lest some other savage steal it from them while they were out shopping.

No one ever conclusively explained why shanty parents were spending so much more time outside of their homes, but the important thing was that it made everyone forget the utter failure of the property title program's core promise'--that property titles would ignite micro-lending thanks to the collateral of the micro-entrepreneur's micro-shack as collateral. Thanks to De Soto's salesmanship and the backing of the world's neoliberal nomenklatura '-- Bill Clinton called De Soto "the world's greatest living economist" and he was praised by everyone from Milton Friedman to Vladimir Putin to Margaret Thatcher. The disappointing results in Peru were ignored, and De Soto's program was extended to developing countries around the world including Egypt, Cambodia, the Philippines, Indonesia and elsewhere. And in nearly every case, De Soto's Institute for Liberty and Democracy has taken the lead in advising governments and selling the dream of turning titled slum-dwellers into micro-entrepreneurs.

The real change brought by De Soto's property-titling program has ranged from nil to nightmarish.

In Cambodia, where the World Bank implemented De Soto's land-titling program in 2001, poor and vulnerable people in the capital Phnom Penh have suffered at the hands of land developers and speculators who've used arson, police corruption and violence to forcibly evict roughly 10% of the city's population from their homes in more valuable districts, relocating them to the city outskirts.

An article in Slate titled "The De Soto Delusion" described what happened in Cambodia when the land-titling program was first implemented:

"In the nine months or so leading up to the project kickoff, a devastating series of slum fires and forced evictions purged 23,000 squatters from tracts of untitled land in the heart of Phnom Penh. These squatters were then plopped onto dusty relocation sites several miles outside of the city, where there were no jobs and where the price of commuting to and from central Phnom Penh (about $2 per day) surpassed whatever daily wage they had been earning in town before the fires. Meanwhile, the burned-out inner city land passed immediately to some of the wealthiest property developers in the country."

De Soto and his Institute for Liberty and Democracy have advised property-title programs elsewhere too'--Haiti, Dominican Republic, Panama, Russia'--again with results ranging from nil to bad. Even where it doesn't lead to mass evictions and violence, it has the effect of shifting a greater tax burden onto the poor, who end up paying more in property taxes, and of forcing them to pony up for costly filing fees to gain title, fees that they often cannot afford. Property title in and of itself'--without a whole range of reforms in governance, corruption, education, income, wealth distribution and so on'--is clearly no panacea. But it does provide an alternative to programs that give money to the poor and redistribute wealth, and that alone is a good thing, if you're the type smitten by Hernando De Soto'--as Omidyar clearly is.

Studies of property-titling programs in the slums of Brazil and Manila revealed that it created a new bitterly competitive culture and bifurcation, in which a small handful of titled slum dwellers quickly learn to benefit by turning into micro-slumlords renting out dwellings to lesser slum dwellers, who subsequently find themselves forced to pay monthly fees for their shanty rooms'--creating an underclass within the underclass. De Soto has described these slums as "acres of diamonds"'--wealth waiting to be unlocked by property titling'--and his acolytes even coined a new acronym for slums: "Strategic Low-income Urban Management Systems."

All of which begs the obvious question: If De Soto's property-title program is such a proven failure in case after case, why is it so popular among the world's political and business elites?

The answer is rather obvious: It offers a simple, low-cost, technocratic market solution to the problem of global poverty'--a complex and costly problem that can only be alleviated by dedicating huge amounts of resources and a very different politics from the one that tells us that markets are god, markets can solve everything. Even before Omidyar committed $5 million to the dark plutocratic "idealism" De Soto represents, he was Tweeting his admiration for De Soto:

"Brilliant dinner with Hernando de Soto. Property rights underlie and enable everything."

Indeed, property rights underlie and enable everything Omidyar wants to hear'--but distract and divert from what the targets of those programs might actually need or be asking for.

Which brings us back to the wonderful words written about Pierre Omidyar last month: Where is the proof that he's a "civic-minded" billionaire, a "different" billionaire, an "idealistic" billionaire who's in it for ideals and not for profit? How is Omidyar any different from any other billionaire'--when he is funding the same programs and pushing the same vision for the world backed by the Kochs, Soros, Gates, and every other neoliberal billionaire?

When you scratch the surface of his investments and get a sense of what sort of ideal world he'd like to make, it becomes clear that Omidyar is no different from his peers.

And the reason that matters, of course, is because Pierre Omidyar's dystopian vision is merging with Glenn Greenwald's and Laura Poitras' monopoly on the crown jewels of the National Security Agency '-- the world's secrets, our secrets '-- and using the value of those secrets as the capital for what's being billed as an entirely new, idealistic media project, an idealism that the CJR and others promise will not shy away from taking on power.

The question, however, is what defines power to a neoliberal mind? We're going to take a wild guess here and say: The State.

So brace yourself, you're about to get something you've never seen before: billionaire-backed journalism taking on the power of the state. How radical is that? To quote "60 Minutes" producer Lowell Bergman:

"What has been adjudicated and established in the wake of Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement is the ability of the press to basically write or broadcast almost anything about the government.There's very few restrictions in that way. It's not true when we're talking about private power, especially major Fortune 500 corporations, or people worth more than, say, a billion dollars."

In other words: look out Government, you're about to be pummeled by a crusading, righteous billionaire! And corporate America? Ah, don't worry. Your dirty secrets'--freshly transferred from the nasty non-profit hands of the Guardian to the aggressively for-profit hands of Pierre Omidyar'--are safe with us.

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Wed, 20 Nov 2013 12:27

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Mon, 18 Nov 2013 03:42

http://www.duffelblog.com/2013/10/pentagon-proposes-new-antarctica-command/#13847403069391&req=rpuSetSize&h=248&w=226

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Wed, 20 Nov 2013 13:29

Paul Ciancia, the suspected gunman in the Nov. 1 shooting spree at LAX, has been released from the hospital and was in federal custody, authorities said Tuesday.

Suspected LAX shooter Paul Ciancia seen in a DMV photo. (Credit: FBI)

The last remaining patient from the shooting at Los Angeles International Airport was released from Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Westwood on Monday, Roxanne Moster said in a statement.

Ciancia, who has been in critical condition after the shooting, was the last patient from the incident taken to UCLA Medical Center.

Ciancia had been taken into custody by the U.S. Marshals Service, according to Thom Mrozek, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Central District of California.

No court appearance for Ciancia had been scheduled and no details about his ''custody status'' or the location where he was held were being released, Mrozek said.

Ciancia had allegedly pulled an assault rifle from a bag near the entrance to Terminal 3, fatally shooting Transportation Security Administration agent Gerardo I. Hernandez at point-blank range, and then returning to fire on Hernandez again. Ciancia allegedly then fired on at least two other TSA employees and a civilian passenger as he proceeded through the TSA checkpoint and into the gate area.

He was shot by airport police responding to the incident, which left LAX in chaos and disrupted air travel around the world.

The 23-year-old was charged with the murder of a federal officer and the intentional use of a firearm during the commission of violence an international airport.

A New Jersey native who had been living in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Sun Valley, Ciancia was believed to have acted alone, specifically targeting TSA employees.

Check back for updates on this developing story.

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Mon, 18 Nov 2013 23:04

Shocking new developments in the re-investigation of Brittany Murphy's untimely demise confirm her father's long-standing suspicions of a possible poisoning. Angelo Bertolotti never believed the conclusion of the LA Coroner that both Brittany and her husband Simon Monjack died of natural causes (pneumonia and anemia), five months apart.

After years of litigation and obstruction, Brittany's father secured the release of her hair, blood and tissues for independent testing. Based on the symptoms exhibited by Brittany and Simon shortly prior to their deaths, Mr. Bertolotti ordered testing for heavy metals and toxins. The Office of the Los Angeles Coroner admittedly did not test for any poisonous substances.

A father's heart steered him in the right direction, since the tests confirmed Angelo Bertolotti's worst suspicions. The lab report states, ''Ten (10) of the heavy metals evaluated were detected at levels higher that the WHO [The World Health Organization] high levels. Testing the hair strand sample identified as'' back of the head'' we have detected ten (10) heavy metals at levels above the WHO high levels recommendation. If we were to eliminate the possibility of a simultaneous accidental heavy metals exposure to the sample donor then the only logical explanation would be an exposure to these metals (toxins) administered by a third party perpetrator with likely criminal intent.'' (Emphasis added)

Heavy metals can be commonly found in rodenticides (chemicals that kill mice or rats) and insecticides. Symptoms of acute heavy metal poisoning in humans can include headache, dizziness, gastrointestinal, neurological, respiratory, or dermal symptoms such as abdominal cramps, tremors, tachycardia, sweating, disorientation, coughing, wheezing, congestion, and pneumonia. Brittany Murphy and Simon Monjack exhibited all of these symptoms prior to their untimely deaths. The levels of heavy metals detected in Brittany Murphy's hair were from 2 to over 9 times higher than the levels set as ''high'' by The World Health Organization.

''Vicious rumors, spread by tabloids, unfairly smeared Brittany's reputation,'' said Angelo Bertolotti. ''My daughter was neither anorexic nor a drug junkie, as they repeatedly implied. Brittany and Simon were ridiculed by The Hollywood Reporter, when they complained of being under surveillance and in fear for their lives. I will not rest until the truth about these tragic events is told. There will be justice for Brittany.''

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Tue, 19 Nov 2013 03:30

18 November 2013Last updated at 00:53 ET Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play.

Among the dead was Irek Minnikhanov, a son of the president of the Russian Republic of Tatarstan, as Tim Allman reports.

A passenger plane has crashed at an airport in the Russian city of Kazan, killing all 50 people on board.

The Boeing 737 had taken off from Moscow and was trying to land but exploded on impact at about 19:20 local time (15:20 GMT), officials said.

The Emergencies Ministry said there were 44 passengers and six crew members on the Tatarstan Airlines flight.

Investigators are now looking at whether a technical failure or crew error may have caused the crash.

Investigative committee official Vladimir Markin told Rossiya 24 TV that experts were checking whether poor quality fuel and weather conditions could have been contributing factors.

It was raining in Kazan when the aircraft crashed.

Among the dead was Irek Minnikhanov, a son of the president of the Russian Republic of Tatarstan, according to the official passenger list.

Aleksander Antonov, who headed Tatarstan's branch of the Federal Security Service, was also among the passengers.

The UK Foreign Office confirmed that a British national died in the crash.

"We are in touch with local authorities and providing consular assistance to those affected," it said in a statement.

The victims also included two children.

Russian President Vladimir Putin "expressed his condolences to the relatives of the victims in this horrible disaster", his spokesman Dmitry Peskov was quoted by the news agency Interfax as saying.

A government commission has been set up to investigate the cause, he said.

Reports said the pilot, 47-year-old Rustem Salikhov, had already tried to land several times before crashing.

The crew had said they were not ready to land because of technical problems, Russian news agencies report.

A journalist who said she had flown on the same aircraft from Kazan to Moscow earlier on Sunday told Russia's Channel TV that there was a strong vibration during the landing in the Russian capital.

"When we were landing it was not clear whether there was a strong wind, although in Moscow the weather was fine, or some kind of technical trouble or problem with the flight," said Lenara Kashafutdinova.

"We were blown in different directions, the plane was tossed around. The man sitting next to me was white as a sheet."

The plane had been in service since 1990, Russian officials are quoted as saying by the local media.

The airport in Kazan - the capital of Tatarstan - has been closed since the accident and is not expected to re-open until Monday afternoon.

Kazan lies about 720km (450 miles) east of Moscow.

Family members and friends of the victims are getting help by a team of psychologists. The government also promised financial compensation.

The BBC's Daniel Sandford in Moscow says that although some of Russia's biggest airlines now have very good reputations, frequent crashes by smaller operators mean the country has one of the worst air safety records in the world.

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Wed, 20 Nov 2013 08:58

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Tue, 19 Nov 2013 03:42

Russia's Sovcombank to buy local GE Money BankTop News

Russia's Sovcombank to buy local GE Money Bank

Mon, Oct 28 09:45 AM EDT

MOSCOW, Oct 28 (Reuters) - Russia's mid-sized Sovcombank is buying the local unit of GE Money Bank, a subsidiary of U.S. conglomerate General Electric, in another departure of a foreign bank from a Russian domestic market dominated by state-controlled lenders.

Sovcombank, ranked among Russia's top 60 by assets, said on Monday it had signed a binding agreement to buy GE Money Bank, expecting to close the deal after getting the green light from local regulators. It did not disclose the price.

The Russian unit of GE Money Bank is ranked among Russia's 150 biggest banks by assets and is focused on high-margin consumer lending. It declined to comment.

General Electric will float a majority stake in its Swiss consumer finance unit GE Money Bank in the fourth quarter, as part of a retreat from the sector to focus more on industrial interests.

Many foreign banks entered Russia just before the global financial crisis of 2008-2009. They are now scaling back operations to allocate funds to meet higher capital requirements at home, at a time when Russian state-controlled giants like Sberbank and VTB are ramping up their business.

Although consumer lending margins remain high, the Russian central bank is trying to cool consumer lending expansion, which saw growth of about 50-70 percent in recent years, by demanding more capital and provisions for possible bad loans.

Among others, Britain's Barclays and HSBC and Spain's Santander have scaled back their operations in Russia. However, other foreign banks such as Italy's UniCredit and Austria's Raiffeisen Bank see Russia as a key source of growth.

Russia's Sovcombank to buy local GE Money BankTop News

Russia's Sovcombank to buy local GE Money Bank

Mon, Oct 28 09:45 AM EDT

MOSCOW, Oct 28 (Reuters) - Russia's mid-sized Sovcombank is buying the local unit of GE Money Bank, a subsidiary of U.S. conglomerate General Electric, in another departure of a foreign bank from a Russian domestic market dominated by state-controlled lenders.

Sovcombank, ranked among Russia's top 60 by assets, said on Monday it had signed a binding agreement to buy GE Money Bank, expecting to close the deal after getting the green light from local regulators. It did not disclose the price.

The Russian unit of GE Money Bank is ranked among Russia's 150 biggest banks by assets and is focused on high-margin consumer lending. It declined to comment.

General Electric will float a majority stake in its Swiss consumer finance unit GE Money Bank in the fourth quarter, as part of a retreat from the sector to focus more on industrial interests.

Many foreign banks entered Russia just before the global financial crisis of 2008-2009. They are now scaling back operations to allocate funds to meet higher capital requirements at home, at a time when Russian state-controlled giants like Sberbank and VTB are ramping up their business.

Although consumer lending margins remain high, the Russian central bank is trying to cool consumer lending expansion, which saw growth of about 50-70 percent in recent years, by demanding more capital and provisions for possible bad loans.

Among others, Britain's Barclays and HSBC and Spain's Santander have scaled back their operations in Russia. However, other foreign banks such as Italy's UniCredit and Austria's Raiffeisen Bank see Russia as a key source of growth.

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Tue, 19 Nov 2013 03:38

GE plans credit card unit spinoff to shrink finance armTop News

GE plans credit card unit spinoff to shrink finance arm

Fri, Nov 15 15:55 PM EST

By Lewis Krauskopf and Ernest Scheyder

NORWALK, Connecticut (Reuters) - General Electric Co (GE.N) will spin off its credit card business next year into a separately traded company as it tries to reduce its exposure to unpredictable financial businesses and return to its manufacturing roots.

The new company should be worth roughly $16 billion to $18 billion, bankers estimate, equal to about 6 percent of GE's overall market value.

The initial public offering of roughly 20 percent of the credit card business will help GE better focus on its industrial divisions, which makes locomotives, jet engines, dishwashers and scores of other goods, executives said.

Since the financial crisis, GE's share performance has lagged rivals like Honeywell International Inc (HON.N) and United Technologies Corp, (UTX.N), which have much smaller financing arms.

At one time, the GE Capital unit, which houses the company's financial operations, contributed nearly half of GE's total profit. But the unit's rising funding costs during the 2008 financial crisis nearly sank the entire company, prompting executives to try to scale it down.

After the spinoff, GE Capital will help finance medical equipment and other big-ticket items that the company produces.

The unit that GE is spinning off makes credit card loans to consumers in North America. The cards are usually offered through retailers like Pep Boys (PBY.N), La-Z-Boy Inc (LZB.N) and Wal-Mart Stores Inc (WMT.N), and carry those retailers brands.

The unit also makes personal loans to consumers to cover expenses for things like vacations and medical procedures.

"This is the right business for GE to exit," said Keith Sherin, head of GE Capital.

Asked why the spinoff did not include the international part of the retail finance business, Sherin said that would make the transaction much more complicated.

GE, which has not yet named the company, will start the spinoff next year with the IPO. In 2015, GE will give its shareholders the chance to swap GE stock for shares of the new business.

It may also sell some part of the business to other investors or companies, but it has tried and failed to sell its credit card business before, sources have told Reuters.

Compensation for Immelt and other senior GE executives, who do not have golden parachutes, is tied to how quickly they can shrink the company's financial portfolio, according to regulatory filings.

The spinoff is expected to reduce GE's total outstanding shares to about 9 billion to 9.5 billion from roughly 10.12 billion today.

GE Capital was named a systemically risky financial institution last summer by the U.S. Financial Stability Oversight Council. The designation, commonly known as "Too Big To Fail," in effect guaranteed more regulatory oversight of GE Capital.

GE views the spinoff as its "last major action" in reducing profit from its GE Capital unit to 30 percent of the overall company total, executives said in a presentation Friday. The remaining profit comes from selling goods ranging from locomotives to jet engines to dishwashers.

GE shares rose nearly 1 percent to $27.25.

A BETTER TIME TO SPIN-OFF?

GE could not sell the business previously because very few banks are big enough to buy it, said Robert Hammer, the chief executive of R.K. Hammer Investment Bankers, which brokers card portfolio sales and has managed private label credit card companies.

With losses on credit card loans declining across the industry, the valuations for these businesses could rise, Hammer added.

"This is a pretty good time to divest or spin off the business," he said.

But GE executives acknowledged the economic recovery remains tepid.

"I hope the market conditions continue to be favorable for something like this" Sherin said after the presentation, speaking of the IPO.

One question that could affect the IPO valuation is how much debt it takes on and how the business finances itself in the future.

The GE spinoff comes as Spanish bank Santander' (SAN.MC) is getting ready to spin off it U.S. auto lending arm, called Santander Consumer USA. That offering is expected in the coming months and could indicate how much demand there is for GE's business, a banker said.

If the company's market capitalization were around $16 billion, it would be smaller than credit card company Discover Financial Services (DFS.N) and larger than CIT Inc (CIT.N).

GE Capital, which includes all of the company's financial units, posted revenue of $46 billion last year. Sherin expects GE Capital's profit to dip in 2014 and 2015 as it divests the retail finance business, but to grow in line with its industrial businesses starting in 2016.

Proceeds from the IPO will be used to fund the new company, and Sherin said GE would focus next year on making sure it can operate independently.

Sherin said GE had not yet determined whether it would need to add more cash to the new company beyond the IPO proceeds, noting the company would have to meet whatever the regulatory standards are for capital requirements.

(Additional reporting by Jessica Toonkel and Dan Wilchins in New York; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick, Jeffrey Benkoe and Jim Marshall)

GE plans credit card unit spinoff to shrink finance armTop News

GE plans credit card unit spinoff to shrink finance arm

Fri, Nov 15 15:55 PM EST

By Lewis Krauskopf and Ernest Scheyder

NORWALK, Connecticut (Reuters) - General Electric Co (GE.N) will spin off its credit card business next year into a separately traded company as it tries to reduce its exposure to unpredictable financial businesses and return to its manufacturing roots.

The new company should be worth roughly $16 billion to $18 billion, bankers estimate, equal to about 6 percent of GE's overall market value.

The initial public offering of roughly 20 percent of the credit card business will help GE better focus on its industrial divisions, which makes locomotives, jet engines, dishwashers and scores of other goods, executives said.

Since the financial crisis, GE's share performance has lagged rivals like Honeywell International Inc (HON.N) and United Technologies Corp, (UTX.N), which have much smaller financing arms.

At one time, the GE Capital unit, which houses the company's financial operations, contributed nearly half of GE's total profit. But the unit's rising funding costs during the 2008 financial crisis nearly sank the entire company, prompting executives to try to scale it down.

After the spinoff, GE Capital will help finance medical equipment and other big-ticket items that the company produces.

The unit that GE is spinning off makes credit card loans to consumers in North America. The cards are usually offered through retailers like Pep Boys (PBY.N), La-Z-Boy Inc (LZB.N) and Wal-Mart Stores Inc (WMT.N), and carry those retailers brands.

The unit also makes personal loans to consumers to cover expenses for things like vacations and medical procedures.

"This is the right business for GE to exit," said Keith Sherin, head of GE Capital.

Asked why the spinoff did not include the international part of the retail finance business, Sherin said that would make the transaction much more complicated.

GE, which has not yet named the company, will start the spinoff next year with the IPO. In 2015, GE will give its shareholders the chance to swap GE stock for shares of the new business.

It may also sell some part of the business to other investors or companies, but it has tried and failed to sell its credit card business before, sources have told Reuters.

Compensation for Immelt and other senior GE executives, who do not have golden parachutes, is tied to how quickly they can shrink the company's financial portfolio, according to regulatory filings.

The spinoff is expected to reduce GE's total outstanding shares to about 9 billion to 9.5 billion from roughly 10.12 billion today.

GE Capital was named a systemically risky financial institution last summer by the U.S. Financial Stability Oversight Council. The designation, commonly known as "Too Big To Fail," in effect guaranteed more regulatory oversight of GE Capital.

GE views the spinoff as its "last major action" in reducing profit from its GE Capital unit to 30 percent of the overall company total, executives said in a presentation Friday. The remaining profit comes from selling goods ranging from locomotives to jet engines to dishwashers.

GE shares rose nearly 1 percent to $27.25.

A BETTER TIME TO SPIN-OFF?

GE could not sell the business previously because very few banks are big enough to buy it, said Robert Hammer, the chief executive of R.K. Hammer Investment Bankers, which brokers card portfolio sales and has managed private label credit card companies.

With losses on credit card loans declining across the industry, the valuations for these businesses could rise, Hammer added.

"This is a pretty good time to divest or spin off the business," he said.

But GE executives acknowledged the economic recovery remains tepid.

"I hope the market conditions continue to be favorable for something like this" Sherin said after the presentation, speaking of the IPO.

One question that could affect the IPO valuation is how much debt it takes on and how the business finances itself in the future.

The GE spinoff comes as Spanish bank Santander' (SAN.MC) is getting ready to spin off it U.S. auto lending arm, called Santander Consumer USA. That offering is expected in the coming months and could indicate how much demand there is for GE's business, a banker said.

If the company's market capitalization were around $16 billion, it would be smaller than credit card company Discover Financial Services (DFS.N) and larger than CIT Inc (CIT.N).

GE Capital, which includes all of the company's financial units, posted revenue of $46 billion last year. Sherin expects GE Capital's profit to dip in 2014 and 2015 as it divests the retail finance business, but to grow in line with its industrial businesses starting in 2016.

Proceeds from the IPO will be used to fund the new company, and Sherin said GE would focus next year on making sure it can operate independently.

Sherin said GE had not yet determined whether it would need to add more cash to the new company beyond the IPO proceeds, noting the company would have to meet whatever the regulatory standards are for capital requirements.

(Additional reporting by Jessica Toonkel and Dan Wilchins in New York; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick, Jeffrey Benkoe and Jim Marshall)

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Thu, 21 Nov 2013 10:05

BRUSSELS '' Seven EU countries have formed what France calls a ''club'' to produce military drones from 2020 onward.

The scheme was agreed in Brussels on Tuesday (19 November) at a meeting of the European Defence Agency (EDA), the EU's defence think tank, by France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain.

The group-of-seven's defence ministers signed a ''letter of intent'' tasking the EDA to draw up a study on joint production of Medium Altitude Long Endurance (Male) craft, which can be used to strike military targets or for surveillance of migrant boats in the Mediterranean Sea.

The EDA said in a press release that ''the objective of this community is to exchange information as well as to identify and facilitate co-operation among member states which currently operate or plan to operate RPAS [Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems].''

The think tank's director, Claude-France Arnould, noted: ''In view of today's constrained financial situation, this effort for defence must be fully efficient which implies co-operation and searching for synergies.''

Another EDA official, Peter Round, told media: ''This is the starting pistol for us to be able to start work on a European RPAS.''

The French defence minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, said: ''If Europe hopes to maintain a strategic capability, countries must pool their capacities and actions in a pragmatic way.''

He called the group of seven a ''club of drone-using countries.''

'...

It also comes amid a raft of existing European drone projects.

Three European arms firms '' France's Dassualt, Franco-German firm Eads and Italy's Finmeccanica '' agreed in June to launch their own European drone programme.

France, Greece, Italy, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland are working on what they call a ''euro-Ucav,'' or unmanned combat air vehicle, the Neuron, which made a test flight in December 2012.

France and the UK are working on a ''stealth'' drone called Telemos to fly in 2018.

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Source: RT - News

Thu, 21 Nov 2013 09:24

Published time: November 20, 2013 13:18Edited time: November 21, 2013 04:37A model of the 'EuroHawk' unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) (Reuters/Wolfgang Rattay)

France, Germany and other European countries on Tuesday announced the creation of a "drone users club" to go head-to-head against US- and Israeli-made unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) that now dominate the skies.

At a time when aerial-vehicles are radically altering the modern battlefield, Europe finds itself playing catch up in the race to develop what it calls Medium Altitude Long Endurance (MALE) pilotless aircraft.

''If Europe hopes to maintain a strategic capability, countries must pool their capacities and actions in a pragmatic way,'' French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said after the talks in Brussels.

Referring to the members as the 'drone users club', presently comprised of France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain, Le Drian said the group would cooperate on a number of technical aspects, including training, certification, logistics, maintenance and the planning for future projects, the defense minister noted.

Membership is open to any of the 28 EU member states that are operating drones or that anticipate to within five years.

Europe has become increasingly dependent on US and Israeli drone technology: France used US drones during its military intervention this year against Islamists in Mali, while Germany uses the Israeli-built Heron 1 drone for reconnaissance purposes in Afghanistan.

European leaders are also looking to develop air-refueling capabilities after EU nations were forced to rely on the US military during the NATO campaign in Libya in 2011.

In response to Europe's lagging behind in what military experts predict is the future of combat, Le Drian said the European Defense Agency has been charged with creating a "European generation" of drones within a decade.

Many aviation experts, pointing to the US military's increased dependence on drones in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan, say the days of piloted fighter aircraft are numbered.

Last year, German Defense Minister Thomas de Maiziere said his country would cooperate with France to develop a new generation of armed aerial vehicles.

"We have a gap in our capabilities that we would like to close," he said.

The European Defense Agency said it will now take into account the costs, technological capabilities and other factors, and draw up a report that could become the cornerstone of a European drone program.

Europe's top three defense companies, EADS, France's Dassault Aviation and Italy's Finmeccanica offered in June to cooperate on the development of a prototype MALE if given the greenlight by Brussels.

However, despite the enthusiasm for this eye-in-the-sky death technology, human rights groups have been sounding the alarm on drone warfare following a rash of civilian deaths in Afghanistan and Pakistan and elsewhere. Last month, Amnesty International issued a report that says US officials responsible for carrying out drone strikes may have to stand trial for war crimes.

The report is based on nine out of 45 drone strikes reported between January 2012 and August 2013 in North Waziristan, a mountainous region of northeast Pakistan where the US drone campaign is most intensive.

The research focused on one particular case '' that of 68-year-old Mamana Bibi, who was killed by a US drone last October while she was working in her garden with her grandchildren.

European leaders will formally approve the projects at an EU summit next month focusing on defense cooperation.

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Tue, 19 Nov 2013 10:41

MSNBC's Martin Bashir on Monday apologized for having suggested last Friday that someone teach former Gov. Sarah Palin a lesson about slavery by urinating in her eyes and defecating in her mouth.

''Last Friday, on this broadcast,'' the MSNBC host began, ''I made some comments which were deeply offensive and directed at Governor Sarah Palin. I wanted to take this opportunity to say sorry to Mrs. Palin, and to also offer an unreserved apology to her friends and family, her supporters, our viewers, and anyone who may have heard what I said.''

''My words were wholly unacceptable. They were neither accurate, nor fair. They were unworthy of anyone who would claim to have an interest in politics, and they have brought shame upon my friends and colleagues at this network, none of whom were responsible for the things that I said,'' he added.

He continued, adding that he had tarnished America's great tradition of being a place where ideas from all areas can be heard and discussed.

''Upon reflection, I so wish that I had been more thoughtful, more considerate, more compassionate, but I was not. And what I said is now a matter of public record,'' he said. ''But if I could add something to the public record,'' Bashir added, ''it would be this: That I deeply regret what I said, and that I have learned a sober lesson in these last few days.''

''That the politics of vitriol and destruction is a miserable place to be, and a miserable person to become. And I promise that I will take the opportunity to learn from this experience. My hope is that it will renew in me a spirit of humility and humanity, that looks for the good and that builds upon the great things that this country has to offer to all of us, regardless of our political persuasion. This will be my guiding light and compass in the days ahead. But once again, I am truly sorry for what I said on Friday,'' he added.

''

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Wed, 20 Nov 2013 13:02

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Thu, 21 Nov 2013 12:05

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Thu, 21 Nov 2013 11:53

MRC TV is an online platform for people to share and view videos, articles and opinions on topics that are important to them '-- from news to political issues and rip-roaring humor.

MRC TV is brought to you by the Media Research Center, a 501(c) 3 nonprofit research and education organization. The MRC is located at: 1900 Campus Commons Drive, Reston, VA 20194. For information about the MRC, please visit www.MRC.org.

Copyright (C) 2013, Media Research Center. All Rights Reserved.

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Thu, 21 Nov 2013 11:41

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Thu, 21 Nov 2013 11:36

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Thu, 21 Nov 2013 11:32

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Thu, 21 Nov 2013 11:24

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Witnesses testified on the future of virtual currencies such as bitcoin, and how to better protect consumers.

Witnesses testified on the future of virtual currencies such as bitcoin, and how to better protect consumers.

1 hour, 39 minutes | 2,591 Views

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Thu, 21 Nov 2013 11:10

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Thu, 21 Nov 2013 10:50

Even after the Newtown, Conn., massacre, Republican opponents of reasonable firearms restrictions in Congress blocked proposals for strengthened background checks and other steps to make future gun tragedies less likely. Now the question is whether anti-gun-control extremists will allow a federal ban on the manufacture, sale, import or possession of guns that are undetectable by metal detectors and X-ray machines to expire on Dec. 9.

When Congress first approved the Undetectable Firearms Act in 1988, and renewed it in 1998 and 2003, the possibility of undetectable plastic guns being taken onto planes and into government buildings where guns are prohibited was largely theoretical. Today, 3-D printing technology has reached a point where it is possible to cheaply create fully functional plastic handguns capable of firing multiple shots. A blueprint for creating such a gun, known as the Liberator, was downloaded more than 100,000 times when it was posted on the website of a group called Defense Distributed earlier this year.

Last week, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives tested a version of the Liberator produced by the agency and found its firepower to be sufficient to ''reach vital organs and perforate the skull.'' The weapon's design calls for a small amount of metal to be included, which makes it legal under current law. But the metal part is tiny and can be easily removed. Agency officials are concerned about the spread of undetectable guns as 3-D printers become more widely available.

Senator Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, is working with two Democratic colleagues, Bill Nelson of Florida and Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, to pass an updated renewal measure that responds to law enforcement concerns. Representative Steve Israel, Democrat of New York, is pressing a similar bill in the House. The ban on undetectable guns was first signed into law by President Ronald Reagan and previous renewals have received bipartisan support. This time should be no different.

Meet The New York Times's Editorial Board >>

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Thu, 21 Nov 2013 10:32

For some it is an unmissable international cultural tradition, for others it is a lot of fuss over cheap plonk.

But Beaujolais Nouveau continues to enjoy phenomenal marking success each November.

The stroke of midnight on the third Thursday of the month gives the green light for bottles to be cracked open.

Customers in the Au Petit Chavignol restaurant in Paris were among the first to try the new vintage.

''Tr¨s fruit(C),'' (very fruity) was the verdict of one diner. One prominent wine expert has said this year's wine contains a whiff of blackberry, raspberry and cherry '' describing it as ''sturdy'' despite fears it might have been damaged by a late harvest.

Many people across the globe will follow the Parisians and the French: last year saw events in 120 countries.

Japan started early because of the time difference. It is set to be the leading export market, as last year when it bought 8.8 million bottles.

In Britain sales have slumped in recent years, to the extent that some supermarkets no longer stock Beaujolais Nouveau at all '' although higher quality wines from the Beaujolais region have enjoyed a revival.

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Wed, 20 Nov 2013 13:29

Paul Ciancia, the suspected gunman in the Nov. 1 shooting spree at LAX, has been released from the hospital and was in federal custody, authorities said Tuesday.

Suspected LAX shooter Paul Ciancia seen in a DMV photo. (Credit: FBI)

The last remaining patient from the shooting at Los Angeles International Airport was released from Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Westwood on Monday, Roxanne Moster said in a statement.

Ciancia, who has been in critical condition after the shooting, was the last patient from the incident taken to UCLA Medical Center.

Ciancia had been taken into custody by the U.S. Marshals Service, according to Thom Mrozek, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Central District of California.

No court appearance for Ciancia had been scheduled and no details about his ''custody status'' or the location where he was held were being released, Mrozek said.

Ciancia had allegedly pulled an assault rifle from a bag near the entrance to Terminal 3, fatally shooting Transportation Security Administration agent Gerardo I. Hernandez at point-blank range, and then returning to fire on Hernandez again. Ciancia allegedly then fired on at least two other TSA employees and a civilian passenger as he proceeded through the TSA checkpoint and into the gate area.

He was shot by airport police responding to the incident, which left LAX in chaos and disrupted air travel around the world.

The 23-year-old was charged with the murder of a federal officer and the intentional use of a firearm during the commission of violence an international airport.

A New Jersey native who had been living in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Sun Valley, Ciancia was believed to have acted alone, specifically targeting TSA employees.

Check back for updates on this developing story.

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Thu, 21 Nov 2013 05:20

>>>we'll be covering this in greater depth, but the airport in syracuse, new york, has installed recently new exit portals, meaning you're not allowed to just leave the airport. you have to enter into a glass pod, wait for it to close behind you, then wait for an automated voice and a green light . that's just to leave the building and walk out of the terminal. while critics say if the official arrival of the police state he. the airport says they're in lieu of human security eyeballing departing passengers, and they do not contain x-rays.

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Thu, 21 Nov 2013 13:43

Daisy LutherThe Organic PrepperNovember 20th, 2013Reader Views: 933

This is from the ''Believe-It-or-Not-This-Isn't-Satire'' files.

If you don't get lined up for this year's lethal injection '' ahem '' I mean flu shot '' you just might get a push from a well-meaning (but brainwashed) friend or neighbor. A national campaign has begun with the intention to shame and peer pressure everyone to get the flu shot.

The campaign was created by Sanofi-Pasteur, the company who makes'...you guessed it'...a flu vaccine called Fluzone, approved by our good friends at the FDA in 2011. (They also collaborate with the notable eugenicists of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.) You can find out more about the FLUgitive campaign on Facebook.

''Because flu season can begin as early as October and last through May, the best prevention for those planning to get their annual flu shot is to get it as early as possible in the season, allowing your body time to build up its immunity,'' said Carlos E. Picone, M.D., F.C.C.P., Vice-Chair of the Department of Internal Medicine at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, D.C.

Research has shown that social influences are a primary factor in the adoption of health behaviors. The FLUgitives campaign leverages the positive power of social peer influence to drive more people to help protect themselves against the flu by getting vaccinated and features four #FLUgitives whom everyone might know '' or may even relate to themselves. (source)

Check out the mocking video campaign below for your recommended daily allowance of offensive and insulting propaganda.

The Fitness FanaticConvinced that exercise and all-protein diet is the key to staying healthy, this gym rat dreads getting the flu vaccine because nothing can get in the way of his workout. Putting his beloved biceps on the back burner is not an option. With big protection and a tiny needle, the Fluzone Intradermal vaccine only goes skin deep so no one has to mess with ''lightening'' and ''thunder'' unless they really have to.

The Turbo MomA modern day Superwoman, this suburban warrior balances caring for her kids, husband, home and pets on top of a busy job. But her hectic schedule leaves little time for anything else. Fluzone Intradermal vaccine is right on top of that '' it's a simple and quick way to get the protection she needs without missing a beat.

The Latest and Greatest GuyA self-proclaimed gadget loving playboy, this FLUgitive always wants the newest version of everything.

He should ask about Fluzone Intradermal vaccine- it's a smart, fast and efficient technology, just like his gadgets.

The Scaredy CatThis constant worrier is on edge about pretty much everything.

But since his fear of getting sick outweighs his fear of getting a flu shot, Fluzone Intradermal vaccine is right up his alley. It uses a next-generation device to quickly help deliver vaccine just under the skin's surface, so he can find something else to worry about for a change.

There's even a dubious little app that allows you to load your photo and see how bad you will look if you don't get your flu shot. No, I'm not kidding.

Notably, one type of FLUgitive is not represented in the videos '' those of us who avoid the shot because we know better. Do your research and make your decision '' don't base it on biased propaganda presented by those who profit from the vaccine.

Thank you to Vanessa for the link!

Delivered by The Daily Sheeple

Contributed by Daisy Luther of The Organic Prepper.

Daisy Luther is a freelance writer and editor. Her website, The Organic Prepper, offers information on healthy prepping, including premium nutritional choices, general wellness and non-tech solutions. You can follow Daisy on Facebook and Twitter, and you can email her at daisy@theorganicprepper.ca

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