STEVE BOUSQUET, - Miami Herald
Stephan: Here is another example of the emerging surveillance society. This will be tried in Florida and, if it works well, expect to see it across the country by 2016.
TALLAHASSEE — A year-long stalemate between Florida and Washington ended Saturday when the federal government gave the state access to a comprehensive federal citizenship database, which the state will use to resume an election-year purge of noncitizen voters.
After repeatedly refusing, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security agreed to open its database to the Department of State, which oversees Florida’s voter registration system. The state will now cross-check the names of Florida voters against a federal citizenship database known as SAVE, or Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements.
It wasn’t clear why DHS changed course and the department had no comment Saturday. But the reversal comes after a federal judge in Florida refused to halt purge efforts.
The news is a victory for Republican Gov. Rick Scott, who has said the purge is necessary to guarantee fair elections. Democrats and voter advocacy groups have criticized Scott for the action, saying it is aimed at Democratic-leaning voters in an election year. Some groups filed lawsuits to block it.
Within days, Florida will resume the laborious process of purging non-citizens from the list of 11.2 million registered voters. A previous purge based on a flawed list of 2,700 drivers with voter cards who were suspected of being […]
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MURIEL KANE, - The Raw Story
Stephan: It is in the nature of surveillance entities to want to acquire more and more information about more and more people. That's what they do. This is the latest on America's emerging 'soft' police state. Much of the blame for this can be laid at the feet of Obama. It began with Reagan, but it has continued to grow like a cancer year by year, with the years of the Obama administration the worst of all.
I counsel you again to assume that everything you write, text, video, or say over an electronic medium is being recorded by some government agency, as well as a spectrum of corporations.
My prediction is that within a decade, if not before, there will be a public relations campaign, argued probably on the basis of assisting with health care -- 'even if you are unconsciousness we will know what to do' -- to start implanting information/GPS chips in children at birth, and in older people when they experience any kind of medical crisis. Within a generation everyone will be chipped. It will probably also have a financial angle -- 'this will replace credit cards and checks, and make it much easier for people to move around and pay for what they use.' Orwell on steroids is coming.
Click through to see the video of the interview.
NSA whistleblower William Binney was interviewed by internet journalist Geoff Shively at the HOPE Number 9 hackers conference in New York on Friday.
Binney, who resigned from the NSA in 2001 over its domestic surveillance program, had just delivered a keynote speech in which he revealed what Shively called ‘evidence which we have not seen until this point.
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Saturday, July 14th, 2012
CHARLES HUGH SMITH, - Business Insider
Stephan: Here, I think is a pretty good assessment of the current situation in the country, and the negative effects of the rapacious unethical form of capitalism that has come to dominate our economy.
We can change this. Simply stop buying or doing business with corporations that behave in this manner. If you don't feed the monster it will starve -- or change. All this depends on our passivity and acquiescence.
The neofeudal colonization of the ‘home market’ has transformed the middle class into debt serfs.
According to the conventional account, the Great American Middle Class has been eroded by rising energy costs, globalization, and the declining purchasing power of the U.S. dollar in the four decades since 1973.
While these trends have certainly undermined middle-class wealth and income, there are five other less politically acceptable dynamics at work:
The divergence of State/private vested interests and the interests of the middle class
The emergence of financialization as the key driver of profits and political power
The neofeudal ‘colonization
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Saturday, July 14th, 2012
JENNIFER PRESTON, - The New York Times
Stephan: Here is more on the food crisis. The effects of climate change are beginning to bite and the results will effect everyone's life. I am paying very close attention to this trend because I think it may be the first social destabilizer arising from climate change.
I have included some of the farmer-reader comments posted to this report to give some sense of how farmers are thinking about this
Scattered rain fell in parts of the Midwest on Friday, but it was not enough to provide relief to farmers struggling to salvage crops scorched by worsening drought conditions and ranchers worried about feeding livestock.
More than 1,000 counties in 26 states across the country were named natural-disaster areas on Thursday in a statement from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It was the single largest designation in the program’s history and the worst drought since 1988, government officials said.
michael sims @farmersims
Corn is starting to go brown!! What next? #drought12
13 Jul 12
Nearly 61 percent of the contiguous U.S. was listed in drought this week, up from 56 percent for the previous week, according to the National Weather Service’s Drought Monitor, a weekly government report.
The report found that nearly two-thirds of the states in the Midwest are facing drought conditions, up from 50 percent a week earlier, prompting deep concerns about the deteriorating crop conditions in the Corn Belt.
In Iowa, and 17 other important corn-growing states, the report said that ’30 percent of the crop is now in poor or very poor condition, up from 22 percent the previous week.
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Saturday, July 14th, 2012
Stephan: As you can see from this report, fewer and fewer corporations own larger and larger shares of all media. As this trend continues it is going to culminate in a handful of corporations essentially controlling all aspects of news presentation. As even an 8th grader in civics class -- in those few schools that still teach civics -- would recognize, a healthy Fourth Estate is essential to a successful democracy. This is not a good trend.
In May, 2012 Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Company announced the purchase of 63 newspapers, including 23 dailies, from the debt-ridden Media General Company. The transaction was a course reversal for Buffett, who earlier had said he wouldn’t buy newspapers, and created a major new player in the industry. It also left Media General-whose history with newspapers dates back to the mid-1800’s-with only one remaining daily, the Tampa Tribune, which many predict it will still try to sell.
The purchase, seen as a rare vote of confidence in a struggling industry, also capped a period of intense change in U.S. newspaper ownership. In the last 18 months many better known newspaper companies divested most or all of their holdings while a number of new entities, including hedge funds and private equity firms, jumped in.
According to the investment banking firm of Dirks, Van Essen & Murray, which monitors newspaper transactions, a total of 71 daily newspapers were sold as part of 11 different transactions during 2011, the busiest year for sales since 2007.
And newspapers were not the only media to undergo major changes. The last 18 months also saw local television sales reach new heights, the merging of Newsweek and the Daily Beast, […]
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