Better late than never

Wouldn't this seem like a swell time for the U.S. Senate to ratify the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, adopted in 1979 by the UN General Assembly, and often described as an international bill of rights for women? Consisting of a preamble and 30 articles, it defines what constitutes discrimination against women and sets up an agenda for national action to end such discrimination.

It's not just Obama.

It's going to be important in 2014 -- in terms of manpower; donations; Green, Peace & Freedom and independent challenges; etc. -- to remember who is responsible for what.

Apparently, House Democratic minority leader Nancy Pelosi influenced Democratic members of whom we can usually expect better, such as Debbie Wasserman Schultz (FL), Sheila Jackson Lee (TX), Luis Gutierrez (IL), Jan Schakowsky (IL), Marcy Kaptur (OH), Chris Van Hollen (MD), Steve Israel (NY), Ami Bera (CA), Joaquin Castro (TX), Joe Kennedy (MA), Annie Kuster (NH), Nita Lowey (NY) and Louise Slaughter (NY), to vote to protect NSA's power. If only 12 of them had opposed the program, some spying would have been stopped.

That the vote was close is good news, however: it offers hope that opponents will be encouraged to keep fighting.

How Nancy Pelosi Saved the NSA Surveillance Program: "The obituary of Rep. Justin Amash's amendment to claw back the sweeping powers of the National Security Agency has largely been written as a victory for the White House and NSA chief Keith Alexander, who lobbied the Hill aggressively in the days and hours ahead of Wednesday's shockingly close vote. But Hill sources say most of the credit for the amendment's defeat goes to someone else: House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. It's an odd turn, considering that Pelosi has been, on many occasions, a vocal surveillance critic...."

The rest of the story: http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/07/25/how_nancy_pelosi_saved_the_nsa_surveillance_program

More on possible congressional resistance to domestic spying: Six Ways Congress May Reform NSA Snooping

1) Raise the standard for what records are considered “relevant.”
2) Require NSA analysts to obtain court approval before searching metadata.
3) Declassify Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinions.
4) Change the way Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judges are appointed.
5) Appoint a public advocate to argue before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
6) End phone metadata collection on constitutional grounds.

Small Change: Does U.S. currency have to be boring?

Our paper money has been homely for so long, you almost think it has to be that way. And maybe it does; getting this dull, deeply conservative country to change anything is nearly impossible. I once suggested that the government is missing revenue opportunities by not selling ad space on U.S. currency. The mail response was hilarious: you would have thought I'd advocated dressing the Mall with billboards for strip clubs that took advantage of the profile of the Washington Monument; except for a few anti-tax types who immediately recognized a worthwhile proposal when they heard one, most people reacted with horror to the idea of "defiling a sacred institution."

Anyway, in response to the The Dollar ReDe$ign Project, artist and designer Michael Tyznik created this lovely and relevant series of U.S. paper basing his design on the premise that our dough is "aesthetically lacking." American banknotes, he explains,

are in dire need of a redesign. Even though the green color of money is deeply interwoven into the nation's culture, the need for color differentiation between denominations has forced the inclusion of color. The recent redesign of banknotes by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing is poorly executed and aesthetically lacking. Because the coloring of the current notes is so subtle, it is still hard to differentiate between denominations by that method alone.

My proposed redesign keeps the culturally important green color of money, but introduces a brightly colored holographic strip into each denomination, making them easy to tell apart. This strip includes embossed dots for the sight-impaired as well, making currency far more accessible.

Although these elegant bills are a big improvement graphically beyond what's in your pocket, the artist's best innovation is on the reverse side:

One of the most important things about America is our Bill of Rights. It is possibly the most important information any citizen can have. The design of our money currently contains semi-religious (the eye in the pyramid) and overtly religious (“In God We Trust”) symbols and text that go against the incredibly important separation of church and state implicit in the first amendment. In my redesign, these are replaced with the text of the Bill of Rights. It has been proposed that these ten amendments are in order of importance, so it is fitting that the most important rights are included on the most common banknotes.

You'll note that Tyznik also wants to recalibrate our money: The $1 bill, he says,

lasts only 21 months before it needs to be replaced. For this reason, I propose that the $1 banknote be eliminated in favor of the current $1 coin and a new $2 coin. For this reason, Washington is depicted on the $5. I also propose the discontinuation of the penny, because it currently costs more to produce one than it is worth. This is precedented by the elimination of the half-penny in 1857, after which the smallest unit of currency, the penny, had more buying power than today's quarter does.

I think it's a measure of how seriously we need a redesign that Snopes had to go out of its way to deny that Treasury commissioned the project or planned to use it as a replacement for our current forms of U.S. legal tender.

Change Watch: War on Terror II

The Obama administration makes reassuring noises about constraining executive power and protecting civil liberties, but then adopts whatever appalling policy George W. Bush put in place.

"We know the rules by now, the strange conventions and stilted Kabuki scripts that govern our cartoon facsimile of a national security debate. The Obama administration makes vague, reassuring noises about constraining executive power and protecting civil liberties, but then merrily adopts whatever appalling policy George W. Bush put in place. Conservatives hit the panic button on the right-wing noise machine anyway, keeping the delicate ecosystem in balance by creating the false impression that something has changed. We've watched the formula play out with Guantánamo Bay, torture prosecutions and the invocation of 'state secrets.' We appear to be on the verge of doing the same with national security surveillance.

"Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee seemed to abandon hope of bringing any real change to the Patriot Act. A lopsided and depressingly bipartisan majority approved legislation that would reauthorize a series of expanded surveillance powers set to expire at the end of the year. Several senators had proposed that reauthorization be wedded to safeguards designed to protect the privacy of innocent Americans from indiscriminate data dragnets--but behind-the-scenes maneuvering by the Obama administration ensured that even the most modest of these were stripped from the final bill now being sent to the full Senate."

The rest of the story: 'War on Terror' II by Julian Sanchez (The Nation 2009-10-19)

Free Speech: If you bring your smartphone to a hotel room with internet access, does it become a communication facility?

While it might seem obvious to you that emails, text messages, IMs and tweets fall under the protection of the First Amendment, the guardians of authority may think otherwise. As the Times puts it, "[a]s demonstrations have evolved with the help of text messages and online social networks, so too has the response of law enforcement.

On Thursday, F.B.I. agents descended on a house in Jackson Heights, Queens, and spent 16 hours searching it. The most likely reason for the raid: a man who lived there had helped coordinate communications among protesters at the Group of 20 summit in Pittsburgh.

Elliot Madison, a 41-year social worker and self-described anarchist, was arrested during the G20 and charged with "hindering apprehension or prosecution, criminal use of a communication facility and possession of instruments of crime." He is out on $30,000 bail after he and Michael Wallschlaeger, 46, were tracked to the Carefree Inn in Pittsburgh where the Pennsylvania State Police said he was found "with computers and police scanners while using the social-networking site Twitter to spread information about police movements."

Text messaging and twittering have been important to large scale demonstrations from the Republican National Convention in 2004 to the Iranian election protests of recent weeks. Elliott Madison is one of the first in this country to be formally charged with criminal twittering, however. A Pennsylvania complaint accuses him of “directing others, specifically protesters of the G-20 summit, in order to avoid apprehension after a lawful order to disperse.”

A search warrant executed by the F.B.I. at Mr. Madison’s house authorized agents and officers looking for violations of federal rioting laws to seize computers and phones, black masks and clothes and financial records and address books. Among the items seized, according to a list prepared by the agents, were electronic equipment, newspapers, books and gas masks. The items also included what was described as a picture of Lenin.

What kind of anarchist makes a hero out Lenin?

A judge ordered authorities to stop examining the seized materials until Oct. 16, while she considered whether the FBI's search warrant was too wide and too vague.

Although Madison's activities, as part "the Tin Can Comms Collective, a group of people who collected information and used Twitter to send mass text messages describing protest-related events that they observed on the streets," more closely resemble those of a reporter than of a revolutionary, for the moment police agencies will be able to harass protesters and stifle dissent with bogus arrests for texting and tweeting. Organizers will need to take care in using social networking and digital communication media in confrontations with authorities, at least until the courts get everyone's rights and obligations sorted out and Constitutional guarantees are put back in place.

The rest of the story: Arrest Puts Focus on Protesters’ Texting by Colin Moynihan (New York Times 2009-10-05)
See, also: New York man accused of using Twitter to direct protesters during G20 summit (The Guardian 2009-09-04)

Change Watch: White House Proposes Changes in Bill Protecting Reporters’ Confidentiality

Sounding like Bush-Cheney never left the building,

[t]he Obama administration has told lawmakers that it opposes legislation that could protect reporters from being imprisoned if they refuse to disclose confidential sources who leak material about national security, according to several people involved with the negotiations.

The administration this week sent to Congress sweeping revisions to a “media shield” bill that would significantly weaken its protections against forcing reporters to testify.

The bill includes safeguards that would require prosecutors to exhaust other methods for finding the source of the information before subpoenaing a reporter, and would balance investigators’ interests with “the public interest in gathering news and maintaining the free flow of information.”

But under the administration’s proposal, such procedures would not apply to leaks of a matter deemed to cause “significant” harm to national security. Moreover, judges would be instructed to be deferential to executive branch assertions about whether a leak caused or was likely to cause such harm, according to officials familiar with the proposal.

The rest of the story: White House Proposes Changes in Bill Protecting Reporters’ Confidentiality by Charlie Savage (New York Times 2009-09-30)

The Media: Top Censored Stories of 2009/2010

Project Censored, founded by Carl Jensen in 1976, is a media research program working in cooperation with independent media groups in the US. Project Censored’s principle objective is to train Sonoma State University students in media research. First Amendment issues and the advocacy for, and protection of, free press rights in the United States are central to its mission. Each year, Project Censored publishes a ranking of the top 25 national news stories that are under-reported, ignored, misrepresented, or censored by the US corporate media in Censored: Media Democracy in Action, a yearbook released each September.

1. US Congress Sells Out to Wall Street
2. US Schools are More Segregated Today than in the 1950s
3. Toxic Waste Behind Somali Pirates
4. Nuclear Waste Pools in North Carolina
5. Europe Blocks US Toxic Products
6. Lobbyists Buy Congress
7. Obama’s Military Appointments Have Corrupt Past
8. Bailed out Banks and America’s Wealthiest Cheat IRS Out of Billions
9. US Arms Used for War Crimes in Gaza
10. Ecuador Declares Foreign Debt Illegitimate
11. Private Corporations Profit from the Occupation of Palestine
12. Mysterious Death of Mike Connell—Karl Rove’s Election Thief
13. Katrina’s Hidden Race War
14. Congress Invested in Defense Contracts
15. World Bank’s Carbon Trade Fiasco
16. US Repression of Haiti Continues
17. The ICC Facilitates US Covert War in Sudan
18. Ecuador’s Constitutional Rights of Nature
19. Bank Bailout Recipients Spent to Defeat Labor
20. Secret Control of the Presidential Debates
21. Recession Causes States to Cut Welfare
22. Obama’s Trilateral Commission Team
23. Activists Slam World Water Forum as a Corporate-Driven Fraud
24. Dollar Glut Finances US Military Expansion
25. Fast Track Oil Exploitation in Western Amazon

Activism: Our Tattered Bill of Rights

Here is a timely new action:

The Campaign for Our Constitution is a coalition of Southern Californians working to bring attention to our country’s Constitutional crisis and restore America’s values....

What We Want:

Revive habeas corpus, the basic right to hear the charges against you
Restore FISA, the check on warrantless wiretapping
Close Guantanamo
Bring back checks and balances

Read more about our goals

How We'll Get It

Expand the Community: Meet others online and at events
Refine the Message: Talk strategy with other activists, bloggers and
Constitutional experts
Make Some Noise: Get the word out to local media
Take Direct Action: Put pressure on California’s members of
Congress to restore our civil liberties

Read more about our strategy -- from the website.

<http://aclu-sc.org/ourconstitution/>