Greed, Poverty, Unfettered Capitalism, Pope Francis and Sarah Palin

Pope Francis has stunned the world, and shook up Sarah Palin, with his statements on homosexuality, abortion and birth control, but that ain't all.  The Pope has gone from being suspiciously liberal to outright radical with his views on "Unfettered Capitalism". 

I almost never even think about Sarah Palin, but she occasionally provides comic relief.  “He’s had some statements that to me sound kind of liberal, has taken me aback, has kind of surprised me,” Palin told CNN in a recent interview.

OK enough of the comic relief.  I also have probably spent less than an hour or two in my lifetime pondering the words of this, or any other Pope until today when Pope Francis released his "apostolic exhortation," a lengthy and detailed exposition of how the Catholic Church should focus its energies.  Pope Francis might just shake things up a lot.  Here is a summary of his words on greed, income inequality, poverty and unfettered capitalism.

Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.  To all this we can add widespread corruption and self-serving tax evasion, which have taken on worldwide dimensions. The thirst for power and possessions knows no limits. In this system, which tends to devour everything which stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenseless before the interests of a deified market, which become the only rule.  I exhort you to generous solidarity and a return of economics and finance to an ethical approach which favors human beings.  Today in many places we hear a call for greater security. But until exclusion and inequality in society and between peoples is reversed, it will be impossible to eliminate violence. The poor and the poorer peoples are accused of violence, yet without equal opportunities the different forms of aggression and conflict will find a fertile terrain for growth and eventually explode.

The Washington Post did an excellent story assembling graphs to illustrate many points the Pope made, it is well worth reading.

UN to Declare Human Right to Privacy

A non-binding UN resolution that declares a "human right to privacy" as a basic right is being drafted and will come up for a vote soon.  The US and UK are opposing the language, as it would put them in violation, but given that the US has tortured, kidnapped and killed civilians with drones, this is just another mosquito bite for the government.  It will however keep the topic in the public eye, although The Guardian appears to be the only media paying any attention to the story, I didn't see any other stories in the US press.  We can thank Edward Snowden for the world becoming aware of the US / UK excessive usurping of basic human rights.

The United Nations moved a step closer to calling for an end to excessive surveillance on Tuesday in a resolution that reaffirms the “human right to privacy” and calls for the UN’s human rights commissioner to conduct an inquiry into the impact of mass digital snooping.
A UN committee that deals with human rights issues adopted the German- and Brazilian-drafted resolution that has become an increasingly sensitive issue among UN members.
The resolution, titled “The right to privacy in the digital age”, does not name specific countries but states the UN is: “Deeply concerned at the negative impact that surveillance and/or interception of communications … may have on the exercise and enjoyment of human rights.”
The resolution says “unlawful or arbitrary” surveillance may “contradict the tenets of a democratic society”. It says states “must ensure full compliance with their obligations under international human rights law”.
The 193-member general assembly is expected to vote on the non-binding resolution next month.
The resolution was co-sponsored by Brazil and Germany after leaked documents from former National Security Agency consultant Edward Snowden revealed that the agency had spied on their political leaders.

Press Mutiny over Obama restrictions

There are 38 news organizations ready to stage a revolt over what they view as the "White House’s own Soviet-style news service, which gets privileged access to Mr. Obama at the expense of journalists who cover the president."

At issue is President Obama's policy of not allowing press photographers to cover many official events, then releasing photos and video taken by people under his control.  The Guardian is reporting that:

A mini-revolt by news organisations against White House press restrictions gathered momentum Monday as USA Today joined other media shops to have declared a boycott on officially issued photographs.
“We do not publish, either in print or online, handout photos originating from the White House press office, except in very extraordinary circumstances,” deputy director Andrew Scott said in a memo to employees. “The functions of the president at the White House are fundamentally public in nature, and should be documented for the public by independent news organizations, not solely by the White House press office.”
The memo followed the submission to the White House last Thursday of a letter signed by 38 US media organisations to protest limits on photographers' access.  The Obama administration has aggressively discouraged news organizations from pursuing sensitive stories, seizing reporters’ phone records and naming at least one journalist who published leaked information as a possible criminal co-conspirator. The reliance of the Obama White House on official photography has been a longtime source of complaint.

Dark Money Corrupts Elections

The Center for Public Integrity analyzed the IRS forms of a number of non-profit politically involved groups, and these fat cats are pouring hundreds of millions into lobbying, attack ads and funding their political agenda, including grants to groups ranging from ALEC to Give Missourians a Raise, a union-backed group that successfully fought to raise the state’s minimum wage.  Here is what they found.

The Advocacy Fund, a left leaning group connected to the Tides Foundation, gave $7.7 million in grants to more than 50 groups.  The American Petroleum Institute, received $165.4 million in dues in 2012. That includes $98.4 million for political or lobbying expenses — the highest amounts in five years, based on the organization's previous IRS filings.  Americans for Prosperity, backed by oil moguls David and Charles Koch, reported spending $33.5 million on political campaign activities, $83 million in advertising and promotion and $3 million on travel in 2012. Club for Growth
During the fiscal year ending June 2012, the group spent more than $1 million on two contractors in Bethesda, Md., for media and research purposes; $1.4 million on legislative involvement and policy advocacy; $941,000 on issue advocacy; and $244,000 on "independent express advocacy."  Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, a drug industry trade association, doled out $18.1 million in grants, including some to politically active “dark money” groups. It awarded $1.5 million to American Action Network; $75,000 to Heritage Action for America; $25,000 to American Commitment; and roughly $250,000 each to the American Legislative Exchange Council, Americans for Tax Reform and Freedom Path Inc. Another $50,000 went to American Justice Partnership, the third largest donor to the Republican State Leadership Committee.  The Republican Jewish Coalition spent $6.6 million on “advertising and promotion.” Of that amount, FEC records indicate $4.6 million went toward ads urging voters to oust Obama, which was nearly 46 percent of its overall spending last year.  The U.S. Chamber of Commerce spent $53.9 million on political campaign activities — more than it spent in at least five years. The group also reported spending $57 million on advertising and promotion, $9.1 million on travel and $5.4 million in compensation for its president, Thomas Donohue.  The U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform — it also doesn’t disclose its members — received $39.8 million in dues, mostly from 21 groups that paid more than $1 million each. Of this money collected, $32.2 million was for lobbying or political expenses including $3.7 million to the Republican State Leadership Committee and $1 million each to the Republican Governors Association and the Florida Jobs PAC.  YG Network, the nonprofit arm of the “Young Guns” empire spent nearly $3 million on political advertisements expressly calling for the election of Republican candidates or the defeat of Democratic ones, according to filings with the FEC. 

Feel good about the NSA

This Video from Stephen Colbert is really funny.  He revels in the nonsense put out by the government when talking about the NSA.  Now you can see the logic behind the nonsense.

Umatilla Chemical Weapons Incinerator Almost Gone

The Umatilla Chemical Depot opened in 1941, but no chemical weapons were there until 1962, over 50 years ago in the midst of the cold war constantly threatening to become a hot war.  Once the US decided to destroy them as a result of signing the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Army decided to incinerate them, over much protest from Environmental groups.  The incinerator was completed in 2001. The Army began weapons disposal on September 8, 2004 and completed disposal on October 25, 2011, and now the last remains are being demolished.  Let's hope they never come back.

Corporatocracy Gone Wild

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a trade deal that's supposed to be good for all US citizens, but as I've blogged before, it is totally controlled and written by mega corporations to secure their grip on international trade and laws, and if it is enacted it will further the degradation of our people while the mega rich will gain control over everybody and everything.  It is blessed by President Obama, but no members of Congress will be allowed to see it or debate it, it's being written in total secrecy by the corporate elite.  Public Citizen obtained a leaked chapter of the draft language from WikiLeaks and had this to say.

“The Obama administration’s proposals are the worst – the most damaging for health – we have seen in a U.S. trade agreement to date. The Obama administration has backtracked from even the modest health considerations adopted under the Bush administration,” said Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s global access to medicines program. “The Obama administration’s shameful bullying on behalf of the giant drug companies would lead to preventable suffering and death in Asia-Pacific countries. And soon the administration is expected to propose additional TPP terms that would lock Americans into high prices for cancer drugs for years to come.”   Last week, the AARP and major consumer groups wrote to the Obama administration to express their “deep concern” that U.S. proposals for the TPP would “limit the ability of states and the federal government to moderate escalating prescription drug, biologic drug and medical device costs in public programs,” and contradict cost-cutting plans for biotech medicines in the White House budget.

Other U.S.-demanded measures for the TPP would empower the tobacco giants to sue governments before foreign tribunals to demand taxpayer compensation for their health regulations and have been widely criticized. “This supposed trade negotiation has devolved into a secretive rulemaking against public health, on behalf of Big Pharma and Big Tobacco,” said Maybarduk.

Predatory Drug Pricing

I don't know what it would take to get government action on predatory drug pricing, but take a look at this article on two drugs to treat fatal illnesses, Cystic Fibrosis and cancer.  It makes me so angry that we tolerate this abuse of very vulnerable sick people.

In January 2012, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Kalydeco, the first drug to treat the underlying cause of cystic fibrosis, after just three months of review. It was one of the fastest approvals of a new medicine in the agency’s history. Vertex Pharmaceuticals, which discovered and developed the drug, priced Kalydeco at $294,000 a year, which made it one of the world’s most expensive medicines. The company also pledged to provide it free to any patient in the United States who is uninsured or whose insurance won’t cover it. Doctors and patients enthusiastically welcomed the drug because it offers life-saving health benefits and there is no other treatment. Insurers and governments readily paid the cost.  Several months later, Zaltrap was approved to treat colorectal cancer. The drug was discovered by Regeneron, an emerging biopharmaceutical company like Vertex, but sold by the French drug maker Sanofi. Though it worked no better in clinical trials than Roche’s cancer drug Avastin, which itself adds only 1.4 months to life expectancy for patients with advanced colorectal cancer, Sanofi priced Zaltrap at $11,000 a month, or twice Avastin’s price. Unexpectedly, there was resistance. Doctors at Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York, one of the world’s leading cancer centers, decided Zaltrap wasn’t worth prescribing. They announced their decision—the first time prominent physicians anywhere had said “Enough” to the introduction of a high-priced cancer drug—on the op-ed page of the New York Times. Three weeks later Sanofi effectively dropped its price by half through rebates to doctors and hospitals. Even so, British health authorities said they would not pay for the treatment.

Banks Still Too Big To Jail

Elizabeth Warren is still hammering on the Obama Administration on the last 5 years of inaction since the great financial crash of 2008, nearly nothing has been accomplished in changing the structure and culture of banks in the US.  The Guardian reports:

"We have got to get back to running this country for American families, not for its largest financial institutions," said Warren, who said the issue was an indictment of how little had changed since the 2008 banking crash.  The four biggest Wall Street banks are 30% larger than before the financial crisis, she said, while the five biggest institutions hold more than half the bank assets in the country.
Warren claimed this amounted to an $83bn-a-year taxpayer subsidy for some Wall Street institutions, because they were so large that they could safely rely on a government bailout in the event of a future crisis, and were therefore able to take bigger risks than rivals. She also cited research suggesting the crash had cost up to $14tn, or $120,000 for each American household.
"Three years since Dodd-Frank was passed, the biggest banks are bigger than ever, the risks to the system have grown and the market distortions continue."
She said current regulators do not give "much reason for confidence" and added: "It is time to act: the last thing we should do is wait for another crisis."

Ron Wyden, "The Culture of Misinformation"

Ron Wyden comments on the bill passed by the US Senate Intelligence Committee over his objections in an interview with The Oregonian yesterday.

After a dozen years on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Ron Wyden doesn't get surprised easily.  But Gen. Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency, recently managed it, by assuring the committee that the NSA planned to put bulk data it had collected on American citizens into a secure lockbox. 
Repeatedly, the Oregon senator recalls, Alexander had told the committee the NSA didn't hold data on American citizens.  "Now," says Wyden, "he said he's going to put into a lockbox the data that he's said he doesn't have."
"The culture of misinformation," he says, "has caused a lot of people to say, they're telling us stuff that just isn't true." Even the supersecret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, Wyden points out, has ruled that NSA has sometimes exceeded its legal and constitutional authority.
Wyden is introducing his own bill, very different from the committee's, that would prevent bulk data collection on American citizens, create an independent counsel to respond to NSA surveillance requests to the FISA court and eliminate "backdoor" breaking into social media systems. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has introduced similar legislation, and last week Leahy and Wyden formed an alliance, becoming co-sponsors of each others' bills.

Wyden also commented to The Guardian recently.

Ron Wyden said the bill maintains "business as usual" and "remains far from anything that could be considered meaningful reform".

Spies Breach "Fundamental Rights" in EU

The Guardian is reporting on continued outrage in Europe over the spying by the NSA and France, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden.  An analysis presented to a hearing in the EU parliament in Brussels argues that EU law prohibits the actions of the spy agencies.

Sergio Carrera, a Spanish jurist, and Francesco Ragazzi, a professor of international relations at Leiden University in the Netherlands, who co-wrote the paper, made the appeal for European action at a hearing in the EU parliament in Brussels on Thursday.
They said the US National Security Agency (NSA), the UK's GCHQ and equivalent bodies in France, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden had breached basic articles of the EU treaty, such as article 4.3 on "sincere co-operation", as well as privacy clauses in the EU charter of fundamental values and in the European charter of fundamental rights.

"It's no longer credible to say the EU has no legal competence and should do nothing on this. Sorry, we don't think this is acceptable," Carrera said.
"We are witnessing a systematic breach of people's fundamental rights," he added.
Ragazzi said: "The bigger the crisis, the more the system of checks and balances should be reinforced. This is what distinguishes democracies from police states."
The idea that espionage is a national prerogative has been widely used to deflect EU queries into the scandal. 
They said the EU parliament should threaten to block an EU-US free trade agreement unless the NSA and GCHQ disclose the full nature of their surveillance programmes.
They said MEPs should push EU countries to draft a "professional code for the transnational management of data".
They also called for new EU laws to stop internet companies giving information to intelligence services, to protect whistleblowers such as the NSA leaker Edward Snowden, and to form a permanent oversight body on intelligence matters.

FDA (Finally) Bans Trans Fats in Processed Foods

The FDA is out to prevent your early heart attack by eliminating the addition of Trans Fats in processed foods, like frozen pizzas and microwave popcorn. 

Trans fat can still be found in such processed foods as:

• crackers, cookies, cakes, frozen pies and other baked goods
• snack foods (such as microwave popcorn)
• frozen pizza
• vegetable shortenings and stick margarines
• coffee creamers
• refrigerated dough products (such as biscuits and cinnamon rolls)
• ready-to-use frostings

More than decade ago, a sea change began in the American diet, with consumers starting to avoid foods with trans fat and companies responding by reducing the amount of trans fat in their products.
This evolution began when FDA first proposed in 1999 that manufacturers be required to declare the amount of trans fat on Nutrition Facts labels because of public health concerns. That requirement became effective in 2006.
However, there are still many processed foods made with partially hydrogenated oils (PHOs), the major dietary source of trans fat in processed food. Trans fat has been linked to an increased risk of coronary heart disease, in which plaque builds up inside the arteries and may cause a heart attack.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that a further reduction of trans fat in the food supply can prevent an additional 7,000 deaths from heart disease each year and up to 20,000 heart attacks each year.
Part of the FDA's responsibility to the public is to ensure that food in the American food supply is safe. Therefore, due to the risks associated with consuming PHOs, FDA has issued a Federal Register notice with its preliminary determination that PHOs are no longer "generally recognized as safe," or GRAS, for short. If this preliminary determination is finalized, then PHOs would become food additives subject to premarket approval by FDA. Foods containing unapproved food additives are considered adulterated under U.S. law, meaning they cannot legally be sold.

Pharmaceutical Marketing as Organized Crime

One of the Links on my blog is to Howard Brody's blog, Hooked.  He blogs about medical ethics in the Pharmaceutical industry, or, more often, the lack of it.  He recently did a book review on a book by a European Researcher, Peter C. Gøtzsche, Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare (New York: Radcliffe Publishing, 2013).  Here are some of the zingers in the book.

Throughout the book, Gøtzsche uses the organized crime motif to characterize the drug industry. This is quite deliberate and measured. He argues that something counts as organized crime when:

• They kill people
• They lie about what they do
• They routinely break the law as a part of their business practices
• They use their ill-gotten gains to corrupt the government regulatory apparatus so as to be allowed to continue to operate

Gøtzsche is a physician, epidemiologist and research methodologist, and has achieved prominence as head of the Nordic Cochrane Center, a part of the Cochrane Collaboration which is generally recognized as the most reliable and independent assessor of medical data—a sort of gold standard if you want to know: how good is the evidence that any treatment works for any disease? So this guy is not one to fly off the handle and make charges that he cannot document with solid evidence.

• “In the United States and Europe, drugs are the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer.”(1)
• “The main reason we take so many drugs is that drug companies don’t sell drugs, they sell lies about drugs. Blatant lies that—in all the cases I have studied—have continued after the statements were proven wrong.”(2)
• “The book addresses a general system failure caused by widespread crime, corruption and impotent drug regulation in need of radical reforms. Some readers will find my book one-sided and polemic, but there is little point in describing what goes well in a system that is out of control. If a criminologist undertakes a study of muggers, no one expects a ‘balanced’ account mentioning that many muggers are good family men.”(2)

Unemployment, Talent Scarcity or Incompetent HR?

The official reported unemployment rate is 7.20, but actual rates are much higher.  Nick Corcodilos makes the argument that the "talent shortage" reported by HR managers is really because they have set up impossible job requirements coupled with a reliance on applicant tracking systems (ATSes) and job boards like Taleo, Monster.com and LinkedIn, that screen out everybody, then HR reports they can't find the right person and the job doesn't get filled.

Over 25 million Americans are unemployed or under-employed. (According to the Business Desk, that's how many Americans say they want but can't find a full-time job.) Meanwhile, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, 3.9 million jobs were vacant in September.

What Is Going On

Here's the simple truth: Unemployment is made in America by employers who have given up control over their competitive edge -- recruiting and hiring -- to a handful of database jockeys who are funded by HR executives, who in turn have no idea how to recruit or hire themselves.

Companies Don't Hire Anymore

Employers don't do their own hiring, and that's the number one problem. They outsource their competitive edge (recruiting and hiring) to third parties like Taleo, Kenexa, LinkedIn, Monster.com and CareerBuilder. Monster and LinkedIn alone sucked almost $2 billion out of the employment system in 2012. These vendors offer little more than trivial technologies and cheap string-search routines masquerading as "algorithms" for finding "hidden talent" and "matching people to jobs."

Employers Don't Know How to Recruit

Here's how human resources departments across America "recruit." They put impossible mixes of keywords about jobs into a computer. They press a button and pay billions of dollars for a chance that Prince Charming will materialize on their computer displays. When the prince fails to appear, they double their bets and keep gambling. (Last year, companies polled said just 1.3 percent of their hires came from Monster.com and 1.2 percent from CareerBuilder. See "Is LinkedIn Cheating Employers and Job Seekers Alike?")

The Employment System Vendors Are Lying

The big job boards and the ATSes tell employers that sophisticated database technology will find the perfect hire.

• "Don't settle for teaching a good worker anything about doing a job. Hire only the perfect fit!"
• "We make that possible when you use more keywords for a job!"
• "The database handles it all!"

When matches fail to appear, these vendors blame "the talent shortage" and contend that job seekers lack the specific skills employers need.
Except that's a lie. Job descriptions heavily larded with keywords make it virtually impossible to find acceptable candidates. Wharton researcher Peter Cappelli tells about an employer that got 25,000 applicants for a routine engineering position. The ATS rejected every single one of them. Every day that an impossible job requisition remains unfilled, the employment system vendors make more money while companies keep advertising for the perfect hires.

Employers Have No Business Plan

Employers claim job applicants lack the requisite skills and talents for today's jobs. But in "Why Good People Can't Get Jobs," Peter Cappelli reports that they are wrong. The quality of the American worker pool has not diminished. Rather, American companies:

• Don't want to pay market value to hire the right workers.
• Don't want to train talented workers to do a new job.
• Are content to keep using ATSes that don't get the job done.

America Counts Jobs, Not Profitable Work

The federal government tracks the number of people who have jobs and the number of vacant jobs. But tallying jobs to assess the economy is like counting chickens before they hatch. The federal government has no idea which jobs or which work is actually profitable and contributing to a healthy economy.
It's no secret that the weekly employment figures are questionable and misleading. The definitions of jobs and "who is employed" are so manipulated that no one knows what is going on.

People Must Stop Begging for Jobs

It's time for people to stop thinking about jobs, and high time to start thinking about how -- and where -- they can create profit.
For example, if I run a company, I'll hire you to do work -- if it pays off more than what I pay you to do it. Today, few employers know which jobs actually pay off. That's why you need to know how to walk into a manager's office and demonstrate, hands down, how you will contribute profit to the manager's business. That's right: Be smarter than the manager about his own business. Stop begging for jobs. Start offering profit.

  .

Curry County Defeats Law Enforcement Levy

Curry County may go down in history as the first bankrupt county in Oregon, possibly by next June.  The citizens defeated a law-enforcement levy, one of 4 levies on the ballot yesterday.  They did approve a hospital bond levy and a Port Orford police levy, but shot down the law enforcement and a levy. to fund a new fire truck in Gold Beach.  The county landed a $1 million Federal Funds windfall thanks to Ron Wyden, but even with that their projected deficit is at $2 million.
The county commissioners had this to say.

Curry County Commissioner chair David Brock Smith plans to open conversations with Gov. John Kitzhaber regarding the economic status of the county after the failure of Measure 8-73 at the ballot boxes yesterday.

“The whole thing went down in flames,” he said, after a long pause. “I understand the hard economic times we’re in, that it’s difficult for citizens to look at their pocketbook and have to write out that extra check. …”

The county has enough money to fund its existing services — already basically cut in half this past year — until June 30.

Of note is that the county is down to four sheriff’s deputies, leaving most of the county without coverage during some parts of the day.

“As unfortunate as it is, we must begin conversations with the governor’s office on what those minimum adequate levels of public safety are, Smith said. “We must keep some level of civility in terms of public safety. We must keep the jail open, we must be able to keep the DA’s office whole so we can prosecute crimes other than just Measure 11 crimes.

“We must keep the juvenile department solid so we can give them the resources to preempt youth from becoming adult criminals. That’s a core service within the county, if not the core service.”

Commissioner David Itzen said he understands why voters rejected the measure, especially with three other tax questions on the ballot.

“They just couldn’t find it within their budget to make the necessary changes,” he said. “I guess we’ll need to do something again.”

That “something,” Itzen said, will likely be another question on the May ballot.

Portland Cleveland High School Students Set Model of Inclusion

The students at Cleveland High School have selected a Lesbian couple to the Homecoming Court as reported in The Oregonian.  It's going to be a better world when these folks start running the show.

When Cleveland High students helped Sophie Schoenfeld and Laurel Osborne make school history last month, they hardly seemed to notice.
The two seniors have been dating for about a year. In October, their fellow students elected them to the school’s homecoming court, marking the first time the Southeast Portland school -- and likely any Portland-area high school -- has voted in a same-sex couple.
Every year a prince and a princess for each grade are nominated and voted on by their fellow students. But at the Oct. 4 homecoming assembly, students broke tradition and selected the two girls as the senior class representatives for the court.
The vote, first reported by the Cleveland High School Clarion newspaper, was historic. Yet the students treated the pair like any other homecoming couple, according to Schoenfeld, 18. Teachers, she said, spoke more about the vote’s importance than their classmates.
“A lot of teachers went up to us and said it speaks volumes for the school,” Schoenfeld said.
The couple said they have never felt judged for their sexual orientation at Cleveland High.
“Cleveland is such a cool community,” said Osborne, 17. “I’ve never felt discriminated against. We feel really lucky because it’s not always like that. Cleveland is just a progressive, accepting place.”

Edward Snowden Picks Up Support in Germany

The Guardian is reporting on an article in the German weekly Der Spiegel that many highly placed Germans are calling for recognition of Edward Snowden as a whistleblower instead of a criminal, and some are advocating he be offered asylum in Germany, not that it would likely be adopted by Angela Merkel.  Snowdens' temporary 1 year asylum runs out next June.

Heiner Geissler, the former general secretary of Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats, says in the appeal: "Snowden has done the western world a great service. It is now up to us to help him."  The writer and public intellectual Hans Magnus Enzensberger argues in his contribution that "the American dream is turning into a nightmare" and suggests that Norway would be best placed to offer Snowden refuge, given its track record of offering political asylum to Leon Trotsky in 1935. He bemoans the fact that in Britain, "which has become a US colony", Snowden is regarded as a traitor.
The weekly news magazine also publishes a "manifesto for truth", written by Snowden, in which the former NSA employee warns of the danger of spy agencies setting the political agenda.
"At the beginning, some of the governments who were exposed by the revelations of mass surveillance initiated an unprecedented smear campaign. They intimidated journalists and criminalised the publication of the truth
"Today we know that this was a mistake, and that such behaviour is not in the public interest. The debate they tried to stop is now taking place all over the world", Snowden writes in the short comment piece sent to Der Spiegel via an encrypted channel.
As calls for drastic measures in response to the NSA revelations are increasing in Germany, Angela Merkel seems to be avoiding direct confrontation with Washington. Several politicians from the chancellor's party have expressed their eagerness to meet Snowden in Russia while simultaneously seeming to rule out the possibility of inviting the whistleblower to Germany. "There is no reason to make a call on a Snowden stay in Germany at this stage," Michael Grosse-Brömer told Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung.

Ron Wyden and the NSA Steamroller

“We’re just going to keep fighting this battle. It’s going to be a long one.”
Ron Wyden has his hands full in trying to rein in the NSA steamroller, which has powerful allies in Congress, such as Dianne Feinstein, Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Saxby Chambliss a Georgia Republican on the same committee.  Wyden has labeled their ilk the "Business as Usual Brigade", and true to form they steamrolled a NSA "reform" bill that just continues business as usual with a few weak tweaks to existing practice.

The bill is a direct challenge to one introduced Tuesday by senator Patrick Leahy that would end domestic phone-records collection. It was also opposed by leading intelligence committee member Mark Udall, who said it did not go far enough.
"The NSA's invasive surveillance of Americans' private information does not respect our constitutional values and needs fundamental reform, not incidental changes. Unfortunately, the bill passed by the Senate intelligence committee does not go far enough to address the NSA's overreaching domestic surveillance programs," Udall said.
Another Democratic member of the committee, Ron Wyden, said the bill maintains "business as usual" and "remains far from anything that could be considered meaningful reform". 
Wyden suggested that recent concern about NSA spying on foreign leaders had distracted from the real focus on mass domestic surveillance in the US. “The statements that American intelligence officials have made this week about collecting on the intentions of foreign leadership, that’s consistent with the understanding I’ve had for years, as a member of the intelligence committee,” he said.
“That has implications for foreign policy. My top priority is ending the mass surveillance, digital surveillance, on millions and millions of law-abiding Americans.”
Feinstein unexpectedly announced on Monday that she was “totally opposed” to the foreign leader spying of the sort the NSA conducts of German chancellor Angela Merkel. Feinstein has been a staunch supporter of the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records.
“Americans are making it clear, that they never – repeat never – agreed to give up their constitutional liberties for the appearance of security,” Wyden said. “We’re just going to keep fighting this battle. It’s going to be a long one.”