Wyden Town Hall Shut Down

I saw an article in Golocalpdx.com about a Ron Wyden Town Hall meeting in Portland being disrupted by protesters with Don't Shoot PDX, chanting "Hands up don't shoot," "I can't breathe," and "No justice no peace.".  

Given that Wyden has little to nothing to do with the running of any police force anywhere and his progressive orientation, it seemed to me to be an opportunist grab by the group of a public forum that they used to publicize their protest.  Too bad for those who attended, the town hall was cancelled after the protesters refused to call it quits.  I can support protests against injustice and police violence, but if I were them I'd pick better targets than Wyden.

Luxembourg Takes a Leak

The ICIJ has obtained a trove of leaked documents detailing the nefarious tactics of massive multi-nationals to evade taxes all over the world using the "squeaky clean on the outside, corporate friendly on the inside" Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and their secret tax agreements.  See this video from the ICIJ to see how it all works.  The Corporate cast of villains includes a cast of usual suspects including AIG, Deutchse Bank, IKEA and more.  According to Wikipedia:

In March 2010, the Sunday Telegraph reported that most of Kim Jong-Il's $4bn in secret accounts is in Luxembourg banks.^[45] Amazon.co.uk also benefits from Luxembourg tax loopholes by channeling substantial UK revenues as reported by The Guardian in April 2012.^[46] Luxembourg ranked third on the Tax Justice Network's 2011 Financial Secrecy Index of the world's major tax havens, scoring only slightly behind the Cayman Islands.^[47] In 2013, Luxembourg is ranked as the 2nd safest tax haven in the world, behind Switzerland.

 Additional ICIJ background is here and here.

Hungry and Homeless in Ft Lauderdale

A number of US Cities have enacted laws making homelessness illegal and those who would feed them criminals, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless.  The latest abomination took place in Ft Lauderdale, FL where two ministers and a 90 year old man who runs a charitable organization were arrested for illegally feeding homeless people.  Take note Oregon, this could be coming to a community near you.

Despite heated protests, Fort Lauderdale passed an ordinance early on Oct. 22,restricting charitable groups from doling out meals to homeless people in public, the Sun Sentinel reported.

The new rules, billed as "public health and safety measures," limit outdoor feeding programs to one per city block and must be set up at least 500 feet away from residential properties. Organizers are also required to bring portable toilets for workers, according to the Sentinel.

Making it increasingly difficult for people in need to access food has become the norm in a number of major U.S. cities.

Find out more about Love The Neighbor and how you can support the group here.

The Strange Development in Troutdale

There is a 12 acre undeveloped parcel in Troutdale that the city wants to make into something since it's just adjacent to the Sandy River and could be very attractive, but there's a problem.  According to an article in The Oregonian the property:

holds remnants of a former sewage plant and thousands of buried sheep bodies...  

But rest assured, the city has a buyer who plans to transform it into:

a destination hotel, spa, convention center and bicyclist mecca on the banks of the Sandy River.

The company dug a test pit and found that after a half century or more underground, the animal remains have formed a gelatinous goo under a thick layer of dirt, Wand said.

The material isn't toxic, Wand said. But he added: "You don't want to build over jiggly stuff that might not support a parking lot or building foundation."

The company hopes to remove the remains this October, before the rainiest weather complicates the work but during the windy season, which they hope will make what's expected to be a smelly excavation more tolerable for surrounding residents and businesses.

I couldn't even hope to make this stuff up, sounds like Love Canal West.  Are you serious that 50 year-old sheep jello buried underground along with a former sewage site isn't toxic? I think I'll take my next vacation somewhere else.  Good luck folks on that smell.

 

 

Jeff Merkley Needs to Explain his Out Of State Campaign Expenditures

The new local online news organization Golocalpdx.com has published an analysis of campaign expenditures made by Jeff Merkley and found 78% of his money is spent outside Oregon, which blew my mind.  Furthermore, his campaign has stonewalled the news organization and:

"refused to answer any questions regarding his out-of-Oregon spending and refused to answer questions about his or his consultants' relationships/ownership with any of the companies receiving millions of dollars of campaign accounts."

 I await an explanation of this revelation, and I hope other local media picks the story up too.

Oregon Should Put Limits on Drones

I'll send an email to my Oregon State Representatives suggesting Oregon should follow up on California's initiative in limiting Drone use in Law Enforcement.  I think it would "fly" here too.  If only we could do the same with Automated License Plate Tracking.

Obama War on Freedom of the Press

The NY Times reporter James Risen may be in jail weeks from now for refusing to reveal his sources in a case first involving George W Bush and then aggressively pursued by President Obama and Eric Holder. There is a petition in support of Risen, I invite all to sign it.  In an article in The Guardian, Rises says about Obama "He’s the greatest enemy to press freedom in a generation.”.  Those are pretty strong words, but a report by the Committee to Protect Journalists tells the tale, with nearly every journalist interviewed calling this administration the most hostile to the press in history.

Six government employees, plus two contractors including Edward Snowden, have been subjects of felony criminal prosecutions since 2009 under the 1917 Espionage Act, accused of leaking classified information to the press—compared with a total of three such prosecutions in all previous U.S. administrations.  

 “This is the most closed, control freak administration I’ve ever covered,” said David E. Sanger, veteran chief Washington correspondent of The New York Times.  

New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan wrote earlier this year, “it’s turning out to be the administration of unprecedented secrecy and unprecedented attacks on a free press.”  

“President Obama had said that default should be  disclosure,” Times reporter Shane told me. “The culture they’ve created is not one that favors disclosure.”  The administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration, when I was one of the editors involved in The Washington Post’s investigation of Watergate. The 30 experienced Washington journalists at a variety of news organizations whom I interviewed for this report could not remember any precedent.

Oregon Political Attack Ads and Dark Money

The outside Koch brothers have targeted Senator Jeff Merkley and are running attack ads in Oregon.  They launched an estimated $3.6 million television campaign of 30 second ads, courtesy of a Koch controlled group called freedompartners which is pouring money into the election.  The Oregonian Politifact page has of course rated the ad as false.

And what about the organization?  On its membership page, it has this to say, not very enlightening.

With more than 200 engaged members, Freedom Partners is a chamber of commerce that advances its members’ interest in promoting the principles of a free market and a free society.

The board of Directors of the organization is tied closely to Koch, as an example.  "Dr. Richard Fink is an executive vice president and member of the board of directors of Koch Industries, Inc.  Additionally, Rich is chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Koch Companies Public Sector, LLC, which provides legal, government, philanthropy, and community relations services to Koch companies.  Rich also serves as the president of the Charles G. Koch Foundation, and a director of the Fred C. and Mary R. Koch Foundation.  Rich earned his PhD from New York University and M.A. from UCLA.  He graduated Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude with a bachelor’s in economics from Rutgers University."

More to come I'm sure

Ron Wyden Battles On For Civil Rights

I don;t think I can come up with any commentary other than to quote excerpts from Wyden's speech to the TechFestNW event in Portland on Friday, August 15, 2014.  He is a wise thinker on government power to do good or evil in the digital age.  Read the full speech.

For centuries, individual privacy was protected to a large extent by the limited resources of governments. It simply wasn’t possible for governments to secretly collect huge amounts of personal information about every single citizen without building massive networks of spies and informants. ...  

Our luck has run out. Here in the 21st century, this dynamic has already shifted in a profound and fundamental way. Advances in technology have made it possible for governments around the world to vacuum up and rifle through the personal information of huge numbers of law-abiding citizens. If you would defend a society built on the principle of individual liberty you need to recognize that you can no longer rely on the fact that mass surveillance is hard – in the 21st century, it’s easy. The only protections that we can count on now are those that are written into law, upheld by a responsible judiciary, and enforced by a public willing to stand up for their own freedoms.  Fortunately, our Founding Fathers left us with some pretty darn good legal principles that can guide us when it comes to privacy. The Fourth Amendment guarantees the fundamental right of the people to be secure from unreasonable searches and seizures. Justice Louis Brandeis called this the right to be left alone. 

 

Oregon Resists Gilead Predatory Pricing on Solvaldi

Oregon is considering restricting Medicaid reimbursement for hepatitis C drug Sovaldi treatments because of the predatory pricing established by Gilead Pharmaceuticals which puts the price of a single pill at $1,000 or about $84,000 for a patient on a standard, 12-week treatment schedule.

The state can't afford to treat every patient given the way Gilead has priced its treatment.  The thought in Oregon is to only treat the sickest with the drug and wait for other competitors to offer alternatives and drive the price down through competition.

Ron Wyden is investigating the pricing of the drug as well as payments to research studies lauding the drugs' effectiveness, which OHSU found to be seriously biased and flawed.  That raises the question of whether or not Gilead gamed the research process to justify their high price.

NSA Reform Lite - The Empire Strikes Back

Ron Wyden blasted the House adoption of the USA Freedom Act which was so watered down and full of holes that some of it's original sponsors voted against it.  According to the Washington Post half of the original co-sponsors turned against the bill after it was gutted.

The new version from the House Rules Committee, privacy advocates say, significantly weakened the reform and included loopholes that could potentially allow bulk data collection on U.S. citizens to continue.

Privacy advocates weren't the only ones upset about the changes. Many co-sponsors of the original version were also concerned. In fact, a Washington Post analysis of the votes shows that 76 of the 152 co-sponsors of the earlier version voted against passage of the altered version on the House floor Thursday. So, half of the co-sponsors ended up voting against what was supposed to be their own NSA reform bill.

That includes Rep. Jared Polis, (D-Colo.), who released a press statement about his change of heart after the vote. “Unfortunately, the USA Freedom Act, which I cosponsored as introduced, has been watered down and co-opted to the point that it creates the possibility that NSA could misuse the bill- contrary to the legislative intent- to conduct broad searches of communication records," Polis said.

Ron Wyden had this to say.

Given the Executive Branch’s record of consistently making inaccurate public statements about these laws in order to conceal ongoing dragnet surveillance of Americans, it would be naive to trust the Executive Branch to apply new surveillance laws with restraint. 

It is unfortunately clear that some of the same officials who were responsible for conducting this dragnet surveillance and misleading the public about it are now working to make sure that any attempt at reform legislation is as limited as possible. 

Congress Trashes the Constitution, Blames Snowden

The NSA and Corporate Media are waging a bizarre sideshow over whether Edward Snowden tried to raise his concerns inside the NSA about their disregard of Constitutional protections of US citizens.  Wait a minute, these folks are arguing that he should have raised his voice privately to the folks running the unconstitutional operation?  You gotta be kidding, he'd have been squashed and locked up in some hole in a distant country and he knew it.  Even Ron Wyden didn't reveal it to the public because it would have been the end of his career.  The Intelligence game is rigged against whistleblowers and everybody knows it.

The current sideshow from Dianne Feinstein alleges essentially that Snowden didn't try to single handedly stop the criminal actions of Congress, the President and the NSA.  As The Guardian reported, first everybody claimed there were No emails on the subject, then claimed they found one email.  You can bet your ass there's lots more they're hiding, but even if there's only one the fact remains that whistleblowers were on a suicide journey if they told their bosses that they were criminals.

Senate intelligence committee members Ron Wyden and Mark Udall have long argued the administration may have been in breach of surveillance statutes in its activities. They were prevented from raising many of their concerns in public due to confidentiality requirements. Ben Wizner, Snowden’s legal adviser, said of the email: “This whole issue is a red herring. The problem was not some unknown and isolated instance of misconduct. The problem was that an entire system of mass surveillance had been deployed – and deemed legal – without the knowledge or consent of the public. Snowden raised many complaints over many channels. The NSA is releasing a single part of a single exchange after previously claiming that no evidence existed.”

The real issue that the media should be focusing on is the conduct of Congress, specifically the members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees who are supposed to be protecting our rights and the Constitution, and whether or not they should be judged as criminals for their part in the unconstitutional acts, along with President Obama.  All of then knew what was happening and let it go on without even telling most other members of congress.

Has Too Big to Jail Finally Been Overcome?

We finally have a felony conviction, aiding and abetting tax evasion, for the major bank Credit Suisse, but what are the penalties?  For starters the bank will be fined $2.6 billion, a fair hunk of change to be sure, but the CEO Brady Dougan said this in a press statement, so where's the beef?

Dougan said the settlement had had little impact on business. “We have found no instances where clients cannot do business with us,” he said. “Our discussions with clients have been very reassuring and we haven’t seen very many issues at all.”

So much for feeling too much pain, now does he go to jail?  Not a chance in my opinion, even if Switzerland extradited him which they won't. Then there's the matter of the tax evaders, Credit Suisse hasn't been required to reveal who they are so the IRS can collect taxes from them, as well as prosecute them.  That has Senators Carl Levin and John McCain puzzled too after they did all the investigative work that led to the conviction.

Senators Carl Levin and John McCain welcomed the $2.6bn fine of the bank announced Monday but said more needed to be done. Levin and McCain led the permanent subcommittee on investigations team that uncovered much of the wrongdoing at the bank.

In a statement, Levin said it was “appropriate” that Credit Suisse had been held criminally liable for aiding and abetting tax evasion – the first bank of this scale to held criminally liable for 20 years.

He said the fine struck “an important blow against tax evasion through bank secrecy”.

“But it is a mystery to me why the US government didn’t require as part of the agreement that the bank cough up some of the names of the US clients with secret Swiss bank accounts. More than 20,000 Americans were Credit Suisse account holders in Switzerland, the vast majority of whom never disclosed their accounts as required by US law. This leaves their identities undisclosed, with no accountability for taxes owed. The changes Credit Suisse has agreed to make to its practices are long overdue and welcome, but must be carefully monitored,” he said.

McCain said he was “gratified” by the Justice Department’s decision to require Credit Suisse to plead guilty to criminal wrongdoing. “In such cases, it is vitally important for all Americans to know that no financial institution is ‘too big to prosecute,’” he said. But he added that questions remained.

“Over the next few days, I look forward to reviewing this guilty plea closely to see whether it appropriately holds officers, directors and key executives individually accountable and whether the plea will be sufficient to help deter similar misconduct in the future,” he said.

In The Guardian story, they interviewed  John Coffee, Adolf A Berle professor of law at Columbia Law School, and he said.

“It is less than a severe sanction when no officers are indicted, when the settlement does not require the dismissal of any employees and where they do not get the names of these US customers,” he said. He said other regulators could take further action, the SEC could bar it from being a money manager, but that was not going to happen.

“Mary Jo White [chair of the SEC] does not want to inconvenience a major bank over a little thing like a federal felony conviction,” he said.

GM Lawyers at work, ban "Problems"

The General Motors ignition switch defect has revealed that GM had a list of banned words in Emails, including "problem".  Lawyers don't like words with clear-cut meanings.

What do the words “safety,” ‘’chaotic” and “problem” have in common?
They’re all on General Motors’ list of banned words for employees who were documenting potential safety issues.
The revelation of the 68-word list is one of the odder twists in GM’s ongoing recall of 2.6 million older-model small cars for defective ignition switches.
On Friday, the U.S. government slapped GM with a $35 million fine for failing to report the deadly defect for more than a decade. The government also released a 2008 GM training document that includes the list and warns employees to stick to the facts and not use language that could hurt the company down the road.
The word “defect,” for example, “can be regarded as a legal admission” and should be avoided, the company document says.
Adjectives like “bad,” ‘’terrifying,” ‘’dangerous,” ‘’horrific” and “evil” are on the list. So are unflattering terms like “deathtrap,” ‘’widow-maker” and “Hindenburg.” Even seemingly benign words like “always” and “never” made it on the list.

Portland Nuisance Rally

Once again residents in residential neighborhoods will endure the annual 'Alley Sweeper' rally that sends motorcycles down Portland's public back alleys, mostly in quiet neighborhoods.  While there isn't any law against being a pest, the rally shatters the nerves of those living on streets with alleys behind them.

"I've been listening to this noise all morning long, this is crazy and wrong," said Northeast Portland resident Melinda Williams.
Some neighbors don't appreciate seeing adventure riders, who typically ride in small groups in rural areas, whizzing by their back alley garages and yards.
"There are children, they play in the yards,"said Mark Knutson, who lives next door to Williams.  "Having motorcycles flying through here in mass, is not safe or right."

The jerks who perpetrate this nuisance have the predictable justifications.

 "It's to promote motorcycle awareness and all these alleys are here for public access," said organizer Eric Nordquist. "It's a social event for riders and those who enjoy watching."

Glaxo corruption revealed

Another upstanding Pharmaceutical company with a self-proclaimed "zero tolerance" corruption policy is neck deep in corruption inquiries, including one in Poland,which the company knew about internally but chose not to tell anyone until a UK television program blew the whistle on them.

GSK admitted on Monday that it had brought in private detectives to investigate the Polish claims in 2011 and "found evidence of inappropriate communication in contravention of GSK policy by a single employee. The employee concerned was reprimanded and disciplined in 2011."
The company said it was continuing to investigate the claims and was "co-operating fully with the CBA". However, GSK failed to inform the public or its shareholders of the Polish investigation until Monday despite chief executive Sir Andrew Witty promising to reform the organisation in the wake of the "shameful" and "deeply disappointing" allegations in China.
GSK only revealed details of the allegations following the Panorama investigation, broadcast on BBC1 on Monday. 
In the Panorama programme Jarek Wisniewski, a former GSK sales representative in the Polish region of Lodz, said GSK staff paid doctors to give speeches which did not take place. "We pay agreement for a speech, we pay £100 but we expect more than 100 prescriptions for this drug."
Wisniewski said his regional manager told them to do it, and that he blew the whistle to GSK. He said this resulted in his being sidelined at work and eventually sacked.

GSK is also embroiled in corruption investigations in the Middle East, primarily in  Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan, and in 2012 GSK paid a record $3bn (£1.9bn) in fines to settle claims that it bribed US doctors into prescribing antidepressants for non-approved uses.

Obamacare and the Tax Attack Email

Every once in a while I check in on factcheck.org to see what nonsense is going around, and I noted their debunking of this viral email, according to factcheck.org, it is total gibberish, but of course it is in every wingnut's inbox.

Viral email: THE FIRST THREE MONTHS!
Happy New Year America
Here is what happened on January 1st 2014:

Top Income Tax bracket went from 35% to 39.6%
Top Income Payroll Tax went from 37.4% to 52.2%
Capital Gains Tax went from 15% to 28%
Dividend Tax went from 15% to 39.6%
Estate Tax went from 0% to 55%

Remember this ‘fact;’ if you have any money, the Democrats want it! All these taxes were passed with only Democrat votes. Not one Republican voted to do these taxes. Remember this come election time. And make sure your friends and neighbors know this info too!

 These taxes were all passed under the affordable care act, otherwise known as Obama care.

According to factcheck.org,

We started getting dozens of queries about this one about three weeks before tax filing day. It’s nonsense. Some of these figures aren’t accurate, and none of these increases took effect on Jan. 1, 2014, or had anything to do with the Affordable Care Act. And the claim that “not one Republican voted to do these” is false.

Enough said on that subject, read their analysis for the facts.

Don't Like Torture? CIA Says You're Too Emotional

Senator Ron Wyden blasted former NSA and CIA Director Michael Hayden when he suggested Dianme Feinstein was "too emotional" about torture undertaken by the CIA during the Bush administration.

General Hayden’s suggestion that Chairman Feinstein was motivated by ‘emotion’ rather than a focus on the facts is simply outrageous.  General Hayden unfortunately has a long history of misleading the American public – he did it on domestic surveillance when he was the head of the NSA, and he did it on torture when he was the CIA Director.
The best way to correct this culture of misinformation is to give the American people a chance to review the facts for themselves, and I’ll be working with my colleagues and the administration to ensure that happens quickly.

NSA - Ain't Nobody Safe

The NSA has confirmed in an article from The Guardian that a loophole in the restrictions against domestic spying was employed to search US citizens communications without any warrant.  This should probably come as no surprise given that NSA will use any opening to do whatever they like to anybody.  Senator Ron Wyden initiated the question, finally responded to by James Clapper in typical elaborate double-talk.

“There have been queries, using US person identifiers, of communications lawfully acquired to obtain foreign intelligence targeting non-US persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States,” Clapper wrote in the letter, which has been obtained by the Guardian.
“These queries were performed pursuant to minimization procedures approved by the Fisa court and consistent with the statute and the fourth amendment.”

 Ron Wyden and Mark Udall responded.

On Tuesday, Wyden and Udall said the NSA’s warrantless searches of Americans’ emails and phone calls “should be concerning to all.”
“This is unacceptable. It raises serious constitutional questions, and poses a real threat to the privacy rights of law-abiding Americans. If a government agency thinks that a particular American is engaged in terrorism or espionage, the fourth amendment requires that the government secure a warrant or emergency authorisation before monitoring his or her communications. This fact should be beyond dispute,” the two senators said in a joint statement.
They continued: “Today’s admission by the Director of National Intelligence is further proof that meaningful surveillance reform must include closing the back-door searches loophole and requiring the intelligence community to show probable cause before deliberately searching through data collected under section 702 to find the communications of individual Americans."

Government Transparency, A Promise Unfulfilled

The Associated Press did an analysis of how well the Obama administration was doing on his promise to have "the most transparent administration in history", and it's not looking good according to their analysis in an article published by The Guardian.

The government's own figures from 99 federal agencies covering six years show that halfway through its second term, the administration has made few meaningful improvements in the way it releases records. In category after category — except for reducing numbers of old requests and a slight increase in how often it waived copying fees — the government's efforts to be more open about its activities last year were their worst since President Barack Obama took office.
And five years after Obama directed agencies to less frequently invoke a "deliberative process" exception to withhold materials describing decision-making behind the scenes, the government did it anyway, a record 81,752 times.
"I'm concerned the growing trend toward relying upon FOIA exemptions to withhold large swaths of government information is hindering the public's right to know," said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. "It becomes too much of a temptation. If you screw up in government, just mark it 'top secret.'"