(Note from Sierra Voices Editor: Many of us opposed to the re-opening of the Idaho-Maryland Mine here in Nevada County, CA, have warned of well failures due to mine de-watering, 24×7 truck traffic congestion, arsenic contamination of water, increased flow burden in local streams, etc., and have been called alarmists by Emgold’s CEO, David Watkinson. In the following article you will read that every one of these concerns have borne out in the actual case of the re-opening of the old Drum Lummon mine in Helena, Montana by Toronto-based RX Gold & Silver Inc).

By Eve Byron

MARYSVILLE — A standing-room-only crowd on Wednesday outlined impacts to their daily lives to Lewis and Clark County officials from the renewal of operations of the historic underground Drumlummon gold mine, less than half a mile from the formerly sleepy hamlet.

County officials had called the meeting to hear concerns of area residents, and they got an earful from the crowd, largely made up of frustrated neighbors.

Noise from mining rigs backing up and rocks being dumped into trucks wakes Roger Nolte multiple times at night. Heavy truck traffic on Marysville Road, mixed with recreational vehicles going to the Great Divide Ski Area and residents going into Helena, frightens commuters, noted Karen Marble.

Silver Creek, which used to dry up in August, is running year round and causing flooding downstream along Applegate Drive, said Larry Michaelson. He attributes the consistent water flows and flooding to mine operators treating, pumping and discharging 300 gallons per minute into the stream out of the lower mine depths.

Meanwhile, wells in town are drying up due to that pumping, said Earl Fred, because it allows mine operators access to historic drillings of past owners. The springs that supply residential water on his property dried up, and a new well drilled last December by the mine owners, RX Gold & Silver Inc., already has had its static water level drop by 30 feet.

“I’m particularly disappointed that public officials at all levels are not protecting our right to a peaceful environment,” said Nolte, whose house is directly across from the mine, which restarted exploration work in 2008. “It’s enough to make me go insane.”

Lainie Christensen added that the renewed mining exploration and

excavation are enough to make anybody crazy.

“Their operating hours when they were doing core drilling outside the mine were 24/7, all the time, unless they were changing drill bits,” she said.

County commissioners said they’re trying to work with the Canadian-based mine operators. The company submitted an application for an operating permit to the state Department of Environmental Quality on Dec. 28, and that state agency has 90 days to review it. The DEQ is expected to issue a deficiency letter to Toronto-based RX Gold & Silver Inc., since mining applications typically are lacking in one area or another.

While county officials and the public can comment on the proposed mining operations via DEQ, commissioners said they have a better opportunity to mitigate impacts via the Hard Rick Mining Act, which is under the state Department of Commerce.

“This law forces local government and the mine operator to sit down and negotiate in good faith and determine how the mine will mitigate impacts caused by the mine to local government,” said Harold Blattie with the Montana Association of Counties. “It looks at road, law enforcement … and schools. To do that, the mine has to give a plan laying out how many employees it will have, how it will grow, what their production expectations are, the basic plan and intentions.”

RX has been extracting ore from the Drumlummon since 2009. While it employs about 120 people and has pulled millions of dollars of gold from the mine, it’s been operating under a “Small Miners Exclusion Statement,” and an exploration license from the DEQ. Under those documents, the company could only disturb 5 acres or less and extract up to 10,000 tons of ore.

State and county officials have noted that while the mine is operating within the strict parameters of the law, they’ve questioned whether it is in fact a “small mine” and noted that the actual operating permit, along with mitigation mandates, could be years off.

Many at the meeting said the mine’s impacts already are being felt, and they urged the county to become involved as early as possible in the process.

“Sure we get emotional … but this is our homes, and lives and for some a life investment in this place, and we stand to be impacted the most by RX operations,” Christensen said.

Commission members agreed that was important to work with the company to try to lessen impacts to Marysville residents, as well as those downstream in the Helena valley.

“We are here, and will be by your side,” said Commissioner Andy Hunthausen, who added that they’ll meet with residents again in a month, and also with Canyon Creek residents to talk about possible impacts. “But there are some things we have impact over and something we don’t, because some things are state law.

“But we can work through this and do the best we can to try to come up with solutions.”

The underground Drumlummon Mine was created more than a century ago, with 29 miles of shafts that were drilled, chipped and blasted into a honeycomb maze. After a lengthy legal dispute, water flooded the lower levels, the mine closed and few paid attention to the mine that made Marysville and millionaires.

Yet RX Gold & Silver believes there’s still pay dirt left, missed by the previous miners who removed 586,000 ounces of gold and almost 5 million ounces of silver from 1 million tons of ore. The company, formerly named RX Exploration, plans to pump out and treat an estimated 100 million gallons of arsenic-tainted water, then use the latest available technology — which basically involves more powerful drills and equipment than that of the late 1800s— to search for precious metals.

Darryl James, a representative of RX, was at the meeting but didn’t comment.

Gingrich set about putting a black face on America’s poor, and was rewarded with 40% of South Carolina’s primary vote.

Marking a triumph for the return of unvarnished racism on the American political stage, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich handily won the South Carolina Republican presidential primary on Saturday, leaving in tatters the presumed inevitability of a Mitt Romney romp to the Republican presidential nomination. Finishing with 40 percent of the vote, Gingrich vanquished Romney, who garnered only 28 percent. Rick Santorum and Ron Paul managed 17 and 13 percent, respectively, while Herman Cain brought up the rear with 1 percent.

Until early this week, Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, was expected to win by a comfortable margin — that is, until Gingrich topped the damage inflicted on Romney by the Newt-supporting superPAC, Winning Our Future, by establishing his supremacy in the race-baiting contest among all the GOP candidates in a Monday-night debate sponsored by Fox News. Subsequent polls showed Gingrich surging.

Gingrich then turbo-charged that surge by turning a negative into a positive: his second wife’s charge that Gingrich had asked her for an “open marriage” while he was carrying on an affair with the woman who would become his third wife. Marianne Gingrich’s accusation broke on Thursday, and CNN’s John King opened that night’s debate by asking Gingrich to respond. Gingrich responded with gusto, with a direct attack on King, whose question he called “close to despicable.” The former speaker’s attack on “media elites” won him a standing ovation from the Republican audience in the debate hall (and likely more than a few watching from home).

Newt the Destroyer

Gingrich came to South Carolina determined, at the very least, to destroy the candidacy of Romney, aided by ”King of Bain,” a video hit-piece by Winning Our Future, about Mitt Romney’s tenure as CEO of Bain Capital, a player in theleveraged-buy-out frenzy that reshaped the landscape of U.S. business in the 1980s and ’90s. The video depicts Romney as a heartless destroyer of the lives of working-class white people, all salt-of-the earth types who worked in the manufacturing companies bought up by Bain and sold for the sum of their parts.

In his concession speech on Saturday night, Romney took several swipes at Gingrich, suggesting the former speaker was in league with Obama, without ever calling Gingrich by name.

“Those who pick up the weapons of the left today will find them turned against us tomorrow,” Romney said. ”Let me be clear,” he continued. “If Republican leaders want to join this president in demonizing success and disparaging conservative values then they’re not going to be fit to be our nominee.”

For his attacks on Romney’s business practices, Gingrich was dubbed a kamikaze by the chattering classes, who chalked up his anti-Romney offensive to a desire to maim his opponent before his own presumably impending exit from the race — mere retribution, it was believed, for the destruction of Gingrich’s momentary surge in Iowa by hard-hitting ads run by the pro-Romney superPAC, Restore Our Future. But Gingrich, characteristically, had in mind something far more grand: winning the nomination.

Even as Gingrich and the Gingrich-friendly superPAC hammered at Romney — with the help of $5 million pumped in by casino kingpin Sheldon Adelson — he was honing his winning strategy for propelling his candidacy on the toxic fuel of racial resentment, a particularly potent brew with a black man occupying the White House.

And the Newt Shall Rise Again

After his loss to Romney and Santorum in Iowa, Gingrich apparently devised a plan that set his sights on South Carolina, where the Confederate flag still flies on the grounds of the state capitol. He knew New Hampshire was Romney’s game, since, as the former governor of the state next door, Romney was nearly impossible to beat in the first-in-the-nation primary. But the national media were there, and Newt made the most of their presence, knowing his antics would be duly noted in the Palmetto state. So he deftly repackaged an off-hand, race-baiting remark made by Rick Santorum in Iowa, and dubbed Barack Obama the “food stamp president.”

He set about putting a black face on all of America’s poor, and then insinuating that these presumably dark-skinned dependents on public assistance arrived at their lowly station through laziness and the radical, redistributionist policies of America’s first African-American president. Whenever he could pair his racist theories with attacks on other targets of the right — say, labor unions and public employees — he did. Child labor laws should be adjusted so that public school custodians could be replaced with poor kids — who did, after all, need the money, he said, and an infusion of work ethic.

Then Gingrich said he would go into a place that would look, to those in South Carolina’s Republican base with a fear of black people, like the lion’s den.

“I said I was willing to go to the NAACP national convention, which most Republicans are unwilling to do, and talk about the importance of food stamps versus paychecks…,” Gingrich said, as AlterNet reported, in response to a challenging question at a New Hampshire campaign stop. “Here’s a Republican who is standing up, [willing to talk to] one of the most left-wing groups in America about how to help the people they represent.”

Because, obviously, they are incapable of figuring that out on their own.

Doubling Down on the Race War

Then Gingrich got another of his big ideas. Why wait for the NAACP convention to roll around to collect television footage, for the edification of the racially prejudiced segment of the electorate he’s targeting, of himself yelling directly at black people? Why not get that ball rolling in time for the South Carolina primary?

On January 14, exactly a week ahead of the South Carolina primary, Gingrich paid a visit to the Jones Memorial A.M.E. Church in Columbia, South Carolina, to face a largely African-American audience described by Politico as “hostile.” There, he belligerently stuck to his guns in describing the nation’s first black commander-in-chief as the “food stamp president” by repeating his false claimthat, under Barack Obama, “more people have been put on food stamps by Barack Obama than any president in American history.” (Actually, George W. Bush wins that honor, thanks to the economic crash his administration incited.) Gingrich’s foray into enemy territory yielded local reporting that the white, right-wing base of the South Carolina G.O.P. could really soak up.

Monday night’s debate offered Gingrich an opportunity to belittle a black person to his face on national television, when Fox News analyst Juan Williams challenged Gingrich on his comments about the poor, about African-Americans, and his description of Obama.

“Can’t you see that this is viewed, at a minimum, as insulting to all Americans, but particularly to black Americans?” Williams asked.

“No. I don’t see that,” Gingrich replied.

As Williams continued, taking Gingrich to task for his fusing of food stamps, race and Obama in his stump speech, it became clear that Gingrich was winning the round when the audience in the debate hall loudly booed Williams. Gingrich repeated his false claim about Obama’s responsibility for the numbers of people on the nutrition assistance program.

“Now,” he continued, “I know among the politically correct, you’re not supposed to use facts that are uncomfortable.”

(Later in the week, Gingrich would claim the “idea of work” to be a “strange, distant concept” to Juan Williams.)

Later, in response to a question about the wisdom of pursing a confrontation with Iran, Gingrich gave an answer full of coded racism and Confederate hagiography, but one easily missed by those not steeped in American history or the legends of the South.

“South Carolina in the Revolutionary War had a young 13-year-old named Andrew Jackson. He was sabred by a British officer and wore a scar his whole life,” Gingrich said. “Andrew Jackson had a pretty clear-cut idea about America’s enemies: Kill them.”

As president, Andrew Jackson presided over the Trail of Tears, the genocidal removal of American Indians,who were deemed America’s enemies, from their native lands. He also embraced a racial philosophy that reserved democracy only for white men, who were regarded as superior in every way to non-whites.

Clearing the Racist Path

While Gingrich was hardly the originator of the racial subtext to the GOP presidential contest, his unapologetic, bellicose articulation of racist tropes served to smoke out his competitors, who had, until that time, tried to blow the race whistle more subtly, or at least out of view of the mainstream media. (Santorum famously walked back from his Iowa remarks about black people and welfare by saying that he never used the phrase “black people,” but rather the term “blah people.”)

But Gingrich’s astonishing performance in Monday night’s debate demanded more from the rest of the field, two of whom did their best to serve it up. Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who later left the race and endorsed Gingrich, invoked the Civil War when responding to a question about the Justice Department’s challenge to South Carolina’s draconian new voter ID law. “South Carolina is at war with this federal government and with this administration,” Perry said.

Former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum took the opportunity to link young African-American women to promiscuity, while deriding the Obama administration for not permitting the funding of abstinence-only programs as the solution.

Mitt Romney stuck to his more subtle attack on Obama as a “nice guy” who was “in over his head,” playing, in the land of Andrew Jackson, to the notion that African-Americans are intellectually inferior to whites. Ron Paul used his opposition to the drug war as proof of his concern about African-Americans. But the next day, according to the Associated Press:

Paul chose the South Carolina Statehouse grounds, surrounded by Civil War icons and the Confederate battle flag, to talk Tuesday about states’ rights to possibly ignore federal laws they don’t like, which in the past would have included civil rights and voting laws.

Shades of the Battle to Come

In victory, Gingrich was hardly kinder or gentler. And why should he be? He had found his winning formula. His combative speech largely targeted, in frontrunner fashion, his presumed general-election opponent instead of his Republican rivals. Taking aim at “elites” in Washington and New York, Gingrich condemned their purported “anti-religious bigotry,” and painted Obama, using nearly the tropes of the right, as a “Saul Alinsky radical” who seeks to foster a culture of dependency through the tyranny of food stamps to create a “European-style welfare state.” And he repeated his linking of Obama to food stamps.

The speech hit all of the scapegoating fear-notes that characterize the rhetoric of the Tea Party: To the base Gingrich seeks to win, Alinsky’s name is Jewish and foreign-sounding to many Americans; Europeans = secular foreigners; dependency = welfare; welfare = lazy; welfare = black people; food stamps = black people.

Gingrich chalked up his win not, as the pundits did, to his superior debating skills, but because, he said, “I articulate the deepest-felt values of the American people.”

That depends, one imagines, on how one defines “American.” Whether Gingrich prevails in his quest for the presidential nomination, he has drawn the battle lines for the general election. People will say it’s all about the economy. But it’s more likely to be a rhetorical re-fighting of the Civil War, with a black Democrat and a white Republican doing battle on a American landscape deemed, just four years ago, to be post-racial.

Megaupload Type Shutdowns and Patriot Act Are Killing Cloud Storage

The government’s takedown of the 800 pound gorilla online storage site Megaupload may have killed the cloud storage model.

Many innocent users have had their data taken away from them.

As PC World notes:

The MegaUpload seizure shows how personal files hosted on remote servers operated by a third party can easily be caught up in a government raid targeted at digital pirates.

***

Before its closure MegaUpload had 180 million registered users and an average of 50 million daily visits, claimed a total visitor history of more than one billion, and accounted for about four percent of all global Internet traffic….

***

Take, for example, Videobb.com, a site that appears to be similar to Megavideo. Videobb bills itself as an ideal place to share videos without ever having to worry about “disk space or bandwidth again.” Videobb is “safe, secure and easy” the company says, and that’s probably true; at least unless the FBI and the Department of Justice decide that videobb is ripe for a takedown. Behind the scenes, videobb is rife with pirated content just as Megavideo was.

A quick check of sites that index pirated content shows you can find recent episodes of The Big Bang Theory, Modern Family, and the recent movie Contagion available for free streaming on Videobb.

Videobb isn’t alone, either; services such as Novamov, ZShare, and VidXDen all offer file-sharing services similar to Megavideo and all of them are being used (or at least have been used) to distribute pirated content. The trick is that you won’t see the pirated content on these sites’ front pages; you have to know how to access it through third-party sites that contain links to the secret files.

If you use any of these sites to store or distribute your own non-infringing files, you are wise to have backups elsewhere, because they may be next on the DOJ’s copyright hit list.

***

Keep in mind that when you use these services you also make it easier for the government, and possibly hackers, to peer into your files without your knowledge — but that’s a discussion for another day.

Bottom line: if your cloud service offers file storage on the front end and shows pirated video out the back, don’t be surprised if your files vanish one day.

In other words, the government is exercising the power to seize all of the legal property held in a storage facility because a handful of crooks have illegal property in theirs.

And if that’s not enough to kill your enthusiasm for cloud storage, CIO points out:

Worries have been steadily growing among European IT leaders that the USA Patriot Act would give the U.S. government unfettered access to their data if stored on the cloud servers of American providers—so much so that Obama administration officials this week held a press conference to quell international concern over the protection of data stored on U.S. soil.

***

Anxiety was heightened last year when a Microsoft UK managing director admitted that he could not guarantee that data stored on the company’s servers, even those outside the U.S., would not be seized by the U.S. government.

***

Escaping the grasp of the Patriot Act, however, may be more difficult than the marketing suggests. “You have to fence yourself off and make sure that neither you or your cloud service provider has any operations in the United States,” explains [Alex Lakatos, a partner and cross-border litigation expert in the Washington, D.C. office of Mayer Brown], “otherwise you’re vulnerable to U.S. jurisdiction.” Few large IT customers or cloud providers fit that description in today’s global business environment. And the cloud computing model is built on the argument data can and should reside anywhere around the world, freely passing between borders.

***

So, what’s a European cloud customer to do—or, for that matter, a U.S. customer anxious about how their cloud provider might respond to a government request for data under the Patriot Act? Cloud and other technology service providers have a mixed record when it comes to keeping customer data out of government hands. “For the cloud service providers, their life may be easier if they give the government whatever it’s asking for,” Lakatos says.

By Kristen Tullos

Cities can use local housing codes and land banks to push back against banks’ reckless behavior.

Since the beginning of the economic downturn, Congress has passed numerous pieces of legislation aimed at stabilizing the housing market. Their legislative efforts succeeded in stabilizing financial markets, but foreclosures have continued unabated, affecting families and neighborhoods across the country. While the foreclosure crisis continues to be a drag on the economy, its effects are felt most acutely in communities and neighborhoods.

For the last decade or so, growth in America’s housing stock was driven primarily by investment rather than demand. As a result, there is a surplus in the housing market, which causes many foreclosed homes to sit vacant for years, generating no revenue for their (often institutional) owners who have no intention of occupying the property themselves. Rather, the institutional owners must either pay to maintain the property or let it fall into disrepair. In the many cities where this is the case, it is economically rational for the lender to modify the mortgage, if possible, and allow the current occupants to remain in their home. There are two benefits to such an arrangement: (1) the lender will not be responsible for maintaining the property, and (2) the property will continue to generate revenue for the lender in the form of mortgage payments.

In refusing to modify mortgages, lenders are often acting irrationally. Despite many attempts, the federal government has failed to pass legislation that would force or sufficiently incentivize lenders to modify mortgage principals on a large scale. As a result, foreclosures continue and local governments are left to bear a disproportionate share of the burden. The harms of abandoned property are well-documented: nearby property values decrease, property tax revenues decrease, the community’s safety and health are often put at risk, and a negative perception keeps out new investment.

Not all localities, however, are letting these institutional lenders harm their neighborhoods without a fight. Increasingly, they are holding absentee and institutional lenders accountable for the mess their mindless foreclosures create within their jurisdiction. The most successful approaches have included two components: strong code enforcement and a land bank. Land banks are local, usually governmental, entities that can acquire, hold, and dispose of properties according to community needs and priorities. The best way to explain the process is to walk through the steps.

The mortgagee, often a bank, forecloses a mortgage that the homeowner is no longer paying. The bank may not be able to resell the property, so it sits vacant. This is happening all across the country. The New York Times reported that there were 15,000 abandoned properties in Chicago back in October 2011, most of which resulted from foreclosures. Ideally, the property would not be sitting vacant at all, but the problem of vacancy is compounded when institutional owners fail to manage the property. Most institutional owners, often the big banks, are not well-equipped to maintain properties at the standard required by local housing codes. As a result, it often falls on the local government to board up broken windows and mow overgrown grass.

Here, code enforcement comes into play (which is sometimes supplemented by a vacant property registration system). The owners can be fined when the property does not meet code. The fine must be sufficiently large to give the absent owners an incentive to either maintain or sell the property. If the institutional owner does not pay the fine, it can be placed against the property as a lien. Eventually, non-payment allows the city to foreclose the lien and take the property into its inventory, ideally transferring it to a land bank with expertise in land management to assist in long-term community development.

Alternatively, the banks may choose to donate unoccupied properties in their inventories as a way to avoid paying the steep fines. The case study of Cleveland has been widely publicized in the New York Times and 60 Minutes, among other media outlets. The banks that own dilapidated property in Cleveland, including Bank of America, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Wells Fargo, are so tired of paying fines that they are actually donating them to the local land bank and sometimes paying it up to $7,500 to demolish formerly-occupied properties! The inefficiency of this option for banks is startling and, if banks get their act together, will result in more modifications in lieu of foreclosures.

Cities facing high rates of foreclosure and high rates of property abandonment would be well-advised to adopt this model. Doing so on a widespread basis will have one of two positive effects: either the institutional owner will maintain the property in a way that lessens the harm to the community or the locality will be able to impose large fines and eventually take control of the abandoned property. Without a successful national program to decrease foreclosures, this is the most powerful option local governments can adopt to minimize the effects of the foreclosure crisis.

Kristen Tullos is a

Click for Larger View

The Special Nevada County Screening of the documentary, THRIVE, has just hit gold. The creators and hosts, Foster and Kimberly Gamble, of the riveting film have agreed to attend IN PERSON rather than via Skype as originally planned. Nevada County has the remarkable opportunity to come together utilizing the most talked about documentary since ‘Zeitgeist’ and ‘What the Bleep Do We Know.’ THRIVE explores the challenge of surviving vs. thriving in the current and future global crises.

This screening of THRIVE will take place Friday, January 20^th, 5:30pm to 10pm, at the Alpha Building, 210 Broad St. Nevada City. An unconventional documentary, THRIVE lifts the veil on what’s REALLY going on in our world by following the money upstream.

This community screening will also include special guest via skype, renown physicist, Nassim Haramein. Audience Q and A periods will be available throughout the screening with Foster and Kimberly Gamble as well as Nassim Haramein.

Questioning “worldviews” throughout, this two-hour long documentary dives into the global consolidation of money and power in nearly every aspect of our lives. Weaving together breakthroughs in science, consciousness and activism, THRIVE offers real solutions, empowering us with unprecedented and bold strategies for reclaiming our lives and our future.

The film includes interviews with former astronaut Edgar Mitchell, physicist Adam Trombly, Steven Greer M.D., Deepak Chopra M.D., Bill Still producer of the Money Masters, Catherine Austin Fitts, former Assistant Secretary of H.U.D., David Icke author of The Biggest Secret, Elizabeth Sahtouris Evolutionary Biologist, Paul Hawken of Natural Capital Institute, and Amy Goodman host of the Democracy Now.

In order to successfully meet our current global challenges, we need to ask hard questions in order to find solutions that go beyond just ‘getting by.’ This Special Nevada County Screening and IN PERSON presence of Foster and Kimberly Gamble is a tool for that process. Monthly meetings will follow allowing deeper discussion into the dozen different topics that THRIVE addresses.

It’s not about surviving. It’s about thriving.

In December, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow show featured a segment on Occupy Nevada County, which had held a rally to protest foreclosures and had successfully intervened to postpone an eviction.  Since then several realtors and people facing foreclosure have contacted the local Occupy group with offers and requests for help.  The public has been largely supportive.  With the high rates of foreclosures, evictions, and homelessness in Nevada County, the issue’s relevance is easy to understand.

While continuing these efforts, Occupy Nevada County’s primary focus in January is the less familiar issue of “corporate personhood,” the legal doctrine giving corporations constitutional rights similar to those of natural persons. Since the late 19^th century Supreme Court rulings have bestowed and gradually expanded the rights of corporations as “persons” under the law.

For-profit corporations are state-created vehicles for producing wealth for their stockholders, but the “legal fiction” of corporate personhood gives them constitutional rights originally designed for human beings.  This creates a huge power imbalance on the political playing field.  Transnational corporations can marshal resources far beyond those of most people.  They can relocate to anywhere, change nationalities, span continents, and exist in many places simultaneously.  Their only conscience is the bottom line.  Criminal corporations can pay token fines and still do business; there are no corporate three strikes laws and they cannot go to jail because they are non-corporeal. Corporations have no natural death—they can span centuries.  For these and other reasons, “corporate persons” have a huge political advantage over limited human beings.

In 2010, the Supreme Court’s Citizens United vs. the Federal Elections Commission decision worsened this power imbalance by ruling that the 2002 McCain-Feingold Campaign Reform Act violated the First Amendment rights of corporations and unions. As a result,  campaign finance laws in many states were overturned, and corporations and unions were allowed to pour unlimited funds into election campaigns.  There are organizing efforts underway to get all concentrated money out of elections through public financing of elections.

The Citizens United decision has been described as “money equals speech.” In the case of corporations, corporate “speech” is tax-deductible!  When corporations are given the same constitutional rights as people, large corporations come out ahead, since they can afford more “free speech” and political power than human beings.  These powerful entities now control more wealth than do many countries, and they dominate cultures, economies, and governments.  Corporations are now able to spend massive sums to create a megaphone so big that their message drowns out the voices of actual human beings.

How does this abstract political doctrine of “corporate personhood” and the resulting distortion of democracy relate to concrete issues, such as the rising rates of foreclosures and evictions?  The answer is simple.  When money equals speech, it is harder for those without money to be heard.  It is no wonder, then, that public policies are often skewed to favor large corporations, big banks, and the wealthy at the expense of poor, working, and middle class people.

In the case of the foreclosure crisis, in 1999 big banks successfully lobbied to overturn the Glass-Stegall Act, which had separated investment banks from commercial banks.  This enabled system-wide speculation, the development of complex “financial instruments,” and a housing bubble that finally (and predictably) burst, taking the economy down with it.  Insiders got rich by betting that the mortgage derivatives they marketed would collapse in value.  As the documentary “Inside Job” explains, profit-driven big banks and financial institutions caused the economic crisis.  The government then bailed out these “too big to fail” banks, while the equity that millions of Americans had invested in their homes evaporated.  Citizens United allows these banks and other corporations, including those from the “foreclosure servicing” sector, to pour unlimited funds into campaigns to elect candidates who will enact policies that favor profits over people.

Occupy Nevada County has scheduled meetings, workshops, rallies, and other events leading up to January 21, the second anniversary of Citizens United, when there will be a festival and teach-in in Nevada City.  The goal of these actions is to raise awareness and build support for the nationwide Move to Amend campaign to enact a constitutional amendment to abolish corporate personhood and overturn Citizens United.   To find out more go to http://ga.occupywallstreetnc.org.

Someone said, “If it doesn’t breathe, it doesn’t deserve free speech.”  If it’s only conscience is the bottom line it doesn’t deserve to determine public policy.  Democracy is not for corporations.  Democracy is for people.

While the 99% suffered hardship, a new study shows that the Fed propped up buddies in the banking industry and a vast shadow banking system far beyond what anyone has guessed.

By J. Andrew Felkerson

Speculation about the the Fed’s actions during the financial crisis has made headlines on and off again over the last several years.  The latest drama occurred on November 27 when Bloomberg published an article, “Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks $13 Billion Undisclosed to Congress,” which gives an account of the news agency’s struggle to bring to light the details of the Fed’s emergency programs. Bloomberg throws out some very large numbers, revealing that as of March 2009, the Fed lent, spent, or committed $7.77 trillion worth of aid to the financial system and that banks used the low interest rates charged on these loans to make an estimated $13 billion in income.

On December 6, the Fed struck back, issuing a four page unsigned memo intended to correct recent “egregious errors and mistakes” found in various reports of its emergency lending facilities.  The Fed argues that the “total credit outstanding under liquidity programs was never more than about $1.5 trillion.”  While Bloomberg wasn’t mentioned explicitly in the Fed memo, it was fairly clear to whom the response was directed.  The following day Bloomberg defended its reporting, and the Wall Street Journal’s David Wessel came to the Fed’s defense, characterizing Bloomberg’s methodology as a “great story,” but ultimately not “true.”

All this may sound like controversy, but it’s little more than a tempest in a teacup.

Here’s the hurricane: In reality, no less than $29.616 trillion is the total emergency assistance provided by the Fed to foreign and domestic entities during the Global Financial Crisis. Let’s repeat that: $29 trillion. This astounding number is over twice U.S. gross domestic product, the nominal value of all goods and services produced for the year 2010.  This is the total of the bailout as calculated by Nicola Matthews and myself as part of the Ford Foundation project, A Research And Policy Dialogue Project On Improving Governance Of The Government Safety Net In Financial Crisis.  We will be presenting the results of our analysis in a series of papers published by the Levy Economics Institute, the first of which, “29,000,000,000,000: A Detailed Look at the Fed’s Bailout by Funding Facility and Recipient,” is already available here.

The results we have calculated are presented below, and it is important to note that the totals are cumulative and in billions of U.S. dollars. (The numbers in parentheses indicate amounts still outstanding as of November 10, 2011).

I want to be clear. These are the totals of Fed lending and asset purchases actually undertaken since the bail-out began. There is no double-counting. And we do not include any credit facilities created by the Fed unless they were actually used. These figures accurately reflect the cumulative totals over the approximately three years actually used by the Fed to prop-up domestic and international banks, shadow banks, central banks, and even some non-financial institutions.

The programs above constitute the crisis prevention machinery rolled out by the Fed to combat the worst financial panic since 1929. All the programs above were designed and implemented to target domestic financial and nonfinancial corporations or foreign central banks or markets, or both. Only one of the facilities, the Term Auction Facility, can be viewed as being consistent with the Fed’s mandate to protect the commercial banking system from systemic failure. The rest are the result of the increasing relevance of the “shadow banking” to our economy—and of the Fed’s attempt to rescue the shadow banking sector.

Shadow banks are highly leveraged financial institutions that perform functions historically relegated to the commercial banking system. It is important to note that these financial concerns do not have access to the conventional means of Fed support. Nor were they ever really regulated or supervised by the Fed. They engaged in extremely risky behavior that in large part led to the global financial crisis. And when it hit, the Fed spent and lent $29 trillion, much of it devoted to rescuing the shadow banking system.

Thus, we see a host of unconventional programs designed to aid these institutions rather than the Fed’s traditional patrons. The information used to calculate the totals above is freely available (thanks in large part to the valiant efforts of a group of lawmakers led by Senator Bernie Sanders) as the result of an amendment inserted into the Dodd Frank bill. Moreover, this information has been freely available since December 10, 2010 on the Fed’s website.

So why didn’t someone else already put the data together in this way?

Obviously, $29 trillion is much bigger than the previous estimates of $7.77 trillion (Bloomberg) or $1.5 trillion (the Fed and the Wall Street Journal). An in-depth account of each of the facilities above is a rather lengthy process as the Levy working paper attests; therefore we will only lay out the reason for the difference between the Bloomberg and Fed numbers. So, how is it that we arrive at such a number? The main difference in our analysis is the variables we identify as essential in understanding the Fed’s response. In our paper we report three measures that we view as essential to capturing the size and magnitude of the bailout. Each of the three measures deals exclusively with programs put into place by the Fed that transcend its conventional lender of last resort function [LOLR]. That is, we only include the emergency facilities the Fed created. We agree with the Fed that only facilities which were actually made operational should be considered in any account of the Fed’s actions. But we take the side of Bloomberg regarding the general lack of transparency by the Fed—the Fed fought tooth and nail to keep the details of its programs secret.

At any given moment inspection of the amount owed to the Fed resulting from nonconventional lender of last resort actions provides a reasonable account of what the Fed was doing in the period leading up to that time. However, looking at this number over time and in the context of the weekly amount lent provides insight into how the Fed’s efforts evolved over the run of the crisis. These two approaches to measurement (a “stock” or outstanding balance and a “flow” or cumulated amount spent and lent weekly) only provide us with details regarding the scope of the Fed’s bailout. To get a clear picture we need some account of the magnitude. We believe that this is captured by looking at the cumulative totals of all programs.

Perhaps the largest difference in our analysis is that we learned our money and banking theory from the late Hyman Minsky. He taught us that the modern economy is essentially financial, and as such, is prone to systemic financial crises that if left unchecked can lead to “bone crunching depressions”. Therefore it is essential to have a LOLR. Thus, any transaction between the Fed and the markets which is not part of conventional monetary operations, such as lending from the discount window or open market operations, represents an instance in which private markets were not able to or were unwilling to engage in the normal financial intermediation process. If at any point in time the private markets were capable (or willing) to carry out business as usual, Fed intervention would not have been required. Thus, we need to account for each extraordinary event, and the best way that we know to do this is by summing each instance–which results in a cumulative total of over $29 trillion dollars.

A figure as large as $29.616 trillion should not be taken lightly, but focus on the specific magnitude of the figure diverts our attention from a larger issue that is at stake: how should the LOLR responsibility to be discharged in the future? With unemployment remaining persistently high and millions continuing to lose their homes to foreclosure as the result of lost income from a poor economy or outright fraud in the mortgage lending and foreclosure process, it becomes increasingly difficult to justify the ability of a single institution staffed by unelected officials to carry out such a targeted commitment of the obligations of the United States citizenry. Thanks to the actions of Senator Sanders and other individuals possessing the temerity to question the authority of the Fed we now have access to much of the data regarding what the Fed did during the recent crisis.

But we still need to go through the data from the past three years of bail-outs to answer the following questions: Who got funds from the Fed? How much did they get? And why did they get them? The Fed has not adequately explained why its emergency lending and asset purchases went on for so long and accumulated to such a large number.

By Mike Masnick

from the copyright-as-censorship department

Imagine if the US government, with no notice or warning, raided a small but popular magazine’s offices over a Thanksgiving weekend, seized the company’s printing presses, and told the world that the magazine was a criminal enterprise with a giant banner on their building. Then imagine that it never arrested anyone, never let a trial happen, and filed everything about the case under seal, not even letting the magazine’s lawyers talk to the judge presiding over the case. And it continued to deny any due process at all for over a year, before finally just handing everything back to the magazine and pretending nothing happened. I expect most people would be outraged. I expect that nearly all of you would say that’s a classic case of prior restraint, a massive First Amendment violation, and exactly the kind of thing that does not, or should not, happen in the United States.

But, in a story that’s been in the making for over a year, and which we’re exposing to the public for the first time now, this is exactly the scenario that has played out over the past year — with the only difference being that, rather than “a printing press” and a “magazine,” the story involved “a domain” and a “blog.”

There are so many things about this story that are crazy, it’s difficult to know where to start, so let’s give the most important point first: The US government has effectively admitted that it totally screwed up and falsely seized & censored a non-infringing domain of a popular blog, having falsely claimed that it was taking part in criminal copyright infringement. Then, after trying to hide behind a totally secretive court process with absolutely no due process whatsoever (in fact, not even serving papers on the lawyer for the site or providing timely notifications — or providing any documents at all), for over a year, the government has finally realized it couldn’t hide any more and has given up, and returned the domain name to its original owner. If you ever wanted to understand why ICE’s domain seizures violate the law — and why SOPA and PROTECT IP are almost certainly unconstitutional — look no further than what happened in this case.

Okay, now some details. First, remember Dajaz1.com? It was one of the sites seized over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend back in 2010 — a little over a year ago. Those seizures struck us as particularly interesting, because among the sites seized were a bunch of hip hop blogs, including a few that were highly ranked on Vibe’s list of the top hip hop blogs. These weren’t the kinds of things anyone would expect, when supporters of these domain seizures and laws like SOPA and PROTECT IP talk of “rogue sites.” Blogs would have lots of protected speech, and in the hip hop community these blogs, in particular, were like the new radio. Artists routinely leaked their works directly to these sites in order to promote their albums. We even pointed to a few cases of stars like Kanye West and Diddy tweeting links to some of the seized domains in the past.

In fact, as the details came out, it became clear that ICE and the Justice Department were inway over their heads. ICE’s “investigation” was done by a technically inept recent college grad, who didn’t even seem to understand the basics of the technology. But it didn’t stop him from going to a judge and asking for a site to be completely censored with no due process.

The Dajaz1 case became particularly interesting to us, after we saw evidence showing that the songs that ICE used in its affidavit as “evidence” of criminal copyright infringement were songs sent by representatives of the copyright holder with the request that the site publicize the works — in one case, even coming from a VP at a major music label. Even worse, about the only evidence that ICE had that these songs were infringing was the word of the “VP of Anti-Piracy Legal Affairs for the RIAA,” Carlos Linares, who was simply not in a position to know if the songs were infringing or authorized. In fact, one of the songs involved an artist not even represented by an RIAA label, and Linares clearly had absolutely no right to speak on behalf of that artist.

Despite all of this, the government simply seized the domain, put up a big scary warning graphic on the site, suggesting its operators were criminals, and then refused to comment at all about the case. Defenders of the seizures insisted that this was all perfectly legal and nothing to be worried about. They promised us that the government had every right to do this and plenty of additional evidence to back up its claims. They promised us that the government would allow for plenty of due process within a reasonable amount of time. They also insisted that, after hearing nothing happening in the case for many months, it meant that no attempt to object to the seizure had occurred. Turns out… none of that was true.

What happened next is a story that should never happen in the US. It’s like something out of Kafka or the movie Brazil, but it should never have happened under the US Constitution. First, you have to understand the two separate processes: there’s seizure and then there’s forfeiture. Under the seizure laws, the government has 60 days from seizure to “notify” those whose property it seized (imagine having the government swoop in and take away your property, and not even being told why for two whole months). Once notified, the property owner has 35 days to file a claim to request the return of the property. If that doesn’t happen, the government can effectively just keep the property, so it tends to rely on intimidation and threats towards anyone who indicates plans to ask for their property back (usually in the form of threatening to file charges). However, if such a claim is filed, the government then has 90 days to start the full “forfeiture” process, which would allow the government to keep the seized property and never have to give it back. If the claim to return the property is filed and the government does not file for forfeiture, it is required to return the property. Thus seizures are supposedly used as a temporary part of the investigation, to stop criminal activity or to prevent the destruction of evidence. However, that’s not how things always play out in real life.

As we’d heard with a number of domain names that had been seized, the government began stalling like mad when contacted by representatives for domain holders seeking to get their domains back. ICE even flat out lied to the public, stating that no one was challenging the seizures, when it knew full well that some sites were, in fact, challenging. Out of that came theRojadirecta case, but what of Dajaz1?

After continuing to stall and refusing to respond to Dajaz1’s filing requesting the domain be returned, the government told Dajaz1’s lawyer, Andrew P. Bridges, that it would begin forfeiture procedures (as required by law if it wanted to keep the domain). Bridges made clear that Dajaz1 would challenge the forfeiture procedure and seek to get the domain name back at that time. Then, the deadline for the government to file for forfeiture came and went and nothing apparently happened. Absolutely nothing. Bridges contacted the government to ask what was going on, and was told that the government had received an extension from the court. Bridges, quite reasonably, asked how that was possible without him, as counsel for the site, being informed of it or given a chance to make the case for why such an extension was improper.

He also asked for a copy of the the court’s order allowing the extension. The government told him no and that the extension was filed under seal and could not be released, even in redacted form.

He asked for the motion papers asking for the extension. The government told him no and that the papers were filed under seal and could not be released, even in redacted form.

He again asked whether he would be notified about further filings for extensions. The government told him no.

He then asked the US attorney to inform the court that, if the government made another request for an extension, the domain owner opposed the extension and would like the opportunity to be heard. The government would not agree.

And file further extensions the government did. Repeatedly. Or, at least that’s what Bridges was told. He sent someone to investigate the docket at the court, but the docket itself was secret, meaning there was no record of any of this available.

The government was required to file for forfeiture by May. The initial (supposed) secret extension was until July. Then it got another one that went until September. And then another one until November… or so the government said. When Bridges asked the government for some proof that it had actually obtained the extensions in question, the government attorney told Bridges that he would just have “trust” him.

Finally, the government decided that it would not file a forfeiture complaint — because there was no probable cause – and it let the last (supposed) extension expire. Only after Bridges asked again for the status of the domain did the government indicate that it would return the domain to its owner — something that finally happened today. Dajaz1.com is finally back in the hands of its rightful owner. This is really quite incredible, considering the “rush” with which it seized these domain names, claiming the urgency in stopping a crime in progress. But, of course, after realizing that it had no evidence to suggest a crime was ever in progress – there was absolutely no urgency to correct the error.

The level of secrecy in this case makes it sound like a terrorist investigation, not the censorship of a popular music blog. Normally, when there’s a lawsuit, the docket is available on PACER. Even in cases where things are filed under seal or everything is redacted, there’s at least a placeholder for them in PACER. This case does not exist anywhere that anyone can find. The docket was apparently kept hidden in a judge’s office in Los Angeles the whole time. No one knew this was going on, other than the US Attorney and the representatives of Dajaz1 (who still never saw the docket or the extension orders).

Let’s just take stock here for a second. We have the government clearly censoring free speech in the form of a blog that discussed the music world and was widely recognized for its influence in promoting new acts. The government seized the blog with no adversarial hearing and no initial due process. Then, rather than actually provide some sort of belated due process in the form of an adversarial hearing, it continued to deny any and all due process by secretly (even to Dajaz1’s own lawyer) extending the seizure without any way to challenge those extensions. All in all, the government completely censored a popular web site for over a year, when it had no real evidence for probable cause of infringement, as it had falsely claimed in the original rubber stamped affidavit. As we noted in reviewing the affidavit, the case had been put together by folks who clearly did not understand the law, the site or the music space. But to then double down on that and continue to hold the domain for a year in secret? That just compounds the error and takes it to new extremes.

This was flat out censorship for no reason, for an entire year, by the US government… Everyone should be horrified by this. It also shows what a joke the claims of supporters are that since “a judge reviewed the affidavit,” there’s due process. Without the other party, there is no real due process. Not only that, but the government made sure, at every step of the way, that the other party was not heard. That’s horrifying. It wasn’t just an act of omission in leaving out the party, but actively preventing the party from being heard.

And yet the feds and private companies continue to say we should just “trust them” to get these kinds of things right? Even more bizarre, they want to expand their ability to do this incontestable censorship through laws like PROTECT IP and SOPA? If anything, this massive screwup on the part of ICE, the Justice Department and the RIAA should lead us to go in the other direction. ICE and the DOJ should be investigated and reprimanded, if not directly penalized, for clear First Amendment violations, while the ICE program for seizing domains should be dismantled. John Morton, who led ICE’s domain seizure program, should tender his resignation or be fired. Victoria Espinel, the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator, who defended these seizures to Congress, should issue a public apology, and begin a process to revamp the government’s role in such enforcement actions (and consider tendering her resignation as well). The federal government should issue a huge apology to the operators of Dajaz1 and make it clear that it will no longer take such drastic censorship actions. The RIAA should be investigated for providing claims about the site that were not true, and which it had no right to make.

If Congress needs to do anything, it should be to investigate the lawless, unconstitutional, cowboy censorship and blocking of due process by both Homeland Security and the Justice Department. The last thing it should be doing is allowing more such actions. This whole thing has been a disgrace by the US government, starting with a bogus seizure, improper and illegal censorship, followed by denial of due process and unnecessary secrecy. Dajaz1 is currently reviewing its options in terms of whether it can or should take further action as a result of this, but at least it has its domain back. And people wonder why we’re so concerned about these seizures and new proposals to further such censorship.

By Patrick Meighan

My name is Patrick Meighan, and I’m a husband, a father, a writer on the Fox animated sitcom “Family Guy”, and a member of the Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Santa Monica.

I was arrested at about 1 a.m. Wednesday morning with 291 other people at Occupy LA. I was sitting in City Hall Park with a pillow, a blanket, and a copy of Thich Nhat Hanh’s “Being Peace” when 1,400 heavily-armed LAPD officers in paramilitary SWAT gear streamed in. I was in a group of about 50 peaceful protestors who sat Indian-style, arms interlocked, around a tent (the symbolic image of the Occupy movement). The LAPD officers encircled us, weapons drawn, while we chanted “We Are Peaceful” and “We Are Nonviolent” and “Join Us.”

As we sat there, encircled, a separate team of LAPD officers used knives to slice open every personal tent in the park. They forcibly removed anyone sleeping inside, and then yanked out and destroyed any personal property inside those tents, scattering the contents across the park. They then did the same with the communal property of the Occupy LA movement. For example, I watched as the LAPD destroyed a pop-up canopy tent that, until that moment, had been serving as Occupy LA’s First Aid and Wellness tent, in which volunteer health professionals gave free medical care to absolutely anyone who requested it. As it happens, my family had personally contributed that exact canopy tent to Occupy LA, at a cost of several hundred of my family’s dollars. As I watched, the LAPD sliced that canopy tent to shreds, broke the telescoping poles into pieces and scattered the detritus across the park. Note that these were the objects described in subsequent mainstream press reports as “30 tons of garbage” that was “abandoned” by Occupy LA: personal property forcibly stolen from us, destroyed in front of our eyes and then left for maintenance workers to dispose of while we were sent to prison.

When the LAPD finally began arresting those of us interlocked around the symbolic tent, we were all ordered by the LAPD to unlink from each other (in order to facilitate the arrests). Each seated, nonviolent protester beside me who refused to cooperate by unlinking his arms had the following done to him: an LAPD officer would forcibly extend the protestor’s legs, grab his left foot, twist it all the way around and then stomp his boot on the insole, pinning the protestor’s left foot to the pavement, twisted backwards. Then the LAPD officer would grab the protestor’s right foot and twist it all the way the other direction until the non-violent protestor, in incredible agony, would shriek in pain and unlink from his neighbor.

It was horrible to watch, and apparently designed to terrorize the rest of us. At least I was sufficiently terrorized. I unlinked my arms voluntarily and informed the LAPD officers that I would go peacefully and cooperatively. I stood as instructed, and then I had my arms wrenched behind my back, and an officer hyperextended my wrists into my inner arms. It was super violent, it hurt really really bad, and he was doing it on purpose. When I involuntarily recoiled from the pain, the LAPD officer threw me face-first to the pavement. He had my hands behind my back, so I landed right on my face. The officer dropped with his knee on my back and ground my face into the pavement. It really, really hurt and my face started bleeding and I was very scared. I begged for mercy and I promised that I was honestly not resisting and would not resist.

My hands were then zipcuffed very tightly behind my back, where they turned blue. I am now suffering nerve damage in my right thumb and palm.

I was put on a paddywagon with other nonviolent protestors and taken to a parking garage in Parker Center. They forced us to kneel (and sit–SEE UPDATE) on the hard pavement of that parking garage for seven straight hours with our hands still tightly zipcuffed behind our backs. Some began to pass out. One man rolled to the ground and vomited for a long, long time before falling unconscious. The LAPD officers watched and did nothing.

At 9 a.m. we were finally taken from the pavement into the station to be processed. The charge was sitting in the park after the police said not to. It’s a misdemeanor. Almost always, for a misdemeanor, the police just give you a ticket and let you go. It costs you a couple hundred dollars. Apparently, that’s what happened with most every other misdemeanor arrest in LA that day.

With us Occupy LA protestors, however, they set bail at $5,000 and booked us into jail. Almost none of the protesters could afford to bail themselves out. I’m lucky and I could afford it, except the LAPD spent all day refusing to actually *accept* the bail they set. If you were an accused murderer or a rapist in LAPD custody that day, you could bail yourself right out and be back on the street, no problem. But if you were a nonviolent Occupy LA protestor with bail money in hand, you were held long into the following morning, with absolutely no access to a lawyer.

I spent most of my day and night crammed into an eight-man jail cell, along with sixteen other Occupy LA protesters. My sleeping spot was on the floor next to the toilet.

Finally, at 2:30 the next morning, after twenty-five hours in custody, I was released on bail. But there were at least 200 Occupy LA protestors who couldn’t afford the bail. The LAPD chose to keep those peaceful, non-violent protesters in prison for two full days… the absolute legal maximum that the LAPD is allowed to detain someone on misdemeanor charges.

As a reminder, Antonio Villaraigosa has referred to all of this as “the LAPD’s finest hour.”

So that’s what happened to the 292 women and men were arrested last Wednesday. Now let’s talk about a man who was not arrested last Wednesday. He is former Citigroup CEO Charles Prince. Under Charles Prince, Citigroup was guilty of massive, coordinated securities fraud.

Citigroup spent years intentionally buying up every bad mortgage loan it could find, creating bad securities out of those bad loans and then selling shares in those bad securities to duped investors. And then they sometimes secretly bet *against* their *own* bad securities to make even more money. For one such bad Citigroup security, Citigroup executives were internally calling it, quote, “a collection of dogshit”. To investors, however, they called it, quote, “an attractive investment rigorously selected by an independent investment adviser”.

This is fraud, and it’s a felony, and the Charles Princes of the world spent several years doing it again and again: knowingly writing bad mortgages, and then packaging them into fraudulent securities which they then sold to suckers and then repeating the process. This is a big part of why your property values went up so fast. But then the bubble burst, and that’s why our economy is now shattered for a generation, and it’s also why your home is now underwater. Or at least mine is.

Anyway, if your retirement fund lost a decade’s-worth of gains overnight, this is why.

If your son’s middle school has added furlough days because the school district can’t afford to keep its doors open for a full school year, this is why.

If your daughter has come out of college with a degree only to discover that there are no jobs for her, this is why.

But back to Charles Prince. For his four years of in charge of massive, repeated fraud at Citigroup, he received fifty-three million dollars in salary and also received another ninety-four million dollars in stock holdings. What Charles Prince has *not* received is a pair of zipcuffs. The nerves in his thumb are fine. No cop has thrown Charles Prince into the pavement, face-first. Each and every peaceful, nonviolent Occupy LA protester arrested last week has has spent more time sleeping on a jail floor than every single Charles Prince on Wall Street, combined.

The more I think about that, the madder I get. What does it say about our country that nonviolent protesters are given the bottom of a police boot while those who steal hundreds of billions, do trillions worth of damage to our economy and shatter our social fabric for a generation are not only spared the zipcuffs but showered with rewards?

In any event, believe it or not, I’m really not angry that I got arrested. I chose to get arrested. And I’m not even angry that the mayor and the LAPD decided to give non-violent protestors like me a little extra shiv in jail (although I’m not especially grateful for it either).

I’m just really angry that every single Charles Prince wasn’t in jail with me.

Thank you for letting me share that anger with you today.

Patrick Meighan

——-

UPDATE (12/9/11): Hey all, thank you for the nice thoughts from many folks who have read this account. One necessary clarification about the 7 hours spent by the roughly 100-of-us in the Parker Center parking garage immediately following our arrest: though we were indeed forced to kneel on that parking garage pavement for an extended period and though we did in fact have our hands tightly zipcuffed behind our backs for that entire seven-hour stretch on the pavement, and though we were barred from standing and moving for that time period, the LAPD officers, in point of fact, did allow us to shift ourselves out of the kneeling position onto our butt-cheeks, our side-legs, etc., as necessary. At the very least, when we began to do so, they did not stop us. I apologize for implying otherwise.

World leaders are stalling on climate action at the 2011 Climate Summit in Durban, South Africa. What needs to happen to get things moving and make a change before it’s too late?

By Jamie Henn

The U.N. climate talks desperately need a crisis. For the last 10 days, negotiations here in Durban, South Africa, have made little progress on the fundamental challenge these talks were set up to confront: how the world can come together to avoid catastrophic climate change.

Instead, the pace of negotiations has been set by the one country the rest of the world should be turning their back on: the United States.

The U.S. never signed the Kyoto Protocol, the only legally binding international agreement designed to reduce emissions, but it is allowed to take part in the negotiations in a separate track dedicated to securing a long-term climate agreement. After President Obama’s election, the international community had high hopes the new administration would bring a new sense of ambition and commitment to talks.

Instead, the only thing the U.S. brought to the table was a wrecking ball. Rather than standing out of the way and letting the rest of the world get on with setting up an international architecture to facilitate cutting emissions, stopping deforestation, and investing in renewable energy, the U.S. has spent the years since Copenhagen attempting to systemically dismantle the U.N. process.

Highest on the U.S. hit list is the Kyoto Protocol, an imperfect treaty (thanks in large part to U.S. recalcitrance), but currently the best instrument in the global climate toolbox. Next on the list is the very idea of legally binding commitments—the U.S. would prefer a “pledge and review” world where countries make their own voluntary commitments and then report out on what they’ve decided.

Here in Durban, however, the U.S. has taken on an even more insidious role by pushing a proposal that the international community adopt a “mandate” to negotiate a new climate treaty that will take effect in—wait for it—2020.

This isn’t just a delay, it’s a death sentence. Scientists have stated over and over that in order to avoid catastrophic climate change, emissions must peak by 2015 or 2020 at the absolute latest. (For a closer look at the scientific reasoning, read David Roberts.)

It is especially callous and cold-hearted for the U.S. to be pushing the 2020 timeline here in Durban. Africa is already seeing the devastating impacts of the climate crisis, from the deadly drought still ravaging the Horn of Africa to terrible flooding, including here in Durban where heavy rains killed at least eight people just last week.

But instead of being recognized as yet another delay tactic from the world’s biggest historical emitter, the 2020 timeline seems to be gaining traction here at the talks. Brazil and India have vaguely expressed support, China has made cryptic comments about the proposal, and the European Union has yet to stand up clearly and strongly against the delay. If the talks here in Durban are allowed to simply stumble to the closing gavel, there’s a chance that the U.S. proposal could become the new mandate for the U.N. climate talks.

It’s time for a crisis moment. The world has successfully stood up to the United States at the U.N. climate talks before. On the final day of the talks in Bali in 2007, delegates actively booed Bush administration negotiators over their repeated attempts to hold up progress. Finally, the delegate from Papua New Guinea challenged the U.S.: “If you’re not willing to lead, get out of the way.” Minutes later, the U.S. negotiators relented and allowed a deal to move forward.

Civil society needs to do everything we can to create a similar crisis moment here in Durban. If African nations stand up to the U.S. and are backed up by Brazil, India, and the E.U., there’s a chance that the world can save Kyoto, beat back the 2020 delay, and set a mandate for new agreements within the next year or by 2015 at the latest.

The world stood up to the U.S. in Bali, it can do it again in Durban. In the words of a South African freedom-fighter-turned-president, “It’s always impossible until it’s done.”

Interested?

• Climate Action: What Will it Take to Avert Disastrous Climate Change?
  We thought we had 20, 30, 50 years to take on the climate crisis. We were wrong. The scary science, smart policies, and critical actions that could still avert disaster.
• After Copenhagen: How Can We Move Forward?
  Copenhagen brought poor nations and grassroots groups into partnership. Our chances of preventing climate catastrophe now rest on the ability of this new alliance to communicate to the world’s richest and most powerful peoples that the emissions emergency is, above all things, a crisis of justice.