Pierre Omidyar and Richard Branson, photo by Pierre Omidyar
RECENTLY, the FSF's President [1] and OSI's President [2] both made it into the press in relation to Bitcoin. which some associate with FOSS [3]. "BitHub Pays Open-Source Developers in Bitcoin," says one recent headline [4]. Bitcoin generally helps us bypass the international banking cartel, which may seemingly be working in a state of competition but is actually a self-sustaining monster which is very political. It censors, it incriminates, and it also buys (almost literally) our politicians.
"Public figures we now have about unemployment are quite bogus and very deceiving at best."Over the past month we've accumulated many examples of economic injustices that are reinforced by banks. We hope to show that a better world is possible once the Big Banks are off their high horse.
Here in the UK, poverty is becoming a real issue, as confirmed by a new report [5]. Great Britain is better known for its billionaires, not for those whom the media ignores. The UK is making it harder for the unemployed to even get housing [6]. Philanthropy is for the most part a publicity stunt [7] and unlike in France, where a 'millionaire's tax' has been passed [8], here in Britain we're forced to compete with the millionaires and billionaires (who evade tax) using alternative paradigms and business models [9], It's not looking too good [10] because hatred/xenophobia [11] (e.g. blaming immigrants baselessly [12]) and general fear [13] become new tools of distraction (fearing the poor and other races/nationalities, ignoring the real issue which the UK's immigration minister speaks of [14]). People are dying because of these policies [15-18] and the delusion of dependence on oligarchs continues to distract everyone from the real villains [19-20]. Our fundamental services in the economy (e.g. post office and healthcare, like the rail system) are being privatised to create more new oligarchs, essentially stealing what is public. The situation seems to be worse in the UK than in the rest of the EU, where money is at least trickling down from the government to people, at least sometimes [21]; this is one thing that oligarchs would not do. Banks in Europe don't get the levels of bailout they get in the UK [22], so it's clear that the City of London (financial centre) still dominates British politics (British MPs just got a serious pay rise [23]). Greece is another sad story [24] and it helps show why austerity would be a horrible deal for the UK [25].
In the US, like in the UK, many people are on zero-hours contracts [26], so even those who are considered "employed" are not really properly employed (that's 10% of so of the British population). Public figures we now have about unemployment are quite bogus and very deceiving at best.
"...people who act as intellectuals are deprived and marginalised unless they play ball for the plutocrats."Looking at the United States, which by some criteria is the only Western country to have a wider economic disparity than the UK, there is another round of war on the poor [27-28], to the point where simple illnesses kill the poor [29] (eliminating them). There are signs of hope in New York [30] and Seattle [31] because of new elected officials, but overall the picture is grim because of homelessness and corruption [32-33] (Wall Street in particular plays a role, creating a "crisis" [34-35] to justify cuts). There are far better ways for dealing with the situation [36-37], but since these would not serve the oligarchs, nothing is going to change for the better. Oligarchs don't like democracy [38-40]; it's a threat to them. Oligarchs are doing incredibly well for themselves [41-43] (sometimes at the expense of taxpayers [44-48]), whereas others risk going hungry [49] or even dead [50-52]. Many workers are treated like cattle [53-55] and it is making more people furious, leading some to action [56-58] like marches [59].
The problem can be seen in other English-speaking countries. In Australia, for example, the headline "Childcare workers asked to hand back wage rise" [60] recently received a lot of attention. It sure seems like the oligarchs at the top just keep hoarding more and more, giving back nothing at all to those below them, even when their business is doing well [61-62] (owing to the actual work of those at the bottom). In universities it is exceedingly easy to see economic injustice [63-65]; people who act as intellectuals are deprived and marginalised unless they play ball for the plutocrats.
"In prior years Assange helped expose tax evaders (with help from Elmer) and he continues to possess copies of documents that can destroy corrupt banks"At the end of the day there's room for hope. And why? Because activism on the Internet is proving to be effective. WikiLeaks recently exposed plans to suppress anti-Keystone activists [66-67]. making it clear why plutocrats (especially in the UK these days [68-69]) want Julian Assange killed [70]. He created a tool of effective resistance and he is its main maintainer and public faces. In prior years Assange helped expose tax evaders (with help from Elmer) and he continues to possess copies of documents that can destroy corrupt banks. Sarah Harrison, the British girlfriend [71] of Assange (who is Australian), recently explained why Pierre Omidyar is part of the banking cartel [72-73] and therefore must not be trusted, especially with his media ventures [74]. He used economic embargo against Wikileaks before he started spinning the story [75] (Wikileaks is already being maligned by the same institutions [76]).
We need to use Bitcoin, not PayPal. And we need to remember what the likes of Omidyar think of people like Edward Snowden, who are made enemies of the state because oligarchs (like Omidyar), make it so [77-78]. ⬆
Related/contextual items from the news:
Free software advocate Richard Stallman has warned Bitcoin owners who believe they are untraceable that it is, in fact, easy for governments to track users, and called for a for “truly anonymous” crypto-currency to “make democracy safe”
The recent bubble -- and reports of criminal activity -- may have scared off onlookers, but there's little question bitcoin has arrived
Tip4Commit enables people to tip open source contributors with digital currency
Privacy software provider WhisperSystems has announced that it is integrating bitcoin with open-source code hosting site GitHub to launch a new service, Bithub. This service will offer the company’s developers an easy and fair way to fund their work on its open-source security systems.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s Monitoring Poverty and Social Exclusion 2013 report offers the latest figures on poverty across the UK, revealing a growing social crisis.
All members of the Park Slope Co-op are required to work 2.75 hours every four weeks. Jobs vary from working on the check-out to unloading deliveries to working in the office upstairs.
Will China, Russia and Mexico, governed by extractive elites, really do so well? Is Europe such a write-off? And what about Britain?
A review into the impact of EU migration on Britain has been delayed because the Government feared it was too positive.
The latest part of Whitehall’s Balance of Competences study, which looked specifically at freedom of movement, had been due to be released yesterday. But, according to reports, it has now been shelved until next year because Theresa May, the Home Secretary, takes issues with its findings.
The boss of Domino's Pizza should "probably pay his staff a little more" if he wants to recruit extra workers, the UK's immigration minister has said.
Don't let the bluster, incompetence and misinformation obscure the Quiet Man's true, Tory purpose: destroying the welfare safety net
The number of people using food banks in the county has "increased sharply". The total number of users of the four operational Trussell trust food banks in Kent in 2012-13 was 1,618. The total for the same four food banks, for the first six months of 2012-13 alone had almost doubled to 3,195. These figures are likely to understate the true extent of food poverty in the county, the report notes, as they do not take account of the myriad other sources of local food aid, such as soup kitchens.
Hunger in Britain has reached the level of a “public health emergency” and the Government may be covering up the extent to which austerity and welfare cuts are adding to the problem, leading experts have said.
In a letter to the British Medical Journal, a group of doctors and senior academics from the Medical Research Council and two leading universities said that the effect of Government policies on vulnerable people’s ability to afford food needed to be “urgently” monitored.
A surge in the number of people requiring emergency food aid, a decrease in the amount of calories consumed by British families, and a doubling of the number of malnutrition cases seen at English hospitals represent “all the signs of a public health emergency that could go unrecognised until it is too late to take preventative action,” they write.
Last week, Tory MP Esther McVey, Iain Duncan Smith's deputy, insisted it was "right" that half a million Britons be dependent on food banks in "tough times". Around the same time, the motor racing heiress Tamara Ecclestone totted up a champagne bill of €£30,000 in one evening. A rich teenager in Texas has just got away with probation for drunkenly running over and killing four people because his lawyers argued successfully that he suffered from "affluenza", which rendered him unable to handle a car responsibly. What we've been realising for some time now is that, for all the team sport rhetoric, only two sides are really at play in Britain and beyond: Team Super-Rich and Team Everyone Else.
Here our earnest authors come up against a very 21st-century conundrum: the ever-widening notion that the fate of our liberties should be taken out of the hands of governments and given to … corporations and oligarchs. This is the logic behind the move by Glenn Greenwald and other dissident superstars to “partner” with hi-tech oligarch Pierre Omidyar, “leveraging” Greenwald’s control of Edward Snowden’s NSA documents to create a profitable new media venture. This would be the same Omidyar whose PayPal cut Wikileaks off at the financial knees in its hour of greatest peril, whose “microfinancing initiatives” have led to mass suicides among the debt-ridden poor in India and who now appears driven to monetize dissent in the same way he’s monetized poverty relief. It’s unlikely that hard-hitting exposes of hi-tech corporate chicanery will feature overmuch at Pierre’s new plaything.
With nearly €80 billion on offer, the EU's new research and innovation programme...
European finance ministers are taking another crack at an issue that's bedeviled them: how to handle failing banks at an EU level.
MPs are set to receive an 11% pay rise when a parliamentary watchdog publishes its final recommendations on salaries this week.
"The public sector is exporting its problems to the private sector," he says. "When the state is squeezed - as it has been frequently - the easiest thing is to postpone payment to suppliers. Hence a liquidity problem in the private sector."
But he will say there must be no let up in austerity if he is to finish the job of paying off Britain's debts.
Millions will have to wait longer for a state pension, he will confirm.
And there will be an extra €£1bn of cuts from the budgets of government departments for each of the next three years.
As many as 5.5 million Britons could be signed up to work contracts that promise them less than three hours of work a week, five times more than existing estimates, new figures suggest.
A survey of 5,000 members of Unite, Britain's biggest union representing more than 1 million people, found that 22% of workers employed by private businesses had deals that offered little or no guarantee of work and pay.
The US economy is losing up to a billion dollars a week because of the “fiscally irresponsible” decision to end long-term unemployment benefits, a Harvard economist said on Friday.
The U.S. is about to cut the maximum duration of public support for the unemployed. The federal extension of unemployment insurance expires on Jan. 1. To see the consequences, look at North Carolina.
Seven inches of snow dumped over New York on his second day in office is not the only blizzard Bill de Blasio, the newly instated mayor, is having to negotiate. He is also heading into a political blizzard over his plans to tackle inequality by raising taxes on the very rich.
The 109th mayor used his inaugural speech on 1 January to issue a liberal clarion call of the type not heard in New York – or arguably anywhere else in the US – for at least 20 years. As the first Democratic mayor to take office in the city since 1994, he vowed to take on what he has dubbed "the Tale of Two Cities" – the vast income gap that sets a sparkling and buoyant Manhattan apart from the grinding poverty found in the outer boroughs.
Getting a $15/hr minimum wage for all of Seattle is going to take longer, but it is going to happen or be put to the voters.
According to the 2013 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) presented to Congress by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in November, nearly 64,000 people, including 22,000 children, are homeless in New York City.
At the cross-roads, the sign directing traffic appears to be to the Right, the Left, under the misleading sign “Under Construction,” is in process of being permanently closed off, obstructions everywhere, barriers at every quarter-mile, a monstrous sign, “PRIVATIZATION,” instructing the foolhardy to turn back and take the right fork.
Yet the country's biggest banks are using "their" money and laws (that they often wrote) to block municipalities' use of eminent domain. "Their" money includes the massive bailouts Washington provided to them since 2007. Big bank directors and major shareholders - a tiny minority - fund the politicians, parties and think-tanks that oppose municipalities' use of eminent domain. In these ways, capitalism systematically undermines democratic decision-making about economic affairs.
The term neoliberal is a bit misleading. The doctrines are neither new, nor liberal. As you say, big business and the rich rely extensively on what economist Dean Baker calls "the conservative nanny state" that they nourish. That is dramatically true of financial institutions. A recent IMF study attributes the profits of the big banks almost entirely to the implicit government insurance policy ("too big to fail"), not just the widely publicized bailouts, but access to cheap credit, favorable ratings because of the state guarantee and much else. The same is true of the productive economy. The IT revolution, now its driving force, relied very heavily on state-based R&D, procurement and other devices. That pattern goes back to early English industrialization.
SELLER OF EXPENSIVE PRINTER INK HP's CEO Meg Whitman has been given a pay rise of $1.5m, despite ongoing job cuts and protests at the firm, as the giant enterprise IT company starts to show signs of recovery under her leadership.
Macquarie Group Limited is a publicly traded banking, financial, advisory, investment, and fund management services headquartered in Sydney, Australia. In the United States, it has pushed for the privatization of public infrastructure and assets and operates major toll roads including Chicago's Skyway, Indiana's Toll Road, and the Dulles Greenway in Virginia, where area residents complain that higher tolls are pushing traffic into residential areas. The firm also owns a stake in Acquarion, a private, for-profit water service provider in New England, and is a major investor in K12 Inc., a for-profit provider of poorly performing "cyberschools." K12 Inc. receives 86% of its revenue from taxpayers.
U.S. taxpayers and toll payers contribute to making Moore "America's Highest Paid Road Worker." Moore made $8.8 million in compensation in fiscal year 2013, according to Bloomberg BusinessWeek . Macquarie's top executives are also well compensated making an estimated $53 million in combined compensation in fiscal year 2013. In the fiscal year ending March 31, 2013, Macquarie reported $6.7 billion in revenue (this amount converted from Australian to U.S. dollars).
"Why are we sending taxpayer revenue to executives and shareholders abroad when we need to be investing in America, rebuilding our roads, bridges and other infrastructure?" said Lisa Graves, Executive Director for the Center for Media and Democracy.
The budget debate now consuming Washington often seems to come down to guns versus butter, or at least its contemporary manifestation, Reaper Drones versus food stamps.
What gets lost in the increasingly caustic rhetoric is just how inefficient the U.S. government is when it spends, especially when it is outsourcing tasks to hugely profitable private companies.
ON SATURDAY copywriter Mita Diran tweeted about working for 30 hours straight at her Indonesian agency job.
Corporate giant that told workers to go to church and return their presents has more tone-deaf advice to offer
The invisible hand waves bye-bye to Eddie Lampert, whose business plan has run Sears into the ground
It is, as Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts says in an email, a small issue. But the Equal Employment for All Act would make a big difference for job-seeking Americans with poor credit ratings. The bill would amend the Fair Credit Reporting Act to stop employers from requiring or suggesting that applicants disclose their credit history and from procuring a consumer or investigative report. It also bars employers from disqualifying job seekers based on a poor credit rating or other information on their creditworthiness.
Warren was joined in sponsoring the legislation by Sens. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Patrick Leahy of Vermont, Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.
While it is true that you don’t typically have to bribe your postman to deliver the mail in the US, in many key ways America’s political and financial practices make it in absolute terms far more corrupt than the usual global South suspects. After all, the US economy is worth over $16 trillion a year, so in our corruption a lot more money changes hands.
The creator of The Wire, David Simon, delivered a coruscating speech about the divide between rich and poor in America, and how capitalism has lost sight of its social compact.
So the march is on. Fifteen years after Granny D started her march across the United States in the name of “campaign finance reform,” we will begin our march across New Hampshire (the long way), in the name of “corruption reform.”
According to a new report, CEOs at the forefront of the drive to “fix the debt” by slashing Social Security and Medicare, possess personal retirement funds worth an average of $14.5 million, and three have retirement nest eggs worth more than $100 million. The average Social Security check is $1,308 per month.
Raising taxes on the wealthy is similarly popular–as the Washington Post's own polling has shown–which makes it unclear why the Post is worried that "many Americans are uncomfortable with the notion of the government redistributing income." If anything, they'd like to see more of it.
According to the Sept. 22, 2013 edition of GPB News , part-time workers provide a distressing 75% of college instruction. They receive no benefits and no security. The pay is dismal. At one state college in Alabama , instructors are paid less than $1,800.00 for teaching a course. To make ends meet, some instructors must work two or three jobs, leaving them exhausted and demoralized. The quality of instruction inevitably suffers because of such dire conditions.
At UC Berkeley, the California public university system’s flagship campus, on November 20, 2009, in the early morning hours, dozens of students occupied and barricaded themselves inside Wheeler Hall, a beautiful neoclassical building at the center of campus that hosts more classes than any other campus building. Throughout the day, thousands of students, faculty, and campus workers massed outside Wheeler to support the students holed up inside.
[...]
While the student movement at Berkeley, with some notable exceptions, struggled to build on the 2009 mobilization the following year after administration repression, the resonance of anti-tuition hike struggles in California in 2011 with the national Occupy movement led to an explosion of protest activities throughout the state university system that fall. Berkeley was no exception. What began as a decently-attended protest on November 9 ballooned into a major standoff with off-campus police called in to respond to the erection of tents on the grassy knoll adjacent to the “Mario Savio Steps” on historic Sproul Plaza. Hundreds of students linked arms to nonviolently prevent the tents from being taken down by external riot police and withstood police brutality in return.
In one widely-circulated video, a female student and faculty member are seen being grabbed by their hair and thrown to the ground while nearby students scream in pain as they are jabbed in the abdomen with batons. Berkeley Professor and former US Poet Laureate Robert Hass and his wife and fellow faculty member Professor Brenda Hillman also suffered police violence as they stood with students. Graduate student organizers sustained broken ribs, sprained wrists, and badly bruised torsos; some have reported longer-lasting psychological trauma.
On International Human Rights Day, protesters occupied the offices of Quebec’s Education Minister for several hours on Tuesday in order to raise awareness of the plight of non-status children in Quebec.
A corporate presentation made public by WikiLeaks reveals exactly how the energy industry sees pesky climate activists: as a bunch of “radicals,” “realists,” “idealists, and “opportunists.” Also, as a real threat, judging from evidence that Canadian energy giant Suncor hired the consulting firm Strategic Forecasting, or Stratfor, to help it nip populist opposition to development Alberta, Canada’s vast oil reserves—which depends on the controversial Keystone XL Pipeline—in the bud. (Suncor told InsideClimate News that it never hired Stratfor, but its name comes up 11 times in this 35-page presentation, embedded below.)
The presentation was prepared by Stratfor, a global intelligence firm based in Texas, for what appears to be Suncor Energy, Canada’s largest oil sands producer. (While Suncor denies ever having commissioned or seen the presentation, the company’s name is mentioned a total of 11 times throughout.) It breaks down nearly two dozen environmental organizations, including Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Federation,World Wildlife Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council, into four basic categories: radicals, idealists , realists and opportunities and then sets out potential strategies for dealing with each, such as intentionally delaying negotiations or, as is proposed in this slide, ignoring them...
While it might be a stretch to imagine that Julian Assange is on Barack Obama's infamous kill list- there is a overt trend to brand journalists as terrorists. If the objective behind this trend is successful, it might grant Michael Grunwald his sadistic wish after all. For example, this week it was revealed that British police are examining whether Guardian newspaper staff should be investigated for terrorism offenses over their handling of data leaked by Edward Snowden, Britain's senior counter-terrorism officer said on Tuesday.
WikiLeaks staffer who accompanied Edward Snowden to Russia, attacks the eBay founder for not helping the 'PayPal 14'
The story started in December, 2010, when PayPal suspended its relationship with WikiLeaks and the foundation accepting donations on their behalf for a period of several months. Today, PayPal can be found as one of several payment options available to support WikiLeaks' work.