In Tunisia, US Backing Dictatorship

Posted on January 17, 2011 by Alicia

INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC ACCURACY – PRESS RELEASE: CNN is reporting: “Police in Tunisia’s capital city used batons and tear gas to clear a peaceful demonstration on Friday. … [This occurs] after days of riots that have killed at least 21 people.”

STEPHEN ZUNES
Zunes just wrote the piece “Pro-Democracy Uprising Fails to Keep Washington From Backing Tunisian Dictatorship.”

Zunes is professor of politics at the University of San Francisco and senior policy analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus.

CHRISTOPHER ALEXANDER

Alexander is director of the Dean Rusk International Studies Program at Davidson College in North Carolina and a specialist on Tunisia. He is author of Tunisia: Stability and Reform in the Modern Maghreb.

He said today: “Until this week, I was betting that [Tunisian President] Ben Ali would ride this out. But the regime’s traditional tools can no longer address the situation.

“There’s broad-based social unrest, people have no faith in the government given the mafia-type corruption around the president’s family, human rights abuses, and until yesterday, his refusal to make any kind of political reform.

“Economics is huge in this. In mid-December, a university graduate lit himself on fire after police busted him for selling vegetables. The economy has generally been unable to generate good jobs for university graduates and has gotten even worse since the global recession, especially since Tunisia is largely dependent on exporting to Europe.

“The U.S. government has been predictably quiet given that Tunisia has been pro-U.S. Some WikiLeaks revelations regarding Tunisia became public in November. What struck many Tunisians was that U.S. diplomats seemed to privately have the same conception of Ben Ali that they did. Another aspect of what is happening is the role social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, has played in protesters organizing themselves.

“General strikes now underway in Tunisia are particularly significant given how hard Ali has worked to co-opt the unions.”

Earlier this month, Foreign Policy published a piece by Alexander titled “Tunisia’s protest wave: where it comes from and what it means”

Graphic video and regular information about Tunisia is available via: angryarab.blogspot.com

Twitter feed about Tunisia

Twitter feed from Tunisia — translation plug-in available

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

Obama Eying Internet ID for Americans

Posted on January 13, 2011 by Alicia

CBS NEWS – President Obama is planning to hand the U.S. Commerce Department authority over a forthcoming cybersecurity effort to create an Internet ID for Americans, a White House official said here today.

It’s “the absolute perfect spot in the U.S. government” to centralize efforts toward creating an “identity ecosystem” for the Internet, White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt said.

That news, first reported by CNET, effectively pushes the department to the forefront of the issue, beating out other potential candidates, including the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security. The move also is likely to please privacy and civil-liberties groups that have raised concerns in the past over the dual roles of police and intelligence agencies.

The announcement came at an event today at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, where U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and Schmidt spoke.

The Obama administration is currently drafting what it’s calling the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace, which Locke said will be released by the president in the next few months. (An early version was publicly released last summer.)

Click to continue reading on Obama’s Internet ID plan.

Article by Declan McCullagh

© COPYRIGHT CBS NEWS, 2011

Photograph by Vince Alongi

AT&T’s Man in the White House

Posted on January 10, 2011 by Alicia

SAVE THE INTERNET – When President Obama said he was going to “bring change to Washington,” no one expected William Daley to be his choice to get the job done.

Obama’s incoming chief of staff is about as corporate friendly as any Democratic insider can be, which is saying a lot.

For supporters of an open Internet, Daley’s appointment raises the prospect that the president will break all promises to defend Net Neutrality at the urging of a chief of staff determined to cozy up with industry and protect the status quo.

The outlook for any progress under Daley is dim.

Daley currently serves as a top executive at J.P. Morgan Chase & Co — concerning those who had hoped to see this president rein in a reckless financial sector.

Daley once told the New York Times that the Obama administration had “miscalculated” by moving too far to the left on health care reform — concerning those who had hoped the president would fight Republican efforts to repeal the law.

Daley served as a special counsel to President Clinton in 1993, helping the administration’s successful push to ratify NAFTA — concerning those across the labor movement, who delivered supporters to Obama by the busload.

It’s worse for advocates of open and democratic media. From 2001 through 2004, Daley led lobbying efforts for SBC Communications, Inc. His first assignment was to lock in the company’s local monopolies while allowing it to charge extortionate rates for competitors seeking to share SBC’s lines, defying a basic communications principle known as “common carriage.”

He was a top executive at SBC as the company laid the groundwork for its 2005 takeover of AT&T Corporation, after which it rebranded the merged entity as AT&T Inc. During that time, Daley worked very closely with Randall Stephenson, who has since risen through the ranks to become AT&T CEO and chairman.

He joined Stephenson and former AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre in a 2002 meeting to lobby the FCC’s top brass for industry deregulation. Daley, Stephenson and Whitacre wanted the FCC to declare that high-speed Internet access would no longer be considered a “telecommunications service,” but rather an “information service.” The regulatory change would give phone and cable companies broad latitude to raise prices, stifle competition and control consumer choice on the Web.

An all-too-compliant FCC obliged later that year, removing high-speed Internet access services from regulation under common carriage. Daley supported this radical move, which reversed the long-held rule establishing nondiscriminatory communications networks as essential to economic opportunity and innovation. (Read Aparna Sridhar’s 2010 report for a good history of this deregulatory process).

In so doing, the FCC undercut its own ability to keep Internet providers from gutting Net Neutrality and interfering with our right to connect to any website, service or application on the Web.

AT&T Stakes Its Claim to the Oval Office

Now companies like Comcast and AT&T are vying to be the Internet’s new gatekeepers — creating special lanes for their own websites and services, or for those of a few big corporate partners, while leaving the rest of us on a digital dirt road.

However you look at it, there are very few degrees that separate Daley from his successor at AT&T, James Cicconi, who now leads lobbying efforts for the communications giant.

Daley’s appointment to the White House brought praise from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where Cicconi serves as a director. The Chamber marches in lockstep with AT&T in opposing Net Neutrality. Working together, the two groups have been very effective in buying up opposition to Net Neutrality among Democrats and Republicans alike.

AT&T is the largest single corporate contributor to congressional campaigns, since 1989 giving more than $45 million in donations to both Republican and Democratic candidates. It spent nearly $13 million on DC lobbyists just in 2010.

AT&T has staked out the legislative branch. With Daley to start work in days, it can now make a claim to the White House, too.

Thus far, AT&T-funded Republicans have introduced one bill, designed to strip the FCC of its power to protect the open Internet. The president was expected to veto this and other anti-Net Neutrality legislation should it make its way to his desk.

But with Daley at his side, how long will it be before Obama caves?

Article by Tim Karr of Save the Internet

© COPYRIGHT SAVE THE INTERNET, 2011

US Will Respond to Chinese Military Build-Up

Posted on January 10, 2011 by Alicia

THE TELEGRAPH/UK – Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, was speaking as he arrived in Beijing on Sunday for four days of talks aimed at renewing ties between the US and Chinese armed forces. However his visit has been overshadowed by a series of announcements by the Chinese about the growing strength of their missile technology, naval capabilities and other defence initiatives.

The visit is the first by a US defence secretary since 2000, and comes at a time of heightened tension in the region. It is also almost one year after China suspended military contacts with Washington following arms sales to Taiwan.

With relations between North and South Korea at their lowest point in decades, Beijing has been angered by joint US-South Korean military exercises close to its shores, while Washington is concerned by China’s increasing willingness to flex its muscles. Ten days ago, Japan revealed that it had scrambled its fighter jets 44 times in the last nine months in response to incursions into Japanese air space by the Chinese air force.

“I’ve been concerned about the development of the anti-ship cruise and ballistic missiles ever since I took this job,” said Mr Gates. “They clearly have the potential to put some of our capabilities at risk and we have to pay attention to them. We have to respond appropriately with our own programmes.”

Last Thursday, Mr Gates announced a five-year military budget that would include funding for a new generation of long-range bombers, as well as for new electronic jammers and radar.

Click to read the full article on the US response to China’s military build up.

Article by David Elmer

Photograph by Gary Lerude

Rise in Falluja Birth Defects & Cancer Linked to US Assault

Posted on January 6, 2011 by Alicia

GUARDIAN.CO.UK – The following correction was printed in the Guardian’s Corrections and clarifications column, Wednesday 5 January 2011

The story below reported the authors of a study as saying that birth defects in the Iraqi city of Falluja could have been caused by weaponry used in US assaults in 2004, and added by way of background that this suggestion might add to the dispute over whether rounds containing depleted uranium have residual effects. But a line of explanation went wrong in saying that such rounds “contain ionising radiation to burst through armour”. As readers with expertise in this area noted, it is not the radiation emitted by this substance that makes it penetrate armour. Rather, depleted uranium is used because of its density and its melting point, one of whose effects is to produce heat and therefore fires or explosions upon high-speed impact.

A study examining the causes of a dramatic spike in birth defects in the Iraqi city of Falluja has for the first time concluded that genetic damage could have been caused by weaponry used in US assaults that took place six years ago.

The research, which will be published next week, confirms earlier estimates revealed by the Guardian of a major, unexplained rise in cancers and chronic neural-tube, cardiac and skeletal defects in newborns. The authors found that malformations are close to 11 times higher than normal rates, and rose to unprecedented levels in the first half of this year – a period that had not been surveyed in earlier reports.

The findings, which will be published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, come prior to a much-anticipated World Health Organisation study of Falluja’s genetic health. They follow two alarming earlier studies, one of which found a distortion in the sex ratio of newborns since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 – a 15% drop in births of boys.

Click to read full article on link between rise in Falluja birth defects and cancer, and US assault.

Article by Martin Chulov

Photograph by US Army/Flickr

@MediaRootsNews