Bill of Rights

Across the country, momentum has been building for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution declaring that the democratic rights and freedoms granted to people do not apply to corporations and corporate entities.

In November alone, local voters in Colorado, Montana, Maine, Wisconsin andCalifornia passed various resolutions to ban corporate personhood. Seven bills have been introduced in the current Congress, including four this month—includingamendmentproposals. Public interest groups have been gathering petition signatures, all with an eye to the two-year anniversary of a Supreme Court ruling, known as Citizens United, which granted significant new political powers to corporations by ending a century-old prohibition on directly spending money from their corporate treasuries for political campaigns.

A constitutional amendment proposed by Congress must pass House and Senate chambers with two-thirds majorities and then be ratified by three-fourths of the states. The last amendment, passed in 1992, concerned congressional pay and was proposed in 1789. The 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age to 18, passed in 1971, after tens of thousands of youths that age died in Vietnam but could not vote. Though the political equivalent of climbing Mt. Everest, supporters of an amendment to reverse or reign in corporate constitutional rights are not deterred.

“We are facing a crisis in American democracy today,” said John Bonifaz, co-founder and director of Free Speech for People, who has been involved with various proposals in Congress. “The question is whether it is ‘We the people’ or ‘We the corporations.’ The response to that crisis has to be a bold vision that will restore democracy to the people. Constitutional amendment fights are the very kind of fights that return us to the basic principles of what we are as a nation.

[To read the rest of this article, follow the link]

It said this violated the Fifth Amendment, which bars the taking of private property for public use without just compensation.

A company run by former American International Group Chief Executive Maurice “Hank” Greenberg Monday filed a $25 billion lawsuit against the United States, claiming that the government takeover of the insurer was unconstitutional. In its complaint, Greenberg’s Starr International said that in bailing out AIG [AIG 21.01 --- UNCH ] and taking a nearly 80 percent stake, the government failed to compensate existing shareholders. It said this violated the Fifth Amendment, which bars the taking of private property for public use without just compensation.

“The government’s actions were ostensibly designed to protect the United States economy and rescue the country’s financial system,” Starr said. “Although this might be a laudable goal, as a matter of basic law, the ends could not and did not justify the unlawful means employed.”

The United States, it went on, “is not empowered to trample shareholder and property rights even in the midst of a financial emergency.”

Monday’s lawsuit was filed with the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington, D.C., which handles lawsuits seeking money from the government. Once the world’s largest insurer by market value, AIG accepted $182.3 billion of federal bailouts beginning on Sept. 16, 2008, amid a liquidity crisis spurred by its exposure to risky debt through credit default swaps.

[As reported by McCullough, on Dvorak Uncensored]

McCaffrey helped pave the way for women writers in fantasy and science fiction, and was both the first woman awarded a Hugo Award and the first awarded a Nebula Award. Even in her 80s she continued to write, and over her lifetime produced a prodigious number of books and short stories. She was still answering readers’ mail on her website as of a few weeks ago.

Her influence on other writers, both male and female, and of both fantasy and science fiction, can scarcely be measured.

Rest in peace, Ms. McCaffrey. You will be missed.

Update:

From a post now up at Random House:

McCaffrey died at her home in Ireland on November 21st shortly after suffering a stroke.

[Reported by Matt Blum, Wired Magazine]

A crowd of protesters shouted “shame” and booed the police officers as they dragged her into the street. Others could be heard shouting, “help her.”

Stu Loeser, a spokesman for New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg, says the best way for reporters to avoid being arrested while covering Occupy Wall Street is to carry a press pass issued by the New York Police Department.

But the NYPD isn’t issuing press passes to reporters covering Occupy Wall Street, as we learned when we contacted them Thursday.

“We aren’t issuing press credentials to reporters covering Occupy Wall Street,” said Detective Gina Sarubbi, NYPD’s Deputy Commissioner of Public Information.

So far the NYPD has arrested  26 journalists covering the protests in New York this week,  including two AP reporters and a Vanity Fairphotographer. Loeser  defended the arrests Thursday, according to a memo reprinted by The New York Observer. “You can imagine my surprise when we found that only five of the 26 arrested reporters actually have valid NYPD-issued press credentials,” he wrote.

Loeser added, in a tweet to Megan McCarthy, the news editor at The New York Observer (and a former Wired writer), “you don’t have a press pass; that’s your option. But why should some random NYPD take your word that you’re press?”

But Detective Sarubbi said that even if the NYPD were issuing press passes to cover the protests, there are no appointments available to get a press pass before January 2012.

Wired has been trying to get NYPD press credentials for freelancer Quinn Norton, who is on special assignment to cover the Occupy movement. Even before this week’s arrests, the NYPD made it clear they would not issue her credentials, as she first had to comply with Kafka-esque rules, such as proving she’d already covered six on-the-spot events in New York City — events that you would actually need a press pass to cover.

When I asked if six stories on Occupy Wall Street would count, Sarubbi said no.

I then tried to make the case that issuing press passes to legitimate reporters might help prevent arrests and prevent police from beating reporters, as happened to two journalists for the conservative Daily Caller on Thursday, and that the lack of spots until January seemed odd, and Sarubbi got angry.

“Don’t tell me how to do my job and I won’t tell you how to do yours,” she said.

Sarubbi then hung up without even a goodbye.

[To read the rest of Ryan Singel's article, follow this link]

"Frankly, I see no way in the next 60 years at least that we will be able to challenge the human brain in terms of complexity." —Federico Faggin, the architect of the first microprocessor

Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil have postulated that one day, humans will be able to download their consciousness to a computer. Nonsense, replied Federico Faggin, the architect of the first microprocessor.

Faggin appeared at a small gathering of Intel’s top minds on Tuesday night, in part to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the microprocessor.

“If I look at the next 40 years, what I can see in the mainstream is more of the same: faster processors, more cores, blah blah blah, the same things we’ve been doing,” Faggin said. The real goal will be to build chips that emulate the brain, also known as cognitive computing, he said.

Faggin said he studied neural science for five years while at Synaptics, where he worked on its optical character recognizer chip and touchpad, and concluded that mankind is “far, far away from understanding the way the brain works”.

A brain, Faggin said, is a living thing. A computer is a zombie, an “idiot savant,” he said. “And its intelligence is the intelligence of the programmer who programmed it.”

In other words, the concept of the technological singularity, where mankind’s collective intelligence increases by way of generations of machines that become successively more intelligent, is still science fiction.

“Frankly, I don’t subscribe to that,” Faggin said, when asked about the singularity concept. “Frankly, I see no way in the next 60 years at least that we will be able to challenge the human brain in terms of complexity. Those same people are talking about downloading the brain into the computer. Who can do that? What is a brain? What is consciousness? They’re talking about things that they don’t really know what they’re talking about, in my opinion.”

“So I think there’s a long bridge to go before we understand how the brain work and the integrate some of these more salient characteristics, so I’m not worried about a singularity at all,” Faggin said.

[From the Mark Hachman article posted on PCMag.com, which can be read by following this link]

Low-income workers losing credits while businesses saving more than $1 billion

Michigan is among just a handful of states raising taxes on low-income working families while cutting taxes for other groups, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities said in a report released Tuesday.

The Washington-based group notes that Michigan, New Jersey and Wisconsin all have scaled back tax credits for low-income workers in recent years while cutting business taxes. In Michigan’s case, low-income families will see their tax breaks shrink starting next year by about $260 million annually while businesses will get a $1.1 billion tax break starting in January and a $1.7 billion tax break the year after.

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder originally wanted to eliminate the state Earned Income Tax Credit, but agreed to reduce it from 20 percent of the federal credit to 6 percent for tax year 2012.

[Read the rest of this AP article by clicking here]

...not even a crawler along the bottom of any news network reporting that this was going on. Yet, these folks can cover Egypt and Moscow. Odd.

If you were on the West Coast last night, as you were about to go to bed, you would have figured out that something was up in New York City. The encampment called Occupy Wall Street was about to be attacked by a large police contingent and removed from lower Manhattan, forcibly.

You would have been alerted to this via social media, either Facebook or Twitter. You would’ve then gone to your computer to visit either UStream.com or any number of Occupy Wall Street websites to watch a live stream amateurishly filmed by someone with an iPhone. This would’ve been accompanied by miscellaneous commentary.

CNN, which seemed to have no difficulty being in Moscow during the fall of communism, had no reporter on the grounds.

Apparently, the bridges were all shut down, the subway was closed, and a huge armed police contingent marched through the city, but the mainstream media was M.I.A. The only footage came from cell phones.

I checked all the networks and there was not even a crawler along the bottom of any news network reporting that this was going on. Yet, these folks can cover Egypt and Moscow. Odd.

Finally, Al Jazeera comes on with live reports. Geez.

So the streaming continues but then stops abruptly as the plug was pulled on the cell towers serving the park area. Just like in Egypt. Funny how that works.

[Read the rest of John C. Dvorak's excellent article by visiting PCMag.com]

Mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac received the biggest federal bailout of the financial crisis. And nearly $100 million of those tax dollars went to lucrative pay packages for top executives, filings show.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac received the biggest federal bailout of the financial crisis. And nearly $100 million of those tax dollars went to lucrative pay packages for top executives, filings show.

The top five executives at Fannie Mae received $33.3 million in 2009 and 2010, while the top five at Freddie Mac received $28.1 million. And each company has set pay targets of as much as $17 million for its top managers for 2011.

That’s a total of $95.4 million, which will essentially be coming from taxpayers, who have been keeping the mortgage finance giants alive with regular quarterly cash infusions since the Federal Home Finance Agency (FHFA) took control of the companies in September 2008.

Fannie CEO Michael Williams and Freddie CEO Charles Halderman, each received about $5.5 million in pay for last year, and they could receive more when their final deferred compensation for 2010 is set. All the executives receive a significant portion of their pay in the year or years after they earn it.

The CEOs’ pay targets for 2011 are about $6 million a piece, though Halderman might not get much of that money since he’s announced plans to leave Freddie sometime in 2012. He must still be at the company in order to receive the deferred compensation. His base pay for 2011 is $900,000, with most of the rest of his compensation coming in deferred payments.

The salary filings were all made by the companies in early 2011, but received relatively little attention until a recent report by Politico, the political news Web site, which highlighted about $12.8 million in bonuses the executives received for last year.

[To read the rest of this article by Chris Isidore, at CNN Money, follow the link]

Since the wren's brain responses were stronger for duets than for any other sound, it appears that their brains are wired for cooperation.

Deep in the cloud forests of Ecuador, on the slopes of an active volcano, there lives a chubby, unassuming looking bird known as the plain-tailed wren. As the name implies, it does not look extraordinary, but there is something extraordinary in the way this bird sings. The plain-tailed wren is famous for its unusual duet, where the vocalizations of a male and a female meld so seamlessly that one might think it was a single bird singing.

“What’s happening is that the male and female are alternating syllables, thought it often sounds like one bird singing alone, very sharply, shrilly and loudly,” explained John Hopkins behavioral neuroscientist Eric Fortune.

In order to examine how sensory information from each wren is used to coordinate singing between individuals for this cooperative behavior, Fortune and his colleagues listened to more than 1,000 wren vocalizations captured in over 150 hours of recordings. They found that wrens commonly sang duets, but both males and females also sang on their own as well. The structure and sequence of syllables sung in duets and solitary singing were identical—with gaps in the individual song where the partner would normally sing. But during a solo, the duration of gaps between sung syllables varied more significantly. This suggests that sensory cues affect the duration and variability of the gaps, and that the birds do not use a fixed pattern to sing.

To learn how cooperative duet singing was encoded in the brain, the researchers captured 6 birds and monitored brain activity in the area that controls singing. They recorded up to 30 hours from each of the three female and three male wrens, and then played back isolated “units” from the recordings. These various pieces included both duets and isolated syllables, and the researchers manipulated some of them, reversing a clip in its entirety or presenting each syllable in reverse order. The researchers expected to find that the brain responded most to the wren’s own singing voice, but both females and males responded best to the duet.

“We found that the brain of each individual participant prefers the combined activity over his or her own part,” said Fortune. Since the wren’s brain responses were stronger for duets than for any other sound, it appears that their brains are wired for cooperation. Because the neurotransmitter systems that control brain activity at the molecular level are nearly identical in all vertebrates and the layout of the brain structures is the same, the brain mechanisms observed in the wrens could hint at the same ones used for cooperative behavior in other vertebrate species. (Written by Allie Wilkinson, Ars Technica)

[For further information, follow this link at Science Magazine]

As the oil and gas industry has turned increasingly to hydraulic fracturing to extract reserves, fears about groundwater contamination from the toxic chemicals used in “fracking” have intensified. And that’s prompted a $747 million spending spree by major industry players in an effort to allay those fears and influence key energy committee members in Congress, according to a new report released by Common Cause.

The report, “Deep Drilling, Deep Pockets,” suggests that the industry is pumping cash into the pockets of lawmakers in much the same way it pumps chemicals into tight shale formations to extract oil and gas. Only what it’s extracting from Congress is loopholes in environmental controls, such as legislation in 2005 that exempted fracking from regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act.

Common Cause calculates that gas industry leaders have spent $20 million on the campaigns of current members of Congress and another $726 million on lobbying efforts related to fracking over the past ten years. The campaign contributions have increased substantially in recent years, the report found.

Current members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee have been recipients of much of this largesse, with Representative Joe Barton of Texas, the former committee chairman, topping the list with $514,945 in contributions. Only three Colorado lawmakers show up in the top one hundred recipients — Doug Lamborn clocks in at 63rd with a measly $96,600, followed by Michael Bennet (69th, $87,595) and Cory Gardner (79th, $77,500).

But with gas-friendly Governor John Hickenlooper insisting that contamination of groundwater from fracking is “almost inconceivable” and Colorado lagging behind other states in requiring disclosure of the chemicals used in fracking, look for more vigorous lobbying on the issue at a state level as the use of the controversial extraction method continues to expand.

[Read the rest of Alan Prendergast's article on Fracking and the Gas Industry]

We can't feed the poor but we can fund a war?

An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life. "A fight is going on inside me," he said to the boy. "It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves..."

An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life. “A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy. “It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil—he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.”

He continued, “The other is good—he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith.

“The same fight is going on inside you—and inside every other person, too.”

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?”

The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”

Businesses have 10 business days to respond to each complaint before it's published. But that's not enough...

One mystery company really doesn’t want you to hear about complaint that its product allegedly hurt a child.

The unnamed firm has sued the Consumer Product Safety Commission to prevent it from releasing the report to the public as part of a new database of consumer complaints, now available at SaferProducts.gov. It has also asked a federal court in Maryland to seal all court documents related to the case, filed in October.

“This company going to great lengths to keep its name secret,” said Scott Michelman, staff attorney at consumer advocacy group Public Citizen.  Along with the Consumer Federation of America and Consumers Union, Public Citizen filed an objection with the U.S. District Court in Maryland on Oct. 31, asking that the seal request be denied.

The mystery lawsuit threatens the entire concept of publicly available government complaint data, consumer advocates say.

In March, the Consumer Product Safety Commission launched SaferProducts.gov to make it easy to find consumer complaints about products and services. The site was created as the result of a law passed by Congress in 2008 called the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act.

For the first time, relatively raw complaints — not complaints vetted or confirmed by the government agency — were made public starting in March.

Businesses have 10 business days to respond to each complaint before it’s published. But that’s not enough for the company involved in the complaint, which involves “an incident that allegedly harmed a child,” according to a report in the Washington Post.

The company involved says the lawsuit must not be made public because doing so would effectively publish the consumer complaint it seeks to quash, according to the Post.

Despite all this mystery, the lawsuit represents an important legal crossroads, Michelman said. If a company can sue to keep a complaint out of public eye, the entire concept behind the public database would be threatened, he said.

“If this company is allowed to keep a report of a potentially hazardous product out, it would effectively undermine a tool that Congress ordered created to protect consumers,” he said.

[To read the rest of this article from Bob Sullivan at Red Tape, click the link]

"These companies generated so many excess tax breaks that they reported negative taxes (often receiving outright tax rebate checks from the US Treasury), totaling $21.8 billion," the report charges. "These companies' 'negative tax rates' mean that they made more after taxes than before taxes in those no-tax years."

A scathing new report on corporate tax breaks is out, and telcos and media companies figure prominently. Authored by Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the survey focuses on 280 corporations that it concludes paid, on average, far less than the 35 percent corporate income tax tithe.

“Over the three years covered by our study, the average effective tax rate for all 280 companies was only 18.5 percent,” charges Corporate Taxpayers & Corporate Tax Dodgers, 2008-2010. “For the past two years, 2009 and 2010, the effective tax rate for all 280 companies averaged only 17.3 percent, less than half of the statutory 35 percent rate.”

AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon Communications appear in the study. The last company places number 19 in the survey’s list titled “30 Corporations Paying No Total Income Tax in 2008-2010.”

Below is an excerpt from that roster, highlighting the top two cited corporations, followed by Verizon at 19th place. Yes, those are minus signs next to those 2008 through 2010 tax estimates.

“These companies generated so many excess tax breaks that they reported negative taxes (often receiving outright tax rebate checks from the US Treasury), totaling $21.8 billion,” the report charges. “These companies’ ‘negative tax rates’ mean that they made more after taxes than before taxes in those no-tax years.”

Verizon is hardly up there with General Electric, which the report says generated an eye-popping negative 45.3 percent tax rate from 2008 through 2010, but it identifies the wireless giant’s estimated minus 2.9 percent largesse as part of a general corporate trend.

The survey also includes a list titled “25 Companies with the Largest Total Tax Subsidies in 2008-10.” According to that lineup, AT&T generated almost $14.5 billion, Verizon $12.3 billion, and Comcast $2.12 billion in tax breaks during those years. The estimated total tax breakage for all the companies is $114.8 billion.

[Read this article written by Matthew Lasar in its entirety by following this link to Arstechnica]