WASHINGTON – Tim Alberta reports for National Journal that the “Republican Study Committee [RSC]—a group of 172 conservative House members—has barred Heritage Foundation employees from attending its weekly meeting in the Capitol.” Heritage, a fiscally conservative Washington think-tank, has traditionally been involved in the closed-door meetings but no longer.
Through the summer, Heritage insisted that a relatively popular program, commonly known as “food stamps,” be voted on separately from subsidies to big agrobusiness.
In July, Michael Needham, CEO of Heritage arm Heritage Action, released a statement to that effect. It read, “The purpose of ending the unholy alliance that has dominated the food stamp and farm bill for decades is to allow substantive debate that would allow the House to show its conservative values. Also, Needham warned the RSC against “subsidies and government intervention that will continue to harm consumers and taxpayers alike.”
You can read more here about how powerful Republican Party politicians are in league against conservatives and with powerful farming special interests.
MOSCOW, Russia – In an unexpected turn of events on Wednesday, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden outed a supposedly rag-tag group of Syrian rebel hackers as a sophisticated persona management project. Little has been known about the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) since inception, but most believe them to be residing in Damascus, Syria. Aside from a few shoddily written VICE interviews and an excellent write-up from Brian Krebs, there hasn’t been much information about the inner-workings of the crew.
Today, Internet Chronicle correspondents had a chance to catch up with Snowden for a few rounds of Moscow Mules while we discussed how the Syrian Electronic Army may be, in fact, more illusory than we could have possibly imagined.
The Internet Chronicle: Did you know about the Syrian Electronic Avenue before they became mainstream?
Edward Snowden: I did. The intel passed through my data center numerous times, months before they even began to make waves with their arbitrarily chosen attacks that were, of course, dignified ex post facto.
IC: Fascinating. Do you know if they are truly Syrian freedom fighters or something else entirely?
ES: OK, from what I saw, it’s hard to tell either way. As the United States’ hands are dipped in all sorts of fucking gunk, there’s no telling what’s really going on. However, I got to see plenty of internal memorandums referencing SEA as a group of roughly six people. The company Infragard was mentioned quite a bit in the slides that I saw.
IC: Infragard? You mean the private government cybersecurity contracting firm?
ES: Correct. They came up quite a bit in our paperwork, as they tend to work closely with pretty much every government agency involved in covert operations. As do Lockheed Martin, Halliburton, and of course Booz Allen Hamilton.
IC: So what you’re saying is SEA is a creation of a private security firm contracted out by the U.S. government?
Snowden is widely regarded as a hero.
ES: From the information that I saw, that didn’t seem important at the time, but in retrospect, yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. It’s plain to see that if you analyze the language they use, you can tell they have been trained to type in broken English, which is a common tactic deployed by the CIA, later adopted into persona management projects spearheaded by HBGary Federal in their Romas/COIN program that was uncovered by the now incarcerated journalist, the Hunter S. Thompson of our era, Barrett Brown. It really makes you think.
People don’t realize that these private contractors are truly the enemies. They’ve even forced Obama’s hand into nuking Syria and killing 5 million people, all because of the cyberwarfare via anti-rhetoric perpetuated by the SEA. Obama’s just the puppet for the masterminds at the Infragard splinter-cell persona management project. We’ve been trained to see this group as simple hacktivist merry-pranksters fighting a war against Twitter accounts and whois information. Yet, they are something far more insidious.
IC: The popular theme being thrown around these days is “the next war will be fought online.” Could this be the beginning?
ES: Absolutely. In fact, I would go so far as saying it has been going on for far longer than we even realize. Nation-state actors have been deployed via persona management firms for years now, ever since Tom Ryan Blog, aka th3j35t3r, tricked people into believing he was a porn star and got a heaps of classified information from unsuspecting troglodytes on Facebook. These types of spurious entities are really only the beginning. Imagine villages, even entire cities completely fabricated by military contractors! Think about the hacking power they would have and the ability to steer public interest. Scary shit, man.
Nation Editor Barbara Ehrenreich said the Government’s Message to the Poor is ‘Die’
WASHINGTON – Barbara Ehrenreich, contributing editor at The Nation, suggested on August 15 that the government’s message to poor people is essentially to “die.” Asked by The Internet Chronicle about the roots of New York City’s stop-and-frisk program, Ehrenreich alluded to a Michigan woman’s struggle to escape a 30-day prison sentence for being unable to pay for a son’s incarceration. Ehrenreich was speaking at the Lamont Street Collective.
“There’s a punitive mentality in this country,” said Ehrenreich, “that is not entirely sane.”
New York City Police have a long-standing policy of halting, interrogating, and searching pedestrians – judicial critics have said, without probable cause. In an August 12 decision, federal District Judge Shira Scheindlin rejected the city’s stop-and-frisk policy, saying that it amounted to “indirect racial profiling.” The vast majority of those stopped in 2012 alone were black or Hispanic.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has defended the policy. And Tuesday, city attorneys sent a letter to Scheindlin citing statistics that use of the policy had declined by more than half over a year.
According to a statement by the American Civil Liberties Union, Edwina Nowlin, a Detroit, Michigan native, served 28 days of her sentence before the organization’s having successfully interceded.
Ehrenreich, the New York Times bestselling author of “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America” blamed the rise of New York City’s financial sector in the 1980s and 1990s for the persecution of the poor. “Gentrification,” she said, has become rationale for targeting the impoverished.
Said Ehrenreich, Nowlin “was picked up by the cops on the street and charged with not only the usual homeless crime of being in the street and so forth but with failing to pay for her son’s – 16-year-old son’s – room and board in jail … So [Nowlin] gets picked up and she gets put in jail for that. Then she gets a paycheck. She thinks it can be applied to her son’s room and board, but no, it’s immediately confiscated for her room and board in jail.”
Added Ehrenreich, “Now, what is going on here? What are they thinking? I mean, the message to people who don’t have money is, ‘die;’ you know, just be dead; be gone.”
Ehrenreich also said that the mass incarceration of the poor – the design, she claims, of the Bloomberg administration’s embrace of stop-and-frisk – initiated under the aegis of beautification.
At the close of her talk, she said that her opposition to stop-and-frisk not due to its enforcement being racist but because police should not have grounds to randomly halt and interrogate innocent individuals whatsoever.
The author’s comments on August 15 are in the video below:
