Anti-Labor "Cadillac tax" Repealed in Senate

Senate Votes to Repeal Anti-Union 'Cadillac tax"'

By Peter Sullivan - 12/03/15 03:44 PM EST

The Senate voted overwhelmingly on Thursday to repeal the “Cadillac tax” on high-cost health plans, a rare area of bipartisan agreement around the healthcare law.

But the Senate did show support for repealing the tax. Both Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) voted for the amendment. Seven Democrats, including Sen. Dick Durbin (Ill.), the No. 3 Democrat, and three Republicans voted against it. 

There are currently ongoing talks to include a repeal or delay of the Cadillac tax in a separate package of tax breaks, known as tax extenders, that is expected to move before the end of the year.

The major question is the White House, which has defended the tax as a check on health cost growth and a source of funding for ObamaCare. Repealing the tax would take roughly $90 billion away from the law over 10 years. It is unclear what compromise, if any, the White House might agree to.

Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.), sponsor of the repeal bill, noted its broad support on Thursday ahead of the amendment vote.

“There is no opposition to this legislation,” he said. “The unions support this amendment, the Chamber [of Commerce] supports this amendment, seniors support this amendment.”

Opponents of the tax warn that employers will increase the deductibles and other out of pocket expenses that employees have to pay in a bid to avoid hitting the tax. The 40 percent tax hits plans with costs that exceed $10,200 for individuals or $27,500 for families.  

Defenders of the tax, like the White House, argue that it gives employers an incentive to support payment reforms and efficiencies to bring down the cost of healthcare, and that to a certain extent increased cost-sharing from employees, giving them an incentive to seek out more efficient, lower-cost care.  

JOE HILL ex NOV 2015

Remembering the Life and Music of Labor Agitator Joe Hill, Who Was Executed 100 Years Ago Today

BY David Cochran

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He was killed by firing squad in the state of Utah on November 19, 1915.  

Joe Hill saw his music as a weapon in the class war, composing songs to be sung on soapboxes, picket lines or in jail. And 100 years ago today, the forces of capital and the state of Utah executed him.
Chicago musician and scholar Bucky Halker is honoring the centennial with a CD of new interpretations of Hill’s music, “Anywhere But Utah—The Songs of Joe Hill,” taking his title from Hill’s dying wish that his remains be transported out of state because he didn’t want “to be found dead in Utah.” The album includes such familiar Hill classics as "The Preacher and the Slave," "There is Power in a Union" and "Rebel Girl" as well as some surprising obscurities, like the wistfully romantic "Come and Take a Joy-Ride in My Aeroplane."
Born Joel Hagglund in Sweden, Hill immigrated to the United States in 1902, changing his name to Joseph Hillstrom, which would eventually be shortened to Joe Hill. Working his way across the country, Hill became politicized, eventually joining the Industrial Workers of the World. Popularly known as the Wobblies, the IWW sought to organize those workers more mainstream unions avoided—the unskilled, migrants, immigrants, minorities—in an effort to combine the entire working class into One Big Union.
As a Wobbly, Hill was active in free speech fights in Fresno and San Diego, a strike of railroad construction workers in British Columbia and even fought in the Mexican Revolution.
In 1914, Hill was arrested in Salt Lake City and charged with killing a storekeeper, allegedly in a botched robbery. Despite the flimsy nature of the evidence, Hill was convicted and sentenced to death, with the prosecutor urging conviction as much on the basis of Hill’s IWW membership as any putative evidence of his involvement in the crime. An international amnesty movement pressed for a new trial, but the Utah governor refused and Hill was executed by firing squad on November 19, 1915. In a final message to IWW General Secretary Bill Haywood, Hill urged, “Don’t waste any time in mourning—organize.”
Since his death, Hill has been immortalized in a wide variety of cultural expression, including poetry by Kenneth Patchen, fiction by Wallace Stegner, and a song by Alfred Hayes and Earl Robinson, popularized by Paul Robeson, promising “where workingmen are out on strike, Joe Hill is at their side.”
I talked to Halker about Hill’s music, politics and legacy. Halker is the author of the seminal work on Gilded Age labor music, For Democracy, Workers, and God: Labor Song-Poems and Labor Protest, 1865-95, and has previously released a tribute album to Woody Guthrie.
For one who was not a native English speaker, Joe Hill had a keen understanding of American slang, humor, and various folk and popular song forms. How did he become such a master of the American vernacular? How does he compare with other folksingers closely associated with insurgent movements, such as Woody Guthrie?
Hill is part of a long tradition of “organic” intellectuals in the USA. He was also just plain smart, which you can tell from reading his lyrics and other writing. He was self-educated, with an appetite for ideas. And remember that the labor movement was filled with men and women of this sort, dating to the early 19th century. Unions, of course, often had their own libraries, so workers could check out literature related to everything from poetry to economics. Also, cheap pamphlets on the issues of the day, including Marxism, were extremely common in the years after the Civil War and well into the 20th century. If you look at the people who wrote labor music and poetry, they typically share this kind of background.
Hill and Guthrie also share a tremendous skill in the realm of vernacular speech. He mastered all this hobo and Wobbly slang of the era and the latest music-hall, vaudeville lyrics of the day. Also, Hill’s work is filled with humor, irony and sarcasm—hardly easy skills to gain in your second language. No doubt he picked all this up from hobos, labor activists, and Wobblies, but I also believe his ear for music helped him in this effort.
Hill had some musical training and a passion for music that is obvious in his lyrical approach. You can tell from his lyrics that he paid close attention to the musical hall and Tin Pan Alley writers of the day. Most of them were also immigrants or children of immigrants and were very skilled at slang, lyrical twists and clever use of idioms. Indeed, Hill’s lyrics and choice of tunes have much more in common with music hall composers than the folk or county models that Guthrie and others made use of in the years of the great labor uprising of the 1930s and which became the template for labor songsters thereafter.
Hill and other Wobbly bards and writers should get some credit for their use of sarcasm and irony in the development of American literature. They had sharp wits and tongues that worked deftly and quickly, which only pissed off the lunkhead bosses, the law and the ruling elite even more. The authorities and their lackeys dislike radicals even more when they’re much smarter than they are.
What was the role of music in the creation of the Wobbly movement culture?
Music was a centerpiece of the Wobbly “movement culture.” However, I wouldn’t say this came into existence with the IWW. Earlier, the abolitionists and the Gilded Age labor movement made singing, songwriting, poetry and other forms of writing a key part of their efforts. Coal miners and Jewish textile workers had already developed a strong working-class poetic and musical tradition, as did the Knights of Labor. So Joe Hill and Woody Guthrie were standing on big shoulders.
Having said that, the IWW took the music and poetry to new heights and cleverly used singing and chanting as a way to garner attention from workers, the media, and the authorities. Fifty workers singing makes a lot more noise at a rally or in a jail cell than one speaker on a soapbox or one person ranting in the joint.
What kinds of considerations did you take into account in updating Hill’s music?
I quickly decided I wanted to record a couple of the sentimental love songs because that part of Hill’s personality had been neglected. They read like old vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley lyrics, so I worked on melodies and chord changes that were common to those types of pieces. I also decided that on songs like “Ta Ra Ra Boom De Ay” and “It’s A Long Way Down to the Soupline” that I wanted to use a brass band that had the flavor of the music hall that Hill was leaning on. I hoped to make it a bit like a drunken Salvation Army band in the process, which fit the brass band sound anyway.
I knew he’d been to Hawaii and the Pacific Islands too, so I decided to do a couple songs with the ukulele at the center, which was appropriate given some things I’d read on Hill and the music he heard on that trip (plus the ukulele had become popular at the time).
I wanted to make a record that Hill would like. That was my priority from the beginning. I don’t think he’d like a straight folk revival, strumming acoustic guitar approach, as that has nothing to do with most of his material. He played the piano and the fiddle, after all. The folk revivalists did a great service by keeping Hill’s work in circulation, but trying to keep him in that small musical box is way off the mark. So, I borrowed from vaudeville and the music hall, piano blues and early jazz, alt-country, swing, punk and gospel.
I think Joe would be very happy with this recording—more so than what’s preceded.
What sorts of musical choices did Hill make? What kinds of influences did he draw on?
Hill came from a music-loving family and he also had some musical training as a child before his dad died and the family fell on hard times. He heard a lot of religious music, as his family were strong Lutherans and sometimes attended Salvation Army gatherings. Since hymns were well known, even across sectarian religious (and political) lines, hymn tunes were often used by labor songwriters going back to the mid-19th century. Hill’s use of “In the Sweet By and By” as the tune for “The Preacher and the Slave” was very much in a labor tradition, as was “Nearer My God to Thee” for his “Nearer My Job to Thee.”
Hill also wrote his own music for some of his songs—for his classic “Rebel Girl,” for example. And though he leaned heavily for the music of the “Internationale” for his “Workers of the World Awaken,” he did include clear pieces of his own work in writing that one, too.
But most often he drew on the vaudeville, music hall, early Tin Pan Alley songs that were popular with workers at the time. For “Ta Ra Ra Boom De Ay” he took the tune from a music hall hit by the same name. For “Scissor Bill” he took the tune from “Steamboat Bill,” which was a huge hit at the time and a best-selling early recording.
With all his tune choices, he was like other working-class writers and had the same goal—use tunes that workers knew already for labor songs and then they’d be easy for workers to sing.
Can you give the background of some of the other songs?
“Der Chief of Fresno” grew out of the IWW’s free speech campaign. Fresno was a place where the police were notably confrontational. Hill added his voice to the mix with a piece that appears to have been a chant of sorts. That’s why I added the multiple voices on the words “der chief” whenever it comes around. I like the use of the German “Der” in the title, as if the chief might make a good member of the oppressive Prussian army.
“Stung Right” represents the strong anti-military bent of the IWW, even before the outbreak of World War I. Many immigrant workers had already come from regions of the world where they were drafted and made to fight the battles for the ruling class and were determined to stay out of future such wars. What’s more, many working-class groups saw war as a senseless ruling class fight that only pitted workers against each other. Nationalism was seen as suspect.
Little wonder, then, that after the Spanish-American War in 1898, and the needless slaughter it entailed, anti-war and anti-military sentiments found welcome ears. Hill was aware that workers also signed up with the military when their economic situations were difficult. At least they gave you a bit of cash and some food in the army. In this piece, he’s warning workers not to fall for it
“Rebel Girl” is another of his best efforts. Hill wrote it himself for Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Hill followed her career closely and admired her work on behalf of labor. They frequently corresponded while Hill was in prison. He even wrote a cute little song for her son called “Bronco Buster Flynn.” Flynn had visited Hill while he was awaiting execution and sent him a photo of her son Buster.
One song that struck me was "Come Take a Joy Ride in My Aeroplane." As you say in your liner notes, that seems to represent a "romantic and carefree side" that we don't typically associate with Hill.
There were three of these romantic, sentimental songs that Hill wrote, all of which were discovered after his arrest and none of which had music or tunes for them. Of course, there may be more, but we haven’t yet found those. They weren’t typical of Hill’s writing, which is generally focused on labor and political issues. But you can find some of this same sentiment in his letters, so it clearly was a key component of who Joe Hill was.
Frankly, I think historians and musicians have missed the boat in not addressing this romantic impulse. I suppose it seems counter to our image of the left-wing radical. But hell—I’d rather hang out with a person with strong romantic tendencies and a left-wing leaning personality, than some dour old sourpuss like Marx or Lenin, wouldn’t you? I also think within the IWW there was a strong sense of romance about the world. This can be found clearly in Wobbly writers like Haywire Mac or Ralph Chaplin. Some of this could be channeled toward a utopian impulse, as in the classic IWW song “Big Rock Candy Mountain.”
Hill just gave it a more personal twist. Why shouldn’t he want to fall in love and be carried away for a while in the reverie of romance? Don’t we all? Here’s a guy who went to work at age nine, contracted tuberculosis, went on the tramp to survive and worked an endless stream of low-paying jobs. Why not dream of taking flight above this dreary earth with your gal and soar above the troubles below? Sounds like fun to me.
What is it about Hill that makes his legacy resonate so widely?
Obviously, the injustice of his arrest, trial, and execution continues to resonate, especially when a day doesn’t pass without some prisoner being released from prison after new evidence or DNA tests exonerated him or her.
Beyond that obvious point, I think there are many people who hear his songs and immediately sense that the issues raised by Hill and other Wobbly bards remain important to our national discussion, including decent wages and working conditions, immigrant rights, discrimination based on race, the oppression of women, the right to form a union and the right to free speech.
I have to admit, however, that I’m often bewildered by conservative labor leaders in the USA who pull out Hill’s legacy when it’s convenient and make positive comments about him. If he were around today, they’d throw him out of their conventions in a minute.
I also think there’s considerable appeal to Hill’s personal demeanor throughout the trial. He died a heroic, noble death—something few people can claim for their lives. He gave his life for the cause, and his trial and execution played out in the international media of the day. He’s a romantic character of the type that is more common in early movies than in reality.

David Cochran

Democratic Socialism of Sen. Bernie Sanders

Democratic Socialism of Sen. Bernie Sanders

Sen. Bernie Sanders said:
People are not truly free when they are unable to feed their family. People are not truly free when they are unable to retire with dignity. People are not truly free when they are unemployed or underpaid or when they are exhausted by working long hours. People are not truly free when they have no health care.
So let me define for you, simply and straightforwardly, what democratic socialism means to me. It builds on what Franklin Delano Roosevelt said when he fought for guaranteed economic rights for all Americans. And it builds on what Martin Luther King, Jr. said in 1968 when he stated that; “This country has socialism for the rich, and rugged individualism for the poor.” It builds on the success of many other countries around the world that have done a far better job than we have in protecting the needs of their working families, the elderly, the children, the sick and the poor.
Democratic socialism means that we must create an economy that works for all, not just the very wealthy.

Democratic socialism means that we must reform a political system in America today which is not only grossly unfair but, in many respects, corrupt.

It is a system, for example, which during the 1990s allowed Wall Street to spend $5 billion in lobbying and campaign contributions to get deregulated. Then, ten years later, after the greed, recklessness, and illegal behavior of Wall Street led to their collapse, it is a system which provided trillions in government aid to bail them out. Wall Street used their wealth and power to get Congress to do their bidding for deregulation and then, when their greed caused their collapse, they used their wealth and power to get Congress to bail them out. Quite a system!

And, then, to add insult to injury, we were told that not only were the banks too big to fail, the bankers were too big to jail. Kids who get caught possessing marijuana get police records. Wall Street CEOs who help destroy the economy get raises in their salaries. This is what Martin Luther King, Jr. meant by socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for everyone else.

In my view, it’s time we had democratic socialism for working families, not just Wall Street, billionaires and large corporations. It means that we should not be providing welfare for corporations, huge tax breaks for the very rich, or trade policies which boost corporate profits as workers lose their jobs. It means that we create a government that works for works for all of us, not just powerful special interests. It means that economic rights must be an essential part of what America stands for.

The speech that Sen. Sanders delivered was a cultural landmark. Before the Great Recession, no one could have imagined a major party presidential candidate delivering an address that exposed the inequalities in our economic system.

Sanders explained why he is running for president, “I’m not running for president because it’s my turn, but because it’s the turn of all of us to live in a nation of hope and opportunity not for some, not for the few, but for all.”

Bernie Sanders isn’t a communist or a socialist. Sen. Sanders is a throwback to the days of true liberalism. It wasn’t a coincidence that Sanders frequently referred to the most successful Democratic president of all time in his speech.

Sanders said, “I don’t believe government should own the means of production, but I do believe that the middle class and the working families who produce the wealth of America deserve a fair deal.”
Sanders echoed the view of governmental power that echoed FDR. Roosevelt used his power to balance the scales after a decades of a Republican federal government that had become too pro-business and corporation

GOP Congress Wants to Cut Pensions

Tell Congress to Make Your Pension Vote Count

Right now some retirees across the country are facing enormous cuts to the benefits they earned through years of loyalty and service to their employers. Congress caused this problem last December by rolling back a decades old provision preventing cuts to promised retiree benefits. To make matters even worse, Congress allows retirees to vote on the cuts but any ballot that goes unreturned is counted as in favor of the cuts, and even if the beneficiaries vote against the cuts, the Treasury still has the right to require cuts to pension benefits. 

Legislation sponsored by Senator Rob Portman and Representatives David Joyce and Tim Ryan, the Pension Accountability Act (S. 2147/H.R. 4029), will give plan participants a meaningful voice when plans are considering making cuts. The legislation requires a majority, binding vote from plan participants before any cuts may be made and only returned ballots will be counted in the vote total.

In addition to the Pension Accountability Act, the Teamsters Union continues to support S. 1631/ H.R. 2844, the Keep Our Pension Promises Act (KOPPA). KOPPA would protect workers and retirees from cuts to their earned retirement benefits. The legislation would restore anti-cutback rules so that retirees in financially troubled multi-employer pension plans would be protected from having their earned benefits cut.

We want to ensure that our nation’s retirees will have a voice when it comes to cuts in benefits that were earned over a lifetime of service. We urge you to email your Senators and Representative to ask them to sign onto S. 2147/ H.R. 4029, the Pension Accountability Act.

Rep. Ted Lieu

District: FH-CA33

Phone:(202) 225-3976

Fax:(202) 225-4099

Your message has been submitted.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein

Phone:(202) 224-3841

Fax:(202) 228-3954

Thanks! Your form has been submitted.

Thank You for Taking Action

Sen. Barbara Boxer

Phone:(202) 224-3553

Fax:(202) 224-0454

Privacy Apps from Ed Snowden

Edward Snowden Explains How To Reclaim Your Privacy

Micah Lee

Nov. 12 2015, 7:39 a.m.

LAST MONTH, I met Edward Snowden in a hotel in central Moscow, just blocks away from Red Square. It was the first time we’d met in person; he first emailed me nearly two years earlier, and we eventually created an encrypted channel to journalists Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, to whom Snowden would disclose overreaching mass surveillance by the National Security Agency and its British equivalent, GCHQ.
This time around, Snowden’s anonymity was gone; the world knew who he was, much of what he’d leaked, and that he’d been living in exile in Moscow, where he’s been stranded ever since the State Department canceled his passport while he was en route to Latin America. His situation was more stable, the threats against him a bit easier to predict. So I approached my 2015 Snowden meeting with less paranoia than was warranted in 2013, and with a little more attention to physical security, since this time our communications would not be confined to the internet.
Our first meeting would be in the hotel lobby, and I arrived with all my important electronic gear in tow. I had powered down my smartphone and placed it in a “faraday bag” designed to block all radio emissions. This, in turn, was tucked inside my backpack next to my laptop (which I configured and hardened specifically for traveling to Russia), also powered off. Both electronic devices stored their data in encrypted form, but disk encryption isn’t perfect, and leaving these in my hotel room seemed like an invitation to tampering.
Most of the lobby seats were taken by well-dressed Russians sipping cocktails. I planted myself on an empty couch off in a nook hidden from most of the action and from the only security camera I could spot. Snowden had told me I’d have to wait awhile before he met me, and for a moment I wondered if I was being watched: A bearded man wearing glasses and a trench coat stood a few feet from me, apparently doing nothing aside from staring at a stained-glass window. Later he shifted from one side of my couch to the other, walking away just after I made eye contact.
Eventually, Snowden appeared. We smiled and said good to see you, and then walked up the spiral staircase near the elevator to the room where I would be conducting the interview, before we really started talking.
It also turns out that I didn’t need to be quite so cautious. Later, he told me to feel free to take out my phone so I could coordinate a rendezvous with some mutual friends who were in town. Operational security, or “opsec,” was a recurring theme across our several chats in Moscow.
In most of Snowden’s interviews he speaks broadly about the importance of privacy, surveillance reform, and encryption. But he rarely has the opportunity to delve into the details and help people of all technical backgrounds understand opsec and begin to strengthen their own security and privacy. He and I mutually agreed that our interview would focus more on nerdy computer talk and less on politics, because we’re both nerds and not many of his interviews get to be like that. I believe he wanted to use our chats to promote cool projects and to educate people. For example, Snowden had mentioned prior to our in-person meeting that he had tweeted about the Tor anonymity system and was surprised by how many people thought it was some big government trap. He wanted to fix those kinds of misconceptions.
Our interview, conducted over room-service hamburgers, started with the basics.

Micah Lee: What are some operational security practices you think everyone should adopt? Just useful stuff for average people.
Edward Snowden: [Opsec] is important even if you’re not worried about the NSA. Because when you think about who the victims of surveillance are, on a day-to-day basis, you’re thinking about people who are in abusive spousal relationships, you’re thinking about people who are concerned about stalkers, you’re thinking about children who are concerned about their parents overhearing things. It’s to reclaim a level of privacy.

• The first step that anyone could take is to encrypt their phone calls and their text messages. You can do that through the smartphone app Signal, by Open Whisper Systems. It’s free, and you can just download it immediately. And anybody you’re talking to now, their communications, if it’s intercepted, can’t be read by adversaries. [Signal is available for iOS and Android, and, unlike a lot of security tools, is very easy to use.]
• You should encrypt your hard disk, so that if your computer is stolen the information isn’t obtainable to an adversary — pictures, where you live, where you work, where your kids are, where you go to school. [I’ve written a guide to encrypting your disk on Windows, Mac, and Linux.]
• Use a password manager. One of the main things that gets people’s private information exposed, not necessarily to the most powerful adversaries, but to the most common ones, are data dumps. Your credentials may be revealed because some service you stopped using in 2007 gets hacked, and your password that you were using for that one site also works for your Gmail account. A password manager allows you to create unique passwords for every site that are unbreakable, but you don’t have the burden of memorizing them. [The password manager KeePassX is free, open source, cross-platform, and never stores anything in the cloud.]
• The other thing there is two-factor authentication. The value of this is if someone does steal your password, or it’s left or exposed somewhere … [two-factor authentication] allows the provider to send you a secondary means of authentication — a text message or something like that. [If you enable two-factor authentication, an attacker needs both your password as the first factor and a physical device, like your phone, as your second factor, to login to your account. Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, GitHub, Battle.net, and tons of other services all support two-factor authentication.]

We should not live lives as if we are electronically naked.

We should armor ourselves using systems we can rely on every day. This doesn’t need to be an extraordinary lifestyle change. It doesn’t have to be something that is disruptive. It should be invisible, it should be atmospheric, it should be something that happens painlessly, effortlessly. This is why I like apps like Signal, because they’re low friction. It doesn’t require you to re-order your life. It doesn’t require you to change your method of communications. You can use it right now to talk to your friends.

Micah Lee and Edward Snowden, Moscow, Russia.

Photo: Sue Gardner

Lee: What do you think about Tor? Do you think that everyone should be familiar with it, or do you think that it’s only a use-it-if-you-need-it thing?
Snowden: I think Tor is the most important privacy-enhancing technology project being used today. I use Tor personally all the time. We know it works from at least one anecdotal case that’s fairly familiar to most people at this point. That’s not to say that Tor is bulletproof. What Tor does is it provides a measure of security and allows you to disassociate your physical location. …
But the basic idea, the concept of Tor that is so valuable, is that it’s run by volunteers. Anyone can create a new node on the network, whether it’s an entry node, a middle router, or an exit point, on the basis of their willingness to accept some risk. The voluntary nature of this network means that it is survivable, it’s resistant, it’s flexible.
[Tor Browser is a great way to selectively use Tor to look something up and not leave a trace that you did it. It can also help bypass censorship when you’re on a network where certain sites are blocked. If you want to get more involved, you can volunteer to run your own Tor node, as I do, and support the diversity of the Tor network.]
Lee: So that is all stuff that everybody should be doing. What about people who have exceptional threat models, like future intelligence-community whistleblowers, and other people who have nation-state adversaries? Maybe journalists, in some cases, or activists, or people like that?
Snowden: So the first answer is that you can’t learn this from a single article. The needs of every individual in a high-risk environment are different. And the capabilities of the adversary are constantly improving. The tooling changes as well.
What really matters is to be conscious of the principles of compromise. How can the adversary, in general, gain access to information that is sensitive to you? What kinds of things do you need to protect? Because of course you don’t need to hide everything from the adversary. You don’t need to live a paranoid life, off the grid, in hiding, in the woods in Montana.
What we do need to protect are the facts of our activities, our beliefs, and our lives that could be used against us in manners that are contrary to our interests. So when we think about this for whistleblowers, for example, if you witnessed some kind of wrongdoing and you need to reveal this information, and you believe there are people that want to interfere with that, you need to think about how to compartmentalize that.
Tell no one who doesn’t need to know. [Lindsay Mills, Snowden’s girlfriend of several years, didn’t know that he had been collecting documents to leak to journalists until she heard about it on the news, like everyone else.]
When we talk about whistleblowers and what to do, you want to think about tools for protecting your identity, protecting the existence of the relationship from any type of conventional communication system. You want to use something like SecureDrop, over the Tor network, so there is no connection between the computer that you are using at the time — preferably with a non-persistent operating system like Tails, so you’ve left no forensic trace on the machine you’re using, which hopefully is a disposable machine that you can get rid of afterward, that can’t be found in a raid, that can’t be analyzed or anything like that — so that the only outcome of your operational activities are the stories reported by the journalists. [SecureDrop is a whistleblower submission system. Here is a guide to using The Intercept’s SecureDrop server as safely as possible.]
And this is to be sure that whoever has been engaging in this wrongdoing cannot distract from the controversy by pointing to your physical identity. Instead they have to deal with the facts of the controversy rather than the actors that are involved in it.
Lee: What about for people who are, like, in a repressive regime and are trying to …
Snowden: Use Tor.
Lee: Use Tor?
Snowden: If you’re not using Tor you’re doing it wrong. Now, there is a counterpoint here where the use of privacy-enhancing technologies in certain areas can actually single you out for additional surveillance through the exercise of repressive measures. This is why it’s so critical for developers who are working on security-enhancing tools to not make their protocols stand out.
Lee: So you mentioned that what you want to spread are the principles of operational security. And you mentioned some of them, like need-to-know, compartmentalization. Can you talk more about what are the principles of operating securely?
Snowden: Almost every principle of operating security is to think about vulnerability. Think about what the risks of compromise are and how to mitigate them. In every step, in every action, in every point involved, in every point of decision, you have to stop and reflect and think, “What would be the impact if my adversary were aware of my activities?” If that impact is something that’s not survivable, either you have to change or refrain from that activity, you have to mitigate that through some kind of tools or system to protect the information and reduce the risk of compromise, or ultimately, you have to accept the risk of discovery and have a plan to mitigate the response. Because sometimes you can’t always keep something secret, but you can plan your response.
Lee: Are there principles of operational security that you think would be applicable to everyday life?
Snowden: Yes, that’s selective sharing. Everybody doesn’t need to know everything about us. Your friend doesn’t need to know what pharmacy you go to. Facebook doesn’t need to know your password security questions. You don’t need to have your mother’s maiden name on your Facebook page, if that’s what you use for recovering your password on Gmail. The idea here is that sharing is OK, but it should always be voluntary. It should be thoughtful, it should be things that are mutually beneficial to people that you’re sharing with, and these aren’t things that are simply taken from you.
If you interact with the internet … the typical methods of communication today betray you silently, quietly, invisibly, at every click. At every page that you land on, information is being stolen. It’s being collected, intercepted, analyzed, and stored by governments, foreign and domestic, and by companies. You can reduce this by taking a few key steps. Basic things. If information is being collected about you, make sure it’s being done in a voluntary way.
For example, if you use browser plugins like HTTPS Everywhere by EFF, you can try to enforce secure encrypted communications so your data is not being passed in transit electronically naked.
Lee: Do you think people should use adblock software?
Snowden: Yes.

Everybody should be running adblock software, if only from a safety perspective …

We’ve seen internet providers like Comcast, AT&T, or whoever it is, insert their own ads into your plaintext http connections. … As long as service providers are serving ads with active content that require the use of Javascript to display, that have some kind of active content like Flash embedded in it, anything that can be a vector for attack in your web browser — you should be actively trying to block these. Because if the service provider is not working to protect the sanctity of the relationship between reader and publisher, you have not just a right but a duty to take every effort to protect yourself in response. Lee: Nice. So there’s a lot of esoteric attacks that you hear about in the media. There’s disk encryption attacks like evil maid attacks, and cold-boot attacks. There’s all sorts of firmware attacks. There’s BadUSB and BadBIOS, and baseband attacks on cellphones. All of these are probably unlikely to happen to many people very often. Is this something people should be concerned about? How do you go about deciding if you personally should be concerned about this sort of attack and try to defend against it?
Snowden: It all comes down to personal evaluation of your personal threat model, right? That is the bottom line of what operational security is about. You have to assess the risk of compromise. On the basis of that determine how much effort needs to be invested into mitigating that risk.
Now in the case of cold-boot attacks and things like that, there are many things you can do. For example, cold-boot attacks can be defeated by never leaving your machine unattended. This is something that is not important for the vast majority of users, because most people don’t need to worry about someone sneaking in when their machine is unattended. … There is the evil maid attack, which can be protected against by keeping your bootloader physically on you, but wearing it as a necklace, for example, on an external USB device.
You’ve got BadBIOS. You can protect against this by dumping your BIOS, hashing it (hopefully not with SHA1 anymore), and simply comparing your BIOS. In theory, if it’s owned badly enough you need to do this externally. You need to dump it using a JTAG or some kind of reader to make sure that it actually matches, if you don’t trust your operating system.

There’s a counter to every attack. The idea is you can play the cat-and-mouse game forever.

You can go to any depth, you can drive yourself crazy thinking about bugs in the walls and cameras in the ceiling. Or you can think about what are the most realistic threats in your current situation? And on that basis take some activity to mitigate the most realistic threats. In that case, for most people, that’s going to be very simple things. That’s going to be using a safe browser. That’s going to be disabling scripts and active content, ideally using a virtual machine or some other form of sandboxed browser, where if there’s a compromise it’s not persistent. [I recently wrote about how to set up virtual machines.] And making sure that your regular day-to-day communications are being selectively shared through encrypted means. Lee: What sort of security tools are you currently excited about? What are you finding interesting?
Snowden: I’ll just namecheck Qubes here, just because it’s interesting. I’m really excited about Qubes because the idea of VM-separating machines, requiring expensive, costly sandbox escapes to get persistence on a machine, is a big step up in terms of burdening the attacker with greater resource and sophistication requirements for maintaining a compromise. I’d love to see them continue this project. I’d love to see them make it more accessible and much more secure. [You can read more about how to use Qubes here and here.]
Something that we haven’t seen that we need to see is a greater hardening of the overall kernels of every operating system through things like grsecurity [a set of patches to improve Linux security], but unfortunately there’s a big usability gap between the capabilities that are out there, that are possible, and what is attainable for the average user.
Lee: People use smartphones a lot. What do you think about using a smartphone for secure communications?
Snowden: Something that people forget about cellphones in general, of any type, is that you’re leaving a permanent record of all of your physical locations as you move around. … The problem with cellphones is they’re basically always talking about you, even when you’re not using them. That’s not to say that everyone should burn their cellphones … but you have to think about the context for your usage. Are you carrying a device that, by virtue of simply having it on your person, places you in a historic record in a place that you don’t want to be associated with, even if it’s something as simple as your place of worship?
Lee: There are tons of software developers out there that would love to figure out how to end mass surveillance. What should they be doing with their time?
Snowden: Mixed routing is one of the most important things that we need in terms of regular infrastructure because we haven’t solved the problem of how to divorce the content of communication from the fact that it has occurred at all. To have real privacy you have to have both. Not just what you talked to your mother about, but the fact that you talked to your mother at all. …
The problem with communications today is that the internet service provider knows exactly who you are. They know exactly where you live. They know what your credit card number is, when you last paid, how much it was.

You should be able to buy a pile of internet the same way you buy a bottle of water.

We need means of engaging in private connections to the internet. We need ways of engaging in private communications. We need mechanisms affording for private associations. And ultimately, we need ways to engage in private payment and shipping, which are the basis of trade. These are research questions that need to be resolved. We need to find a way to protect the rights that we ourselves inherited for the next generation. If we don’t, today we’re standing at a fork in the road that divides between an open society and a controlled system. If we don’t do anything about this, people will look back at this moment and they’ll say, why did you let that happen? Do you want to live in a quantified world? Where not only is the content of every conversation, not only are the movements of every person known, but even the location of all the objects are known? Where the book that you leant to a friend leaves a record that they have read it? These things might be useful capabilities that provide value to society, but that’s only going to be a net good if we’re able to mitigate the impact of our activity, of our sharing, of our openness.
Lee: Ideally, governments around the world shouldn’t be spying on everybody. But that’s not really the case, so where do you think — what do you think the way to solve this problem is? Do you think it’s all just encrypting everything, or do you think that trying to get Congress to pass new laws and trying to do policy stuff is equally as important? Where do you think the balance is between tech and policy to combat mass surveillance? And what do you think that Congress should do, or that people should be urging Congress to do?
Snowden: I think reform comes with many faces. There’s legal reform, there’s statutory reform more generally, there are the products and outcomes of judicial decisions. … In the United States it has been held that these programs of mass surveillance, which were implemented secretly without the knowledge or the consent of the public, violate our rights, that they went too far, that they should end. And they have been modified or changed as a result. But there are many other programs, and many other countries, where these reforms have not yet had the impact that is so vital to free society. And in these contexts, in these situations, I believe that we do — as a community, as an open society, whether we’re talking about ordinary citizens or the technological community specifically — we have to look for ways of enforcing human rights through any means.
That can be through technology, that can be through politics, that can be through voting, that can be through behavior. But technology is, of all of these things, perhaps the quickest and most promising means through which we can respond to the greatest violations of human rights in a manner that is not dependent on every single legislative body on the planet to reform itself at the same time, which is probably somewhat optimistic to hope for. We would be instead able to create systems … that enforce and guarantee the rights that are necessary to maintain a free and open society.
Lee: On a different note — people said I should ask about Twitter — how long have you had a Twitter account for?
Snowden: Two weeks.
Lee: How many followers do you have?
Snowden: A million and a half, I think.
Lee: That’s a lot of followers. How are you liking being a Twitter user so far?
Snowden: I’m trying very hard not to mess up.
Lee: You’ve been tweeting a lot lately, including in the middle of the night Moscow time.
Snowden: Ha. I make no secret about the fact that I live on Eastern Standard Time. The majority of my work and associations, my political activism, still occurs in my home, in the United States. So it only really make sense that I work on the same hours.
Lee: Do you feel like Twitter is sucking away all your time? I mean I kind of have Twitter open all day long and I sometimes get sucked into flame wars. How is it affecting you?
Snowden: There were a few days when people kept tweeting cats for almost an entire day. And I know I shouldn’t, I have a lot of work to do, but I just couldn’t stop looking at them.
Lee: The real question is, what was your Twitter handle before this? Because you were obviously on Twitter. You know all the ins and outs.
Snowden: I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of other Twitter accounts.
Disclosure: Snowden and I are both directors of Freedom of the Press Foundation.

Contact the author:

Micah Lee✉micah.lee@​theintercept.comt@micahflee

TPP Fast Track Traitors and Heros

So who voted for TPP fast track in the Senate? (List)

By Editor on June 24, 2015

Source: Rollcall.com

Unions Fight Inequality and Strengthen Democracy

How Unions Fight Inequality and Strengthen Democracy

November 2, 2015

Richard Eskow

A new study from the International Monetary Fund concludes that unions reduce inequality and foster a healthier economy for everyone, mainly by preventing the wealthiest among us from keeping the fruits of a collaboratively created prosperity for themselves.

The IMF study shows that a reinvigorated labor movement is essential to both a just economy and a well-functioning democracy. It deserves widespread attention – and should inspire concerted action.

Unionization Matters

The IMF is not considered a hotbed of leftism, yet the conclusion reached by research economists Florence Jaumotte and Carolina Osorio Buitron is clear. As they explained in a summary of their work, they found that “the decline in union density has been strongly associated with the rise of top income inequality” and that “unionization matters for income distribution.”

Jaumotte and Osorio Buitron examined the relationship between unionization and income inequality indicators in 20 advanced economies between 1980 and 2010. They found “a strong negative relationship between unionization and top earners’ income shares,” and concluded that this relationship “appears to be largely causal.”

In other words, the IMF authors found that the very wealthy capture a larger share of an economy’s overall income when fewer people belong to unions. They found this to be true even after controlling for other forces that can affect inequality, including technology, globalization, and financial deregulation.

Cause and Effect

Their findings are consistent with this country’s experience. Hourly wages kept pace with productivity gains in the United States for roughly a quarter-century after World War II, as the Economic Policy Institute observes.

As the EPI notes, “If the hourly pay of typical American workers had kept pace with productivity growth since the 1970s, then there would have been no rise in income inequality during that period.”

Union membership began declining in this country at roughly the same time as wages began to lag behind productivity. EPI noted the relationship between union membership and inequality back in 2012. The IMF study provides further insight into the forces behind that relationship.

Inequality Matters

But why does inequality even matter? There are those, mostly on the right, who argue it doesn’t. They claim that inequality is irrelevant as long as the economy is growing, perhaps because they assume that growing economies more effectively meet people’s basic needs.

But that’s not what’s happening. Stock markets may be booming, but wage stagnation in the United States is choking off the middle class. Basic needs like higher education are becoming increasingly unaffordable.

An economy can only grow in an equitable, well-distributed way when there is a large base of consumers to purchase goods and services. When all the wealth is concentrated among a very few people at the top, the majority is deprived of spending income. The wealthy few will have difficulty spending all their money – or even investing all of it – while millions of others are unable to make the purchases they want and need.

Despite right-wing mythology, the wealthy are not “job creators.” As economist J. Bradford DeLong says, “save for those in the top 0.01 percent who are going to use their money for useful purposes” – that is, by leaving it to charity – “the contribution they make to any reasonable utilitarian measure of societal welfare is zero.”

In other words, an economy for the rich is an economy where society as a whole suffers.

The Democracy Effect

Inequality is not the only adverse outcome of a weakened union movement. The IMF authors also conclude (reasonably enough) that decline in union membership has led to unions having less influence on public policy. That has led to a lower real minimum wage, weaker unemployment benefits, and weaker employment protection laws.

The IMF’s Jaumotte and Osorio Buitron cite Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz’s work, which shows that highly concentrated wealth allows top earners to (in their words) “manipulate the economic and political system in their favor.”

To put it more plainly: The rules are rigged.

The evidence for that is all around us. The very wealthiest among us have captured a much larger share of the U.S. national income in recent decades. They have also, as a Princeton study shows, been able to dictate our national political agenda with little or no regard for what the majority wants.

Unrigging the Rules

How do we restore balance to our economy and our democracy? Tax policy clearly needs to be changed so that millionaires, billionaires, and corporations once again pay their fair share of taxes. Actual tax rates for all three groups have fallen dramatically in the last 50 years. And campaign financing needs to be reformed so that the wealthy can no longer “buy” candidates or single-handedly sponsor presidential campaigns.

We need to break up the too-big-to-fail banks, resist the financialization of our economy (where more and more of our national income goes to banking institutions), and regulate Wall Street more effectively.

And now, thanks to these IMF researchers, we also know that we need a stronger union movement, too.

Looking to Labor

American unions introduced many of the reforms we take for granted today. They gave us weekends off, workplace safety laws, the 40-hour work week, and dozens of other innovations. But these reforms are endangered, while others are needed – including guaranteed sick leave, vacation time, and caregiver leave.

What do we do now? The union movement has been politically demonized for decades. Union membership has plummeted, for a number of reasons. The labor movement needs to be revitalized and renewed, and that effort needs to be one of the major undertakings of our time.

Pro-corporate forces would have us believe that our economic woes are irreversible, that we are the victims of unstoppable, God-like forces like globalization and technology. But, while these forces are powerful, we now know that much of our destiny remains within our control.

The union movement is one of our democracy’s most potent economic tools. Its benefits flow not only to its members, but to society as a whole. The IMF paper is a research study, but it can also be taken as a call to arms.

Need New CA College Accreditor

SOAPBOX

SEPTEMBER 20, 2015C

New community college accreditor needed now

Task force exposed accrediting commission’s problems,

recommends replacing it

BY JOSHUA PECHTHALT, CFT

State Community College Chancellor Brice Harris has released his long-awaited Accreditation Task Force report, and the news is not good for the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges.

The report, however, is good news for California, because it puts accreditation – the process of monitoring and reporting that provides assurance to students and taxpayers that a college offers a quality education – on a path toward renewal.

Joshua Pechthalt

The blue-ribbon task force, comprising faculty, administrators, college presidents, elected officials and other expert stakeholders, has starkly exposed the commission’s problems and recommends replacing it with another accreditor.

This is a welcome development. Unfortunately, it may not happen overnight.

Two years ago, the California Federation of Teachers, representing a majority of California’s community college faculty, filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education regarding the commission’s failure to comply with multiple accreditor standards – the behaviors by which an accreditor is measured to keep its own authorization. The department, agreeing, issued a letter detailing the commission’s lack of compliance with 15 standards. This opened the floodgates:

▪  The San Francisco city attorney won a court decision that the agency broke four laws in its effort to shutter City College of San Francisco. The college remains open.

▪  California’s Joint Legislative Audit Committee criticized the commission for its City College of San Francisco decision, absurd levels of secrecy, disproportionate rate of sanctions compared with other accreditors, and inconsistent treatment of colleges.

▪  The Community College Board of Governors rescinded regulatory language that had given the commission sole authority over accreditation of California’s community colleges.

▪  Assemblyman Phil Ting, D-San Francisco, authored Assembly Bill 1397 to make the commission more transparent and accountable. Receiving strong bipartisan support, Ting nonetheless placed it on hold until January to give the state chancellor a chance to move his task force’s recommendations forward.

The task force, finding the “California Community College system and its member institutions have lost confidence in the ACCJC,” concluded the colleges need to transition to another accreditor.

This represents a sea change in perceptions of the agency; the California Federation of Teachers’ critique has become mainstream opinion.

The faculty union’s formerly lonely position was partly due to the obscurity of accreditation itself. Necessary for students to earn transferable credits and financial aid, a college’s accreditation is always a complex process.

But in the hands of the commission, accreditation became needlessly bureaucratic, time-consuming, expensive, secretive and focused on things far removed from the classroom. It also became extraordinarily punitive, involving harsh sanctions leading to high levels of faculty anxiety, endless paperwork, student fears of disaccreditation and consequent enrollment losses.

As students fled sanctioned colleges, often to attend more expensive private schools, many endured terrible educational and financial outcomes.

Another reason the shift took so long was fear of the commission’s sanctioning powers and reputation for vindictiveness, which kept many college leaders silent. State Sen. Jim Nielsen provided a glimpse of what they were up against with the commission’s President Barbara Beno when he told colleagues, “I have never dealt with a more arrogant, condescending and dismissive individual.”

Change, finally, is coming. However, the path to another accreditor faces obstacles. The chancellor suggests the transition could take 10 years. This timeline contradicts his report, which notes, “Further delay in resolving the issues with the accreditor will have adverse effects on our colleges, on our students, and on California’s economy and future.”

Important considerations lie ahead, such as which accreditor makes sense. A new Accreditor must agree to take on California’s 113 colleges, and the U.S. Department of Education must recognize the new Accreditor’s expansion of responsibilities. These steps will take time, but not 10 years. The problem is clear. It needs fixing before more damage is done.

Joshua Pechthalt is president of the California Federation of Teach

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/op-ed/soapbox/article35795502.html#storylink=cpy

AFT: Why Strong Unions Are Good

When Unions Are Strong, Families Are Strong

by Randi Weingarten, Pres. AFT

Republicans have staked out endless signature issues: shutting down the government, vilifying immigrants, denouncing rights like paid sick leave and equal pay because they are "women's issues," privatizing education, and -- wait for it --obliterating the rights of working people to negotiate together for better wages and benefits that can sustain their families.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie recently said that our teachers union deserves a "punch in the face." Fellow presidential longshot and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker wants to nationalize his plan to destroy public sector unions. Yet unions are now more popular with Republicans than Christie and Walker are. That's right, thelatest polling shows that while Christie and Walker have negligible support among Republican voters (1.5 and 3 percent, respectively), a full 42 percent of Republicans support unions.

In fact, support for unions is increasing. Last month's Gallup poll showed that in just one year, support for unions grew five points to nearly 60 percent. And according to the Brookings Institution, more than 50 percent of nonunion workers say that if an election was held in their workplace tomorrow, they would vote for union representation.

So why would a governor advance an agenda that both presses his finger on the scale of inequality against working people and places a dead weight on the economy, as it has in Wisconsin? Especially since we know that when working people are supported, as they've been in neighboring Minnesota, the economy is strengthened?

The same wealthy special interests and CEOs who back Walker's policies and manipulate economic rules in their favor want to make it even harder for working people to come together, speak up and get ahead.

All across the country, though, people understand that unions are good for their families. Journalist Denis Hamill recently wrote about the sea change when his father's factory was unionized: Workers' terrible pay and working conditions improved immediately. Unionization was a lifeline, lifting families out of tenements and into the middle class.

That's still the case, as a new study from researchers at Harvard University, Wellesley College and the Center for American Progress shows. Children in areas with higher union membership have more economic mobility, and children in union households have better outcomes.

Unions also give women a leg up. According to a new report from the Institute for Women's Policy Research, the wage gap between men and women narrows for union women, from 77 cents for women in general compared with every dollar a man earns, to 89 cents for union women. And a union contract makes an even bigger difference for women of color.

Unions like the American Federation of Teachers are strengthening our families, schools and economy -- at the bargaining table, ballot box and beyond.

Take what we're doing in McDowell County, W.Va. -- the eighth-poorest county in the nation. Our union brought together public and private partners who have collectively invested more than $16 million in the last four years. The county, which was built on the coal industry, is being transformed by things it never had before--like widespread broadband access, dental care and addiction treatment.

And in New York City, our union's work in encouraging infrastructure investments by pension funds is creating jobs by helping to finance the building of the new LaGuardia Airport. Five years ago, we made a commitment--through the Clinton Global Initiative with the AFL-CIO and the Building Trades -- to invest $10 billion of our members' pension funds into infrastructure. We've already created tens of thousands of good jobs, and the LaGuardia project furthers this commitment.

Yet we are still the object of unrelenting attacks. Politicians like Christie and Walker, and the wealthy special interests that support their plans, want to eliminate unions because they see anything that helps working families get a bigger piece of the economic pie as eroding their power.

The U.S. Supreme Court case Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association is their latest tactic. Focused exclusively on public service workers -- like teachers, nurses and firefighters -- the case could undermine unions' efforts to make our voices heard on issues that affect all of us: fighting for smaller class sizes, working so we can all retire with dignity, holding billionaires accountable for paying their fair share, and making sure employers understand we are working harder and harder just to get by.

Walker has said that the way to eliminate unions is to "divide and conquer." But that's not what Americans want. Hardworking Americans know that, as Hillary Clinton has said, "When unions are strong, families are strong. And when families are strong, America is strong."

Follow Randi Weingarten on Twitter: www.twitter.com/rweingarten