The Progressive Mind

WikiLeaks TPP 2nd Chapter

TrumanTown — Sat, 24 Jan 2015 16:57:32 GMT

https://www.wikileaks.org/tpp-ip2/pressrelease/

Paul Ryan:Yes I Am a Nut

TrumanTown — Thu, 16 Oct 2014 19:35:45 GMT

http://nymag.com/daily....ut.html

At AFL-CIO Convention, Sen. Bernie Sanders Proposes Wealth Tax

LIBertea — Sat, 06 Sep 2014 18:12:47 GMT

BURLINGTON, Vt. - With the wealth gap in the United States growing and greater already than in any other major country, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders today called for a progressive estate tax on multi-millionaires and billionaires.

“A nation will not survive morally or economically when so few have so much while so many have so little. We need a tax system which asks the billionaire class to pay its fair share of taxes and which reduces the obscene degree of wealth inequality in America,” Sanders said in a speech here this morning at the Vermont AFL-CIO annual convention.

The growing wealth gap in the U.S. is worse now than at any time since 1928, the year before the Great Depression began. The top 1 percent of Americans own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. The richest 400 Americans have amassed more than $2 trillion in wealth, a sum greater than all of the assets of the bottom 150 million Americans combined. One family, the Waltons of Wal-Mart fame, owns more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of Americans.

While the rich are becoming richer, more Americans live in poverty today than at any time in our nation’s history. Half of all Americans have less than $10,000 in savings. We have the highest rate of childhood poverty – 22 percent – than any other major country.

Sanders said the fairest way to reduce wealth inequality, lower the $17 trillion national debt and pay for investments in infrastructure, education and other neglected national priorities would be to enact a progressive estate tax on the wealthiest Americans, the top 0.25 percent.

Under his proposal, 99.75 percent of Americans would not pay a penny more in estate taxes. For those who would pay more, the tax rate on estates valued from $3.5 million to $10 million would be 40 percent. There would be a 50 percent tax on estates worth $10 million to $50 million and a 55 percent levy on estates worth more than $50 million. A 10 percent surtax would be applied on estates worth more than $1 billion, a category that today includes fewer than 500 American families. The bill also would close estate tax loopholes that have allowed the wealthy to avoid an estimated $100 billion since 2000. On all estates, the first $3.5 million for individuals and $7 million for couples would be exempt from federal taxes.

Sanders’ proposal won praise from leading economists.

America “is creating an aristocracy of wealth populated by heirs who don't have to work for a living yet have great influence over how the nation's productive assets are deployed,” according to Robert B. Reich, a former U.S. Department of Labor secretary who is now a University of California at Berkely professor. Reich called Sanders' estate tax bill “a welcome step toward reversing this trend.”

Thomas Piketty, the top-selling author and Paris School of Economics professor, said the United States pioneered progressive estate and income taxes but today is on the verge of becoming even more unequal than pre-World War I Europe. “To avoid this, one needs stronger investment in skills and education, better paying jobs and a more progressive tax system. Sen. Sanders' estate tax bill is an important step in this direction.”

Grandmother Sentenced to Prison for Protesting US Drone Base

LIBertea — Wed, 13 Aug 2014 17:45:45 GMT

“This has got to stop.”

Judge David Gideon’s words refer not to the use of drones, but the activities of anti-drone activists. He has uttered this phrase from the bench repeatedly in recent months as activists have appeared before him, and the words must have been echoing through his mind as he sentenced Mary Anne Grady Flores, a 58-year-old grandmother from Ithaca, New York, to one year in prison on July 10. Her crime? Participating in a nonviolent anti-drone protest at an upstate New York military base after being ordered by the local courts to stay away from the site. The base is used to train drone pilots and technicians, and to control drone surveillance and strikes in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Such Orders of Protection typically protect victims of domestic violence from their abusers and witnesses of violent crimes from threats of retribution. Grady Flores’ one-year sentence is the result of a strange legal sleight of hand that positions the Hancock Air Base commander, Col. Earl A. Evans, as the victim of protests. Justices in the town of DeWitt, where the base is located, have slapped these Orders of Protection on dozens of activists arrested at Hancock since 2012.

But Grady Flores was the first protester to be sentenced for violating one. Prosecutors in Grady Flores’ case did not seek jail time, citing her role as caregiver for her elderly mother. Apparently, however, Judge Gideon was determined to make an example of her, in the hopes that a long sentence would deter others from resistance.

Grady Flores is now out on bond and has filed an appeal, which may take months to resolve. Her case will be closely watched by the 30 or so activists accused of violating Orders of Protection who await trial. If Judge Gideon hoped to quell resistance with his harsh sentence, his plan seems to have backfired: Anti-drone activists say their resistance and organizing will only increase. What really needs to stop, they say, are the United States’ drone strikes in countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen.

“Mary Anne’s sentence is big news,” says Brian Terrell, anti-drone organizer with Voices for Creative Nonviolence. “The drone program is so blatantly illegal that the authorities have to go to absurd lengths to justify and protect it. They need to redefine words like ‘imminent threat’ and ‘due process’ to cover up the criminality. Here, they have to redefine the meaning of an Order of Protection. I hope that this will bring more people out to protest.”

It has. On July 23 — just days after local activists raised $5,000 to free Grady Flores on bond so she could do media work and prepare for her appeal — seven activists were arrested at the base (including my 74-year-old mother). They carried with them documents they hope to make part of their legal defense, including a People’s Order of Protection, demanding that the 174th Attack Wing of the Air National Guard “stay away from the Children of the World and their families, including their homes, schools, places of play and work.” The judge freed two on their own recognizance and set bonds for the rest, including an unprecedented $10,000 bond for two repeat offenders, including Grady Flores’ younger sister, Clare Grady. All were charged with trespassing, and two (including Clare) were charged with violating Orders of Protection.

Drones, drones everywhere

The Legal and Ethical Case Against Drones

Predators armed with Hellfire missiles. Reapers armed with Joint Direct Attack Munitions. Global Hawks stuffed with high-tech surveillance equipment. These and other drones are quickly becoming the go-to weapon for budget-conscious war-fighters in Washington who are unwilling to bear the public scrutiny that accompanies US military body counts. Already, the Air Force is training more drone pilots than old-fashioned seat-in-the-plane fighter and bomber pilots combined.

And struggling municipalities that have reaped little from President Barack Obama’s much-touted “recovery” are eager to host the drone bases as a way of retaining and reviving threadbare military installations in their communities. Hancock is just one of 64 military bases from which drone surveillance or strikes are co-ordinated and carried out. There’s Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, Wright Army Airfield in Georgia, Springfield Air National Guard Base in Ohio — the list goes on.

While weaponized drones keep US military personnel off the battlefield and out of harm’s way, carrying out remote-controlled, long-range assassinations can be deeply psychologically scarring. A 2011 Air Force study found that 42 percent of drone operators report moderate to high levels of stress as a result of their work and attribute those feelings at least in part to the “existential conflict” of long-distance war fighting. And, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan, civilian casualties mount. In a January study, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimated that under the Obama administration, US drone strikes have killed at least 2,400 people in nearly 400 separate attacks.

Anti-drone organizers around the world are coordinating their efforts, declaring October 4 the first Global Action Day Against the Use of Drones for Surveillance and Killing.

In New York, the protest group Upstate Drone Action has turned its attention even farther north to the Niagra Falls Air Reserve Station, where Reaper drones have recently been deployed. The group staged a “Fly Kites, Not Drones” action on July 6.

The Empire State is not the only community organizing against drone bases. In June, a robust coalition in Michigan organized a 163-mile walk from Chicago to Battle Creek, Michigan, to raise awareness about the establishment of a new node of drone flights there. Battle Creek, the home city of Kellogg’s, has been nicknamed Cereal City, but local activist Joanna Learner warned in an open letter to Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) that the drone base could earn the city a new nickname: “The Serial (Killing) City.” More than a hundred people participated in the 12-day walk, many of them first-time activists.

Meanwhile, anti-drone organizers around the world are coordinating their efforts, declaring October 4 the first Global Action Day Against the Use of Drones for Surveillance and Killing.

At her sentencing before Judge Gideon, Grady Flores asked, “Who is the real victim here: the commander of a military base whose drones kill innocent people halfway around the world, or those innocent people themselves who are the real ones in need of protection from the terror of US drone attacks?” The answer is clear.

Leaked Docs Show Spyware Used to Snoop on US Computers

LIBertea — Mon, 11 Aug 2014 18:21:46 GMT

Software created by the controversial UK based Gamma Group International was used to spy on computers that appear to be located in the United States, the UK, Germany, Russia, Iran and Bahrain, according to a leaked trove of documents analyzed by ProPublica.

It’s not clear whether the surveillance was conducted by governments or private entities. Customer email addresses in the collection appeared to belong to a German surveillance company, an independent consultant in Dubai, the Bosnian and Hungarian Intelligence services, a Dutch law enforcement officer and the Qatari government.

Countries With Computers Targeted by FinFisher

Bahrain
Belgium
Cyprus
Egypt
Germany
Iraq
Islamic Republic of Iran
Italy
Kuwait
Lebanon
Lithuania
Morocco
Netherlands
Qatar
Russian Federation
Saudi Arabia
Sweden
Switzerland
Thailand
Tunisia
United Arab Emirates
United Kingdom
United States
Yemen

The leaked files, which were posted online by hackers, are the latest in a series of revelations about how state actors including repressive regimes have used Gamma’s software to spy on dissidents, journalists and activist groups.

The documents, leaked last Saturday, could not be readily verified, but experts told ProPublica they believed them to be genuine. “I think it’s highly unlikely that it’s a fake,” said Morgan Marquis-Bore, a security researcher who while at The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto had analyzed Gamma Group’s software and who authored an article about the leak on Thursday.

The documents confirm many details that have already been reported about Gamma, such as that its tools were used to spy on Bahraini activists. Some documents in the trove contain metadata tied to e-mail addresses of several Gamma employees. Bill Marczak, another Gamma Group expert at the Citizen Lab, said that several dates in the documents correspond to publicly known events such as the day that a particular Bahraini activist was hacked.

Gamma has not commented publicly on the authenticity of the documents. A phone number listed on a Gamma Group website was disconnected. Gamma Group did not respond to email requests for comment.

The leaked files contain more than 40 gigabytes of confidential technical material including software code, internal memos, strategy reports and user guides on how to use Gamma Group software suite called FinFisher. FinFisher enables customers to monitor secure web traffic, Skype calls, webcams and personal files. It is installed as malware on targets’ computers and cell phones.

A price list included in the trove shows a license of the software priced at almost $4 million.

The documents reveal that Gamma uses technology from a French company called Vupen Security that sells so-called computer ‘exploits.’

Exploits include techniques called “zero days,” for “popular software like Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, Adobe Acrobat Reader and many more.” Zero days are exploits that have not yet been detected by the software maker and therefore are not blocked.

Vupen has said publicly that it only sells its exploits to governments, but Gamma may have no such scruples. “Gamma is an independent company that is not bound to any country, governmental organisation, etc.,” says one file in the Gamma Group’s material. At least one Gamma customer listed in the materials is a private security company.

Vupen didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Many of Gamma’s product brochures have previously been published by The Wall Street Journal and Wikileaks, but the latest trove shows how the products are getting more sophisticated.

In one document, engineers at Gamma tested a product called FinSpy, which inserts malware onto a user’s machine, and found that it could not be blocked by most antivirus software.

Documents also reveal that Gamma had been working to bypass encryption tools including a mobile phone encryption app, Silent Circle, and were able to bypass the protection given by hard-drive encryption products TrueCrypt and Microsoft’s Bitlocker.

Mike Janke the CEO of Silent Circle said in an email “We have serious doubts about if they were going to be successful” in circumventing the phone software, and that they were working on bulletproofing their app.

Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment.

The documents also describe a “country-wide” surveillance product called FinFly ISP which promises customers the ability to intercept internet traffic and masquerade as ordinary websites in order to install malware on a target’s computer.

The most recent date-stamp found in the documents is August 2nd, which coincides with the first tweet by a parody Twitter account, @GammaGroupPR, which first announced the hack, and may be run by the hacker or hackers responsible for the leak.

No Escaping Dragnet Nation

On Reddit, a user called PhineasFisher claimed responsibility for the leak. “Two years ago their software was found being widely used by governments in the middle east, especially Bahrain, to hack and spy on the computers and phones of journalists and dissidents,” the user wrote. The name on the @GammaGroupPR Twitter account is also “Phineas Fisher.”

GammaGroup, the surveillance company whose documents were released, is no stranger to the spotlight. The security firm F-Secure first reported the purchase of FinFisher software by the Egyptian State Security agency in 2011. In 2012, Bloomberg News and The Citizen Lab showed how the company’s malware was used to target activists in Bahrain.

In 2013, the software company Mozilla sent a cease-and-desist letter to the company after a report by The Citizen Lab showed that a spyware-infected version of the Firefox browser manufactured by Gamma was being used to spy on Malaysian activists.

Act now! FCC extends deadline for comments on Net Neutrality

LIBertea — Wed, 16 Jul 2014 18:18:40 GMT

So swamped was the FCC’s website yesterday, the cutoff date for the first round of public comments on proposed rules for Net neutrality, they’ve extended the deadline until midnight, Friday, July 18.

Craig Aaron, president of the media reform group Free Press, writes, “By the end of the day on July 15, the FCC had received more than 780,000 public comments on its Net neutrality-killing proposal — a huge number that would have been much higher if the agency’s site hadn’t broken down repeatedly.”

FCC claims that the high number of comments have not exceeded those received after Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” at the 2004 Super Bowl are a trope that has been gleefully embraced up by many media outlets, but it’s incorrect, according to Aaron, because “…within those 780,000 Net Neutrality comments the FCC has already posted are petitions signed by millions of individuals.”

He adds, “This week’s deadline is just the first round. The FCC welcomes reply comments until September. And the public can and should keep weighing in until the agency actually votes on new rules, which isn’t expected to happen until November or December at the earliest.

“Here’s the bottom line: By any measure, this marks the greatest public response to any rulemaking in the FCC’s history. And the Battle for the Net is just getting started.”

Email the FCC at openinternet@fcc.gov. Or follow some of the steps below:

Additional Resources

» File your public comment using this handy form from Common Cause.

» Save the Internet has a sample script, an email petition and instructions on how to call Wheeler and request that the chairman abandon his proposal.

» Using WhiteHouse.gov’s We the People site, critics of the new proposal have also launched a petition, calling for “nothing less than complete neutrality in our communication channels.” It already has over 40,000 signatures.

» A second petition asks the FCC to reclassify broadband as a regulated common-carrier service, which means it would have to be open to all, and serve all customers without discrimination. Currently broadband is classified as an information service, a category that gives the FCC a fairly limited set of regulatory options.

» There are a number of other organizations that are working on maintaining Net neutrality, including: Access, CREDO Action, Demand Progress, Fight for the Future, Free Press, Open Technology Institute, Public Knowledge, Voices for Internet Freedom

Michael Winship is the Emmy Award-winning senior writer of Moyers & Company and BillMoyers.com, and a senior writing fellow at the policy and advocacy group Demos.

Despite a Pledge by Samsung, Child Labor Proves Resilient

LIBertea — Sat, 12 Jul 2014 12:12:49 GMT

A little more than a week ago, Samsung, the South Korean electronics giant, said in an annual review of conditions at its manufacturing centers that it had found no evidence of under-age workers or child laborers in its global supply chain. In recent years, Samsung has promoted its efforts to monitor and evaluate suppliers and manufacturing operations around the world, noting that the policies were aimed at protecting workers and preventing minors from being hired.

For instance, even though the legal working age in China is 16, Samsung considers that too young, and so its suppliers are instructed not to hire workers under 18. To ensure they do not cheat, Samsung says, it has forced all of them to install a sophisticated facial recognition system on factory sites.

But on Tuesday morning, the three young girls met with a reporter from The New York Times after they were initially identified by the labor rights group China Labor Watch. Near their factory here in Dongguan, they explained how easy it was to work for a company that supplies Samsung.

According to the girls, they were part of a “labor dispatch system” that often funnels child laborers to factories during the summer to help meet a surge in orders that comes just ahead of the fall and winter shopping seasons in the United States and Europe. They were hired as temporary workers, they said, and paid through an agency that has recruitment channels in poor regions.

After they told their story, the three girls locked arms and walked past the security guards and into the Shinyang Electronics factory, which employs more than 600 workers in Dongguan, one of China’s biggest manufacturing centers.

“As part of our pledge against child labor, Samsung routinely conducts inspections to monitor our suppliers to ensure they follow our commitment,” Samsung said in a statement. “We are urgently looking into the latest allegations and will take appropriate measures in accordance with our policies to prevent any cases of child labor in our suppliers.”

The situation at the factory in Dongguan underscores some of the challenges multinational corporations face in sourcing goods from here. Wages and working conditions in China have steadily improved over the last decade. But ensuring that supplier factories comply with guidelines set by global brands, as well as China’s labor laws, is difficult, even though larger factories are regularly audited by outside inspectors.

Many global brands have struggled with labor problems in their Chinese operations. In the last few years, Apple has come under scrutiny in China over labor and safety problems, notably a spate of worker suicides and unrest at facilities run by its biggest contract manufacturer, the Taiwanese company Foxconn.

Apple declined to comment for this article, but the company has said it has taken steps to address labor issues in its supply chain, including deeper audits on its partners and a program that punishes suppliers that hire under-age workers.

Now, Samsung — whose smartphones are popular worldwide — is also the target of labor rights activists. In a report released on Thursday, China Labor Watch, which is based in New York, accused Samsung of allowing a supplier in Dongguan to hire under-age workers, cheating those workers on pay, denying them overtime wages and failing to give them government-mandated labor contracts.

“After allegedly inspecting hundreds of Chinese suppliers, Samsung did not find one child worker,” China Labor Watch said in a statement released on Thursday. “Yet in just one Samsung supplier factory, C.L.W. has uncovered several children employed without labor contracts, working 11 hours per day and only being paid for 10 of those hours.”

For the last decade, labor rights groups have tried to draw attention to labor abuse and health and safety violations in some of China’s biggest factories. They often send young activists to work undercover in the workshops, document conditions, secretly interview workers and examine their pay stubs and employment contracts.

In the Samsung case, a young activist at China Labor Watch was hired by the Dongguan factory and began collecting evidence and making friends with workers suspected of being under-age. According to the account by the labor rights group, the activist ate with the three young girls, and also with two young boys who were believed to be under-age, and secretly recorded their conversations.

The activist also took photographs of conditions inside the Shinyang facility, which is owned and managed by a company in South Korea. The Dongguan factory now works exclusively for Samsung to produce plastic components for mobile phones.

A Shinyang spokeswoman, who gave her name as Ms. Fang, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday that Samsung audited the company on June 25 and that the auditors found no evidence of workers below age 18, let alone 16.

Samsung says in its own exhaustive audits of hundreds of factories in China during the last two years that third-party auditors found not a single under-age worker. But a Samsung spokeswoman says the company is now conducting its own investigation into the Shinyang facility.

According to its annual sustainability report, which includes a review of human rights and labor conditions at its global centers, Samsung says it has “zero tolerance” for child labor and could “suspend transactions” with suppliers that do not comply with its rules.

In its 2014 report, released on June 30, Samsung acknowledged weaknesses in its supply chain. For instance, the report said that a majority of the facilities Samsung had audited in China failed to comply with the country’s law on the maximum hours of overtime workers are permitted, which is 36 hours a month. The company said it was trying to rectify the situation.

If Samsung verifies that at least three young girls were working at its supplier factory, experts say that would cast some doubts on what the company considers stringent audits, including the use of facial recognition software to determine whether the faces of workers matched their government-issued identity cards.

According to the three young girls, they began working at Shinyang on June 30, just five days after the Shinyang factory says it was audited. They said they were hired as “temporary workers,” given fake ID cards and asked to work the most difficult shift, 8:30 p.m. to 5:30 a.m., and then to put in an additional three hours of overtime, six days a week.

The work was grueling but tolerable, they said. The girls complained that they were paid about $1.20 an hour because they had been hired by a middleman or “labor dispatch company.” A typical worker, they said, was paid $1.45 an hour. Labor rights activists say this is an increasingly common way factories reduce costs and skirt the labor law.

China Labor Watch said the girls were allowed to avoid the facial recognition system, which is supposed to help prevent under-age workers. And when asked how the factory could provide them with false government-issued ID cards, one of the girls said: “The factory can just borrow real identification cards from other factories to register us. And the system for checking employees as they enter the factory is not that strict.”

New GI Bill Benefitting For-Profit Colleges Instead of Veterans

LIBertea — Wed, 09 Jul 2014 15:17:58 GMT

Few public programs have become as iconic as the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 — the G.I. Bill. It offered returning World War II veterans educational opportunities, unemployment benefits and cheap loans to start businesses or purchase homes or farms. It’s widely credited with helping to build a large and vibrant American middle class.

According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, “By the time the original GI Bill ended on July 25, 1956, 7.8 million of 16 million World War II Veterans had participated in an education or training program.”

In 2008, Congress passed a new G.I. Bill for veterans who had served at least three years during the post-9/11 “War on Terror.” The new bill focused on education — it lacked the other provisions of its World War II predecessor.

But it’s unlikely that the new G.I. Bill’s investment in educating today’s vets will have the same impact as the 1944 version. That’s because a lot has changed in America’s higher education system since the post-war years. Over the past four decades, there has been exponential growth in for-profit colleges, which are marketing their programs to veterans and grabbing an outsized share of the $10 billion dollars that the government spends educating veterans each year.

In 2012, a 2-year investigation by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions found that the for-profit sector was aggressively recruiting new students, only half of whom would complete their degrees. According to the report, “the vast majority of the students [at for-profit colleges] left with student loan debt that may follow them throughout their lives.” At the same time, the schools were vastly profitable, and in 2009 paid their executive officers average annual salaries of $7.3 million.

The committee concluded that “in the absence of significant reforms that align the incentives of for-profit colleges to ensure colleges succeed financially only when students also succeed, and ensure that taxpayer dollars are used to further the educational mission of the colleges, the sector will continue to turn out hundreds of thousands of students with debt but no degree, and taxpayers will see little return on their investment.”

On yesterday’s PBS NewsHour, Aaron Glantz of the Center for Investigative Reporting looked at how for-profit colleges, many with spotty track records, “have netted a growing amount of money from a new generation of vets” taking advantage of the New G.I. Bill.

Glantz:

In California alone, the Center for Investigative Reporting found nearly 300 schools banned from receiving state financial aid that still got G.I. Bill money, even schools with no academic accreditation at all, beauty schools, auto repair programs, and dog training academies, together, more than $600 million.
The biggest beneficiary is the for-profit University of Phoenix, which fails to graduate most of its students, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
Nationally, it took in nearly a billion dollars from the G.I. Bill over the last five years. The University of Phoenix has been especially successful at attracting veterans in San Diego, a port city with a high concentration of veterans.
Every year, soldiers and sailors here retire from active duty and turn to the G.I. Bill as they transition to civilian life.

Forget Workers' Rights!! iPhone 6 Will Be Made By ROBOTS

LIBertea — Mon, 07 Jul 2014 21:21:59 GMT

First it was burgers, then waiters, traders, and recently earnings-report-writers; but now it's iPhones. The endless pressure to raise minimum wages, demand bathroom breaks, expect to sleep, and tolerable breathing standards have finally culminated in China's FoxConn - manufacturer of the iPhone - to use a 'robot army' to build the new model. As The Daily Mail reports, The firm has pledged to have a million robot workers by the end of the year - and CEO Terry Gou has revealed the robots, dubbed 'Foxbots', are in the final stages of testing.

As The Daily Mail reports,

It is believed Foxconn will install 10,000 robots as a test.

...

Lines dedicated to Apple devices getting first priority, according to IT Home.

It says Gou told a shareholder meeting that Apple would be the first company to take advantage of the new robot workers meaning that its next product - the iPhone 6 - will be manufactured in this way.

...

Each $25,000 Foxbot can complete an average of 30,000 devices per year it has been claimed.

Foxconn, which currently employs more than 1.2 million workers at its various factories across China.

However, the firm's robot initiative has been delayed since it was first announced in 2011.

At the time, Gou said the company had about 10,000 units already in operation, a number that was supposed to rise to 300,000 in 2012, then one million by 2014.

* * *

Great news for FoxConn stock... how long until China rules robots illegal?

ABC morphs into Fox News Lite and embraces Gun Nuts

LIBertea — Mon, 07 Jul 2014 16:28:18 GMT

ABC's This Week fluffed the Open Carry lunatics in Texas. After all, they just want to exercise their rights too!

1 hour ago by Heather

If there's one thing the Open Carry movement doesn't deserve, it's a fluff piece on a national Sunday news show. But ABC News seems to be having a metamorphosis into Fox News Lite.

Viewers were treated to this little slice of fluffy goodness right smack-dab in the middle of the show, featuring the man who is spearheading the Open Carry movement. From the transcript:

PITTS: That video went viral. A national movement was born, not just the right to carry a long gun openly in public, but handguns, as well.
(on camera): And that's the bottom line for you, the right to openly carry a pistol.
GRISHAM: Right. And, you know, once we get that, people aren't going to be walking around with rifles. And you probably won't even see a whole bunch of people walking around with pistols, but we should have that opportunity.
PITTS (voice-over): The open carry movement's chief adversary is a group called Mothers Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, founded by Shannon Watts, a stay-at-home mom from Indiana.
SHANNON WATTS, FOUNDER, MOTHERS DEMAND ACTION FOR GUN SENSE IN AMERICA: If we use our wallets and we use our votes, we can effect real change in our country's gun culture.
PITTS (on camera): Her group pressured big name store chains, like Starbucks, Chipotle, Chili's and Jack in the Box to ask their customers to leave their guns at home. Just this week, retail giant Target weighed in, writing, "We respectfully request that guests not bring firearms to Target, even in communities where it's permitted by law."
WATTS: They listened to us when we said we don't want loaded assault weapons around our children when we're shopping.
PITTS (voice-over): Nearly every week, CJ Grisham, his wife Emily and often their 12- and 16-year-old, hit the road to attend open carry marches across Texas.
GRISHAM: Oh, our guns are kissing.
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: Oh.
PITTS: One weekend, we rode along to a rally in San Antonio.

GRISHAM: They are people with guns and they're not shooting up a school, they're not shooting up a business, they're not robbing a bank.
PITTS (on camera): There are folk in the country that you are scaring, right?
GRISHAM: I realize that there are people that -- that have what I call an irrational fear of guns.
PITTS (voice-over): For Grisham and those who support him nationwide, the battle over open carry is far from over, it's just beginning.
For THIS WEEK, Byron Pitts, ABC News, San Antonio.

Raddatz followed up that report with the reassurance that long guns were not going to be carried as much as pistols would, as though that would somehow be a comforting thought.

As for Grisham's claim that those of us who object have an irrational fear? Are they going to start wearing signs saying they're the good guys here to save us from the lunatics with guns? Isn't that a little like putting inmates in charge of the asylum?

There is no liberty in living in a hellhole where men swagger around with handguns or assault weapons in plain sight and ABC was irresponsible in running this piece without some kind of report about why it is people have an objection to their rights being trampled so someone else's rights can be elevated.