CISPA, "National Security," and the NSA's Ability to Read Your Emails

BY TREVOR TIMM, Electronic Frontier Foundation

This week the House of Representatives is debating CISPA, the dangerous 'cybersecurity' bill that threatens to decimate Internet users' privacy in the name of security. EFF and a wide variety of other groups have been protesting the law's provisions giving companies the power to read users' emails and other communications and hand them to the government without any judicial oversight whatsoever--essentially a giant 'cybersecurity' exception to all existing privacy laws.

We've already shown how the bill's definition of 'cyber threat information' can lead the companies and government to surveil citizens for a host of reasons beyond critical cybersecurity threats. But we want to focus on one vital portion of the bill that is not getting enough attention: what the government can do with your private information once companies hand it over.

Even though CISPA is styled as a 'cybersecurity' bill, it explicitly allows the Department of Homeland Security and other government agencies like the National Security Agency (NSA) to use your information for 'national security' purposes--expanding the bill far beyond its purported goal.?Bill sponser Mike Rogers introduced a package of amendments yesterday, but did not remove "national security" as one of the purposes for which information can be used.

The Erosion of Civil Liberties

In the past decade, the amorphous phrase "national security" has invaded many arenas of government action, and has been used to justify much activity that did not involve legitimate terrorist threats. The most obvious (and odious) example is the unfortunately named USA-PATRIOT Act, a law that was sold to the American public as essential to combating terrorism, but which has overwhelmingly been applied to ordinary American citizens never even suspected of terrorism.

In just one of many examples, from 2003-2006, the FBI issued more than 192,000 National Security Letters to get Americans' business, phone or Internet records without a warrant. These invasive letters--which come with a gag order on the recipient so they can't even admit they received one--have been used to gather information about untold number of ordinary citizens, including journalists. Exactly one of those cases ended in a terrorism conviction--and he would have been convicted without the NSL evidence. The ACLU has catalogued how many other PATRIOT Act provisions have been similarly abused. EFF is suing for information about one provision, known as Section 215, which Senators have warned is being secretly interpreted to invade privacy in a way that "most Americans would be stunned" to learn about.

"Information sharing"-- CISPA's mantra--has also created privacy nightmares for everyday Americans in the name of national security. The federal government routinely shares its massive national security databases with local law enforcement agencies with predictable results. An investigation by PBS Frontline and the Washington Post's Dana Priest showed that "many states have yet to use their vast and growing anti-terror apparatus to capture any terrorists; instead the government has built a massive database that collects, stores and analyzes information on thousands of U.S. citizens and residents, many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing."

Despite the ample evidence of these expansive "national security" powers being used on ordinary citizens, the government has only continued down the same path. Just last month, the National Counterterrorism Center drastically changed its rules so it can now copy entire data bases from other federal government agencies and keep information on citizens for up to five years--even if they're completely innocent.

Wrongdoing and Abuse Go Unchecked

Of course, with such unchecked power, abuse is inevitable. In 2010, EFF learned through Freedom of Information Act requests indications that the FBI--one of the many agencies that might receive private communications via CISPA--may have committed upwards of 40,000 possible intelligence violations in the nine years since 9/11--many of which were done under the PATRIOT Act. In addition, we've found evidence of the FBI "lying in declarations to courts, using improper evidence to obtain grand jury subpoenas, and accessing password-protected files without a warrant."

Incredibly, it recently emerged the FBI may have not only condoned this type of behavior, but encouraged it. Wired recently published an FBI memo on agent training that said, "Under certain circumstances, the FBI has the ability to bend or suspend the law and impinge on freedoms of others" and cited various wiretapping laws in national security investigations. (emphasis ours)

Increased powers of the National Security Agency

CISPA's author Rep. Mike Rogers has tried to stave off criticism of that CISPA would lead to government abuse by insisting that the bill allows citizens to sue the government if they misuse their information. But this provides very little comfort. Any such lawsuit will be difficult, if not impossible, to bring. The government can attempt to use the same "national security" exception in CISPA that allows them to use the information for other purposes to escape liability.

First, the statute of limitations for such a lawsuit is two years from the date of the actual violation.? It's not at all clear how an individual would know of such misuse if it were kept inside the government. Given that the National Security Agency is notoriously secretive--its employees even used to refer to it as "No Such Agency"--they may attempt to prevent users from finding out exactly how this information was ever used. And a provision in CISPA that provides an exemption to the Freedom of Information Act for all private information given to it by companies for anything cybersecurity related doesn't help.

Even if a user knew the government was misusing his or her information, litigation would be difficult, expensive, and time consuming given if classified information or national security is involved, the government may invoke the "state secrets privilege."

EFF has been involved for years in a lawsuit over Fourth Amendment and statutory violations stemming from another abuse of the government's claimed 'national security' powers--the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program. Given the NSA may be a recipient of "cyber threat information" in CISPA, they stand to gain more power to spy on Americans despite laws that would otherwise prevent them from doing so.

Despite six years of litigation, the government continues to maintain that the "state secrets" privilege prevents lawsuits over the warrantless wiretapping program from being heard, arguing that even if the allegations are true, the suit should be dismissed because of--you guessed it--national security concerns. The same state secrets privilege has been invoked in other cases involving the CIA's extraordinary rendition program and their authority to target Americans in drone strikes overseas with no judicial safeguards.

CISPA will create yet another tool for the government to expand its already massive national security apparatus, and in turn, erode ordinary citizens' rights, while giving them virtually no recourse if their civil liberties are violated. The House of Representatives is beginning debates on CISPSA tomorrow, with a vote coming no later than Friday.? Join EFF in opposing CISPA by calling, emailing, and tweeting at your Representatives.

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CISPA Legislation Is Disguised?Fascism

CISPA the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act if signed into law will allow??the military and NSA warrant-less spying on Americans? confidential electronic Communications; any transmitted private information circumventing the fourth amendment. CISPA will allow any self-protected cyber entity to share with the Feds any person?s private information that might allegedly relate to a cyber threat or crime. Considering the U.S. Government?s current business relationship with telephone and Internet companies, it should be expected the feds would use CISPA to gain unprecedented access to lawful Americans? private electronic communications. Almost every week news media reports corrupt police arrested for selling drugs, taking bribes and perjury. It is foreseeable that broad provisions in CISPA that call for private businesses / cyber entities to share with Spy Agencies confidential information will open the door for corrupt government and police to sell a corporations? confidential information to its competitors, foreign governments and others. CISPA provides insufficient safeguards to control disposition of (shared) confidential corporate / cyber entity information, including confidential information shared by spy agencies with private entities derived from spying on Americans.

The recently House Passed Cyber Security Bill overrides the Fourth Amendment. Government may use against Americans in Criminal, Civil and Administrative courts (any information) derived from CISPA warrant-less spying.

CISPA will open the door for U.S. Government spy agencies such as NSA; the FBI; government asset forfeiture contractors, any private entity (to take out of context) any innocent?hastily written email, fax or phone call to allege a crime or violation was committed to cause a person?s arrest, assess fines and or civilly forfeit a business or property. There are more than 350 laws and violations that can subject property to government asset forfeiture. Government civil asset forfeiture requires only a civil preponderance of evidence for police to forfeit property, little more than hearsay.

CISPA (warrant-less electronic surveillance) will enable the U.S. Justice Department to bypass the Fourth Amendment, use information extracted from CISPA electronic surveillance) of Americans? Web Server Records, Internet Activity, transmitted emails, faxes, and phone calls to issue subpoenas in hopes of finding evidence or to prosecute Citizens for any alleged crime or violation.

If the current CISPA is signed into law it is problematic federal, state and local law enforcement agencies and private government contractors will want access to prior Bush II NSA and other government illegally obtained electronic records to secure evidence to arrest Americans; civilly forfeit their homes, businesses and other assets under Title 18USC and other laws. Of obvious concern, what happens to fair justice in America if police become dependent on ?Asset Forfeiture? to help pay their salaries and budget operating costs?

Note: the passed ?Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act of 2000? (effectively eliminated) the ?five year statue of limitations? for Government Civil Asset Forfeiture of property: the statute now runs five years (from the date) police allege they ?learned? an asset became subject to forfeiture.

If CISPA takes affect, allows (no warrant) electronic government surveillance of Americans, it is expected CISPA will be used by government not only to thwart cyber threats, but to aggressively prosecute Americans and businesses for any alleged crime: U.S. Government spy and police agencies; quasi government contractors for profit, will relentlessly sift through Citizen and businesses? (government retained Internet data), emails and phone communications) to discover possible crimes or civil violations.

A corrupt U.S. Government Administration too easily use CISPA no-warrant-seized emails, faxes, Internet data and phone call information) to target, blackmail and extort its political opposition; target any Citizen, corporation and others in the manner Hitler used his Nazi passed legislation that permitted no-warrant Nazi police searches and seizure of Citizens and businesses or to extort support for the Nazi fascist government. Hitler Nazi Laws made it possible for the Nazis to strong-arm German parliament to pass Hitler?s 1933 Discriminatory Decrees that suspended the Constitutional Freedoms of German Citizens. History shows how that turned out.

CISPA warrant-less electronic surveillance) has the potential of turning America into a Fascist Police State.

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Obama Defends War on Medical Marijuana With Lame Excuses

by Scott Morgan

Finally, finally, finally, someone in the press has managed to corner the President on the question of why the war on medical marijuana is getting worse under his watch. Here you go folks, the answer we've been waiting for?

Let me ask you about the War on Drugs. You vowed in 2008, when you were running for election, that you would not "use Justice Department resources to try and circumvent state laws about medical marijuana." Yet we just ran a story that shows your administration is launching more raids on medical pot than the Bush administration did. What's up with that?

Here's what's up: What I specifically said was that we were not going to prioritize prosecutions of persons who are using medical marijuana. I never made a commitment that somehow we were going to give carte blanche to large-scale producers and operators of marijuana ? and the reason is, because it's against federal law. I can't nullify congressional law. I can't ask the Justice Department to say, "Ignore completely a federal law that's on the books." What I can say is, "Use your prosecutorial discretion and properly prioritize your resources to go after things that are really doing folks damage." As a consequence, there haven't been prosecutions of users of marijuana for medical purposes. [Rolling Stone]

I don't know how one could fairly characterize this as anything other than complete nonsense. Obama wants credit for stopping the arrests of medical marijuana users, which is just ridiculous on it's face. It's not like the federal government was bringing misdemeanor possession cases against sick grandmas until Obama came along. That was never the issue and he knows it.

This is a debate about whether the federal government should be stomping on state-regulated medical marijuana programs, thwarting the will of voters, prosecuting responsible providers, and depriving patients of access to their medicine. The President said, "I will not be using justice department resources to try to circumvent state laws on this issue," and that statement was made in response to repeated questions about whether the Obama Administration would continue the deeply unpopular dispensary raids that began under Bush. Nobody thought he talking about something else.

Obama deliberately led everyone to believe that his DOJ would stop targeting facilities that operated legally under state law. That's why everyone is pissed off that the raids haven't stopped. If I misinterpreted his words, then so did most of the marijuana reform movement, the entire American press, and several state legislatures. When the Obama Administration's pledge to respect state laws was making front-page headlines, they sure as hell didn't speak up to clarify that they'd meant no such thing.

Adding insult to injury, Obama then digs in deeper by randomly suggesting that the businesses they're raiding might actually be violating state laws after all:

The only tension that's come up ? and this gets hyped up a lot ? is a murky area where you have large-scale, commercial operations that may supply medical marijuana users, but in some cases may also be supplying recreational users. In that situation, we put the Justice Department in a very difficult place if we're telling them, "This is supposed to be against the law, but we want you to turn the other way." That's not something we're going to do.

For the millionth time, if they're breaking state laws, then they can and should be prosecuted by the state. None of this amounts to any remote justification for federal intervention, but moreover, we know this is garbage anyway because they've targeted numerous businesses that were considered models of effective local regulation. The President is implying that these people deserved what they got, which is outrageous.

Think about this: federal prosecutors have even threatened to charge state employees simply for working to ensure legal compliance by licensed medical marijuana businesses. Obama claims to be concerned about illegal recreational sales, while his agents have been actively threatening to arrest the very people whose job it is to prevent that sort of thing. It's nuts. Everything he's saying is horribly disingenuous at best, and anyone who's followed the issue at all ought to see right through it.

Obama's comments today are a fresh story and I don?t know yet how others will react, but as far as I'm concerned, this matter is very far from resolved. The President's answers should give rise to more questions, not less. As long as the war on medical marijuana in America continues, those responsible should be able and willing to defend their actions. If Obama can't give us a straight answer, or even acknowledge the promises he broke before our eyes, then it's our job to keep making noise until he does.

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More to Come Soon

More to Come Soon!

Healthy polar bear count confounds doomsayers

PAUL WALDIE

The debate about climate change and its impact on polar bears has intensified with the release of a survey that shows the bear population in a key part of northern Canada is far larger than many scientists thought, and might be growing.

The number of bears along the western shore of Hudson Bay, believed to be among the most threatened bear subpopulations, stands at 1,013 and could be even higher, according to the results of an aerial survey released Wednesday by the Government of Nunavut. That?s 66 per cent higher than estimates by other researchers who forecasted the numbers would fall to as low as 610 because of warming temperatures that melt ice faster and ruin bears? ability to hunt. The Hudson Bay region, which straddles Nunavut and Manitoba, is critical because it?s considered a bellwether for how polar bears are doing elsewhere in the Arctic.

The study shows that ?the bear population is not in crisis as people believed,? said Drikus Gissing, Nunavut?s director of wildlife management. ?There is no doom and gloom.?

Read More

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Demise of Peak Oil Theory

by David Deming

Peak Oil is the theory that the production history of petroleum follows a symmetrical bell-shaped curve. Once the curve peaks, decline is inevitable. The theory is commonly invoked to justify the development of alternative energy sources that are allegedly renewable and sustainable.

Peak Oil theory was originated by American geologist M. King Hubbert. In 1956 Hubbert predicted that US oil production would peak between 1965 and 1970. When production peaked in 1970, it was interpreted as proof that Hubbert's model was correct and that US oil production had entered a period of inexorable and irreversible decline. Unanswered was the question of whether or not US production had declined simply because it had become cheaper to purchase imported oil.

Peak Oil is a theory based upon assumptions. Like other scientific theories, it is subject to empirical corroboration or falsification. Although Hubbert correctly predicted the timing of peak US oil production, several of his other predictions based on Peak Oil theory were wrong.

Hubbert predicted that the maximum possible US oil production by 2011 would be one billion barrels. But actual production in 2011 was two billion barrels. Hubbert predicted that annual world oil production would peak in the year 2000 at 12.5 billion barrels. It didn't. World oil production in 2011 was 26.5 billion barrels and continues to increase. Hubbert was grossly wrong about natural gas production. In 1956 he predicted that by 2010 US annual gas production would be 4 TCF. But in 2010, US wells produced more than 26 TCF of gas.

The flaw of Peak Oil theory is that it assumes the amount of a resource is a static number determined solely by geological factors. But the size of a exploitable resource also depends upon price and technology. These factors are very difficult to predict.

The US oil industry began in 1859 when Colonel Edwin Drake hired blacksmith Billy Smith to drill a 69-foot-deep well. Subsequent technological advances have opened up resources beyond the limits of our ancestors' imaginations. We can drill offshore in water up to eight-thousand feet deep. We have enhanced recovery techniques, horizontal drilling, and four-dimensional seismic imaging. Oklahoma oilman Harold Hamm is turning North Dakota into Saudi Arabia by utilizing hydraulic fracturing technology. US oil production has reversed its forty-year long decline. By the year 2020, it is anticipated that the US will be the world's top oil producer.

For at least a hundred years, people have repeatedly warned that the world is running out of oil. In 1920, the US Geological Survey estimated that the world contained only 60 billion barrels of recoverable oil. But to date we have produced more than 1000 billion barrels and currently have more than 1500 billion barrels in reserve. World petroleum reserves are at an all-time high. The world is awash in a glut of oil. Conventional oil resources are currently estimated to be in the neighborhood of ten trillion barrels. The resource base is growing faster than production can deplete it.

In addition to conventional oil, the US has huge amounts of unconventional oil resources that remain untouched. The western US alone has 2000 billion barrels of oil in the form of oil shales. At a current consumption rate of 7 billion barrels a year, that's a 286-year supply.

Nine years ago, I predicted that "the age of petroleum has only just begun." I was right. The Peak Oil theorists, the malthusians, and the environmentalists were all wrong. They have been proven wrong, over and over again, for decades. A tabulation of every failed prediction of resource exhaustion would fill a library.

Sustainability is a chimera. No energy source has been, or ever will be, sustainable. In the eleventh century, Europeans anticipated the industrial revolution by transforming their society from dependence on human and animal power to water power. In the eighteenth century, water power was superseded by steam engines fired by burning wood. Coal replaced wood, and oil and gas have now largely supplanted coal. In the far distant future we will probably utilize some type of nuclear power. But for at least the next hundred years, oil will remain our primary energy source because it is abundant, inexpensive, and reliable.

Petroleum is the lifeblood of our industrial economy. The US economy will remain stagnant and depressed until we begin to aggressively develop our native energy resources. As Harold Hamm has said, "we can do this." What's stopping us is not geology, but ignorance and bad public policy.
__
David Deming [send him mail] is associate professor of arts and sciences at the University of Oklahoma. His book, Black & White: Politically Incorrect Essays on Politics, Culture, Science, Religion, Energy and Environment, is available for purchase on Amazon.com.

Copyright ? 2012 by LewRockwell.com

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Once Again, The Administration Vindictively Charges A Whistleblower As Being A Spy

by Mike Masnick

This is getting ridiculous. When President Obama was campaigning and even when he first took office, he claimed that it was a priority to support whistleblowing activities. And yet, as President, he has been ridiculously aggressive in pushing vindictive criminal lawsuits against whistleblowers -- often by abusing the Espionage Act. The Espionage Act is supposed to be used against spies. But the Obama Justice Department has used it over and over again against whistleblowers in a purely vindictive manner. In fact, he's used it to bring charges against whistleblowers more often than every other President combined. This strategy turned out to be a disaster in the Thomas Drake case (which was initiated by President Bush, but continued with strong support by President Obama), where the case completely collapsed, once it became clear that the charges were nothing but a vindictive attack on a whistleblower.

Apparently the Obama administration has not learned its lesson. It has now used the Espionage Act to go after a former CIA agent, John Kiriakou, who blew the whistle on the CIA's waterboarding torture regime. This now makes it the sixth Espionage Act prosecution of a whistleblower brought by the Obama administration. All other presidents before him used it a total of 3 times. As the Government Accountability Project notes, the really stunning thing in all of this is that Kiriakou will be the only person prosecuted in relation to the use of waterboarding -- and simply for blowing the whistle on it.

if you torture a prisoner, you will not be held criminally liable, but if you blow the whistle on torture, you risk criminal prosecution under the Espionage Act.

Something seems very, very wrong about this.

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CISPA Bill Lets ISPs Spy On and Report Pirating Subscribers

by Ernesto, TorrentFreak

After the SOPA and PIPA uproar the Internet has become increasingly aware of the US Government?s attempts at meddling with the web. In recent days the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) has moved to the forefront. Critics of the bill point out that it would allow companies to spy on Internet users, and as it?s written CISPA would further allow ISPs to block allegedly infringing transfers and report pirating users to a variety of organizations.

When it comes to legislation involving the Internet, the masses have become quite paranoid. Perhaps rightly so.

The latest bill to gain attention online is CISPA, or the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act. As the title suggests the main goal of the bill is to deal with ?cybersecurity,? but with a lack of definition as to what that actually entails, it?s also one of the major weaknesses.

In short CISPA would allow companies to spy on Internet users and collect and share this data with third-party companies or Government agencies. As long as the company states that these privacy violations are needed to protect against ?cybersecurity? threats, they are immune from civil and criminal liabilities.

Some have described the bill as a new SOPA, but it?s nothing like it. Where SOPA was focused on the shutting down of copyright infringing websites, CISPA is directly targeted at individual Internet subscribers, including copyright infringers.

While the definition of a cybersecurity threat is rather vague, intellectual property is specifically mentioned in the bill. For example, among many other descriptions CISPA defines a cybersecurity purpose as follows.

?A system designed or employed to [...] protect a system or network from [...] theft or misappropriation of [...] intellectual property.?

In other words, the bill would make it possible for ISPs to actively monitor the private communications of subscribers to detect and censor the transfers of copyrighted content. In addition, the personal details of these users could then be freely shared with third parties.

It?s hard to not interpret the above as a huge problem for people?s right to private communications.

While there is little known about how companies and authorities plan to use the bill, it is the vagueness and broad definitions that get people worried. Copyright holders should have tools to protect their rights, but as it stands CISPA completely destroys people?s right to privacy under certain circumstances.

This has caused great concern among the public, and a few days ago digital rights group EFF also sent out an alarming message warning people about the looming threat posed by CISPA.

?There are almost no restrictions on what can be collected and how it can be used, provided a company can claim it was motivated by ?cybersecurity purposes?,? EFF writes.

?That means a company like Google, Facebook, Twitter, or AT&T could intercept your emails and text messages, send copies to one another and to the government, and modify those communications or prevent them from reaching their destination if it fits into their plan to stop cybersecurity threats.?

In recent weeks CISPA has gained support from over 100 lawmakers in Congress, anti-piracy lobby groups such as the BSA and US Chamber of Commerce, but also tech companies including Facebook, Microsoft and Verizon.

These supporters are likely to argue that the bill wont be used as a massive spying machine, but if that?s the case the text should be amended to reflect that. To a certain degree CISPA faces the same problem as SOPA, in that the vagueness of the definitions give rise to speculations, in this case horrific 1984-like spying systems.

In its current form CISPA serves only to fuel the paranoid concerns of the public in which ironically the bill itself exists as the security threat.

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isps: hey pirates, too bad.

pirates (everyone): hey isps, i no longer need this level of service. please downgrade my account.

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Our Marxist Tax Code

BY LAURENCE M. VANCE

Tax season is winding down once again, but the progressivity of the tax code is still with us. Most Americans who had more taxes withheld from their paychecks than they owe in taxes have already filed for their refunds. But not only did many Americans have no tax liability, some of them who didn?t owe any taxes to begin with still received a refund, all thanks to our Marxist tax code.

At the end of section two of Marx?s Communist Manifesto, in addition to calling for the abolition of private property and the centralization of the means of production in the hands of the state, he petitioned for ?a heavy progressive or graduated income tax.?

This is based on the Marxist dictum (that many Americans think appears in the Constitution): ?From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,? and on Marx?s mistaken notion of the result of the inequality of wealth, as we see in his Das Kapital: ?In proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse?. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation at the opposite pole.?

Yet, from its very beginning, the U.S. tax code has sought to soak ?the rich? with ?a heavy progressive or graduated income tax.?

The income tax began with a 1 percent tax on taxable income above $3,000 followed by a series of surcharges of up to 6 percent applied to higher incomes. The maximum rate of 7 percent was applied to taxable income over $500,000. In addition, there was an exemption of $3,000 for a single person and $4,000 for a married couple.

The tax rate in the highest tax bracket rapidly increased, up to 67 percent in 1917 and 77 percent in 1918, and then rose to 81 percent in 1940, 88 percent in 1942, and a whopping 94 percent in 1944. In 1942, the top rate began applying to all incomes over $200,000 instead of $5 million as it had previously. After dropping briefly, the top rate stayed near or above 90 percent between 1950 and 1963.

Under President Reagan, the top marginal tax rate fell from 70 down to 50 percent, and then down to 38.5 before stopping at 28 percent. The tax brackets were also eventually reduced to just two. This doesn?t mean that the government cut spending and balanced its budgets during the 1980s like it should have, or that it didn?t raise other taxes like it shouldn?t have, but the fact remains that the highest tax bracket fell to under 30 percent for the first time since 1931.

After both rates and brackets increased during the Bush Sr. and Clinton years, the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 (EGTRRA) and the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 (JGTRRA) gave us our current system of six brackets of 10, 15, 25, 28, 33, and 35 percent. The lowest bracket was scheduled to be eliminated, and four of the other rates were scheduled to rise, giving us five brackets of 15, 28, 31, 26, and 39.6 percent, were it not for the two-year extension of the Bush tax cuts enacted at the end of 2010.

But although the tax brackets have fallen in number and amount since their height in the 1960s, this does not mean that ?the rich? have stopped paying their ?fair share.?

According to the most recently released IRS data, in tax year 2009, the top 1 percent of taxpayers (in terms of adjusted gross income) paid 36.73 percent of all federal income taxes. The top 5 percent of taxpayers paid 58.66 percent. The top 10 percent of taxpayers paid 70.47. The top 25 percent of taxpayers paid 87.3 percent of the taxes, and the top 50 percent paid a whopping 97.75 percent.

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SpaceX: Entrepreneur's race to space

From PayPal to electric cars to rockets, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk wants his company, SpaceX, to build America's next manned spacecraft. Scott Pelley reports.

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Should We Worry about the Class Divide?

by Jeffrey Tucker

Charles Murray's new book Coming Apart has generated an incredible amount of handwringing on all sides. For those who are skilled at ignoring such debates -- good impulse, I say! -- his thesis is that the ebb and flow of wealth and status between classes that once characterized American culture has ended.

He marshals vast evidence that we now have two separate worlds, one for the lowers and one for the uppers, and a huge chasm separates them. He demonstrates this with vast amounts of data that label the lower third of all races as essentially falling apart in every way. Increasingly, the lowers are characterized by divorce, unemployment, social alienation, and economic stagnation, while the uppers are stable in all the opposite ways.

There might be something to his worry. He quotes Alexis de Tocqueville (who somehow continues to set the standard for how we should be as a nation): In America, "the more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people; on the contrary, they constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes: they listen to them, they speak to them every day."

Is that really true anymore? Murray says no.

But why is it not true, what does it all mean and what are we to do about it? This is what the debate is about. To the Left, the answer about what to do is completely obvious. We need massive government programs to boost the lowers, and we need new taxes and punishments to whack the uppers good and hard. Never mind that the programs for the lowers don't work and the punishments on the rich end up only bolstering a new government elite that lords it over everyone.

The Right has a different solution. Well, not everyone on the right, but those neoconservatives who take it as a given that every coherent nation needs a unified national culture. To quote David Brooks:

We need a program that would force members of the upper tribe and the lower tribe to live together, if only for a few years. We need a program in which people from both tribes work together to spread out the values, practices and institutions that lead to achievement. If we could jam the tribes together, we'd have a better elite and a better mass.

No thanks on this Stalinist plan. The Right is just like the Left in this sense: if there is a national problem, it needs a solution imposed by force. The Left favors looting people, whereas the Right favors tasing people. Either way, it is all about increasing the police powers of the state. On the extremes, the Left wants total expropriation to make everyone equally poor, whereas the Right wants total war to unify us all in a grand project of killing and being killed.

This is what worries me most about the Murray thesis. No matter where you look for answers, the solutions actually seem worse than the problem itself.

More fundamentally, we have to ask: What is the problem we are actually trying to solve? It is hardly a new problem that the elite has separated itself from the lowers. I seriously doubt that this is more intense now than it was in the Gilded Age -- gated communities were a sign of wealth then, too -- or even in the Founding period, when a tiny group of elite landowners decided to wreck a perfectly decent system under the Articles of Confederation to ram through a Constitution that put them in charge of the entire country.

So long as the elite are an economic elite and not a political elite, they are benefactors to everyone, providing the capital, the great ideas, the norms and codes, the educational institutions and the cultural infrastructure to protect the country from the rapacious state. This is what Hans-Hermann Hoppe calls the "natural elite," and every society needs them. Resentment against this elite is purely destructive.

Bryan Caplan adds an interesting insight here. One of Murray's interesting insights is that the elite are largely intact from a cultural and social point of view. This observation contradicts the rhetoric of populism that blames all problems on the elite. Caplan says that traditionalists need to "embrace the elite and boost its self-confidence. Then traditionalists and elites can join hands and preach the Good News of bourgeois virtue."

Nor is the gap between rich and poor really a problem. The truth is that the poor are living better than the rich did only decades ago. The average working-class guy with a cellphone holds more computing power in his hand than was available to presidents and CEOs a decade ago. That the pace of advancement disportionately affects one group more than another is actually irrelevant at the individual level.

That leaves the fundamental question: Why has this actually happened? From what I've read, Murray seems to overlook the political reasons for why the lower third has begun to eschew the bourgeois virtues. It all comes down to economic opportunity and deep integration into the division of labor, for it is through commerce that individuals acquire value in the eyes of themselves and others.

The regulatory and tax states have made the lower classes into pariahs from the point of view of the commercial world. They are expensive to hire and hard to fire, which makes them even more expensive to hire. The minimum wage is bad enough, but that is only the beginning. A giant machinery governs how, where, when, and under what terms they can work and enjoy fulfilling lives. Business creation is harder than ever for anyone but the highly educated elite.

When they do get jobs, the whole system is allied against their social advancement. Cash business is criminalized. Everything requires a permit. The bureaucracy rules, instead of the entrepreneur. The laws, taxes, mandates, programs -- and everything else the state has done -- work like a giant bed of sharp rocks in the middle of a river that punishes those who tried to get to the other side.

Inflation and the Fed's interest-rate policy have punished the accumulation of wealth and shortened the time horizon of the lower third of the population classes. The rise of the police state and the criminalization of their lifestyle have driven them into a culturally, socially, and legally marginal existence, so that they are always one step away from entanglement with police, courts, and jail.

As government grows -- and the regulatory and tax states expand -- and as the prohibitions on behaviors, services, and goods grow and grow, society becomes ever less economically mobile and dynamic. The class system that is part of every society becomes a caste system of entrenched position. It becomes a society of the put-upons versus the privileged.

From my reading so far, I don't see that Murray is tuned into this reality, which is probably expected, since so much of the cost of statism is invisible to us and not discernible at this time. It consists of the opportunities missed, the jobs not created, the social advancement that does not take place, the wealth creation that does not happen. Conjectural futures evade the statisticians.

To end on note of hope: Murray is looking backward at what the state has already done; the proliferation of technology could end this trend here as it has around the world.
__
Jeffrey Tucker, publisher and executive editor of Laissez-Faire Books, is author of Bourbon for Breakfast: Living Outside the Statist Quo and It's a Jetsons World. You can write him directly here.

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EPA Levies $438,000 in Fines and Mandatory 'Environmental Projects' on School Bus Contractor for 'Excessive Idling'

By Elizabeth Harrington

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) enforced nearly $500,000 in fines and mandatory "environmental projects" on a school bus contractor for "excessive idling," and as part of its anti-idling campaign to reduce the carbon footprint of school buses waiting to pick up children for their routes.

"As part of a settlement for alleged excessive diesel idling in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, Durham School Services will commit to reduce idling from its school bus fleet of 13,900 buses operating in 30 states," read an EPA press release on Tuesday.

The EPA says an agency inspector two years ago spotted buses of the Durham School Services, the second largest school bus transportation contractor in the country, "idling for extended periods of time" in school lots in New England.

"The inspector observed some buses idling for close to two hours before departing the bus lot to pick up school children," it said. State rules limit idling to three minutes in Connecticut and five minutes in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, where the infractions occurred.

Durham reached a settlement for the violation and agreed to pay $90,000 in penalties. It also agreed to pay for $348,000 worth of environmental projects, including implementing a national training and management program "to prevent excessive idling from its entire fleet of school buses."

Under the program Durham must require its supervisors to "monitor idling in school bus lots, post anti-idling signs in areas where drivers congregate, and notify the school districts it serves of its anti-idling policy."

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The State versus George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin

by Thomas L. Knapp

Any take on the shooting of Trayvon Martin should start with an obvious ? but often missing ? disclaimer: I don?t know exactly what happened in Sanford, Florida on the night of February 26, 2012.

It?s likely to the point of near certainty that you don?t either. Even the people closest to the events have only partial knowledge at their disposal, and the rest of us necessarily access that knowledge indirectly. We?re reduced to choosing from between competing narratives, each of us most likely to choose the one which best matches our own biases.

Was Zimmerman the heroic community watchman, acting in self-defense as he was menaced by Trayvon Martin, thug of the week? Or was Martin the innocent victim murdered by Zimmerman, an over-zealous wannabe cop at best and perhaps even a racist hooligan?

Either way, we should recognize one important fact in all of this: Government has thus far played no constructive role in the matter, and in fact has created an environment in which incidents of this type are more likely to happen and less likely to be justly resolved.

If we assume the worst of Zimmerman ? that he attacked and murdered an innocent young black man without cause or provocation ? we need look no further than America?s police culture for his excuse.

American police gun down hundreds, possibly thousands of innocent civilians each year, (for obvious reasons, they don?t keep such statistics, or at least don?t share those statistics with us ? we have to comb the newspapers ourselves and try to keep rough running totals) many if not most of them people of color, and almost always with total impunity (yes, I know racism isn?t always ?structural,? but let?s not ignore cases where it clearly is).

Were Zimmerman a sworn officer with a badge instead of just a neighborhood watch volunteer, there?s every likelihood that we wouldn?t even know his identity at this point. The local police department would refuse to release it (only mere civilians get their names publicized when they?re accused of crimes) and put him on paid ?administrative leave? while they conduct an ?internal investigation,? inevitably clearing him of all wrongdoing. And absent some high-dollar lawyering up by his victim?s family, that would be the end of it.

Additionally, as libertarian author J. Neil Schulman notes, Martin was disarmed in advance. At 17, he was legally forbidden to own or carry a firearm with which to defend himself. The state knowingly and intentionally left him at Zimmerman?s mercy. And had the situation been reversed, Martin would no doubt have learned that race and age become two-way streets when prosecutors see their shot at some limelight: As a black male, he?d have been charged before the gun cooled, and he?d almost certainly have been tried ?as an adult.?

Supposing, on the other hand, that Zimmerman is the innocent party, his case is a perfect example of what American ?justice? has become.

The local police found no grounds to charge him with a crime. They accepted his version of events and wrote off the shooting as a justifiable act of self-defense. They may or may not have been correct in that assessment, but nobody gets it right every time, right? As Benjamin Franklin said, ?That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved.?

But this isn?t Franklin?s America. These days, if there?s a sufficiently loud hue and cry from a powerful (and usually well-organized) political constituency, well, one level of government or another will find something to charge you with. And if they can?t get a conviction, then they?ll find something else to charge you with. And if that doesn?t work, stand by to be harassed to bankruptcy and quite likely to your grave. If you don?t believe me, ask OJ Simpson, Laurence Powell or Stacey Koon.

The shooting of Martin by Zimmerman is an ugly thing in itself, whatever the circumstances that led up to it. But it?s also a perfect example of the idiocy of vesting a monopoly on ?justice? in the state. We?re never going to get every case right, but the incentives of monopoly government inherently tend toward maximizing both the number of cases we get wrong and the severity of the consequeneces.

Government failed Trayvon Martin, arguably leading to his death. Now government is failing George Zimmerman, inexorably leading to his likely imprisonment and his certain hardship.

These failures are not anomalies. They are what the state is and what it does. We can have political government or we can have the possibility of justice, but we can?t have both.
_
Thomas L. Knapp is Senior News Analyst and Media Coordinator at the Center for a Stateless Society (c4ss.org).

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