Month: July 2013

Meet the Big Banks’ Latest Slave Product: “Payroll Debit Cards”

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I firmly believe that the biggest domestic policy error over the past generation has been the no-strings-attached bail out of the mega banks in these United States, and their subsequent designation as “too big to fail” and “too big to jail.”  This has given the sociopaths that run these crony organizations a license to steal, and they are doing a great job of it.

So in the latest bank theft product, employers of low income workers are being persuaded to pay their employees via “prepaid payroll cards.”  Not only are these cards typically associated with high fees, but they also discourage employees from using credit unions for their banking needs.

While companies try to defend themselves by saying they are providing a cheaper method for employees that do not have bank accounts to gain access to their funds, in many cases using these “prepaid cards” isn’t simply an option, but a requirement.  Oh, and take a guess why the mega banks are pushing into this line of business?  Prepaid cards are essentially exempt from financial regulation.  Serfs up boy and girls.  From the New York Times:

A growing number of American workers are confronting a frustrating predicament on payday: to get their wages, they must first pay a fee.

For these largely hourly workers, paper paychecks and even direct deposit have been replaced by prepaid cards issued by their employers.

These fees can take such a big bite out of paychecks that some employees end up making less than the minimum wage once the charges are taken into account, according to interviews with consumer lawyers, employees, and state and federal regulators.

Devonte Yates, 21, who earns $7.25 an hour working a drive-through station at a McDonald’s in Milwaukee, says he spends $40 to $50 a month on fees associated with his JPMorgan Chase payroll card.

Anyone surprised that “the morgue” is at the center of this?

“It’s pretty bad,” he said. “There’s a fee for literally everything you do.”

Many employees say they have no choice but to use the cards: some companies no longer offer common payroll options like ordinary checks or direct deposit.

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Good News! Jeff Olson Found Not Guilty for Using Chalk on Sidewalk

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In a bit of good news, San Diego man Jeff Olson has been acquitted by a jury of his peers for the heinous transgression of using water soluble chalk to write anti-bank messages on a public sidewalk in a case I highlighted last week. While this is a favorable outcome, the simple fact that Bank of … Read more

Why the Collection of Metadata is a Very, Very Big Deal

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Some people seemed strangely relieved in the wake of the NSA spying scandal when Obama said “no one is listening to your phone calls.” First of all, while they are clearly not listening to everyone’s phone calls, they certainly are listening to certain people’s calls and that isn’t acceptable in a free society.  Second of all, it’s pretty obvious that the one reason they aren’t listening to everyone’s calls is because it wouldn’t be practical or effective.  As Matt Blaze notes in this great article from Wired, the government isn’t primarily tracking metadata rather than content in an attempt to protect privacy, but rather because metadata is the most efficient and effective way in which to spy on and preempt domestic political dissent.  From Wired:

We now know that every day, U.S. phone companies quietly send the government a list of who called whom and when — “telephony metadata” — for every call made on their networks, because of a secret order by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. It turns out that this has been going on for seven years (and was even reported by USA Today then); the difference now is that the government — uncharacteristically for such a secret intelligence operation — quickly acknowledged the authenticity of the leaked order and the existence of the metadata collection program.

Should we be worried? At least “nobody is listening to our telephone calls” (so the president himself assured us). People breathed a sigh of relief since first learning of the surveillance because surely there’s nothing to worry about when it comes to such seemingly innocuous information — it’s just metadata, after all. Phew!

With today’s communications technology, is metadata really less revealing than content? Especially when we’re dealing with metadata at the scale that we now know the NSA and FBI are receiving?

Because at such a scale, people’s intuition about the relative invasiveness of content and metadata starts to fail them. Phone records can actually be more revealing than content when someone has as many records and as complete a set of them as the NSA does.

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Barrett Brown’s Letter from Jail

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Barrett Brown is an American political prisoner who’s struggle I have highlighted in the past. Most notably in my article earlier this year, Barrett Brown: A Jailed American Dissident.  It was through Barrett’s investigative journalism that I was able to learn about the shadiness of Booz Allen Hamilton and the defense contract industry generally well before Edward Snowden’s leaks came on the scene. Well now he has written a note from prison, published by The Guardian of course.  Some excerpts:

It’s a fine thing to see mainstream American media outlets finally sparing some of their attention toward the cyber-industrial complex – that unprecedented conglomeration of state, military and corporate interests that together exercise growing power over the flow of information. It would be even more heartening if so many of the nation’s most influential voices, from senator to pundits, were not clearly intent on killing off even this belated scrutiny into the invisible empire that so thoroughly scrutinizes us – at our own expense and to unknown ends.

Besides, the government to which we’re ceding these broad new powers is a democracy, overseen by real, live Americans. And it’s hard to imagine American government officials abusing their powers – or at least, it would be, had such officials not already abused similar but more limited powers through repeated campaigns of disinformation, intimidation and airtight crimes directed at the American public over the last five decades. Cointelpro, Operation Mockingbird, Ultra and Chaos are among the now-acknowledged CIA, FBI and NSA programs by which those agencies managed to subvert American democracy with impunity. Supporters of mass surveillance conducted under the very same agencies have yet to address how such abuses can be insured against in the context of powers far greater than anything J Edgar Hoover could command.

Many have never heard of these programs; the sort of people who trust states with secret authority tend not to know what such things have led to in the recent past. Those who do know of such things may perhaps contend that these practices would never be repeated today. But it was just two years ago that the late Michael Hastings revealed that US army officials in Afghanistan were conducting psy-ops against visiting US senators in order to sway them towards continued funding for that unsuccessful war. If military and intelligence officials have so little respect for the civilian leadership, one can guess how they feel about mere civilians.

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