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	Attacks on the Press by Sandra Mims Rowe Committee to Protect Journalists   Blogger Rami Nakhle leaned across the table toward a cluster of U.S. technology leaders. "People are tortured to death because their Facebook account is hacked. You can make a difference between life and death," he told the Silicon Valley executives and computer engineers representing Facebook, Google, and other companies.   Nakhle explained how he and his friends had been using the companies'' software to smuggle video footage and news out of Syria to reporters across the world. Then he described the security bugs that enabled the authorities to track and torture them.   This was one of many dramatic moments during a September conference CPJ convened in San Francisco to connect the technology community with the journalists who risk their lives to report from some of the most restricted countries in the world. These journalists find themselves empowered by the digital explosion at the same time they are endangered by technological changes, both designed and unintended, that expose them to repressive forces.   "They are brave enough," Nakhle said of the journalists. "They know why they are taking these risks. With a small investment in their security, you can save many lives," he told the group.   Technology has democratized news publishing, and it has rattled regimes that equate survival with control of all aspects of society, especially the flow of information. Video footage of repression from Burma to Syria to Egypt dramatically illustrates the benefits of Internet platforms and social media. Only a few years ago, much of this footage could not have been recorded easily and would never have been allowed out of a restricted country. Yet the Arab uprisings of 2011 also demonstrate the urgent need for providers and users of digital tools to fully understand the dangers of deploying them in repressive nations.   As the threats to online journalists grow in scope and frequency, they also underscore CPJ''s mandate to be a truly global organization. More journalists need CPJ''s help than ever before. Because many of these online journalists are freelancers or work for small, local news outlets, they do not have the resources of large institutions behind them. They often lack the experience and training they need to minimize risk. Today, about half of the journalists imprisoned worldwide work primarily online.   Authoritarian states can, and do, buy communications surveillance and filtering equipment from Western manufacturers. While such equipment may have been intended for law enforcement to combat terrorism or organized crime, its uses have spread well beyond that. In much of the world, the enemies of free speech are monitoring journalists and bloggers, filtering online content, and attacking news websites.   During the popular uprising in Syria, authorities dragooned Internet experts into working for the regime. The government-aligned hacking group known as the Syrian Electronic Army targeted critical press outlets and sought to undermine online reporting deemed harmful to authorities. Supplementing the old-fashioned beatings used to secure the names of colleagues and sources from journalists, the digital "army" has employed the phishing of Facebook pages to dupe people into providing passwords and identities.   In November, just days after CPJ awarded its International Press Freedom Award to the founder of the Mexican weekly Ríodoce, Javier Valdez Cárdenas, the publication''s website was forced offline by a denial-of-service attack. Ríodoce is one of the few publications in the region to report on drug trafficking. Even clearer was the message sent by the murderers of Mexican journalist María Elisabeth Macías Castro, whose mutilated body was accompanied by a computer keyboard and a cardboard placard stating her online pseudonym and threatening others who use social media to report the news. Macías'' murder in September was the first case documented by CPJ worldwide in which a journalist was killed in direct relation to reporting done on social media.   CPJ is recruiting the people and acquiring the knowledge to defend online journalists. In 2010, CPJ hired Danny O''Brien as its first Internet advocacy coordinator. O''Brien, based in San Francisco, organized the September meeting between journalists and Silicon Valley technologists. The conference was the first in what will become many efforts by CPJ to act as a bridge between Silicon Valley and the journalists who depend on their products--not only to get the news out, but also to protect them and their sources from physical harm.   While the Internet has provided the equivalent of a printing press to millions of people across the world, it has also broadened the power to shutter those presses. Technology is allowing journalists to slip the chains of censorship, but that newfound freedom will be fleeting if not defended. CPJ is leading the way.   * Sandra Mims Rowe is chairman of the Committee to Protect Journalists. Visit the related web page
	Credit should be a public utility, dispensed and managed for the benefit of the people by Ellen Brown Public Banking Institute USA   April 2012   Credit should be a public utility, dispensed and managed for the benefit of the people.   Public Banks are viable solutions to the present economic crises in US states. Are potentially available to any-sized government or community able to meet the requirements for setting up a bank. Owned by the people of a state or community. Economically sustainable, because they operate transparently according to applicable banking regulations. Able to offset pressures for tax increases with returned credit income to   the community. Ready sources of affordable credit for local governments. Required to promote the public interest, as defined in their charters.   How to ease State Budget Crises: Own a Bank   Cut spending, raise taxes, sell off public assets – these are the unsatisfactory solutions being offered; but the states’ budget crises did not arise from too much spending or too little taxation. It arose from a credit freeze on Wall Street. In the wake of the 2009 financial market collapse, banks curtailed their lending more sharply than in any year since 1942, driving massive unemployment, which caused local tax revenues to plummet. The logical solution, then, is to restore credit to the local economy.   North Dakota’s state-owned bank captured national attention a few years ago after a banking crisis and recession caused Americans to consider North Dakota’s contrasting prosperity.   Walt McRee, a senior consultant with the Public Banking Institute, “A state that had no fallout from the 2008 financial collapse, has a substantial budget, the lowest unemployment in the nation, the highest number of community banks per capita in the country — all because it doesn’t send its money to Wall Street,” McRee said. “It keeps all of the tax money and all of the revenues that come in through normal state operations.”   The Public Banking Institute, an educational nonprofit organization, reports 17 states have introduced legislation to create publicly owned banks or derivations, or for studies or task forces to determine how a publicly owned bank would operate in their jurisdictions.   Their conclusion was that state-owned banks in their states would have a substantial positive impact on employment, new lending, and state and local government revenue.   Why don’t we have a public bank, by Deborah Orr. (Guardian News)   Surely, if the government got into lending money instead of borrowing it, the public sector could create wealth, too.   I cannot for the life of me understand why the private sector has all the dibs on fractional reserve banking, and the public sector none. Fractional reserve banking is the wheeze whereby the more money a bank lends, the larger its assets become. It’s the reason the private sector is so great at “creating wealth”. It simply has a mandate to do so. But the private sector completely sodded up their goose that laid the golden eggs by lending too wildly to people who couldn’t pay it back. Now the problem is that they are lending too cautiously. Surely, if the government got into lending money instead of borrowing it, the public sector could create wealth, too – wealth that could wipe out the deficit? I’d move my mortgage to such a bank, and I’m certain that plenty of others would. Unlike private banks, this public bank would have the same institution underwriting it as does the lending. So caution, not risk, would be built in. Cool. The right is always complaining the left has no solutions. What on earth is wrong with this one?   “Should State and Local Governments Own Public Banks?”.   If you are not happy with the way Wall Street operates, there is an alternative. We can create public banks to create public money for the public good. In fact, here in DC, a group has already formed to look into creating a public bank for the city modeled after the only public bank in the U.S., the Bank of North Dakota, formed back in 1919 and going strong today.   The Public Banking Institute’s vision is to establish a network of public banks across the country to generate affordable credit according to the priorities of real people, not corporate persons or banks.   “Once a nation parts with the control of its currency and credit, it matters not who makes that nation’s laws. Usury, once in control, will wreck any nation. Until the control of the issue of currency and credit is restored to government and recognized as its most conspicuous and sacred responsibility, all talk of the sovereignty of Parliament and of democracy is idle and futile.” -William Lyon Mackenzie King, 10th Prime Minister of Canada.   Fred Mosely, economics professor at Mt Holyoke College, reviewed the history of US banking, focusing on the insight that capitalism is inherently unstable without vigorous, active regulation. He appealed for a return to policies that would propel the government to nationalize failing banks and sack their dysfunctional boards of directors – rather than throw bailout money at them.   Mosely also advocated for public state-owned banks, and listed their advantages as including: Acting as a ‘public option’ in banking whose presence helps to stabilize the whole banking system. Provide counter-cyclical lending to minimize recessions. Provide low interest rates on home mortgages and student loans. Can allocate credit to achieve social-eoconomic objectives such as affordable housing, green energy, health care, etc.   The Move OUR Money campaign is a call for cities, counties and state governments to move the public''s money out of private banks and into public banks. Every quarter that goes into a parking meter, every tax payment that we make, every dollar that banks pay in penalties - it''s all OURs. Let''s put it in OUR bank - a public bank, one that serves the public interest.   Don''t have a public bank? Contact the Public Banking Insitute to find out how you can start one in your community. Let''s get with it and take our credit back from private banks -- let''s Move OUR Money!   * Ellen Brown is president of the Public Banking Institute.   http://publicbanking.wordpress.com/ Visit the related web page
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