Verizon Wireless will now collect phone users' information, including their GPS location and Web browsing history, and sell the data to third parties unless customers opt out of the tracking service.

Verizon Wireless' (VZW) updated privacy policy permits the mobile giant to also track customers' app usage, device type, calling features and amount of phone use, as well as any search terms they type when browsing the Web on a VZW mobile device, and demographic information provided by other companies, such as gender and age.

Revenge strike against cuffing of Occupy Wall St protesters

Hacktivists have published a dossier of personal information on the head of Citigroup in retaliation for the cuffing of protesters at an Occupy Wall Street demo.

Members of a group called CabinCr3w, a hacking gang affiliated with Anonymous, revealed phone numbers, an address, email address and financial information on Vikram Pandit, Citigroup's chief executive officer.

The exposé follows the arrest of a group of anti-capitalist protesters who allegedly sparked a ruckus inside a Citibank branch while withdrawing funds and closing their accounts. About 24 people were detained and charged with criminal trespass on Saturday afternoon, The Wall Street Journal reports.

In The New York Times "Sunday Review" of Sept. 25, 2011, Michael Kazin, a co-editor of Dissent magazine, published an article entitled "Whatever Happened to the American Left?" It is drawn from a new book of his entitled American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation. In the article (full disclosure: I have not read the book, only the review that appeared in The Times Sunday Book Review on Sept. 18) Mr. Kazin attributed the aforementioned decline to a number of factors. They included: unlike the (relatively) powerful left of the 1930s, the modern left, unlike the modern Right, has not been germinating for very long; in the 1970s they started leaving traditional "left" issues such as "class justice" for such things as rights for minorities and women; the failed promises of the Democratic Party, post pre-Viet Nam Lyndon Johnson; dependence on "politicians;" and "not reconnecting with ordinary Americans." So, you see, the "decline of the US left" is all the left's fault.

Well, historical developments like the decline, indeed the virtual disappearance of any real, socialistically-oriented left as real as its cousin, the "liberal/progressive" left, don't happen in an historical vacuum. Indeed in this case it would appear that what the Right-wing, Corporate Power has done to the US left since the height of its power during the New Deal is the primary cause of its decline. Further it would appear that the failure of self-styled US leftists to recognize and come to grips with the amazingly powerful legal, legislative, and propagandistic forces that the US Corporate Power mobilized against the left, and then organize to oppose it with strength, is also a major cause of the US left's decline.

Organized left-wings began developing in European constitutional democracies and monarchies in the late 19th century. In some, like Prussia, the left-wing party(s) appeared before the labor union movement did. In others, like the United Kingdom, the trade union movement came first, followed by left parliamentary parties. However, whichever came first, eventually any further successes that the left might have in their parliaments, in forcing concessions on labor relations, on health services, on the structure of work and leisure time, on any other broad-based national social legislation, was built on a base of strong trade union movement. This is the case in Western Europe down to this very day.

There is no danger that the protesters who have occupied squares, parks and plazas across the nation in defiance of the corporate state will be co-opted by the Democratic Party or groups like MoveOn. The faux liberal reformers, whose abject failure to stand up for the rights of the poor and the working class, have signed on to this movement because they fear becoming irrelevant. Union leaders, who pull down salaries five times that of the rank and file as they bargain away rights and benefits, know the foundations are shaking. So do Democratic politicians from Barack Obama to Nancy Pelosi. So do the array of "liberal" groups and institutions, including the press, that have worked to funnel discontented voters back into the swamp of electoral politics and mocked those who called for profound structural reform.

Resistance, real resistance, to the corporate state was displayed when a couple of thousand protesters, clutching mops and brooms, early Friday morning forced the owners of Zuccotti Park and the New York City police to back down from a proposed attempt to expel them in order to "clean" the premises. These protesters in that one glorious moment did what the traditional "liberal" establishment has steadily refused to do - fight back. And it was deeply moving to watch the corporate rats scamper back to their holes on Wall Street. It lent a whole new meaning to the phrase "too big to fail."

President Obama, who has been traveling the country urging Congress to pass his jobs bill so Americans can be put to work on infrastructure projects, need only look out a window in the West Wing to see one such project. Under way on his front lawn for the last 17 months, it is highly visible and yet mysterious.

For the first time in recent memory, the ground and pipes beneath the Oval Office are exposed, and each day, workers lower massive concrete blocks several stories underground. Cranes, trucks and construction workers file in and out of the hole, usually through a passageway between the White House and the Old Executive Office Building.

The cavernous hole has inspired much speculation. Is it an Olympic-size swimming pool for the fitness-conscious first couple? A more spacious bunker? A place, perhaps, to hide the deficit?

The General Services Administration says it is an elaborate renovation of the building's aging air-conditioning and electrical systems. These upgrades take place periodically, a G.S.A. spokeswoman, Sara Merriam, said, adding that Washington's Big Dig would soon continue on the other side of the White House grounds.

Part I - Going Rogue Again

Back on 1 September 2011 I posted a piece (see essay six below) titled America's FBI Goes Rogue. The gist of that piece was that the FBI's Counter Terrorist Unit has transformed itself into an instigator of crime.

The Agency's modus operandi (MO) here reminds one of those carnivorous plants that have evolved physical shapes that lure their insect victims to their deaths. So too does the FBI's approach to "terror prevention" rely on spinning crime scenarios so as to lure unsuspecting "terrorists" into a criminal trap.

The recently announced arrest of the American-Iranian, Mansor Arbsibsiar, a "failed used car salesman turned drug peddler (who has a cousin employed by Iran's Quds Force, the special operations unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards) falls neatly into this MO. The U.S. Justice Department alleges that Arbsibsiar planned to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador in Washington. At the same time the Department assures us that, according to U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, "for the entire operation, the government's confidential sources were monitored and guided by federal law enforcement agents." In this case the confidential source was a Drug Enforcement Agency operative, who is himself a convicted felon. According to Gareth Porter, the operative is heard on one of the FBI's clandestine recording "inducing Arbarsiar to agree to the assassination of the Saudi ambassador." That is entrapment and it is illegal. The "guides" are FBI agents who are involved in fabricating the crime itself. The result is a guaranteed arrest for the government. As Glenn Greenwald has noted, "nobody can deny its [the Department of Justice] record of excellence in thwarting its own terrorist plots." And indeed, not unexpectedly, Bharara reminded us that during the entire "terrorist" episode, "no one was actually in danger."

In what appears to be an effort to garner email addresses for his U.S. Senate campaign, a Texas Republican who formerly served on Washington Mutual's board of directors has launched a website called "End Occupy," which blames young Americans and their "false sense of entitlement" for the country's current economic status.

"The Occupy Wall Street crowd represents the same flawed values that got our country into this economic mess," Tom Leppert's "EndOccupy.com" claims. "They possess a false sense of entitlement and think they should be receiving government handouts and run up the debt on an imaginary credit card by making hard-working Americans and future generations pay for the bill." It goes on to ask for petition signatures, which will be sent to President Barack Obama.

But for Leppert, who's running to replace Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), that allegation may just produce a round of laughter from the occupied streets of New York all the way to his home in Dallas, Texas, given his history. Leppert was one of the last chairmen of Washington Mutual's audit committee, right before the company earned the title of largest bank failure in U.S. history, fleecing shareholders of $63 billion.

The first bishop in the US is indicted for child sex-abuse coverup; meanwhile, his colleagues push for laws that will intrude on our sexual freedom.

Last week, the House's passage of the now-notorious H.R. 358 -- also known as the "Let Women Die" bill -- caused deserved outrage. But the bill's connection to the high-ranking Catholic group that fought for its passage, even while the American church is fighting a horrific new sex abuse scandal, hasn't been given the attention it deserves.

The new bill (which the president has vowed to veto) would essentially obliterate abortion coverage by both public and private insurers, and most egregiously get hospitals off the hook for refusing to perform abortions for women whose lives are in immediate danger. It would literally allow hospitals to let women die with impunity.

A ground-breaking investigation examines the most secret aspect of America's shadowy drone wars and maps out a world of hidden bases dotting the globe.

They increasingly dot the planet. There's a facility outside Las Vegas where "pilots" work in climate-controlled trailers, another at a dusty camp in Africa formerly used by the French Foreign Legion, a third at a big air base in Afghanistan where Air Force personnel sit in front of multiple computer screens, and a fourth that almost no one talks about at an air base in the United Arab Emirates.

And that leaves at least 56 more such facilities to mention in an expanding American empire of unmanned drone bases being set up worldwide. Despite frequent news reports on the drone assassination campaign launched in support of America's ever-widening undeclared wars and a spate of stories on drone bases in Africa and the Middle East, most of these facilities have remained unnoted, uncounted, and remarkably anonymous -- until now.

Run by the military, the Central Intelligence Agency, and their proxies, these bases -- some little more than desolate airstrips, others sophisticated command and control centers filled with computer screens and high-tech electronic equipment -- are the backbone of a new American robotic way of war. They are also the latest development in a long-evolving saga of American power projection abroad -- in this case, remote-controlled strikes anywhere on the planet with a minimal foreign "footprint" and little accountability.

Leaders from the organics industry and the genetically-modified-foods lobby are tangling in Washington over whether GMOs should be labeled as such. Eve Conant on the debate over "Frankenfoods."

The distance between New York and Washington, D.C., is 313 miles, a number that became especially relevant last week to activist Adam Eidinger as he prepared to set out on foot for the capital, along with hundreds of other food activists, farmers, and business leaders.

"Many organic leaders realized this past spring that, basically, we don't have a friend in the White House," says Eidinger, who hopes the march will accomplish what good will could not. "We're going over the cliff here. This is very much a personal thing with the president now."