1. ‘ A New Kind Of Corporate Slavery‘, via RINF.com.

This piece describes in more detail than I’ve previously seen commercial work undertaken by prisoners in the US, at rates from $0.18-$1.35 an hour. The Federal Prison Industry / Unicor was created during the depths of the Great Depression,

when Roosevelt requireed federal agencies to buy from FPI when they needed any of the products manufactured by the prison industry. By 2006 Unicor had come a long way: last year, according to its annual report, the corporation held assets of $730 million in 108 factories and service centers at 79 prisons across the country. Its gross sales were $718 million with profits of $71.2 million. Those profits were produced by more than 21,000 inmate laborers who made, on average, $1,700 for a year’s work. The profits aren’t, as one might suspect, plowed back into the prison system to, say, improve healthcare services at Carswell or reduce the inflated prices for basic personal hygiene supplies at prison commissaries. Instead, it is plowed back into Unicor.

In recent years, Unicor has added to its list of factory-made products what it calls “services”: computer recycling centers, industrial laundry services, printing shops, and call centers — all for sale to private, for-profit companies in spite of the law’s prohibiting language. BOP Director Harry Lappin, who is also head of Unicor, maneuvered around that little obstacle in the law, apparently successfully, when he testified before a congressional committee last year that the corporation’s new offerings are “a service, not a product” and that therefore the law does not apply. Unicor now advertises its call centers on its web page and in its catalogs as “domestic outsourcing at offshore prices.”

Three major national communications networks use the “domestic outsourcing” call center at Carswell for their directory assistance services, according to FPI program director Todd Baldau. Baldau refused to name the clients, citing “proprietary information.” However, two inmates who currently work at the center, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation, said the companies are Excel Telecom, Cricket Communications, and Metro 411. Calls and e-mails to the three companies were not returned. Baldau would not say what the companies pay Unicor for inmate labor for their call centers, but the corporation’s 2006 annual report listed sales of $27.8 million from its 18 service centers, including Carswell, with profits of $2.5 million.

2. Major Bank Issue Global Stock And Credit Crash Alert 

By Ambrose Evans Pritchard, in The Telegraph

Disclaimer, I know that this writer’s take on the break up of the Eurozone is based on misreading of a German article suggesting that some nuts are choosing to refuse Euros printed outside Germany. The article made it clear that is was fringe activity, whereas Ambrose did not. Euros still pass as currency in Germany, it can be safely said, wherever they’re printed.

That makes me sympathise with the possibility that Bob Juanjuah, Royal Bank of Scotland’s credit strategist, may just be paving the way for major writedowns at his institution later on by implying that conditions are out of their control — who can blame a bank for going under when the whole world’s taking a bath?

In any case, the prediction is stark:

The Royal Bank of Scotland has advised clients to brace for a full-fledged crash in global stock and credit markets over the next three months as inflation paralyses the major central banks.

“A very nasty period is soon to be upon us - be prepared,” said Bob Janjuah, the bank’s credit strategist.

A report by the bank’s research team warns that the S&P 500 index of Wall Street equities is likely to fall by more than 300 points to around 1050 by September as “all the chickens come home to roost” from the excesses of the global boom, with contagion spreading across Europe and emerging markets.

Such a slide on world bourses would amount to one of the worst bear markets over the last century.

3. Over the Counter Intelligence

(via Dirt Diggers Digest)

“… an activity that used to be handled by spooks on the federal payroll has been steadily transformed into a $50 billion Intelligence-Industrial Complex.”

A short article based on a book I’ve yet to read, Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing, which explains to what extent State intelligence functions have been handed over to private military corporations.

4. Unfolding Financial Meltdown On Wall Street 

 (via Global Research)

Lehman Brothers, the US’s fourth-largest investment bank is the next faltering bank expected to fail. Unlike Bear Stearns, which got decimated by the JP Morgan buyout using Federal Reserve money, Lehman Brothers is probably in line for a massive bailout from the Fed. At least, that’s what its CEO Richard Fuld seems to believe. The June 4, 2008 Financial Times of London quoted him as stating, “The Federal Reserve’s decision earlier this year to lend directly to investment banks should take questions about Lehman’s liquidity off the table.” Whether Lehman can come up with the “liquidity” to meet its debts is no longer an issue, because it expects to be feeding at the trough of the Federal Reserve, just as JPM did when it bought Bear Stearns at bargain-basement prices. The difference between the two “bailouts” is that Lehman Brothers, unlike Bear Stearns, will actually get the money. Why is Fuld so confident of this rescue operation? Fuld, like Dimon (and unlike Bear CEO Alan Schwartz), sits on the Board of the New York Federal Reserve.

5. The Future Of Copyright

by my friend Rasmus Fleischer, for the Cato Institute. Some excerpts…

The capacity of portable storage devices is increasing exponentially, much faster than Internet bandwidth, according to a principle known as “Kryder’s Law.” [7] The information in our pockets yesterday was measured in megabytes, today in gigabytes, tomorrow in terabytes and in a few years probably in petabytes (an incredible amount of data). Within 10-15 years a cheap pocket-size media player will probably be able to store all recorded music that has ever been released — ready for direct copying to another person’s device.

When American troops liberated the city of Luxembourg in 1944, they made a strange capture: a machine capable of recording sound on magnetic tapes. Shortly after the war, this German military invention made its appearance in private homes. Tape recorders integrated listening and reproduction in one device, but as separate functions. That’s no longer the case with digital technology. Today, to use digital information is to copy it.

the essence of copyright maximalism: Every broken regulation brings a cry for at least one new regulation even more sweepingly worded than the last. Copyright law in the 21st century tends to be less concerned about concrete cases of infringement, and more about criminalizing entire technologies because of their potential uses.

“I believe this is a ‘wild card’ that most people in the music industry are not seeing at all,” writes Swedish filesharing researcher Daniel Johansson. “When music fans can say, ‘I have all the music from 1950-2010, do you want a copy?’ — what kind of business models will be viable in such a reality?”

Believers in copyright keep dreaming about building a digital simulation of a 20th-century copyright economy, based on scarcity and with distinct limits between broadcasting and unit sales. I don’t believe such a stabilization will ever occur, but I fear that this vision of copyright utopia is triggering an escalation of technology regulations running out of control and ruining civil liberties.

6. Washington DC Pus Itself Under Surveillance 

LA Times via Black Listed News.

From a dimly lit room in a secure command center, 21 streaming video feeds from 4,775 surveillance cameras around the nation’s capital are projected across three screens and monitored at all hours. Every few seconds, footage from a different location pops up — a busy road, a picnic bench, the entrance to the new baseball stadium.

Seven years after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty is trying to set up one of the most comprehensive centrally controlled visual surveillance systems in the world. In the nerve center, which opened last month, the city’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency can monitor video from four city agencies — covering streets, schools, housing projects, parks and roads — for threats and other nefarious activities.

For those who have accepted the city’s fate as a prime terrorist target, this may be cause for relief. But to the many civil liberties groups headquartered in Washington, the move undermines privacy, encourages abuse and represents the first step toward a surveillance system like London’s, where a person’s every public move can be tracked on about 10,000 government-funded cameras that have been dubbed a “ring of steel.”