Shaun Richman, writing at In These Times, explains how the right-wing, "right to work" effort behind the Friedrichs v. CTA case currently before the U.S. Supreme Court could actually have positive consequences for unions everywhere if the Court sides with the plaintiffs. The plaintiffs argue that "every interaction that a union has with its government employer is inherently political" (italics in original), making a union's collection of dues "inherently" "compelled" political speech -- but "every interaction" would include strikes and attempts to bargain for better working conditions that states just so happen to prohibit, and if they're all "inherently political" interactions, then they're also protected free speech under the First Amendment. Then again, I suppose the Roberts Court could just call collecting dues "compelled political speech" but not any of the other things, if the plaintiffs' suit doesn't formally raise them.
NSA's "hacker-in-chief" tells security conference attendees how they might keep folks like him out of their computer systems. I guess you should take that with a grain of salt, but it seems that the more you ask your system to do, and the more people who have password access to that system, the more possible entry points the NSA has. And then a lot of times the NSA will exploit holes good sysadmins can fill by installing patches to their systems promptly and paying attention to the anomalous activity on their networks (via the "out-of-band network tap").
Dave Johnson, writing at the Campaign for America's Future blog, describes how the Johnson-Tyco merger will take even more of the tax burden off corporations and put it on the rest of us. Incredibly, even though Johnson is headquartered in Milwaukee and Tyco in Princeton, the resulting corporation will be Irish, since Tyco "moved" to Ireland in 2013 (after being Swiss from 2008 and a "citizen" of Bermuda from 1997). By the way, Sen. Sanders's way of putting it -- "You can’t be an American company only when you want corporate welfare from American taxpayers or you want lucrative contracts from the federal government. If you want the advantages of being an American company then you can’t run away from America to avoid paying taxes" -- is the right way of putting it.
Surprise, surprise, the Federal Trade Commission has accused DeVry University of deceiving potential students about their job prospects after they graduate. Typical lies-damn-lies-and-statistics, too: DeVry not only allegedly brags about their 90% placement rate without spelling out that that's a rate over 30 years, but also, apparently, by counting graduates as "employed in their majors" when they weren't, counting graduates as "employed in their majors" when they were already employed in their majors, and counting graduates as "not actively seeking work" when "desperately seeking work" would have been more accurate. I wonder if Marco Rubio will ride to their rescue!
Finally, we learn from Argentine journalist Darío Aranda (via translator Nancy Piñiero) how a small and rural Argentine town has thus far kept Monsanto from building a GMO seed plant there. I suppose a hater, after reading this article, will say that the protestors who blockaded the 30-hectare site owned by Monsanto were law-breakers simple and plain, and when confronted with all the ways Monsanto and the Argentine government themselves broke the law during the permitting process, that hater would probably just mumble about bureaucracy and "job terrorism." It is true that if you break the law, you suffer the consequences, and with upwards of 20 protestors injured at the hands of police, I bet they understand that more acutely than we do. So does Rosa Parks.
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