In the days following Steve Jobs’s death, publisher Simon & Schuster decided to release its authorized biography of the Apple founder a month earlier than planned. The book, written by Walter Isaacson and simply called Steve Jobs, will be out on the 24th, but details are already leaking.
According to the Huffington Post, which got a hold of a copy, Isaacson paints Jobs as a gruff supporter of Barack Obama, telling him: “You’re headed for a one-term presidency” when they met in 2010. He encouraged Obama to work more closely with businesses, citing “regulations and unnecessary costs” that might make an American company build factories in China, and criticized teachers unions for blocking much-needed education reforms.
Jobs and Obama did not quite have a love affair, but the Apple chief was willing to help:
Though Jobs was not that impressed by Obama, later telling Isaacson that his focus on the reasons that things can’t get done “infuriates” him, they kept in touch and talked by phone a few more times. Jobs even offered to help create Obama’s political ads for the 2012 campaign. “He had made the same offer in 2008, but he’d become annoyed when Obama’s strategist David Axelrod wasn’t totally deferential,” writes Isaacson. Jobs later told the author that he wanted to do for Obama what the legendary “morning in America” ads did for Ronald Reagan.
The book also described how Jobs was “angrier than [Isaacson] had ever seen him” when Google released its Android operating system, which he felt infringed on patented iPhone technology:
“Our lawsuit is saying, ‘Google you fucking ripped off the iPhone, wholesale ripped us off,’” Jobs said, according to Isaacson. “I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product.”
Jobs also slammed Google’s work, telling Isaacson that “outside of Search, Google’s products — Android, Google Docs — are shit.”
The author has also issued some previews of his own in the form of a 60 Minutes appearance set to air on Sunday. In the television interview, Isaacson explains why Jobs initially declined to undergo surgery to treat his pancreatic cancer, hoping instead that alternative therapies would be enough to cure the disease:
“I’ve asked [Jobs why he didn't get an operation then] and he said, ‘I didn’t want my body to be opened…I didn’t want to be violated in that way,’” Isaacson recalls. So he waited nine months, while his wife and others urged him to do it, before getting the operation, reveals Isaacson. Asked by Kroft how such an intelligent man could make such a seemingly stupid decision, Isaacson replies, “I think that he kind of felt that if you ignore something, if you don’t want something to exist, you can have magical thinking … we talked about this a lot,” he tells Kroft. “He wanted to talk about it, how he regretted it …. I think he felt he should have been operated on sooner.”
The 656-page book, which is based on years of research and dozens of conversations between the writer and his subject, also addresses less weighty topics, such as the contents of Jobs’s iPod, which included Bob Dylan, Yo-Yo Ma, and the work of his onetime girlfriend Joan Baez.
This post has been updated with additional information.
Steve Jobs Said He’d ‘Go Thermonuclear War’ On Google Over iPhone ‘Theft’ [HuffPo]
Biographer: Jobs refused early and potentially life-saving surgery [CBS News]
That’ll teach ‘em to mess with the Military-Industrial Complex.
As the Washington Post reported earlier this month, Maryland’s “Montgomery County Council resolution asking Congress to spend less on wars and redirect the funds to social programs has drawn the scrutiny of one of the county’s largest employers and other lawmakers.”
Despite the non-binding resolution’s 5 to 4 majority support on the Council, it was withdrawn from consideration after “Bethesda-based Lockheed Martin,” a giant manufacturer of sophisticated military weapons, “which employs more than 5,000 workers in Montgomery, urged county officials against the resolution.”
The Lockheed lobbyists were joined in their efforts to derail the County Council’s resolution — supported by Democratic members of the council — by Democratic state and county officials concerned about implications of insulting the weapons contractor giant, as officials in neighboring Virginia “gleefully watch[ed] from afar” as the two states are in frequent competition for billions of Pentagon dollars and the jobs that portend to go with them.
But Pentagon dollars are among the least efficient ways to increase jobs and wealth in any given community, as explained by John Feffer, a co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies and Jean Athey, a coordinator of Montgomery County Peace Action, a supporter of the now-withdrawn Montgomery resolution:
Spend a billion dollars on the military, economists Robert Pollin and Hedi Garrett-Peltier estimate, and you get about 11,000 jobs (just a little more than what Lockheed Martin employs in all of Maryland). Spend that same billion dollars on clean energy projects and you generate about 17,000 jobs. The same money invested in education produces nearly 30,000 jobs.
Nonetheless, Lockheed and other longtime members of the Military-Industrial Complex continue to work with public officials in exploiting the “jobs scam” in order to pit state against state, county against county and town against town to bilk tax-payers out of billions under the cynical rubrik of “job creation.”
And when that doesn’t work, there are other, darker methods that can be used to send the “right” message to those members of the public who might have the temerity to oppose their corporate interests…
Propaganda Blitzkreig
In his book, The Great American Jobs Scam, Greg LeRoy revealed how, over the past sixty years, corporate America extracted billions of dollars from our public coffers in the form of tax breaks, subsidies and outright gifts of land and property from local, state and regional governments, as they are induced to bid against one another for the “privilege” of private-sector employment in their jurisdictions. No new jobs are created in the process. They are simply shifted from one region to another — at least until they are sent overseas to sweatshops and $2/day wages.
Lockheed Martin is all too happy to bring their considerable tax-payer-supplied resources to bear to shut down even the tiniest perceived threat to their massive, and seemingly-unending tsunami of public dollars, as the Montgomery County Council incident underscores all too clearly.
Lockheed Martin is a giant military contractor, headquartered in Montgomery County’s Bethesda, MD. It extracts some $29 billion per year from the U.S. Treasury. It delivers a powerful arsenal of offensive weaponry, under that classic Orwellian label — “Defense”! Its CEO, Robert J. Stevens, has made sure that your tax dollars are put to good use. In 2008, 22,863,062 of those dollars — an amount more than 57 times greater than the annual compensation of the President of the United States — went directly into Stevens’ pocket as executive compensation.
In Montgomery County, Lockheed Martin’s lobbyists demonstrated that the “jobs scam” provides an efficient means for silencing opposition to the bloated Pentagon budget when the masters of war prevented the Montgomery County Council from considering, let alone adopting, their non-binding Resolution [PDF] that simply called upon the U.S. Congress “to make major reductions in the Pentagon budget.”
Lockheed’s behind-the-scenes effort to kill the Montgomery County Council Resolution coincided with a coordinated propaganda blitzkreig entitled “Second to None” in which the “jobs scam” was applied by both the weapons industry and helpful “Defense” Secretary Leon Panetta (see video above).
As reported by the Washington Post, Valerie Ervin (D-Silver Spring), President of the Montgomery County Council, working with the Montgomery branch of Peace Action, introduced the non-binding resolution to call upon the U.S. Congress “to make major reductions in the Pentagon budget.”
The self-explanatory resolution, by way of direct language and links, set forth reasons that were both compelling and straightforward.
The $7.2 trillion* in public monies that have been poured down the economic black hole, aka the Pentagon budget, during the period 1998 – 2011, has coincided with “huge cuts…at the federal, state, and local levels of domestic spending.” These have occasioned loss of Montgomery County revenues, with adverse impacts on “education, environmental programs, health care, safety net services, public safety, and transportation projects.”
The resolution asserts:
The people of Montgomery County will pay or become indebted for approximately $2.5 billion per year of their limited financial resources for Department of Defense spending in fiscal year 2012.
Enter Lockheed Martin and the ‘Jobs Scam’
The resolution, supported by five of the Montgomery County Council’s nine members, was removed from the Council’s agenda even before it could be considered after Lockheed Martin lobbyist, Lawrence Duncan, MD Gov. Martin O’Malley (D), Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D), state delegate C. William Frick (D-Montgomery) and County Executive Isiah Leggett (D) intervened.
The “jobs scam” underpinnings of the Lockheed lobbying effort jump off the pages of the Washington Post’s article, which, after noting that Lockheed Martin employs more than 5,000 workers in Montgomery County, added:
Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell (R) had spoken with Lockheed Martin about the resolution. The news of the legislative action made it to other state officials, causing anxiety over a sore issue for Maryland: The state has lost at least two defense contractors to Virginia in recent years.
Last year, Northrop Grumman chose Virginia over Maryland for its new global headquarters after a process that pitted the two neighboring states against each other. The defense firm moved to Falls Church this summer.
As has often been the case over the past sixty years, so-called political “leaders” succumbed to the “jobs scam’s” implicit threat. Frick, according to the Washington Post, said the resolution “could have potentially sent the wrong message to an important business sector.” Leggett referred to the Resolution as “a dagger pointed directly at the heart of Montgomery County.”
Economic and ‘spiritual death’
As Jim Hightower observed in Thieves in High Places: “The military budget is a massive wealth transfer program from ordinary taxpayers to major corporations, and it has proven easy over the years to wrap this transfer in the red, white and blue and have a portion of the American people burst out in a rousing chorus of the national anthem and applaud their own mugging.”
But the pernicious impact of the patriot-supported taxpayer dollars transferred into the Military-Industrial Complex goes well beyond the relatively much-higher number of jobs that could be created by public monies spent on clean energy infrastructure and on education.
In his 1961 Farewell Address President Eisenhower warned us of the need to guard against a “Military-Industrial Complex” whose “influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government.”
President Eisenhower’s perception of the Military-Industrial Complex’s “grave implications” to the “very structure of our society” echoed the warnings provided in President George Washington’s 1796 Farewell Address about the dangers to liberty posed by “overgrown military establishments” and by sociologist C. Wright Mills’ seminal work, The Power Elite (1956), which ominously foretold, “American militarism, in fully developed form, would mean the triumph in all areas of life of the military metaphysics, and hence the subordination to it of all other ways of life.”
Military spending not only produces fewer jobs, but serves to deplete productive economic growth — a form of economic spending that Seymour Melman described in Pentagon Capitalism as “parasitic growth” which not only depletes the money that would otherwise be available to the civilian sector of society but which siphons off the best and brightest minds to military research.
“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. so eloquently observed in his 1967 speech, Beyond Vietnam: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
Military-Industrial complex strikes back?
Let me ask you one question /
Is your money that good? /
Will it buy you forgiveness? /
Do you think that it could? /
I think you will find /
When your death takes its toll /
All the money you made /
Will never buy back your soul. /
– Bob Dylan, Masters of War
Shortly after Peace Action’s involvement in the proposed Montgomery County Council Resolution, on Oct. 13, the Peace Action Montgomery web site was, for the first time in its six year existence, hacked and infected with several computer viruses, the group’s coordinator, Athey told The BRAD BLOG.
It is really not possible to draw any hard-and-fast conclusions about who was behind the attack. To date, no one has stepped forward with hard evidence such as the emails which revealed the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s links to a plot to use “terror tools” in an effort to discredit journalists (including The BRAD BLOG’s Brad Friedman), who had been critical of the Chamber’s hard-right agenda.
Still, a growing body of evidence reveals a Military-Industrial Complex which has reacted harshly to citizens who would stand in the way of the ever-expanding, often-parasitic Pentagon budget.
In an email Athey described to us another another coincidence. In 2005-2006, shortly after Peace Action Montgomery engaged in demonstrations outside Lockheed Martin’s corporate offices, several of its members were placed on the “terrorist watch list”. The incident, unfortunately, is no longer particularly unusual, as revealed by AlterNet in “Inside the Surveillance State: How Peaceful Activists Get Swept Up onto ‘Terrorist’ Watch Lists”.
Back in April, 2002, 20 out of 37 members of Peace Action Milwaukee were detained when their names surfaced on a computerized “No Fly Watch List.”
In September of 2010, the Washington Post reported that the U.S. Department of Justice admitted that the “FBI improperly investigated some left-leaning U.S. advocacy groups after…Sept. 11.” The DoJ cited “cases in which agents put activists on terrorist watch lists even though they were planning nonviolent civil disobedience.”
Recently, Gov. Ed Rendell (D-PA) was compelled to apologize after it was revealed that the PA Department of Homeland Security had entered a contract with an Israeli/U.S. firm, the Institute of Terrorism and Research to “track” activists including those who targeted Lockheed Martin in Valley Forge, PA for “nonviolent direct action campaign protests.”
We have failed to heed President Eisenhower’s warning as to how the influence of the Military-Industrial Complex would permeate our “economic, political, even spiritual” facets of life. The pernicious impact in the political sphere can be found in the fact that political “leaders” in this country have lost sight of the fundamental principles of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, to wit: “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
The peaceful exercise of that right can never be considered a “terrorist threat.” Yet, what the government did in these instances was to use public monies to target citizens for protesting the squandering of precious public funds on the instruments of war.
On the heels of the continuing “jobs scam” played out with public dollars via lobbyists on the public dole and public officials beholden to them, and with the subtle — and not so subtle — methods of intimidation employed against those who would challenge the machine, is it any wonder that citizens, via Occupy Wall Street, have finally begun to stand up against the entire machine by occupying our public squares in defiance of those who have used our own largesse to work against the very citizens they claim to defend, protect and employ?
* * *
Video in which Sec. of “Defense” Leon Panetta parrots the ‘jobs scam’ of the Military-Industrial complex follows…
_____
*The estimated $7.2 trillion poured down the Pentagon budget black hole between 1998 and 2011 may well be too conservative. As reported by AlterNet’s Tom Englehardt, the U.S. is, at present, spending $1.2 trillion/year, much of which flows to private mercenaries. Engelhardt argues that where Washington bailed out major financial institutions, “the Pentagon and the National Security Complex” have “become” Washington. Their “size, influence, and power protects them from the consequences of failure.”
SYDNEY (Reuters) – Police broke up a Sydney protest camp inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement in an early morning raid on Sunday, making dozens of arrests, police and protesters said.
The ‘Occupy Sydney’ protest against corporate greed and economic inequality in the Martin Place business district had been going on for a week, with a small group sleeping out in the square despite seizure of camping equipment, setting up solar panels to charge mobile phones.
The raid by about 100 officers came two days after police in Melbourne broke up a parallel protest there in violent scenes. New South Wales state police said they had made 40 arrests in Sydney on Sunday. Some protesters were expected to be charged with crimes, including assaulting police.
Video shot by protesters and posted on their website (www.occupysydney.org.au) showed a rubbish-strewn patch of ground, with police moving through in the dark.
Protest spokesman who gave his name as Tim Davis Frank said about 70 people were in the area when the raid started around 5 a.m. (2:00 p.m. EDT Saturday), including some homeless people who had joined the demonstrators.
“I was fast asleep. People started yelling – get your camera out. One of the police was yelling something into a microphone,” Davis Frank told Reuters. “They basically informed us we had 10 minutes to gather our possessions.”
Police said protesters had originally had permission to protest for two hours, which they had exceeded more than a week ago, and had repeatedly ignored requests to leave.
“Protesters were given a final warning to leave Martin Place this morning before police moved in and cleared the area,” police said in a statement.
Although inspired by the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement, the protests generally only attracted crowds of up to a few hundred, largely drawn from left-wing groups.
Australia’s economy weathered the global economic crisis better than most developed nations, buoyed by its key resources exports, and currently has a low unemployment rate.
Reporting by Chris McCall, Editing by Yoko Nishikawa)
About 500 people, including activists from the Occupy Wall Street movement, marched through New York on Saturday in protest at police abuses.
The demonstration through Manhattan marked the nationwide Annual Day of Protest to Stop Police Brutality.
However, the rally came under extra attention this year against the background of the anti-establishment protest camp near Wall Street and its growing number of imitators around the world.
Police “defend the one percent,” one placard read, referring to the Occupy Wall Street movement’s slogan of “We are 99 percent.”
“Hey, hey, hey, how many kids have you killed today?” the crowd shouted, echoing a Vietnam War-era chant.
Police turned out in force to ensure the demonstrators did not block traffic as they marched through the city, but the event passed peacefully.
The demonstration came a day after Occupy Wall Street activists in New York were joined by veteran folk singers Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie at a march where more than 30 people were reported arrested.
Earlier Friday, a march in Harlem against the New York Police Department’s controversial policy of stop-and-frisk ended when some 30 people were arrested, including civil rights campaigner and Princeton University professor Cornel West.
One participant at Saturday’s rally said he was disappointed at the turnout.
“We need bigger numbers — five or 10 million — and then they’d listen. This is not enough,” said David, 28, who did not want to give his last name.
Occupy Wall Street is now in its sixth week, with the symbolic center at the Manhattan protest camp targeting what participants say is corporate influence over politics and lack of opportunity for those outside the business and political elite.
Albuquerque police tasered a man who lunged at four Occupy Albuquerque protesters while swinging a knife and later told police that their presence was disrespectful to a state university, police said on Saturday.
The man, 48-year-old Miguel Aguirre, approached at least four protesters on Friday near the University of New Mexico campus while carrying a 6- to 8-inch blade, according to police. He asked them: “Who wants to be first?”
Aguirre was later tasered and arrested, according to a police report. None of the protesters were injured.
The Albuquerque demonstration was part of a number of protests that have sprung up from the Occupy Wall Street movement that began last month in New York, protesting against jobs woes and wealth inequality.
Among the protesters Aguirre is accused of accosting were a pair who, hearing about a man armed with a knife, tried to explain to him that they wanted the protest to remain peaceful and to avoid any negative publicity.
Aguirre told police he had been on a days-long drinking binge and did not remember pulling a knife on the protesters, police said. He also told police the protesters were disrespecting the university and had no right to be there.
Aguirre was charged with aggravated assault, four counts of assault with a deadly weapon, and refusing to obey police, among other charges.
(Reporting by Mary Slosson; Editing by Cynthia Johnston)
About 130 protesters were arrested at an Occupy Chicago demonstration early on Sunday after they set up tents and refused to leave a public park after closing time, police said.
The protests, which have spread across the United States and to other countries since starting in New York last month, focus on anger over inequality of wealth, government bailouts of big banks and persistently high unemployment.
The breakup of the protest in Grant Park was the second mass arrest of Occupy Chicago demonstrators in the past week. A week ago, about 175 protesters were arrested.
The protesters were charged with violating a city ordinance, the equivalent of the lowest misdemeanor, and most were released after agreeing to appear in court, Chicago Police Officer Robert Perez said.
Grant Park, the site of large protests against the Vietnam War during the Democratic Party’s convention in Chicago in 1968, is supposed to be closed after 11 p.m., police said.
Protesters decry unequal treatment for the 99 percent of Americans who are not the top earners but critics say the groups lack clear objectives.
Hundreds of Occupy Wall Street demonstrators have been arrested in New York since the protests began. There have been numerous arrests in Tampa, Cincinnati, Des Moines, Minneapolis, Denver and other cities.
Goldman Sachs has withdrawn its sponsorship and funding of a credit union honoring Occupy Wall Street at a fund-raising event, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The investment giant pulled its support for the Lowest East Side’s Federal Credit Union and its 25 anniversary after learning that the protestors were among the honorees for the event.
Goldman not only took its name off the event, but also declined to follow through on a pledge to donate $5,000 to the credit union. Occupy Wall Street chose the credit union as one of the places for its finances based on it not being controlled by the Wall Street banks.
The demonstrators currently have almost $450,000 in donations, with some of it placed in the credit union.
