That
wasn't the first time VR had faced intimidation tactics courtesy of the
mafia-like U.S. Chamber. In December of 2009, after StopTheChamber had
issued a reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of
the Chamber's CEO Tom Donohue, Fox "News" sprung to its defense --
after the Chamber had tipped them off, according to one of their
reporters -- resulting in a front page FoxNews.com hit piece on VR,
making the silly, but effective claim, that the Chamber was being "HUNTED BY THE LEFT" with a "Bounty Put on Head of Chamber Boss."
The result, as The BRAD BLOG detailed at the time, was an absolute deluge of extremely graphic and violent death threats and racist emails from Fox "News" readers sent to the non-profit, non-partisan progressive advocacy organization.
Terror Tools & Your Tax Dollars Used Against You
As I pointed out to Firedoglake's David Dayen, during an interview for a story he was doing about these revelations on Friday, the day I was unable to post to The BRAD BLOG, one of the most maddening aspects about all of this is that journalists and progressive citizens and organizations are being attacked by corporations using our own tax dollars against us.
The U.S. Chamber is funded by its member corporations, the world's largest. Among those funders are AIG and Bank of America, both of whom received billions in tax-payer bailouts, as well as fossil-fuel companies such as ExxonMobile, the most profitable corporation in the history of civilization, who, nonetheless, continues to receive billions in tax-payer subsidies each and every year.
As organizations like VelvetRevolution.us and The BRAD BLOG beg for $5, $10 and $50 donations to stay afloat -- to report on and fight for things like the right to vote or a living wage for all U.S. citizens or for health care or a livable planet or to return competition to the public airwaves or for corporate and governmental accountability or against the absurd notion of "corporate personhood" or against the Chamber and their corporate cronies' control of virtually every aspect of American elections and democracy -- the Chamber musters millions, harvested from tax-payers, to discredit those same tax-payers with dishonest, thug-like, secret conspiracies of vengeance -- using their own tax dollars!
Worse, we now have evidence that they are enlisting, with the (at least passive) cooperation of the U.S. government, the very same tools that the U.S. government employs to supposedly fight terrorism around the world.
Doubt that? What "sold the Chamber to begin with," according to Berico's Patrick Ryan in one of the emails released by Anonymous, was "the Iranian shipping demo."
The demo, as published by Berico and Palantir on YouTube last November, demonstrates how they have developed software employed by the Dept. of Defense to map networks of organizations, individuals and companies via both classified and public source information, in order to create ties between them, and then use those ties to discredit or infiltrate.
Here's Palantir's "Iranian Shipping Demo" video...
...Note how the Palantir/Berico organizational mapping software described in the video, tracking shipments of weapons to terrorist organizations around the world, mirrors the web of connections used to show (if completely inaccurately) who my purported associates are in Palantir/Berico/HBGary's Team Themis Power Point presentation discussed at the beginning of this article -- the very presentation prepared by the three firms for the U.S. Chamber's law firm in hopes of securing the $2 million per month deal to attack me and other progressive advocates...
Your tax dollars at work. Fighting against terrorism. And you.
Corporate Immunity from the Rule of Law
Writing about Team Themis' Bank of America plot to discredit him, the one which almost identically mirrors the same group's proposed plot for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Glenn Greenwald, a Constitutional attorney in addition to now being a journalist and author, posits that the proposals, "quite possibly constitute serious crimes."
"Manufacturing and submitting fake documents with the intent they be published likely constitutes forgery and fraud," he says. "Threatening the careers of journalists and activists in order to force them to be silent is possibly extortion and, depending on the specific means to be used, constitutes other crimes as well."
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