“The Occupy Wall Street, much of the calls have been coming for more government spending and more government involvement in people’s lives,” Bachmann said in a video posted by the Bay Citizen.”The Tea Party movement, in high contrast, is calling for less government and less spending.”

Bachmann defined the Occupy movement’s approach as ”government-directed solutions based on temporary gimmicks,” while she said the tea party pushes “permanent solutions driven from the private sector,” according to the Oakland Tribune.

She also said there’s a difference in the cleanliness of the two movements: “The Tea Party picks up its trash after it has a demonstration.”

On the radio program of conservative talker Laura Ingraham, Michele Bachmann rattled off a litany of complaints against China, accusing the country of blinding U.S. satellites with lasers, selling weapons to terrorist regimes and engaging in cyber attacks on both U.S. businesses and the military.

“China has widespread intellectual property theft of United States’ intellectual property. Don’t forget that,” Bachmann told Ingraham. “They’ve also been engaged in industrial espionage against the West as well. And they actively have engaged in cyber attacks both on our military and on our commercial companies.”

“And don’t forget I sit on the intelligence committee. This is an open source document. I’m not sharing something I shouldn’t,” she said, “but China has blinded United States satellites with their lasers. They’ve also supplied arms to the Taliban, and they’ve helped North Korea deliver missiles to Iran and Pakistan. And they’ve assisted Iran with their nuclear program.”

“Just keep these things in mind when it comes to China, they are a very bad actor,” she added.

China is suspected in a massive hacking incident uncovered last month.

Chinese-made weapons have also turned up in Afghanistan, but most intelligence experts have noted that they came from nation’s friendly to the U.S. such as Pakistan, or through adversaries such as Iran, not through direct sales from China.

And the United Nations has accused China of allowing North Korea to transport weapons to Iran, though China denies it.

As for the claim that China blinded U.S. satellites with lasers, in 2007, U.S. officials announced that a laser had “illuminated” one of its satellites over China. The satellite was unharmed and in the ensuing months, more satellites were hit.

As the Union of Concerned Scientists outlined in its 2009 report on the incident (PDF), the laser was likely deployed to track the orbit of the satellites, something many nations do, which causes no damage to the satellites’ sensory equipment.

Prospects for a nuclear revival would start with mining uranium in Colorado.

One of those more pro-mining Rocky Mountain states is neighboring Wyoming, where Uranium One is launching an in-situ mining project in the Powder River Basin. Republican lawmakers have objected to the purchase of Uranium One by Russian government-owned Atomredmetzoloto (ARMZ) for national security reasons.

There is considerable political angst that uranium mined in Wyoming could wind up in Iran because ARMZ supplies that neighboring and highly unfriendly nation. Uranium One’s Schwab, a South African based in the company’s Denver office, said it’s fear-mongering to suggest highly regulated uranium will wind up in a rogue state. It’s the unregulated stuff people should worry about, he said.

“It’s like gun ownership, for instance,” Schwab said. “In South Africa, the only people who own guns now are the criminals, because the people who try to do it legally are prohibited. It’s just impossible.”

The Denver Post Wednesday reported Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak addressed the political issue during a Denver visit on Tuesday: “Do you mind some investment? It is a normal commercial operation — not something that is operating on any political guidance.”

In a statement to the Colorado Independent, Colorado Sen. Mark Udall, a proponent of reviving the nation’s moribund nuclear power industry, said the ARMZ sale needs to be watched closely.

“With the increasing interest in strategic minerals, it’s definitely valid and responsible to ask serious questions about who has the right to extract, own and develop them, and I’m continuing to study the situation involving Uranium One,” Udall said. “I also understand that the proposal must be cleared by the U.S. Committee on Foreign Investments.”

U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner also must sign off on the sale, and he will have to do so under a cloud of suspicion dating to the Cold War and the fact that a deal supplying American nuclear plants with uranium from old Russian nuclear weapons is set to expire in 2013. Despite a virtual freeze on new nuclear plants since the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, the U.S. still gets 20 percent of its electricity from aging nuclear plants.

More than 90 percent of the uranium used in U.S. nuclear plants is imported, and under the expiring weapons program, up to a third of that supply comes from Russia. Colorado is a former uranium-mining hotbed that produced uranium for some of the first atomic weapons, and in some depressed areas of the state an industry revival is viewed favorably. But there is mounting environmental and political pressure to clean up the industry’s toxic legacy and limit future operations.

Uranium One’s Schwab sees that as a mistake.

“If you think oil is bad, uranium is in the exact same picture where you import all your uranium and you’re going to be held hostage to that when in 2013 the agreement with the Russians ends,” he said. “Then, where do you get your uranium from?”

Jeff Parsons, senior attorney for the Western Mining Action Project, says Colorado is poised to get all of the environmental problems associated with the “dirty front end [mining]” of any nuclear power revival and few of the benefits.

“The increase of foreign companies taking over mining interests in the United States is part of a trend over the last 20 years or so,” Parsons said. “We’ve seen more and more foreign mining companies in Colorado and across the West.”

Uranium is a “locatable mineral” under the 1872 Mining Law that was meant to speed the settlement of the West, and as such it is not subject to any sort of royalty payment similar to what the oil and gas industry must pay to drill on federal lands.

“What’s happened in the last 20 years is the growth in multi-national foreign companies taking over these deposits is they get a better deal in the United States than they get in any other country,” Parsons said.

Next: Why hasn’t the 1872 Mining Law been reformed to compel companies to pay royalties for extracting hard-rock minerals from federal lands?

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story misidentified the nonprofit environmental law firm that Jeff Parsons works for. His is a senior attorney with the Western Mining Action Project in Lyons.

Got a tip? Freelance story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

Andrew Romanoff stumps outside the Colorado College debate April 23, 2010 (Boven)

“I don’t think there are any substantial policy differences between us and whatever distinctions that we have are vanishingly small compared to the distinctions that both of us have with the [Republicans] running for this seat,” Bennet said. He thought the debate should center around those differences and how as Democrats they would tackle the problems left in the wake of the finance-turned-economic crisis, where jobs continue to lag and the U.S. middle-class continues to shrink. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t think we can afford another ten years like the last ten years we’ve lived through and provide more opportunity to our kids and grandkids.”

Romanoff referenced committee votes cast by Bennet that he thought signaled a blind spot. One concerned greater protections for homeowners in foreclosure. Another would have removed a loophole some small colleges are using to drive students to expensive consumer loans instead of student loans. Romanoff, seriously lagging in fundraising, also pointed to the fact that Bennet continues to accept political action committee donations.

“I resent the fact that my integrity is being impugned, but at the end of the day, I will stand on my record and stand on my votes,” Bennet said at one point. He described how he had just voted to take student loans out of the hands of private lenders. He said he voted twice for Wall Street and health care reform and spoke to the Secretary of Education this week about the problem of underperforming or perhaps boondoggle colleges failing to properly educate students. He said he would be a “very strong advocate” to remove public funding for those kinds of institutions.

Bennet told the Colorado Independent in February that political action committee or PAC money was not the problem Romanoff was making it out to be. PACs he said at the time are required to disclose donors. There’s no mystery at work, no secret funders pulling strings. He also said he didn’t feel it was possible to win a statewide Senate race without accepting PAC money. At the debate Friday, however, he added that he now had more than 18,000 individual donors to his campaign and had received one of smallest percentages of PAC candidate contributions in the state.

A questioner from the Colorado Springs Independent, which sponsored the debate with Channel 13 News, asked Romanoff about the way he has managed his campaign. Romanoff has drawn heat in the media for running a surprisingly desultory campaign over the last eight months, where players have changed over frequently, fundraising efforts have been stop and start and messaging has been muddy. Romanoff confirmed that he was in the race to win it. He said the true measure of leadership was whether he was winning over voters. As evidence that he was, he cited his win in the strawpoll caucus voting in March.

“The best test of our organization are the results. We won the caucuses by eight points despite an avalanche of corporate cash. The opposition said we should have won by more. So we did… we took the assemblies state wide by 16 points.”

The candidates voiced similarly reserved views of nuclear power.

Romanoff said there was still no way safe way to dispose of nuclear waste. He would focus his efforts on bolstering the non-nuclear clean energy industry. “If you send me to the U.S. Senate, I will work to end our unholy addiction to fossil fuel so we no longer have to spill our blood and waste our [military] power and pollute our skies.”

Bennet said he supports continued research to update nuclear power but he doesn’t believe that the current nuclear industry is economically viable. He also believes there’s no viable method to dispose of the waste. He added that uranium mining in the state has posed enormous clean up problems in the past, including threatening water sources.

Unlike Romanoff, Bennet thought we should continue to look for ways to exploit domestic oil resources. “We need to adopt an energy policy in this country that relies on renewables, as well as natural gas, as well as our offshore oil.”

Both candidates agreed that rancher properties in Pinon Canyon should not be annexed by the Army. Bennet signed the bill that placed a one-year moratorium on expansion and said that he doesn’t see any need for Army expansion given that present facilities are not being used. Romanoff agreed, saying he was against state annexation of private lands.

Both candidates support comprehensive immigration reform. Bennet said it’s important that immigrants learn English and have full access to education and employment. He said that encouraging people to live in the shadows is a recipe for failure. That’s when people become a drain on the education system and health care systems.

Romanoff agreed. The U.S. needs to secure its borders and regulate employers who hire illegal immigrant workers. He supports a path to citizenship.

Both candidates feel the president and Congress should scale back troop involvement in Afghanistan while encouraging democratic and economic development there.

Got a tip? Freelance story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

These events beg a question some analysts have been asking since the dawn of the so-called new economy, when the internet and digital communications became integrated with the for-profit privately held universe. The question goes something like: How well does our desire for free expression mix with the demands and constraints of business?*

Twitter announced Monday it might have to shut down Iran’s postmodern revolution to make technical upgrades, because, you know, Twitter is a business after all and its managers and tech people had already decided that now was the time.

Concerned user/customers tweeted Twitter to say that now was not the time for upgrades, and Twitter agreed.

‘Our network host had planned this upgrade for tonight,’ [Twitter] founder Biz Stone said yesterday in a message to users. ‘However, our network partners at NTT America recognise the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran.’

So the revolution will be Twittered without interruption — by consent of management.

Social media’s power of political persuasion may be coming of age but so are questions about the ethics of tweeting, friending and so on.

In the U.S. election last year, when Facebook groups centered around libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul and Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton complained that their pages were being censored, Facebook administrators said that the groups were actually only experiencing technical glitches. Was Facebook, whose management was in the tank for Obama, telling the truth? Maybe. Who knows?

Reporting the story for the Huffington Post, Sara Hebert wrote that many Facebook users were becoming politically active for the first time in their lives and doing so in the post 9-11 world shaped by the secretive and abusive Bush-Cheney Administration.

The fear that Facebook may be biased — another source of hidden control, either as a result of staff interference or software design or alleged or ignored technical difficulties — seems a natural concern and one that should be addressed as a function of the medium.

Hebert advocated a “transparency division,” in effect, for all digital communications services, which would work to bolster confidence. It just makes good business sense, she argued.

In a digital world, the ability for privately owned services that are increasingly the contemporary equivalent of the public communications utilities of the now-distant past — early radio and TV and telephones — should expect wariness and suspicion on the part of users who depend on these technologies to communicate their most private and most political thoughts. To brush off issues of censorship as mere “technical glitches” is dispiriting for being remote and murky — the fertile swampland where fears of censorship grow.

But is depending on management to increase transparency really the best option, the best way to guard our “most private and most political thoughts”?

In a recent post to the IDC listserv — a space where analysts and theorists of all stripes explore our digital reality — IT theorist Nick Knouf considered Twitter.

He presents the conditions of use Twitter imposes on its users:

1. We reserve the right to modify or terminate the Twitter.com service for any reason, without notice at any time.

2. We reserve the right to alter these Terms of Use at any time. If the alterations constitute a material change to the Terms of Use, we will notify you via internet mail according to the preference expressed on your account. What constitutes a “material change” will be determined at our sole discretion, in good faith and using common sense and reasonable judgement.

3. We reserve the right, in accordance with any applicable laws, to refuse service to anyone for any reason at any time.

4. We may, but have no obligation to, remove Content and accounts containing Content that we determine in our sole discretion are unlawful, offensive, threatening, libelous, defamatory, obscene or otherwise objectionable or violates any party’s intellectual property or these Terms of Use.

5. The Twitter service makes it possible to post images and text hosted on Twitter to outside websites. This use is accepted (and even encouraged!). However, pages on other websites which display data hosted on Twitter.com must provide a link back to Twitter.

6. We reserve the right to reclaim usernames on behalf of businesses or individuals that hold legal claim or trademark on those usernames.

Is all of that really OK with all of us? Knouf asks. He suggests another kind of “Twitter Revolution” for Americans to undertake and celebrate:

I fail to understand why people continue to valorize a commercial service for these things while perfectly equivalent (in terms of technical functionality) services exist like http://identi.ca/ running Laconica (http://laconi.ca/trac/). So why not make a statement and encourage a move to an alternative service, thus refusing to materially support a provider that claims the right to remove anything it finds “otherwise objectionable” …? There are differences– real ones at that — between services that claim a faux-openness and those that are based on another type of openness that at least allows modification, forking, and … [user] control.

—
* I wrote a sloppy version of the question and so updated it. It originally appeared as: “Who will guarantee free expression now that we depend on businesses to transmit those expressions?” As Ernest pointed out in comments, with few exceptions, we have long depended on businesses to transmit our expressions.

A display of photographs and a statement by the Iranian artist in the halls of Colorado International School has caused a dust-up between administrators and an outraged parent who accuses the school of spreading “anti-American propaganda.”

Every month at this language-immersion school of 44 students, most of whom are in pre-school and kindergarten, the customs, geography and language of one nation are highlighted with a special presentation. This month, to coincide with Persian New Year, the focus is on Iran, and the school invited Farhad Vakili Tabar to display photographs from his homeland.

The pictures show smiling children at work and at play in the different regions of Iran. No controversy there; it’s the artist’s statement of purpose, which is framed and hanging by the school office, that has raised eyebrows.

Near the photos of the Iranian children is one image of an Iraqi boy named Ali Rekaad, a brief story of his life, and the date and time that he and his entire family were killed by a U.S. bomb. Underneath is artist Farhad Vakili Tabar’s stated purpose for the collection of photographs:

“By showing the portraits of some Iranian children, I hope to bring up the faces of thousands of Iraqi children who have died, become orphans, handicapped or homeless in this war.”

  Michael Thau, who says he speaks for other furious parents, calls the display traumatic and inappropriate for children, who shouldn’t be learning about the murder of innocent children at the hands of U.S. soldiers — people who could be members of their own family.

“This has nothing to do with one’s perspective on the war and occupation,” Thau said. “The whole purpose of the exhibit is to feel bad about and learn about dead children in Iraq reportedly killed by U.S. forces – that’s enough for a lot of people to see this as an extremely volatile, one-sided, half-truth approach.”

Cielle Amundson, the head of Colorado International School, says the display of photographs was meant to help students identify with the children of Iran. The artist’s political statement was purposely hung high – above the eye-level of 4- to 6-year-olds – where it would be visible to the adults.

“I don’t see it as anti-American; I see it as anti-war,” Amundson said. “It was meant for adult discussion. The little kids have no clue; they are just excited to see images of other kids around the world.”

Asked why he used images of Iranian children to make a statement about the war in Iraq, Vakili Tabar answered that the image of Ali Rekaad reminds him of the boys and girls he grew up with in Tehran.

“To me the point is that we can’t go after bad guys and become the bad guys ourselves; to isolate the terrorists we must not ourselves terrorize; destruction is not the way to peace,” he said.

But Vakili Tabar, who has lived in the United States for 31 years, says even a U.S.-led war that he vehemently opposes will not shake his allegiance to his adopted country.

“This country is much more than its politicians,” he said. “This country is the people and the concept behind its formation. I love this nation because in both law and concept it has accepted diversity.”

The display of Vakili Tabar’s photographs, as well as his statement of purpose, is currently on display at the Colorado International School, 4100 E. Iliff Ave., Denver.

The road to stripping public pensions of immoral investments will require significant detours. Colorado has mapped out two. On Tuesday, the state’s retirement program announced a moratorium on new investments in companies doing significant amounts of business in the Iranian energy industry. This follows legislation last year that decreed divestiture of Sudanese-related investments.Colorado’s move puts it among the leaders of a nascent national movement to strip all public pensions of Iran-related investments.

However, until the concept of fiduciary responsibility changes, buying stocks and bonds that generate enough return to fund the retirement checks of former state employees begins and ends with an amoral commitment to making money.

Meredith Williams, who directs the Colorado Public Employees’ Retirement Association known as PERA, acknowledged as much after the hoopla of a press conference in the governor’s office announcing the agreement on Iran.

“PERA employees are part of a trust,” Williams explained. “By law, they have a fiduciary responsibility to do what is in the best interest of (retired) employees.”

That means that for all the talk of punishing Iran financially for its contributions to terrorism and the distribution of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) used to take American lives in Iraq and Afghanistan, the law may not allow PERA to dump hundreds of millions of dollars worth of stock in companies doing business in Iran.

“That’s possible,” Williams agreed in an impromptu press conference in the halls of the Capitol.

The legislature set the legal standard for automatic divestiture at genocide. There is no genocide in Iran – at least none that has been reported and confirmed as is the case in Sudan. The upshot is that Colorado’s retirees could be living partly on blood money for years to come.

The moratorium on future investments in Iran-linked companies is a start. It avoided legislative action that is hard to adjust to meet changing circumstances. It received the blessings of Republicans and Democrats, as well as the Jewish Community Relations Council.

State Treasurer Cary Kennedy, a Democrat, called the Iranian divestiture resolution an “example of success achieved when everyone works together without partisan bickering.”

“America’s public pensions should not aid and abet regimes that build IEDs or call for the destruction of Israel,” added Republican state Sen. Josh Penry. “This policy is rooted in the best interest of those who invested in PERA. This agreement is a model to be emulated by other pensions …”

It is also a model without deadlines. The Iran divestiture resolution that the PERA board unanimously endorsed includes no certain dates for taking specific actions.

“The biggest change is in gathering information (about companies’ Iranian connections),” Williams said. “We’ll go more in depth and engage the companies (in discussions of their Iranian ties) – what portion of their operations are in Iran. There is not a time frame. It will vary from firm to firm. Some may blow us off. Some may bury us in information.”

PERA will file quarterly reports of its progress in Iranian divestiture. But right now, it has not even developed a list of companies that will be excluded from future investments, nor has it decided which, if any, of its current holdings ought to be shed.

The standard will be if a company has invested more than $20 million in the Iranian energy industry in any one of a specified 10 years, Williams explained.

Once again, no time frame exists for PERA establishing a list of those who have done that.

The promise of action hinges on untangling often complex trails of ownership that wind their way back to Iran. Or as Williams put it: “Companies owning companies owning companies.”

Even that does not guarantee the sale of existing holdings if PERA can’t find non-Iran-linked companies that offer a comparable value and return.

Gov. Bill Ritter was right when he said that divestiture by public pensions helped bring an end to apartheid in South Africa.

But as long as the road to what’s morally right runs through the intersection of what’s fiscally sound, the citizens can expect gridlock.