*Wow! What a useful term of art! It ranks with "chilling effect, "knifing the baby," and "stealing the oxygen." "Strangle the viability!" You don't shoot them or arrest them, or legally charge them with anything... they're just Specially Designated National and Blocked Persons, and they're denied a role in the economic system, and they're just not "viable."
*I idly wonder how many people are Specially Designated National and Blocked Persons. Are they a really large global underclass yet? Do they have their own website in an outlaw state somewhere?
*How would you know if your organization was being "de-viable-ized?" Is it totally secret, like the No-Fly List, or is it blazingly public and loudly trumpeted, like a McCarthy Blacklist?
Via @GregMitch, who is becoming the Ted Koppel marathon journalist for the Wikileaks scandal.
http://www.nasdaq.com/aspx/stock-market-news-story.aspx?storyid=201101121933dowjonesdjonline000522&title=us-rep-wants-to-bar-companies-from-dealing-with-wikileaks
US Rep Wants To Bar Companies from Dealing With Wikileaks
By Ryan Tracy, Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
WASHINGTON -(Dow Jones)- U.S. Rep. Peter T. King (R., NY), the Republican who chairs the House Committee on Homeland Security, asked Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner Wednesday to prohibit people and companies within the U.S. from doing business with the Wikileaks website that has publicized hundreds of thousands of secret government documents.
King said the prohibition should also extend to Wikileaks' founder, Julian Assange. Both ought to be placed on the Specially Designated National and Blocked Persons List, which the Treasury Department can use to bar companies and individuals subject to U.S. jurisdiction from conducting business with a given entity, King said.
King noted that some U.S. companies had voluntarily cut off ties to Wikileaks, but that a New York publisher had recently agreed to pay Assange for an autobiography. Assange has said the book fees would help "keep Wikileaks afloat."
"The U.S. government simply cannot continue its ineffective piecemeal approach of responding in the aftermath of Wikileaks' damage," King wrote in a letter to Geithner. "The U.S. government should be making every effort to strangle the viability of Assange's organization."...
*Julian gets a word in on the subject. Might have more "viability" if he used the term "blood libel."
