Category Archives: Activism

Washington moves to silence WikiLeaks

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By Bill Van Auken

Source: WSWS.org

The cutting off of Internet access for Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is one more ugly episode in a US presidential election campaign that has plumbed the depths of political degradation.

Effectively imprisoned in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for over four years, Assange now is faced with a further limitation on his contact with the outside world.

On Tuesday, the Foreign Ministry of Ecuador confirmed WikiLeaks’ charge that Ecuador itself had ordered the severing of Assange’s Internet connection under pressure from the US government. In a statement, the ministry said that WikiLeaks had “published a wealth of documents impacting on the US election campaign,” adding that the government of Ecuador “respects the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of other states” and “does not interfere in external electoral processes.” On that grounds, the statement claimed, the Ecuadorian government decided to “restrict access” to the communications network at its London embassy.

This statement from the bourgeois government of Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa is a study in hypocrisy and cowardice. By abetting the US government’s suppression of WikiLeaks, Quito has intervened in the US elections on the side of the ruling establishment and against the rights of the American people. If Correa expects that his professed sensitivity toward the “principle of non-intervention” will be reciprocated, he should recall the fate of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, who was toppled in a coup orchestrated by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2009.

WikiLeaks cited reports that Secretary of State John Kerry had demanded that the government of Ecuador carry out the action “on the sidelines of the negotiations” surrounding the abortive Colombian peace accord last month in Bogota. The US government intervened to prevent any further exposures that could damage the campaign of Clinton, who has emerged as the clear favorite of the US military and intelligence complex as well as the Wall Street banks.

Whether the State Department was the only entity placing pressure on Ecuador on behalf of the Clinton campaign, or whether Wall Street also intervened directly, is unclear. The timing of the Internet cutoff, in the immediate aftermath of the release of Clinton’s Goldman Sachs speeches, may be more than coincidental.

In the spring of 2014, the government of Ecuador agreed to transfer more than half of its gold reserves to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. for three years, in an attempt to raise cash to cover a growing deficit brought on by the collapse in oil prices. It reportedly sent 466,000 ounces of gold to Goldman Sachs, worth about $580 million at the time, in return for “high security” financial instruments and an anticipated profit on its investment. It is hardly a stretch of the imagination to believe that such a relationship would give Goldman Sachs considerable leverage in relation to the Ecuadorian government.

In any case, it is evident that the US ruling establishment is growing increasingly desperate to stanch the flow of previously secret emails and documents that are exposing the real character not only of Clinton, but of capitalist politics as a whole. While WikiLeaks has released over 17,000 emails from the account of Clinton campaign manager and top establishment Democrat John Podesta, it is believed that there are more than 33,000 still to come.

The transcripts of Clinton’s speeches to Goldman Sachs and other top banks and employers’ groups, for which she was paid on average $200,000 per appearance, are the most incriminating. They expose the workings of the oligarchy that rules America and the thinking and actions of a politician prepared to do anything to advance the interests of this ruling stratum, while simultaneously accruing ever greater riches and power for herself.

While on the campaign trail, Clinton has postured as a “progressive,” determined to hold Wall Street’s feet to the fire. But in her speeches to Goldman Sachs, she made clear her unconditional defense of the banks and financial houses. Under conditions of popular outrage against the bankers and their role in dragging millions into crisis in the financial meltdown of 2008, Clinton gave speeches praising the Wall Street financiers and insisting that they were best equipped to regulate themselves. She apologized to them for supporting the toothless Dodd-Frank financial regulatory law, saying that it had to be enacted for “political reasons.”

In front of her Wall Street audiences, Clinton made clear she had no inhibitions about ordering mass slaughter abroad. While telling her public audiences that she supports a “no-fly zone” in Syria as a humanitarian measure to save lives, she confidentially acknowledged to her Goldman Sachs audience that such an action is “going to kill a lot of Syrians” and become “an American and NATO involvement where you take a lot of civilians.” In the same speech she declared her willingness to bomb Iran.

The emails have laid bare the nexus of corrupt connections between the State Department, the Clinton Foundation, her various campaigns and her network of financial and corporate donors, which together constitute a quasi-criminal influence-peddling enterprise that could best be described as “Clinton, Inc.”

The revelations contained in the WikiLeaks material have been ignored or downplayed by the corporate media, which instead has focused unrelentingly on the charges of sexual misconduct leveled against Clinton’s Republican rival, Donald Trump.

The Clinton camp itself has sought to deflect any questions regarding what the candidate said in her speeches or the corrupt operations of her campaign by claiming, with no evidence whatsoever, that the material released by WikiLeaks had been hacked by the Russian government and therefore cannot be trusted.

This line of argumentation serves not only to divert attention from the WikiLeaks material, but also to further the Clinton campaign’s neo-McCarthyite claims of Kremlin intervention on behalf of Trump and advance a propaganda campaign aimed at preparing popular opinion for a direct military confrontation with Russia.

There is an air of desperation in the attempt to quash the WikiLeaks material. CNN news anchor Chris Cuomo, an open supporter of Clinton, went so far as to lie to his audience, claiming it was illegal for them to access the emails and insisting they could obtain any information on them only through the filter of the corporate media.

Well before the release of documents related to the Democratic Party, the determination of ruling circles to suppress WikiLeaks had found repeated and violent expression. State Department officials have come forward with a report that in 2010, in the midst of WikiLeaks’ mass release of State Department cables exposing US imperialist operations around the world, Clinton, then secretary of state, asked subordinates, “Can’t we just drone this guy?” She recently said she could not remember the remark, but if she made it, it was a joke.

During the same period, however, Clinton supporter and longtime Democratic campaign operative Bob Beckel declared in a television interview in relation to Assange: “A dead man can’t leak stuff. This guy’s a traitor, he’s treasonous, and he has broken every law of the United States… there’s only one way to do it: illegally shoot the son of a bitch.”

To this point, the American ruling class has limited itself to judicial frame-ups and character assassination, counting on the help of its servants within both the media and the pseudo-left, large sections of which have either joined the witch-hunt against Assange or downplayed his victimization.

The principal vehicle for this campaign of persecution had been fabricated allegations of sexual misconduct pursued by Swedish authorities acting in league with the US and British governments. Earlier this year, the UN’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention issued findings that Assange had been “deprived of his liberty in an arbitrary manner,” meaning the body had reached the conclusion that the Swedish case constituted a politically motivated frame-up.

In the midst of the current attempt to silence Assange, an even more bizarre and filthy frame-up has been concocted, attempting to smear the WikiLeaks founder with charges of taking Russian money as well as pedophilia.

At the center of these allegations is a little known online dating service, Toddandclare.com, which first attempted to lure Assange into a supposed deal to film an ad for the site, for which he supposedly would be paid $1 million, to be provided by the Russian government. When WikiLeaks rejected this preposterous provocation, the same site claimed that Assange had been charged with inappropriate contact through the site with an eight-year-old Canadian child visiting the Bahamas. This accusation was then invoked in an attempt to pressure the UN to drop its demand for an end to the persecution of Assange.

Even a cursory investigation makes clear that these allegations constitute a grotesque fabrication. Bahamian police have stated that there are no charges or any case whatsoever against Assange. The dating service has no business address, working phone number or corporate presence anywhere in the US, having all the earmarks of a dummy company created by US intelligence for the purpose of hounding Assange.

The use of such tactics is a measure of how terrified the US ruling class has become in the face of growing mass hostility to both major political parties and their two abhorrent candidates. Their fear is that the relentless exposure of the inner workings of a government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich is robbing the existing political setup of what little legitimacy it had left within the population, and creating the conditions for a political radicalization within the working class and social upheavals, whoever is elected on November 8.

 

Related Article:

Real Reason Trump’s Being Treated Like He’s Crazy for Refusing to Accept Election Results by Rob Kall

The Cyber-War on Wikileaks

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By Srećko Horvat

Source: CounterPunch

When the ruling class is in panic, their first reaction is to hide the panic.

They react out of cynicism: when their masks are revealed, instead of running around naked, they usually point the finger at the mask they wear. These days the whole world could witness a postmodern version of the infamous quote “Let them eat cake”, attributed to Marie-Antoinette, queen of France during the French Revolution.

As a reaction to WikiLeaks publishing his emails, John Podesta, the man behind Hillary Clinton’s campaign, posted a photo of a dinner preparation, saying “I bet the lobster risotto is better than the food at the Ecuadorian Embassy”.

A similar version of vulgar cynicism emerged earlier this month when Hillary Clinton reacted to the claim that she reportedly wanted to “drone” WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (“Can’t we just drone this guy?”) when she was the US Secretary of State. Instead of denying her comments, Clinton said that she doesn’t recall any such joke, “It would have been a joke if it had been said, but I don’t recall that”.

One doesn’t have to read between the lines to understand that if Hillary Clinton had said that, she would have considered it a joke. But when emperors joke, it usually has dire consequences for those who are the objects of their “humor.”

Cyber-war Not with Russia…but WikiLeaks

During the last few months I have visited Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London several times and each time I came out of the Embassy, where he is spending his fifth year in political asylum under legitimate fear he might be extradited to the US, my thought was the following one: although he lives, without his family, in a postmodern version of solitary confinement (even prisoners are allowed to walk for up to one hour a day), although he has no access to fresh air or sunlight for more than 2000 days, although the UK government recently denied him safe passage to a hospital for an MRI scan, if his access to the internet would be cut off this would be the most severe attack on his physical and mental freedom.

The last time I saw him, which was only two weeks ago, he expressed the fear that, because he had already published leaks concerning US elections and with more to come, the US might find various ways to silence him, including pressuring Ecuador or even shutting down the internet.

What seemed a distant possibility only two weeks ago, soon became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

When the Obama administration recently announced that it is, as Biden said, planing an “unprecedented cyber covert action against Russia”, the first victim was not Putin, but precisely Julian Assange whose internet was cut off just a day after Biden’s self-contradictory proclamation.

No wonder Edward Snowden reacted immediately by saying that “nobody told Joe Biden what ‘covert operation’ means.

According to the U.S. Department of Defense’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, a covert operation is “an operation that is so planned and executed as to conceal the identity of or permit plausible denial by the sponsor.”

It is no secret anymore that the Ecuadorian government has come under extreme pressure since Assange leaked the Democratic National Committee email database. We don’t know yet whether the US pressured Ecuador to shut down the internet, but it is clear that the present US government and the government to come is fighting a war with WikiLeaks which is all but “covert”. Is it really a coincidence that Julian Assange’s internet access was cut off shortly after publication of Clinton’s Goldman Sachs speeches?

If at the beginning we still had a “soft” version of postmodern McCarthyism, with Hillary calling everyone opposed to her campaign a Russian spy (not only Assange, but also Donald Trump and Jill Stein), then with Obama’s recent intervention it became more serious.

With Obama’s threat of a cyber-war, the “soft” McCarthyism didn’t only acquire geopolitical significance, but at the same time a new mask was revealed: Obama is obviously trying to cement the public debate and make the Russian threat “real”, or at least to use it as a weapon in order to help Clinton to get elected. Moreover, this new twist in something that has already become much more than only US elections (US elections are never only US elections!), shows not only how Obama is ready to strengthen Hillary’s campaign, but it also reveals that a cyber war is already in the making.

It is not a cyber war with Russia, but with WikiLeaks.

And it is not the first time.

What would Clausewitz say?

In 2010, when the Collateral Murder video was published, the Afghan and Iraq war logs were released, and we witnessed one of the most sinister attacks on freedom of speech in recent history. VISA, Mastercard, Diners, American Express and Paypal imposed a banking blockade on WikiLeaks, although WikiLeaks had not been charged with any crime at either state, federal or international level. So if the US government successfully convinced payment companies representing more than 97% of the global market to shut down an independent publisher, why wouldn’t they pressure Ecuador or any other state or company to cut off the internet?

The US is not only rhetorically trying to “get” Assange (it is worth to check out the Assassinate Assange video for evidence of the verbal masturbation of US officials), he poses a serious threat to the major elite factions in the US to remain in power. No wonder panic is rising in the US, which is now going even so far that a 16-year-old boy in Britain has been arrested on criminal charges related to the alleged hacking of email accounts used by CIA director John Brennan, which WikiLeaks published in October 2016.

What WikiLeaks obviously successfully challenged–and maybe one day (“history is written by the victors”, remember?) it will be learned in military strategy– is what the Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz would call the “centre of gravity” (Schwerpunkt), which is the “central feature of the enemy’s power”.

Instead of speaking about the Russians, we should start speaking about the Schwerpunkt of the actual leaks, their real essence. Just take the following quotes by Hillary Clinton exposed by WikiLeaks, which reveal her true nature and the politics behind her campaign: “We are going to ring China with missile defence”, “I want to defend fracking” and climate change environmentalists “should get a life”, “you need both a public and a private position”, “my dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders”.

What WikiLeaks has shown is not only that Hillary is a hawkish war-monger, first it was Libya (over 1,700 of the 33,000 Clinton emails published by WikiLeaks reference Libya), then it was Syria (at a Goldman Sachs conference she explicitly stated she would like to intervene in Syria), tomorrow it will be another war.

It is now clear – and this is the real “centre of gravity” where we should focus our attention – that the future Clinton cabinet may already been filled with Wall Street people like Obama’s was. No wonder WikiLeaks revelations create utter panic not only in the Democratic Party itself but also the Obama administration.

One question remains, isn’t WikiLeaks, by leaking all these dirty secrets, influencing the US elections? Yes, it certainly is, but the current criticism misses its point: isn’t the very point of organisations such as WikiLeaks to publish the material they have and to influence public opinion?

The question should finally be turned around: isn’t the US mainstream media the one influencing the US elections? And isn’t Obama, by announcing a cyber-war with Russia, influencing the elections?

WikiLeaks is not only influencing the US elections, but transforming the US elections – as they should have been from the very beginning – into a global debate with serious geopolitical consequences at stake. What WikiLeaks is doing is revealing this brutal fight for power, but, as the old saying goes, “when a wise man points at the Moon, the idiot looks at the finger”. Instead of looking at the finger pointing to Russia, we should take a look at the leaks themselves.

If democracy and transparency means anything today, we should say: let them leak!

 

Srećko Horvat is a philosopher and activist. He is co-author, with Slavoj Žižek, of What Does Europe Want? (Columbia University Press, 2014) and author of The Radicality of Love (Polity Press, 2015). Together with Yanis Varoufakis he co-created the movement DiEM 25. https://diem25.org/

A Nonviolent Strategy to End the Climate Catastrophe

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By Robert J. Burrowes

As the evidence mounts that we are fast approaching the final point-of-no-return beyond which it will be impossible to take sufficient effective action to prevent climate catastrophe – see ‘The World Passes 400 PPM Threshold. Permanently‘– the evidence of ineffective official responses climbs too. See, for example, ‘Climate Con: why a new global deal on aviation emissions is really bad news’.

Even worse, we continue to be given response options that, even when they are well meaning, are naïve and inadequate whether they are suggested by individuals – see, for example, ‘Committing Geocide: Climate Change and Corporate Capture‘– or major environment organizations such as Greenpeace, 350.org and
Friends of the Earth.

Moreover, given the myriad indications of progressive environmental breakdown in domains unrelated to the climate catastrophe, one must be terrified and delusional to suggest or even believe that anything less than a comprehensive strategy, which goes well beyond anything governments and corporations will ever endorse, gives us any chance of averting the sixth mass extinction event in planetary history. A mass extinction that will include us.

As an aside, if you believe the ‘end of century’ scenario (for human extinction) being driven by the same corporate interests that drove climate denial for so long, then you are simply a victim of their latest attempt to drive ‘business as usual’ while delaying action for as long as possible at any cost.

Another problem, if you understand anything about human psychology and political organization, is that mobilizing people in large numbers to act strategically and powerfully is not easy. Of course, if it wasn’t so difficult, this crisis would not have arisen in the first place. We would have responded intelligently and strategically decades ago as some aware individuals, starting with Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi 100 years ago, suggested.

To briefly recap the wider nature of the crisis we face: Consider our synergistic and devastating assaults on the environment through military violence (often leaving vast areas uninhabitable), rainforest destruction, industrial farming, mining, commercial fishing and the spreading radioactive contamination from Fukushima. We are also systematically destroying the limited supply of fresh water on the planet which means that water scarcity is becoming a frequent reality for many people and the collapse of hydrological systems is now likely by 2020. Human activity drives 200 species of life (plants, birds,animals, fish, amphibians, insects, reptiles) to extinction each day and 80% of the world’s forests and over 90% of the large fish in the ocean are already gone. Despite this readily available information, governments continue to prioritize spending $US2,000,000,000 each day on military violence, the sole purpose of which is to terrorize and kill fellow human beings.

So what are we to do?

Well, if you are inclined to assess the evidence and to design a response strategy that has the possibility of success built into it,then I invite you to consider the strategy outlined on the Nonviolent Campaign Strategy website.  This strategy identifies all twelve components of a nonviolent strategy to end the climate catastrophe, including the myriad of strategic goals for such a strategy to be comprehensive and effective. You are very welcome to suggest improvements in this strategy and to invite other individuals and groups to participate in helping to implement it.

If you are happy to leave strategic responses to others but still wish to contribute powerfully, then you and others you know are welcome to participate in the simple fifteen-year program outlined in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth‘. You might also consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World‘.

One final point: a tragic outcome of modern humans terrorizing their children into obedience (to maintain social control) is that most of the human population is (unconsciously) terrified, self-hating and powerless. For a full explanation of this, see ‘Why Violence?‘ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice‘.

So don’t wait around waiting for others to act first. It is your leadership that is required in this circumstance. And it is your leadership that might ultimately make the difference.

 

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?‘ His email address is flametree@riseup.netand his website is at http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com

Robert J. Burrowes
P.O. Box 68
Daylesford
Victoria 3460
Australia
Email: flametree@riseup.net

Websites:
Nonviolence Charter
Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth
‘Why Violence?’
Nonviolent Campaign Strategy
Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy
Anita: Songs of Nonviolence
Robert Burrowes
Global Nonviolence Network

I Participate

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By Jonathan Bessette

Source: Adbusters

Recall that you’re sitting in a rapid transit vehicle, carried along the sky-line above cement highways, paved in homage to the Romans, who designed a system of militarized paths stretching everywhere, causing everything to lead back to one place. Here we are everyone, the year of the Monkey, 2016, 98 years after The Great War … too bad it isn’t the year of the Dalmatians … Mickey Mouse recently Tweeted that Disney is working on buying the rights to the Chinese lunar calendar. Imagine 12 animated classics framing each and every year for the remainder of humanity’s existence. 

At this point human society is so vast, so complex, so multilayered, that it is impossible to stay updated, engaged, and participating in every area of local and global importance. Education takes us from a place of innocence, creativity and joy, forcing us to fall into the institutional lines of desks and faced forward attention. As a nodal point of knowledge each new person will be filled to the brim with information that makes them useful to the status quo.

Neuroscience now tells us that the brain has plasticity and the neurosynaptic networks that are created through nurturing, which become identity and personality, can be changed and overwritten. Newer pathways can be formed and strengthened and older ones can be reduced. Does this mean that our free-will has a physical manifestation as identity, as culture, and every choice affects the people, animals and objects around us? Everything we think and do reinforces everything we think and do, creating a strange logical loop which justifies our lives as ourselves. Without any major impetus, what reason do we have to change? Why compromise our internally consistent narrative and accept the narrative of someone else? What stands to be different?

Surreality is becoming a more constant state as life in the present starts to look like Science Fiction of the future from the past. The last historian wandering around Paris in the 21st Century, forgotten by a technologically advanced world that cares only for materialism. A beguiled Case, the lead character of Gibson’s Neuromancer, disenfranchised because he can no longer participate in the romance of cyberspace, looking something like a hacker barred by the law to approach or touch a computer. Of course cyborgs, robots, virtual reality and AI dance at the periphery, the momentum of current technological trends, yet we titillate ourselves with the practical possibility of these totems nearing our hearts and minds.

Information overflows like never before. Some cry Apocalypse! End Times! The Rapture! But most of the world is still filling up their gas tanks, believing that the day when Climate Change will actually affect them is the day that it will be clearly outlined in a power point presentation, at their offices or wherever they work, explaining the equity found in maintaining current profit margins while in the same breath rearranging the economic vehicle of prosperity.     

“Change without Changing!” might be the Party Slogan for whoever runs for the Presidency after Obama sputters to a close.

Take my hand and run through the ever-increasing fields of soya beans, where we can hear the Monsanto genetically-modified breeze blowing the answer in the wind, whispering corporate sonatas, proving that commercial capitalism is a system of religion. Faith in Profit! The Gospel of Endless Progress! Join our Church of Business! Maybe Monsanto can use its private militia to assassinate Thomas Piketty, because of the seeds he’s sowing about capitalism being a mechanical beast that needs regulation because its fuel is the disparity between rich and poor … the larger the gap the more efficacious the fuel.

Then I think whether or not you’ll be reading this on paper or a flat-screen … whether either will be made from recyclable resources, and the argument that the printed word is less sustainable than the digital, so let’s put them to the test, right here, right now:

What can you do with a single piece of printed paper? Read it, eat it, burn it, re-write on it, make origami, a paper airplane or a boat, use it as a funnel, snort powders with it, wipe our bums? What can we do with a tablet? Access every possible available medium via the Internet and software?

It takes at least a lumber, ink, metal, and print industry to create the basic elements to manufacture printed media on a large scale. The average printed matter, kept in modest condition, can last up to 100 years and still be usable. The space that a single printed work takes up is quite large, creating the need to provide space of the material itself. When recycling an old book there are few components to worry about, making it rather simple.

It takes at least most types of mining and the processing of raw materials (petroleum, silicon, zinc, aluminum), software and hardware development, manufacturing, and the assembly of components to create a tablet. The average tablet, kept in modest condition, can remain functional until it’s obsolete. It certainly will not last 100 years, and even if it did the components, chips and circuitry would be so worn down that anything you might have used it for would no longer be possible. Of course you can store a million, a billion, even a zillion books on a single tablet, but will everyone have equal access to it? Tablets are extremely difficult to recycle, their components don’t just make up another tablet. The loss from entropy alone assures destruction, and we cannot grow more zinc, petroleum, or aluminum.

But really none of this matters, we don’t have any control over what corporations choose to do with our futures, or what medium we will use. These new, futuristic developments, intended to define human culture, are being devised and formed inside of grand boardrooms, in tall skyscrapers, by CEOs and shareholders. They, the 1%, are only concerned with whether the product they create for us will become a necessary commodity, like food, like water, like shelter … like Subway, like Coke Cola, like Single Room Occupancies (SROs).

You hear someone talking about the protest on Burnaby Mountain. People don’t want Kinder-Morgan expanding the capacity of an already existent pipeline because it will significantly increase the traffic of oil tankers in the Burrard Inlet. Someone else discusses the unrest of activist groups in Vancouver; about the substandard living conditions; the war on the poor; the two new prisons … they care about housing those who arise from poverty and have been given nowhere else to go. Anger overtakes you for a moment and you think, I don’t like this, why is there so much injustice, maybe I can do something about it…

A flabbergasted voice backtracking intellectual missives comes on over the radio, you’re not sure if it’s in your head or not:
“Revolution is just going around and around, it’s a cycle, it begins with violence and it ends with violence and it only achieves the same power structure that precedes it.”

You think about the French Revolution, the Arab Spring, Anonymous, and realize grass-roots change can rise up from the ground, from the dirt, from the dust whence we came, to challenge the oligarchical deities of the political / corporate aristocracy. We can sell everything we own and buy whole streets collectively, live there together, change the land and what’s on it together. We can join all kinds of innovative communities. We can gather in massive groups and walk through the streets, calling attention to everything corruption has built up around us. We can participate in Civil Disobedience, because the obedience that is asked of us causes harm to someone or something that is alive and is not fairly allowed to defend itself.

No matter how much Ayn Rand and Alan Greenspan and Justin Trudeau tell you that the money will trickle down, no matter how much they tell you that they are the ones who created the railroads, produced the banks, developed the industries that sustain our economies … they didn’t do a damn thing. We laid the tracks, we hammered the spikes, we drove the trains, we maintained the services, we built the buildings, we painted the walls, we fitted the plumbing, we opened the doors, we mopped the floors, we surveyed the land, we mineral tested the rock, we operated the drills, we processed the crude and we shipped the products. None of these things that they presume to own did they make or build. They didn’t put one brick in the wall, they didn’t dig one trench, and they didn’t turn one switch. It’s all ours…

Now an unsettling feeling might skitter across you when you realize that you are implicated in this whole thing. Why do we feel so disenfranchised? Why does the 1% own so much more influence, so much more than we little peons? I feel powerless but every day I participate in the construction of human society. Every action contributes to a massive effect called the singularity of my life. Don’t fall into the kinds of aporia that Jacques Ellul observes in The Technological Society, where no one claims responsibility for the projects of technology. Who made this computer? Was it the engineers, or the design team, the software developers, the hardware makers? Or was it the companies who mined the silver, the petroleum, the zinc, the aluminum, the silicon? No single person in the process can take responsibility for the whole … so no one does, they just accept it, and its justification is its presence.

Well then … we are in a pickle aren’t we? But maybe revolution is the act of taking responsibility? Clips of revolution flicker through your mind-film, you see riots, Molotov cocktails, police lined up with transparent plastic shields. You realize you do not want to risk your comfort, your coziness, your conformity, so you fit in and play nice and salute whoever is in power. Or maybe you are just not interested, you have your soma, your serial monogamy, your fair trade Americano. Besides, you’re too busy, you’ve got kids, you work 60 hours a week, you recently bought a home in one of the most expensive housing markets in the world, you already have enough responsibilities …

Killing Democracy by a Thousand Cuts

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By Jim Heddle and Mary Beth Brangan

Source: FreePress.org

How are our votes being stolen? Let us count the ways…

Electoral Proctology

As the fateful June 7 primary election day approached in 6 states, including California, a stellar group of election protection luminaries gathered on Memorial Day weekend in a private home in Santa Monica with about 100 of their closest friends.  Their purpose, as that great American philosopher W.C. Fields once advised, was ‘to seize the bull by the tail and stare the situation squarely in the face.’

[ See videos of the meeting: Don’t Let Them Steal Your Vote –  Part 1https://youtu.be/Pax4z8AuGTU

Part 2  https://youtu.be/jF0Eab9wKQc  ]

Not a Pretty Picture

Chaired by movie star and long-time political activist Mimi Kennedy, a panel including Harvey Wasserman, Bob Fitrakis, Greg Palast, Bev Harris and John Blakey compared notes on the myriad methods their investigations have uncovered that are destroying the validity of U.S. elections. Facing these facts is the first step in the daunting task of restoring election integrity in America’s very broken electoral system.

In this year’s primary season alone we have seen:

·         Massive disenfranchisement caused by arbitrarily changing voters’ assigned precincts and then giving incorrect information on the changes.

·         Chaos caused in predominately minority districts by reducing the number of precincts  – and the number of machines per precinct – causing long lines and hours-long waits which turned away many voters with jobs or other time commitments.

·         Arcane regulations which instructed poll workers to give unprecedented numbers of voters ‘provisional ballots,’ which are rarely counted.

·         For example, in California, voters who registered ‘NPP’ for No Party Preference and were mailed a ballot, were not permitted to vote in the Democratic primary unless they took both the ballot and its envelope to a polling place and said the magic words, “I surrender this ballot and request a cross-over ballot.” Without those exact words, poll workers were instructed not to supply a ‘cross-over’ ballot AND not to inform the voter of the rule.

·         Media outlets prematurely calling elections before all ballots are counted – or, in some cases, even cast.

·         As of this writing, 2.6 million ballots yet to be counted for the California primary

But it gets worse.

Strip & Flip

The theme of the Santa Monica panel was set by a hot-off-the-press book just published by Fitrakis and Wasserman titled ‘The Strip & Flip Selection of 2016: The Five Jim Crows & Electronic Election Theft.’  [ Get it here: http://freepress.org/store.php ] This is the latest in a string of books the team has written in the last decade.  They have had a ringside seat to both observe – and also fight against – the increasing corruption of the U.S. electoral system, based, as they are in Columbus, Ohio, capitol of a key swing state.  In 2012, Fitrakis’s threatened lawsuit in Ohio state court prevented the planned electronic theft of the election and saved Obama’s election victory.

[See “Swing State: How the Fix Was Nixed in Ohio 2012”   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10qwtBlHeTY ]

Election Theft, as American as Apple Pie

Intentional disenfranchisement of potential voters in order to favor selected demographic sectors is simple in concept, if complex in means. It has been a part of the American electoral landscape from the git-go.  Eliminating legitimate voters from the voter rolls by various tactics – that’s the ‘strip’ part.  Skewing the ballot count in order to produce desired outcome percentages – that’s the ‘flip’ part – also achieved by multiple mechanisms, as we shall see.

“Not every conspiracy is a theory.”

The ad slogan for the current thriller ‘Money Monsters’ actually gets it right. Though poo-pooed as ‘conspiracy theory’ by pundits and vote fraud denialists across the political spectrum, Bob & Harvey’s work – in combination with the work of many other investigator/activists including co-panel members Bev Harris, Greg Palast,, Mimi Kennedy and John Blakey – has incontrovertibly revealed the plethora of means by which America’s electoral system has now been stripped of the last vestiges of whatever trustworthiness it may have ever actually possessed.

A short run down follows – to be expanded upon below – of issues discussed by the panel.

But, keep in mind that, for brevity, the list does not include additional key related issues, such as: unlimited campaign spending by anonymous persons and non-voting corporate entities and their surrogates – even from foreign states or agents; mainstream media’s biased reporting; manipulations by party officials; ‘super delegate’ and ‘contested convention’ schemes; the counter-democracy Electoral College; or the ‘gerrymandering-on-steroids’ REDMAP redistricting process carried out by Republicans following the 2010 election, which left them in control of the House of Representatives and many key state legislatures until at least 2020, when the next census-based re-districting is scheduled.  The latter major ploy is well documented in David Daley’s recent book “Rat F**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy.”)

Here’s the short list from the Santa Monica panel presentations:

·         Massive electronic purging of legitimate voters from voter rolls across the country

·         Massive vote suppression and disenfranchisement by myriad means on a national scale

·         Virtually decisive control of voter rolls without detection; vote counting and reporting by privately owned, secret, electronic devices and computer programs specifically designed to steal elections through cyber chicanery.

The Five Jim Crows

It all started with the constitution, Wasserman explained, a document drafted in secret, behind closed doors by a tiny elite of propertied white men, and rammed through to ratification by the states through electoral manipulation.   It denied voting rights to women and to males without property, but contained the “3/5ths clause” that gave slave owners congressional representation for their slaves despite the fact that the slaves themselves couldn’t vote.

The so-called Three-Fifths Compromise is in Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the United States Constitution:

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.

The effect, according to Wikipedia, “was to give the southern states a third more seats in Congress and a third more electoral votes than if slaves had been ignored, but fewer than if slaves and free persons had been counted equally, allowing the slaveholder interests to largely dominate the government of the United States until 1861.”  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Fifths_Compromise

It was also a divide-and-conquer strategy to make sure black and white laborers would never again unite in revolting as they did in Virginia in 1675 in what’s called Bacon’s Rebellion.

Fitrakis and Wasserman call that ‘the First Jim Crow.’  After the Civil War and emancipation, they explain, Supreme Court rulings, KuKluxKlan terror, black lynchings, literacy tests and other apartheid strategies established the ‘Second Jim Crow,’ that “again guaranteed that blacks in the South (and parts of the North) would not be allowed to vote, and that they would be carefully divided from whites by caste as well as class.”

The Third Jim Crow was/is the ‘War on Drugs’ initiated by Richard Nixon to combat the liberalization of the southern Democratic Party, the anti-war movement and the rise of the Black Power movement.  As Nixon administration official John Erlichman recently explained to Harper’s interviewer Dan Blum,

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”  https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/

Young, left-leaning Latinos were also caught up in the Drug War dragnet.  Now, 45 years later, 41 million (mostly people of color) have been jailed for pot and other controlled substances, making private corporate prisons a growth industry, and giving the U.S. the highest prison population in the world.  Though having no significant impact on drug use, the Drug War has disenfranchised millions of potential voters, and continues to do so today.  Michelle Alexander’s recent book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindnessshows how one system of race-based disenfranchisement has been replaced by another.  http://newjimcrow.com/

The Fourth Jim Crow, explain the authors, was born of America’s push to establish what they call “a race-based global empire” with a long series of foreign interventions – also continuing today – which “involved the white-ruled US interfering with the political systems of non-white nations.”

The impact of these interventions on our own political system, say Wasserman and Fitrakis, has been catastrophic. “They’ve established the US as a corporate-ruled race-based empire, fueling the growth of a military whose intrinsic power overshadows our entire electoral process…and set the stage for…the Fifth Jim Crow – the electronic flipping of our elections.”

Engineering Vote Fraud Abroad Comes Home to Roost

Manipulation of election outcomes in other countries has been developed into a high art by such US agencies as the CIA, USAID and other so-called ‘democracy promotion’ projects fielded abroad by both the Republican and Democratic parties.

Note the authors, “Overseas, the CIA began to apply advanced electronics to the art and science of election theft.  By the 1970’s, in front of the Church Committee, the Agency admitted to already having manipulated countless Third World elections to protect America’s corporate and ‘national security’ interests.”  They trace the subsequent development of electronic voting technology techniques, corporations and institutions up to the present day, when up to 80% of US votes in the coming presidential election will be electronically mediated.  In line with the adage that ‘what goes around, comes around,’ American expertise in foreign nations’ electronic vote rigging has now come home to compromise the integrity and validity of our own system, big time.

The New Jim Crow – “Interstate Crosscheck”

Panel member investigative journalist Greg Palast has been researching and reporting on this process for going on two decades for such outlets abroad as the BBC and the Guardian news paper.  Still, like the proverbial ‘prophet without honor in his own country,’ Palast states with deep frustration that he still has a hell of a time getting American so-called ‘mainstream’ media to pay any attention to his explosive exposes. http://www.gregpalast.com/

Now reporting for Rolling Stone, he is also using crowd funding to produce a forth-coming documentary titled, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: A Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kg2gCgFMBOg

In his presentation in Santa Monica Palast debunked claims by Donald Trump and others that ‘millions of people’ are committing ‘voter fraud’ by ‘voting more than once.’  Describing what he calls ‘the next, or Sixth Jim Crow,’  he reported that 29 state election officials across the country have announced the creation of what they call ‘The Interstate Crosscheck.’  Touted as a defense against mythical individual ‘voter fraud’ the system purports to identify people who are voting more than once, sometimes in multiple states, and purge them from polling lists.

In actuality, in violation of the Voting Rights Act, says Palast, the program uses census data to identify African American voters – tagged ‘BLA’ for black– with similar common names and fraudulently remove them from voter lists.

In the history of the South, when slaves were finally freed, they were often registered by their masters’ surnames.  As a result, to this day, many black persons carry the same or similar names, thus facilitating the “Interstate Crosscheck” scam.

Based on his findings, Palast says, “We expect 1 million voters – almost all of them voters of color – to lose their right to vote in 29 Republican-controlled states before the November election.”

But, he is quick to point out, it isn’t just Republicans who regularly mess with elections.  As questionable outcomes in this primary suggest, “the Democrats are dirty,” Palast says, pointing out that Democrats invented Jim Crow, which Nixon just adopted for his so-called ‘southern strategy.’

Palast admits to being tired of being a ‘reporter in exile,’ and hopes that, now that he is reporting for Rolling Stone, he can finally come home and report his investigative findings to his own countrymen “who need to know this stuff!”

“Fraction Magic” – A Digital Thumb on the Scale: Fractionalization & Decimalization of Votes

Harking back to the infamous “3/5ths clause” described above, what if you were hired to write a vote-counting program that could assign various arbitrary decimal or fractional values to each and all of the votes counted and come up with desired percentages for every candidate and contest?

To use a simple-minded butcher’s scale analogy: What if your program assigned a vote for Hillary the arbitrary ‘weight’ of 2 pounds, and assigned a Bernie vote just a weight of 1 pound?

Then, in a given race, Bernie got 200 votes and Hillary got 150 votes.

If you just added up the total votes for each candidate, you would call the election for Bernie with a 50-vote lead.

But, if your private, proprietary, secret counting program totaled their votes by the artificial ‘weights’ it arbitrarily assigned to them, you would announce Hillary the winner with a 300 to 200-vote lead.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the intentionally programed ‘glitch’ that BlackBoxVoting.org founder Bev Harris and her colleague, IT expert Bennie Smith have discovered in a significant number of America’s vote counting systems. It is achieved via ‘fractionalization’ or ‘decimalization.’

They explain that it works like this: “Instead of “1” the vote is allowed to be 1/2,  or 1+7/8, or any other value that is not a whole number.”

That allows ‘weighting’ of selected electoral contests. “Weighting a race removes the principle of ‘one person-one vote’ to allow some votes to be counted as less than one or more than one. Regardless of what the real votes are, candidates can receive a set percentage of votes. Results can be controlled. For example, Candidate A can be assigned 44% of the votes, Candidate B 51%, and Candidate C the rest.”

On her excellent webite BlackBoxVoting.org, Harris and Smith report,

…the results of our review of the GEMS election management system, which counts approximately 25 percent of all votes in the United States. The results of this study demonstrate that a fractional vote feature is embedded in each GEMS application which can be used to invisibly, yet radically, alter election outcomes by pre-setting desired vote percentages to redistribute votes. This tampering is not visible to election observers, even if they are standing in the room and watching the computer. Use of the decimalized vote feature is unlikely to be detected by auditing or canvass procedures, and can be applied across large jurisdictions in less than 60 seconds.  http://blackboxvoting.org/

“GEMS vote-counting systems are and have been operated under five trade names: Global Election Systems, Diebold Election Systems, Premier Election Systems, Dominion Voting Systems, and Election Systems & Software, in addition to a number of private regional subcontractors. At the time of this writing, this system is used statewide in Alaska, Connecticut, Georgia, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Utah and Vermont, and for counties in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin and Wyoming. It is also used in Canada.”

Read more: http://blackboxvoting.org/fraction-magic-1/

Adjusted Exit Polls

Around the world, so-called exit polls – which ask a sampling of exiting voters how they voted – are viewed as the Gold Standard for checking the accuracy of the ballot count.  In most countries, if the ballot count and the exit poll numbers don’t match, there is either a recount or the election is declared ‘not free and fair.’

Not so in America.  Here, as Jonathan Simon documents in his book Code Red: Computerized Election Theft and The New American Century, the exit poll numbers are instead adjusted to match the official vote count.

In the US, the exit pollster of record has been Edison/Mitofsky http://www.edisonresearch.com/election-polling/ working for a consortium of news organizations that comprise the National Election Pool (NEP): ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, NBC and the Associated Press.  As Wasserman relates, when election researcher and statistician Dr. Steve Freeman called the late Warren Mitofsky personally to request the raw data from the 2004 exit polls, the response was “Go f**k  yourself.”

[ See also: Analysis of the 2004 Presidential Election Exit Poll Discrepancies

http://www.verifiedvoting.org/wp-content/uploads/downloads/Exit_Polls_2004_Edison-Mitofsky.pdf

Maybe that’s why respected international election observer Former President Jimmy Carter can say the USA “is not a functioning democracy.”  Maybe that’s why, as Fitrakis and Wasserman point out:

In March 2015, the Harvard Electoral Integrity Project reported that over fourteen hundred international election experts gathered data the year before and pronounced the United States was 45th in election integrity among the world’s long-standing democracies. The Project reported that on a 100-point scale, the U.S. received an integrity rating of 69.3% – one notch ahead of the narco-drug state Columbia….

What this means in practice is revealed in a recent study of three decades of data by liberal mainstream political scientists Martin Gilens of Princeton, and Benjamin Page of Northwestern. Their analysis confirmed that the U.S. political system has become “an oligarchy” – as Carter himself has said – where wealthy elites and their corporations “rule,” regardless of which party is in Congress and the White House.

“The central point that emerges from our research,” Gilens and Page wrote, “is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”

As Gilens explained in an interview, “ordinary citizens have virtually no influence over what their government does in the United States.”

Citizen Exit Polls

Edison Research was scheduled to do exit polling for the NEP media consortium in the California primary.  But when Ohio election protection attorney Cliff Arnebeck gave notice that he intended to sue for the raw data, the California exit poll was canceled.

Into the breach jumped California activist/funder Lori Grace and her Institute for American Democracy and Election Integrity (www.trustvote.org), engaging professional pollsters to sample selected districts in Northern and Southern California.  The results will be forthcoming at TrustVote.org. http://trustvote.org/

Already the site reports:

In other eleven states besides California, there has been noted a significant difference between the Edison Research exit polls and the electronic vote totals presented on the morning after the primaries. These totals do not include anything from California. These differences show votes appear to be shifted from Bernie Sanders to Hillary Clinton. The chances of this kind of shift happening are considered to be statistically impossible between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning in these eleven states….

…In addition, some people may have concerns that [private election system or voting machine] companies like Scytl/SOE and ES&S which managed the votes in Kentucky, New York and Arizona, have directors who are also on the boards of other companies involved in wire-tapping, the defense industry and military interrogations.

A System Designed for Cheating

Corroborating the findings of the other Santa Monica presenters with his own recent experience, John Blakey of Audit Arizona reported that, in this very primary, in Maricopa County, domain of infamous Sherrif Joe Arpaio, 150,000 voters appear to have been ‘suppressed.’  Possibly that’s because 85% of Arizona voters use vote-by-mail ballots, which, extensive evidence shows, rarely get counted.

Blakey is suing the State of Arizona for access to records. “We have the right language for it now,” Blakey says, thanks to the work of the other panel members. “It’s not ‘voter fraud,’ it’s vote fraud.  It is a system designed for cheating.”

STD – Software Transmitted Disease

Well-known actor Mimi Kennedy is a fierce, long-term election protection activist in private life.  In this election she received poll worker training that has taken her into the heart of California’s election system.  She says her friend Bev Harris’ ‘fraction magic’ findings show how deeply what she calls “STD, Software Transmitted Disease” has infected our electoral system.  She explains, “There are seven thousand small voting jurisdictions all over America.  State law controls elections.  Seven thousand jurisdictions within and among those states can have some say in process, procedure, choice of private contractors, common servicer software and hardware.  Outside IT ‘experts’ are hired who may or may not be honest or bright. That means that fraud capacity is there.  People ask me ‘Who are the ‘them’ that may be stealing our votes?’  I tell them, ‘someone in any of those jurisdictions who can.’”

The Ohio Plan, ‘How to Nix the Fix’

Wasserman and Fitrakis admit that, “as we approach the 2016 election, the prospects for a truly democratic outcome are grim.”

However, lest we despair in the face of all these discouraging revelations, they insist that the fixes in our badly compromised electoral system CAN be nixed.

“The only cure,” they conclude, “is a bottom-up revolution in human consciousness and action.”  They hope their work “will help inform and motivate an energized grassroots uprising” based on what they call The Ohio Plan.

The Ohio Plan:

1.      Universal, automatic, same-day voter registration.

2.      A four-day national voting holiday.

3.      Votes counted by students & elders, paid the minimum wage.

4.      Universal use of hand-counted paper ballots.

5.      A universal automatic recount.

May it be so.

============

Mary Beth Brangan and James Heddle co-direct EON, The Ecological Options Network.  Since 2004, they have produced many video reports in cooperation with FreePress.org and the Columbus Institute for Contemporary Journalism which can be viewed on the EON’s YouTube channel Election Protection & Deep Democracy playlist  https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF06C90E53E4D6919  They are currently at work on a new documentary SHUTDOWN: The California-Fukushima Connection.  http://www.shutdowndoc.tv/   

The Desire to Fit In is the Root of Almost All Wrongdoing

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By Christopher Freiman

Source: aeon

Imagine that one morning you discover a ring that grants you magic powers. With this ring on your finger, you can seize the presidency, rob Fort Knox and instantly become the most famous person on the planet. So, would you do it?

Readers of Plato’s Republic will find this thought experiment familiar. For Plato, one of the central problems of ethics is explaining why we should prioritise moral virtue over power or money. If the price of exploiting the mythical ‘Ring of Gyges’ – acting wrongly – isn’t worth the material rewards, then morality is vindicated.

Notice that Plato assumes that we stray from the moral path through being tempted by personal gain – that’s why he tries to show that virtue is more valuable than the gold we can get through vice. He isn’t alone in making this assumption. In Leviathan (1651), Thomas Hobbes worries about justifying morality to the ‘fool’ who says that ‘there is no such thing as justice’ and breaks his word when it works to his advantage. And when thinking about our reasons to prefer virtue to vice, in his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751) David Hume confronts the ‘sensible knave’, a person tempted to do wrong when he imagines ‘that an act of iniquity or infidelity will make a considerable addition to his fortune’.

Some of history’s greatest philosophers, then, agree that wrongdoing tends to be motivated by self-interest. Alas, I’m not one of history’s greatest philosophers. Although most assume that an immoral person is one who’s ready to defy law and convention to get what they want, I think the inverse is often true. Immorality is frequently motivated by a readiness to conform to law and convention in opposition to our own values. In these cases, it’s not that we care too little about others; it’s that we care too much. More specifically, we care too much about how we stack up in the eyes of others.

Doing the wrong thing is, for most of us, pretty mundane. It’s not usurping political power or stealing millions of dollars. It’s nervously joining in the chorus of laughs for your co-worker’s bigoted joke or lying about your politics to appease your family at Thanksgiving dinner. We ‘go along to get along’ in defiance of what we really value or believe because we don’t want any trouble. Immanuel Kant calls this sort of excessively deferential attitude servility. Rather than downgrading the values and commitments of others, servility involves downgrading your own values and commitments relative to those of others. The servile person is thus the mirror image of the conventional, self-interested immoralist found in Plato, Hobbes and Hume. Instead of stepping on whomever is in his way to get what he wants, the servile person is, in Kant’s words, someone who ‘makes himself a worm’ and thus ‘cannot complain afterwards if people step on him’.

Kant thinks that your basic moral obligation is to not treat humanity as a mere means. When you make a lying promise that you’ll pay back a loan or threaten someone unless he hands over his wallet, you’re treating your victim as a mere means. You’re using him like a tool that exists only to serve your purposes, not respecting him as a person who has value in himself.

But Kant also says that you shouldn’t treat yourself as a mere means. This part of his categorical imperative gets less publicity than his injunction against mistreating others, but it’s no less important. Thomas Hill, a philosopher at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, notes in Autonomy and Self-Respect (1991) that servility involves a mistaken assessment of your moral status. Crucially, the servile person is guilty of the same root error as the person who deceives or threatens others – namely, denying the basic moral equality of all persons. It’s just that the person you’re degrading is you. But servile behaviour neglects the fact that you’re entitled to the same respect as anyone else.

Now, maybe you’re thinking that lying about your opinion of Donald Drumpf [or Shillary Clinton] to placate your parents so you can eat your cranberry sauce in peace is no big deal. Fair enough. But servility can cause much graver moral transgressions.

Take the most famous psychological study of the 20th century: Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments. Milgram discovered that most of his subjects would deliver excruciating – and sometimes apparently debilitating or lethal – electric shocks to innocent victims when an experimenter told them to do so. In ‘The Perils of Obedience’ (1973), Milgram explained that one reason why the typical subject goes along with malevolent authority is because he ‘fears that he will appear arrogant, untoward, and rude if he breaks off’. The subjects’ commitment to politeness overwhelmed their commitment to basic moral decency. And a lot of us are more like Milgram’s subjects than we’d care to admit: we don’t want to appear arrogant, untoward or rude at the dinner table, the classroom, the business meeting. So we swallow our objections and allow ourselves – and others – to be stepped on.

The pernicious consequences of servility aren’t confined to the lab, either. Indeed, Milgram’s experiment was motivated partly by his desire to understand how so many ordinary-seeming people could have participated in the moral horrors of the Holocaust. More recently, the military violence at Abu Ghraib has been explained in part by the soldiers’ socialisation into conformity. These examples and reflections on our own lives reveal an underappreciated moral lesson. It’s not always, or even usually, the case that we do wrong because we lack respect for others. Often it’s because we lack respect for ourselves.

Thinking Dangerously in the Age of Normalized Ignorance

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By Henry Giroux

Source: CounterPunch

What happens to a society when thinking is eviscerated and is disdained in favor of raw emotion? [1] What happens when political discourse functions as a bunker rather than a bridge? What happens when the spheres of morality and spirituality give way to the naked instrumentalism of a savage market rationality? What happens when time becomes a burden for most people and surviving becomes more crucial than trying to lead a life with dignity? What happens when domestic terrorism, disposability, and social death become the new signposts and defining features of a society? What happens to a social order ruled by an “economics of contempt” that blames the poor for their condition and wallows in a culture of shaming?[2] What happens when loneliness and isolation become the preferred modes of sociality? What happens to a polity when it retreats into private silos and is no longer able to connect personal suffering with larger social issues? What happens to thinking when a society is addicted to speed and over-stimulation? What happens to a country when the presiding principles of a society are violence and ignorance? What happens is that democracy withers not just as an ideal but also as a reality, and individual and social agency become weaponized as part of the larger spectacle and matrix of violence?[3]

The forces normalizing and contributing to such violence are too expansive to cite, but surely they would include: the absurdity of celebrity culture; the blight of rampant consumerism; state-legitimated pedagogies of repression that kill the imagination of students; a culture of immediacy in which accelerated time leaves no room for reflection; the reduction of education to training; the transformation of mainstream media into a mix of advertisements, propaganda, and entertainment; the emergence of an economic system which argues that only the market can provide remedies for the endless problems it produces, extending from massive poverty and unemployment to decaying schools and a war on poor minority youth; the expanding use of state secrecy and the fear-producing surveillance state; and a Hollywood fluff machine that rarely relies on anything but an endless spectacle of mind-numbing violence. Historical memory has been reduced to the likes of a Disney theme park and a culture of instant gratification has a lock on producing new levels of social amnesia.

As we learned in the recent debate between Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton (a billionaire and millionaire), ignorance is the DNA of authoritarianism, serving to subvert the truth and obscure the workings of power. Willful ignorance has become a normalized political tool and form of public pedagogy that both provides the foundation for what Noam Chomsky labels as the rise of the “stupid party” and which works incessantly to create a “stupid nation.”[4]Trump, of course, proves that stupidity is in fashion and deeply entrenched within the larger culture while Hilary capitalizes on her penchant for disingenuousness by claiming support for policies she really disdains, i.e., stating she will raise taxes on her buddies from Goldman Sachs and other members of the financial elite. Hardly believable from a woman who “has earned millions of dollars from speeches to Wall Street banks and investment firms (and) was paid $675,000 for a series of speeches to Goldman Sachs.”[5] No hints of the radical imagination here, or the truth for that matter. Only the politics of stupidity and evasion and a media spectacle supporting the celebration of corrupted and limited and pathologized political horizons.

Manufactured ignorance also makes invisible the corruption of the financial elite, allowing them to plunder resources and define the accumulation of capital as a divine blessing. It gets worse. Manufactured ignorance aided by the voracious seductions of commodified corporate-driven disimagination machine that promotes a culture of empty pleasures through and endless regime of consuming and discarding. American society is now dominated by a pervasive commodified landscape of disimagination machines that extends from Hollywood movies and video games to mainstream television, magazines, news, and the social media. These mind-numbing desiring machines which thrive on speed and sensation function mostly as workstations of ignorance to create a fog of distractions that promote forms of social amnesia that erase from memory and public discourse the structural, systemic and social forces that reinforce what can be called organized powerlessness and massive human suffering. This is the stuff of a politics of disappearance that erases the presence of the poor, unemployed, the “approximately 11 million Americans cycle[d] through jails and prisons each year,” black youth, immigrants, ecological disasters, class warfare, acts of state sponsored terrorism, the rise of the police state, and the rise of the warfare state.[6] As the machinery of social death accelerates, America’s most precious investment, youth, also disappear. As neoliberal disimagination machines such as Fox News make clear youth as a social investment no longer count in a society that disdains long term investments and their messy calls for being included in the script of democracy. As such, the current war on youth is about erasing the future, at least any alternative future and any notion of imagination that might summon one into view.

When coupled with an age of precarity and endless uncertainty in which young people have few decent jobs, are strangulated by debt, face a future of career-less jobs, and isolation, young people have little room for politics because they are more concerned with trying to survive rather than engaging in political struggles, or imagining a different future. At the same time, armies of the unemployed or underemployed are caught in a spiral of receding wages, diminished social provisions, and increasingly find themselves paralyzed by anxiety and free-floating anger. In such situations, thinking and informed action become more difficult while a politics wedded to economic and social justice is eviscerated. Moreover, politics becomes toxic when dominated by unapologetic discourses of racism and hatred and is on full display in the Trump campaign. Tapping into such anger and redirecting away from the real problems that produce it has become the central script in the rise of the new authoritarians. This poisonous discourse gains momentum and accelerates as it moves between white supremacist incantations of Trump and his zealots and the deceptive vocabulary of Hillary Clinton and her financial elite backers who embrace a savage neoliberalism with its false claims to freedom, choice, and the virtues of militarization. Civic death is on full display as the ideals of democracy disappear in an election in which authoritarianism in its various forms rules without apology. As thinking dangerously and acting with civic courage wanes, state violence, disposability and voicelessness become the dominant registers of an authoritarian politics that has intensified in American life producing neo-fascist movements in American society that have moved from the fringes to the center of political life.

Tragedy looms large in American society as the forces that promote powerlessness and voicelessness intensify among those elements of the population struggling just to survive the symbolic violence of a culture of cruelty and the material violence of a punishing state. The issue of losing one’s voice either to the forces of imposed silencing or state repression weaken dissent and open the door to the seductions of a dogmatism that speaks in the language of decline, making America great again, while touting the coded vocabulary of white nationalism and racial purity. How else to explain Trump’s call for imposing racial profiling as a way to boost the notion of law and order.

Thinking undangerously is the first step in the triumph of formalism over substance, theater over politics, and the transformation of politics into a form of celebrity culture. The refusal to think works in the service of a form of voicelessness, which is another marker of what it means to be powerless. Within this moral and political vacuum, the codes, rhetoric, and language of white supremacy is on the rise wrapped in the spectacle of fear-mongering and implied threats of state repression. In this instance, emotion become more important than reason, ideas lose their grip on reality, and fashion becomes a rationale for discarding historical memory, informed arguments, and critical thought. Reflection no longer challenges the demands of commonsense. In the mainstream media, the endless and unapologetic proliferation of lies become fodder for higher ratings, informed by suffocating pastiche of talking heads, all of whom surrender to “the incontestable demands of quiet acceptance.”[7]Within such an environment, the truth of an event is not open to public discussion or informed judgment at least in the official media apparatuses producing, distributing and circulating ideas that parade as commonsense. As a result, all that remains is the fog of ignorance and the haze of political and moral indifference.

Americans occupy a historical moment in which it is crucial to think dangerously, particularly since such thinking has the power to shift the questions, provide the tools for offering historical and relational contexts, and “push at the frontiers…of the human imagination.”[8]Stuart Hall is right in insisting that thinking dangerously is crucial “to change the scale of magnification. … to break into the confusing fabric that ‘the real’ apparently presents, and find another way in. So it’s like a microscope and until you look at the evidence through the microscope, you can’t see the hidden relations.”[9] In this instance, the critical capacity for thinking becomes dangerous when it can intervene in the “continuity of commonsense, unsettle strategies of domination,” and work to promote strategies of transformation.[10]

As Adorno observes, such thinking “speaks for what is not narrow-minded—and commonsense most certainly is.”[11] As such, dangerous thinking is not only analytical in its search for understanding and truth, it is also critical and subversive, always employing modes of self and social critique necessary to examine its own grounds and those poisonous fundamentalisms in the larger society haunting the body politic. As Michael Payne observes, thinking dangerously (or critical theory in this instance) should be cast in the language of hints, dialogue, and an openness to other positions, rather than be “cast in the language of orders.”[12] Of course, this is not to suggest that thinking dangerously guarantees action, but at the same time, any action that distances itself from such thinking is bound to fail.

In an age when shouting, rage, and unchecked emotions shape public discourse, self-reflection becomes a liability and suppresses the axiom that critical thought should function to “lift…human beings above the evidence of our senses and sets appearances apart from the truth.”[13]   Salmon Rushdie is right in viewing thinking dangerously as a type of political necessity whose purpose is to “push boundaries and take risks and so, at times, to change the way we see the world.”[14] As Hannah Arendt noted, thoughtfulness, the ability to think reflectively and critically is fundamental to radical change and a necessity in a functioning democracy. Put differently, formative cultures that make such thinking possible along with the spaces in which dialogue, debate, and dissent can flourish are essential to producing critically literate and actively engaged citizens.

Unfortunately, thinking undangerously cuts across ideological and political divides. For instance, there is a new kind of historical and social amnesia overtaking some elements of resistance in the United States. Many progressives have forgotten the lessons of earlier movements for real change extending from the anti-Vietnam War and Black Freedom movements to the radical feminist and gay rights movements of the sixties. History as a repository of learning with vast resources to enable people to build on historical legacies, develop mass movements, and take seriously the pedagogical task of consciousness raising, is in decline. Too much of contemporary politics has become more personal, often reducing agency to the discourses and highly charged emotions of trauma. These historical legacies of resistance did not limit their politics to a call recognition and security within the confines of isolated political issues. Instead, they called for a radical transformation of capitalist and other authoritarian societies. Moroever, they understood that the truth of domination lie in understanding the totality of a society and how various issues were connected to each other. George Monbiot exemplifies this issue in arguing against responding to the varied crisis associated with neoliberalism as if they emerged in isolation—a response that contributes to neoliberalism’s anonymity. He writes:

Its anonymity is both a symptom and cause of its power. It has played a major role in a remarkable variety of crises: the financial meltdown of 2007?8, the offshoring of wealth and power, of which the Panama Papers offer us merely a glimpse, the slow collapse of public health and education, resurgent child poverty, the epidemic of loneliness, the collapse of ecosystems, the rise of Donald Trump. But we respond to these crises as if they emerge in isolation, apparently unaware that they have all been either catalyzed or exacerbated by the same coherent philosophy; a philosophy that has – or had – a name. What greater power can there be than to operate namelessly?[15]

This politics of the disconnect is exacerbated by the fact that mass social movements run the risk of undermining by a politics that has collapsed into the personal. For example, for too many progressives personal pain represents a retreat into an interiority that focuses on trauma. Robin Kelley provides a caveat here in pointing out that all too often “managing trauma does not require dismantling structural racism” and the larger issues of “oppression, repression, and subjugation” get replaced with “words such as PTSD, micro-aggressions, and triggers.” [16] Kelley is not suggesting that the pain of personal suffering be ignored. Instead, he warns “against … the consequences of framing all grievances in the ‘language of personaltrauma.’”[17]

Personal trauma in this case can begin with legitimate calls for spaces free of racism, sexual harassment, and various other forms of hidden but morally and politically unacceptable assaults. And at its best, such a politics functions as an entry into political activism; but when it becomes less a justifiable starting point than an endpoint it begins to sabotage any viable notion of radical politics. Kelley is right in insisting that “trauma can easily slip into thinking of ourselves as victims and objects rather than agents.”[18] Moreover, the language of safe spaces, personal trauma, and triggers can easily become a topsy-turvy discursive universe of trick mirrors and trapdoors that end up reproducing a politics of intimidation and conformity, while forgetting that pedagogical practices and a corresponding politics in the service of dramatic transformation are always unsettling and discomforting.

Progressives must avoid at all cost is the rebirth of a politics in which how we think and act is guaranteed by the discourses of origins, personal experience, and biology. When individuals become trapped within their own experiences, the political imagination weakens, and a politics emerges that runs the risk of inhabiting a culture of exclusion and hardness that shuts down dialogue, undermines compassion, kills empathy, makes it more difficult to listen to and learn from others. A politics that puts an emphasis on personal pain can become blind to its own limitations and can offer falsely a guaranteed access to the truth and a comforting embrace of a discourse of political certainty.

In such cases, the walls go up again as the discourses of biology and exclusion merge to guard the frontiers of moral righteousness and political absolutism. Put differently, the registers of militarization are on full display in such alleged sites of resistance such as higher education where a growing culture of political purity marks out a space in which the personal becomes the only politics there is housed within a discourse of “weaponized sensitivity” and “armed ignorance.”[19] The first causality of armed ignorance is a kind of thoughtfulness that embraces empathy for the other, a willingness to enter into public discussion, and dialogue with those who exist outside of the bunkers of imagined communities of exclusion. Leon Wieseltier is right in arguing that “grievance is sometimes the author of blindness, or worse.”[20]

Under such conditions, empathy wanes and only extends as far as recognizing those who mirror the self, one that endlessly narrates itself on the high ground of an unassailable moralism and stultifying orbits of self-interests. In addition, politics collapses into the privatized orbits of a crude essentialism that disdains forms of public discourse in which boundaries break down and the exercise of public deliberation is viewed as fundamental to a substantive democracy. Of course, there is more at work here than what might be called the atrophy of critical thought, self-reflection, and theory, there is also the degeneration of agency itself.

What does thinking look like when it is transformed into a pedagogical parasite on the body of democracy? At one level, it becomes toxic, blinding the ideological warriors to their own militant ignorance and anti-democratic rhetoric. At the same time, it shuts down any attempt to develop public spheres that connect rather than separate advocates of a politics walled in by suffocating notions of essentialism dressed up in the appeal to orthodoxy parading as revolutionary zeal. What must be remembered is that thinking undangerously mimics a pedagogy of repression that falsely assumes a revolutionary stance when in fact everything about it is counter-revolutionary. In the end this suggests a kind of theoretical helplessness, a replacing of the courage to think dangerously with the discourse of denunciation and a language overflowing with the comforting binary of good and evil.

There is more at risk here than legitimating the worse forms of thoughtlessness, there is also the intolerable potential for both the moral collapse of politics and the undermining of any vestige of democracy. Thinking dangerously as a critical enterprise is about both a search for the truth and a commitment to the recognition that no society is ever just enough and hence is fundamental to the always unfinished struggle, making the impossible all the more possible. Not one or the other but both. Such thinking should be used to both understand and engage the major upheavals people face and to connect such problems to larger political, structural, and economic issues.

Thinking dangerously can make the pedagogical more political by mapping the full range of how power is used and how it can be made accountable in all of its uses. Thinking dangerously is about more than doing a critical reading of screen culture and other texts, it is also about how knowledge, desire, and values become invaluable tools in the service of economic and political justice, how language provides the framework for dealing with power and what it means to develop a sense of compassion for others and the planet. Dangerous thinking is more than a mode of resistance, it is the basis for a formative and pedagogical culture of questioning and politics that takes seriously how the imagination can become central to the practice of freedom, justice, and democratic change.

Notes.

[1] This essay draws upon a number of ideas in Henry A. Giroux,Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism (New York: Routledge, 2015).

[2] I have borrowed this term from Jeffrey St. Clair, “The Economics of Contempt,” Counterpunch (May 23, 2014).

[3] Brad Evans and I have taken up the issue of violence in its various valences in Brad Evans and Henry A. Giroux, Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of the Spectacle (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2015). Also, see Henry A. Giroux, America’s Addiction to Terrorism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016).

[4] Noam Chomsky, “Corporations and the Richest Americans Viscerally Oppose the Common good,” Alternet (Sep9tember 29, 2014). Online: http://www.alternet.org/visions/chomsky-corporations-and-richest-americans-viscerally-oppose-common-good

[5] Chris Cillizza , “The New York Times just perfectly explained Hillary Clinton’s Goldman Sachs speech problem,” The WashingtonPost (February 26, 2016). Online:https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/02/26/the-new-york-times-just-perfectly-explained-why-hillary-clintons-answers-on-her-paid-speeches-dont-work/

[6] Rebecca Gordon, “There Oughta Be a Law…Should Prison Really Be the American Way?,” TomDispatch.com (September 25, 2016). Online: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176190/tomgram%3A_rebecca_gordon%2C_arresting_our_way_to_%22justice%22/

[7] Brad Evans and Julien Reid, “The Promise of Violence in the Age of Catastrophe,” Truthout (January 5, 2014. Online: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/20977-the-promise-of-violence-in-the-age-of-catastrophe

[8] Arundhati Roy, Power Politics (Cambridge, Ma: South End Press, 2001), P. 1

[9] Stuart Hall and Les Back, “In Conversation: At Home and Not at Home”, Cultural Studies, Vol. 23, No. 4, (July 2009), pp. 664-665.

[10] I have taken this phrases from an interview with Homi Bhaba in Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham, “Staging the Politics of Difference: Homi Bhabha’s Critical Literacy JAC ((1999), p. 9.

[11] Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Life (London: Polity Press, 2005), p.139.

[12] Michael Payne, “What Difference Has Theory Mad? From Freud to Adam Phillips,” College Literature 32:2 (Spring 2005), p. 7.

[13] Ibid., Bauman, Liquid Life, 151.

[14] Salman Rushdie, “Whither Moral Courage?” The New York Times, (April 28, 2013)

[15] George Monbiot, “Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems,” The Guardian, (April 15, 2016) Online: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot

[16] Robin D.G. Kelley, “Black Study, Black Struggle – final response,”Boston Review, (March 7, 2016). Online: http://bostonreview.net/forum/black-study-black-struggle/robin-d-g-kelley-robin-d-g-kelleys-final-response

[17] Ibid., Robin D.G. Kelley, “Black Study, Black Struggle – final response.” Boston Review.,

[18] Robin D.G. Kelley, “Black Study, Black Struggle,” Boston Review,(March 7, 2016) Online: https://bostonreview.net/forum/robin-d-g-kelley-black-study-black-struggle

[19] The notion of weaponized sensitivity is from Lionel Shriver, “Will the Left Survive the Millennials?” New York Times (September 23, 2016). Online. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/23/opinion/will-the-left-survive-the-millennials.html. Armed ignorance was coined by my colleague Brad Evans in a personal correspondence.

[20] Leon Wieseltier, “How voters’ personal suffering overtook reason – and brought us Donald Trump,” Washington Post, (June 22, 2016). Online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/06/22/how-voters-personal-suffering-overtook-reason-and-brought-us-donald-trump/

 

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Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University. His most recent books are America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth (Monthly Review Press, 2013) and Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (Haymarket Press, 2014). His web site is www.henryagiroux.com.