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The New York Times is Orwell’s Ministry of Truth
By Edward Curtin
Source: Behind the Curtain
“Ingsoc. The sacred principles of ingsoc. Newspeak, double-speak, the mutability of the past.” – George Orwell, 1984
As today dawned, I was looking out the window into the cold grayness with small patches of snow littering the frozen ground. As light snow began to fall, I felt a deep mourning in my soul as a memory came to me of another snowy day in 1972 when I awoke to news of Richard Nixon’s savage Christmas bombing of North Vietnam with more than a hundred B-52 bombers, in wave after wave, dropping death and destruction on Hanoi and other parts of North Vietnam. I thought of the war the United States is now waging against Russia via Ukraine and how, as during the U.S. war against Vietnam, few Americans seem to care until it becomes too late. It depressed me.
Soon after I was greeted by an editorial from The New York Times’ Editorial Board, “A Brutal New Phase of the War in Ukraine.” It is a piece of propaganda so obvious that only those desperate to believe blatant lies would not fall down laughing. Yet it is no laughing matter, for The N.Y. Times is advocating for a wider war, more lethal weapons for Ukraine, and escalation of the fighting that risks nuclear war. So their title is apt because they are promoting the brutality. This angered me.
The Times’ Editorial Board tells us that President Putin, like Hitler, is mad. “Like the last European war, this one is mostly one man’s madness.” Russia and Putin are “cruel”; are conducting a “regular horror” with missile strikes against civilian targets; are “desperate”; are pursuing Putin’s “delusions”; are waging a “terrible and useless war”; are “committing atrocities”; are responsible for “murder, rape and pillaging,” etc.
On the other hand, “a heroic Ukraine” “has won repeated and decisive victories against Russian forces” who have lost “well over 100,000 Russian soldiers killed and wounded,” according to the “reliable” source, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chief of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley. To add to this rosy report, the Ukrainians seem to have suffered no causalities since none are mentioned by the cozy Times’ Editorial Board members from their keyboards on Eighth Avenue. When you support a U.S. war, as has always been The Times’ modus operandi as a stenographer for the government, mentioning the dead pawns used to accomplish the imperialists’ dreams is bad manners. So are the atrocities committed by those forces, so they too have been omitted. Neo-Nazis, the Azov Battalion? They too must never have existed since they are not mentioned.
But then, according to the esteemed editorial writers, this is not a U.S. proxy war waged via Ukraine by U.S./NATO “to strip Russia of its destiny and greatness.” No, it is simply Russian aggression, supported by “the Kremlin’s propaganda machinery” that has churned “out false narratives about a heroic Russian struggle against forces of fascism and debauchery.” U.S./NATO were “horrified by the crude violation of the postwar order,” so we are laughingly told, and so came to Ukraine’s defense as “Mr. Putin’s response has been to throw ever more lives, resources and cruelty at Ukraine.”
Nowhere in this diatribe by the Times’ Board of propagandists – and here the whole game is given away for anyone with a bit of an historical sense – is there any mention of the U.S. engineered coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014. It just didn’t happen. Never happened. Magic by omission. The U.S., together with the Ukrainian government “led” by the puppet-actor “President Volodymyr Zelensky,” are completely innocence parties, according to the Times. (Note also, that nowhere in this four page diatribe is President Putin addressed by his title, as if to say that “Mr. Putin” is illegitimate and Zelensky is the real thing.)
All the problems stem from when “Mr. Putin seized Crimea and stirred up a secessionist conflict in eastern Ukraine n 2014.”
Nowhere is it mentioned that for years on end U.S./NATO has been moving troops and weapons right up to Russia’s borders, that George W. Bush pulled the U.S. out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and that Trump did the same with the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, that the U.S. has set up so-called anti-ballistic missile sites in Poland and Rumania and asserted its right to a nuclear first-strike, that more and more countries have been added to NATO’s eastern expansion despite promises to Russia to the contrary, that 15,000 plus mostly Russian-speaking people in eastern Ukraine have been killed by Ukrainian forces for years before February 2022, that the Minsk agreements were part of a scheme to give time for the arming of Ukraine, that the U.S. has rejected all calls from Russia to respect its borders and its integrity, that the U.S./NATO has surrounded Russia with military bases, that there was a vote in Crimea after the coup, that the U.S. has been for years waging economic war on Russia via sanctions, etc. In short, all of the reasons that Russia felt that it was under attack for decades and that the U.S. was stone deaf to its appeals to negotiate these threats to its existence. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that if all were reversed and Russia had put troops and weapons in Mexico and Canada that the United States would respond forcefully.
This editorial is propaganda by omission and strident stupidity by commission.
The editorial has all its facts “wrong,” and not by accident. The paper may say that its opinion journalists’ claims are separate from those of its newsroom, yet their claims echo the daily barrage of falsehoods from its front pages, such as:
- Ukraine is winning on the battlefield.
- “Russia faces decades of economic stagnation and regression even if the war ends soon.”
- That on Jan.14, as part of its cruel attacks on civilian targets, a Russian missile struck an apartment building in Dnipro, killing many.
- Only one man can stop this war – Vladimir Putin – because he started it.
- Until now, the U.S. and its allies were reluctant to deploy heavy weapons to Ukraine “for fear of escalating this conflict into an all-in East-West war.”
- Russia is desperate as Putin pursues “his delusions.”
- Putin is “isolated from anyone who would dare to speak truth to his power.”
- Putin began trying to change Ukraine’s borders by force in 2014.
- During the last 11 months Ukraine has won repeated and decisive victories against Russian forces …. The war is at a stalemate.”
- The Russian people are being subjected to the Kremlin’s propaganda machinery “churning out false narratives.”
This is expert opinion for dummies. A vast tapestry of lies, as Harold Pinter said in his Nobel Prize address. The war escalation the editorial writers are promoting is in their words, “this time pitting Western arms against a desperate Russia,” as if the U.S./NATO does not have CIA and special forces in Ukraine, just weapons, and as if “this time” means it wasn’t so for the past nine years at least as the U.S. was building Ukraine’s military and arms for this very fight.
It is a fight they will lose in the days to come. Russia was, is, and will triumph.
Everything in the editorial is disingenuous. Simple propaganda: the good guys against the bad guys. Putin another Hitler. The good guys are winning, just as they did in Vietnam, until reality dawned and it had to be admitted they weren’t (and didn’t). History is repeating itself.
Little has changed and so my morning sense of mourning when I remembered Nixon and Kissinger’s savagery at Christmas 1972 was appropriate. As then, so today, we are being subjected to a vast tapestry of lies told by the corporate media for their bosses, as the U.S. continues its doomed efforts to control the world. It is not Russia that is desperate now, but propagandists such as the writers of this strident and stupid editorial. It is not the Russian people who need to wake up, as they claim, but the American people and those who still cling to the myth that The New York Times Corporation is an organ of truth. It is the Ministry of Truth with its newspeak, double-speak, and its efforts to change the past.
Let Harold Pinter have the last words:
The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.
Hardly Anyone Is Thinking Logically About The Risk Of Nuclear War
By Caitlin Johnstone
Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved its symbolic Doomsday Clock to ninety seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been set since its founding after the second world war. Chief among their reasons for doing so is the increasingly dangerous war in Ukraine.
A statement authored by the Bulletin’s editor John Mecklin is as biased against Russia as any mainstream western punditry today and makes no mention of the US empire’s role in provoking, prolonging and benefiting from this conflict, yet it still provides a fairly reasonable appraisal of the magnitude of the threat we’re staring down the barrel of at this point in history:
This year, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moves the hands of the Doomsday Clock forward, largely (though not exclusively) because of the mounting dangers of the war in Ukraine. The Clock now stands at 90 seconds to midnight—the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been.
The war in Ukraine may enter a second horrifying year, with both sides convinced they can win. Ukraine’s sovereignty and broader European security arrangements that have largely held since the end of World War II are at stake. Also, Russia’s war on Ukraine has raised profound questions about how states interact, eroding norms of international conduct that underpin successful responses to a variety of global risks.
And worst of all, Russia’s thinly veiled threats to use nuclear weapons remind the world that escalation of the conflict—by accident, intention, or miscalculation—is a terrible risk. The possibility that the conflict could spin out of anyone’s control remains high.
Mecklin encourages dialogue between Russia, Ukraine and NATO powers in order to de-escalate tensions in “this time of unprecedented global danger.” He quotes UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who warned last August that the world has entered “a time of nuclear danger not seen since the height of the Cold War.”
We came a hair’s breadth from nuclear annihilation during the chaotic and unpredictable brinkmanship at the height of the last cold war, and in fact had numerous close calls that could have easily wound up going another way. As former Secretary of State Dean Acheson put it, humanity survived the Cuban Missile Crisis by “plain dumb luck”.
There’s no logical basis for the belief that we’ll get lucky again. Believing nuclear war won’t happen because it didn’t happen last time is a type of fallacious reasoning known as normalcy bias; it’s as rational as believing Russian roulette is safe because the man handing you the pistol didn’t blow his head off when he pulled the trigger.
But that’s the kind of sloppy thinking you’ll run into when you try to discuss this subject in public; I’m always encountering arguments that there’s no risk of nuclear war because we’ve gone all this time without disaster. One of the reasons I engage so much on social media is that I find it’s a good way of keeping tabs on the dominant propaganda narratives in our civilization and understanding what people are thinking and believing about things, and nowhere have I been met with more fuzzbrained comments than the times I’ve written about the need to prevent an entirely preventable nuclear holocaust.
The most common response I get is something along the lines of “Well if there is a nuclear war it will be Putin’s fault,” as though whose “fault” it is will matter to us while we’re watching the world end, along with the related “Well Russia shouldn’t have invaded then” and “Well Russia should stop threatening to use nukes then.” People genuinely don’t seem to understand that in the event of a full-scale nuclear war, it will really be the end of everyone. They still kind of imagine everyone still being there and shaking their fists at Russia afterward, and themselves sitting there feeling self-righteous and vindicated for correctly saying what a bad, bad man Vladimir Putin is.
They don’t understand that there will be no pundits discussing the nuclear armageddon on Fox and MSNBC, arguing about whose fault it was and which political party is to blame. They don’t get that there won’t be any war crimes tribunals in the radioactive ashes as the biosphere starves to death in nuclear winter. They don’t understand that once the nukes start flying, nobody’s shoulds or shouldn’ts about it will matter at all, and neither will your political opinions about Putin. All that will matter is that it happened, and that it can’t be taken back.
Another common response when I talk about the looming threat of nuclear war is, “Oh so you just don’t care about Ukrainians and you want them all to die.” The other day some lady responded to a Twitter thread I made about the need to avoid nuclear armageddon by saying that I must love rape and war crimes. People sincerely believe that’s a valid response to a discussion about the need to prevent the single worst thing that could possibly happen from happening. It really doesn’t seem to occur to them that they’re not actually engaging the subject at hand in any real way.
Slightly more perceptive interlocutors will argue that if we back down to tyrants just because they have nuclear weapons then everyone will try to get nukes and those who have them will become more belligerent, which will end up making nuclear war more likely in the long run. This response is a straw man fallacy because it misrepresents the argument as “just back down” rather than a call to engage in diplomacy and dialogue to de-escalate and begin sincerely negotiating toward detente, none of which is happening to any meaningful extent in this conflict. More importantly, it pretends that Russia is just invading its neighbor out of the blue instead of the well-documented reality that it is in fact responding to provocations by the US empire. The US has a moral obligation to de-escalate a conflict it knowingly provoked to advance its own interests, especially when that conflict could kill everyone in the world.
The whole “We can’t just back down to bullies like Putin” line of argumentation is further invalidated by the fact that it’s one thing to draw a line in the sand that must never be crossed — even if in the face of armageddon — but it’s quite another to say that line should be over something as small as who governs Crimea. This planet is populated with eight billion humans and countless other sentient creatures, very few of whom care one way or another who governs Crimea and almost none of whom would be willing to watch their loved ones die over it. Wanting to draw the line there is obnoxious, arrogant, and absurd.
And that’s just the shoddy brainwork of the rank-and-file public; the thinking of those who actually got us into this situation is surely just as dogshit. From what I can tell standing on this side of the thick veils of government secrecy which separate us from the truth, it appears to arise predominantly from a combination of immense hubris and zealous groupthink; hubris to think they can control all possible outcomes in a game of brinkmanship with so many small, unpredictable moving parts, and zealous groupthink in mindlessly adhering to the imperial doctrine that US unipolar planetary hegemony must be secured at all cost. They’re playing games with the life of every creature on this planet, and anyone who thinks that’s smart or wise should be as far from such decisions as possible.
The logical faceplants I’m describing here seem to arise partly from the fact that our civilization is completely inundated with empire propaganda about this conflict, and partly from the fact that people just haven’t thought terribly hard about nuclear war and what it would mean. The latter is probably because the prospect of everyone dying horrifically is such a huge, heavy, uncomfortable subject to sit down and deeply grapple with to the extent that it demands. For most people it’s just this vague, blurry mass in the periphery of their awareness, because they’ve been doing all these weird mental gymnastics to squirm and compartmentalize away from this thing rather than facing it.
But if ever there was a time to start doing some rigorous independent thinking and stop trusting the authorities to sort things out, it would be now. They’re showing us every sign that they’re just going to keep ramping up these games of nuclear chicken until they either fill their bottomless need for more complete global control or get us all killed trying. People need to start waking up to what’s going on and start making things uncomfortable for the people who are driving our world toward total destruction.
It does not need to be this way. Peace talks are possible. Diplomacy, de-escalation and detente are possible. Anyone who says otherwise is lying. We need to start building some public pressure to end this madness, because if the mushroom clouds ever show up, there is not one person alive who in that moment will believe that it was worth it.
Saturday Matinee: River’s Edge
By Roger Ebert
Source: RogerEbert.com
I remember reading about the case at the time. A high school kid killed his girlfriend and left her body lying on the ground. Over the next few days, he brought some of his friends out to look at her body, and gradually word of the crime spread through his circle of friends. But for a long time, nobody called the cops.
A lot of op-ed articles were written to analyze this event, which was seen as symptomatic of a wider moral breakdown in our society. “River’s Edge,” which is a horrifying fiction inspired by the case, offers no explanation and no message; it regards the crime in much the same way the kid’s friends stood around looking at the body. The difference is that the film feels a horror that the teenagers apparently did not.
This is the best analytical film about a crime since “The Onion Field” and “In Cold Blood.” Like those films, it poses these questions: Why do we need to be told this story? How is it useful to see limited and brutish people doing cruel and stupid things? I suppose there are two answers. One, because such things exist in the world and some of us are curious about them as we are curious in general about human nature. Two, because an artist is never merely a reporter and by seeing the tragedy through his eyes, he helps us to see it through ours.
“River’s Edge” was directed by Tim Hunter, who made “Tex,” about ordinary teenagers who found themselves faced with the choice of dealing drugs. In “River’s Edge,” that choice has long since been made. These teenagers are alcoholics and drug abusers, including one whose mother is afraid he is stealing her marijuana and a 12-year-old who blackmails the older kids for six-packs.
The central figure in the film is not the murderer, Sampson (Daniel Roebuck), a large, stolid youth who seems perpetually puzzled about why he does anything. It is Layne (Crispin Glover), a strung-out, mercurial rebel who always seems to be on speed and who takes it upon himself to help conceal the crime. When his girlfriend asks him, like, well, gee, she was our friend and all, so shouldn’t we feel bad, or something, his answer is that the murderer “had his reasons.” What were they? The victim was talking back.
Glover’s performance is electric. He’s like a young Eric Roberts, and he carries around a constant sense of danger. Eventually, we realize the danger is born of paranoia; he is reflecting it at us with his fear.
These kids form a clique that exists outside the mainstream in their high school. They hang around outside, smoking and sneering. In town, they have a friend named Feck (Dennis Hopper), a drug dealer who lives inside a locked house and once killed a woman himself, so he has something in common with the kid, you see? It is another of Hopper’s possessed performances, done with sweat and the whites of his eyes.
“River’s Edge” is not a film I will forget very soon. Its portrait of these adolescents is an exercise in despair. Not even old enough to legally order a beer, they already are destroyed by alcohol and drugs, abandoned by parents who also have lost hope. When the story of the dead girl first appeared in the papers, it seemed like a freak show, an aberration. “River’s Edge” sets it in an ordinary town and makes it seem like just what the op-ed philosophers said: an emblem of breakdown. The girl’s body eventually was discovered and buried. If you seek her monument, look around you.
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Watch River’s Edge on Hoopla here: https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/12027310
The Cost Of Living Has Become Extremely Oppressive And 57 Percent Of Americans Cannot Afford A $1,000 Emergency Expense
By Michael Snyder
Source: Activist Post
I don’t have to tell you that your money doesn’t go as far as it once did. You see it every time that you go shopping. Our leaders flooded the system with money and pursued highly inflationary policies for years, and now we are all paying the price. The cost of living has been rising much faster than our incomes have, and this is systematically destroying the middle class. Survey after survey has shown that a solid majority of the population is living paycheck to paycheck, and at this point most U.S. consumers are tapped out. In fact, one brand new survey just discovered that 57 percent of Americans cannot even afford to pay a $1,000 emergency expense…
According to Bankrate’s Annual Emergency Fund Report, 68% of people are worried they wouldn’t be able to cover their living expenses for just one month if they lost their primary source of income. And when push comes to shove, the majority (57%) of U.S. adults are currently unable to afford a $1,000 emergency expense.
When broken down by generation, Gen Zers (85%) and Millennials (79%) are more likely to be worried about covering an emergency expense.
These numbers are quite ominous, because they clearly demonstrate that we are completely and utterly unprepared for any sort of a major economic downturn.
And thanks to the rapidly rising cost of living, we are losing even more ground with each passing month.
Another survey that was recently released found that “earnings are falling behind the cost of living” for 72 percent of middle income families…
Nearly three-quarters, or 72%, of middle-income families say their earnings are falling behind the cost of living, up from 68% a year ago, according to a separate report by Primerica based on a survey of households with incomes between $30,000 and $100,000. A similar share, 74%, said they are unable to save for their future, up from 66% a year ago.
We haven’t experienced anything like this in the United States in decades.
When I walked into a Walmart store the other day, I was shocked by how high the prices are now.
Isn’t Walmart supposed to be the place with “low prices every day”?
Well, the prices were certainly not “low” when I walked through the store.
And I was stunned to learn that McDonald’s is now selling one hash brown for three dollars.
Are you kidding me?
I am sure that many of you can remember a time when they were 50 cents.
Sadly, those days are not coming back.
Food prices are going to continue to go up, and the CEO of Unilever recently admitted that his company has actually “been accelerating the rate of price increases that we’ve had to put into the market”…
“For the last 18 months we’ve seen extraordinary input cost pressure … it runs across petrochemical derived products, agricultural derived products, energy, transport, logistics,” he said.
“It’s been feeding through for quite some time now and we’ve been accelerating the rate of price increases that we’ve had to put into the market,” he added.
That doesn’t sound good at all.
And he also ominously warned that “there’s more inflationary pressure coming”…
Unilever’s view, he said, was that “we know for sure there’s more inflationary pressure coming through in our input costs.”
As food prices continue to rise, these big companies are going to look for ways to reduce input costs.
One way that they are going to do that is by starting to put crushed bugs in our food.
I know that this may sound really bizarre to you, but this is already happening in Europe…
As of yesterday, a food additive made out of powdered crickets began appearing in foods from pizza, to pasta to cereals across the European Union.
Yes, really.
Defatted house crickets are on the menu for Europeans across the continent, without the vast majority of them knowing it is now in their food.
So you might want to start reading labels a lot more carefully from now on.
Of course it isn’t just the cost of food that has become extremely oppressive.
Just about everything has gotten more expensive, and this has broken the remaining strength of the U.S. consumer.
If you doubt this, just consider some of the latest economic numbers that we have seen.
-U.S. retail sales fell once again last month…
US retail sales continued their fall in December, dropping by 1.1% as inflation remained high, the Commerce Department reported Wednesday.
That’s the largest monthly decline since December 2021, and practically every category (except for building materials, groceries and sporting goods) saw sales drop from the prior month.
-Sales of existing homes have now fallen for 11 months in a row…
U.S. existing home sales slowed for the 11th consecutive month in December as higher mortgage rates, surging inflation and steep home prices sapped consumer demand from the housing market.
-More Americans than ever before are being forced to pay at least 30 percent of their incomes on rent…
The average US household is now considered ‘rent-burdened’ as a record-high number of people are spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent.
According to Moody’s Analytics’ latest affordability report, the national average rent-to-income (RTI) ratio reached 30 percent for the first time since the company began tracking the data more than 20 years ago.
U.S. consumers are being stretched financially like never before, and many are turning to debt to help them maintain their current lifestyles.
As a result, the savings rate has plunged to a historic low, credit card debt has surged to a record high, and the average rate of interest on credit card balances has also risen to a record high. As Zero Hedge has aptly noted, this is “nothing short of catastrophic”…
The combination of record high credit card debt and record high credit card interest is nothing short of catastrophic for both the US economy, and the strapped consumer who has no choice but to keep buying on credit while hoping next month’s bill will somehow not come. Unfortunately, it will and at some point in the very near future, this will also translate into massive loan losses for US consumer banks; that’s when Powell will finally panic.
For a long time, we have been warned that the very foolish economic policies that our leaders were implementing would have deeply tragic consequences.
And now it is starting to happen right in front of our eyes.
Sadly, the truth is that this is just the beginning.
The entire system is cracking and crumbling all around us, and there is much more pain ahead.
Two for Tuesday
360 Degree Surveillance: How Police Use Public-Private Partnerships to Spy on Americans
By John & Nisha Whitehead
Source: The Rutherford Institute
“We live in a surveillance state founded on a partnership between government and the technology industry.”— Law Professor Avidan Y. Cover
In this age of ubiquitous surveillance, there are no private lives: everything is public.
Surveillance cameras mounted on utility poles, traffic lights, businesses, and homes. License plate readers. Ring doorbells. GPS devices. Dash cameras. Drones. Store security cameras. Geofencing and geotracking. FitBits. Alexa. Internet-connected devices.
There are roughly one billion surveillance cameras worldwide and that number continues to grow, thanks to their wholehearted adoption by governments (especially law enforcement and military agencies), businesses, and individual consumers.
With every new surveillance device we welcome into our lives, the government gains yet another toehold into our private worlds.
Indeed, empowered by advances in surveillance technology and emboldened by rapidly expanding public-private partnerships between law enforcement, the Intelligence Community, and the private sector, police have become particularly adept at sidestepping the Fourth Amendment.
As law professor Avidan Y. Cover explains:
A key feature of the surveillance state is the cooperative relationship between the private sector and the government. The private sector’s role is vital to the surveillance both practically and legally. The private sector, of course, provides the infrastructure and tools for the surveillance… The private sector is also critical to the surveillance state’s legality. Under the third-party doctrine, the Fourth Amendment is not implicated when the government acquires information that people provide to corporations, because they voluntarily provide their information to another entity and assume the risk that the entity will disclose the information to the government. Therefore, people do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their calling data, or potentially even their emails. As a result, the government does not normally need a warrant to obtain information transmitted electronically. But the Fourth Amendment is not only a source of protection for individual privacy; it also limits government excess and abuse through challenges by the people. The third-party doctrine removes this vital and populist check on government overreach.
Critical to this end run around the Fourth Amendment’s prohibitions against unreasonable searches and seizures by government agents is a pass play that allows police to avoid public transparency requirements (open bids, public meetings, installation protocols) by having private companies and individuals do the upfront heavy lifting, leaving police to harvest the intel on the back end.
Stingray devices, facial recognition technology, body cameras, automated license plate readers, gunshot detection, predictive policing software, AI-enhanced video analytics, real-time crime centers, fusion centers: all of these technologies and surveillance programs rely on public-private partnerships that together create a sticky spiderweb from which there is no escape.
As the cost of these technologies becomes more affordable for the average consumer, an effort underwritten by the tech industry and encouraged by law enforcement agencies and local governing boards, which in turn benefit from access to surveillance they don’t need to include in their budgets, big cities, small towns, urban, suburban and rural communities alike are adding themselves to the surveillance state’s interconnected grid.
What this adds up to for government agencies (that is, FBI, NSA, DHS agents, etc., as well as local police) is a surveillance map that allows them to track someone’s movements over time and space, hopscotching from doorbell camera feeds and business security cameras to public cameras on utility poles, license plate readers, traffic cameras, drones, etc.
It has all but eliminated the notion of privacy and radically re-drawn the line of demarcation between our public and private selves.
Over the past 50 years, surveillance has brought about a series of revolutions in how governments govern and populations are policed to the detriment of us all. Cybersecurity expert Adam Scott Wandt has identified three such revolutions.
The first surveillance revolution came about as a result of government video cameras being installed in public areas. There were a reported 51 million surveillance cameras blanketing the United States in 2022. It’s estimated that Americans are caught on camera an average of 238 times every week (160 times per week while driving; 40 times per week at work; 24 times per week while out running errands and shopping; and 14 times per week through various other channels and activities). That doesn’t even touch on the coverage by surveillance drones, which remain a relatively covert part of police spying operations.
The second revolution occurred when law enforcement agencies started forging public-private partnerships with commercial establishments like banks and drug stores and parking lots in order to gain access to their live surveillance feeds. The use of automatic license plate readers (manufactured and distributed by the likes of Flock Safety), once deployed exclusively by police and now spreading to home owners associations and gated communities, extends the reach of the surveillance state that much further afield. It’s a win-win for police budgets and local legislatures when they can persuade businesses and residential communities to shoulder the costs of the equipment and share the footage, and they can conscript the citizenry to spy on each other through crowdsourced surveillance.
The third revolution was ushered in with the growing popularity of doorbell cameras such as Ring, Amazon’s video surveillance doorbell, and Google’s Nest Cam.
Amazon has been particularly aggressive in its pursuit of a relationship with police, enlisting them in its marketing efforts, and going so far as to hosting parties for police, providing free Ring doorbells and deep discounts, sharing “active camera” maps of Ring owners, allowing access to the Law Enforcement Neighborhood Portal, which enables police to directly contact owners for access to their footage, and coaching police on how to obtain footage without a warrant.
Ring currently partners with upwards of 2,161 law enforcement agencies and 455 fire departments, and that number grows exponentially every year. As Vice reports, “Ring has also heavily pursued city discount programs and private alliances with neighborhood watch groups. When cities provide free or discounted Ring cameras, they sometimes create camera registries, and police sometimes order people to aim Ring cameras at their neighbors, or only give cameras to people surveilled by neighborhood watches.”
In November 2022, San Francisco police gained access to the live footage of privately owned internet cameras as opposed to merely being able to access recorded footage. No longer do police even have to request permission of homeowners for such access: increasingly, corporations have given police access to footage as part of their so-called criminal investigations with or without court orders.
We would suggest a fourth revolutionary shift to be the use of facial recognition software and artificial intelligence-powered programs that can track people by their biometrics, clothing, behavior and car, thereby synthesizing the many strands of surveillance video footage into one cohesive narrative, which privacy advocates refer to as 360 degree surveillance.
Finally, Wandt sees autonomous cars equipped with cameras that record everything around them as yet another revolutionary expansion of surveillance to be tapped by police.
Yet in the present moment, it’s those public-private partnerships that signify a watershed moment in the transition from a police state to a surveillance state and sound a death knoll for our privacy rights. This fusion of government power and private power is also at the heart of the surveillance state’s growing stranglehold on the populace.
As always, these intrusions into our personal lives are justified in the name of national security and fighting crime. Yet while the price to be paid for having the government’s so-called protection is nothing less than our right to privacy, the guarantee of safety remains dubious, at best.
As a study on camera surveillance by researchers at City University of New York concluded, the presence of cameras were somewhat effective as a deterrent for crimes such as car burglaries and property theft, but they had no significant effect on violent crimes.
On the other hand, when you combine overcriminalization with wall-to-wall surveillance monitored by police in pursuit of crimes, the resulting suspect society inevitably gives way to a nation of criminals. In such a society, we are all guilty of some crime or other.
The predatory effect of these surveillance cameras has also yet to be fully addressed, but they are vulnerable to being hacked by third parties and abused by corporate and government employees.
After all, power corrupts. We’ve seen this abuse of power recur time and time again throughout history. For instance, as an in-depth investigative report by the Associated Press concludes, the very same mass surveillance technologies that were supposedly so necessary to fight the spread of COVID-19 are now being used to stifle dissent, persecute activists, harass marginalized communities, and link people’s health information to other surveillance and law enforcement tools. As the AP reports, federal officials have also been looking into how to add “‘identifiable patient data,’ such as mental health, substance use and behavioral health information from group homes, shelters, jails, detox facilities and schools,” to its surveillance toolkit.
These cameras—and the public-private eyes peering at us through them—are re-engineering a society structured around the aesthetic of fear and, in the process, empowering “people to not just watch their neighborhood, but to organize as watchers,” creating not just digital neighborhood watches but digital gated communities.
Finally, there is a repressive, suppressive effect to surveillance that not only acts as a potentially small deterrent on crime but serves to monitor and chill lawful First Amendment activity. As Matthew Feeney warns in the New York Times, “In the past, Communists, civil rights leaders, feminists, Quakers, folk singers, war protesters and others have been on the receiving end of law enforcement surveillance. No one knows who the next target will be.”
No one knows, but it’s a pretty good bet that the surveillance state will be keeping a close watch on anyone seen as a threat to the government’s chokehold on power.
It’s George Orwell’s 1984 on a global scale.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, Orwell’s dystopian nightmare has become our looming reality.
How the US is blackmailing countries that buy American weapons
By Vladimir Platov
Source: New Eastern Outlook
Economic sanctions and blackmail have long been the preferred methods of conducting foreign policy and advancing the United States’ own geopolitical interests.
In 2018, the US withdrew from the agreement on Iran’s nuclear program signed in May 2015, following which Washington began to implement the “maximum pressure” strategy on Iran.
In 2019, the US government imposed a slew of restrictions on the Chinese firm Huawei, which is widely regarded as a leader in digital technologies, particularly in the deployment of 5G networks. Following that, Washington began to intercept Huawei’s foreign market as a result of an open competitive struggle.
And Russia’s gas squeeze in Europe, orchestrated by the US, exacerbated an already obvious economic and financial crisis for Europeans, resulting in total population impoverishment against the backdrop of America reaping additional superprofits from the sale of expensive American LNG instead of cheap Russian gas to Europe.
Sanctions, including secondary ones, become a tool for seizing funds and assets and bankrupting competitors, and are used by the United States to strengthen its global dominance.
Although the definition of extortion as a common law crime in US criminal law varies across states, both in wording and substance, it is nevertheless recognized everywhere as a serious offense and prosecuted under domestic law. In recent years, in an effort to introduce “rules” unilaterally favorable to the United States in place of international law, Washington’s policy has begun to carry the principle of “extraterritorial” sanctions into the international arena when the United States imposes them and openly extorts not only US legal subjects but also foreign ones, including independent states.
The fact that under these conditions, the US uses the dominant role of the US dollar, blackmail, and economic sanctions as the main instruments of foreign policy (the use of sanctions almost tripled in 2009-2019 alone) makes many countries think about possible alternatives. One of them is already the increasing use of national currencies in bilateral trade.
Washington’s abuse of such criminal policies and blatantly illegal pressures are causing resentment even among the United States’ allies. It is no coincidence that in 2019 the chairman of the United Kingdom’s central bank, Mark Carney, called for the creation of an international digital currency that would weaken the dominant role of the US dollar in international trade.
Washington is increasingly using outright blackmail, not just in the political, economic, and trade spheres. It is also used in the military sphere, with the sale and subsequent use of American weapons directly threatening the national security of countries that purchase US weapons.
And one of the many egregious examples of this is the events of 2016, when the US attempted to stage a coup in Turkey by killing President Erdoğan with American weapons and preventing Turkish authorities from using US air defenses to prevent them from shooting down F-16 aircraft flying from the US military base at Incirlik. And it was only thanks to the intervention of Russian politician Alexander Dugin (against whom, by the way, Ukrainian accomplices of the United States committed an act of terrorism in 2022 and killed his daughter) and the Russian military at the behest of President Vladimir Putin that this sinister plan of Washington was foiled. The arrested Turkish coup plotters themselves have given detailed accounts of it. In particular, about how the Russian military, using seven Russian fighter jets and two S-400 missile systems in northern Syria, warned the coupist aircraft that if the radar showed any indication of their suspicious or improper actions, they would be hit directly. As a result, the Turkish F-16s could only track Erdoğan’s plane and not attack it. In addition to the testimony of the Turkish participants in this failed American coup attempt, those interested can learn more from a Turkish report published on Odatv.com on September 21, 2016.
This blackmail of Ankara with US weapons continues even now, as pointed out in particular by Bloomberg the other day, which reported that the US will not supply Turkey with F-16s until it agrees to admit Sweden to NATO.
Even if Turkey, under pressure from Washington, agrees to admit Finland and Sweden to NATO, which the United States is trying hard to push into the alliance, Turkey will never be able to use those aircraft or other American weapons unless such use would be advantageous to the White House.
And the US decision in April 2021 to withdraw US Patriot air defense batteries from the Persian Gulf region after the White House deteriorated relations with the Saudi monarchy is proof of that.
The threat from Washington to restrict the use of purchased US weapons has become increasingly serious for many countries recently. Especially considering that it is the US that sells twice as many weapons as Russia and six times as many as China, thus dominating the market for weapons of death, destruction and protection of many states from external threats, the vast majority of which are also initiated by Washington. Here one can also see the recent White House game of supplying Greece with more and more offensive weapons against Turkey, whose relations with both Athens and Washington have recently deteriorated significantly.
Washington has made similar attempts at blackmail in its arms supplies to the other two rival parties to the conflict in South Asia – Pakistan and India. Therefore, despite Washington’s blatant blackmail and intimidation of New Delhi, India continues to focus on buying arms from Russia rather than the United States. In the meantime, India has two important defense needs: the availability of weapons and their quality. In its preferential treatment of Russia on this issue, Indian leaders assume that if the country begins to buy weapons from the West, it will strengthen its autonomy but sacrifice these two needs, since Western systems are many times more expensive but inferior to Russian ones.
After the Crash 