Category Archives: Economics

A Gloomy Summary of the Outgoing Year

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By Vladimir Mashin

Source: New Eastern Outlook

The outgoing 2014 is destined, apparently, to go down in the annals of history as a special year given its share of iconic dates (note, for example, 100 years since WWI and 75 years since WWII, 25 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall), and due to abundance of events having worldwide significance.

Today the mankind is on the verge of epochal changes in its history, which will determine the course of the world development for decades to come. 2014 was a turning point in international relations, sharply denoting the main trend of our time – the reconfiguration of the entire world system, reformatting of global structures, the shift from a unipolar to a polycentric world in which decisions on key issues should be based on cooperation and agreements between states and their associations, relying on equal participation and consideration of the interests of the whole mankind. And the contours of this world are now visible.

On the surface, these processes take the form of a deep civilizational and geopolitical fault.

There is a weakening of the position of the United States and the West in general as the center of gravity of the world. Many European political scientists and world known academics speak explicitly about the decline of the Western civilization. European nations are homogeneous, and the continual rise of immigration in recent decades has in fact already changed the ethnic composition of the Old World. Europe found itself unable to integrate the Muslim minority, which is already more than 30 million people, but it is also unable, due to the declining population and its aging, to maintain the current standard of living and the rate of production growth without an influx of the young foreign workforce.

The European sub-ethnic group has entered the phase of obscuration and is on the verge of (according to the criteria of historical time) being absorbed by new, emerging and already prominently visible types (of sub-ethnic groups). This is the Asian sub-ethnic group – a synthesis of several types of cultures and religions. By 2020, experts anticipate a rise of the African sub-ethnic group. In the Western Hemisphere the Hispanic sub-ethnic group is being created on the basis of a huge diversity of ethnic groups and beliefs.

These processes are to a large extent objective: for example, the outgoing year marked the emergence of China as an economic leader (China surpassed the United States in its purchasing power parity in 2014).

If the current trend continues, the “third world”, which today by population surpasses the West five times, by 2050 will surpass it ten-fold.

The reformatting of international relations will further continue. China proposed the following definition for this process: construction of a new non-American world.

In 2014 the US administration, giving itself the status of a self-proclaimed “exceptional nation” entitled to lead world processes, in fact launched a war for the world domination using the NATO military force in conjunction with new methods of disinformation and media control. (This has already occurred in history three-quarters of a century ago, when Germany tried to become a superpower promoting the “Aryan supremacy” with a reliance on military force and Goebbels propaganda). This manifested itself in successive waves of the NATO expansion, contrary to assurances given at the highest level, and in violation of a solemn declaration on the establishment of an equal and indivisible security system in the Euro-Atlantic area. By this logic, the Anschluss of 2014 is a large-scale operation by the US State Department to subjugate the European Union, and then, with combined forces, to launch an attack on the East – stubborn, but temptingly rich with its natural resources and human potential.

The Ukrainian crisis was the result of the policy pursued by the United States and Western countries during the last quarter-century of controlled expansion of their geopolitical space, strengthening their own security at the expense of others. Washington took a line on the separation of Ukraine from Russia and dragging it into the NATO. With the support of the United States and some European countries an armed anti-constitutional coup was carried out in Ukraine. Radical nationalists put the country on the brink of a schism and pushed it into a civil war that has taken thousands of lives and led to the horrible devastation turning into a tragedy for hundreds of thousands of civilians.

In a way, the EU is solving its own problems by capturing Ukrainian markets in order to prevent the collapse of its own integration scheme which had failed the test posed by the protracted economic crisis, since Ukraine, with its 46 million people, black earth, metallurgy and engineering, can reanimate Europe going through a systemic crisis.

The Ukrainian crisis is not a simple episode – it reflects a deep civilizational fault, which has ripped across all continents. The already complex and tense situation is further aggravated, poisoned by provocative, negatively charged statements of certain Western officials.

The Western attempt to tear Ukraine away from Russia and drag it to its side has only further exacerbated the general systemic crisis of international relations.

There is a growing discrepancy between the global ambitions of the US administration and their actual capabilities. America remains the leading economic and military power; however, Washington has no real power, and especially no moral right to lecture everyone else on democracy and proper behavior. Normal people’s hair stands on end from what they see on TV and read in the detailed reports and presentations about the tortures by CIA “experts” of so-called terrorists whose guilt has not been proven. And that’s not to mention the evidence submitted by Snowden about the United States espionage around the world.

In 2014, the Western media coined the “hybrid war” term. It applies to, first of all, the United States and the American war strategy – it is truly hybrid and focused on the military defeat of the enemy, and simultaneously regime change in states pursuing policies objectionable to Washington. Financial and economic pressure is used as well as information attacks, increasing pressure by proxy along the borders of the respective state, and, of course, informational and ideological influence by relying on externally funded non-governmental organizations. Is this not what is called a war?

In 2014, the flares of the “Arab Spring”, seemingly so encouraging at the initial stages, proceeded to incinerate the Middle East which by its degree of ‘flashpoint’ tension – right now twelve different scale armed conflicts are blazing there – has moved to the forefront of world events. The main reason is the US military invasion of Iraq in 2003. The transition of control in Baghdad from the Sunnis who had been in power traditionally to the Shiite majority, with the direct complicity of the United States, has led to a breach in the balance of power in the Persian Gulf, which had existed for decades and was the basis for maintaining stability. This resultant bias towards the growing influence of Shiites and indirectly Iran immediately caused an explosion of discontent and fear within the Sunni minority in Iraq and Sunni communities as a whole in the region.

Open intervention by Western powers in the Iraqi drama, into the affairs of Libya and Syria, seriously complicates the situation and leads to the increased activity of Islamist extremists. At the core of the “Arab Spring” events was the struggle for social justice, for a way out of the vicious circle of underdevelopment and injustice – it was an arising national identity, the movement against Westernization, the desire for self-assertion and defining a decent place for Arabs in the international community. The US and some European countries have tried to turn to their advantage the rise of revolutionary action and in its wake the ascent of Islamic parties to the levers of power in a number of Arab countries. To do this, proven methods were used, such as incitement to religious and ethnic strife, the tacit support of extremist organizations. The activation of al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, the Taliban and the establishment of the Islamic Caliphate in Syria and Iraq is a direct result of the policy of the United States and other Western powers.

There is a real disintegration of state, social and civilizational structures going on in the Middle East region. ISIS terrorists have laid claim to their statehood status, and are beginning to develop the territories, setting up governmental authorities there, that are quasi-state, but, nonetheless, perform administrative functions. We cannot exclude the possibility that the actions of Islamist terrorists can also spread beyond the region.

Throughout 2014, new centers of the extremist activity in Africa (Libya, Mali, Sinai, Nigeria, Somalia, etc.) have appeared and the centers of radicalism in Afghanistan and Pakistan are expanding on the map.

Some Western leaders are still thinking in terms of the Cold War, not fully grasping the possible catastrophic consequences of current trends. But the development of some of them raises the question of the preservation of life on our planet: for example, the fact that nine states have 16,300 nuclear warheads at their disposal, which is enough to kill all life on the Earth many times over.

In the 20th century, the world repeatedly faced with the risk of weapons of mass destruction being used (UN official sources indicated thirteen such situations after 1962). In 2002, the world was in danger of the Indo-Pakistani War (note that Pakistan has the fastest growing nuclear program in the world). According to Al-Arabiya website of December 10, 2014, Israel offered to sell a nuclear bomb to the apartheid regime in South Africa. And the 2003 UN Security Council resolution number 687 declared as its goal “making the Middle East a zone free of weapons of mass destruction and missiles capable of delivering these weapons” (The Conference for the implementation of this task was scheduled for 2012, but is still delayed to this day).

The civilizational fault in today’s globalized, but very fragile world is becoming one of the forms of many contradictions. And, at their base is the question of values. Western powers are moving away from their once traditional postulates and are trying to return their former hegemony by force. This is a very painful process, because the West does not want to accept the fact of its diminishing influence and loss of ability to manage global processes. Now there is an increasingly growing tendency towards asserting the unconditional right of every civilization to choose, without pressure and pointers from the outside, a system of government, relevant government institutions, ethnic, ethical and cultural paradigms.

There is a genuine war going on between sound conservatism – for the preservation of ethical moral principles developed by the mankind over centuries of Homo sapiens’ evolvement, and rampant liberalism, the accession to power of instincts, which means degradation, offensive barbarism, leading eventually to the extinction of the human race. Our outstanding scientists – Vernadsky, Moiseev, Rauschenbach – warned us about this.

Russia consistently and firmly acts from its belief in the cultural and civilizational diversity of the modern world, where each state has the right to its own path of development and should be able to freely and independently determine its foreign policy in the framework of the goals and principles of the UN Charter. Attempts to impose a different value system, interference in the internal affairs of other countries are fraught with the danger of sliding towards chaos and unmanageability of international affairs.

Brzezinski’s famous political thriller – “The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives” – clearly defines the objectives of the chess game: to provide the US world domination euphemistically called “leadership”. Besides, it directly and bluntly asserts that in the twenty-first century “the chief geopolitical prize for America is Eurasia.”

And now, when the center of global processes has suddenly moved to Ukraine, where a real opposition front opened up, the United States and Western Europe have lined up openly against Russia.

Linking together the events in Ukraine, the Middle East, Southwest Asia and the Caucasus, it is possible to see strategic plans of globalists. The situation is extremely fluctuant, the balance vacillates, and there is a reason to believe that the historical time for containing Russia by the combined West has been lost.

Russia, with its unique natural resources, economic and, most importantly, human potential, a fusion of many peoples and cultures, is geographically and historically a unique independent world civilization, able to withstand the challenges of the coming epoch.

Russian President Vladimir Putin in his recent speech said that no one in history has ever been able to subjugate Russia to his will. It’s not even an assessment, but a statement of fact. Although such attempts have been made by the West for the sake of quenching its thirst for expanding the geopolitical space under its control.

The obvious fact now is that the vast majority of the states with which Russia continues its dialogue appreciate the independent role of the Russian Federation in the international arena.

American professor Samuel Huntington, a historian so often quoted recently while praising the power of the United States, nonetheless admitted that “the West conquered the world not by the superiority of its ideas, moral values or religion (few other civilizations were converted to it) but rather as a result of superiority in the use of organized violence.” In the West, this fact has been forgotten, but in the East – it will never be. The US invasion to Iraq, which in fact laid the groundwork for a chain of collisions – tragic for the peoples and endless to this day – national, ethnic, religious, economic, and social, at the same time has sucked the US deeply into the quagmire of a perpetual conflict with the Islamic world. Since the Roman Empire there has never been a situation where the tentacles of one nation’s claims stretched so far from its borders.

Ultimately, humanity can survive if it realizes that there is no real alternative to cooperation. We have so many global and regional issues, and the world is becoming so fragile that there is simply no other way out. (For example, Secretary of State Kerry, for nine long months made unilateral shuttle trips in an attempt to reach a peaceful political settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. But unilateral American efforts proved ineffective. Moreover, there has been a new outbreak of bloody clashes in Jerusalem, and tension in Israeli-Palestinian affairs is growing. Meanwhile, in another situation on the Syrian track, when Russia and the United States worked together with China, we were able to prevent a major war in the region, eliminate chemical weapons in Syria and convene the Geneva Conference).

Unfortunately, in today’s world the number of terrorist attacks and conflict situations is on the rise again. New dividing lines or the construction of new walls will not lead to the resolution of these problems.

To cope with these and other pending challenges, we can only work together on the basis of equal and mutually respectful cooperation.

Vladimir Mashin, Ph.D. in History, a political commentator, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Time and the Technological World

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Source: The Hipcrime Vocab

Check out this fascinating summary of  How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World. This particular summary looks at the part of the book that documents how our perception of time has changed, and how that has affected the modern world.

The book talks about something called the “Hummingbird Effect,” which describes the way in which various inventions and technical discoveries change the world in unexpected ways. Some of you may recall James’ Burke’s excellent TV show Connections on BBC/PBS (These used to be available on YouTube, but JamesBurkeWeb appears to have disappeared. Still, some episodes can still be found) which covered the same ground:

Johnson points out that, much like the evolution of bees gave flowers their colors and the evolution of pollen altered the design of the hummingbird’s wings, the most remarkable thing about innovations is the way they precipitate unanticipated changes that reverberate far and wide beyond the field or discipline or problem at the epicenter of the particular innovation. Pointing to the Gutenberg press — itself already an example of the combinatorial nature of creative breakthroughs — Johnson writes:

    “Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press created a surge in demand for spectacles, as the new practice of reading made Europeans across the continent suddenly realize that they were farsighted; the market demand for spectacles encouraged a growing number of people to produce and experiment with lenses, which led to the invention of the microscope, which shortly thereafter enabled us to perceive that our bodies were made up of microscopic cells. You wouldn’t think that printing technology would have anything to do with the expansion of our vision down to the cellular scale, just as you wouldn’t have thought that the evolution of pollen would alter the design of a hummingbird’s wing. But that is the way change happens.”

It starts with Galileo’s observation that a pendulum always swings to-and-fro in a regular amount of time.

“But machines that could keep a reliable beat didn’t exist in Galileo’s age; the metronome wouldn’t be invented for another few centuries. So watching the altar lamp sway back and forth with such regularity planted the seed of an idea in Galileo’s young mind. As is so often the case, however, it would take decades before the seed would blossom into something useful.”

The ability to accurately measure time was a departure from before when:

    “Instead of fifteen minutes, time was described as how long it would take to milk the cow or nail soles to a new pair of shoes. Instead of being paid by the hour, craftsmen were conventionally paid by the piece produced — what was commonly called “taken-work” — and their daily schedules were almost comically unregulated.”

Once the regimentation of the clock was introduced, many things followed from that due to the Hummingbird Effect:

Over the century that followed, the pendulum clock, a hundred times more accurate than any preceding technology, became a staple of European life and forever changed our relationship with time. But the hummingbird’s wings continued to flap — accurate timekeeping became the imperceptible heartbeat beneath all technology of the Industrial Revolution, from scheduling the division of labor in factories to keeping steam-powered locomotives running on time. It was the invisible hand of the clock that first moved the market — a move toward unanticipated innovations in other fields. Without clocks, Johnson argues, the Industrial Revolution may have never taken off — or “at the very least, have taken much longer to reach escape velocity.” He explains:

    “Accurate clocks, thanks to their unrivaled ability to determine longitude at sea, greatly reduced the risks of global shipping networks, which gave the first industrialists a constant supply of raw materials and access to overseas markets. In the late 1600s and early 1700s, the most reliable watches in the world were manufactured in England, which created a pool of expertise with fine-tool manufacture that would prove to be incredibly handy when the demands of industrial innovation arrived, just as the glassmaking expertise producing spectacles opened the door for telescopes and microscopes. The watchmakers were the advance guard of what would become industrial engineering.”

Not mentioned is the introduction of public schools, designed to take farmers used to “cow milking time” and “discipline” them into a workforce able to sit still and obey and punch a clock, a system we are still living with today. Those of us who cannot or will not conform to this ruthless discipline are severely punished:

And yet, as with most innovations, the industrialization of time came with a dark side — one Bertrand Russell so eloquently lamented in the 1920s when he asked: “What will be the good of the conquest of leisure and health, if no one remembers how to use them?” Johnson writes:

    “The natural rhythms of tasks and leisure had to be forcibly replaced with an abstract grid. When you spend your whole life inside that grid, it seems like second nature, but when you are experiencing it for the first time, as the laborers of industrial England did in the second half of the eighteenth century, it arrives as a shock to the system. Timepieces were not just tools to help you coordinate the day’s events, but something more ominous: the “deadly statistical clock,” in Dickens’s Hard Times, “which measured every second with a beat like a rap upon a coffin lid.”

[…]

    “To be a Romantic at the turn of the nineteenth century was in part to break from the growing tyranny of clock time: to sleep late, ramble aimlessly through the city, refuse to live by the “statistical clocks” that governed economic life… The time discipline of the pendulum clock took the informal flow of experience and nailed it to a mathematical grid. If time is a river, the pendulum clock turned it into a canal of evenly spaced locks, engineered for the rhythms of industry.“

And as clocks became ever more precise and ubiquitous, things flowed from that – more regimentation, more standardization (village clocks used to be set by the sun’s position, but this introduced inaccuracies in railroad timetables – thus two inventions, one steam-powered and one not, are bound up together), and entirely new scientific discoveries which led to new inventions such as the computers that now rule over our lives:

Johnson goes on to trace the hummingbird flutterings to the emergence of pocket watches, the democratization of time through the implementation of Standard Time, and the invention of the first quartz clock in 1928, which boasted the unprecedented accuracy of losing or gaining only one thousandth of a second per day…But the most groundbreaking effect of the quartz clock — the most unpredictable manifestation of the hummingbird effect in the story of time — was that it gave rise to modern computing and the Information Age. Johnson writes:

    “Computer chips are masters of time discipline… Instead of thousands of operations per minute, the microprocessor is executing billions of calculations per second, while shuffling information in and out of other microchips on the circuit board. Those operations are all coordinated by a master clock, now almost without exception made of quartz… A modern computer is the assemblage of many different technologies and modes of knowledge: the symbolic logic of programming languages, the electrical engineering of the circuit board, the visual language of interface design. But without the microsecond accuracy of a quartz clock, modern computers would be useless.”

And once the computer is invented – note that it becomes the new mega-metaphor taking over from the steam engine – the brain as “neural network” that can be simulated, the economy as a perfect “information processing machine” via the price mechanism and humans as “rational utility maximizers”of Neoliberal economics, and recasting the analog world as binary one of ones and zeros – art, music, literature, etc. that can be simulated through sufficiently complex algorithms. All this flows from our view of the world, which in turn is dictated by our technology.

The Hummingbird Effect: How Galileo Invented Time and Gave Rise to the Modern Tyranny of the Clock (Brain Pickings)

More at the link. It’s worth noting that this entire thesis was laid out by Lewis Mumford as far back in the 1930’s in Technics and Society, and this book looks like it covers much the same ground.

Mumford’s these is that the Industrial Revolution did not spring forth fully-formed from nowhere, but came forth from changes in the human perception of the world and man’s relationship to nature that had been occurring for centuries beforehand. He called this the Eotechnic period, and points out that it needs to be understood to see how the modern world emerged. He classified the subsequent periods as Paleotechnic (centered around the stream engine, iron and coal), and the Neotechnic (centered around electricity and the scientific method). He stressed how much our perception of the natural world and human nature dictate the nature of our science and social organization.

Several intellectual revolutions had to take place in order to get us to the Industrial Revolution. One, as noted above and emphasized by Mumford, was the accurate measurement of time. Another was the increasing control over motive forces exemplified by the windmill and watermill. Another was individual perception, as indicated by the use of perspective in painting. Another was the increasing standardization, political centralization and bureaucracy. Another was the discovery of the New World of which the ancients had no knowledge or precedent. Another was the increasing use of the abstraction of money for trade. But perhaps the biggest one of all was recasting the natural world as a machine that could be analyzed and understood. These changes were all formative to the Industrial Revolution, which could not have come about without them.

Mumford writes extensively about the Medieval period, and how that period increasingly used technology to control the environment but in a genuinely humane way, one designed to enhance human needs and desires rather than control or eliminate them. Think of the medieval clock-making guild as opposed to the deskilled factory worker for example. The decentralized and localized nature of the Medieval period is what allowed technology to be used in this way.

But, beginning in the seventeenth century with the rise of the nation-state and the consolation of Europe’s kingdoms into large, centralized states with standards and bureaucracy (much of it due to the emergence of gunpowder and artillery, against which castles and mounted knights were useless), all that began to to change. Technology became increasingly tyrannical, and man was more and more forced into the “logic of the machine.” Consider the armies that emerged identical uniforms, identical weapons with interchangeable parts and drilled, regimented training designed to turn men into interchangeable parts themselves. Military training was the precursor to the disciplined workforce of the Industrial Revolution, which is why the connection between business and military discipline remains to this day (corporations today are run on the top-down hierarchical military model). Since battles were won by sheer numbers of “citizens” with rifles rather than an aristocratic warrior class who owned horses, the social relations changed, and the common man emerged with more importance. Population growth equaled national strength in the new order. Man’s rationality became celebrated, all other values were discounted. Productivity and technological “progress” became goals in the themselves rather than means to an end. Pursuit of growth and profit became all-consuming, human needs be damned.

In contrast to the Medieval period, today’s technology is dehumanizing, submitting man to centralized control, and seeing him as nothing more than a machine. Mumford envisioned a society where human values could once again take center stage instead of the productivist logic of “the myth of the machine” Thus Mumford was not anti-technology; rather he wanted a world in which technology served profoundly different values than in our present time. The brutal regulation of time, rather than the human time of being in the world – the difference between chronos and kairos, or the subjective and the objective – is one of the best illustrations of this difference. Just because we can measure time down to the nanosecond does not mean we have to be enslaved to it. That is a social choice, as Mumford would quickly remind us.

 

The CIA-engineered oil glut to bring down Putin and Maduro

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Russian President Vladimir Putin shakes hands with his Venezuelan counterpart Nicolas Maduro during a signing ceremony at the Kremlin in Moscow

By Wayne Madsen

Source: Intrepid Report

John Brennan’s long familiarity with Saudi Arabia, owing to the time he spent there as the CIA station chief in Riyadh in the 1990s and his knowledge of Saudi oil operations, has paid off. WMR has learned that Brennan’s agents inside Saudi Aramco convinced the firm’s management and the Saudi Oil Ministry to begin fracking operations to stimulate production in Saudi Arabia’s oldest oil fields.

By pumping salt water into older wells, some at a depth of 3 to 6 thousand feet, an inordinate amount of pressure was built up. The CIA’s oil industry implants knew what would occur when the fracking operations began. Due to the dangerously high water pressure, the Saudis were forced continuously pump oil until the pressure became equalized. That process is continuing. If the Saudis ceased pumping oil, they would permanently lose the wells to salt water contamination. In the current “pump it or lose it” situation, the Saudis are forced to pump at a rate that may take up to 5 years before they can slow down production rates.

The net result of the CIA-inspired fracking operations, which the Saudis were warned not to pursue by petroleum engineers working for some foreign-based firms like Schlumberger, is that there will be an oil supply glut for the next 5 years. The glut will be followed by a reduction in Saudi oil production unless new oil fields are brought on line. There is now a major push by U.S. and Canadian oil companies to bring the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the United States to offset the expected sharp rise in oil prices in five years.

The CIA operation to frack Middle Eastern oil fields was not only limited to Saudi Arabia. WMR has learned from oil industry sources that similar fracking caused overproduction problems in Kuwait and Iraq.

The result of the sudden decline in oil prices has resulted in heavy damage to the economies of the CIA-targeted countries of Russia, Iran, and Venezuela. Brennan and his economic warfare operatives banked on the Saudi overproduction to harm the economies of all three countries and the CIA has not been disappointed. The CIA figures that the governments of Vladimir Putin in Russia, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Iran, and Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela will have long since collapsed and been replaced by pro-Western regimes within 5 years.

Already, from his base in Switzerland, exiled Russian tax evader billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky has called for Putin’s overthrow and even his assassination. Meanwhile, the U.S. Congress and the Obama administration have taken cues from the CIA to impose devastating economic sanctions on both Russia and Venezuela. Similar congressional legislation to increase sanctions on Iran is pending.

Russia has been harmed the most by the CIA’s Saudi oil production scheme. The Russian ruble fell 56 percent in value against the U.S. dollar while Russian interest rates climbed to 17 percent. The price of shares of Russia’s largest lending bank, Sberbank, fell 18 percent. Although the Russian economic collapse has resulted in financial ripples around the world, with Austrian and French banks losing their stock values and the value of the Polish zloty and Hungarian forint falling against the dollar, the Obama administration says that there will be no easing on economic sanctions imposed on Russia over Ukraine. Obama has put the investments of American holders of Russian bonds in dire jeopardy.

The Pacific Investment Management Company’s (PEBIX) Emerging Markets Bond Fund, which holds over $800 million in Russian bonds, has lost almost 8 percent in value in the past few weeks.

Russian Central Bank Vice Chairman Sergei Shvetsov said, “What is happening is a nightmare that we could not even have imagined a year ago.”

Meanwhile, basic staples in Venezuela, including cooking oil, rice, and corn flour, are becoming hard to obtain. The U.S. dollar has jumped 1,700 percent in value against the Venezuelan bolivar on the black market. The CIA is using the financial collapse to push for an undemocratic overthrow of the Venezuelan government.

Iran, which has been under punitive Western economic sanctions for a number of years over its nuclear power program, is probably best able to weather the storm. Iran has built up a rather impressive domestic food production, telecommunications, and oil industry infrastructure to survive the sanctions. However, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani appears very aware of the Saudi role in the conspiracy to drive down oil prices.

Rouhani recently said, “The main reason for [the oil price plunge] is [a] political conspiracy by certain countries against the interest of the region and the Islamic world and it is only in the interest of some other countries . . . Iran and people of the region will not forget such conspiracies, or in other words, treachery against the interests of the Muslim world.”

Brennan’s and the CIA’s industrial sabotage of the Saudi and other Middle East oil industries will continue to have far-reaching effects on the world economy. Oil industry insiders fear that the CIA has unleashed something that may deal a devastating blow to the global economy.

The Calling: How Cronyism Worsens Income Inequality (and Freed Markets Reduce It)

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By Steven Horwitz

Source: Future of Freedom Foundation

I recently gave an introductory Public Choice talk sponsored by Students for Liberty at the University of Ottawa. The next speaker was my friend Anne Rathbone Bradley, who was Skyping in from Washington. Anne gave a terrific talk about cronyism and rent-seeking that nicely complemented many of the points I’d made. But one of the side issues she raised really stuck with me, and I want to expand on it.

Anne connected cronyism (I hesitate to call it “crony capitalism”), rent-seeking, and income inequality in a way I hadn’t quite thought about before. The key to the connection is to realize some important truths about the political process.

The first truth is that cronyism is no accident. It is no accident that the U.S. economy has increasingly become one in which your connections to political power matter more for your ability to increase your wealth than does producing a product or service that consumers wish to buy. We are becoming what Ayn Rand deftly termed an “aristocracy of pull.”

The ability of some to get wealthier through political connections does trouble many on the political left, but they often argue that with better elected officials, or more ethical businesspeople, or limits on campaign contributions, we could dramatically reduce this sort of cronyism. What their argument misses is that as long as government gives out goodies, private-sector actors will find ways to get their hands on them. If you really want to take the money out of politics, you need to make it harder for politicians to hand out money.

For libertarians, the state is always little more than a dispenser of privileges to special interests. This is not an accident of who is elected or who is wealthy. Government privileges provide an easy path to profit for those who can capture them — and with none of the hard work of actually competing in the market. This is why many people, including those in the private sector, like the state.

The second important truth is that these political privileges are much more likely to be captured by those who already have financial and political power. Despite the fantasy believed by so many that government regulation and other interventions are all about constraining the rich and powerful in the name of the masses, in fact a great deal of government regulation is driven by the desires of those same rich and powerful to become more so. The more power we give to government, the more power we are giving to those with the money and connections to access political power. In other words, expanding the state gives more power and privilege to the powerful and privileged.

The last truth is that when private-sector actors seek to use political privileges to enhance their profits, they often do so by blocking smaller competitors’ access to the market, or by raising their costs of competing. When Walmart supports a higher minimum wage, it thereby favors raising the costs for their small mom-and-pop rivals. When taxicab companies defend their monopoly privileges, they intend to shut firms like Uber and Lyft out of the market altogether. When entrenched hairdressers demand that hair braiders be licensed, the established practitioners mean to raise their competitors’ costs or shut them out altogether.

When we put all three of these truths together, we get a story about the way in which those who already have wealth and power can and do make use of the state to block the upward mobility of their poorer, less-powerful potential competitors. Small-business owners, Uber and Lyft drivers, and African-American women who want to open hair-braiding businesses are trying to grab on to the bottom rungs of the income ladder and work their way up. These are the very people — start-up entrepreneurs and the working poor — that those critical of the market claim to care about.

In a world where government has all of these powers to intervene in markets, rent-seeking and cronyism are inevitable. Regulation will ensure that those who know the right people can tilt the regulatory playing field in their favor. The result will be a worsening of the income inequality that concerns so many. The rich will get richer through rent-seeking and cronyism, and they will do so at the expense of the poor and relatively powerless. If rent-seeking and cronyism worsen income inequality, and the source of rent-seeking and cronyism is the state’s ability to intervene, then a pretty good case can be made that freed markets will give us a world with less income inequality than the status quo.

Libertarians are right to point out that inequalities of income are not inherently bad. If the existing pattern of incomes were the result of a truly freed market (like in the famous, if simplified, Wilt Chamberlain example in Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia), there would be no reason for worry. This is especially true because in a freed market, dynamic change would ensure that the same people do not occupy the same rungs on the ladder from year to year.

However, if inequalities are instead the result of a mixed economy in which those who already have wealth and power can enhance it at the expense of those with less — not to mention the consumers who lose out on the benefits of greater competition and lower prices, then libertarians are right to object and look for solutions. Of course, asking for more state action to combat state-driven inequalities is unlikely to work and very likely to make matters worse.

Thus, we can ground our arguments against government intervention in the market in our desire to reduce inequalities that are not the result of voluntary exchanges that benefit both parties.

Finally, this whole argument gives libertarians another reason to love the sharing economy of Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, and the rest. Not only are such companies providing important competition for established firms and thereby lowering prices and bringing better services and more options to consumers, they are also part of the fight against the unearned privileges of the rich and powerful and the fight against politically driven, and therefore unjustified, increases in income inequality.

Classical liberalism needs to reassert its long-standing commitment to progressive goals, even as it rejects the means preferred by most so-called progressives today. We have an opportunity to bring new allies to our cause by recognizing the interrelationships among rent-seeking, cronyism, the sharing economy, small businesspeople, and income inequality. Let’s not overlook it.

WSJ reports: Bank of North Dakota outperforms Wall Street

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By Ellen Brown

Source: Intrepid Report

While 49 state treasuries were submerged in red ink after the 2008 financial crash, one state’s bank outperformed all others and actually launched an economy-shifting new industry. So reports the Wall Street Journal this week, discussing the Bank of North Dakota (BND) and its striking success in the midst of a national financial collapse led by the major banks.

Chester Dawson begins his November 16 article:

It is more profitable than Goldman Sachs Group Inc., has a better credit rating than J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and hasn’t seen profit growth drop since 2003. Meet Bank of North Dakota, the U.S.’s lone state-owned bank, which has one branch, no automated teller machines and not a single investment banker.

He backs this up with comparative data on the BND’s performance:

[I]ts total assets have more than doubled, to $6.9 billion last year from $2.8 billion in 2007. By contrast, assets of the much bigger Bank of America Corp. have grown much more slowly, to $2.1 trillion from $1.7 trillion in that period.

. . . Return on equity, a measure of profitability, is 18.56%, about 70% higher than those at Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan. . . .

Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services last month reaffirmed its double-A-minus rating of the bank, whose deposits are guaranteed by the state of North Dakota. That is above the rating for both Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan and among U.S. financial institutions, second only to the Federal Home Loan Banks, rated double-A-plus.

Dawson goes on, however, to credit the BND’s remarkable performance to the Bakken oil boom. Giving his article the controversial title, “Shale Boom Helps North Dakota Bank Earn Returns Goldman Would Envy: U.S.’s Lone State-Owned Bank Is Beneficiary of Fracking,” he contends:

The reason for its success? As the sole repository of the state of North Dakota’s revenue, the bank has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the boom in Bakken shale-oil production from hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. In fact, the bank played a crucial part in kick-starting the oil frenzy in the state in 2008 amid the financial crisis.

That is how the Wall Street-owned media routinely write off the exceptional record of this lone publicly-owned bank, crediting it to the success of the private oil industry. It would be more accurate to say that the bank made the boom.

Excess deposits do not explain the BND’s record profits

Dawson confirms that the BND played a crucial role in kickstarting the boom and the economy, at a time when other states were languishing in recession. It did this by lending for critical infrastructure (roads, housing, hospitals, hotels) when other states’ banks were curtailing local lending.

But while the state itself may have reaped increased taxes and fees from the oil boom, the BND got no more out of the deal than an increase in deposits, as Dawson also confirms. The BND is the sole repository of state revenues by law.

Having excess deposits can hardly be the reason the BND has outdistanced even JPMorganChase and Bank of America, which also have massive excess deposits and have not turned them into loans. Instead, they have invested their excess deposits in securities.

Interestingly, the BND has also followed this practice. According to Standard & Poor’s October 2014 credit report, it had a loan to deposit ratio in 2009 of 91%. This ratio dropped to 57.5% in 2014. The excess deposits have gone primarily into Treasuries, US government agency debt, and mortgage-backed securities. Thus the bank’s extraordinary profitability cannot be explained by an excess of deposits or an expanded loan portfolio.

Further eroding the Dawson explanation is that the oil boom did not actually hit North Dakota until 2010. Yet it was the sole state to have escaped the credit crisis by the spring of 2009, when every other state’s budget had already dipped into negative territory. Montana, the runner-up, was in the black by the end of 2009; but it dropped into the red in March of that year and had to implement a pay freeze on state employees.

According to Standard & Poor’s, the BND’s return on equity was up to 23.4% in 2009—substantially higher than in any of the years of the oil boom that began in 2010.

The real reasons for its stellar success

To what, then, are the remarkable achievements of this lone public bank attributable?

The answer is something the privately-owned major media have tried to sweep under the rug: the public banking model is simply more profitable and efficient than the private model. Profits, rather than being siphoned into offshore tax havens, are recycled back into the bank, the state and the community.

The BND’s costs are extremely low: no exorbitantly-paid executives; no bonuses, fees, or commissions; only only one branch office; very low borrowing costs; and no FDIC premiums (the state rather than the FDIC guarantees its deposits).

These are all features that set publicly-owned banks apart from privately-owned banks. Beyond that, they are safer for depositors, allow public infrastructure costs to be cut in half, and provide a non-criminal alternative to a Wall Street cartel caught in a laundry list of frauds.

Dawson describes some other unique aspects of the BND’s public banking model:

It traditionally extends credit, or invests directly, in areas other lenders shun, such as rural housing loans.

. . . [R]etail banking accounts for just 2%-3% of its business. The bank’s focus is providing loans to students and extending credit to companies in North Dakota, often in partnership with smaller community banks.

Bank of North Dakota also acts as a clearinghouse for interbank transactions in the state by settling checks and distributing coins and currency. . . .

The bank’s mission is promoting economic development, not competing with private banks. “We’re a state agency and profit maximization isn’t what drives us,” President Eric Hardmeyer said.

. . . It recently started offering mortgages to individuals in the most underserved corners of the state. But Mr. Hardmeyer dismisses any notion the bank could run into trouble with deadbeat borrowers. “We know our customers,” he said. “You’ve got to understand the conservative nature of this state. Nobody here is really interested in making subprime loans.”

The downsides of a boom

The bank’s mission to promote economic development could help explain why its return on equity has actually fallen since the oil boom hit in 2010. The mass invasion by private oil interests has put a severe strain on the state’s infrastructure, forcing it to muster its resources defensively to keep up; and the BND is in the thick of that battle.

In an August 2011 article titled, “North Dakota’s Oil Boom is a Blessing and a Curse,” Ryan Holeywell writes that virtually all major infrastructure in the boom cities and counties is strained or exhausted. To shore up its infrastructure needs, the state has committed hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. Meanwhile, it is trying to promote industries other than oil and gas, such as companies involved with unmanned aircraft, manufacturing associated with wind energy equipment, and data centers; but the remoteness of the western part of the state, along with the high cost of labor, makes doing business there complicated and expensive.

Hydrofracking, which has been widely attacked as an environmental hazard, is not as bad in North Dakota as in other states, since the process takes place nearly two miles underground; but it still raises significant environmental concerns. In 2011, the state levied $3 million in fines against 20 oil companies for environmental violations. It also undertook a review of industry regulations and was in the process of doubling its oil field inspectors.

The greatest stresses from the oil industry, however, involve the shortage of housing and the damage to the county road system, which in many places consists of two-lane gravel and dirt roads. Drilling a new well requires more than 2,000 truck trips, and the heavy rigs are destroying the roads. Fixing them has been estimated to require an investment of more than $900 million over the next 20 years.

These are external costs imposed by the oil industry that the government has to pick up. All of it requires financing, and the BND is there to provide the credit lines.

Lighting a fire under legislators

What the Bank of North Dakota has done to sustain its state’s oil boom, a publicly-owned bank could do for other promising industries in other states. But Dawson observes that no other state has yet voted to take up the challenge, despite a plethora of bills introduced for the purpose. Legislators are slow to move on innovations, unless a fire is lit under them by a crisis or a mass popular movement.

We would be better off sparking a movement than waiting for a crisis. The compelling data in Dawson’s Wall Street Journal article, properly construed, could add fuel to the flames.

Ellen Brown is an attorney, founder of the Public Banking Institute, and author of twelve books, including the best-selling Web of Debt. In The Public Bank Solution, her latest book, she explores successful public banking models historically and globally. Her 200+ blog articles are at EllenBrown.com.

 

Podcast Roundup

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12/2: On The Progressive Commentary Hour host Gary Null has an in-depth conversation with Peter Levenda on the Nazi legacy, its survival and influence in world events, and its continuation to this day:

Show link: http://s35.podbean.com/pb/1448aab68f3651499d84a256f2ad4c14/54820c63/data1/blogs18/371244/uploads/PCH_120214.mp3

 

12/3: Host KMO and partner Olga have a wide-ranging discussion with podcaster Duncan Crary, and entrepreneur Vic Christopher on localism, architecture and regenerating community among other topics on the C-Realm podcast:

Show link: http://www.c-realm.com/wp-content/uploads/443_Troy.mp3

 

12/3:  On the latest episode of Guns and Butter, host Bonnie Faulker interviews Judyth Vary Baker (an ex-girlfriend of Lee Harvey Oswald) on the connection between cancer causing bioweapons research and the JFK assassination:

Show link: http://archives.kpfa.org/data/20141203-Wed1300.mp3

 

12/4: Freeman and author Jamie Hanshaw discuss propagandistic and ritualistic aspects of the American Music Awards on The Free Zone:

Show link: http://freeman.theanomalieschannel.com/amas-american-mind-control-awards.mp3

 

12/5:  On the Corbett Report, Lionel of LionelMedia.com joins James Corbett for an epic discussion on fake stories in the media, manipulation of the historical record, the fake Syria sniper boy video, the Corbett/Lionel law, and the importance of self-correction.

http://www.corbettreport.com/mp3/2014-12-04%20Lionel.mp3

 

Miguel Conner and author Valarie Ziegler discuss the Gnostic subtext of Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner, one of the greatest television programs of the 60s:

 

 

Monsanto Sues Maui for Direct Democracy, Launches New PR Campaign

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By Rebekah Wilce

Source: PR Watch

Residents of Maui County, Hawai’i voted on November 4 to ban the growing of genetically modified (GMO) crops on the islands of Maui, Lanai, and Molokai until scientific studies are conducted on their safety and benefits. Monsanto and Dow Chemical’s unit Mycogen Seeds have sued the county in federal court to stop the law passed by the people.

In Vermont, the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA, of which Monsanto and Dow were recently listed as members) has sued the state over its law requiring GMO labels. And Monsanto has a history of suing to prevent consumer labeling regarding its products. The company sued a number of dairies in the 1990s and 2000s for labeling milk free from recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH), which Monsanto developed and marketed as Posilac® (sold to Eli Lilly in 2008), the only commercially approved form. Vermont itself is no stranger to such suits. The International Dairy Foods Association sued Vermont for passing a law requiring labeling of milk containing rBGH (Monsanto wrote an amicus brief in support of the plaintiff, and GMA was a plaintiff-appellant) — and it won in federal court.

On the same day that Monsanto said it would challenge the decision of Maui’s citizens to regulate their own land and environment in court, the company also launched a new national advertising campaign as part of an effort to improve the image of the widely reviled company.

The glossy ads portray families of many cultures sitting down to eat gorgeous foods, invoking images more often seen in the pages of Saveur than in the hallways of one of the world’s largest chemical companies.

In addition to print ads in several national magazines and TV ads airing on national cable networks and several local stations in coastal cities, the campaign includes a slick new website launched in September, Discover.Monsanto.com.

The website invites questions from the public. The vast majority are skeptical, if not hostile. Others sound like they were written by Monsanto staff. Predictably, some of the hardest questions, like the one posed by Tim H., “In 2013, how much money has Monsanto spent on lobbyists in DC? What laws were these lobbyists attempting to create/amend and why?” are given short shrift.

Monsanto’s pretty TV ads target moms and millenials, according to the company’s corporate brand lead, Jessica Simmons. Monsanto has even hired a new “director of millenial engagement,” Vance Crowe, 32. He represented the company at a recent South by Southwest Eco conference in Austin, where revelations that Monsanto had paid for a panel of farmers to attend and present generated some excitement, as Tom Philpott reports in Mother Jones.

Crowe told NPR‘s “The Salt” blog, “[T]he challenge with something like SXSW Eco is that it doesn’t do anybody any good if people are so passionate that they’re yelling. The challenge is how can we enter the conversation so that people don’t feel like they have to yell to be heard?” Apparently, Crowe hopes to “enter the conversation” one party at a time. He enthusiastically describes how he and a gay colleague attended sessions on “sustainable fashion” and got invited to parties where they won fans and accolades.

Coincidentally, the front page of Discover.Monsanto.com contains, under “Here’s where we work,” a picture of corn crops being tended in Maui, with the text, “Hawaii’s unique climate allows for three to four growing seasons a year, reducing the time it takes us to develop new products. Our island roots go back more than 45 years.”

The marketing text may indicate the issue at the heart of Monsanto’s lawsuit against Maui. Those multiple growing seasons mean that “about 90 percent of all corn grown in the U.S. is genetically engineered and has been developed partially at Hawaii farms,” according to the Associated Press. Monsanto and the rest of the seed crop industry reap $146.3 million a year in sales from their activities in the state, according to a 2009 USDA report. Now Monsanto would have to substantially downsize its activity in Maui County in order to follow the new law, according to its lawsuit.

Monsanto’s new PR campaign seeks to make its brand approachable to the American consumer. Yet, with 92 percent of Americans demanding that GMO foods be labelled, according to a new Consumer Reports poll, Monsanto and its new millenial hires have their work cut out for them.

Consumer Reports recently put out a study on where GMOs are hiding in your food, including in packages labeled “natural.” You can access the report here.

Rebekah Wilce is a reporter and researcher who directs CMD’s Food Rights Network project.

Grooming Students for A Lifetime of Surveillance

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The same technologists who protest against the NSA’s metadata collection programs are the ones profiting the most from the widespread surveillance of students.

By Jessy Irwin

Source: Model View Culture

Since 2011, billions of dollars of venture capital investment have poured into public education through private, for-profit technologies that promise to revolutionize education. Designed for the “21st century” classroom, these tools promise to remedy the many, many societal ills facing public education with artificial intelligence, machine learning, data mining, and other technological advancements.

They are also being used to track and record every move students make in the classroom, grooming students for a lifetime of surveillance and turning education into one of the most data-intensive industries on the face of the earth. The NSA has nothing on the monitoring tools that education technologists have developed in to “personalize” and “adapt” learning for students in public school districts across the United States.

(Mega)data Collection + Analysis

“Adaptive”, “personalized” learning platforms are one of the most heavily-funded verticals in education technology. By breaking down learning into a series of tasks, and further distilling those tasks down to a series of clicks that can be measured and analyzed, companies like Knewton (which has raised $105 million in venture capital), or the recently shuttered inBloom (which raised over $100 million from the Gates Foundation) gather immense amounts of information about students into a lengthy profile containing personal information, socioeconomic status and other data that is mined for patterns and insights to improve performance. For students, these clickstreams and data trails begin when they are 5 years old, barely able to read much less type in usernames and passwords required to access their online learning portals.

Data collection and number crunching aren’t the only technologies being explored to revolutionize education– technology billionaire and philanthropist Bill Gates funded a $1.1 million project to fit middle-school students with biometric sensors to monitor their response and engagement levels during lessons, and advocated a $5 billion program to install video cameras in every classroom to record teachers for evaluation.

The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, a law put in place in 1974 to protect student academic records, does nothing to protect student data when it is in the hands of education technology companies. Instead, FERPA threatens to take federal funding away from schools who are found to have breached student privacy while it fails to mandate bare minimum security standards for the storage and transmission of student data. In fact, a recent revision of FERPA increased the power that companies have to collect and mine student data.  Though lawmakers and privacy advocates are regularly outraged at the immense volume of student data freely floating through the web, the repeated failure to create legislation that protects student data from being used for profit is astounding.

One thing is clear: those who have the power to protect student privacy will not do so as long as they can continue to subsidize the cost of public education with student data.

Internet Censorship in Schools

In most educational institutions, the vast majority of IT operations are focused on monitoring, filtering and blocking web traffic instead of building secure networks that safeguard student records and sensitive behavioral data. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the widespread adoption of web filtering software tools in K-12 schools. Usage of these technologies is required for compliance with programs like E-Rate, which grant federal money to schools to fund internet access for their students.

To be eligible for funding from the E-Rate program, schools are required to comply with federal regulations that ban access to websites displaying pornography, graphic material, or any other that could otherwise be judged as immoral, improper or lewd. More often than not, this subjective criteria is determined by the opinions and belief systems of school administrators under political pressure to deny students access to content on controversial issues about topics like evolution, birth control and sex education. These decisions disproportionately affect young girls and LGBTQ students by denying them access to sites that provide important information about their rights, their developing bodies, their sexuality and their access to contraceptives. In the case of Securly, the first filtering tool designed for schools, the controls set by IT and administration for web access can extend far beyond the walls of the school and determine what content students can access while using school- issued machines from their home internet connections.

Despite the many positive contributions of the internet in the distribution and dissemination of knowledge across the planet, students are regularly denied access to valuable information that could positively impact their learning… all to safeguard a small percentage of federal budget money granted to their schools. The implications of this are particularly severe for low-income students who do not have access to the Internet at home; without the ability to freely access the web on their own terms, their digital literacy skills lag behind those of their affluent peers. Though teachers request better and broader internet access for students in their classrooms, administrator-imposed blocks and filters on school internet leave most students woefully unprepared to navigate the realities of the web. When students do find a way around the tools used to limit their access to the outside world (this happened with a group of students who were given iPads in the Los Angeles United School district last year), they’re labelled as “hackers” or miscreants, and disciplined for using Tor, a tool popular among students for anonymous web browsing and circumventing blacklists that ban websites from school networks.

Social Media Surveillance

Schools are adopting many other surveillance technologies with unprecedented reach into the private communications and lives of students and their families. In Lower Merion, PA, a suburb outside of Philadelphia, educators engaged remote administration tools on students’ laptops to regularly spy on their activities while at home. In a case that made its way into federal courts, one student was punished by administrators who mistook candy pictured through his laptop’s camera for drugs. While the full extent of the spying was never exposed, parents and students have expressed concern about educators having the ability to watch young girls undress in the privacy of their homes, unaware that they were being watched through their school-issued computers.

In 2013, the Glendale Unified School District in Glendale, CA took a move straight from the NSA surveillance handbook by seeking out a $40,000 contract with Geo Listening, a social media monitoring company that charges schools to eavesdrop on student social media chatter. While the company claims to only access posts that are public in the school districts they work with, and says it works closely with school districts to tailor their monitoring programs to prevent cyberbullying, suicide and active shooter incidents, it is very easy— too easy, in fact— to use such technologies to identify and target students who have been labeled deviant or delinquent within their communities, or who are otherwise outspoken and critical of their teachers and schools.

Schools are also demanding access to students’ social media communications in ways that severely harm their constitutionally protected rights to free speech. In Minnewaska, MN, a female student who complained about a hall monitor’s behavior in a Facebook post was questioned and given in-school suspension. Later, when a parent reported the student for “sexting” over Facebook with a classmate, she was removed from class again as a group of educators and a police officer armed with a taser demanded that the student hand over her password. They then read private communications that took place outside of school through her Facebook account. After being pulled from class multiple times, suspended from school, and barred from attending a school field trip (the same punishment was not doled out to the male student involved in the messaging), the ACLU stepped in to defend the student’s right to privacy and free speech in communications outside of school property. Though the ruling in the case upheld students’ protection under the 1st and 4th amendments, school districts around the country continue to demand access to students’ social media accounts and threaten to mark students’ academic records to make it difficult to get into a desired university or to seek other avenues for continued education.

Physical Surveillance

In addition to the online monitoring taking place in schools, there are many surveillance mechanisms in place to enforce physical security in public schools. Since the shootings that took place at Virginia Tech in 2007, and again after those that took place in Sandy Hook, CT in 2012, technology companies have launched myriad tools designed to minimize the potential loss of life in the next active shooting incident at a school. Some of these technologies include:

By preying on the absolute worst fears of administrators and parents across the country, technology companies are earning millions of dollars selling security “solutions” that do not accurately address the threat model these tools claim to dispel. School districts that purchase these systems further perpetuate the farce of security theater and infringe on students’ rights to privacy and individual freedom.

A Lifetime of Surveillance

When we develop and use educational technologies that monitor a student’s every moment in school and online, we groom that student for a lifetime of surveillance from the NSA, from data brokers, from advertisers, marketers, and even CCTV cameras. By watching every move that students make while learning, we model to students that we do not trust them– that ultimately, their every move will be under scrutiny from others. When students recognize that they are being watched, they begin to act differently– and from that very moment they begin to cede one small bit of freedom at a time.

Though the education technology revolution continually promises a silver bullet that will be a great democratizing force for all of society’s ills, it categorically disregards the patriarchal power structures and biases that both legitimate and perpetuate discrimination against minorities and marginalized groups. Despite it being well within the scope of educational technology tools to track, identify and expose biases towards groups of students, technologists avoid implementing small changes that monitor educator performance and correct for unconscious biases that negatively affect student learning. Because the surveillance taking place in schools is typically based on qualitative criteria like morality, appropriateness and good behavior, these technologies extend current practices and prejudices that perpetuate injustices against marginalized groups.

There are few to no safeguards built into the online and offline monitoring systems to protect students from the abuse of these tools. Young female students who are active on social media can be unfairly targeted, slut-shamed and disciplined for suggestive language that takes place outside of school, while their male counterparts are not held equally accountable for participating in sexually charged online conversations. Youth of color, a group that is disproportionately stereotyped as angry, aggressive, and unpredictable by educators, can easily be monitored, disciplined, and entered into the juvenile justice system for any outburst that could vaguely be misinterpreted as a threat to a homogeneous caucasian school culture. Any student grappling with issues of abuse, depression, disability, gender identity or sexuality could easily be discovered by online surveillance tools, stigmatized and outed to their teachers, parents and wider community.

Education technologists also continue to widen the digital divide between affluent and economically oppressed. Despite an industry-wide insistence that technology is not being developed to replace educators in the classroom, many poor school districts faced with massive budget cuts are implementing experimental blended learning programs reliant on “adaptive” and “personalized” software as a way to mitigate the effect of large class sizes on student learning. This means that students who attend costly private schools or live within rich school districts that can afford to employ more educators and maintain smaller class sizes receive much more personalized instruction from their teachers. Instead of receiving much-needed interaction and personalized learning directly from educators, poor students living in disadvantaged communities receive instruction from educational software that collects their data (which is likely to be sold), and have less individual instruction time from teachers than their affluent counterparts.

By developing technologies that collect, track, record, analyze every move a student makes both online and off, technologists and investors and educators are ensuring that today’s students will have less privacy than any other generation that came before them, threatening to make privacy and anonymity unattainable for future generations. Though the surveillance mechanisms at play in education technologies affect the privacy of millions of students who pass through the education system each year, this system is a profound, persistent threat to the privacy and individual liberty of LGBTQ students, low-income students, and students of color who have already been so severely failed by the status quo.

Ironically, the same technologists and investors who protest against the NSA’s metadata collection programs are the ones profiting the most from the widespread surveillance of students across the country, by building educational tools with the same function.