Category Archives: media

Why this Draconian Response to COVID-19?

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By Jeffrey A. Tucker

Source: Activist Post

Imagine if you are the organizer of a major arts and tech event that attracts a quarter-million attendees. One week out from the conference, the mayor cancels your event. Your event is not named specifically, just that all events involving more than 2,500 people are officially banned. He does this using emergency powers, justified in the name of containing a virus.

And that’s it. This is what happened to South by Southwest, one of the most important events in the world in Austin, Texas, which has thus far not reported a single case of COVID-19. Based on last year’s numbers, It’s the end for:

  • 73,716 conference attendees and 232,258 festival attendees;
  • 4,700 speakers
  • 4,331 media/press attendees
  • 2,124 sessions
  • 70,00 trade show attendees occupying 181,400 square feet of exhibit space
  • 351 official parties and events
  • 612 international acts
  • 1,964 performance acts

Local merchants are devastated. All hotel and flight reservations are lost. It’s a financial calamity for the city (last year brought half a billion dollars for local merchants) and for untold millions of people affected by the abrupt decision.

Draconian, to say the least.

Making matters worse, a vicious and completely false report published by Variety said that the festival was aching for the city to make the call so that the festival could collect insurance money. This turns out to be entirely wrong: South by Southwest had no insurance against infectious disease. It was a smear and response to mass frenzy. After all, a petition on Change.org signed by 55,000 people had demanded the cancellation.

The city acquiesced to the mob. A grand and glorious conference was destroyed – the first of many this season.

Italy now has 16 million people under quarantine, which is to say that they are prisoners.

Anyone living in Lombardy and 14 other central and northern provinces will need special permission to travel. Milan and Venice are both affected. Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte also announced the closure of schools, gyms, museums, nightclubs and other venues across the whole country. The measures, the most radical taken outside China, will last until 3 April.

Americans have been quarantined on cruise ships and then forced to pay for their later hospitalization. The government that quarantines you has zero intention to pay the costs associated with your care, to say nothing of the opportunity costs of missing work.

The press isn’t helping. The New York Times has cheered it all on, aggressively advocating that governments go Medieval on this one.

In six months, if we are in a recession, unemployment is up, financial markets are wrecked, and people are locked in their homes, we’ll wonder why the heck governments chose disease “containment” over disease mitigation. Then the conspiracy theorists get to work.

The containment strategy was never debated or discussed. For the first time in modern history, governments of the world have taken it upon themselves to control population flows in the hopes of stemming the spread of this disease – regardless of the cost and with scant evidence that this strategy will actually work.

More and more, the containment response is looking like global panic. What’s interesting, Psychology Today points out, is that your doctor is not panicking:

COVID-19 is a new virus in a well-known class of viruses. The coronaviruses are cold viruses. I’ve treated countless patients with coronaviruses over the years. In fact, we’ve been able to test for them on our respiratory panels for the entirety of my career.

We know how cold viruses work: They cause runny noses, sneezing, cough, and fever, and make us feel tired and achy. For almost all of us, they run their course without medication. And in the vulnerable, they can trigger a more severe illness like asthma or pneumonia.

Yes, this virus is different and worse than other coronaviruses, but it still looks very familiar. We know more about it than we don’t know.

Doctors know what to do with respiratory viruses. As a pediatrician, I take care of patients with hundreds of different viruses that behave similarly to this one. We take care of the kids at home and see them if the fever is prolonged, if they get dehydrated, or if they develop breathing difficulty. Then we treat those problems and support the child until they get better.

Meanwhile, the New England Journal of Medicine reports as follows:

On the basis of a case definition requiring a diagnosis of pneumonia, the currently reported case fatality rate is approximately 2%. In another article in the Journal, Guan et al. report mortality of 1.4% among 1,099 patients with laboratory-confirmed Covid-19; these patients had a wide spectrum of disease severity. If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.

Slate’s piece on this topic offers more perspective:

This all suggests that COVID-19 is a relatively benign disease for most young people, and a potentially devastating one for the old and chronically ill, albeit not nearly as risky as reported. Given the low mortality rate among younger patients with coronavirus—zero in children 10 or younger among hundreds of cases in China, and 0.2-0.4 percent in most healthy nongeriatric adults (and this is still before accounting for what is likely to be a high number of undetected asymptomatic cases)—we need to divert our focus away from worrying about preventing systemic spread among healthy people—which is likely either inevitable, or out of our control—and commit most if not all of our resources toward protecting those truly at risk of developing critical illness and even death: everyone over 70, and people who are already at higher risk from this kind of virus.

Look, I’m obviously not in a position to comment on the medical aspects of this; I defer to the experts. But neither are medical professionals in a position to comment on the political response to this; mostly they have assiduously declined to do so.

Meanwhile, governments are willy-nilly making drastic decisions that profoundly affect the status of human freedom. Their decisions are going to affect our lives in profound ways. And there has thus far been no real debate on this. It’s just been presumed that containment of the spread rather than the care of the sick is the only way forward.

What’s more, we have governments all-too-willing to deploy their awesome powers to control human populations in direct response to mass public pressure based on fears that have so far not been justified by any available evidence. For this reason, we have every reason to be concerned.

Are we really ready to imprison the world, wreck financial markets, destroy countless jobs, and massively disrupt life as we know it, all to forestall some uncertain fate, even as we do know the right way to deal with the problem from a medical point of view? It’s at least worth debating.

Slouching towards dystopia: the rise of surveillance capitalism and the death of privacy

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Our lives and behaviour have been turned into profit for the Big Tech giants – and we meekly click “Accept”. How did we sleepwalk into a world without privacy?

By John Naughton

Source: New Statesman

Suppose you walk into a shop and the guard at the entrance records your name. Cameras on the ceiling track your every step in the store, log which items you looked at and which ones you ignored. After a while you notice that an employee is following you around, recording on a clipboard how much time you spend in each aisle. And after you’ve chosen an item and bring it to the cashier, she won’t complete the transaction until you reveal your identity, even if you’re paying cash.

Another scenario: a stranger is standing at the garden gate outside your house. You don’t know him or why he’s there. He could be a plain-clothes police officer, but there’s no way of knowing. He’s there 24/7 and behaves like a real busybody. He stops everybody who visits you and checks their identity. This includes taking their mobile phone and copying all its data on to a device he carries. He does the same for family members as they come and go. When the postman arrives, this stranger insists on opening your mail, or at any rate on noting down the names and addresses of your correspondents. He logs when you get up, how long it takes you to get dressed, when you have meals, when you leave for work and arrive at the office, when you get home and when you go to bed, as well as what you read. He is able to record all of your phone calls, texts, emails and the phone numbers of those with whom you exchange WhatsApp messages. And when you ask him what he thinks he’s doing, he just stares at you. If pressed, he says that if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear. If really pressed, he may say that everything he does is for the protection of everyone.

A third scenario: you’re walking down the street when you’re accosted by a cheery, friendly guy. He runs a free photo-framing service – you just let him copy the images on your smartphone and he will tidy them up, frame them beautifully and put them into a gallery so that your friends and family can always see and admire them. And all for nothing! All you have to do is to agree to a simple contract. It’s 40 pages but it’s just typical legal boilerplate – the stuff that turns lawyers on. You can have a copy if you want. You make a quick scan of the contract. It says that of course you own your photographs but that, in exchange for the wonderful free framing service, you grant the chap “a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free and worldwide licence to host, use, distribute, modify, copy, publicly perform or display, translate and create derivative works” of your photos. Oh, and also he can change, suspend, or discontinue the framing service at any time without notice, and may amend any of the agreement’s terms at his sole discretion by posting the revised terms on his website. Your continued use of the framing service after the effective date of the revised agreement constitutes your acceptance of its terms. And because you’re in a hurry and you need some pictures framed by this afternoon for your daughter’s birthday party, you sign on the dotted line.

All of these scenarios are conceivable in what we call real life. It doesn’t take a nanosecond’s reflection to conclude that if you found yourself in one of them you would deem it preposterous and intolerable. And yet they are all simple, if laboured, articulations of everyday occurrences in cyberspace. They describe accommodations that in real life would be totally unacceptable, but which in our digital lives we tolerate meekly and often without reflection.

The question is: how did we get here?

***

It’s a long story, but with hindsight the outlines are becoming clear. Technology comes into it, of course – but plays a smaller part than you might think. It’s more a story about human nature, about how capitalism has mutated to exploit digital technology, about the liberal democratic state and the social contract, and about governments that have been asleep at the wheel for several decades.

To start with the tech: digital is different from earlier general-purpose technologies in a number of significant ways. It has zero marginal costs, which means that once you have made the investment to create something it costs almost nothing to replicate it a billion times. It is subject to very powerful network effects – which mean that if your product becomes sufficiently popular then it becomes, effectively, impregnable. The original design axioms of the internet – no central ownership or control, and indifference to what it was used for so long as users conformed to its technical protocols – created an environment for what became known as “permissionless innovation”. And because every networked device had to be identified and logged, it was also a giant surveillance machine.

Since we humans are social animals, and the internet is a communications network, it is not surprising we adopted it so quickly once services such as email and web browsers had made it accessible to non-techies. But because providing those services involved expense – on servers, bandwidth, tech support, etc – people had to pay for them. (It may seem incredible now, but once upon a time having an email account cost money.) Then newspaper and magazine publishers began putting content on to web servers that could be freely accessed, and in 1996 Hotmail was launched (symbolically, on 4 July, Independence Day) – meaning that anyone could have email for free.

Hotmail quickly became ubiquitous. It became clear that if a business wanted to gain those powerful network effects, it had to Get Big Fast; and the best way to do that was to offer services that were free to use. The only thing that remained was finding a business model that could finance services growing at exponential rates and provide a decent return for investors.

That problem was still unsolved when Google launched its search engine in 1998. Usage of it grew exponentially because it was manifestly better than its competitors. One reason for its superiority was that it monitored very closely what users searched for and used this information to improve the algorithm. So the more that people used the engine, the better it got. But when the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, Google was still burning rather than making money and its two biggest venture capital investors, John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins and Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital, started to lean on its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, to find a business model.

Under that pressure they came up with one in 2001. They realised that the data created by their users’ searches could be used as raw material for algorithms that made informed guesses about what users might be interested in – predictions that could be useful to advertisers. In this way what was thought of as mere “data exhaust” became valuable “behavioural surplus” – information given by users that could be sold. Between that epiphany and Google’s initial public offering in 2004, the company’s revenues increased by over 3,000 per cent.

Thus was born a new business model that the American scholar Shoshana Zuboff later christened “surveillance capitalism”, which she defined as: “a new economic order that claims human experience as the raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction and sales”. Having originated at Google, it was then conveyed to Facebook in 2008 when a senior Google executive, Sheryl Sandberg, joined the social media giant. So Sandberg became, as Zuboff puts it, the “Typhoid Mary” who helped disseminate surveillance capitalism.

***

The dynamic interactions between human nature and this toxic business model lie at the heart of what has happened with social media. The key commodity is data derived from close surveillance of everything that users do when they use these companies’ services. Therefore, the overwhelming priority for the algorithms that curate users’ social media feeds is to maximise “user engagement” – the time spent on them – and it turns out that misinformation, trolling, lies, hate-speech, extremism and other triggers of outrage seem to achieve that goal better than more innocuous stuff. Another engagement maximiser is clickbait – headlines that intrigue but leave out a key piece of information. (“She lied all her life. Guess what happened the one time she told the truth!”) In that sense, social media and many smartphone apps are essentially fuelled by dopamine – the chemical that ferries information between neurons in our brains, and is released when we do things that give us pleasure and satisfaction.

The bottom line is this: while social media users are essential for surveillance capitalism, they are not its paying customers: that role is reserved for advertisers. So the relationship of platform to user is essentially manipulative: he or she has to be encouraged to produce as much behavioural surplus as possible.

A key indicator of this asymmetry is the End User Licence Agreement (EULA) that users are required to accept before they can access the service. Most of these “contracts” consist of three coats of prime legal verbiage that no normal human being can understand, and so nobody reads them. To illustrate the point, in June 2014 the security firm F-Secure set up a free WiFi hotspot in the centre of London’s financial district. Buried in the EULA for this “free” service was a “Herod clause”: in exchange for the WiFi, “the recipient agreed to assign their first born child to us for the duration of eternity”. Six people accepted the terms.  In another experiment, a software firm put an offer of an award of $1,000 at the very end of its terms of service, just to see how many would read that far. Four months and 3,000 downloads later, just one person had claimed the offered sum.

Despite this, our legal systems accept the fact that most internet users click  “Accept” as confirmation of informed consent, which it clearly is not. It’s really passive acceptance of impotence. Such asymmetric contracts would be laughed out of court in real life but are still apparently sacrosanct in cyberspace.

According to the security guru Bruce Schneier of Harvard, “Surveillance is the business model of the internet.” But it’s also a central concern of modern states. When Edward Snowden broke cover in the summer of 2013 with his revelations of the extensiveness and scale of the surveillance capabilities and activities of the US and some other Western countries, the first question that came to mind was: is this a scandal or a crisis? Scandals happen all the time in democracies; they generate a great deal of heat and controversy, but after a while the media caravan moves on and nothing happens. Crises, on the other hand, do lead to substantive reform.

Snowden revealed that the US and its allies had been engaged in mass surveillance under inadequate democratic oversight. His disclosures provoked apparent soul-searching and anger in many Western democracies, but the degree of public concern varied from country to country. It was high in Germany, perhaps because so many Germans have recent memories of Stasi surveillance. In contrast, public opinion in Britain seemed relatively relaxed: opinion surveys at the time suggested that about two-thirds of the British public had confidence in the security services and were thus unruffled by Snowden. Nevertheless, there were three major inquiries into the revelations in the UK, and, ultimately, a new act of parliament – the Investigatory Powers Act 2016. This overhauled and in some ways strengthened judicial oversight of surveillance activities by the security services; but it also gave those services significant new powers  – for example in “equipment interference”  (legal cover to hack into targeted devices such as smartphones, domestic networks and “smart” devices such as thermostats). So, in the end, the impact of the Snowden revelations was that manifestly inadequate oversight provisions were replaced by slightly less inadequate ones. It was a scandal, not a crisis. Western states are still in the surveillance business; and their populations still seem comfortable with this.

There’s currently some concern about facial recognition, a genuinely intrusive surveillance technology. Machine-learning technology has become reasonably good at recognising faces in public places, and many state agencies and private companies are already deploying it. It means that people are being identified and tracked without their knowledge or consent. Protests against facial recognition are well-intentioned, but, as Harvard’s Bruce Schneier points out, banning it is the wrong way to oppose modern surveillance.

This is because facial recognition is just one identification tool among many enabled by digital technology. “People can be identified at a distance by their heartbeat or by their gait, using a laser-based system,” says Schneier. “Cameras are so good that they can read fingerprints and iris patterns from metres away. And even without any of these technologies, we can always be identified because our smartphones broadcast unique numbers called MAC addresses. Other things identify us as well: our phone numbers, our credit card numbers, the licence plates on our cars. China, for example, uses multiple identification technologies to support its surveillance state.”

The important point is that surveillance and our passive acceptance of it lies at the heart of the dystopia we are busily constructing. It doesn’t matter which technology is used to identify people: what matters is that we can be identified, and then correlated and tracked across everything we do. Mass surveillance is increasingly the norm. In countries such as China, a surveillance infrastructure is being built by the government for social control. In Western countries, led by the US, it’s being built by corporations in order to influence our buying behaviour, and is then used incidentally by governments.

What’s happened in the West, largely unnoticed by the citizenry, is a sea-change in the social contract between individuals and the state. Whereas once the deal was that we accepted some limitations on our freedom in exchange for security, now the state requires us to surrender most of our privacy in order to protect us. The (implicit and explicit) argument is that if we have nothing to hide there is nothing to fear. And people seem to accept that ludicrous trope. We have been slouching towards dystopia.

***

The most eerie thing about the last two decades is the quiescence with which people have accepted – and adapted to – revolutionary changes in their information environment and lives. We have seen half-educated tech titans proclaim mottos such as “Move fast and break things” – as Mark Zuckerberg did in the early years of Facebook – and then refuse to acknowledge responsibility when one of the things they may have helped to break is democracy.  (This is the same democracy, incidentally, that enforces the laws that protect their intellectual property, helped fund the technology that has enabled their fortunes and gives them immunity for the destructive nonsense that is disseminated by their platforms.) And we allow them to get away with it.

What can explain such indolent passivity? One obvious reason is that we really (and understandably) value some of the services that the tech industry has provided. There have been various attempts to attach a monetary value to them, but any conversation with a family that’s spread over different countries or continents is enough to convince one that being able to Skype or FaceTime a faraway loved one is a real boon. Or just think of the way that Google has become a memory prosthesis for humanity – or how educational non-profit organisations such as the Khan Academy can disseminate learning for free online.

We would really miss these services if they were one day to disappear, and this may be one reason why many politicians tip-toe round tech companies’ monopoly power. That the services are free at the point of use has undermined anti-trust thinking for decades: how do you prosecute a  monopoly that is not price-gouging its users? (The answer, in the case of social media, is that users are not customers;  the monopoly may well be extorting its actual customers – advertisers – but nobody seems to have inquired too deeply into that until recently.)

Another possible explanation is what one might call imaginative failure – most people simply cannot imagine the nature of the surveillance society that we are constructing, or the implications it might have for them and their grandchildren. There are only two cures for this failure: one is an existential crisis that brings home to people the catastrophic damage that technology could wreak. Imagine, for example, a more deadly strain of the coronavirus that rapidly causes a pandemic – but governments struggle to control it because official edicts are drowned out by malicious disinformation on social media. Would that make people think again about the legal immunity that social media companies enjoy from prosecution for content that they host on their servers?

The other antidote to imaginative failure is artistic creativity. It’s no accident that two of the most influential books of the last century were novels – Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). The first imagined a world in which humans were controlled by fear engendered by comprehensive surveillance; the second portrayed one in which citizens were undone by addiction to pleasure – the dopamine strategy, if you like. The irony of digital technology is that it has given us both of these nightmares at once.

Whatever the explanation, everywhere at the moment one notices a feeling of impotence – a kind of learned helplessness. This is seen most vividly in the way people shrug their shoulders and click “Accept” on grotesquely skewed and manipulative  EULAs. They face a binary choice: accept the terms or go away. Hence what has become known as the “privacy paradox” – whenever researchers and opinion pollsters ask internet users if they value their privacy, they invariably respond with a  resounding “yes”. And yet they continue to use the services that undermine that beloved privacy.

It hasn’t helped that internet users have watched their governments do nothing about tech power for two decades. Surveillance capitalism was enabled because its practitioners operated in a lawless environment. It appropriated people’s data as a free resource and asserted its right to do so, much as previous variations of capitalism appropriated natural resources without legal restrictions. And now the industry claims as one of its prime proprietary assets the huge troves of that appropriated data that it possesses.

It is also relevant that tech companies have been free to acquire start-ups that threatened to become competitors without much, if any, scrutiny from competition authorities. In any rational universe, Google would not be permitted to own YouTube, and Facebook would have to divest itself of WhatsApp and Instagram. It’s even possible – as the French journalist  Frédéric Filloux has recently argued – that  Facebook believes its corporate interests are best served by the re-election of Donald Trump, which is why it’s not going to fact-check any political ads. As far as I can see, this state of affairs has not aroused even a squawk in the US.

When Benjamin Franklin emerged on the final day of deliberation from the Constitutional Convention of 1787, a woman asked him, “Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” To which Franklin replied, “A republic… if you can keep it.” The equivalent reply for our tech-dominated society would be: we have a democracy, if we can keep it.

 

Assange Rips the Matrix

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By Finian Cunningham

Source: Information Clearing House

The persecution of Julian Assange is one of those breakthrough moments when suddenly people realise that almost everything they have been told to believe is not true.

This week the Australian-born journalist and publisher has been subjected to a show trial in a British court with the threat of extradition to the United States looming. If he is extradited, the 48-year old is facing 175 years – a death sentence – in prison on wholly contrived espionage charges.

Assange is being persecuted for the sole and simple reason that he exposed war crimes and systematic corruption by the US government and its Western allies. His years of arbitrary detention and the torture endured over the past year while in solitary confinement in a British dungeon are a grim warning to all citizens. The warning is that their supposed democratic rights are non-existent as far as the powers in Washington and London are concerned. If you dare speak truth to power, then this fate will also be yours.

Thus, when it gets down to it, the harsh reality is that there is no such thing as democracy in the US or Britain. Elections and media are but window-dressing to hide the brutal truth that fundamental, basic democratic rights of free speech and due legal process are not inalienable principles, but rather are dispensable privileges whenever the powers-that-be ordain so.

Julian Assange’s incarceration and pillorying is like an inquisition from medieval times happening in the year 2020. He dared expose the rampant, systematic crimes of so-called authorities through his Wikileaks site. His blasphemy was to expose the charlatans and mass-killers who masquerade as pious leaders.

Those revelations showed the public that the pretensions of democracy and rule of law by the American and British governments are nothing but hypocritical, empty posturing. Assange’s courageous publishing work demonstrated how those governments have waged criminal wars and committed genocidal crimes; how they have made a mockery of international law and democratic rights. And for that heroic service to public truth and empowerment with the truth, Assange is being pilloried like a rebellious serf by overlords posing as “governments” and “judges”.

Assange’s show trial is also powerfully revealing of the real nature of Western so-called news media. Not one of the major US or British news outlets have given any coverage, let alone comment, regarding his week-long extradition trial.

A journalist and publisher is being whipsawed in the court as if he is a dangerous terrorist. He is denied elementary due process by being confined to a glass-cage dock, not able to communicate with his defence lawyers, unable to even hear what his accusers are claiming.

His extradition, to be determined at a future court hearing, seems like a foregone conclusion, such is the bias and hostility towards Assange from the presiding British judge, Vanessa Baraitser.

Given the international outcry from hundreds of doctors and UN representatives over Assange’s torture endured while in British custody, and given the grotesque abuse of legal process by the American and British so-called authorities, the case should be thrown out immediately – if there were any modicum of justice.

The vendetta against Assange tells us what kind of societies citizens (or rather subjects) are living under in the US and Britain. These states are oligarchies where “democratic rights” are strictly conditional on subjects not stepping out of line, such as criticising war crimes or illegal global spying.

Julian Assange has torn through the largely invisible matrix of propaganda and power that people really live under. The saccharin myths of “democracy” and “free speech” are shown for the ugly, putrid reality that they are. And the Western corporate-controlled media in their silence about what is going on are also condemned for the lying servile machines that they are.

We must not accept the fate being prepared for Assange as if it is inevitable or as if we are powerless to overthrow it. The first step towards freedom is truth, and thanks to Julian Assange, we have the power to be free. We know the tyrannical nature of the governments that presume to rule over us in our names. There must be a popular uprising in defence of Assange. Because no-one is free until he is.

A final note by way of testimony: anyone who has been enlightened by Wikileaks’ revelations over the past decade will know that the current escalation of conflict in Syria’s Idlib is due to NATO powers illegally occupying that country. They will know that NATO powers have for years covertly sponsored terror groups to carry out a criminal regime-change war. By contrast, anyone who relies on Western governments and mainstream media for “information” will have no idea whatsoever about what is really going in Syria. A wider war could erupt any day and those who are brainwashed by Western regimes and their media are impotent to stop it. The empowerment of citizens by Julian Assange and Wikileaks over the years is the difference between ending wars or fueling them.

The vendetta against Assange tells us what kind of societies citizens (or rather subjects) are living under in the US and Britain. These states are oligarchies where “democratic rights” are strictly conditional on subjects not stepping out of line, such as criticising war crimes or illegal global spying.

Julian Assange has torn through the largely invisible matrix of propaganda and power that people really live under. The saccharin myths of “democracy” and “free speech” are shown for the ugly, putrid reality that they are. And the Western corporate-controlled media in their silence about what is going on are also condemned for the lying servile machines that they are.

We must not accept the fate being prepared for Assange as if it is inevitable or as if we are powerless to overthrow it. The first step towards freedom is truth, and thanks to Julian Assange, we have the power to be free. We know the tyrannical nature of the governments that presume to rule over us in our names. There must be a popular uprising in defence of Assange. Because no-one is free until he is.

A final note by way of testimony: anyone who has been enlightened by Wikileaks’ revelations over the past decade will know that the current escalation of conflict in Syria’s Idlib is due to NATO powers illegally occupying that country. They will know that NATO powers have for years covertly sponsored terror groups to carry out a criminal regime-change war. By contrast, anyone who relies on Western governments and mainstream media for “information” will have no idea whatsoever about what is really going in Syria. A wider war could erupt any day and those who are brainwashed by Western regimes and their media are impotent to stop it. The empowerment of citizens by Julian Assange and Wikileaks over the years is the difference between ending wars or fueling them.

‘What More Do You Need to Know?’ Health Insurance Stocks Drive Wall Street Rebound on Biden Super Tuesday Wins

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“Biden is the preferred candidate for the financial markets.”

By Eoin Higgins

Source: CommonDreams

Health insurance industry stocks surged Wednesday morning in the wake of former Vice President Joe Biden’s strong showing in the Democratic presidential primary’s Super Tuesday contests, opening up 600 points after traders appeared to bet the candidate’s resurgence would box out any chance of single-payer universal healthcare.

“What more do you need to know,” tweeted journalist Jack Mirkinson of the market’s spike.

Sanders has made Medicare for All a centerpiece of his campaign. The healthcare industry has poured millions in ad buys against Sanders after the Vermont senator won primaries in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada.

“The industry has long seen Biden as their white knight,” said Dr. Adam Gaffney, the president of Physicians for a National Health Program and an outspoken Medicare for All advocate.

Biden on Tuesday won at least nine of the 14 states up for grabs to Sanders’ four. At press time, Maine was yet to be called, with Sanders and Biden locked in a razor-thin contest.

The market surge came after a rough week for the stock market, which at the end of February saw its biggest decline since the 2008 financial crisis after fears of the economic cost of a worldwide coronvirus pandemic increased.

Business commentators also made the connection between Sanders’ victories in the early primary states, particularly in Nevada, and the market’s poor performance last week.

On Fox Business February 28, billionaire Steve Forbes remarked that the weeklong drop was not only about fears of the coronavirus.

“There’s the political side,” Forbes said of the reason for the poor performance. “In the last week, week-and-a-half, the possibility of Bernie Sanders becoming president of the United States has increased, exponentially.”

According to the Washington Post:

Stocks of healthcare companies roared in response to Biden’s performance. Cigna was up more than 10 percent in morning trading, while UnitedHealth Group rose nearly 12 percent. Humana jumped 1.25 percent and Anthem soared nearly 14 percent.

Investor Ed Yardeni told the Post that Wednesday’s spike was a correction to earlier fears of what he called “Bernie Sanders’ socialist program.”

“The market’s sell-off last week on Sanders’ primary victories and rebound on Monday after Biden’s big win in South Carolina and this morning after Super Tuesday suggest that domestic U.S. politics may matter as much as the global health crisis on investors,” said Yardeni.

As Common Dreams reported, the results—which saw billionaire Michael Bloomberg and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) coming in far behind the two frontrunners—transformed a once-crowded primary into a two-man race. Though Biden put up a good showing, exit polls from the contests showed a majority of Democratic voters backing the elimination of private insurance in favor of a government-run system guaranteeing healthcare for all.

The Dem Establishment Successfully Cinched a Biden Super Tuesday Victory

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Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden speaks at a primary election night campaign rally Tuesday, March 3, 2020, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Chris Carlson)

Super Tuesday has raised the stakes and set the stage for a battle for the Democratic Party’s soul; one that will decide if it stays the course with neoliberalism with Biden or moves towards a progressive social-democratic model with Sanders.

By Alan Macleod

Source: Mint Press News

Former Vice-President Joe Biden built on his victory in South Carolina last week to emerge as the only credible “stop Bernie” candidate after Super Tuesday – where voters in 14 states decided on their nominations for president. While results are still not official, it is clear that the former Delaware senator won the popular vote in at least nine states yesterday, including in Texas, Massachusetts and North Carolina, amassing at least 433 delegates. Sanders has currently secured 388, although that number is likely to rise after all of California is counted.

In one of the most remarkable and drastic political turnarounds in American history, Biden – thought of by many as a yesterday’s man – secured a stunning upset victory after a series of key endorsements. His campaign had been flagging, virtually out of money and without organization or many activists on the ground. As of Monday, he had spent just $1.5 million on TV ads in Super Tuesday states, with aides admitting to CNN their goal was merely to “remain competitive;” a remarkable admission for a presidential campaign.

But facing a Sanders nomination, the establishment wing of the party went into overdrive to find a viable alternative to the Vermont senator. Both Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar dropped out and immediately endorsed him, as did other figures like former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke. In a matter of mere hours, the Democratic Party higher-ups managed to coalesce around him in a way the Republicans were unable to in 2016 to stop Trump, proving to the world that the party is certainly not incompetent and can organize and carry out operations with military precision when they perceive it is in their interest to do so.

While the establishment pooled its resources (and delegates) in favor of Biden, Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren has refrained from dropping out, let alone endorsing Sanders, thus splitting the progressive vote. Warren finished a distant third in her home state and secured only 28 delegates yesterday. In a defeatist message, her campaign managers said they would hold a meeting to “assess the path forward.”

Biden declared victory in Los Angeles last night, presenting himself as an opponent of the wealthy and a champion of the people: “Let’s get something straight. Wall Street didn’t build this country. You built this country. The middle class built this country. And unions built the middle class,” he told the crowd. But his speech was upstaged by anti-dairy industry protestors who stormed the stage. Earlier in the speech he also confused his wife for his sister.

https://twitter.com/Breaking911/status/1235044512918941698

While it is clear that he will now be the establishment’s candidate for better or worse, the former vice-president has a long history of making egregious errors in speaking. Earlier this week at a rally he tried and failed to recite the preamble of the Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self evident. All men and women created by the…you know, the thing” he stuttered. And while he promises the working-class “cures for cancer, Alzheimer’s and diabetes” under his presidency, he also told his billionaire backers that he believes they are being “demonized” and that “nothing would change” about America if he were chosen. “I need you very badly,” he told a group of extremely wealthy donors last year.

His policy history and positions, too, might be cause for concern for many voters in the presidential election. These include advocating for cuts to social services, fighting against abortion rights, and supporting NAFTA, the PATRIOT Act and the attacks on Iraq and Libya. And while he retains strong support among Southern black voters, he helped write the 1994 Crime Bill and the Anti-Drug Abuse Bill that exploded the prison population, and fought for segregation and against integration. President Trump has already nicknamed him “Handsy Joe” in reference to his inappropriate touching of women and girls.

While Sanders supporters will be disappointed with the results, other candidates had even worse nights. Chief among them was Michael Bloomberg, who spent more than half a billion dollars on his campaign, picking up just 12 delegates, a third of them in American Samoa. Given his poor performance, that works out to nearly $50 million per delegate. The former Mayor of New York dropped out today, endorsing Biden for the nomination. If he is willing to financially aid Biden anything like how he lavishly spent on himself, Sanders will be fighting a seriously uphill battle.

“It really is a class war we’re up against,” said author and progressive journalist Naomi Klein, who has been traveling with the Sanders team.

The vast majority of this campaign are working class people who are daring to hope for the barest decent things in life. It is this amazing process of raising people’s expectations…What we’re seeing with this establishment pushback, this is not against Bernie Sanders, it is against them. It is against people saying ‘I have a right to healthcare. I have a right to a living wage,’ and it is really sad to see.”

Biden has strong support among the wealthy, the elderly and among Southern black voters. But if he is to win outright and beat Trump in November, he will need to address the age gap in voting. Even in Alabama, where he fared worst, Sanders still comfortably won the vote of those under 30. While there is much work to be done, yesterday was a good day for the establishment wing of the Democratic Party.

Next week will see six more states as well as the Democrats Abroad primaries decided. But Super Tuesday has raised the stakes and set the stage for a battle for the Democratic Party’s soul; one that will decide if it stays the course with neoliberalism with Biden or moves towards a progressive social-democratic model with Sanders.

Data governance and the new frontiers of resistance

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The 21st century corporation is using algorithmic-based intelligence to accumulate data on a massive scale. Social movements need to grasp this change quickly.

By Anita Gurumurthy and Nandini Chami

Source: ROAR

Four centuries after the East India Company set the trend for corporate resource extraction, most of the world is now in the grip of unbridled corporate power. But corporate power is on the cusp of achieving “quantum supremacy” and social movements in the digital age need to understand this in order to shift gears in their struggles. The quantum shift here comes from “network-data” power; the ingredients that make up capitalism’s digital age recipe.

Contemporary capitalism is characterized by the accumulation of data-as-capital. Big Tech, as digital companies are collectively known, use the “platform” business model. This model provides a framework for interactions in the marketplace by connecting its many “nodes” — consumers, advertisers, service providers, producers, suppliers and even objects — that comprise the platform ecosystem, constantly harvesting their data and using algorithms to optimize interactions among them as a means to maximize profit.

The platform model emerged as a business proposition in the early 2000s when internet companies offering digital communication services began extracting user data from networked social interactions to generate valuable information for targeted advertising. It is estimated that by 2025, over 30 percent of global economic activity will be mediated by platform companies, an indication of the growing “platformization” of the real economy. In every economic sector, from agriculture to predictive manufacturing, retail commerce and even paid care work, the platform model is now an essential infrastructural layer.

Control over data-based intelligence gives platform owners a unique vantage point — the power to shape the nature of interactions among member nodes. Practices such as Amazon’s segmenting and hyper-targeting of consumers through price manipulation, Uber’s panoptic disciplining of its partner drivers, and TripAdvisor’s popularity ranking algorithm of listed properties, restaurants and hotels are all examples of how such platforms mediate economic transactions. The accumulation of data that feeds algorithmic optimization enables more intensified data extraction, in a self-propelling cycle that culminates in the platform’s totalizing control of entire economic ecosystems.

Amazon for instance, is no longer an online book store, and was perhaps never intended to be. With intimate knowledge about how the market works, Amazon is a market leader in anticipatory logistics and business analytics, providing both fulfillment and on-demand cloud-based computing services to third parties. Not only has it displaced traditional container-freight stations in port cities, it has begun to look increasingly like a shipping company. The dynamics of an intelligence economy have led to large swathes of economic activity being controlled by a handful of platform monopolies.

Studies suggest that in a matter of a couple of decades, platform monopolies have overtaken oil, automobile and financial corporations in market capitalization. Today, platform-based business models account for seven of the world’s top eight companies ranked by market capitalization. The pan-global platform corporation, with its DNA of data-based intelligence, has replaced the trans-national industrial corporation as the Leviathan of our times.

Enter the intelligent corporation

As the dominant form of economic organization in the capitalist world order, the corporation has always wielded power, not just in the market but also in political and socio-cultural realms. The rise of the “intelligent corporation” defined by the political economy of data capital has produced qualitative shifts in the exercise of corporate power, including the following.

From dominating the market to becoming the market

Like its predecessor, the intelligent corporation also aims at complete market domination. In platform-based capitalism, local business models based on intimate contextual knowledge are completely displaced by the data-based intermediation of marketplace and social transactions. It is by eliminating these disparate pockets of capital accumulation that platform owners maximize their profits.

The intelligent corporation also goes a step further, moving beyond “dominating the market” to “becoming the market.” Integrating across business lines, these companies both operate a platform and promote their own goods and services on it. This places them in direct competition with the businesses that use their infrastructure, and creates a conflict of interest. For example, Amazon uses its product marketplace data to consolidate its private labels, launching high-demand products at prices that undercut third-party sellers.

In this new strategy for acquiring market power, long-term market monopolization is privileged over the ability to break-even in the short run. The ecosystem that a platform seeks to capture has room only for one winner with the wherewithal to forgo immediate profits and invest in business integration — through aggressive acquisition — and systematic data-layer development. Other competitors are destined to fall by the wayside.

From cheap labor to freedom from labor

In the capitalist economy, the key contradiction is between capital and labor. Capital is in a perennial quest for freedom from labor through labor-substituting technological advances and territories to shift production to reduce labor costs. In the intelligence economy, capital seems to have come very close to realizing its primordial pursuit.

Using 360° surveillance, the intelligent corporation creates a self-optimizing ecosystem, manipulating each node, expanding its captive network, accumulating data capital and entrenching its dominance. It is able to achieve a global operational footprint with few assets and a minuscule employee base. Think Uber. Uber drivers are not considered to be employees in most places where the company runs its business. With a god’s eye view of the city and its roads, the customers and the driver, Uber takes over city transport, often without owning a single taxi. Passing off the liability to the driver, who must take a high-interest loan to acquire a vehicle to become Uber’s coveted “partner,” the corporation extracts from the driver more than just labor time.

In traditional labor-intensive manufacturing and services sectors, data capital is slowly but surely affecting far-reaching transformation. Projections show that automation based on artificial intelligence (AI) will eventually displace labor. It is estimated that over 40 percent of the global workforce will lose their jobs in AI-led disruption of manufacturing over the next 15–25 years. A limited number of high-paying jobs may open up for individuals with advanced skills in the development of data and AI technologies. But most of the labor force will end up in low-paid, personalized service work.

For countries in the Global South, the challenge will be especially pernicious. As rising wages erode the comparative advantage of labor in these economies, the shift to AI technology is likely to trigger a re-shoring trend whereby factories are relocated to richer countries that offer more sophisticated infrastructural support for deployment of AI systems. According to the World Bank, over two-thirds of the workforce in developing countries are likely to lose jobs. It is not clear how these changes will shift gender-based segmentation and gender hierarchies in labor markets. However, going by current trends, women seem to be the first to lose their jobs in this transition, with a reversal of both pay and status gains.

Planetary-scale time-space enclosure

Capturing previously non-commodified time and place has always been a central strategy of capitalist expansion. In the intelligence economy, we are witnessing a new phase of such “primitive accumulation” – through “data dispossession.” The expropriation of data from everyday social exchanges through the platform business model is comparable to the expropriation of natural resources for capitalist production in a previous age. The pervasive data extraction by platform companies has transformed data-mined social interaction into a factor of production, just as invaluable a resource as land for the creation of goods and services. The centralization of wealth and power today, derives from an unprecedented quality and scale of dispossession.

The dynamic of data dispossession is self-propelling. It is now well understood that platforms aggressively pursue a strategy of locking-in users, offering instant gratification in exchange for data and making it costly for them to leave a platform. The Chinese “super-platforms” WeChat and Meituan-Dianping combine news, entertainment, restaurant reviews, food delivery and ride-hailing, along with cross-cutting applications such as payment systems and digital wallets, demonstrating a “stickiness” that is almost addictive.

When participation in the platform on the platform owner’s terms becomes de facto the only choice for economic actors, data extractivism is normalized. Similar to the predatory practices of historical colonialism, the platform tactics of the intelligent corporation function as a neo-colonial project. The difference is that this time around, rather than European companies, the US and Chinese platform companies are in the driving seat.

A profoundly unsustainable exploitation of the natural world accompanies the rapid inroads of the intelligent corporation. Take the case of the vast ecological footprint of the online food-delivery sector. According to a 2018 study published in the science journal Resources, Conservation and Recycling, door-to-door fast-food delivery in China accounted for a nearly eightfold jump in packaging waste between 2015 and 2017, from 0.2 to 1.5 million tonnes. This has coincided with the exponential growth of the sector in the country, where the number of customers using food-delivery platforms has gone up from zero in 2009 to 406 million by the end of 2018! The intelligence economy is a veritable resource guzzler whose network data devices are expected to be consuming about one-fifth of global electricity by 2030 just to keep going.

The loss of self-determination for individuals and communities in these new intelligence-based modes of production reflects an asymmetry in power that was previously impossible. This is the route through which the brand-new corporation colonizes bodies and nature, takes control of production and social reproduction, and intensifies accumulation on a global scale.

The “deep corporate” and the death of the social contract

It is no secret that in the digital era, the deep state has had a makeover. Edward Snowden’s revelations and witness testimonies from China’s Uighur-dominated Xinjiang have exposed the dark workings of the contemporary military–industrial complex, the unholy nexus between Big Tech and the state. Trade justice activists have constantly pointed to the “hidden hand” of Silicon Valley and Chinese corporations using their governments to bat for their interests, reducing policy decisions to executive fiats for entrenching their power.

But what is only recently coming to light is the rise of the “deep corporate” — the extension of the Kraken-like tentacles of intelligent corporations into the heart of public life. The subsuming of social life by platform capitalism has distorted the political space thanks to the echo chambers of the automated public sphere. The contagion of mispropaganda and informational warfare in political campaigning has become impossible to contain in a public sphere determined by algorithmic filters. In this scenario, deliberative democracy itself is under the threat of extinction.

The social credit system being developed by China in partnership with eight tech companies takes the “corporatization” of governance to a whole new level. Access to benefits and citizens’ guaranteed rights are now predicated on behavioral scoring on the basis of online purchase history, financial transactions and social media connections on the partnering platforms. With the archetypal “good consumer” becoming the deserving citizen, citizenship is thus dislocated from political claims. The “deep corporate” acquires the formal authority to mediate the social contract.

Living with the intelligent corporation

We are living through a phase in capitalism that is marked by extreme market concentration, unprecedented inequality in wealth and the declining share of labor in global income; a state of affairs that has led even the IMF to express caution. It is no coincidence that this period of intensified economic injustice has coincided with the rise of platform capitalism and its real-world vehicle, the intelligent corporation.

What does living with the intelligent corporation mean?

What is new about this phase of capitalism that has spawned the intelligence economy is a deeply qualitative shift. Datafication and data capital transform the way capitalist “accumulation by dispossession” happens. “Intelligencification” makes plausible a planetary-scale colonization and commodification of everyday life by the new corporation in ways previously impossible. Both nature and caring bodies are trapped in a planetary enclosure insofar as everything and everybody can be turned into data.

It also feeds off and emboldens the financialization apparatus that runs the neoliberal economy. Through the perverse confluence of data and finance, the intelligent corporation universalizes and naturalizes its authority, destroying the marketplace of things and ideas.

Through data extractivism, the intelligent corporation ravages sociality, taking the ideological project of neoliberalism all the way to the expropriation of the political. This is a deep take-over, an “ontological encroachment” of human subjectivity.

Where does all this leave us?

As UNCTAD has highlighted, the pace of concentration of market power is extremely worrying. Consider this: Amazon’s profits-to-sales ratio increased from 10 percent in 2005 to 23 percent in 2015, while that of Alibaba increased in just four years from 10 percent in 2011 to 32 percent in 2015.

Policymakers across the world are struggling to reform their legacy laws to rein in the intelligent corporation. Even the domestic governments of powerful US and Chinese platform corporations are struggling to contain their excesses. The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is currently investigating Amazon and Facebook for abuse of market dominance while the US Justice Department is probing Google. The state of California is facing massive resistance from Uber and Lyft to its new regulation for labor rights of “gig” workers, with the two companies currently leading a $60 billion ballot initiative to extricate themselves from employer’s liability. In November 2019, the state administration for market regulation in China had to hold a meeting with Alibaba and other online retail platforms about their strong-arming of third-party vendors, in violation of existing regulations to curb anti-competitive conduct.

The loopholes of pre-digital taxation laws based on a physical presence in a given country have been effectively exploited by platform companies to escape tax liability, through profit shifting to low-tax jurisdictions. Similarly, when faced with liability for unfair market practices in overseas markets, it is very easy for platform companies to shift liability to their parent company outside the jurisdiction. For instance, Uber in South Africa resorted to the defense that its partner drivers were employees of the parent company headquartered in the Netherlands and not the South African subsidiary, in order to evade its liabilities under existing labor laws. The lack of binding international regulations governing cross-border data flows has also aided rampant data extractivism,

More recently, in the wake of malpractice lawsuits brought against Big Tech by their own employees; exposes about founding CEOs who have enjoyed a godly status; and public disenchantment with multiple revelations of clandestine data mining and algorithmic gaming, the early sheen seems to be wearing off. Google’s parent company Alphabet can no longer use its “Do the right thing” motto without irony. Facebook has been forced to switch to the “too big to fail” defense from the “protector and defender of the freedoms of the global community” line. Alibaba may not be able to proclaim its commitment to the development of small and medium enterprises in Africa for much longer. The façade has crumbled. And this rupture in the discursive hegemony of the intelligent corporation in which we are currently situated is the right moment to mount a collective challenge.

So, resist we must, so that the wealth of data and of networks can be appropriated and used to create a just and humane society. This means taking the intelligent corporation by the horns, and forging a movement that is able to grapple with the ethical–political boundaries of digital intelligence.

Taming the Leviathan and reclaiming the planet

Given the enormous economic and political clout of the modern corporation in the age of data, unshackling people and the planet from corporate power is an urgent task. Struggles against the extreme unfairness of the global trade and intellectual property regime by transnational social movements have shown the necessary connection between the agenda for development justice and the dismantling of corporate power.

Building alliances among movements has become a vital strategy in halting TNCs’ inexorable plunder. The trade justice movement against corporate globalization, the environment movement’s quest for sustainable development, feminist struggles to reclaim the body and the sphere of social reproduction from capital and workers’ struggle against the intensified squeeze on labor and the dismantling of social protection in neoliberal globalization are inspiring examples in this regard. Transnational civil society has painstakingly built alliances and solidarities across these movements to expose corporate excess, bringing pressure on the UN for a global binding treaty on TNCs’ human rights obligations in the face of near-insurmountable odds.

In the digital age, as corporate power assumes indomitable proportions — with tech CEOs carving out data dominions that they rule over — current frameworks of power analysis and action may not go very far. A concerted and coherent strategy is urgently needed in order to enable a more equitable distribution of the gains of data-based intelligence. The Digital Justice Manifesto released in November 2019 by the Just Net Coalition — through a process of strategic and sustained dialogue between digital rights, trade justice, feminist, environmental, labor and human rights groups and activists — outlines such a roadmap. As the Manifesto underlines, we need immediate action along three broad fronts to reclaim digital power from the intelligent corporation:

(a) Wrestling back ownership of our personal and collective data and intelligence by instituting an economic rights framework for data resources.

(b) Governing critical platform infrastructures as public utilities.

(c) Enforcing a local-to-global governance model for digital and data infrastructure that supports local economies and democratic self-determination of collectivities, preventing the enclosure of entire market and social ecosystems by a centralized intelligence. In other words, the governance of tech infrastructure must enable the flourishing of disparate local economies and make room for multiple platform models to function — co-operatives, social enterprises, public etc. — challenging the totalizing impetus of global intelligence capitalism.

Neoliberal globalization and financialization have led to profoundly unequal societies. The impunity of the TNC has been central to this dynamic. Social movements have placed several creative proposals to counter this: mandating charter renewal every five years overturning the principle of corporations’ perpetual legal existence; taxing stock trade on the basis of the holding period to contain excessive financial speculation; placing a cap on the individual assets of founders/CEOs and so on.

“Intelligencification” demands a new frontier for resistance. The power of the intelligent corporation must be contained through tactics small and big in political and cultural realms. A new wisdom about the governance of data must be explored for a truly emancipatory future for all.

Anonymous sources and the guys and gals who made the Iraq war a reality are now claiming that the Kremlin is at it again!

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By Philip Giraldi

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

Those hapless individuals who run the United States are again slipping into a fantasy world where Americans are besieged by imaginary threats coming from both inside and outside the country. Of course, it is particularly convenient to warn of foreign threats, as it makes the people in government seem relevant and needed, but one might recommend that the tune be changed as it is getting a bit boring. After all, there are only so many hours in the day and Russian President Vladimir Putin must pause occasionally to eat or sleep, so the plotting to destroy American democracy must be on hold at least some of the time.

Yes, anonymous sources and the guys and gals who made the Iraq war a reality are now claiming that the Kremlin is at it again! Hints over the past year that Putin might try to replay 2016 in 2020 only do it better this time have now been confirmed! Per one news report the enemy is already at the gates: “U.S. intelligence officials told lawmakers last week that Russia is interfering in the 2020 election campaign by aiming to cast doubt on the integrity of the vote and boost President Donald Trump’s re-election.”

And there’s more! In a New York Times article headlined “Same Goal, Different Playbook: Why Russia Would Support Trump and Sanders: Vladimir Putin is eager both to take the sheen off U.S. democracy and for a counterpart who is less likely to challenge his territorial and nuclear ambitions,” it was revealed that the Kremlin is intending to also help Bernie Sanders, so whichever way the election goes they win.

According to the Times Bernie has been “warn[ed]… of evidence that he is the Russian president’s favorite Democrat.” The article then goes on to explain, relying on its anonymous sources, that “…to the intelligence analysts and outside experts who have spent the past three years dissecting Russian motives in the 2016 election, and who tried to limit the effect of Moscow’s meddling in the 2018 midterms, what is unfolding in 2020 makes perfect sense. Mr. Trump and Mr. Sanders represent the most divergent ends of their respective parties, and both are backed by supporters known more for their passion than their policy rigor, which makes them ripe for exploitation by Russian trolls, disinformation specialists and hackers for hire seeking to widen divisions in American society.”

The Times article was written by David Sanger, the paper’s venerable national security correspondent. He is reliably wedded to Establishment views of the Russian threat, as is his newspaper, and strikes rock bottom in his assessment when he cites none other than “Victoria Nuland, who in a long diplomatic career had served both Republican and Democratic administrations, and had her phone calls intercepted and broadcast by Russian intelligence services.” Nuland, clearly the victim of a nefarious Russian intelligence operation that recorded her saying “fuck the EU,” opined that “Any figures that radicalize politics and do harm to center views and unity in the United States are good for Putin’s Russia.” Nuland is perhaps best known for her role in spending $5 billion in U.S. taxpayer money to overthrow the legitimate government of Ukraine. She is married to leading neoconservative Robert Kagan, which Sanger fails to mention, and is currently a nonresident fellow at the liberal interventionist Brookings Institution. She also works at former Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s consultancy, presumably for the Benjamins. Albright, one might recall, thought that killing 500,000 Iraqi children through U.S. sanctions was “worth it.”

Given the fact that Russia will have very limited resources in their effort to corrupt American democracy, which is, by the way, doing a very good job of self-destruction without any outside help, how exactly will they do it? Sanger explains “As they focus on evading more vigilant government agencies and technology companies trying to identify and counter malicious online activity, the Russians are boring into Iranian cyberoffense units, apparently so that they can initiate attacks that look as if they originate in Iran — which itself has shown interest in messing with the American electoral process… And, in one of the most effective twists, they are feeding disinformation to unsuspecting Americans on Facebook and other social media. By seeding conspiracy theories and baseless claims on the platforms, Russians hope everyday Americans will retransmit those falsehoods from their own accounts. That is an attempt to elude Facebook’s efforts to remove disinformation, which it can do more easily when it flags ‘inauthentic activity,’ like Russians posing as Americans. It is much harder to ban the words of real Americans, who may be parroting a Russian story line, even unintentionally.”

So those wily Russians are making themselves look like Iranians and they are planning on “feeding disinformation” to “unsuspecting Americans” consisting of “conspiracy theories” and “baseless claims.” Sounds like a plan to me as the various occupants of the White House and Congress have been doing exactly that for the past twenty years. That we had a national election in 2016 in which a reality television personality ran against an unindicted criminal would seem to indicate that the effort to brainwash the American people has already been successful.

The usual bottom feeders are also piling on to the Russian interference story. Jane Harman, former congresswoman who once colluded with Israeli intelligence to lobby the Department of Justice to drop criminal charges against two employees of AIPAC in exchange for Israel’s support to make her chair of the House Intelligence Committee, warns “How dangerous it would be if we lose the tip of the spear against those who would destroy us.”

Former CIA Director John Brennan also has something to say. He is “very disturbed” by his conviction that Russia is actively meddling in the 2020 campaign in support of President Trump. He said “We are now in a full-blown national security crisis. By trying to prevent the flow of intelligence to Congress, Trump is abetting a Russian covert operation to keep him in office for Moscow’s interests, not America’s.” Brennan is best known for having orchestrated the illegal campaign to vilify Trump and his associates prior to, during and after the 2016 election. He also participated in a weekly meeting with Barack Obama where he and the president would add and remove names from a “kill list” of U.S. citizens residing overseas. He and his boss should both be in prison, but they are instead fêted as American patriots. Go figure.

Time to take a step back from the developing panic. As usual, the U.S. government intelligence agencies have produced no actual evidence that Moscow is up to anything, and there are already reports that the Office of National Intelligence briefer “overstated” her case against the Kremlin in her briefing of the House Intelligence Committee. Sure, the Russians have an interest in an American election and will favor candidates like Trump and Sanders that are not outright hostile to them, but to claim as the NY Times does that Russia has incompatible “territorial and nuclear interests” is a stretch. And yes, Moscow will definitely use its available intelligence resources to monitor the nomination and election process while also clandestinely doing what it can to improve the chances of those individuals they approve of. That is what intelligence agencies do.

In American Establishment groupthink there is one standard for what Washington does and quite a different standard for everyone else. Does it shock any American to know that the United States has interfered in scores of elections all over the world ever since the Second World War, to include those in places like France and Italy well into the 1980s? And in somewhat more kinetic covert actions, actually removing Mohammed Mossadeq in Iran, Salvador Allende in Chile, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala and Mohamed Morsi in Egypt just for starters, not even considering the multiple plots to kill Fidel Castro. And it continues to do so today openly in places like Iran and Venezuela while also claiming hypocritically that the U.S. is “exceptional” and also a “force for good.” That anyone should be genuinely worrying about Russian proxies buying and distributing a couple of hundred thousands of dollars’ worth of ads in an election in which many billions of dollars’ worth of propaganda will be on the table is ridiculous. It is time to stop blaming Russia for the failure of America’s ruling class to provide an honest and accountable government and one that does not go around the world looking for trouble. That is what the 2020 election should really be all about.

Censorship Is the Way that Any Dictatorship — and NO Democracy — Functions

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

No democracy can survive censorship. If there is censorship, then each individual cannot make his/her own decisions (voting decisions or otherwise) on the basis of truth but only on the basis of whatever passes through the censor’s filter, which is always whatever supports the censoring regime and implants it evermore deeply into the public’s mind — regardless of its actual truthfulness.

The public does have a mind, as a collective constituting the majority of the residents in the given land, which majority rules any democratic government. If the government doesn’t really represent the majority, it’s no democracy, at all, but instead represents other individuals, the real rulers, who might be hidden. Consequently, if a democracy exists but a censor somehow becomes allowed, and emerges into existence in a given land, then democracy will inevitably be snuffed-out there, and dictatorship will inevitably be the result — merely because censorship has been applied there, which blocks some essential truths (truths that the rulers don’t want the public to know) from reaching the public.

Nothing is as toxic to democracy as is censorship. Censorship prevents democracy.

If a dictatorship already exists in a given land, then it does so by means of censorship, because only by that means will the public be willing to pay taxes to the regime and to go to war for it and to kill and die for it. Without censorship, none of that could happen, except in an authentic democracy. An authentic democracy has no censorship.

This is why democracy is so rare. Almost every dictatorship calls itself a ‘democracy’. But a government which calls itself “democratic” isn’t necessarily democratic, but more likely it has simply fooled its public to think that it is one (such as the United States has by now been scientifically proven to be — an actual dictatorship).

Anyone who endorses censorship is a totalitarian, a supporter of totalitarianism, even without recognizing the fact. If the person fails to recognize the fact that censorship is applied only in a totalitarian regime, then that person has bought into the most basic belief of totalitarianism: the idea that censorship can be justified in some circumstances. Dictatorships always pump that lie, so as to be able to continue to exist as a dictatorship. There is no circumstance which ever can justify censorship, unless one believes that dictatorship is, or can be, good instead of bad.

If you think that some censorship is good, then you have bought into the fundamental belief that is promulgated in any dictatorship. It’s a lie, but it fools the majority of people, in a dictatorship.

No writing, nor any other statement, should ever be censored, no matter how vile it is. Indeed, if it is vile, then it needs to be exposed, not hidden; because, if it is hidden, then it will fester until it grows in the dark and finally becomes sprung upon a public who have never been inoculated against it by truth, and therefore the false belief becomes actually seriously dangerous and likely to spread like wildfire, because it had been censored before it became public. The most deadly infections are those that grow in the dark and then become released upon a population who have no pre-existing protection against it.

Every religion, and every evil regime, seeks to censor-out whatever contradicts its propaganda, and is therefore intrinsically hostile toward democracy, but the danger is always being presented not by the writers and speakers of the propaganda, but by its publishers (regardless of media: print, broadcast, or online) — they are the source of all censorship. They are the censors. The people who select what to publish, and what not to publish, are the censors. The regime’s media are what perpetrate censorship, routinely, because those media are actually essential arms of the dictatorship, even if they are not directly owned by the government but instead by the clique who actually possess control over the government because they possess control over the mainstream (and much of the non-mainstream) media and thus the public’s mind in a ‘democracy’ in order to make it the dictatorship that it actually is.

Much has been written about how this censorship has been perpetrated in the post-WW-II (post-26-July-1945) USA., such as here, and here, and here, and here. (All of that has been censored-out from the major media — they don’t report that they represent the regime instead of the public.) As a consequence of that censorship against truth, history is being revised to be ‘history’ so as to portray a false ‘reality’ to people today. And there are numerous other examples of this, by the U.S. regime, each instance, of which lying, is affirmed as being truth by the regime’s agents, but is actually nothing more than vicious lies that are spread by the regime and its agents. What goes on behind the scenes is hidden from the American public, not really in order to protect them, but purely in order to deceive them. The deception of the American people, and of the residents in all of the U.S. Government’s foreign vassal-states (or ‘allies’) in Europe and elsewhere, is extreme, in all fields of international relations. Whereas Julian Assange was the world’s strongest enemy against censorship, he has been almost ten years now under some form or another of imprisonment, including solitary confinement and torture, all without ever having been convicted of anything, and all because he is an enemy against censorship instead of a flak for censorship. And Twitter and other ‘social media’ are hiding from the public — censoring — the sheer outrageousness of it all.

The solution to the problem of lies is not censorship, it is banning censorship. On 7 June 2019, the need for this seemed even clearer to me after Russia’s RT headlined on that date “Glenn Greenwald rips liberals who ‘beg for censorship’”, and that brilliant lawyer and investigative journalist presented powerfully the case against any censorship at all. As one can see from the accompanying video interview there of him, Greenwald was like a force of nature, in that video, or (to use a different metaphor) a huge dose of mental draino for clogged minds.

This also means that issues of libel and slander are only to be addressed in the civil courts, and not, at all, in the government’s prosecutions, the criminal courts.

All censorship needs to be banned. The question therefore becomes: How can this be done? That’s a question I have never seen discussed, perhaps because it is being censored. It’s a very serious question. Any ‘political science’ which exists that has no extensive literature about this question is fake. Perhaps draino for clogged minds is needed especially for scholars.

Things are worse than we know, because censorship exists. Maybe censorship is pervasive.

So: I shall venture a solution to this problem: By law, all media which discuss national and/or international affairs will fire all editors and producers of “news,” but not the employees who have only managerial, presentational, and/or stylistic assignments, and replace these people (all personnel who select what to present and what not to present) by a randomized algorithm being applied to each topic, so that, if, for example, something is entered into a search-box, then the order or presentation of the findings will be listed either (at the user’s selection) from earliest-posted to latest-posted, or latest-posted to earliest-posted, but not by anything that is chosen or determined by the search-engine itself. (In other words: no search-engine will be allowed to censor.) On print or broadcast media, every news-piece will be controlled in real time by its audience so as to determine what the questions are and then to bring into the presentation randomly selected scientifically qualified experts regarding each such question. For example: on the question of climate-change, the experts would be individuals who have terminal graduate-level degrees in each of the related climatology sub-specialties, such as those listed at Wikipedia, but also in essential related fields such as economics (an important climatological sub-specialty that’s not listed there). If, indeed, over 90% of climatologists agree that man-made global warming is a reality, then the result of this method of selecting the “experts” who will be presented is that that viewpoint will be represented by over 90% of the experts — and this outcome would not be controlled by the given ‘news’-medium, nor affected by its advertisers. In other words: only the subject-matter and academic qualifications — no governmental positions or background — would qualify individuals as being “experts” on the given topic. If a terminal degree isn’t a qualification for expertise on a topic, then what is? Aren’t government officials supposed to be relying on them? And if, for example, the topic is Syria, then shouldn’t all individuals who have terminal degrees on Syria be the “experts” who are invited, on a randomized basis, to comment to the public about Syria-related issues? If that were the case, then perhaps many Americans would know that the U.S. and NATO “began operations in April- May 2011 to organize and expand the dissident base in Syria,” “organizing defectors in Syria,” and “smuggle U.S. weapons into Syria, participate in U.S. psychological and information warfare inside Syria” to produce regime-change there, and that Syria had never posed any threat to U.S. national security. And Barack Obama was hoping for such opportunities to overthrow Syria’s Government even when he became President in 2009. If the American public didn’t know those things at the time, then perhaps America’s censorship was total — which would indicate how absolutely crucial a randomization of the public’s information-sources is, so as to replace the power that the existing mainstrean ‘news’-media have over the public’s mind, in America, and in its vassal-nations (which don’t yet include Syria). If the public do not have unprejudiced — which means entirely uncensored — information presented routinely to them, then democracy isn’t even possible.

Anyway: that is one proposed way of replacing censorship, and overcoming dictatorship. How many politicians are proposing such changes? Why aren’t any? Are all of them afraid of the dictators? Is there no basis for hope, at all?