It is getting harder to keep a secret these days. The collective shadow of our society, once safely relegated to the dark basement of the unmentionable, is now exposed to daylight, forcing us to face our contradictions. I’ll offer three examples: Donald Trump’s leaked recordings, Hillary Clinton’s emails and Wall Street speeches, and the endless procession of videos of police brutality.
Once upon a time, “locker room talk” like Donald Trump’s lewd and degrading remarks leaked to the media would have stayed safely sequestered from public view. Misogynistic locker room banter existed, as it were, in an alternate universe. What was said on the golf course or the barroom didn’t register as part of a man’s public reputation; in those places, men were free to say things that would be unforgivable in public. The coexistence of these two realms was seldom questioned. As a high school and college athlete, I remember hearing the kinds of things Trump has said, and they were quite unremarkable in that context. A boy could say the most brutish, repellent things in the locker room without damage to his reputation outside it. Respectable society would never find out. Likewise, when reporters and politicians mingled outside the public performances of their roles, an unwritten understanding kept their conversations safely off the record. I imagine Donald Trump feeling a sense of betrayal at the revelation of his remarks, as if a boy reported to another boy’s girlfriend what he said about her in the locker room.
I think this division into two realms extended to internal, psychological divisions in the individuals making the degrading boasts and comments about women. In polite company, they became people who did not harbor such thoughts. The locker room alter-ego was safely contained in a different psychic compartment. I can imagine a Donald Trump being sincerely – sincerely! – scandalized to hear in polite company the very things he himself said in the safety of the mens’-only field of misogyny. I can imagine him condemning what was said in all earnestness, with zero awareness of hypocrisy.
So it is that rape culture is allowed to persist. It needs a shadow zone. The locker room conversations that objectify and degrade women and contribute to rape culture need a “locker room” in which to happen, a wall of separation between it and the larger realm of general social acceptability.
This wall of separation is breaking down, thanks in large part to the ubiquity of recording technology and the impossibility of stopping the distribution of the recordings on the Internet. Contradictions, whether personal or social, that could once remain hidden are coming unstoppably to light. It is getting harder to uphold a divided self.
As with sex, so with money. Hillary Clinton is having a hard time maintaining a wall of separation between her public posture of economic populism and her decades-long ministration to the needs of Wall Street. In former times a politician’s speeches to elite insiders would exist in an inviolably separate realm from his or her public image. In inside circles of power, the politician would be free to express himself directly. No concealment of his allegiances was necessary, because no one outside the political and corporate elite was listening. So of course, Hillary Clinton was loathe to release the transcripts of her speeches to Wall Street banks. Those speeches were the equivalent of locker room talk, which is supposed to stay in the locker room. Here, though, the context is financial domination rather than sexual domination.
Something similar applies to Clinton’s infamous deleted emails. There is nothing new about the contrast between the public presentation of governance and its ugly inner workings. The exercise of political power has never been pretty. The backroom deals, the threats and coercion, the buying of favors… all the nastiness that the email scandal hints at is characteristic of politics as we know it. The difference today is that it can no longer be confined to the back room. In other words, it is getting harder to maintain the appearance of democracy in a reality of oligopoly.
It is perhaps necessary that Clinton and Trump are both such extreme expressions of the suppressed shadow of our culture, presenting itself in unambiguous form for clearing. Liberal pundits have repeatedly observed that the bigoted sentiments Donald Trump expresses are merely the undisguised version of what Republicans have been saying in code for a long time. The hidden erupts into view. Clinton, meanwhile, is no ordinary establishment politician; she is the very epitome of the establishment, embodying its insincerity, lack of imagination, normalized corruption, and narrow technocratic commitment to preserving the status quo.
This is not meant as a personal criticism. My purpose here is not to condemn Hillary or the Donald; it is to illuminate the dissolving of the insulating compartments that allow contradictions and hypocrisy to exist. Probably in person, each of them is a complex individual like you and me, a mixture of beauty and pain, playing the roles laid out for them. I imagine that in their most private moments neither fully identifies with those roles nor believes in the game into which they have been thrust, any more than you or I believe in it. The elites usually precede the people into cynicism. In any event, our current moment of social evolution is calling each of them, in their public roles, to be an avatar of a cultural shadow archetype, presented to us in extreme form so that it cannot be ignored.
Clinton and Trump are a product of their conditions, playing the “game of thrones” according to the secret rules of the insiders, in a system that has long allowed, encouraged, and in some ways nearly required hypocrisy. That system is coming to an end. We are entering by fits and starts an era of transparency in which, we may someday hope, secret rules and hypocrisy will have no purchase.
Another arena with a longstanding division between sanitized public presentation and gritty reality is law enforcement. As with misogyny and political corruption, there is nothing new about police brutality and nothing new about its disproportionate application to brown-skinned people. For a long time though, it was sequestered in the realm of the unmentionable, relegated to the left-wing margins of political discourse or the statistics of academic papers. No longer. The advent of ubiquitous cell phone video cameras and other video surveillance has lifted the lid off the dark political unconscious and exposed its contents to light.
Here again, this exposure is making the two contradictory functions of the police – serving and protecting, and bullying and abusing – impossible to maintain simultaneously. It is only possible if the latter function is well hidden in the shadows.
I could go on to make similar points about drone strikes, refugee camps, clearcuts, and all the other injury and injustice that technology and social media are bringing into view. For a long time, propriety and ideology have buffered normalcy from the ugly inner workings of its maintenance. For example, the ideology of development has buffered us from the horrors of Third World sweatshops, strip mines, dispossession of land, and so forth. Lurid caricatures of violent criminals hides the grinding injustice of the legal system. The triumphal narrative of exploration and progress obscures the genocide of indigenous cultures. These various buffers, which allow contradictions to stand, have been necessary to operate a civilization built on exploitation and ecocide. Open up any social institution – politics, finance, business, education, medicine, academia, and even philanthropy – and you will find within it the same ugly machinations of power.
Today these buffers are disintegrating, despite the best efforts of established power to maintain secrecy, prosecute whistle-blowers, and control information. We might thank technology for bringing the dark underbelly of our system to light, but I think something larger is afoot. The trend toward transparency that is happening on the systems level is also happening in our personal relationships and within ourselves. Invisible inconsistencies, hiding, pretense, and self-deception show themselves as the light of attention turns inward. The tools of self-examination are proliferating on every level, from the personal to the collective. Herein is a link between the political developments I’ve described and the world of self-help, spirituality, or consciousness. At its best, these comprise ways of shedding light onto our internal contradictions and blockages in order to create a kind of inner transparency. On the interpersonal level too, a lot of work around partnership and community also aims for transparency, for example to expose hidden resentments, repressed desires, and unconscious conflicts. Illuminating the contradictions between the story and the actuality of a relationship brings the possibility of healing.
When previously hidden contradictions rise to consciousness and collide, the result is first denial and rage, followed by cognitive dissonance and the breakdown of normalcy. We see that happening today in the public sphere. That process can be disorienting, even paralyzing, as familiar orienting certitudes turn false. Who are we as a people? What is reliable? What is possible? What is real? We aren’t what we thought we were, and it isn’t what we thought it was. This confusion is a good thing. It is a sign of liberation from the old story that confined us. The exposure and clearing of hidden contradictions brings us to a higher degree of integrity, and frees up prodigious amounts of energy that had been consumed in the maintenance of illusions. What will our society be capable of, when we are no longer wallowing in pretense?
+ I’ve spent the week greedily consuming the treats offered up by Wikileaks’s excavation of John Podesta’s inbox. Each day presents juicy new revelations of the venality of the Clinton campaign. In total, the Podesta files provide the most intimate and unadulterated look at how politics really works in late-capitalist America since the release of the Nixon tapes.
+ There’s a big difference, though. With Nixon, the stakes seemed greater, the banter more Machiavellian, the plots and counter-plots darker and more cynical.
+ The Podesta email tranches show the inner mechanics of a much more mundane, petty and banal political machine. Instead of shaping a campaign around an ideological movement, the Clinton operation resembles the packaging of a political mutual fund, a balanced, low-risk portfolio of financial interests, captive NGOs and dependent demographic sectors.
+ The red meat in the emails can be found in the disclosures of the internal rivalries, self-aggrandizement and sycophancy of hired guns and consultants, especially as they gravitate toward Podesta, whose chilly presence looms behind the scenes like the ghost of Thomas Cromwell.
+ The three prevailing obsessions of the Podesta emails: raising money, containing the contamination of the Clinton Foundation and screwing Bernie Sanders. There’s barely any hint of anxiety over Trump. In fact, they relish his every false move, almost as if each faltering step had been pre-visualized, if not orchestrated.
+ If possible, the press corps comes off worse than Team Clinton. Almost every reporter is revealed as pliable, servile and so lazy that they basically beg the Clinton PR shop to write their stories for them.
+ The press has reiterated this obsequiousness over the course of the last seven days with what can only be described as an orgy of coverage of the Trump sex tapes and assorted scandals. By all accounts, the Trump campaign is dead and has been for weeks. The 24/7 obsession now amounts to a kind of political corpse abuse. Forsaken in this feeding frenzy has been any serious attention at all to the Wikileaks email dump, except to echo Clinton camp assertions that they were the victims of a Russian plot to tilt the election to Trump. If so, the Russians have proved even more incompetent than we thought them to be.
+ Of course, the Russian diversion is a convenient excuse for the lapdog press having missed one major scandal after another that has been staring them in the face for months, if not years.
+ Significantly, the email dump also proves what many of us have long suspected: that there are no walls separating the Clinton campaign, its foundation and Super Pacs and the DNC itself. Those supposedly distinct entities are, in fact, all part of one vast, interconnected organization–a syndicate, if you will, that has deftly evaded campaign finance laws (created by Democrats) and rigged its own primary process to ensure a pre-ordained winner.
+ The key thing to remember about the DNC is that it has been under the complete control of the Clintons and their operatives since the 1990s. Obama never cleaned house and installed his own people, a lapse that proved fatal to his own political and legislative agenda. The Clintons’ loyalty to Obama was always paper-thin and conditioned on whether it would advance their own interests: Hillary’s pursuit of the presidency and Bill’s maniacal quest for lucrative speaking fees.
+ It was no surprise that Bill unloaded on ObamaCare a few days ago, calling it the “craziest thing in the world.” The Clintons want to efface Obama’s legacy and replace it with their own, the same way the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt smashed the images of the previous ruler and replaced it with their own visage.
+ So what follows are a few of my favorite revelations from Podesta’s inbox, starting with an email where Podesta is joking about a fundraiser on Martha’s Vineyard. John Podesta: “I didn’t think wet works meant pool parties at the Vineyard.” Another Clinton murder? Check the drain for trace evidence?
+ I can picture the invitation: “HRC Pool Party: Donate or Drown!”
+ Rightwing websites, of course, are taking this as proof, HRC, murdered Scalia.
+ Peter Berlios reminded me of the global outrage when Trump’s special friend, Vladimir Putin, used a similar expression in regard to the Chechens: “We will wet them even in the shit house.”
+ By the way, John Podesta owned 75,000 shares in Leonidio LLC, a firm linked to who? Yes, Vladimir Putin.
+ Podesta’s correspondent in this exchange is Steve Elmendorf, a longtime Democratic powerbroker who was Dick Gephardt’s chief of staff. Over the years, Elmendorf has perfected the art, crucial to any Democratic candidate, of seducing progressive sectors of the party to dutifully line up behind a neoliberal candidate. A few years ago, he explained his strategic thinking this way:
“The bloggers and online donors represent an important resource for the party, but they are not representative of the majority you need to win elections. The trick will be to harness their energy and their money without looking like you are a captive of the activist left.”
+ Bill Richardson is the famously irascible former Governor of New Mexico, who served as Energy Secretary and UN ambassador during Bill Clinton’s second term. The relationship soured when the governor broke ranks and endorsed Barack Obama in 2008. Richardson and the Clintons have been feuding ever since. Indeed, Bill once described the antagonism as a “permanent” state of hostilities.
In August of 2015, Podesta took it on his own initiative to negotiate a detente between the two men. Apparently, Hillary was furious at Podesta’s impertinence. She doesn’t forgive. Podesta writes back urging her to consider the political consequences, especially with Hispanics in must-win western states like Colorado and New Mexico, where Richardson still has pull.
“I had heard that you were upset that I encouraged a call between [Bill Clinton] and Richardson to bury the hatchet. I did that at the request of Jose Villarreal who pushed me and made the point that Richardson is still on TV a lot, especially on Univision and Telemundo and not withstanding the fact that he can be a dick, it was worth getting him in a good place. Probably worth a quick call to ask him to stay stout and publicly endorse, but if it’s too galling, don’t bother.”
+ Even someone as close to the Clintons as Podesta keeps running into the couple’s aversion to apologizing for anything. After issuing a non-apology apology on her email server scandal, Podesta gripes to his number two, Neera Tanden: “No good deed goes unpunished. Press takeaway was the whine of but ‘she really didn’t apologize to the American people. I am beginning to think Trump is on to something.”
Tanden notes: “Everyone wants her to apologize. And she should. Apologies are like her Achilles heel…This apology thing has become like a pathology. I can only imagine what’s happening in the campaign. Is there some way I can be helpful here? I know if I just email her she will dismiss it out of hand.”
Podesta replies tersely: “You should email her. She can say she’s sorry without apologizing to the American people. Tell her to say it and move on, why get hung on this.”
+ Few figures in the Podesta emails come off as more appalling than Neera Tanden, whose primary mission, perhaps the only thing she is really competent at, is detecting even minor deviations from obedience to Clintonian orthodoxy. No one agitates her more than Bernie and his Sandernistas, who she seems ready to dial up a drone strike against at a moment’s notice. She’s the Lee Atwater of neoliberalism, without Atwater’s malign intelligence and sense of humor.
+ Here’s Neera in panic mode over a Wall Street Journal piece on Hillary’s email server quoting an anonymous White House as saying Clinton may have “screwed up” on the matter. Tanden gets so worked up that she seems ready to target Obama: “WH crapping on her is going to send this into orbit.”
+ During one of her speeches-for-hire, Hillary promised Wall Street tycoons that she would block marijuana legalization (don’t want to cut into those tobacco stocks). Here’s her archly worded back and forth with Xerox’s CEO, Ursula Burns, following March 2014 speech. Clinton used Wall Street lingo to express her opposition to ending pot prohibition “in all senses of the word.” Who says she doesn’t have a sense of humor?
URSULA BURNS: So long means thumbs up, short means thumbs down; or long means I support, short means I don’t. I’m going to start with — I’m going to give you about ten long-shorts.
SECRETARY CLINTON: Even if you could make money on a short, you can’t answer short.
URSULA BURNS: You can answer short, but you got to be careful about letting anybody else know that. They will bet against you. So legalization of pot?
SECRETARY CLINTON: Short in all senses of the word.
+ When served with subpoena for records on Benghazi, a seriously agitated Robbie Mook asks, “We’re not releasing EVERYTHING, right?”
+ Among the things the Clinton damage control team must deal with: “Tony Rodham hustling gold mining deals in Haiti.”
+ I wonder if they considered setting up a special squad to deal with Clinton Hustler Eruptions?
+ Mark Siegel, the former executive director of the DNC, emailed Podesta on the eve of the Convention outlining strategies to entice the “self-righteous (Bernie) ideologues” to “work their asses off for Hillary.”
+ “Let’s throw Bernie a bone,” Siegel recommends, in the form of reducing the number of super delegates in 2020 primary campaign. Perhaps “Bernie Bones” could be come a new treat at Ben & Jerry’s?
+ Hillary’s closest advisor and most intimate confident is Huma Abedin. No one more aggressively enforces Hillary’s own wishes or guards her privacy. Abedin, who we must assume is speaking directly for Hillary, is adamant that Hillary continue with her strategy of avoiding press conferences. Each time Hillary answers a few questions at one of her events, the message gets lost, Huma frets. “Can we survive not answering questions from press at message events?”
Podesta swats down this notion emphatically.
“If she thinks we can get to Labor Day without taking press questions, I think that’s suicidal. We have to find some mechanism to let the stream [sic] out of the pressure cooker.”
Not a huge deal, Huma. If HRC is compelled to answer, she can just lie the way she usually does. Hillary’s a natural.
+ One email to Podesta from Hillary’s account in August of 2014 provides confirmation for what we’ve long suspected: Clinton was well aware that Qatar and Saudi Arabia are the principle funders of ISIS in Iraq and Syria:
“While this military/para-military operation is moving forward, we need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to [ISIS] and other radical Sunni groups in the region.”
+ There’s a reason I started calling MSNBC MSDNC. Here we have an email from a producer of “All In with Chris Hayes” slobbering all over Hillary Clinton in an attempt to secure an appearance on Hayes’ tendentious show:
“Hey Adrienne,
Thanks for your help in getting Karen on with Chris the other night. I have a question for you. As you guys have probably seen, we’ve been airing a ‘Hillary Clinton for Millennials’ segment on our program every night this past week.”
“The point of the segment is basically to inform young people about all of the crap and nonsense that Sec. Clinton and President Clinton (but mostly Sec. Clinton) had to face back in the 90s when President Clinton was running for office…everything from cookie-gate to stand-by-your-man-gate to Hillarycare.”
“The point isn’t to dwell on the past but the point is to talk about this amazing, intelligent woman who probably faced more nonsense back in the day because she is a woman…and she continues to have to face it. She is smarter than most men and more qualified than most men to be president.”
This kind of shameless groveling makes Sean Hannity seem like an objective reporter.
+ How to deal with the Sanders phenomenon haunted even veteran political operators on Team Clinton. Here’s an exchange from January 6, 2016 between Mandy Grunwald and Jennifer Palmieri:
Palmieri: “I liked messing with Bernie on wall street at a staff level for the purposes of muddying the waters and throwing them off their game a bit. But don’t know that it is most effective contrast for her. Seems like we are picking the fight he wants to have.”
Grunwald: “Bernie wants a fight on Wall Street. We should not give him one.”
+ Here’s an excerpt from the Clinton campaing’s press policy, cautioning against allowing coverage of the anemic turnouts at Hillary rallies: “‘Less than a 100 people at a rally? No cell phones! No press!”
+ The emails in 2015 show increasing fear that Elizabeth Warren’s freelance attacks on the big banks and investment houses will alienate the tycoons and moguls who fund the DNC. Nancy Pelosi (Net Worth: $58 million) & Co. scurry to reassure Wall Street: “Elizabeth Warren doesn’t speak for Dem Party!”
+ HRC HQ knew she needed to run against a candidate like Trump. It was her only hope of winning the election & they went to work to make it so. It unnerved some her allies, one of whom wrote Podesta: “Right now I am petrified that Hillary is almost totally dependent on Republicans nominating Trump.”
As the World Burns
+ When there’s no opposition to a war, it will go on forever. See Afghanistan, 15 years and counting. Barbara Lee was the lone vote against it then and one of the few who remember it now. The Authorization for Unilateral Military Force, which launched the Afghan War, has been involved 30 times now for other interventions. Lee should get some kind of peace prize, though not the one awarded to Kissinger, Peres and Obama.
+ Russian meddling in US elections? Yet to be proven. US role in trying to overthrow more than 50 governments worldwide in last 65 years? Fact.
+ Twelve Bush officials sign letter denouncing Trump. Get ready for the Fourth Bush Term!
+ Obama announced this week that Russia will pay a price for hacking into the DNC’s computers, implying that some kind of cyber-attack will be launched on the Kremlin. What’s Obama going to do to the person who leaked the Trump tape or Trump’s tax return? Drone them?
+ Chris Christie, now a wanted man, calls Trump’s comments on kissing and grouping unsuspecting women “completely indefensible “. This is rich coming from a man who publicly humiliates women at his press conferences and then mocked, demonized and locked up a nurse named Kaci Hickox, who had shown the humanity to actually treat Ebola victims.
+ Instead of being subjected to condescending Western philanthropy, Haiti desperately needs to be allowed to chart the course of their own reconstruction. Be sure to read Mark Schuller’s important piece in this week’s CounterPunch.
+ Where’s the feminist outrage over the noxious Jeffrey Goldberg being tapped as the new editor-in-chief of The Atlantic? Judy Miller got run out of the reporting biz for her yellow journalism. Goldberg gets promoted for his! Sexism?
+ With Jeffrey Goldberg helming the Atlantic and Hillary heading for White House, everything is aligning for next big bang war. Good morning, Teheran!
+ Glenn Beck is tortured by a simple question: should he or shouldn’t he vote for Hillary Clinton? When he comes to a resolution perhaps can make his announcement live on Rachel Maddow Show? All together now, follow the bouncing bombs…
+ It took Nixon to go to China, and Donald J. Trump to destroy the GOP from the inside-out. Credit where credit is due. The Donald is fragging the entire GOP establishment, from Paul Ryan to John McCain, as his campaign goes down in flames.
+ Those freaking out over Trump’s joke about jailing Hillary have never shown the slightest angst about her policy of assassinating people, including American citizens, by drone without trial, hearing or indictment.
+ Trump didn’t rise from the swamps of the GOP. He is a monster created, promoted and advertised by the media. Even now they feast on him.
+ Of course, if Trump didn’t exist, the Clintons would have had to invent him. In a way, they did, elevating Trump as the “pied-piper candidate.”
+ Here’s the revolting Curt Schilling, another Pervert for Jesus.
+ Bernie Sanders took off enough time this week from campaigning for Hillary to broadcast this platitude: “When the Founding Fathers were writing the Constitution, I’m pretty sure they weren’t thinking ‘Let’s make sure billionaires can buy elections.’”
But Bernie your old buddy Howard Zinn would have told you that is exactly what the Founding “Fathers” were thinking, which is why they only permitted white land-owning men to enjoy the franchise and doubled down by allowing the southern land barons to keep, breed and sell their slaves to buy elections.
+ The Democrats’ decision to reduce the entire closing chapter of the campaign to a rather prudish emphasis on sexual politics represents a retreat from the party’s frail commitment to tolerance and sexual liberation. Of course, it also protects Hillary from having to grapple with her entangled record on trade, economics, criminal justice and militarism. Just wait for the renewed attacks on rap music, heavy metal, and “Game of Thrones.” Will Tipper Gore be named Culture Czar?
+ Few people know where more of the Clintons’ skeletons are buried than Ken Silverstein, the founder of CounterPunch and one of the best investigative journalists around. As pre-Halloween treat, he unearths a few here regarding the Clinton foundation’s deplorable escapades in Colombia. Silverstein quotes a Colombian union organizer as saying:
“They are doing nothing for workers. I don’t even know what they are doing in this country other than exploiting poverty and extracting money.”
+ Every President needs an Axis of Evil to justify their existence (and those all important defense contracts). Here’s Hillary’s. Read it and bleed.
+ Still, people see through her. Latest WSJ/NBC poll from Ohio, taken after the Trump sex tape and the St. Louis debate, shows HRC still below 50%…with WOMEN voters!
+ Someone sent me a link to a story claiming nervously that while Russia Prepares for War, the US Sleeps. Sleeps? Making Russia prepare for war (and sink billions it doesn’t have into a weapons production that will never come close to rivaling the Pentagon’s armory of mass destruction) has been the point of US foreign policy toward Russia for the last 60 years. Putin is walking blindly into same quagmire that doomed the Soviet Union. (See Andrew Cockburn’s indispensable The Threat. The book may be out of print, but it’s central thesis isn’t.)
+ When Human Rights Watch isn’t clamoring for a humanitarian cruise missile intervention or sabotaging the peace deal in Colombia, it can actually produce some compelling documents, such as this important report on the human toll of the war on drugs. The gist of the report is that every 25 seconds someone is the United States is arrested on simple possession of drugs for their own personal use, totaling more than 1.5 million arrests every year. Each day, there are more than 137,000 people in the US in prison or jail on possession charges, with tens of thousands of others under detention, house arrest or some form of probation.
+ The truly deplorable Joy Behar slimes Bill Clinton’s accusers as “tramps.” I guess that means they should feel grateful that Bill mauled them.
+ Perhaps Trump was just besotted with too much Fitzgerald. After all, he does live in a penthouse as big as the Ritz: “Hard to sit here and be close to you and not kiss you.” (Tender is the Night). Nah…
+ The Washington Post frantically conspired to kill off Nate Parker’s incandescent new film on the Nat Turner slave revolt, Birth of a Nation. After weeks of unrelenting negative publicity, the box office results were meager. The Post couldn’t help but gloat, publishing a stupid little piece by Caitlin Gibson titled: “The Big Debate Over ‘Birth of a Nation’ is Over: Audiences Just weren’t that Interested.”
+ Imagine the Post’s verdict on the greatest American novel: “The big debate over Moby-Dick is over. Only sold 500 copies upon release. Likely never hear from that author again…”
+ The concerted effort to destroy Parker and his film reminds me of the sabotaging of Welles’ Magnificent Ambersons (where a third of the footage was actually dumped in the Pacific Ocean) and John Huston’s fiercely anti-war film of Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, which MGM studios mutilated, cutting the film from its original 2-hour length and adding maudlin voice over narration (See Lillian Ross’s Picture for the gory details.)
+ The announcement that Bob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize for Literature induced much carping from uptight academics about the alleged degeneration of the award. How dare they honor a rock singer? My question is what took them so long? The crusty Nobel committee should have recognized the role of popular music at least 35 years ago and given the prize to Bob Marley. Even Dylan would probably admit that Smokey Robinson should have been in line ahead of him.
+ Still Dylan deserves the recognition. He’s the greatest white blues singer and probably the best songwriter of the rock era. My favorites from across the decades: Masters of War, Highway 61 Revisited, Just Like Tom Thumb Blues, Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again, I Want You, All Along the Watchtower, The Man in Me, Forever Young, I Shall be Released, If You See Her Say Hello, This Wheel’s on Fire, Tears of Rage, Hurricane, Precious Angel, Blind Willie McTell, Julius & Ethyl, Heart of Mine, Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight, Dark Eyes, Everything is Broken, Love Sick, Not Dark Yet.
+ But I hope he tells the committee to shove it, as did Jean-Paul Sartre. If not, I trust he will stay in character and mumble Dylanesque obscurities to a mystified audience.
+ Wikileaks reports that Keith Richards was on the short list for Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Robbed!
“The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist.” -Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
It’s almost time for our quadrennial political distraction, masquerading as the US presidential election. As opposed to previous elections, this one feels quite different. Even with Obama/Romney in 2012, important, basic economic issues were discussed, health care reform was questioned, and foreign policy was given its due.
However, this time, the spectacle of the personalities seems to dominate the conversation: Mrs. Clinton is somehow on a feminist crusade, an inspiration for women everywhere. Going unmentioned are her irredeemable backers, such as the genocidal Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright. As for Trump, his version of America is as naïve, narrow-minded, and delusional as a Leave It to Beaver episode, or a Captain America comic book. In the background, the monstrosity of global capitalism goes unquestioned, and the cries from victims of US institutional racism and structural violence go unheard.
Global warming, broad economic policy, and nuanced foreign policy are simply too much to ask of these candidates. Their stupidity knows no end; their corruption and depravity know no bounds, and many of both of their supporters, as well as media, political, and corporate backers and sycophants can be considered “deplorable”. Many supporters of the two-party system do not bother to think about the damage either potential president would do to people outside the US. Many backers of Trump and Clinton have little to no basic knowledge of world cultures and history.
What are the cords that connect us to these “leaders”, to our American Empire? They are the same ones that the Industrial Revolution, the basis of our civilization, has implanted in each of us since birth, as Alvin Toffler explains in The Third Wave. As our social world became modeled on the factory floors developed in the 18th and 19th centuries, a set of unspoken principles were ironed out, and transferred to the political, social, and economic realms. (1) As we shall see, these principles spread unchecked, and have infiltrated political discourse and social hierarchies. Toffler identifies these implicit rules as:
1) Standardization: Industry, production, and factory life revolved around endless loops and inputs of metals, fabrics, coal, oil, and specialized parts for trains, cars, etc. The simplification and standard mechanical parts used were mirrored and reflected in the culture at large: eventually, markets, the media, radio and TV, and even great art and literature succumbed to commoditization and homogenization. We now have mass marketing, public relations, and “electioneering”, where our duopoly controls all branches of government.
2) Specialization: With the explosion in the fields of science and engineering, specialized techniques were taught to develop, invent, and maintain mechanical and electric equipment. Yet again, this philosophy infected the general society: only bureaucrats are able to work in the halls of power, only industrial experts are able to administer federal agencies, creating the disgraceful revolving door phenomena in Washington.
3) Synchronization: As more people flocked into cities with gleaming promises of steady, factory jobs, time and punctuality became of prime importance. Punching timecards and meeting quotas were necessary: there was no room for leeway, as assembly lines demanded strict timelines. The time demands of labor leaked into white-collar work as well: in banking and finance, railroads, time zones, and office jobs, advanced scheduling became the norm. Eventually, synchronization of the political system gained traction, and the imperial system came to resemble a deathly machine, marching in time to bloody footsteps: military, immoral diplomacy and ideology, and industry worked together to lord over Latin America with the Monroe Doctrine, annihilate Native Americans using Manifest Destiny, even as today, the excuse of the “War on Terror” is used to exterminate entire populations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and elsewhere.
4) Concentration: Think of the vast oil and coal stored underground for millions of years, only to be strip-mined, taken up by rigs, and transported by rail and tanker into vast refineries: concentration of energy. Further, every class of people became absorbed and intensified in the industrial system: workers into factories, children into schools, mentally ill into institutions, finance concentrated into New York, London, and Paris. Mega-mergers of corporations: today, it is the Apple, Google, Shell, and BP’s of the world who have coffers of blood money held tidily in banks throughout the world. Further, the concentration of technocrats who we supposedly need to run our societies: in the West, the military-industrialists, just as the Soviets were once told the nomenklatura was necessary.
5) Maximization: Firms were encouraged to grow as large as possible, and expand into as many fields as possible. Companies in Japan in the mid-twentieth century would actually have workers sing of the glory and greatness of their employer. Today, 62 people have the same wealth as half the world’s population. This is concentration and maximizing at its most obscene. Of course, you won’t hear Clinton, Trump, or anyone in Washington talking about this. Maximizing GDP, corporate profits, fossil fuel use, and flexing imperial muscle is what the Feds do best.
6) Centralization: Connected to the first five rules of empire stated above, centralizing power, wealth, and using knowledge for private gain is required to uphold the industrial state. Taxation, subsidies for industry, political debates via the sham Committee on Presidential Debates, the backroom shenanigans of the DNC and RNC, and cloak and dagger lobbying and bribery now dominate our system of government. Further, the Leviathan of state-sanctioned violence now lords over the world from the Pentagon and NATO, and the centralization of information runs through fiber-optic cables straight to the infernal, yet temperature-controlled offices of the CIA and NSA.
The elections have adopted all the patterns of the industrial, imperial state: we have standardized TV, scripted questions, airbrushed candidates, and childlike debates. We’ve seen specialized tactics of gerrymandering, vote-rigging, PR bullshit, and strategists whose careers accomplish nothing for the public good. We all know of the synchronization of Wall Street, defense and oil companies. The concentration of power in the hands of the few hardly needs mention: here’s the study by Princeton and Northwestern professors who conclude that the US is an oligarchy, not a democracy. We’ve witnessed the maximization of endless primaries, debates, press conferences, and town-hall meetings ad infinitum. The centralization of political ideology (triangulation in Clintonite terms, Machiavellian to a rational person) and the limitations of discourse that our candidates display are all too clear.
These are the iron chains holding us down, shackling us in Plato’s cave: our candidates are figureheads, shadows on the wall; they are puppets of the super-elite. The central position they carve out in the mainstream is really a pit, an abyss: one that we all find ourselves in, as we continue to vote for those who don’t fight for our interests.
The two best options for this election seem to be: voting for Jill Stein, or boycotting the election, as Joel Hirschhorn advocates. As for our obscene election cycles, I believe Zach de la Rocha summed it up best:
A spectacle monopolized
The camera’s eyes on choice disguised
Was it cast for the mass who burn and toil?
Or for vultures who thirst for blood and oil?
William Hawes is a writer specializing in politics and environmental issues. His articles have appeared online at Global Research, Counterpunch, Dissident Voice, The World Financial Review, Gods & Radicals, and Countercurrents. He is author of the e-book Planetary Vision: Essays on Freedom and Empire. You can reach him at wilhawes@gmail.com
Notes:
1.) Alvin Toffler. The Third Wave. Bantam, 1980. p. 46-60.
Another terrorist attack in a major American city, more frightening images and talk of pressure cookers and ball bearings, BBs and pipe bombs, “lone wolves” and Christmas tree lights.
The latest alleged perpetrator is Ahmad Khan Rahami, a young Muslim man who grew up in America and likes souped-up cars. He became “self-radicalized” watching videos on the Internet that inspired him to blow up innocent Americans.
Some experts say the bombs he made show a high level of sophistication and training, but with more than a half a dozen bombs deployed, not a single person was killed. Some saw it coming — others say they can’t believe it.
He traveled to Afghanistan or Pakistan — or both — in the years prior to the attack. Nobody seems to know what he did there, but authorities are pretty sure there’s no wider conspiracy.
Cornered and desperate after authorities released his picture to the public, it’s a small miracle the suspect is still alive after a wild shootout with police.
Sound familiar?
The Boston Herald understandably thinks so. In a piece titled “Attack had eerie resemblance to Boston Marathon bombings,” the Herald points out the many superficial similarities to the 2013 attack at the Boston Marathon. The lead paragraph reads: “From pressure cookers, the release of a suspect photo, to the subsequent manhunt and shootout with cops, yesterday’s arrests of Ahmad Khan Rahami in New York City and New Jersey has stirred echoes of blasts at the Boston Marathon in 2013, security experts said.”
The reliably pro-law-and-order Herald left out the part about the FBI’s prior contact with the suspect. The New York Times, to its credit, did inform us that the FBI conducted an “assessment” on Rahami in 2014, because his father told them he was a terrorist. Then dad took it back.
Interestingly, the Times also mentioned that the suspect’s father claims to have fought with the CIA-supported Afghan Mujahedin against the Soviets back in the 80s. The Times didn’t attach much significance to either revelation and probably won’t pursue the connections much further.
But, as with Tamerlan Tsarnaev, another recent “lone wolf” who suddenly started acting as a cartoonish Muslim fanatic, the FBI and CIA can be found lurking in the back story.
It is entirely possible that there are a lot of so-called lone wolves on the prowl — a sort of self-directed fifth-column of ISIS. But, according to investigative journalist Trevor Aaronson, an alarming number of them are being pushed and prodded by provocateurs on the federal payroll. We don’t know if Rahami was similarly pushed, but it’s a valid question nonetheless.
The FBI claims to have sent undercover agents to “investigate” Rahami, but “didn’t find enough information to charge him,” according to theBoston Globe. What that investigation consisted of is still, and likely will remain, unclear. The FBI seldom reveals its “sources and methods.”
At the very least, the public should be told what this type of contact looks like and whether it is at least conceivable that such government actions can contribute to pushing young men to commit these types of crimes.
But despite these obvious concerns, the US government’s “war on terror” strategies are strangely absent from President Barack Obama’s Countering Violent Extremism program, which is currently grappling with the thorny issue of what might be provoking these desperate acts.
Will we get a legitimate investigation that delves into the precise nature of federal agents’ interactions with Rahami, or will we just get another whitewash that only looks at “intelligence failures.” It will most likely be the latter (here’s why).
History Doesn’t Repeat, It Rhymes
How likely is it that Rahami’s travel to Afghanistan, an active war zone, escaped the scrutiny of federal agents? Tamerlan Tsarnaev traveled overseas to a geopolitical hotspot in the years before the Boston Marathon bombing, but the Feds claim to have ignored internal warnings about him and waved him through at the airport.
Authorities never nailed down exactly where the bombs the Tsarnaevs used were made and who made them. Will we get these details in the Rahami case? The public would like to know who is making all these “sophisticated” explosives.
Like Rahami, Tamerlan Tsarnaev had many of the hallmarks of an individual the FBI routinely coerces to act as undercover informants. In fact, WhoWhatWhy has documented compelling evidence (see here, here andhere).
And what about that decision to release the photos of Rahami? As with the Tsarnaevs such an action almost guarantees a desperate reaction from the pursued — not surprisingly ending in a potentially lethal gun battle.
Former Boston police Commissioner Edward F. Davis, who questioned the wisdom of releasing the Tsarnaevs’ photos after the Marathon bombing, again seems to be questioning the release of such photos. He told the Boston Herald: “Once those pictures go out, that’s when it’s most dangerous. … He [Rahami] attempted suicide by cop. It’s all very familiar.”
Much has been written about the approaching Police State in alternative media. Commentary ranges from various warnings, to shock and outrage, and fear over an impending martial law takeover in North America and Western Europe. It’s hitting us from so many different angles, and yet the mainstream conversation continues to be woefully inadequate in both characterising the situation and offering a remedy.
In order to really understand the modern Police State, we need to explore some very profound and difficult questions. Many people who consider themselves aware think Western society has already reached the tipping point and the deteriorating situation is simply inevitable. If you feel like Winston Smith right about now you aren’t alone.
Prior to the mid 1990s, one might have described the militarisation of public law enforcement something of a creeping paradigm, but one that was still a long way off. Society explored many aspects of the Police State, both the physical and Orwellian psychological scenario, through literature and film. American science fiction writer Philip K. Dick penned some significant works like The Minority Report, and cinematic hits like Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil also explored what this dystopic, future vision of fascist technocracy might look like. As it turned out, and far from fantasy, countless devices, systems and themes depicted in so many of these supposedly ‘fictional’ classics have since made their way into our day to day lives. The dark dream became real.
Unfortunately, as humanity’s freshmen class of the early 21st century, we can no longer afford the intellectual distance enjoyed by previous generations between life today and that blurry, far-off spectre of something that might arrive sometime at some point in the future.
Any modern globalised Police State requires a social engineering framework in order to provide its shape and scope of law enforcement. The latest social engineering blueprint for global technocratic management was unveiled at this year’s 70th United Nations General Assembly in New York City. Their ‘new’ agenda (newer than the old one) entitled, Agenda 2030,1 hopes to “transform our world for the better by 2030.” Author Michael Snyder from the blog ‘End of The American Dream’ explains: “The entire planet is going to be committing to work toward 17 sustainable development goals and 169 specific sustainable development targets, and yet there has been almost a total media blackout about this…”2
Within its 17 ‘universal goals’, the actual Police State provision for Agenda 2030 can be found within Goal 11, which states how the new global government will, “Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.” Translated in technocracy terms, this means more Big Brother tech, smart grid tracking and big data surveillance states.
The age of computerisation and database integration, along with advances in military and crowd control technology perfected overseas, have enabled a sharp advance toward the Police State. Trying to make sense of ‘it’ is a major challenge, to say the least. In its totality, the control system is both multifaceted and multilayered. It may have been possible to describe it, or even define it 20, 30, or 40 years ago, as Philip K. Dick and so many others did. Today, as society has already eclipsed the possible, we face a situation whereby the very thing we are trying to describe is woven through nearly every fabric of modern social, professional, family, religious and political life.
If you happen to live in one of the technocratic nations, you can’t opt out, nor can you fully repeal the advances already made by the control system. What other options are available?
Firstly, we have to try and understand, from an economic, cultural and political perspective at least, how this control system came to be.
What are its strongest areas? Can we reform those areas? Where is it still emerging? Cannot those areas be slowed down? What was the political climate that enabled it?
How to Build a Police State
When you observe a modern Police State, the first things you might notice will not necessarily be the batons, shield, helmets or MRAPs. Think Switzerland or Singapore. A modern Police State will be neat, clean and efficient. Retail zones will be shiny and feature all the top designer brands. Many of the people you see in public will be well-groomed, well-healed and beautiful, but often with only one political party and a strict public code.
Just like admirers of the modern Chinese State, Singapore’s proponents refer to the single party State as “a great argument for Authoritarianism.” Order and civility rule the day, so long as you don’t fall foul of the narrow perimeters set by the State.
What has been accomplished in Southeast Asia since 1965, and what is possible in previously ‘free’ countries like the US, UK and Australia, are two very different social and political evolutions. Still, the modern Police State is advancing globally and it’s being driven primarily by three factors: technology, for-profit industry, and an age-old obsession by the ruling class to manage the masses.
The first and easiest area to challenge is the physical realm of the control system. The most obvious of these are the gadgets and toys. They are easy to see. Look at your local police department and notice the difference between what officers looked like and what they wore in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and now in the 21st century. Notice the firearms and tasers, the ‘Bat-Belts’, and now the body cameras. Your average officer today looks like a cross between a soldier and an android. Dress them like robots and don’t be surprised when they act like machines (and it won’t be long until many of them are replaced by machines).
If you’ve ever attended a street protest or witnessed some civil unrest, then you’ll have noticed the high-tech body armour, the riot and ‘crowd suppression’ equipment.
My first intense experience where I felt the full force of the modern Police State was in 2009, at the G20 Protests in the City of London, England. It was early in the evening and approximately 4,000 demonstrators suddenly found themselves trapped at Bishopsgate. Several hundred police officers on foot and horseback had blocked all the entrances and egresses in and out of the main road. Even alleyways were manned by riot police. Then police began charging the crowds, and beating protesters with clubs. They alternated their ‘surge’ efforts, from different ends of the street, north to south, one brutal flurry after another. The worst part about it was there was no escape route away from the police. Many were beaten and trampled on that evening. It was as if police planners were playing a video game.
Finally, at around 9pm, after being forced to stand, surrounded by police in a ‘Kettle’ for nearly three hours, along with 500 other demonstrators and press, who spent most of that time pressed up against police shields and not knowing what would happen next – I realised this is an impersonal, disinterested and totally uncompromising machine. It does not care who you are, what your views and opinions are, or whether you were innocent or guilty. The lesson was simple: “next time, stay home.” The only detail this machine is concerned with is that you comply with orders, and if no orders are given, then the machine demands you stay where you are until the machine decides what to do with you. If you complain too much, or become emotional, or heaven forbid act out in any way, then the machine will move in to subdue and detain you. That is all there is to it.
Big Brother Reality
It’s well-known that Great Britain is home of the world’s largest and most sophisticated physical Police State, including tens of millions of closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras, covering every conceivable inch of habitable space, both indoors and outdoors. The CCTV phenomenon in Britain was fuelled by an obsession with cameras that became increasingly popular with both government and corporate technocrats in the 1980s and 1990s. The psychology behind the exponential proliferation in cameras was mainly a fairly crude bit of criminology which held that the cameras would somehow act as a deterrent to criminal behaviour, and thus subdue the feral population into a more docile state. Industry used this line too, as sales persons were deployed en masse with endless flip charts and statistical models that claimed CCTV cameras would prevent the UK’s spiralling social malaise.
The only problem is that more cameras don’t equal less crime. Canadian writer Cory Doctorow observed this reality back in 2011, explaining: “After all, that’s how we were sold on CCTV – not mere forensics after the fact, but deterrence. And although study after study has concluded that CCTVs don’t deter most crime (a famous San Francisco study showed that, at best, street crime shifted a few metres down the pavement when the CCTV went up), we’ve been told for years that we must all submit to being photographed all the time because it would keep the people around us from beating us, robbing us, burning our buildings and burglarising our homes.”3
The CCTV is only one single aspect of Big Brother. It turns out that the real value of the CCTV camera grid is not so much the monitoring of crime per se, as it is in mass applied behavioural psychology.
The Panopticon
The physical Police State could not exist without some philosophical underpinning. Before Orwell, there was Bentham…
In the mid 19th century Britain developed a new style of prison architecture known as the ‘Panopticon’ under the aegis of utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham.4 The unique feature of this Panopticon concept was the transparent nature of each prisoner cell, visible to a central surveillance guard tower that could eye inmates at all times. The result of this psychological experiment, according to the pragmatic Benthamite philosophy, was to produce a regime of “self-policing” amongst the inmates, a kind of early behavioural conditioning. For technocrats and emerging utilitarian social managers of that era, this was seen as the most economic and efficient solution. Ultimately, this Benthamite concept is what underpinned phase one of the mass CCTV deployment throughout the UK. Sitting well above the security minions and the industry profiteers, elite scholars knew full well that CCTV cameras do not stop crime.
The real power of the Panopticon is in convincing the general population they are under constant surveillance. After that point, through a long-term process of nudging, diversions and scare tactics, the State gradually moulds the behaviour and thoughts of its subjects.
In order to keep citizens locked into this new conscious state of fear and trepidation, the State needs anenemy…
The Long War & ‘The Extremist’
One of the chief campaigns to nudge society towards a fully-functional Orwellian State is the War on Terror. Ever since September 11, 2001, the concept of an endless war against the ‘terrorists’ – a seemingly ubiquitous and constantly shape-shifting enemy – has been used to justify nearly every large new security expenditure and policy. Back in 2006, US President George W. Bush’s chief architect of the ‘long war’, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, laid out the tea leaves for the next 100 years, stating: “It does not have to do with deployment of US military forces, necessarily. It has to do with the struggle that’s taking place within that faith between violent extremists – a small number of them, relatively – who are capable of going out and killing a great many people, as they’re doing, and the overwhelming majority of that religion that does not believe in violent extremism or terrorism.”5
In George Orwell’s classic novel 1984, Winston Smith also grappled with the State’s endless war. “Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.”
In Oceania, people eventually forgot what started the long war. The news was just one terrorist attack after another. They enemy was everywhere, but nowhere too. The population learned to acquiesce to the idea that war was the permanent state of affairs, and that questioning the provenance of this idea was futile.
“Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war, but it was evident that there had been a fairly long interval of peace during his childhood, because one of his early memories was of an air raid, which appeared to take everyone by surprise. Perhaps it was the time when the atomic bomb had fallen on Colchester. He did not remember the raid itself.”
And so it was, in the early moments of the 21st century, Orwell’s dream suddenly became a waking reality. Social engineers are firm believers that if the Panopticon (married with the threat of an invisible enemy) can remain in place for a generation, then the State could fundamentally change a once free-thinking society into something noticeably different – a much more fearful and compliant populace.
The Social Media Panopticon
As terror scares and attacks become somewhat of a daily event in the West, identifying and quarantining the ‘extremist’ becomes a primary fetish of the Police State and its media arms. This is very much evident in how terrorists and ‘active shooters’ (dead or alive) are now profiled after the event. The mainstream media has integrated this into its work practice by crafting the post hoc guilty verdict of the accused, prior to a trial, with circumstantial or non sequitur accusations based on an individual’s “web history” that may have “radicalised” the suspect. In effect, the mainstream media’s function as an establishment propaganda arm results in trial by media – the bypassing of any trial by jury as the accused have already been implicitly or explicitly declared guilty by association or something as nebulous as “web history.”
Such incidents, as they are portrayed in the media for psychological conditioning purposes, are intended to cause the public mind to dismiss outdated notions of fair and due process and rule of law in favour of fiat corporate news and government “official” pronouncements. The net effect of this trend is that social media users, ie. the majority of the population, are adopting self-policing habits in their communications online. According to the principals of applied behavioural psychology, if you change the language people use, then eventually you change the way they think and act.
Like Bentham’s Panopticon, this new social media monitoring system works by utilising the digital web, which is arguably the most economic and efficient solution. The acceptance of self-policing and vague terms such as “radicalised” that are subject to the increasingly elastic definitions of the social engineering establishment.
This leads to one of the most profound questions one might ask in the wake of Edward Snowden’s NSA spying revelations: Knowing what we know now, are people more outspoken or are they more self-policing because of the Snowden leaks?
‘The Daily Shooter’
By extension, once the technocrat has regained some modicum of physical control, then the next domain to be conquered is the mind. In 1984, the technocracy was viewed through the eyes of the protagonist Winston Smith, who while remaining a physical prisoner of the Police State, could still retreat into his own mental state.
In our day, the expansion of the surveillance State and vast spying by the likes of the NSA and GCHQ are precisely intended to achieve this same effect, with the justification for such intrusions being an endless series of terror spectacles and lone wolf public shooting events. In the US, these mass shootings and terror scares are happening on an almost daily basis, hence, ‘The Daily Shooter’. Media coverage is both chaotic and relentless. As a result, the pubic are left stupefied and completely unable to challenge whatever narrative the government-media complex is selling at that time. The Police State marches forward.
A similar psychodrama also played out for 1984’s protagonist Winston Smith. As time progressed, however, maintaining some level of autonomy in one’s own thoughts became increasingly difficult for Winston. The final objective of the Police State, it seemed, was not only to fundamentally transform the way citizens act, but how they think too. The all-seeing and all-controlling “Big Brother” State was also the de facto social authority figure. The State’s law enforcement police force also became the “thought police.”
We see this same exact narrative playing out today as the State’s political figureheads continue in their mission to widen their definition of “extremism” along with other State-issued euphemisms used to describe citizens who should be regarded with suspicion.
Fall out of line and you might even be segregated or sent away to a special camp. Following the recent mass shooting in Chattanooga, Tennessee, retired US General and NATO Commander Wesley Clark proposed that any “disloyal Americans” should be sent to internment camps for the “duration of the conflict.”Notice the language: “for the duration of the conflict.” Indeed, it seems that Oceania is at war. He went even further, calling for the US government to identify people most likely to be “radicalised” so we can “cut this off at the beginning.”
“At the beginning?” Here, it seems Clark might be alluding to pre-crime, which will be powered by A.I…
Artificial Intelligence
Post-September 11, UK society was still hooked on their CCTV matrix, and with millions of cameras already in place and crime continuing to rise, security ‘experts’ and politicians simply doubled down on their previous wager, insisting that what the country really needed was more cameras. They believed that once a certain CCTV saturation was reached, by default they would somehow reached their twisted utopia.
It turned out that’s not humanly possible for security workers, most of whom are on a mere £7-10 (aud$14-20) per hour, to keep track, let alone analyse, a seemingly endless stream of footage. For the technocrat, the operative word here is ‘humanly’. Enter A.I…
Once again, advanced technology enters the narrative and supplies the solution to this previous insurmountable problem. The age of Artificial Intelligence, or A.I., is nearly upon us, and this next step in technological development is certain to radically change the entire concept of the Police State.
Laying down the framework an A.I. grid is not easy because the grid must be designed to cope with the application of A.I. As A.I.’s potential and practical applications have not yet been fully realised, designing the grid upon which it will be unleashed has been problematic up to this point. Sadly, society on the whole appears disinterested in questioning the social and unethical imperative currently driving the adoption of these new technologies.
At present, the big money is on the Smart Grid. Technocrats and their corporate partners are hoping to usher in their new surveillance grid under the auspices of ‘smart’ technologies. With A.I. in play, technocrats will be able to utilise the smart grid – which includes your mobile phone – to detect and track multiple targets over a wide area.6 Add facial recognition and data profiling to the mix and it’s a recipe for a full-on A.I. Smart Grid future. The ultimate hands-free, ‘surveillance selfie’ – compliments of Big Brother.
Just imagine, one day you’re simply walking down the street and pointing to something in the air. All of it is being captured on a 1.8 billion pixel video stream from the sky. They already know your identity and location with the phone in your pocket, and they already have your face logged and tracked.7
At this point we introduce Philip K. Dick’s concept of “pre-crime” whereby an A.I. system can predict an action you are likely to take.8 The system will then close the ‘Big Data’ loop by storing the video footage alongside your profile into a massive data ‘mash-up’. It will then compare with other potentially ‘suspicious’ activity in the area. Great Britain’s national police force, the Metropolitan Police, are already using a type of pre-crime software that British technocrats believe will somehow ‘revolutionalise’ modern policing in the 21st century.9
UK consumer advocate Pippa King explains how CCTV is already being phased out: “CCTV, closed circuit television, is not quite what is operating on our streets today. What we have now isIPTV, an internet protocol television network that can relay images to analytical software that uses algorithms to determine pre-crime area in real time.”
“Currently this AI looks at areas that may be targeted for crimes such as burglaries or joyriding,10 with the predicted hotspot information being sent direct to law enforcement smart phones in the field. This analytical software is being used in Glasgow, hailed as Britain’s first ‘smart city’,11 where the Israeli security firm NICE Systems are running the CCTV/IPTV network, analysing data from the 442 fixed HD surveillance cameras and 30 mobile units under a project called ‘Community Safety Glasgow’,12 whose primary objectives are described as ‘delivering Glasgow a more efficient traffic management system, identifying crime in the city and tracking individuals’.”13
This all can happen thanks to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) latest creation – the ARGUS camera, Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance.14 According to its designers ARGUS, “melds together video from each of its 368 chips to create a 1.8 billion pixel video stream” all in real-time and archived. It’s just one of the many new toys used by the State to realise its Orwellian ambitions.
Who’s Paying For It All?
Aside from its ability to trample over the rights of law abiding citizens, the Police State has one other chief characteristic which may also be its Achilles heal: it’s bankrupting the State. Here’s how it works:
The gravy chain is endless, but only with the help of taxpayers’ money, along with a series of bribes and favours between politicians and corporates. If you have ‘friends’ in government administration, then you are more likely to cash in on any number of lucrative ‘domestic defense’ contracts.
Where you have constant crisis you also have constant business opportunity. In this dark paradigm, timing is everything. As US President Barack Obama’s sociopathic15 former chief of staff, now Mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emmanuel, once said:
“You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”
With that mantra in mind, in the wake of any shooting, terror scare, or crisis, industrial lobbyists and their elected political gophers will waste no time pushing for new federally-funded add-ons like training courses, workplace psychologists, regulators, specialist contractors, police cameras and other big-ticket items16 – anything to help “solve the crisis.” One such program in the US is known simply as the ‘1033’.
“The 1033 program has flooded our local police forces with military equipment, and has turned them from Peace Officers, to a domestic army.”
“Officers stopped looking like officers, and more like soldiers all kitted out with fully automatic weapons, armoured vehicles, body armour, grenades launchers, night vision, and even bayonets! Besides the cost of liberty, how much has this domestic army cost you the tax payer?”17
In the US, no single entity embodies the Police State gravy train more than the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), where federal grants are used to bribe local law enforcement and absorb them into a larger framework of institutional dependency.
At over $200 billion per year, the DHS is now America’s most expensive federal agency. As any sane local law enforcement chief will tell you, once you smoke from the federal crack pipe, you’re hooked for life. Remember that each federal Police State agenda item has a lucrative contract attached to it. With each move central government makes, a large amount of money is also made (by someone).
By cutting off public money that is driving the runaway federal Police State in Western countries, the people have a chance to mitigate and potentially reform the current agenda.
If we hope to preserve what is left of our hard fought democracy, then now is the time to put it to the test. The alternative is unthinkable.
About the Author
Patrick Henningsen is an independent investigative reporter, editor, and journalist. A native of Omaha, Nebraska and a graduate of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in California, he is currently based in London, England and is the managing editor of 21st Century Wire – News for the Waking Generation (www.21stCenturyWire.com) which covers exposés on intelligence, geopolitics, foreign policy, the war on terror, technology and Wall Street. Patrick is a regular commentator on Russia Today.
No nation in world history harmed more people grievously over a longer duration than America – never beautiful, no bastion of democratic values, no advocate of world peace and stability.
Bipartisan lunatics run things, a criminal cabal, humanity’s greatest threat. The domestic and geopolitical agendas of each new administration is worse than its predecessors.
Elections when held are farcical. Duopoly power always wins, monied interests alone served, ordinary people increasingly harmed – full-blown tyranny and nuclear war perhaps following the next major state-sponsored false flag.
Americans have no say on how they’re governed, democracy a mirage. None whatever exists. Scoundrel media and self-serving politicians pretend otherwise – most people either unaware of how they’re ill-served or too indifferent to try changing things, going along with what harms them.
Intelligent people I know are too preoccupied in their daily lives to realize and get involved against the grave danger facing humanity.
The likelihood of a Hillary presidency should terrify everyone – a war goddess, the greatest threat to world peace of any leader in US history if she succeeds Obama.
Yet media scoundrels serve as her press agents. Polls show her ahead. US voters are so out-of-touch, uninformed and indifferent, they support what demands opposition.
I tremble at what’s coming with her in charge. Things may never be the same again. How many more wars will be waged?
How many victims will die or be gravely harmed with her as president? Will the remnants of social justice be entirely discarded? Will police state ruthlessness be harsher than ever? Is unthinkable nuclear war likely?
Is Orwell’s dystopian nightmare on steroids our future? Will Americans ever awaken to the clear and present danger they face? Will they revolt or remain dismissive?
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
Though Russia doesn’t consider herself a superpower, other than the US, and just perhaps China, Russia is as close as we come. A very real problem is that Russia has a very poor understanding of America, how politics work, what Americans think and, more than anything else, Russia still thinks America is a democracy.
You see, at the same time America was tearing the Soviet Union apart, the same thing was being done to America. Neither nation survived, it wasn’t just the Soviet Union that fell to the New World Order, it was America as well. Let me explain as succinctly as possible.
During the Clinton years, powerful Nazi inspired elements in America plotted what has been the successful overthrow of America’s constitution. The movement was led by rogue “industrialist” John Mellon Scaife and lawyers Antonio Scalia and Newt Gingrich. Financing them all was the Rothschild owned and controlled Federal Reserve Corporation.
A secret society hidden in plain sight was set up called the Federalist Society. This Nazi controlled group, backed by the powerful Israel lobby, moved into every law school in America, recruiting top candidates based on skill sets needed.
This program was devised by the CIA and recruited thousands of budding sociopathic personality types, recruiting them into the Federalist Society and channeling them into top law firms or government agencies.
Adding to these recruits were senior lawyers with ties to organized and corporate crime, thousands of them in a major CIA operation.
There, they were pushed forward and after a decade ran the US Department of Justice, nearly every court in the nation, controlled the law schools, controlled the American Bar Association, the FBI and had put over 150 of their members into the Congress of the United States.
They also controlled every regulatory agency, environment, banking and finance, food and drug safety, you can see where this is going.
They also controlled 5 justices of the Supreme Court of the United States.
During the Clinton Administration, they managed to temporarily get control of the US House of Representatives through the help of the Contract with America and Newt Gingrich, financed by Zionist “black propaganda” moneyman Rupert Murdoch. In payment for this, “Newt” gave Murdoch an American broadcast network, Fox, though illegal. You see, non-Americans can’t control networks, or couldn’t. That’s ok, Gingrich eventually gave Murdoch illegal American citizenship as well.
Murdoch only had to publish Newt’s useless books and give his wife, and Newt traded them in with regularity, a highly paid “do nothing job” as a bribe.
Where things really paid off was 2000. During the Clinton administration, Scaife hired lawyer Ken Starr to investigate Clinton and get himself nominated as Special Prosecutor. Scaife paid Starr by naming him President of Pepperdine University, which Scaife controlled, for those who care about facts.
Clinton backer George Soros hired a former CIA agent named Steve Kangas to get dirt on Scaife. Kangas amassed enough evidence on Scaife and his deal with Starr to send them both to the electric chair. Scaife, Scalia and the Federalists had Kangas kidnapped and murdered in order to save Ken Starr who had been promised a seat on the US Supreme Court. Look into it.
The deal really came to life in 2000. The CIA and Diebold Corporation had contracted with a computer guru named Michael Connell who developed software that would simply flip votes done on electronic voting machines. Targeted would be the states of Ohio, Florida and Virginia only, piling up votes in key precincts just enough to guarantee control of the Electoral College.
Without this it is impossible for the Republican Party to get a president elected without staging an international incident such as the kidnapping of US diplomats in Tehran. We aren’t going to say the Ayatollah was an MI6 agent and was sent to Iran for exactly this purpose, even though it is true and we can prove it.
In 2000, even with millions of votes flipped, exit polls support Bush losing by 5 million votes, the election couldn’t be saved. Here, the Federalists stepped in and had their 5 Supreme Court justices step in and overthrow both the areas of equal protection and states’ rights of the US Constitution to place Bush in office.
2000 was important. This was a presidential election that also took place on a census year. You see, the census is a rationale for redistricting the US House of Representatives using State legislatures, which were largely taken over by the Federalist Society. Bribes and payoffs at state level are hard to control and organized crime easily got control of enough states to allow redistricting.
Here, the CIA developed a program for designing odd shaped congressional districts that would pile union workers and minorities into bizarre and often discontiguous shapes, taking districts away from democrats by joining them together and creating new republican only districts, often with almost no people living in them.
Additionally, problem representatives like Ohio’s Dennis Kucinich were eliminated entirely, their districts were simply erased, all of this, and it is called gerrymandering, is illegal.
By 2004 there were no more free elections for the House of Representatives, giving this house free rein to investigate anyone, any time and to quell any investigation as well, such as 9/11.
By 2005, by a 5/4 vote, the Supreme Court in the Citizens United case overturned for all time limitations on foreign and corporate spending on American elections, citing an end to democracy in America.
Mike Connell, GOP “guru” died in a mysterious plane crash in Ohio just before testifying about his role in CIA “vote flipping.”
This is as short and sweet as it could be put. For those who fail to understand the Federalist Society and the hold organized crime through the Republican Party has gained over American government, the new Cold War and the threat of a hot war as well is a total surprise.
For those who pay attention, we saw it coming all along.
The Pledge of Allegiance is not an expression of patriotism. It is a loyalty oath that one normally associates with totalitarian regimes. People who love freedom, should be appalled by the idea our children are being coerced to stand and declare their support for the state. This is the worst form of indoctrination and it is completely anathema to the principals articulated in the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. I cannot imagine outspoken libertarians like Thomas Jefferson or Tom Paine ever proclaiming their loyalty to the state when they correctly saw the state as the greatest threat to individual freedom. Which it is.
Now I know that many people think the Pledge is simply an affirmation of their respect for the flag, their love for the country, and their gratitude to the men and women who fought in America’s wars. But that’s not what it is. The Pledge is an attempt to impose conformity on the masses and compel them to click their heels and proclaim their devotion to the Fatherland. That’s not how it’s supposed to work in a democracy. In a democracy, the representatives of the state are supposed to pledge their loyalty to the people and to the laws that protect them. That’s the correct relationship between the state and the people. The Pledge turns that whole concept on its head.
Now I’d have no problem if our schoolchildren recited the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence before class every day:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
That’s great stuff, unfortunately, the people who run this country would never allow it. They’d never allow our kids to recite an incendiary, revolutionary document like that every day for fear it would incite violence against the state. What they want is “good Germans”, not revolutionaries, not freedom-loving populists, and not well-informed, critical thinking individuals who can see through the sham of their jingoistic propaganda. They want people who are going to follow the rules, do what they’re told, fight the wars, and perform their worktime drudgery for 30 or 40 years until they’re carted off to the glue factory. That’s what they want. Reciting the Pledge fits perfectly with this dumbed-down version of permanent indentured servitude. It provides the ideological foundation for bovine acquiescence to the demands of the state and the crooks who run it behind the tri-color banner.
The fact that institutions like the Pledge are never challenged in a public format, points to deeper problems with the media and the way our kids are being educated. And while I don’t have time to talk about that now, it makes me wonder where are the people to question these silly recitations that undermine democracy and personal liberty? Why are their voices never heard?
I can’t answer that, but when I see the state deliberately eviscerating habeas corpus and locking away terror suspects for life with no evidence, no witnesses, no due process, no presumption of innocence, no way to defend themselves or claim their innocence in a court of law or before a jury of their peers–when I see the US state assuming the same unchecked, tyrannical powers as all of the dictatorships that went before them– I grow increasingly concerned that this lack of critical thinking is costing the country quite dearly. We are on the verge of losing what-little democracy we have left because people are incapable of looking around and asking ‘what the hell is going on?’
Pulling your head out of the sand and asking questions is not a sign of disloyalty. It’s a sign of intelligence, the kind of intelligence this country needs to stop the bloody wars and get back on track.
So next time you’re in a situation where you’re asked to stand up and recite the pledge, just pause for a minute and ask yourself what it really means. Is it really an expression of “love of country” or a is it a vacuous and demeaning exercise in nationalism that should be done away with ASAP?
After the Crash 