The Election Has Already Been Hijacked and the Winner Decided: ‘We the People’ Lose

Posted on October 20, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By John W. Whitehead

“Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.” ― Herbert Marcuse

Republicans and Democrats alike fear that the other party will attempt to hijack this election.

President Trump is convinced that mail-in ballots are a scam except in Florida, where it’s safe to vote by mail because of its “great Republican governor.”

The FBI is worried about foreign hackers continuing to target and exploit vulnerabilities in the nation’s electoral system, sowing distrust about the parties, the process and the outcome.

I, on the other hand, am not overly worried: after all, the voting booths have already been hijacked by a political elite comprised of Republicans and Democrats who are determined to retain power at all costs.

The outcome is a foregone conclusion: the Deep State will win and “we the people” will lose.

The damage has already been done.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which has been tasked with helping to “secure” the elections and protect the nation against cyberattacks, is not exactly an agency known for its adherence to freedom principles.

After all, this is the agency largely responsible for turning the American republic into a police state. Since its creation, the DHS has ushered in the domestic use of surveillance drones, expanded the reach of fusion centers, stockpiled an alarming amount of ammunition (including hollow point bullets), urged Americans to become snitches through a “see something, say something” campaign, overseen the fumbling antics of TSA agents everywhere, militarized the nation’s police, spied on activists and veterans, distributed license plate readers and cell phone trackers to law enforcement agencies, contracted to build detention camps, carried out military drills and lockdowns in American cities, conducted virtual strip searches of airline passengers, established Constitution-free border zones, funded city-wide surveillance cameras, and undermined the Fourth Amendment at every turn.

So, no, I’m not losing a night’s sleep over the thought that this election might by any more rigged than it already is.

And I’m not holding my breath in the hopes that the winner of this year’s popularity contest will save us from government surveillance, weaponized drones, militarized police, endless wars, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture schemes, overcriminalization, profit-driven private prisons, graft and corruption, or any of the other evils that masquerade as official government business these days.

You see, after years of trying to wake Americans up to the reality that there is no political savior who will save us from the police state, I’ve come to realize that Americans want to engage in the reassurance ritual of voting.

They want to believe the fantasy that politics matter.

They want to be persuaded that there’s a difference between the Republicans and Democrats (there’s not).

Some will swear that Donald Trump has been an improvement on Barack Obama (he is not).

Others are convinced that Joe Biden’s values are different from Donald Trump’s (with both of them, money talks).

Most of all, voters want to buy into the fantasy that when they elect a president, they’re getting someone who truly represents the citizenry rather than the Deep State (in fact, in the oligarchy that is the American police state, an elite group of wealthy donors is calling the shots in cooperation with a political elite).

The sad truth is that it doesn’t matter who wins the White House, because they all work for the same boss: Corporate America. Understanding this, many corporations hedge their bets on who will win the White House by splitting their donations between Democratic and Republican candidates.

Politics is a game, a joke, a hustle, a con, a distraction, a spectacle, a sport, and for many devout Americans, a religion. It is a political illusion aimed at persuading the citizenry that we are free, that our vote counts, and that we actually have some control over the government when in fact, we are prisoners of a Corporate Elite.

In other words, it’s a sophisticated ruse aimed at keeping us divided and fighting over two parties whose priorities, more often than not, are exactly the same so that we don’t join forces and do what the Declaration of Independence suggests, which is to throw the whole lot out and start over.

It’s no secret that both parties support endless war, engage in out-of-control spending, ignore the citizenry’s basic rights, have no respect for the rule of law, are bought and paid for by Big Business, care most about their own power, and have a long record of expanding government and shrinking liberty. Most of all, both parties enjoy an intimate, incestuous history with each other and with the moneyed elite that rule this country.

Despite the jabs the candidates volley at each other for the benefit of the cameras, they’re a relatively chummy bunch away from the spotlight. Moreover, despite Congress’ so-called political gridlock, our elected officials seem to have no trouble finding common ground when it’s time to collectively kowtow to the megacorporations, lobbyists, defense contractors and other special interest groups to whom they have pledged their true allegiance.

So don’t be fooled by the smear campaigns and name-calling or drawn into their divide-and-conquer politics of hate. They’re just useful tactics that have been proven to engage voters and increase voter turnout while keeping the citizenry at each other’s throats.

It’s all a grand illusion.

It used to be that the cogs, wheels and gear shifts in the government machinery worked to keep the republic running smoothly. However, without our fully realizing it, the mechanism has changed. Its purpose is no longer to keep our republic running smoothly. To the contrary, this particular contraption’s purpose is to keep the Deep State in power. Its various parts are already a corrupt part of the whole.

Just consider how insidious, incestuous and beholden to the corporate elite the various “parts” of the mechanism have become.

Congress. Perhaps the most notorious offenders and most obvious culprits in the creation of the corporate-state, Congress has proven itself to be both inept and avaricious, oblivious champions of an authoritarian system that is systematically dismantling their constituents’ fundamental rights. Long before they’re elected, Congressmen are trained to dance to the tune of their wealthy benefactors, so much so that they spend two-thirds of their time in office raising money. As Reuters reports, “For many lawmakers, the daily routine in Washington involves fundraising as much as legislating. The culture of nonstop political campaigning shapes the rhythms of daily life in Congress, as well as the landscape around the Capitol. It also means that lawmakers often spend more time listening to the concerns of the wealthy than anyone else.”

The President. What Americans want in a president and what they need are two very different things. The making of a popular president is an exercise in branding, marketing and creating alternate realities for the consumer—a.k.a., the citizenry—that allows them to buy into a fantasy about life in America that is utterly divorced from our increasingly grim reality. Take President Trump, for instance, who got elected by promising to drain the swamp in Washington DC. Instead of putting an end to the corruption, however, Trump has paved the way for lobbyists, corporations, the military industrial complex, and the rest of the Deep State (also referred to as “The 7th Floor Group”) to feast on the carcass of the dying American republic. The lesson: to be a successful president, it doesn’t matter whether you keep your campaign promises, sell the American people to the highest bidder, or march in lockstep with the Corporate State as long as you keep telling people what they most want to hear.

The Supreme Court. The U.S. Supreme Court—once the last refuge of justice, the one governmental body really capable of rolling back the slowly emerging tyranny enveloping America—has instead become the champion of the American police state, absolving government and corporate officials of their crimes while relentlessly punishing the average American for exercising his or her rights. Like the rest of the government, the Court has routinely prioritized profit, security, and convenience over the basic rights of the citizenry. Indeed, law professor Erwin Chemerinsky makes a compelling case that the Supreme Court, whose “justices have overwhelmingly come from positions of privilege,” almost unerringly throughout its history sides with the wealthy, the privileged, and the powerful.

The Media. Of course, this triumvirate of total control would be completely ineffective without a propaganda machine provided by the world’s largest corporations. Besides shoveling drivel down our throats at every possible moment, the so-called news agencies which are supposed to act as bulwarks against government propaganda have instead become the mouthpieces of the state. The pundits which pollute our airwaves are at best court jesters and at worst propagandists for the false reality created by the American government. When you have internet and media giants such as Google, NBC Universal, News Corporation, Turner Broadcasting, Thomson Reuters, Comcast, Time Warner, Viacom, Public Radio International and The Washington Post Company donating to political candidates, you no longer have an independent media—what we used to refer to as the “fourth estate”—that can be trusted to hold the government accountable.

The American People. “We the people” now belong to a permanent underclass in America. It doesn’t matter what you call us—chattel, slaves, worker bees, it’s all the same—what matters is that we are expected to march in lockstep with and submit to the will of the state in all matters, public and private. Unfortunately, through our complicity in matters large and small, we have allowed an out-of-control corporate-state apparatus to take over every element of American society.

We’re playing against a stacked deck.

The game is rigged, and “we the people” keep getting dealt the same losing hand. The people dealing the cards—the politicians, the corporations, the judges, the prosecutors, the police, the bureaucrats, the military, the media, etc.—have only one prevailing concern, and that is to maintain their power and control over the citizenry, while milking us of our money and possessions.

It really doesn’t matter what you call them—Republicans, Democrats, the 1%, the elite, the controllers, the masterminds, the shadow government, the police state, the surveillance state, the military industrial complex—so long as you understand that while they are dealing the cards, the deck will always be stacked in their favor.

As I make clear in my book, Battlefield America: The War on the American People, our failure to remain informed about what is taking place in our government, to know and exercise our rights, to vocally protest, to demand accountability on the part of our government representatives, and at a minimum to care about the plight of our fellow Americans has been our downfall.

Now we find ourselves once again caught up in the spectacle of another presidential election, and once again the majority of Americans are acting as if this election will make a difference and bring about change. As if the new boss will be different from the old boss.

When in doubt, just remember what the astute commentator George Carlin had to say about the matter:

The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls. They got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying. Lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork…. It’s a big club and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. …The table is tilted, folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice…. Nobody seems to care. That’s what the owners count on…. It’s called the American Dream, ’cause you have to be asleep to believe it.

‘$2.5 TRILLION THEFT’ – STUDY SHOWS RICHEST 1% OF AMERICANS HAVE TAKEN $50 TRILLION FROM BOTTOM 90% IN RECENT DECADES

Posted on October 16, 2020 by Reid Mukai

The median U.S. worker salary would be around twice as high today if wages kept pace with economic output since World War II, new research revealed.

By Brett Wilkins

Source: Common Dreams

New research published Monday found that the top 1% of U.S. income earners have taken $50 trillion from the bottom 90% over the past several decades, and that the median worker salary would be around twice as high today as it was in 1945 if pay had kept pace with economic output over that period.

The study’s authors, Carter C. Price and Kathryn Edwards of the RAND Corporation, examined income distribution and economic growth in the United States from 1945 to the present. The researchers found stark differences between income distribution from 1945 to 1974 and 1975 to 2018.

What if income growth in America had stayed as equitable as it was in the post-war period?

This peer-reviewed working paper by @CarterCPrice & @keds_economist quantifies the scale of the income gap that was created by rising inequality from 1975 to 2018. https://t.co/CGg2E0KBvw

— RAND (@RANDCorporation) September 14, 2020

According to the study—which was funded by the Seattle-based Fair Work Center—the median salary of a full-time U.S. worker is currently about $50,000. Adjusted for inflation using the consumer price index, workers at or below the current median income now earn less than half of what they would have if incomes had kept pace with economic growth. This means that if salaries had kept pace with economic output, the median worker pay would be between $92,000 and $102,000 today, depending on how inflation is calculated.

Had the more equitable distribution of the roughly 30-year postwar period continued apace, the total annual income of the bottom 90% of American workers would have been $2.5 trillion higher in 2018, or an amount equal to about 12% of GDP. In other words, the upward redistribution of income has enriched the 1% by some $47 trillion—which would now be more than $50 trillion—at the expense of American workers.

David Rolf, a Seattle labor organizer, president of the Fair Work Center, and founder of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 775, is more blunt. He calls this “the $2.5 trillion theft.”

Every year, $2.5 trillion—that's trillion, with a “t”—is redistributed from the bottom 90 percent of Americans to the wealthiest 1 percent. That $50 trillion used to go to working Americans. It’s instead been rerouted to the pockets of the top 1 percent. https://t.co/d4hNjlIKhS

— Nick Hanauer (@NickHanauer) September 15, 2020

“From the standpoint of people who have worked hard and played by the rules and yet are participating far less in economic growth than Americans did a generation ago, whether you call it ‘reverse distribution’ or ‘theft,’ it demands to be called something,” Rolf, who helped lead the fight for a $15 hourly minimum wage in Seattle and beyond, told Fast Company.

Remarkably, the study found that workers at all income levels would be better off today if income kept pace with output. Full-time, prime-age workers in the 25th percentile, for example, would be earning $61,000 instead of $33,000. Workers in the 75th percentile, who in 2018 earned $81,000, would be making $126,000. Even 90th-percentile workers, who earn $133,000, would be making $168,000 under the more equitable distribution.

On the other hand, had the economic pie been divided more equitably, the income of the top 1% would fall from around $1.2 million to a still-affluent $549,000.

“We were shocked by the numbers,” said Nick Hanauer, a venture capitalist and self-described “zillionaire” who, along with Rolf, came up with the idea for the study. “It explains almost everything,” Hanauer told Fast Company. “It explains why people are so pissed off. It explains why they are so economically precarious.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who made correcting economic inequality a pillar of both of his presidential bids, lamented the “h-u-g-e redistribution of income in America” in a Monday tweet.

Since 1975, there has been a h-u-g-e redistribution of income in America, but it has gone in the wrong direction. Over the past 45 years, $50 trillion has been taken out of the pockets of the bottom 90% and into the hands of the top 1%—costing the median worker $42,000 a year.

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) September 14, 2020

The researchers’ findings, which come amid a deadly coronavirus/Covid-19 pandemic, shine light on the injustice of an economy—by far the wealthiest in the history of civilization—in which essential workers struggle mightily, and often in vain, to survive while the richest people grow ever richer at their expense.

According to Americans for Tax Fairness, the total wealth of U.S. billionaires increased by $792 billion, or 27%, during the first five months of the Covid-19 pandemic. During this period, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the world’s wealthiest person, has become the world’s first multi-centibillionaire, with a net worth now surpassing $200 billion. Meanwhile, his employees struggle to make ends meet, and Amazon workers who speak out against poor pay and hazardous working conditions during the pandemic have been fired and derided by company executives.

Compared to other most-developed nations, the U.S. has done a relatively poor job of taking care of its people during the pandemic. In addition to the U.S. being the only developed nation without universal healthcare, its workers have received less in direct payments and government support than people in many comparable countries.

The gap between the richest and poorest U.S. households is now wider than it has ever been in the past 50 years, according to the most recently available data from the U.S. Census Bureau. The pandemic has only exacerbated the situation, as around half of lower-income American households have reported a job or wage loss due to Covid-19.

Internationally, the U.S. ranks 39th out of over 150 nations in income inequality, according to Gini coefficient data compiled by the CIA, placing it roughly on par with nations like Peru and Cameroon. Among Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) nations, the U.S. has the seventh-highest level of income inequality.

The U.S. has the highest poverty rate among the world’s most-developed nations, and the fourth-highest poverty rate among OECD nations after South Africa, Costa Rica, and Romania. According to UNICEF, the U.S. also has the second-highest rate of childhood poverty in the developed world behind Romania, with more than one in five U.S. children—and over one in four Latinx children, and nearly one in three Black and Native American children—living in poverty.

This year, more than 54 million Americans, or roughly one in every six people—including 18 million children—may experience food insecurity, according to the nonprofit group Feeding America.

New Pentagon-Google Partnership Suggests AI Will Soon Be Used to Diagnose Covid-19

Posted on October 15, 2020 by Reid Mukai

Google recently teamed up with the Pentagon as part of the new, AI-driven “Predictive Health” program. Though only focused on “predictive cancer diagnoses” for now, Google and the military have apparent plans to expand the AI model for automating and predicting Covid-19 diagnoses.

By Whitney Webb

Source: Unlimited Hangout

At the beginning of September, Google Cloud announced that it had won a project from the Pentagon’s relatively new Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) to “prototype an AI-enabled digital pathology solution at select DoD [Department of Defense] facilities.” This prototype, per a Google Cloud press release, combines “augmented reality telescopes” with “AI-enabled” cancer detection tools that will allegedly improve the accuracy of “predictive cancer diagnoses.” It is the second DIU contract Google has won this year, with the first being related to combatting “cyber threats.”

The initial implementation of this Pentagon-funded, Google-created “digital pathology solution” will take place “at select Defense Health Agency (DHA) treatment facilities and Veterans Affairs hospitals in the United States,” and the program includes “future plans to expand across the broader U.S. Military Health System,” according to Google.

The initiative is part of a larger DIU-led program called “Predictive Health” that is also partnered with the joint AI effort of the US military and US intelligence community, the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, and JAIC’s “Warfighter Health” initiative. The JAIC, which is currently led by a former Silicon Valley executive, is providing much of the funding for Predictive Health, while its related “Warfighter Health” initiative more broadly seeks “to field AI solutions that are aimed at transforming military health care.”

In addition to its stated goal of improving the accuracy of cancer diagnoses, the implementation of this Google-DIU AI-driven medical diagnosis tool aims to show “frontline health practitioners” that such tools “can improve the lives” of US troops, according to Google executives. As Mike Daniels, vice president of Global Public Sector at Google Cloud, noted in a statement, Google is “partnering with DIU to provide our machine learning and artificial intelligence technology to help frontline healthcare practitioners learn about capabilities that can improve the lives of our military men and women and their families.” Google also stated that the use of their tool at military health facilities would also “lower overall healthcare costs.”

The Google-DIU effort to outsource human doctor decision-making to a tailor-made artificial intelligence algorithm is, for now, only focused on the diagnosis of cancers. However, last Thursday, less than two weeks after winning the DIU contract, Google announced that it was donating $8.5 million to several organizations to advance the development and use of AI “for monitoring and forecasting” Covid-19. That money is part of a larger $100 million donation from Google for financing “solutions” to Covid-19 that was announced in May.

Further evidence that Google soon plans to offer AI-driven “predictive diagnoses” for Covid-19 came in August, when Google Cloud partnered with Harvard’s Global Health Institute to provide “Covid-19 Public Forecasts,” which “provide a projection of Covid-19 cases, deaths, and other metrics over the next 14 days for US counties and states.” The announcement of the Google-Harvard collaboration coincided with an announcement from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) would begin “harness[ing] AI for COVID-19 diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring.”

Notably, other tech companies that have produced “predictive diagnosis” AI models for Covid-19 also began first by offering AI-created “forecasts” of “likely” Covid-19 outbreaks. For instance, the Israeli intelligence–linked Diagnostic Robotics initially offered AI-driven predictive “forecasts” of cities and districts to guide lockdown policy in Israel and the US state of Rhode Island before then teaming up with the US-based company Salesforce to develop a platform that uses AI to “predict” which individuals are likely to be diagnosed with Covid-19 and then uses AI to monitor and even “treat” those individuals.

Furthermore, in partnership with researchers at Mount Sinai healthcare centers in New York, tech giant Microsoft has already aided the development of an AI algorithm that “rapidly diagnoses” Covid-19. Mount Sinai’s AI model, supported by a recent grant from Microsoft’s “AI for Health” initiative, “was as accurate as an experienced radiologist in diagnosing the disease,” according to one of the lead researchers behind the model’s development. While its development was aided by Microsoft, the core of the Mount Sinai AI model is TensorFlow, which was developed by Google and is Google AI’s second-generation system for machine learning.

In addition, both Google and Microsoft are part of a Europe-based effort aimed at “automating diagnoses” for Covid-19 via an AI algorithm that analyzes CT scans, which is similar in several ways to the Mount Sinai AI model. Thus, it seems highly likely that Google’s efforts to offer AI-powered “predictive diagnoses” will soon expand to include tools that use algorithms to diagnose Covid-19, not just cancer.

The Merging of the Pentagon, the CIA, and Silicon Valley

Established in 2015, the Defense Innovation Unit of the Department of Defense officially exists to transfer “leading-edge commercial capabilities to the military faster and more cost-effectively than traditional defense acquisition methods” and to accelerate “the adoption of commercial technology throughout the military and [grow] the national security innovation base.” As the DIU makes clear on its website, the “national security innovation base” it seeks to “grow” consists of private tech companies, namely those based in Silicon Valley, that provide “advanced commercial solutions” to “national security challenges.” This, of course, includes the tech companies that already double as contractors for the national security state, such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, among numerous others.

The DIU boasts offices in Silicon Valley, Boston, Austin, and at the Pentagon itself and is largely led, not by career military men, but by former Silicon Valley executives. For instance, its current director—Michael Brown—is the former CEO of cybersecurity giant Symantec and, prior to that, led the Quantum corporation. In another example, the leader of the DIU’s artificial intelligence portfolio is Jeff Klugman, a former top executive at TiVo, the Quantum corporation, and Hewlett-Packard.

A year after the DIU was created, it was followed by the Defense Innovation Board (DIB), which is composed of “leaders from across the national security innovation base” and provides recommendations that “have been used to inform DoD leadership strategy and action, as well as congressional legislation.” Like the DIU, Silicon Valley is well represented on the DIB, as its members include former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman as well as top executives from Google, Microsoft, and Facebook.

Notably, just months before the DIU-led Predictive Health program was launched, the DIB noted in March 2020 that the Pentagon “owns the largest repository of disease- and cancer-related medical data in the world,” asserting further that “if the entire repository were leveraged to its fullest potential, it would advance diagnosis and treatment for thousands of illnesses, saving lives across DoD and the global population.” The DIB then specifically suggested that “artificial intelligence and machine learning models may help pathologists sort through this massive dataset more quickly and effectively to provide better care for patients in and out of the military,” adding that these troves of medical data should be used “to support DoD reform and modernization efforts in the field of AI/ML [Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning].”

In other words, the Silicon Valley–dominated DIB called for what is now the Predictive Health program just months before the Silicon Valley–dominated DIU formally announced it. Also noteworthy is that Google—whose former CEO, current vice president, and several other Google-tied researchers and businessmen serve on the DIB—is the very company that won the DIU contract to have its AI models serve as the foundation for the Predictive Health program. This, of course, means that Google’s AI models will benefit immensely from the Pentagon’s “unique” and massive medical datasets, which the DIB previously stated was something that the Pentagon “must treat . . . as a strategic asset.”

It is also important to point out the considerable overlap between the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board and the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence. The NSCAI is chaired by Eric Schmidt (also on the DIB) and includes representatives from Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon as well as the current and former leaders of the CIA’s In-Q-Tel.

The official purpose of the NSCAI is “to consider the methods and means necessary to advance the development of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and associated technologies to comprehensively address the national security and defense needs of the United States.” As I previously reported for The Last American Vagabond, the vice-chair of NSCAI, Robert Work—former Deputy Secretary of Defense and senior fellow at the hawkish Center for a New American Security (CNAS)—described the commission’s purpose as determining “how the U.S. national security apparatus should approach artificial intelligence, including a focus on how the government can work with industry to compete with China’s ‘civil-military fusion’ concept [my emphasis].”

For this reason, the NSCAI unites the US intelligence community and the military, which is already collaborating on AI initiatives via the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center and Silicon Valley companies. Notably, many of those Silicon Valley companies—like Google, for instance—are not only contractors to US intelligence, the military, or both but were initially created with funding from the CIA’s In-Q-Tel, which also has a considerable presence on the NSCAI. Thus, while the line between Silicon Valley and the US national-security state has always been murky, now that line is essentially nonexistent as entities like the NSCAI, DIB, and DIU, among several others, clearly show. Whereas China, as Robert Work noted, has the “civil-military fusion” model at its disposal, the NSCAI and the US government respond to that model by further fusing the US technology industry with the national-security state.

It is also certainly interesting that, just like the DIB, the NSCAI called for what would become the DIU’s Predictive Health program a few months before it was formally announced. In a NSCAI paper from June 2020 titled “The Role of AI Technology in Pandemic Response and Preparedness: Recommended Investments and Initiatives,” the commission recommends investments and initiatives aimed at using AI for diagnosing illnesses, including Covid-19. This seems to suggest that the Silicon Valley–led but Pentagon-housed DIU is the body that actually creates the government-industry partnerships and initiatives that are first planned out by the DIB and the NSCAI.

It’s All About the Data

While Google has stated that one of their main goals in participating in the Predictive Health program is showing health-care practitioners how AI can “improve lives,” the DIU was decidedly more direct regarding their intent in implementing this “predictive diagnosis” program. For instance, an article on the Google-DIU pilot program at DefenseOne, citing military officials, notes that the “enormous amount of healthcare data, unique to the Department of Defense, also presents a rare opportunity for the Department to train new machine learning tools.” It then adds that “there are 9.6 million beneficiaries in the Defense Health System, which means a lot of data to improve the accuracy of [AI] models.”

DIU’s chief medical officer, Niels Olsen, who created the Predictive Health program, recently stated that massive quantities of data planned to be obtained by the program and used for developing improved AI algorithms was a critical component of the project. In a Pentagon press release, Olsen stated that “the more data a tool has available to it, the more effective it is. That’s kind of what makes DOD unique. We have a larger pool of information [i. e., medical data] to draw from, so that you can select more diverse cases.”

Thus, the implementation of the Predictive Health program is expected to amass troves upon troves of medical data that offer both the DIU and its partners in Silicon Valley the “rare opportunity” for training new, improved AI models that can then be marketed commercially. This may explain part of the interest in partnering this initiative with the Defense Health Agency (DHA), which “owns the largest repository of disease- and cancer-related medical data in the world” through its management of the Joint Pathology Center, which was noted by the DIB in its March 2020 publication. In addition, as previously mentioned, Google will now be able to access that trove of sensitive data to refine its AI “health-focused” algorithms, thanks to it having won the DIU contract earlier this month.

Notably, the relatively new Predictive Health program builds on past DIU initiatives, such as an AI algorithm that predicts illnesses “48 hours before symptoms show.” That algorithm was developed by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the DIU, and the health IT company Royal Phillips. The Phillips team that developed that algorithm is now “refin[ing] the model at military hospitals and clinics managed by the Veterans Affairs Department.” According to the DTRA’s Edward Argenta, the focus of the program is to eventually use the AI algorithm to analyze data from devices that remotely monitor individual health, specifically “a wearable device that might sit on your body—like a watch-based one or a chest strap one.”

While various “innovation-focused” agencies at the Pentagon have been busy developing their own algorithms after harvesting mass amounts of medical data from military members and their families, a web of intelligence-linked tech companies, including those represented on the DIB and NSCAI, have gained access to the jackpot of medical data through partnering with the “Covid-19 Healthcare Coalition.”

According to its website, the Covid-19 Healthcare Coalition was established as “a coordinated public-interest, private-sector response to the Covid-19 pandemic, convening healthcare organizations, technology firms, nonprofits, academia, and startups.” The coalition, which was launched by the intelligence and defense contractor MITRE, also includes tech giants like Google, Microsoft, Palantir, Salesforce, and Amazon and allows its member organizations to “collaborate, collect, analyze, visualize, and share data and insights.” With access to the data from partnered health-care institutions, such as the Mayo Clinic and the Cedars-Sinai Health System, these tech companies are “helping” the coalition “unlock large-scale analytics for Covid-19.” Institutions tied to the US government, and the NSCAI in particular, such as the CIA’s In-Q-Tel, are also members of the Covid-19 Healthcare Coalition.

Notably, the recent advances in US-based efforts to “predict” or “automate” Covid-19 diagnoses are all tied to this very coalition. Indeed, all of the companies and institutions mentioned thus far in this report have engaged in developing these tools, as Diagnostic Robotics, Salesforce, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Mount Sinai Medical Center are all coalition members.

Google, in the press release regarding its recent partnership with the DIU, noted that the prototype of the AI model set to make “predictive cancer diagnoses” had been “developed from [unspecified] public and private datasets,” making it possible—if not likely—that the private datasets were obtained through Google’s membership in this massive, yet relatively unknown, coalition of health-care institutions, tech companies, and US intelligence–linked entities like MITRE and In-Q-Tel.

This apparent obsession with medical data may explain the dramatic uptick in hacks of hospitals in the United States, which have been considerable in recent months and have largely targeted patient data. It is worth pointing out that the increase in these attacks seeking patient data coincides with the DIB-NSCAI policy recommendations regarding training AI algorithms on troves of medical data for automated and predictive diagnoses, among other applications.

Notably, the “solutions” offered to many of the health-care institutions that have been hacked have come from government-promoted yet opaque groups that are deeply tied to US and allied intelligence agencies as well as Silicon Valley. These “volunteer groups,” such as “the CTI League” and “the Cyber Alliance to Defend Our Healthcare,” offer their services for free but, notably, gain access to the patient data they are tasked with guarding. Are such groups, given their deep ties to Silicon Valley and intelligence agencies, helping acquire even more data to satisfy the Silicon Valley and national-security state’s endless hunger for more and more data?

The Economy Continues To Unravel Despite All Stimulus Measures

Posted on October 14, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Brandon Smith

Source: Alt-Market.com

Since the pandemic lockdowns were first implemented in the US I have been more concerned with the government and central bank response than the virus itself. As I have noted in past articles, the pandemic restrictions and subsequent economic and social crisis events they help to create will cause far more deaths than Covid-19 ever will. Not only that, but the actions of the Federal Reserve continue to con the American public into believing that there is some kind of “plan” to stop the crash that THEY engineered.

The only agenda of the Fed is to increase the pain in the long term; they have no intention of actually preventing any disaster.

This is evidenced in comments by voting members of the Fed, including Neel Kashkari who recently argued for the enforcement of hard lockdowns for at least six weeks in the US, all because the US savings rate was going up. Meaning, because Americans are saving more in order to protect themselves from economic fallout, Kashkari thinks we should be punished with an economic shutdown that would force us to spend whatever we have been able to save.

Do you see how that works?

Fed members and government officials demand hard lockdowns, depleting public savings and destroying small businesses. Then, the public has to beg the Fed and the government for more and more stimulus measures so that they can survive. The people and the system become dependent on a single point of support – fiat money creation and welfare. Yet, the evidence suggests that this strategy is failing to do much of anything except stall the inevitable for a very short time.

If the goal was really to reduce the pain of the pandemic as much as possible, then the strategy should be to keep the economy as open as possible and let the virus run its course. By initiating lockdowns, all we are doing is extending the economic damage over the span of years instead of months. We can deal with the comparatively minimal deaths associated with the virus; we cannot handle the disaster that is about to befall the financial system.

The small business sector appears to be the most fragile element of the economy right now. The PPP loans that were supposed to shore up small businesses failed miserably, with data showing only 13% to 19% of applicants getting a loan of any kind. Over 64% of small businesses that received a loan are also worried about being approved for loan forgiveness. In other words, of the few small business owners that got a PPP loan more than half do not have the ability to pay the loan back if they end up not qualifying for exemption.

This problem does not seem to be affecting the corporate sector, however. International companies are enjoying incredible cash infusions from the Fed through overnight loans as well as Fed stimulus propping up stock markets (at least for now). Tech companies in particular are enjoying a rush of investment as the assumption in the daytrading world is that the central bank will not allow these companies to fail.

Maybe they are right, but stock markets today DO NOT reflect the health of our system in any way. Stock tickers are a placebo, a Pavlovian trigger for the public, a tool to make people believe that the situation is improving merely because share values are going up. This is not the case.

Small businesses in the US account for around 50% of all employment and job creation. They are a vital part of the economy. Yet, government and central bank measures seem to have left them out in the cold to die.

To be sure, the $600 weekly unemployment enhancement created through the CARES Act passed in March did boost consumer spending, primarily on durable goods such as computers, TVs, cellphones, etc. Spending on services declined though, which is where the majority of small businesses make their money. And, considering the fact that most durable goods are manufactured overseas, this means that the majority of stimulus dollars that went to consumers did not go into the US economy, but foreign exporters like China.

Now, the unemployment enhancement has ended and its return is in question. It will be interesting to see if the boost to purchases of goods will continue without that extra $600 weekly stimulus. Consumer spending rose in July by 1.9%, but this was already a weak print compared to the increases during the previous two months.

Unemployment numbers have declined due to soft reopenings in numerous states, and at the very least some part time jobs appear to be returning, but nowhere near the level needed to erase the millions of jobs lost since February after the initial lockdowns began. If you count U-6 measurements and unemployed people who have been removed from the rolls for being jobless for too long, the REAL unemployment rate is closer to 30% of working age Americans. This is essentially Great Depression levels of joblessness.

US GDP has continued to decline by 32% according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis (despite statistical rigging by the Fed and government agencies), and while it’s possible that stimulus slowed the effects of GDP loss, there is no indication what the trillions of dollars created by the Fed have actually bought other than a few months of time and a massive bubble in the stock market.

The economy cannot survive extreme lockdown conditions for any length of time, let alone almost two more months. And, if you want to know what it means when elites in government and central banking call for a “hard lockdowns”, just look at Level 4 restrictions in places like Australia and New Zealand, where only one person can leave home at any given time, can only travel 3 miles from home and only for food and supplies, and anyone caught not wearing a mask is subject to arrest or a $10,000 fine.

This mother in Melbourne, Australia was arrested because of a Facebook post calling for protests over the lockdown restrictions. She later had to take the post down and offered an apology, saying she did not know it was illegal to post such statements on social media:

Yeah, this kind of Orwellian response will do wonders for any economic recovery, and this is what Kashkari is calling for in the US. It’s almost as if the Fed and certain politicians WANT a financial collapse in America…

The REAL solution is to stop the lockdown restrictions altogether. If the goal is truly to protect as many American lives as possible for the “greater good”, then the pandemic response must stop. Luckily, it seems that more and more people are beginning to see through the facade and are rejecting the restrictions. Even in Europe and Australia there have been some signs of protest and rebellion. The problem is that, at least in terms of the economy, it may be too late.

We have to consider the fact that once a large portion of the business sector (like small businesses) takes a massive hit like the one they have suffered over the past several months, many such businesses and jobs will simply not come back. There are many reasons for this, but primarily it’s a matter of debt. The average small business owner carries almost $200,000 in debt for 3-5 years before he reaches profitability or breaks even. This is assuming that there are no major economic catastrophes in that time.

With the pandemic, the riots, the restrictions, etc., businesses will have to take on much more debt with little guarantee of recovery in the next few years let alone the next few months. Chapter 11 business bankruptcies in the US rose over 26% in the first half of 2020 alone.

Even if lockdown restrictions were completely eradicated tomorrow, a large number of businesses would go bankrupt anyway. The “Retail Apocalypse” has been growing over the past decade, LONG before the coronavirus was on issue. Thousands of businesses shut down last year and tens of thousands more are slated to close this year. The virus and lockdowns simply accelerated the existing decline.

This is why large banks are cutting off loans to business owners and consumers right now; they know exactly where all this is headed.

Banks act as middlemen for the PPP loans financed by the Fed, yet those loans are not getting to most businesses. Banks have also cut credit card lending in the past few months, and general lending has crashed. All of this despite low interest rates for banks receiving stimulus injections from the Fed. Where is all of the money going? They are keeping it for themselves, buying up hard assets as well as propping up the stock market. As noted above, the elites have NO INTENTION of saving the economy, only themselves.

If the stimulus is not getting to the main-street economy then the only purpose it serves is to give the public a false sense of comfort. The people who gain the most from the ongoing pandemic chaos are establishment elites that want severe restrictions on personal liberty. Not to mention, the virus and lockdowns offer a convenient scapegoat for the financial crisis that was already brewing due to central bank mismanagement of stimulus, inflation and interest rates. The bottom line is, the banks do not want the crisis to end. Why would they? The longer the panic continues, the more they benefit.

From Blue Shirts to Brown

Posted on October 13, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Alan Hamilton

Source: Off-Guardian

On at least 3 or 4 occasions in the past week we’ve had to smash the windows of people in cars and pull them out of there so they could provide their details – because they weren’t telling us where they were going; they weren’t adhering to the chief health officer’s guidelines, they weren’t providing their name and their address.”
Shane Patton, Victorian Chief Police Officer 04/08/2020

On Saturday 5th of September a national day of protest occurred in cities around Australia against the unnecessary and draconian lockdowns that have been occurring across the country and which are still occurring in Victoria. Similar protests have occurred in cities around the world, most especially in Europe.

These protests are a legitimate and rational response to despotic and often unconstitutional laws that unscientifically characterize every member of society as a bio-security risk to everyone else. They are also a protest against law enforcement bureaucracies that identify responsible, civic-minded citizens as criminals if they dare to question such laws or even worse, step out of their homes in defiance of the lockdown to register their dissent.

The Australian protests occurred peacefully and without incident in most places, including Brisbane where I participated. But it was not the case in Victoria where a State of Disaster has been declared due to the ‘extraordinarily high’ number of active Covid cases there.

On the eve of the nationwide protests, mainstream news reported on the harrowing state of affairs in Victoria which was suffering from hundreds of active cases but, as it turns out, had only 20 people in intensive care suffering from covid-related illnesses. This is in a state of 6.35 million people that has 58 metropolitan hospitals and 69 rural hospitals and District Health services.

Despite the ‘extraordinarily low’ incidence of people who were actually sick from Covid 19, the Victorian Premier decided that new case numbers (>100 per day) were just too high to tolerate anyone leaving their homes for any reason other than the four exemptions provided by the government.

What he neglected to mention when insisting on preserving his lockdown was that most new cases are occurring in the under-30 age bracket: a demographic that is almost always asymptomatic to SARS CoV-2 and which has more chance of dying in a motor vehicle accident than of Covid19.

Undeterred by inconvenient truths like this, the Premier announced he had to protect the public from the potentially catastrophic medical emergency that would doubtless result from masked people walking down St Kilda Road to the Cenotaph in a socially distanced manner, so he banned all participation in the national day of protest.

Just days earlier the Assistant Police Commissioner for the North West Metro Region, Luke Cornelius, warned everyone in Victoria against participating in the Saturday protests. He referred to people who planned to protest against lockdowns as “boof heads”, calling them an “anti-vax, anti-mask, tinfoil hat-wearing brigade who were batshit crazy”.

This oddly extreme language from one of the State’s most senior police officers is not accidental. It serves a specific purpose.

In order to get ordinary well-adjusted police officers – who may have joined the force out of a desire to be of public service – to brutalize a population whose only crime is that they object to being locked in their homes for 23 hrs a day for months on end, you need to demonize dissent. If your officers on the ground can identify in any way with the people they are being told to terrorize, they might not follow orders.

This is a perennial problem for martial leaders everywhere. It’s particularly problematic when the rules being enforced are arbitrary or unjust. Hence the need to malign.

As Saturday rolled around, the police were out in force across Victoria on horseback with cuffs, batons, tasers and guns ready to intimidate, arrest and fine anyone unfortunate enough to attract their attention within the vicinity of a protest in any town in the State – even those towns where not a single case of Covid-19 has been recorded.

And here we get to the crux of the SARS-CoV-2 scam. Sure, there’s a virus out there. It’s real and it certainly kills people but we know enough about it now to know that the draconian response taken by Premier Danial Andrews is scientifically indefensible. So why is he persisting with the lockdowns?

My personal opinion is that the global program of lockdowns is a mechanism for reorganizing societies around the world along the lines of the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset” agenda and all that this entails. It seems Daniel Andrews is fully on board with this agenda. But make no mistake, its coming to your state and country next.

I believe that sustained lockdowns are a “Stanley Milgram-style” experiment designed to see just how far bureaucrats in authority will exceed the moral limits of their power and how much abuse the Australian public will tolerate before they push back.

As part of this experiment, the algorithms that once monitored every nuance of our social media interactions to make frighteningly accurate predictions about us have been extended to track and predict our off-line experience as well. It should come as no surprise that both the Azure and AWS cloud eco-systems have expanded by 50% since the beginning of the pandemic.

The purpose of all this surveillance is not to better understand us as potential marketing targets (the standard explanation) but rather to better control us as victims in a system of profound inequality. Such a system is already in place across much of the world and under the guise of a health pandemic, it is rapidly being expanded to developed countries as well.

So far as I can see the whole experiment is going spectacularly well for the globalists, billionaires, and authoritarians, and very poorly for free citizens everywhere: mostly due to the effectiveness of media propaganda in driving public passivity.

A SCIENTIFIC DICTATORSHIP

Many medical practitioners are aware that Victoria’s management of the SARS CoV-2 pandemic is based on highly selective medical advice which doesn’t stand up to serious scientific scrutiny.

Recently a group of doctors wrote an excellent letter to the Premier advocating an alternative response to disease management, noting that more than 41,000 people die every year in Victoria, roughly 10,000 each from cardiovascular disease and cancer, yet in 7 months of a supposed pandemic less than 600 Victorians have died of Covid-19: 90% of them over 65 years of age and most with multiple co-morbidities.

The problem with the doctor’s alternative advice is that it assumes the government is merely mistaken or misinformed in its policymaking and implementation. The idea that the exercise of political power in Victoria has become pathological never seems to occur to them – despite a wealth of evidence supporting such a notion.

When governments pass laws that are extreme or unjust or which by-pass constitutional constraints, it is rarely by accident. As doctors they ought to be the first to appreciate what a pathological exercise of power means to the cultural and institutional bonds that hold a society together:

As bio-security increasingly substitutes for health care, doctors will find that the personal confidences of their patients are no longer inviolate and that the Hippocratic obligations they once held so dear can be easily compromised by legal mandates to force-medicate people regardless of need or consequence.
When politicians rule by executive decree the police force morphs from a public service comprised of citizens in uniform to the enforcement arm of a political clique. When this happens, public trust in the police is lost and this loss of legitimacy results in a loss of respect. Eventually this loss of respect becomes mutual and the police start to despise the people they victimize and abuse the power they have. The opening quote being a perfect example.
Similarly with the military: when the exercise of our democratic rights is pathologized by those in power, our servicemen and women eventually find they’re being asked to apply, at home, the counter-insurgency training and urban warfare tactics they learned for battlefields abroad. This is something that has occurred since the time of Thucydides and it’s happening again.
Even the tools we use to make sense of the world, such as the scientific method, cease to function properly when our governments become toxic. Once everyone in a society has been force-vaccinated by government decree, it will become legally impossible to prove a link between mandated vaccines and any potential vaccine-related injury. Not because the manufacturers will have immunity from liability (they will), but because there will no longer be a non-vaccinated control group left against which randomized double-blind control studies can be conducted.

Not one of these developments is accidental. All of them are known, predictable outcomes of policy decisions being taken today. And these policy decisions rob everyone of their integrity; health workers, academics, the police and the military.

When those in power have a pathological relationship to the people they rule, you know you are on a road to perdition. We can see such a pathology evolving among our politicians most clearly in Victoria with its home invasions, curfews and lock downs but it is also evident in the overreach of governments around the country.

Western Australia’s recent dispute with mining magnate, Clive Palmer, over the State’s Covid border closure is a case in point. According to the WA Law Society the Government’s anti-Palmer legislation violates several of the fundamental legal principles that underpin the rule of law in a civilized society. Such overreach is also apparent in the ASIO Amendment Act 2020, introduced into Federal Parliament by Peter Dutton in May this year – right at the height of the Covid panic while most members were not even in Canberra.

This legislation is the latest in a succession of Bills that have been passed by our Federal government since 9/11 (85 and counting) which have vastly expanded the powers of law enforcement and security agencies in Australia while limiting public oversight. The legislation effectively criminalizes the free exercise of our basic democratic freedoms.

The Dutton amendment extends powers normally applied to terrorists, to any group or person engaged in any kind of civil disobedience or protest that could possibly result in ‘politically motivated violence’. That would include the anti-lock down protests that I participated in last week.

Among a raft of frightening provisions this bill allows police and intelligence agencies to track, apprehend and question children as young as 14 yrs of age as though they were terrorists. It suspends the rules of habeas corpus and allows the State to arbitrarily restrict a defendant’s access to legal representation.

This is the sort of legislation you’d expect to find in China or Saudi Arabia, not Australia.

The permanent changes to our society that are now in place in Australia following the SARS CoV-2 pandemic mean we qualify as proto-fascist State by any measure of political freedom. This thought is anathema to most Australians and would be vociferously denied by paid-off mainstream media pundits – but probably not constitutional lawyers – because the legislative reality is that we are now much closer to full-blooded fascism than we are to the liberal democracy that existed when I was born in 1963. And we are a very far cry from the nation our diggers returned to in 1945.

The only way we will arrest and/or reverse this trend is if we all take direct, non-violent, physical (not digital) action to exercise our civic and democratic rights at every opportunity we can. The time to speak up and stand up is now. It will be too late tomorrow.

Reporters Claim Facebook is Censoring Information on Julian Assange Case

Posted on October 12, 2020 by Reid Mukai

“90% of my traffic has just been cut off by what seems to be a general algorithm command of some kind to downplay Assange.” “I think it is as simple as that.”

By Alan Macleod

Source: Mint Press News

Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and longtime confidant of Julian Assange, has been fastidiously reporting on the Australian publisher’s extradition hearing to the United States. Yet few people have been reading it. This, according to Murray, is because of a deliberate decision by online media giants to downplay or suppress discussion of the case. On his blog, Murray wrote that he usually receives around 50 percent of his readers from Twitter and 40 percent from Facebook links, but that has dropped to 3 percent and 9 percent, respectively during the hearing. While the February hearings sent around 200,000 readers to his site daily, now that figure is only 3,000.

To be plain that is very much less than my normal daily traffic from them just in ordinary times. It is the insidious nature of this censorship that is especially sinister – people believe they have successfully shared my articles on Twitter and Facebook, while those corporations hide from them that in fact it went into nobody’s timeline,” he added.

Asked about the situation by former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges, Murray explained that

Anybody who is at all radical or takes any view of anything that is outwith the official establishment view gets used to occasional shadow banning, but I have never seen anything on this scale before.”

“90% of my traffic has just been cut off by what seems to be a general algorithm command of some kind to downplay Assange,” he added. “I think it is as simple as that.”

There has been considerable public interest in the court proceedings, but very little mainstream attention given to them. To be fair, British authorities have made it inordinately difficult to cover the case, allowing only a small handful of journalists into the Old Bailey court system, where they can watch a live television link up but cannot bring in recording devices. An online stream can only be watched if one registers and signs in between exactly 9:30 and 9:40 a.m., and if they suffer even a momentary lapse in wifi connection, they are shut out of the session. The court system has also blocked human rights groups, including Amnesty International, from monitoring proceedings.

Still, considering the implications for the future of journalism, the lack of coverage might surprise some. The New York Times, the flagship outlet of American print media (and a Wikileaks partner) printed only two articles on the subject and has not mentioned Assange in over two weeks. Its broadcast journalism equivalent CNN, meanwhile, has not touched the issue at all.

Online media creators have, for many years, lived with the threat of algorithmic suppression or demonetization of content on sensitive or controversial issues. YouTube regularly cuts all advertising on videos on the Syrian Civil War, fracking, or other topics on which advertisers might not wish to promote scrutiny. Even airsoft and paintball enthusiasts have learned not to use words like “shoot” and “gun” in their titles, lest the platform demonetizes their content.

Perhaps more alarmingly, however, Silicon Valley tech giants are becoming increasingly closely intertwined with the state department, to the point where it is often difficult to tell where one ends, and another begins. “What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century…technology and cyber-security companies [like Google] will be to the twenty-first,” wrote Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen in their book, “The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business.” For example, Facebook is now in a close partnership with the Atlantic Council, who essentially decides for them what content to promote in people’s news feeds and what content is discarded as fake news, misinformation, or low quality. The problem is that the Atlantic Council is a NATO cutout, and a government-funded organization whose board of directors is a who’s who of deep state officials, including virtually every living ex-C.I.A. director, Bush-era cabinet members like Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, and military generals like Wesley Clark and David Petraeus. Thus, an organization like this deciding what the world sees on their screens is barely one step removed from total government control of the flow of information.

The U.S. government also frequently directly interferes with content appearing on prominent social media. Earlier this year, Facebook announced that it would remove all comments or posts in praise of recently-slain Iranian General Qassem Soleimani from all its platforms. This was done to comply with the Trump administration’s designation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (which Soleimani led) as a terrorist organization. The problem is that Soleimani was Iran’s most popular political figure, with an over 80 percent approval rating, and that Instagram is used by around one-third of the entire Iranian population. Thus, Iranians speaking in their local language were barred from sharing a majority opinion with their country folk because of a decision by Donald Trump.

The Middle East is a particularly contentious area of the world. Yet when news broke that the British Army’s online psychological operations brigade had managed to become a senior Twitter executive, responsible for Middle Eastern content, media largely ignored it, raising even more questions. Algorithm changes have also hammered independent alternative media outlets — often precisely the ones most likely to cover the Assange case — drastically reducing their search engine traffic flow.

Former C.I.A. chief Leon Panetta (an honorary director of the Atlantic Council) recently admitted that Assange is being prosecuted as a warning to journalists. “All you can do is hope that you can ultimately take action against those that were involved in revealing that information so you can send a message to others not to do the same thing,” he told a German documentary crew. While the message is being heard loud and clear by journalists, the public is far less aware that anything is going on, thanks, in part, to online suppression of news about the case. Judge Vanessa Baraitser is scheduled to pronounce judgment on the media “trial of the century” on January 4, after the U.S. presidential election. Murray will doubtless be there. But will anyone read what he has to say?

Inflation Is Stealth Austerity

Posted on October 8, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

Rather than decry austerity, which demands an open political discussion of trade-offs, we should decry inflation’s stealthy reduction of purchasing power.

Austerity–bad. Inflation–good. Oh wait–they’re the same thing: both are a reduction in purchasing power. The only difference is a reduction via austerity is upfront while inflation is a stealth reduction, obfuscated by “official” distortions and Federal Reserve mumbo-jumbo.

Consider $1,200 in wages, unemployment, stimulus, Social Security payment, etc. If this payment gets cut by 10%–$120–as a result of austerity, pay cut, reduction in hours worked, etc., recipients scream bloody murder.

But if inflation reduces the purchasing power of the $1,200 by 10%, nobody does anything but grumble that “prices keep rising while my income stays the same.” This is the classic boiled frog syndrome: inflation is like the heat being turned up so gradually that the poor frog doesn’t realize he’s about to expire.

Inflation is stealthy because the loss of purchasing power is difficult to monitor. Your $1,200 only buys what $1,080 bought in the recent past; 10% inflation reduced your income exactly the same as if austerity had subtracted the $120 upfront.

Governments and central banks love inflation because the theft goes unnoticed. The public tolerates inflation because it’s easy to passively accept this erosion in their standard of living and difficult to generate the political heat that an outright cut would spark.

Though it’s being openly engineered by the Federal Reserve, inflation appears to be a force nobody controls–unlike austerity which is so clearly a political decision. If Inflation robbed 10% of everyone’s income overnight, people might be roused from their passivity to protest.

But since the theft occurs slowly–what’s 1% a month?–and unevenly across a spectrum of goods and services, this theft doesn’t rouse the same political storm as upfront austerity.

Inflation is a form of sacrifice that few recognize as sacrifice. It seems like everyone’s income is eroded equally, but this isn’t true: the wealthy closest to the Fed’s money spigots are earning multiples of inflation from asset inflation, stock buybacks, etc. Inflation is a pinprick to the wealthy and a stilletto in the kidneys of the bottom 95%.

To the political Aristocracy, inflation is wonderful because they don’t need to ask anyone to sacrifice 10% of their income as they do with austerity; they just steal the 10% a dribble at a time and throw up their hands as if inflation is some mystery force completely beyond their control.

Ironically, austerity–an honest, upfront political decision and sacrifice–is decried, while the dishonest, stealth cut of inflation is passively accepted, even as the Federal Reserve has made a cloaked political decision to reduce the purchasing power of everyone’s income except for the New Nobility (the top 0.1%) that the Fed slavishly serves.

Rather than decry austerity, which demands an open political discussion of trade-offs, we should decry inflation’s stealthy reduction of purchasing power, a Fed policy that benefits the few at the expense of the many.

Here is the Chapwood Index of inflation, which carefully measures “apples to apples” costs of essential goods and services in each city:

As inflation erodes purchasing power, workers’ share of the economy has declined dramatically– a double-whammy of declining purchasing power and standard of living.

Eyewitness to the Agony of Julian Assange

Posted on October 7, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Timothy Erik Strom and John Pilger

Source: CounterPunch

John Pilger has watched Julian Assange’s extradition trial from the public gallery at London’s Old Bailey. He spoke with Timothy Erik Ström of Arena, Australia:

Q: Having watched Julian Assange’s trial firsthand, can you describe the prevailing atmosphere in the court?

The prevailing atmosphere has been shocking. I say that without hesitation; I have sat in many courts and seldom known such a corruption of due process; this is due revenge. Putting aside the ritual associated with ‘British justice’, at times it has been evocative of a Stalinist show trial. One difference is that in the show trials, the defendant stood in the court proper. In the Assange trial, the defendant was caged behind thick glass, and had to crawl on his knees to a slit in the glass, overseen by his guard, to make contact with his lawyers. His message, whispered barely audibly through face masks, WAS then passed by post-it the length of the court to where his barristers were arguing the case against his extradition to an American hellhole.

Consider this daily routine of Julian Assange, an Australian on trial for truth-telling journalism. He was woken at five o’clock in his cell at Belmarsh prison in the bleak southern sprawl of London. The first time I saw Julian in Belmarsh, having passed through half an hour of ‘security’ checks, including a dog’s snout in my rear, I found a painfully thin figure sitting alone wearing a yellow armband. He had lost more than 10 kilos in a matter of months; his arms had no muscle. His first words were: ‘I think I am losing my mind’.

I tried to assure him he wasn’t. His resilience and courage are formidable, but there is a limit. That was more than a year ago. In the past three weeks, in the pre-dawn, he was strip-searched, shackled, and prepared for transport to the Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey, in a truck that his partner, Stella Moris, described as an upended coffin. It had one small window; he had to stand precariously to look out. The truck and its guards were operated by Serco, one of many politically connected companies that run much of Boris Johnson’s Britain.

The journey to the Old Bailey took at least an hour and a half. That’s a minimum of three hours being jolted through snail-like traffic every day. He was led into his narrow cage at the back of the court, then look up, blinking, trying to make out faces in the public gallery through the reflection of the glass. He saw the courtly figure of his dad, John Shipton, and me, and our fists went up. Through the glass, he reached out to touch fingers with Stella, who is a lawyer and seated in the body of the court.

We were here for the ultimate of what the philosopher Guy Debord called The Society of the Spectacle: a man fighting for his life. Yet his crime is to have performed an epic public service: revealing that which we have a right to know: the lies of our governments and the crimes they commit in our name. His creation of WikiLeaks and its failsafe protection of sources revolutionised journalism, restoring it to the vision of its idealists. Edmund Burke’s notion of free journalism as a fourth estate is now a fifth estate that shines a light on those who diminish the very meaning of democracy with their criminal secrecy. That’s why his punishment is so extreme.

The sheer bias in the courts I have sat in this year and last year, with Julian in the dock, blight any notion of British justice. When thuggish police dragged him from his asylum in the Ecuadorean embassy—look closely at the photo and you’ll see he is clutching a Gore Vidal book; Assange has a political humour similar to Vidal’s—a judge gave him an outrageous 50-week sentence in a maximum-security prison for mere bail infringement.

For months, he was denied exercise and held in solitary confinement disguised as ‘heath care’. He once told me he strode the length of his cell, back and forth, back and forth, for his own half-marathon. In the next cell, the occupant screamed through the night. At first he was denied his reading glasses, left behind in the embassy brutality. He was denied the legal documents with which to prepare his case, and access to the prison library and the use of a basic laptop. Books sent to him by a friend, the journalist Charles Glass, himself a survivor of hostage-taking in Beirut, were returned. He could not call his American lawyers. He has been constantly medicated by the prison authorities. When I asked him what they were giving him, he couldn’t say. The governor of Belmarsh has been awarded the Order of the British Empire.

At the Old Bailey, one of the expert medical witnesses, Dr Kate Humphrey, a clinical neuropsychologist at Imperial College, London, described the damage: Julian’s intellect had gone from ‘in the superior, or more likely very superior range’ to ‘significantly below’ this optimal level, to the point where he was struggling to absorb information and ‘perform in the low average range’.

This is what the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Professor Nils Melzer, calls ‘psychological torture’, the result of a gang-like ‘mobbing’ by governments and their media shills. Some of the expert medical evidence is so shocking I have no intention of repeating it here. Suffice to say that Assange is diagnosed with autism and Asperger’s syndrome and, according to Professor Michael Kopelman, one of the world’s leading neuropsychiatrists, he suffers from ‘suicidal preoccupations’ and is likely to find a way to take his life if he is extradited to America.

James Lewis QC, America’s British prosecutor, spent the best part of his cross-examination of Professor Kopelman dismissing mental illness and its dangers as ‘malingering’. I have never heard in a modern setting such a primitive view of human frailty and vulnerability.

My own view is that if Assange is freed, he is likely to recover a substantial part of his life. He has a loving partner, devoted friends and allies and the innate strength of a principled political prisoner. He also has a wicked sense of humour.

But that is a long way off. The moments of collusion between the judge— a Gothic-looking magistrate called Vanessa Baraitser, about whom little is known—and the prosecution acting for the Trump regime have been brazen. Until the last few days, defence arguments have been routinely dismissed. The lead prosecutor, James Lewis QC, ex SAS and currently Chief Justice of the Falklands, by and large gets what he wants, notably up to four hours to denigrate expert witnesses, while the defence’s examination is guillotined at half an hour. I have no doubt, had there been a jury, his freedom would be assured.

The dissident artist Ai Weiwei came to join us one morning in the public gallery. He noted that in China the judge’s decision would already have been made. This caused some dark ironic amusement. My companion in the gallery, the astute diarist and former British ambassador Craig Murray wrote:

I fear that all over London a very hard rain is now falling on those who for a lifetime have worked within institutions of liberal democracy that at least broadly and usually used to operate within the governance of their own professed principles. It has been clear to me from Day 1 that I am watching a charade unfold. It is not in the least a shock to me that Baraitser does not think anything beyond the written opening arguments has any effect. I have again and again reported to you that, where rulings have to be made, she has brought them into court pre-written, before hearing the arguments before her.

I strongly expect the final decision was made in this case even before opening arguments were received.

The plan of the US Government throughout has been to limit the information available to the public and limit the effective access to a wider public of what information is available. Thus we have seen the extreme restrictions on both physical and video access. A complicit mainstream media has ensured those of us who know what is happening are very few in the wider population.

There are few records of the proceedings. They are: Craig Murray’s personal blog, Binoy Kampmark on CounterPunch, Joe Lauria’s live reporting on Consortium News and the World Socialist Website. American journalist Kevin Gosztola’s blog, Shadowproof, funded mostly by himself, has reported more of the trial than the major US press and TV, including CNN, combined.

In Australia, Assange’s homeland, the ‘coverage’ follows a familiar formula set overseas. The London correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald, Latika Bourke, wrote this recently:

The court heard Assange became depressed during the seven years he spent in the Ecuadorian embassy where he sought political asylum to escape extradition to Sweden to answer rape and sexual assault charges.

There were no ‘rape and sexual assault charges’ in Sweden. Bourke’s lazy falsehood is not uncommon. If the Assange trial is the political trial of the century, as I believe it is, its outcome will not only seal the fate of a journalist for doing his job but intimidate the very principles of free journalism and free speech. The absence of serious mainstream reporting of the proceedings is, at the very least, self-destructive. Journalists should ask: who is next?

How shaming it all is. A decade ago, the Guardian exploited Assange’s work, claimed its profit and prizes as well as a lucrative Hollywood deal, then turned on him with venom. Throughout the Old Bailey trial, two names have been cited by the prosecution, the Guardian’s David Leigh, now retired as ‘investigations editor’ and Luke Harding, the Russiaphobe and author of a fictional Guardian ‘scoop’ that claimed Trump adviser Paul Manafort and a group of Russians visited Assange in the Ecuadorean embassy. This never happened, and the Guardian has yet to apologise. The Harding and Leigh book on Assange—written behind their subject’s back—disclosed a secret password to a WikiLeaks file that Assange had entrusted to Leigh during the Guardian’s ‘partnership’. Why the defence has not called this pair is difficult to understand.

Assange is quoted in their book declaring during a dinner at a London restaurant that he didn’t care if informants named in the leaks were harmed. Neither Harding nor Leigh was at the dinner. John Goetz, an investigations reporter with Der Spiegel, was at the dinner and testified that Assange said nothing of the kind. Incredibly, Judge Baraitser stopped Goetz actually saying this in court.

However, the defence has succeeded in demonstrating the extent to which Assange sought to protect and redact names in the files released by WikiLeaks and that no credible evidence existed of individuals harmed by the leaks. The great whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg said that Assange had personally redacted 15,000 files. The renowned New Zealand investigative journalist Nicky Hager, who worked with Assange on the Afghanistan and Iraq war leaks, described how Assange took ‘extraordinary precautions in redacting names of informants’.

Q: What are the implications of this trial’s verdict for journalism more broadly—is it an omen of things to come?

The ‘Assange effect’ is already being felt across the world. If they displease the regime in Washington, investigative journalists are liable to prosecution under the 1917 US Espionage Act; the precedent is stark. It doesn’t matter where you are. For Washington, other people’s nationality and sovereignty rarely mattered; now it does not exist. Britain has effectively surrendered its jurisdiction to Trump’s corrupt Department of Justice. In Australia, a National Security Information Act promises Kafkaesque trials for transgressors. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has been raided by police and journalists’ computers taken away. The government has given unprecedented powers to intelligence officials, making journalistic whistle-blowing almost impossible. Prime Minister Scott Morrison says Assange ‘must face the music’. The perfidious cruelty of his statement is reinforced by its banality.

‘Evil’, wrote Hannah Arendt, ‘comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil’.

Q: Having followed the story of WikiLeaks closely for a decade, how has this eyewitness experience shifted your understanding of what’s at stake with Assange’s trial?

I have long been a critic of journalism as an echo of unaccountable power and a champion of those who are beacons. So, for me, the arrival of WikiLeaks was exciting; I admired the way Assange regarded the public with respect, that he was prepared to share his work with the ‘mainstream’ but not join their collusive club. This, and naked jealousy, made him enemies among the overpaid and undertalented, insecure in their pretensions of independence and impartiality.

I admired the moral dimension to WikiLeaks. Assange was rarely asked about this, yet much of his remarkable energy comes from a powerful moral sense that governments and other vested interests should not operate behind walls of secrecy. He is a democrat. He explained this in one of our first interviews at my home in 2010.

What is at stake for the rest of us has long been at stake: freedom to call authority to account, freedom to challenge, to call out hypocrisy, to dissent. The difference today is that the world’s imperial power, the United States, has never been as unsure of its metastatic authority as it is today. Like a flailing rogue, it is spinning us towards a world war if we allow it. Little of this menace is reflected in the media.

WikiLeaks, on the other hand, has allowed us to glimpse a rampant imperial march through whole societies—think of the carnage in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, to name a few, the dispossession of 37 million people and the deaths of 12 million men, women and children in the ‘war on terror’—most of it behind a façade of deception.

Julian Assange is a threat to these recurring horrors—that’s why he is being persecuted, why a court of law has become an instrument of oppression, why he ought to be our collective conscience: why we all should be the threat.

The judge’s decision will be known on the 4^th of January.

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After the Crash

Dispatches From a Long Recovery (Est. 10/2024)

Category Archives: State Crime