Category Archives: State Crime

Stripping the veneer off America’s propaganda menagerie

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By Wayne Madsen

Source: Intrepid Report

National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange have doubled down recently on the games being played in cyberspace by America’s cyberwarriors. Snowden suggests that many of NSA’s most damaging malware programs are now in the hands of America’s opponents, thanks to enterprising foreign counterintelligence hackers known as the Shadow Brokers. Snowden believes that the malware, including destructive programs such as Stuxnet, are being auctioned off, via Bitcoin payments, by the Shadow Brokers. Snowden stated that the malware was obtained through hacking from a murky NSA operation called the “Equation Group.”

Assange, fearful that a new Ecuadorian president will hand him over to a Clinton administration in 2017, claims to have more hacked bombshells to drop on Team Clinton, courtesy of weak security in Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign computer systems.

We have entered a new phase of cyberwarfare, one in which America’s (and Israel’s) most damaging computer hacking and disruption programs are available to anyone willing to pay in Bitcoins on the cyberblack market. The Democratic Party’s leaked emails, coupled with the leaked State Department cables, has Hillary Clinton in an outrage. These disclosures, along with the Snowden disclosures that illustrate how America spies on friend and foe, have stripped the veneer off of America’s propaganda menagerie. Two of the three culprits Mrs. Clinton would like to see in prison for the rest of their lives are, for the time being, outside of Gulag America. Snowden is enjoying political asylum in Russia and Assange has asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The third, Chelsea Manning, is serving a 35-year prison term at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas and allegedly recently attempted suicide.

Paul Ceglia, who claims to have been the co-founder of Facebook, says he is on the run from the CIA after he filed suit against Facebook and its owner Mark Zuckerberg. Although Zuckerberg admits to having a past business relationship with Ceglia, the US Justice Department criminally charged Ceglia for trying to defraud Facebook after the former associate of Zuckerberg brought a civil suit in federal court in Buffalo against the company. Interestingly, Facebook has donated more money to Hillary Clinton than any other presidential candidate. But what is really at issue in the bizarre case is that Ceglia claims that Facebook’s seed money came from the CIA’s venture capital firm IN-Q-TEL, a charge to which WMR can attest after compiling a massive list of CIA front companies and proprietaries in the soon-to-be-published book: “The Almost Classified Guide to CIA Front Companies, Proprietaries and Contractors.”

The CIA and its partners at Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and other social media firms have striven to control the new media in the same manner that the CIA controlled the “old media” through operations like MOCKINGBIRD. During the Cold War era, the CIA claimed that all the world’s ills were due to Communist front organizations that influenced the media. The truth is that the so-called “fronts” often provided actual accounts of the misdeeds of the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies. However, with U.S. newspapers, magazines, and broadcast networks carrying the water for the CIA, it was Langley’s interpretation of the news that made Western headlines. The “Communist” reports were relegated to the nether regions of “Soviet disinformation” campaigns and “active measures.” The CIA laughably put out a periodical report on such “disinformation” tactics. In reality, what was called “disinformation” was actually bona fide news.

Today, when the CIA wants to debase a news article, it uses such operations as Snopes.com and Wikipedia to engage in CIA disinformation tactics. Uncomfortable truthful news items are quickly dispatched with the term “conspiracy theory.” There is little doubt that Facebook, Wikipedia, and Snopes are part of a “new MOCKINGBIRD” designed for the digital age. Like them or not, Snowden, Assange, Manning, Ceglia, and others have pulled the veil off of the new MOCKINGBIRD.

A formerly secret February 1987 CIA report on Soviet disinformation tactics illustrates that what was described then as “propaganda” was, in fact, the truth.

  • The CIA called baseless charges in a Soviet book that Jonestown, Guyana was a CIA behavioral control operation. It was.
  • The Soviets accused Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) of having the goal of weaponizing outer space. Not only was that the goal then, but it remains the goal of present incarnations of SDI.
  • The Soviets and the Afghan president, Najibullah of the Afghan Communist Party, said that they reached out to 50,000 Afghan mujaheddin in Afghanistan and Pakistan, who agreed to lay down their arms and join a coalition government, with eight opposition parties joining the Communists. The CIA and Western media called the news bogus. It was true with television footage of Afghan refugees returning to their homeland from India. The Soviets wanted an internationally-guaranteed neutral Afghanistan before withdrawing their troops. The CIA wanted a radical Islamic Afghanistan from which to launch attacks on the southern Soviet Union. That decision came back to bite the United States on September 11, 2001.
  • The CIA accused the Sandinista government of Nicaragua and the Soviets of being behind the Christian “Evangelical Committee for Development Aid” as a Communist front group. If so, it would have been the first time Communists and Christian evangelicals broke bread together. The CIA’s charge was fatuously false.
  • The Soviets accused the U.S. of using Africans as test subjects for a new AIDS vaccine. This charge has been proven with Africans being used as “guinea pigs” for various new vaccines in programs funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Clinton Global Initiative, Pfizer Corporation, and other entities linked to CIA biological and genetic warfare operations.
  • Articles in two Bolivian newspapers that stated that the U.S. Information Service in La Paz was trying to recruit Bolivian journalists to write pro-Pentagon articles were deemed by the CIA to be bogus. The CIA charge was false and it included smearing the Federation of Bolivian Press Workers as a Communist front. That is the usual practice by the CIA when it’s caught red-handed.
  • The Soviet news agency Novosti was accused of running a false article, titled “The Relationship Between Journalists and the CIA: Hundreds of Them in International Press.” The article was spot on.
  • The CIA charged as Soviet disinformation charges that the CIA killed nine nonaligned leaders, including Indian Prime Ministers Indira and Rajiv Gandhi. In fact, the CIA has killed many more than nine nonaligned leaders.

In the digital world of YouTube, Facebook, Google, and other social and news media sites, the CIA continues its game of disinformation while accusing others of conducting the same game plan. Some three decades after the Cold War, the CIA’s charges of Soviet disinformation can now be seen as disinformation in their own right.

 

Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).

BREAKING: Leaked FBI Alert Admits Hackers Penetrated US Election Systems

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By Matt Agorist

Source: The Free Thought Project

On Monday, an official FBI alert from August 18 was leaked to Yahoo News. The alert stated the FBI had uncovered evidence showing that at least two state election systems were penetrated by hackers in recent weeks. The FBI quickly issued warnings to election officials across the country to ramp up security on their systems.

It appears from the Flash Alert that the public was not supposed to know about it.

This FLASH has been released TLP: AMBER: The information in this product is only for members of their own organization and those with DIRECT NEED TO KNOW. This information is NOT to be forwarded on beyond NEED TO KNOW recipients.

The FBI then goes on to describe the nature of the attack and lists the IP addresses associated with the intrusion.

Summary

The FBI received information of an additional IP address, 5.149.249.172, which was detected in the July 2016 compromise of a state’s Board of Election Web site. Additionally, in August 2016 attempted intrusion activities into another state’s Board of Election system identified the IP address, 185.104.9.39 used in the aforementioned compromise.

Technical Details

The following information was released by the MS-ISAC on 1 August 2016, which was derived through the course of the investigation. In late June 2016, an unknown actor scanned a state’s Board of Election website for vulnerabilities using Acunetix, and after identifying a Structured Query Language (SQL) injection (SQLi) vulnerability, used SQLmap to target the state website. The majority of the data exfiltration occurred in mid-July. There were 7 suspicious IPs and penetration testing tools Acunetix, SQLMap, and DirBuster used by the actor, detailed in the indicators section below.

“This is a big deal,” said Rich Barger, chief intelligence officer for ThreatConnect, a cybersecurity firm, who reviewed the FBI alert at the request of Yahoo News. “Two state election boards have been popped, and data has been taken. This certainly should be concerning to the common American voter.”

According to the FBI, the hack is the work of a ‘foreign entity.’ However, they have not named the country of origin. This has not stopped other officials from quickly blaming the Russians.

Also absent from the alert are the names of the states involved in the hack.

According to the report from Yahoo News:

The bulletin does not identify the states in question, but sources familiar with the document say it refers to the targeting by suspected foreign hackers of voter registration databases in Arizona and Illinois. In the Illinois case, officials were forced to shut down the state’s voter registration system for ten days in late July, after the hackers managed to download personal data on up to 200,000 state voters, Ken Menzel, the general counsel of the Illinois Board of Elections, said in an interview. The Arizona attack was more limited, involving malicious software that was introduced into its voter registration system but no successful exfiltration of data, a state official said.

“The FBI is requesting that states contact their Board of Elections and determine if any similar activity to their logs, both inbound and outbound, has been detected,” the alert reads. “Attempts should not be made to touch or ping the IP addresses directly.”

While the alert lists the IP addresses from which the attacks originated, it is highly unlikely that the hackers would use any traceable address.

“This is a wake-up call for other states to look at their systems,” said Tom Hicks, chairman of the federal Election Assistance Commission.

This news comes on the heels of a report earlier this month in which a professor from Princeton University and a graduate student proved electronic voting machines in the U.S. remain astonishingly vulnerable to hackers — and they did it in under eight minutes.

Professor Andrew Appel, a Princeton University computer science professor who has studied election security, and grad student Alex Halderman took just seven minutes to break into the authentic Sequoia AVC Advantage electronic voting machine Appel purchased for $82 online — one of the oldest models, but still used in Louisiana, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Virginia.

Appel notes that the only “reasonably safe” voting method is paper ballots as they can be counted alongside the electronic tally. However, crucial swing states, as Appel notes, rely on more vulnerable paperless touchscreen voting which does not back up any of the numbers.

“Then whatever numbers the voting computer says at the close of the polls are completely under the control of the computer program in there,” Appel wrote in a recent blog post entitled “Security Against Election Hacking.” “If the computer is hacked, then the hacker gets to decide what numbers are reported. … All DRE (paperless touchscreen) voting computers are susceptible to this kind of hacking. This is our biggest problem.”

The fact that the FBI is now admitting to the vulnerability of the election should raise serious concern for Americans. Before 2016, talk of vote rigging, or hacking elections, remained on the fringe — in spite of whistleblowers showing the easily provable insecure nature of electronic voting machines.

As the famous quote, often attributed to Joseph Stalin, notes:

The people who cast the votes don’t decide an election, the people who count the votes do.

And now, with electronic voting and this news of how easily hackable it is, even the vote counters may not decide.

BREAKING: Benghazi Documents FINALLY Found – Hidden In Hillary’s Deleted Email File

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By Melissa Davis

Source: US Herald

Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton may have thought she could breathe a sigh of relief when FBI Director James Comey did not recommend charges be filed against her in connection with her unprecedented secret server set-up, but she hadn’t counted on federal judges, who are not quite as forgiving.

U.S. District Court Judge William P. Dimitrouleas has ordered the State Department to search 14,900 newly found Clinton emails to determine if any are responsive to requests in a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed last year.

The FOIA requests sought all communications between then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Obama White House related to the 2012 terror attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi from the day it took place – the anniversary of 9/11 – through the following week.

This week, the State Department was forced to admit in court filings it had “received positive hits” for Benghazi-related documents among the nearly 15,000 Clinton emails uncovered by the FBI during its more than year-long investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s unauthorized use of a private server housed at her home during her tenure as President Obama’s first Secretary of State.

Judge Dimitrouleas gave the Department until September 13 to review the emails, in addition to other communications, and turn over responsive records, but Clinton’s former department claimed it cannot comply with the order by the deadline due to the large number of emails to be reviewed, estimating that it will take until well after the November 8 election.

In a potentially devastating development it was learned that not only did Clinton withhold emails from State when she left the position, contrary to federal law and regulation, but utilized software to degrade the digital data to the extent that it cannot be retrieved.

The use of “bleach bit” technology could, conceivably, lead to allegations of obstruction of justice and evidence of intent.

Evidence points to another Snowden at the NSA

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By James Bamford

Source: Reuters

In the summer of 1972, state-of-the-art campaign spying consisted of amateur burglars, armed with duct tape and microphones, penetrating the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. Today, amateur burglars have been replaced by cyberspies, who penetrated the DNC armed with computers and sophisticated hacking tools.

Where the Watergate burglars came away empty-handed and in handcuffs, the modern- day cyber thieves walked away with tens of thousands of sensitive political documents and are still unidentified.

Now, in the latest twist, hacking tools themselves, likely stolen from the National Security Agency, are on the digital auction block. Once again, the usual suspects start with Russia – though there seems little evidence backing up the accusation.

In addition, if Russia had stolen the hacking tools, it would be senseless to publicize the theft, let alone put them up for sale. It would be like a safecracker stealing the combination to a bank vault and putting it on Facebook. Once revealed, companies and governments would patch their firewalls, just as the bank would change its combination.

A more logical explanation could also be insider theft. If that’s the case, it’s one more reason to question the usefulness of an agency that secretly collects private information on millions of Americans but can’t keep its most valuable data from being stolen, or as it appears in this case, being used against us.

In what appeared more like a Saturday Night Live skit than an act of cybercrime, a group calling itself the Shadow Brokers put up for bid on the Internet what it called a “full state-sponsored toolset” of “cyberweapons.” “!!! Attention government sponsors of cyberwarfare and those who profit from it !!!! How much would you pay for enemies cyberweapons?” said the announcement.

The group said it was releasing some NSA files for “free” and promised “better” ones to the highest bidder. However, those with loosing bids “Lose Lose,” it said, because they would not receive their money back. And should the total sum of the bids, in bitcoins, reach the equivalent of half a billion dollars, the group would make the whole lot public.

While the “auction” seemed tongue in cheek, more like hacktivists than Russian high command, the sample documents were almost certainly real. The draft of a top-secret NSA manual for implanting offensive malware, released by Edward Snowden, contains code for a program codenamed SECONDDATE. That same 16-character string of numbers and characters is in the code released by the Shadow Brokers. The details from the manual were first released by The Intercept last Friday.

The authenticity of the NSA hacking tools were also confirmed by several ex-NSA officials who spoke to the media, including former members of the agency’s Tailored Access Operations (TAO) unit, the home of hacking specialists.

“Without a doubt, they’re the keys to the kingdom,” one former TAO employee told the Washington Post. “The stuff you’re talking about would undermine the security of a lot of major government and corporate networks both here and abroad.” Another added, “From what I saw, there was no doubt in my mind that it was legitimate.”

Like a bank robber’s tool kit for breaking into a vault, cyber exploitation tools, with codenames like EPICBANANA and BUZZDIRECTION, are designed to break into computer systems and networks. Just as the bank robber hopes to find a crack in the vault that has never been discovered, hackers search for digital cracks, or “exploits,” in computer programs like Windows.

The most valuable are “zero day” exploits, meaning there have been zero days since Windows has discovered the “crack” in their programs. Through this crack, the hacker would be able to get into a system and exploit it, by stealing information, until the breach is eventually discovered and patched. According to the former NSA officials who viewed the Shadow Broker files, they contained a number of exploits, including zero-day exploits that the NSA often pays thousands of dollars for to private hacking groups.

The reasons given for laying the blame on Russia appear less convincing, however. “This is probably some Russian mind game, down to the bogus accent,” James A. Lewis, a computer expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, told the New York Times. Why the Russians would engage in such a mind game, he never explained.

Rather than the NSA hacking tools being snatched as a result of a sophisticated cyber operation by Russia or some other nation, it seems more likely that an employee stole them. Experts who have analyzed the files suspect that they date to October 2013, five months after Edward Snowden left his contractor position with the NSA and fled to Hong Kong carrying flash drives containing hundreds of thousands of pages of NSA documents.

So, if Snowden could not have stolen the hacking tools, there are indications that after he departed in May 2013, someone else did, possibly someone assigned to the agency’s highly sensitive Tailored Access Operations.

In December 2013, another highly secret NSA document quietly became public. It was a top secret TAO catalog of NSA hacking tools. Known as the Advanced Network Technology (ANT) catalog, it consisted of 50 pages of extensive pictures, diagrams and descriptions of tools for every kind of hack, mostly targeted at devices manufactured by U.S. companies, including Apple, Cisco, Dell and many others.

Like the hacking tools, the catalog used similar codenames. Among the tools targeting Apple was one codenamed DROPOUTJEEP, which gives NSA total control of iPhones. “A software implant for the Apple iPhone,” says the ANT catalog, “includes the ability to remotely push/pull files from the device. SMS retrieval, contact-list retrieval, voicemail, geolocation, hot mic, camera capture, cell-tower location, etc.”

Another, codenamed IRATEMONK, is, “Technology that can infiltrate the firmware of hard drives manufactured by Maxtor, Samsung, Seagate and Western Digital.”

In 2014, I spent three days in Moscow with Snowden for a magazine assignment and a PBS documentary. During our on-the-record conversations, he would not talk about the ANT catalog, perhaps not wanting to bring attention to another possible NSA whistleblower.

I was, however, given unrestricted access to his cache of documents. These included both the entire British, or GCHQ, files and the entire NSA files.

But going through this archive using a sophisticated digital search tool, I could not find a single reference to the ANT catalog. This confirmed for me that it had likely been released by a second leaker. And if that person could have downloaded and removed the catalog of hacking tools, it’s also likely he or she could have also downloaded and removed the digital tools now being leaked.

In fact, a number of the same hacking implants and tools released by the Shadow Brokers are also in the ANT catalog, including those with codenames BANANAGLEE and JETPLOW. These can be used to create “a persistent back-door capability” into widely used Cisco firewalls, says the catalog.

Consisting of about 300 megabytes of code, the tools could easily and quickly be transferred to a flash drive. But unlike the catalog, the tools themselves – thousands of ones and zeros – would have been useless if leaked to a publication. This could be one reason why they have not emerged until now.

Enter WikiLeaks. Just two days after the first Shadow Brokers message, Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, sent out a Twitter message. “We had already obtained the archive of NSA cyberweapons released earlier today,” Assange wrote, “and will release our own pristine copy in due course.”

The month before, Assange was responsible for releasing the tens of thousands of hacked DNC emails that led to the resignation of the four top committee officials.

There also seems to be a link between Assange and the leaker who stole the ANT catalog, and the possible hacking tools. Among Assange’s close associates is Jacob Appelbaum, a celebrated hacktivist and the only publicly known WikiLeaks staffer in the United States – until he moved to Berlin in 2013 in what he called a “political exile” because of what he said was repeated harassment by U.S. law enforcement personnel. In 2010, a Rolling Stone magazine profile labeled him “the most dangerous man in cyberspace.”

In December 2013, Appelbaum was the first person to reveal the existence of the ANT catalog, at a conference in Berlin, without identifying the source. That same month he said he suspected the U.S. government of breaking into his Berlin apartment. He also co-wrote an article about the catalog in Der Spiegel. But again, he never named a source, which led many to assume, mistakenly, that it was Snowden.

In addition to WikiLeaks, for years Appelbaum worked for Tor, an organization focused on providing its customers anonymity on the Internet. But last May, he stepped down as a result of “serious, public allegations of sexual mistreatment” made by unnamed victims, according to a statement put out by Tor. Appelbaum has denied the charges.

Shortly thereafter, he turned his attention to Hillary Clinton. At a screening of a documentary about Assange in Cannes, France, Appelbaum accused her of having a grudge against him and Assange, and that if she were elected president, she would make their lives difficult. “It’s a situation that will possibly get worse” if she is elected to the White House, he said, according to Yahoo News.

It was only a few months later that Assange released the 20,000 DNC emails. Intelligence agencies have again pointed the finger at Russia for hacking into these emails.

Yet there has been no explanation as to how Assange obtained them. He told NBC News, “There is no proof whatsoever” that he obtained the emails from Russian intelligence. Moscow has also denied involvement.

There are, of course, many sophisticated hackers in Russia, some with close government ties and some without. And planting false and misleading indicators in messages is an old trick. Now Assange has promised to release many more emails before the election, while apparently ignoring email involving Trump. (Trump opposition research was also stolen.)

In hacktivist style, and in what appears to be phony broken English, this new release of cyberweapons also seems to be targeting Clinton. It ends with a long and angry “final message” against “Wealthy Elites . . . breaking laws” but “Elites top friends announce, no law broken, no crime commit[ed]. . . Then Elites run for president. Why run for president when already control country like dictatorship?”

Then after what they call the “fun Cyber Weapons Auction” comes the real message, a serious threat. “We want make sure Wealthy Elite recognizes the danger [of] cyberweapons. Let us spell out for Elites. Your wealth and control depends on electronic data.” Now, they warned, they have control of the NSA’s cyber hacking tools that can take that wealth away. “You see attacks on banks and SWIFT [a worldwide network for financial services] in news. If electronic data go bye-bye where leave Wealthy Elites? Maybe with dumb cattle?”

Snowden’s leaks served a public good. He alerted Americans to illegal eavesdropping on their telephone records and other privacy violations, and Congress changed the law as a result. The DNC leaks exposed corrupt policies within the Democratic Party.

But we now have entered a period many have warned about, when NSA’s cyber weapons could be stolen like loose nukes and used against us. It opens the door to criminal hackers, cyber anarchists and hostile foreign governments that can use the tools to gain access to thousands of computers in order to steal data, plant malware and cause chaos.

It’s one more reason why NSA may prove to be one of Washington’s greatest liabilities rather than assets.

 

About the Author

James Bamford is the author of The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA From 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America. He is a columnist for Foreign Policy magazine.

 

Why Americans Must Demolish the Political Duopoly and Create a New Progressive Alliance

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By Thomas Baldwin

Source: Dandelion Salad

A Call to Action!

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”– Albert Einstein

Duopoly: “preponderant influence or control by two political powers.”

Demolish: “to destroy by breaking apart; to put an end to.”

Corporate fascism (or Corporatism): “the complete merger of corporate and state entities to create a political entity.”

The United States is experiencing a serious crisis and most Americans know it. Our government and the Washington establishment is disintegrating at near breath taking speed. It could well be the most serious situation in at least a hundred years. For years now several authors have described our government in Washington as being “broken” or “dysfunctional”. But these words seem inadequate any longer.

It is much more like a “living” entity which is dying and is in a critical state; all vital signs are poor. Crises are generated in Washington from incompetence and corruption. Little or nothing gets done; few if any serious problems are addressed. Everything is addressed as “partisan.” But that is a delusion because as I will mention later there is really only one party with two different factions serving the corporate fascists. When the two factions finally agree on something, then it is called “bipartisan” because the two political parties appear to be constantly fighting over power and money. What, if anything, is to be done about this evil charade?

Read the full article at  Dandelion Salad.

The Entire Status Quo Is a Fraud

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

Fraud as a way of life caters an extravagant banquet of consequences.

This can’t be said politely: the entire status quo in America is a fraud.

The financial system is a fraud.

The political system is a fraud.

National Defense is a fraud.

The healthcare system is a fraud.

Higher education is a fraud.

The mainstream corporate media is a fraud.

Culture–from high to pop–is a fraud.

Need I go on?

We have come to accept fraud as standard operating practice in America, to the detriment of everything that was once worthy. why is this so?

One reason, which I outline in my book A Radically Beneficial World: Automation, Technology and Creating Jobs for All, is that centralized hierarchies select for fraud and incompetence. Now that virtually every system in America is centralized or regulated by centralized hierarchies, every system in America is fraudulent and incompetent.

Nassim Taleb explains this further in his recent article How To Legally Own Another Person (via Lew G.)

The three ingredients of fraud are abundant: pressure (to get an A, to please your boss, to make your sales numbers, etc.), rationalization (everybody’s doing it) and opportunity.

Taleb explains why failure and fraud become the status quo: admitting error and changing course are risky, and everyone who accepts the servitude of working in a centralized hierarchy–by definition, obedience to authority is the #1 requirement– is averse to risk.

As as I explain in my book, these systems select for risk aversion and the appearance of obedience to rules and authority while maximizing personal gain: in other words, fraud as a daily way of life.

Truth is a dangerous poison in centralized hierarchies: anyone caught telling the truth risks a tenner in bureaucratic Siberia. (In the Soviet Gulag ,a tenner meant a ten-year sentence to a labor camp in Siberia.)

And so the truth is buried, sent to a backwater for further study, obfuscated by jargon, imprisoned by a Top Secret stamp, or simply taken out and executed.Everyone in the system maximizes his/her personal gain by going along with the current trajectory, even if that trajectory is taking the nation off the cliff.

Consider the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a $1+ trillion failure. The aircraft is underpowered, under-armed, insanely overpriced, insanely over-budget and still riddled with bugs after seven years of fixes, making it an unaffordable maintenance nightmare that puts our servicepeople and nation at risk.

But no one in a position of power will speak the truth about the F-35, because it is no longer a weapons system–it’s a jobs program. Defense contractors are careful to spread the work of assembling parts of the F-35 to 40+ states, so 80+ senators will support the program, no matter how much a failure it is as a weapons system, or how costly the failure is becoming.

A rational person in charge would immediately cancel it and start from scratch, with a program run outside the Pentagon and outside congressional meddling.But this is impossible in America: instead, we build failed, under-armored, under-powered, under-armed and unreliable ships (LCS) and failed under-powered, under-armed and unreliable fighters as the most expensive make-work programs in history.

As for our failed healthcare system, one anecdote will do. (You undoubtedly have dozens from your own experience.) A friend from Uruguay with a high-tech job in the U.S. recently flew home to Montevideo for a medical exam because 1) the cost of the flight was cheaper than the cost of the care in the U.S. and 2) she was seen the next day in Montevideo while it would have taken two months to get the same care in the U.S.

I’ve listed dozens of examples here over the years: $120,000 for a couple days in a hospital, no procedures performed; $20,000+ for a single emergency room visit, no procedures performed; several thousand dollars charged to Medicare for a few minutes in an “observation room” that was occupied by patients, no staff present–the list is endless.

We’ve habituated to fraud as a way of life because every system is fraudulent.Consider the costly scam known as higher education. The two essentials higher education should teach are: 1) how to learn anything you need to learn or want to learn on your own, and 2) how to think, behave, plan and function entrepreneurially (i.e. as an autonomous problem-solver and lifelong learner who cooperates and collaborates productively with others) as a way of life.

That higher education fails to do so is self-evident. We could create a highly effective system of higher education that costs 10% of the current corrupt system. I’ve described such a system (in essence, a directed apprenticeship as opposed to sitting in a chair for four years) in The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy: The Revolution in Higher Education.

As for what passes as culture in the U.S.: the majority of what’s being sold as culture, both high and low, is derivative and forgettable. We suffer the dual frauds of absurd refinement (so only the elites can “appreciate” the art, music, food, wine, etc.) and base coarsening: instead of Tender (romantic love and sex) we have Tinder (flammable trash).

Fraud as a way of life caters an extravagant banquet of consequences. While everyone maximizes their personal gain in whatever system of skim, scam and fraud they inhabit, the nation rots from within. We’ve lost our way, and lost the ability to tell the truth, face problems directly, abandon what has failed and what is unaffordable, and accept personal risk as the essential element of successful adaptation.

Here’s a good place to start: require every politician to wear the logos of their top 10 contributors–just like NASCAR drivers and vehicles display the logos of their sponsors. The California Initiative to make this a reality is seeking signatures of registered California voters. Since politicians are owned, let’s make the ownership transparent.

Why Ajamu Baraka? Why Vice President? And Why the Green Party?

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What does the Green Party nomination of longtime Black Agenda Report contributing editor Ajamu Baraka for Vice President mean for the Green Party and the 2016 presidential election?  Is he just a black face on the ticket, or is it really time to begin organizing in black and brown communities outside the matrix of the bankrupt black and brown misleadership class?

By Bruce A. Dixon

Source: Black Agenda Report

In Houston on the first Saturday of August, the Green Party nominated Jill Stein, a Massachusetts physician, and Ajamu Baraka, a longtime human rights activists as its presidential and vice presidential candidates for 2016.  Stein’s nomination was a foregone conclusion, having been the Green candidate in 2012 and the only one of several aspirants to raise money, hire staff and campaign across the country full time for more than a year.

Ajamu Baraka followed a different road to the nomination, having been an interested observer but with no organizational connection to the Green Party till now.  Ajamu Baraka was the founding executive director of the US Human Rights Network, which still seeks to have the framework of internationally recognized human rights law applied to the victims of social and economic injustice in the US.  This is a truly radical concept because the supreme law in the US is the Constitution, which chiefly guarantees property rights and the rights of corporations but not necessarily the rights of human beings to a quality education, the vote, decent housing, health care, renumerative jobs and the right to organize, or to a safe and clean environment, none of which are mentioned.
Ajamu Baraka was among the first to demand, in the wake of the Katrina disaster, that the 300,000 or so persons uprooted, the majority of them African American, be classified as “internally displaced” under international law, a status which would have guaranteed them the right to return to the cities and towns from which they were displaced and dispersed to the four corners of the US.  Since the 1980s Baraka has been a consistent and principled critic of imperial US foreign policy over the years in Africa, Asia, Central and South America and the Middle East.  He’s served in and led fact-finding delegations to Central America, Cuba, Israel-Palestine, Colombia and other places.  In the wake of the 2010 hunger strike waged by Georgia prisoners, Baraka led an unprecedented civilian inspection team into two state prisons where they were able to interview staff and prisoners alike.

I should say here that I count both Jill and Ajamu as comrades and personal friends, that I was on Jill’s campaign staff for several months and that Ajamu Baraka has more than 50 articles published at Black Agenda Report.
So why Ajamu Baraka?

It’s not a simple matter of putting a black face on the ticket.  Greens have run black candidates in local and national races before without managing to make a significant dent in traditional black allegiances to the Democratic party.

Stein chose Baraka because one of her campaign’s objectives is to strengthen state and local Green parties.  As a result of his more than four decades of work in the movement, Baraka has longstanding personal ties with and has been mentor to many of the activists involved in the Black Lives Matter movement around the country.  If anyone can carry the message to these forces that now is the time for organizing alternative centers of struggle for political power, centers of struggle outside the two capitalist parties and outside the nonprofit industrial complex, that someone is Ajamu Baraka.

African American voters have long been the rock upon which the Democratic party’s voting coalition rests.  But since blacks vote Democratic mainly out of fear of the Republicans, they are a captive constituency whose votes are counted but whose demands are ignored.  Jill and the Greens know it will take more than running good black or brown candidates to make its black, Latin and working class captive constituencies climb out of the Democrats’ trunk.  Realistically that won’t much happen this election.  The candidacies of Greens like Joshua Harris in Baltimore and Ashley Flash Gordon in Travis County TX are signs that something new and unprecedented is peeking over the horizon, something that will challenge the vacuity and lack of vision of the black political class.  It’s not a challenge mature enough to accomplish a string of local electoral victories across the country.  But it’s real, it’s gaining ground, building experience and it’s not going away.

The present black political class and the leadership model that supports it have been in place pretty much since the days of Booker T. Washington twelve decades ago.  They won’t be displaced this election cycle, but their political bankruptcy is every bit as real and obvious as that of their white counterparts.

Why Vice President?

A frequently asked question is why Greens run candidates for president every year, but haven’t elected or even run candidates in many states for state reps and state senators, for county commissioners and members of congress.  The answer is really simple.

The two capitalist parties protect themselves against competitors with a briar patch, a minefield of provisions and conditions expressly designed to make it all but impossible for parties not financed by the one percent to appear on the ballot.  In many states, candidates who are not Democrats or Republicans are prohibited from appearing on the ballot until after their parties have scored one percent, two percent or five percent, depending on the state, in a statewide election.

This legal requirement in states like Georgia that Greens must score tens or hundreds of thousands of votes in statewide races before being allowed to run in local races is one more of the deliberate obstacles Democrats and Republicans have erected to competition from third parties at the ballot box.  And it’s why Ajamu Baraka is running for vice president and Jill Stein for president much of the country were Greens are not allowed to run for local office.

Why the Green Party?

For the last fifty years, Republicans have deliberately made themselves the party of white racists and nativists.  There’s simply in the Republican party or African Americans except a shorter line.  Democrats talk a different game, but are responsible to the same one percenters who fund Republicans, so once in office, Democrats govern pretty much like Republicans.  In fact Democratic presidents and governors frequently enact the oppressive policies we won’t allow Republicans to enact.

NAFTA came up twice during the first Bush presidency and failed.  It took a Democrat, a President Clinton to rally enough right wing Democrats to ally with Republicans to get it into law.  Ending public aid was also something no Republican could do, but Democrats only need  the support of the black and poor when they’re candidates, not so much when they’re governing.  The 2008 Bush bailout went before a Democratic Congress and it failed.  Barack Obama had to suspend his campaign for a week and come to DC and work the phones to flip the Congressional Black Caucus and enough other Democrats to pass the Bush bailout, which he quadrupled down on once in the White House.  Again it was a blow no Republican could have struck, though many wanted to.

Barack Obama used stimulus money to fund what he called “Race To The Top”, a drive to privatize public education that resulted in the closing and privatization of thousands of public schools, and pushed hundreds of thousands of qualified experienced public school educators out of the classroom.  This too was something no Republican could have accomplished, much as they wanted to.  There are many, many similar examples of Democrats accomplishing the right wing goals Republicans can only talk about on the state and local levels.
Republicans like Donald Trump talk about how they’d like to do mass deportations.  But our First Black President has deported two million people, more than any other three presidents combined, after promising Latino voters “a road to citizenship” in both his campaigns.

The only reason to vote for Democrats is our fear of Republicans, and as Jill Stein says, this politics of fear has delivered to us everything we were afraid of.  People voted Democratic to end the war in Iraq but we got more war in the Middle East and Africa.  People voted Democrat to raise the minimum wage and see millions of new jobs created.  But the minimum wage has barely risen and the only reason official unemployment figures are down is that his policies have pushed millions of people out of the formal workforce into increasingly precarious economic situations.

At the end of the reign of our first black president, a Democrat when blacks have been the rock and mainstay of Democratic voting coalitions for two generations, forty percent of black children are growing up in poverty.  Isn’t it time for some new questions?

Why must “progressives” ride to Hillary’s rescue if we don’t get progress?

Trump is a bumbling clown and a bogeyman.  He’s raising a fraction of the money Romney raised, four years ago.  Hillary Clinton has a billion dollars to campaign with and most of the corporate media. If she can’t beat this fool with all the resources available to her, why is it up to us?  Why?  Hillary ought to be, and ought to have been helping us, not the other way around.

I don’t expect the Greens to win the presidential election.  But the US system is almost 250 years old, one of the most elderly on the planet.  Its creaks and cracks are highly visible and aren’t going away.  Isn’t it time to start imagining and building what comes next, what comes after capitalism, what comes after genocide and ecocide, what comes after patriarchy and white supremacy?

Isn’t it time to start being the change we want to see?

That won’t happen inside the Democratic party.  It’s been tried again and again.  It’s time to build something different.  So why not the Green Party?
Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report and a member of the state committee of the Georgia Green Party.  He lives and works near Marietta GA and can be reached via email at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.