Tag Archives: Precrime

Total Tyranny: We’ll All Be Targeted Under the Government’s New Precrime Program

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By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“There is now the capacity to make tyranny total in America.”― James Bamford

It never fails.

Just as we get a glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe, there might be a chance of crawling out of this totalitarian cesspool in which we’ve been mired, we get kicked down again.

In the same week that the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously declared that police cannot carry out warrantless home invasions in order to seize guns under the pretext of their “community caretaking” duties, the Biden Administration announced its plans for a “precrime” crime prevention agency.

Talk about taking one step forward and two steps back.

Precrime, straight out of the realm of dystopian science fiction movies such as Minority Report, aims to prevent crimes before they happen by combining widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, precognitive technology, and neighborhood and family snitch programs to enable police to capture would-be criminals before they can do any damage.

This particular precrime division will fall under the Department of Homeland Security, the agency notorious for militarizing the police and SWAT teams; spying on activists, dissidents and veterans; stockpiling ammunition; distributing license plate readers; contracting to build detention camps; tracking cell-phones with Stingray devices; carrying out military drills and lockdowns in American cities; using the TSA as an advance guard; conducting virtual strip searches with full-body scanners; carrying out soft target checkpoints; directing government workers to spy on Americans; conducting widespread spying networks using fusion centers; carrying out Constitution-free border control searches; funding city-wide surveillance cameras; and utilizing drones and other spybots.

The intent, of course, is for the government to be all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful in its preemptive efforts to combat domestic extremism.

Where we run into trouble is when the government gets overzealous and over-ambitious and overreaches.

This is how you turn a nation of citizens into snitches and suspects.

In the blink of an eye, ordinary Americans will find themselves labeled domestic extremists for engaging in lawful behavior that triggers the government’s precrime sensors.

Of course, it’s an elaborate setup: we’ll all be targets.

In such a suspect society, the burden of proof is reversed so that guilt is assumed and innocence must be proven.

It’s the American police state’s take on the dystopian terrors foreshadowed by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Phillip K. Dick all rolled up into one oppressive pre-crime and pre-thought crime package.

What’s more, the technocrats who run the surveillance state don’t even have to break a sweat while monitoring what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, how much you spend, whom you support, and with whom you communicate.

Computers now do the tedious work of trolling social media, the internet, text messages and phone calls for potentially anti-government remarks, all of which is carefully recorded, documented, and stored to be used against you someday at a time and place of the government’s choosing.

In this way, with the help of automated eyes and ears, a growing arsenal of high-tech software, hardware and techniques, government propaganda urging Americans to turn into spies and snitches, as well as social media and behavior sensing software, government agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports aimed at snaring potential enemies of the state.

It works the same in any regime.

As Professor Robert Gellately notes in his book Backing Hitler about the police state tactics used in Nazi Germany: “There were relatively few secret police, and most were just processing the information coming in. I had found a shocking fact. It wasn’t the secret police who were doing this wide-scale surveillance and hiding on every street corner. It was the ordinary German people who were informing on their neighbors.”

Here’s the thing as the Germans themselves quickly discovered: you won’t have to do anything illegal or challenge the government’s authority in order to be flagged as a suspicious character, labeled an enemy of the state and locked up like a dangerous criminal.

In fact, all you will need to do is use certain trigger words, surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, drive a car, stay at a hotel, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious to a neighbor, question government authority, or generally live in the United States.

The following activities are guaranteed to get you censored, surveilled, eventually placed on a government watch list, possibly detained and potentially killed.

Use harmless trigger words like cloud, pork and pirates: The Department of Homeland Security has an expansive list of keywords and phrases it uses to monitor social networking sites and online media for signs of terrorist or other threats. While you’ll definitely send up an alert for using phrases such as dirty bomb, Jihad and Agro terror, you’re just as likely to get flagged for surveillance if you reference the terms SWAT, lockdown, police, cloud, food poisoning, pork, flu, Subway, smart, delays, cancelled, la familia, pirates, hurricane, forest fire, storm, flood, help, ice, snow, worm, warning or social media.

Use a cell phone: Simply by using a cell phone, you make yourself an easy target for government agents—working closely with corporations—who can listen in on your phone calls, read your text messages and emails, and track your movements based on the data transferred from, received by, and stored in your cell phone. Mention any of the so-called “trigger” words in a conversation or text message, and you’ll get flagged for sure.

Drive a car: Unless you’ve got an old junkyard heap without any of the gadgets and gizmos that are so attractive to today’s car buyers (GPS, satellite radio, electrical everything, smart systems, etc.), driving a car today is like wearing a homing device: you’ll be tracked from the moment you open that car door thanks to black box recorders and vehicle-to-vehicle communications systems that can monitor your speed, direction, location, the number of miles traveled, and even your seatbelt use. Once you add satellites, GPS devices, license plate readers, and real-time traffic cameras to the mix, there’s nowhere you can go on our nation’s highways and byways that you can’t be followed. By the time you add self-driving cars into the futuristic mix, equipped with computers that know where you want to go before you do, privacy and autonomy will be little more than distant mirages in your rearview mirror.

Attend a political rally: Enacted in the wake of 9/11, the Patriot Act redefined terrorism so broadly that many non-terrorist political activities such as protest marches, demonstrations and civil disobedience were considered potential terrorist acts, thereby rendering anyone desiring to engage in protected First Amendment expressive activities as suspects of the surveillance state.

Express yourself on social media: The FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies are investing in and relying on corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior. A decorated Marine, 26-year-old Brandon Raub was targeted by the Secret Service because of his Facebook posts, interrogated by government agents about his views on government corruption, arrested with no warning, labeled mentally ill for subscribing to so-called “conspiratorial” views about the government, detained against his will in a psych ward for having “dangerous” opinions, and isolated from his family, friends and attorneys.

Serve in the military: Operation Vigilant Eagle, the brainchild of the Dept. of Homeland Security, calls for surveillance of military veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, characterizing them as extremists and potential domestic terrorist threats because they may be “disgruntled, disillusioned or suffering from the psychological effects of war.” Police agencies are also using Beware, an “early warning” computer system that tips them off to a potential suspect’s inclination to be a troublemaker and assigns individuals a color-coded threat score—green, yellow or red—based on a variety of factors including one’s criminal records, military background, medical history and social media surveillance.

Disagree with a law enforcement official: A growing number of government programs are aimed at identifying, monitoring and locking up anyone considered potentially “dangerous” or mentally ill (according to government standards, of course). For instance, a homeless man in New York City who reportedly had a history of violence but no signs of mental illness was forcibly detained in a psych ward for a week after arguing with shelter police. Despite the fact that doctors cited no medical reason to commit him, the man was locked up in accordance with a $22 million program that monitors mentally ill people considered “potentially” violent. According to the Associated Press, “A judge finally ordered his release, ruling that the man’s commitment violated his civil rights and that bureaucrats had meddled in his medical treatment.”

Call in sick to work: In Virginia, a so-called police “welfare check” instigated by a 58-year-old man’s employer after he called in sick resulted in a two-hour, SWAT team-style raid on the man’s truck and a 72-hour mental health hold. During the standoff, a heavily armed police tactical team confronted Benjamin Burruss as he was leaving an area motel, surrounded his truck, deployed a “stinger” device behind the rear tires, launched a flash grenade, smashed the side window in order to drag him from the truck, handcuffed and searched him, and transported him to a local hospital for a psychiatric evaluation and mental health hold. All of this was done despite the fact that police acknowledged they had no legal basis nor probable cause for detaining Burruss, given that he had not threatened to harm anyone and was not mentally ill.

Limp or stutter: As a result of a nationwide push to certify a broad spectrum of government officials in mental health first-aid training (a 12-hour course comprised of PowerPoint presentations, videos, discussions, role playing and other interactive activities), more Americans are going to run the risk of being reported for having mental health issues by non-medical personnel. Mind you, once you get on such a government watch list—whether it’s a terrorist watch list, a mental health watch list, or a dissident watch list—there’s no clear-cut way to get off, whether or not you should actually be on there. For instance, one 37-year-old disabled man was arrested, diagnosed by police and an unlicensed mental health screener as having “mental health issues,” apparently because of his slurred speech and unsteady gait, and subsequently locked up for five days in a mental health facility against his will and with no access to family and friends. A subsequent hearing found that Gordon Goines, who suffers from a neurological condition similar to multiple sclerosis, has no mental illness and should not have been confined.

Appear confused or nervous, fidget, whistle or smell bad: According to the Transportation Security Administration’s 92-point secret behavior watch list for spotting terrorists, these are among some of the telling signs of suspicious behavior: fidgeting, whistling, bad body odor, yawning, clearing your throat, having a pale face from recently shaving your beard, covering your mouth with your hand when speaking and blinking your eyes fast. You can also be pulled aside for interrogation if you “have ‘unusual items,’ like almanacs and ‘numerous prepaid calling cards or cell phones.’” One critic of the program accurately referred to the program as a “license to harass.”

Allow yourself to be seen in public waving a toy gun or anything remotely resembling a gun, such as a water nozzle or a remote control or a walking cane, for instance: No longer is it unusual to hear about incidents in which police shoot unarmed individuals first and ask questions later. John Crawford was shot by police in an Ohio Wal-Mart for holding an air rifle sold in the store that he may have intended to buy. Thirteen-year-old Andy Lopez Cruz was shot 7 times in 10 seconds by a California police officer who mistook the boy’s toy gun for an assault rifle. Christopher Roupe, 17, was shot and killed after opening the door to a police officer. The officer, mistaking the Wii remote control in Roupe’s hand for a gun, shot him in the chest. Another police officer repeatedly shot 70-year-old Bobby Canipe during a traffic stop. The cop saw the man reaching for his cane and, believing the cane to be a rifle, opened fire.

Stare at a police officer: Miami-Dade police slammed the 14-year-old Tremaine McMillian to the ground, putting him in a chokehold and handcuffing him after he allegedly gave them “dehumanizing stares” and walked away from them, which the officers found unacceptable.

Appear to be pro-gun, pro-freedom or anti-government: You might be a domestic terrorist in the eyes of the FBI (and its network of snitches) if you: express libertarian philosophies (statements, bumper stickers); exhibit Second Amendment-oriented views (NRA or gun club membership); read survivalist literature, including apocalyptic fictional books; show signs of self-sufficiency (stockpiling food, ammo, hand tools, medical supplies); fear an economic collapse; buy gold and barter items; subscribe to religious views concerning the book of Revelation; voice fears about Big Brother or big government; expound about constitutional rights and civil liberties; or believe in a New World Order conspiracy. This is all part of a larger trend in American governance whereby dissent is criminalized and pathologized, and dissenters are censored, silenced or declared unfit for society. 

Attend a public school: Microcosms of the police state, America’s public schools contain almost every aspect of the militarized, intolerant, senseless, overcriminalized, legalistic, surveillance-riddled, totalitarian landscape that plagues those of us on the “outside.” From the moment a child enters one of the nation’s 98,000 public schools to the moment she graduates, she will be exposed to a steady diet of draconian zero tolerance policies that criminalize childish behavior, overreaching anti-bullying statutes that criminalize speech, school resource officers (police) tasked with disciplining and/or arresting so-called “disorderly” students, standardized testing that emphasizes rote answers over critical thinking, politically correct mindsets that teach young people to censor themselves and those around them, and extensive biometric and surveillance systems that, coupled with the rest, acclimate young people to a world in which they have no freedom of thought, speech or movement. Additionally, as part of the government’s so-called ongoing war on terror, the FBI—the nation’s de facto secret police force—has been recruiting students and teachers to spy on each other and report anyone who appears to have the potential to be “anti-government” or “extremist” as part of its “Don’t Be a Puppet” campaign.

Speak truth to power: Long before Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden were being castigated for blowing the whistle on the government’s war crimes and the National Security Agency’s abuse of its surveillance powers, it was activists such as Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lennon who were being singled out for daring to speak truth to power. These men and others like them had their phone calls monitored and data files collected on their activities and associations. For a little while, at least, they became enemy number one in the eyes of the U.S. government.

Yet as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, you don’t even have to be a dissident to get flagged by the government for surveillance, censorship and detention.

All you really need to be is a citizen of the American police state.

OCTOPUS PROMIS: The Rise Of Thought Crime Technology — We’re Living In Orwell’s 1984

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By Aaron Kesel

Source: Activist Post

I don’t know if you have been paying attention or not, but a lot of police organizations across the U.S. have been using what are known as “heat lists” or pre-crime databases for years. What is a “heat list,” you may ask?

Well, “heat lists” are basically databases compiled by algorithms of people that police suspect may commit a crime. Yes, you read that right a person who “may” commit a crime. How these lists are generated and what factors determine an individual “may commit a crime” is unknown. A recent article by Tampa Bay Times highlights how this program in Florida terrorized and monitored residents of Pasco County and how the Pasco County Sheriff Department’s program operates.

According to the Times, the Sheriff’s office generates lists of people it considers likely to break the law, based on arrest histories, unspecified intelligence, and arbitrary decisions by police analysts. Then it sends deputies to find and interrogate anyone whose name appears, often without probable cause, a search warrant, or evidence of a specific crime.

This program according to the Times has been operating since at least 2011. The program introduces a social credit system. It gives people scores based on their criminal records. People get points each time they’re arrested, even when the charges are dropped, and they even get points for just being a suspect of a crime.

The deputies then make frequent – potentially even daily – visits to those with higher scores in the heavily flawed pre-criminal system.

Activists and journalists sued the Chicago Police Department in 2017 for failing to disclose how these programs operate, as Activist Post reported.

Chicago wasn’t the only major police department exposed using predictive crime algorithms. The Los Angeles Police Department was also caught one year later in 2018 by activists from the Stop LA Spying Coalition, as Activist Post reported.

This heat list idea in local law enforcement actually originated in Miami then was rolled out in Chicago. However, Activist Post may have missed other cities that gained less media attention; and as this writer will discuss shortly, the idea comes from a federal database.

A paper released last year by MIT entitled “Technical Flaws of Pretrial Risk Assessments Raise Grave Concerns” has been signed by some of the highest level university experts in the field of A.I. and law who warn about the “technical flaws” of these pre-crime based systems, Activist Post reported.

Fortunately for us, as Nicholas West noted, the pushback has already started in several cities, and a few police departments have dropped their programs after becoming aware of the inaccuracies. In 2018, for example, New Orleans suspended its 6-year running pre-crime program after its secret predictive policing software was exposed.

The scariest part of all this is that the New Orleans and LA police departments were actually both linked to Palantir Technologies, which directly works with the CIA and is suspected of being the current fork of PROMIS Main Core software. PROMIS pre-dates all of these local police heat lists, with algorithms that put suspected “domestic terrorists” into their own round-up lists, created at first by Oliver North for President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George H.W. Bush under FEMA’s Readiness Exercise — 1984 (REX-1984.)

The use of Palantir’s pre-crime algorithm software posits that other police departments may be utilizing the same software for their own pre-crime programs. Palantir is also the same company working with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency on its own lists to catch illegal immigrants, as Activist Post and investigative journalist Barrett Brown originally reported.

You may remember Palantir from journalist Barrett Brown, Anonymous’ hack of HBGary, or accusations that the company provided the technology that enables NSA’s mass surveillance PRISM which is the successor to PROMIS. Palantir’s software in many ways is similar to the Prosecutor’s Management Information System (PROMIS) stolen software Main Core and may be the next evolution in that code, which allegedly predated PRISM. In 2008, Salon.com published details about a top-secret government database that might have been at the heart of the Bush administration’s domestic spying operations. The database known as “Main Core” reportedly collected and stored vast amounts of personal and financial data about millions of Americans in the event of an emergency like Martial Law.

PROMIS was forked into many reported use-cases for the U.S. government, including an intelligence application on board nuclear submarines of the United States and Great Britain, and the use by both the U.S. government and certain allied governments for inventory tracking of nuclear materials and long-range ballistic missiles. But the most bizarre and frightening use was to keep track of dissident Americans under Main Core.

Trump’s administration has now expanded that effort for local police and federal officials with a national security watchlist that includes Americans who have no connection to terrorism. The new TOC (Transnational Organized Crime) watchlist, was authorized through a classified Attorney General order and launched in 2017, as Activist Post reported.

The TOC database allows the government to track and monitor Americans without a warrant, even when there is no evidence they’re breaking the law. Also, anyone who is considered to be an “authority”  – be it police to state and federal agencies, and even some allied foreign governments – can nominate any single person to the list.

The Main Core database isn’t just a rumor or conspiracy theory; PROMIS software was used by Iran-Contra fall guy then-National Security Council, Lt. Col. Oliver North to create the dissidents list for Rex-84 that would later evolve to Main Core. North used PROMIS software in 1982 in the Department of Justice, and at the White House, to compile a list of American dissidents to invoke if the government ever needed to do so under Ronald Reagan’s Continuity of Government (COG) program as a liaison to FEMA.

In 1993, Wired described North’s use of PROMIS in compiling the Main Core database:

Using PROMIS, sources point out, North could have drawn up lists of anyone ever arrested for a political protest, for example, or anyone who had ever refused to pay their taxes. Compared to PROMIS, Richard Nixon’s enemies list or Sen. Joe McCarthy’s blacklist look downright crude.

This Main Core database of individuals was given to a handful of individuals, meaning most government officials had no knowledge of the program ever existing. The database was passed off from administration to administration through National Security channels, according to sources.

This writer wrote extensively on Main Core and PROMIS in an investigation on the cover-up of stolen Inslaw software and murders of journalists Danny Casolaro and Anson NG Yonc, CIA intelligence operative Ian Spiro and NSA employee Alan Standorf. See: “Octopus PROMIS: The Conspiracy Against INSLAW Software, And The Murders To Cover Up A Scandal Bigger Than Watergate.”

The TOC list includes — “Insider threats,” which is relevant to leakers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, and journalists leaking these secrets like Julian Assange. In fact, last February, FBI Director Wray told the House Judiciary Committee that the Bureau had expanded initiatives “to focus on insider threats partnering with TCO [transnational criminal organization] actors.” This is a statement that is being re-echoed from 2017, when Wray stated a similar comment mentioning TCOs during a House meeting.

While presidents change, the leadership under them inside agencies only sees a shift by the replacing of the heads of the agencies. However, policies and stigmas inside stick with those in the intelligence community. In fact, Trump’s government, U.S. National Counterintelligence, and Security Center (NCSC) stressed in its latest report that hacktivists “Anonymous” and “public disclosure organizations” like WikiLeaks pose a “significant threat” similar to that of the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda terrorists, as well as Russia, Iran, and China.

Obama’s DHS didn’t hesitate to call those who believe in conspiracy theories potential right-wing terrorists, stating that the following points might make someone a terrorist in a study by the University of Maryland, which was funded in part by the Department of Homeland Security.

  • Americans who “are fiercely nationalistic, as opposed to universal and international in orientation”
  • Americans considering themselves “anti-global”
  • Americans who are “suspicious of centralized federal authority”
  • Americans who are “reverent of individual liberty (especially their right to own guns and be free of taxes)”
  • Americans exhibiting a belief in “conspiracy theories that involve grave threat to national sovereignty and/or personal liberty and a belief that one’s personal and/or national way of life is under attack”

Palantir was founded with early investment from the CIA and heavily used by the military, and Palantir is a subcontracting company in its own right. The company has even been featured in the Senate’s grilling of Facebook, when Washington State Senator Maria Cantwell asked CEO Mark Zuckerberg, “Do you know who Palantir is?” due to Peter Thiel sitting on Facebook’s board.

Palantir’s Gotham software allows Fusion Center police to track citizens beyond social media and online web accounts with people record searches, vehicle record searches, a Histogram tool, a Map tool, and an Object Explorer tool.

According to DHS, “Fusion centers operate as state and major urban area focal points for the receipt, analysis, gathering, and sharing of threat-related information between federal; state, local, tribal, territorial (SLTT); and private sector partners” like Palantir. Further, Fusion Centers are locally owned and operated, arms of the “intelligence community,” i.e. the 17 intelligence agencies coordinated by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). However, sometimes the buildings are staffed by trained NSA personnel like what happened in Mexico City, according to a 2010 Defense Department (DOD) memorandum.

This is only the beginning of the fight, and it’s going to be a long battle drawn out to prevent the use of this technology, not just here in the U.S. but worldwide as well. There’s no telling how long these projects have been active, and trusting police to honestly tell us is like trusting the wolf guarding the henhouse. For more articles on artificial intelligence predicting criminals, see Uri Gal’s hilarious and honestly titled article: “Predictive Algorithms Are No Better At Telling The Future Than A Crystal Ball.”

P Is for Predator State: The Building Blocks of Tyranny from A to Z

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By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; a culture-death is a clear possibility.” — Professor Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Discourse in the Age of Show Business

While America continues to fixate on the drama-filled reality show scripted by the powers-that-be, directed from the nation’s capital, and played out in high definition across the country, the American Police State has moved steadily forward.

Nothing has changed.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a convenient, traumatic, devastating distraction.

The American people, the permanent underclass in America, have allowed themselves to be so distracted and divided that they have failed to notice the building blocks of tyranny being laid down right under their noses by the architects of the Deep State.

Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton: they have all been complicit in carrying out the Deep State’s agenda. Unless something changes to restore the balance of power, the next president—the new boss—will be the same as the old boss.

Frankly, it really doesn’t matter what you call the old/new boss—the Deep State, the Controllers, the masterminds, the shadow government, the corporate elite, the police state, the surveillance state, the military industrial complex—so long as you understand that no matter who occupies the White House, it is a profit-driven, an unelected bureaucracy that is actually calling the shots.

If our losses are mounting with every passing day—and they are—it is a calculated siege intended to ensure our defeat at the hands of a totalitarian regime.

Free speech, the right to protest, the right to challenge government wrongdoing, due process, a presumption of innocence, the right to self-defense, accountability and transparency in government, privacy, media, sovereignty, assembly, bodily integrity, representative government: all of these and more are casualties in the government’s war on the American people.

Set against a backdrop of government surveillance, militarized federal police, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, overcriminalization, armed surveillance drones, whole body scanners, stop and frisk searches, and the like—all of which have been sanctioned by Congress, the White House and the courts—our constitutional freedoms are being steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded.

As a result, the American people have been treated like enemy combatants, to be spied on, tracked, scanned, frisked, searched, subjected to all manner of intrusions, intimidated, invaded, raided, manhandled, censored, silenced, shot at, locked up, and denied due process.

None of these dangers have dissipated in any way.

They have merely disappeared from our televised news streams.

It’s time to get educated on what’s really going on. Thus, in the interest of liberty and truth, here’s an A-to-Z primer that spells out the grim realities of life in the American Police State that no one seems to be talking about anymore.

A is for the AMERICAN POLICE STATE. A police state “is characterized by bureaucracy, secrecy, perpetual wars, a nation of suspects, militarization, surveillance, widespread police presence, and a citizenry with little recourse against police actions.”

B is for our battered BILL OF RIGHTS. In the militarized police culture that is America today, where you can be kicked, punched, tasered, shot, intimidated, harassed, stripped, searched, brutalized, terrorized, wrongfully arrested, and even killed by a police officer, and that officer is rarely held accountable for violating your rights, the Bill of Rights doesn’t amount to much.

C is for CIVIL ASSET FORFEITURE. This governmental scheme to deprive Americans of their liberties—namely, the right to property—is being carried out under the guise of civil asset forfeiture, a government practice wherein government agents (usually the police and now TSA agents) seize private property they “suspect” may be connected to criminal activity. Then, whether or not any crime is actually proven to have taken place, the government keeps the citizen’s property and it’s virtually impossible to get it back.

D is for DRONES. It was estimated that at least 30,000 drones would be airborne in American airspace by 2020, part of an $80 billion industry. Although some drones will be used for benevolent purposes, many will also be equipped with lasers, tasers and scanning devices, among other weapons—all aimed at “we the people.”

E is for EMERGENCY STATE. From 9/11 to COVID-19, we have been the subjected to an “emergency state” that justifies all manner of government tyranny and power grabs in the so-called name of national security. The government’s ongoing attempts to declare so-called national emergencies in order to circumvent the Constitution’s system of checks and balances constitutes yet another expansion of presidential power that exposes the nation to further constitutional peril.

F is for FASCISM. A study conducted by Princeton and Northwestern University concluded that the U.S. government does not represent the majority of American citizens. Instead, the study found that the government is ruled by the rich and powerful, or the so-called “economic elite.” Moreover, the researchers concluded that policies enacted by this governmental elite nearly always favor special interests and lobbying groups. In other words, we are being ruled by an oligarchy disguised as a democracy, and arguably on our way towards fascism—a form of government where private corporate interests rule, money calls the shots, and the people are seen as mere economic units or databits.

G is for GRENADE LAUNCHERS and GLOBAL POLICE. The federal government has distributed more than $18 billion worth of battlefield-appropriate military weapons, vehicles and equipment such as drones, tanks, and grenade launchers to domestic police departments across the country. As a result, most small-town police forces now have enough firepower to render any citizen resistance futile. Now take those small-town police forces, train them to look and act like the military, and then enlist them to be part of the United Nations’ Strong Cities Network program, and you not only have a standing army that operates beyond the reach of the Constitution but one that is part of a global police force.

H is for HOLLOW-POINT BULLETS. The government’s efforts to militarize and weaponize its agencies and employees is reaching epic proportions, with federal agencies as varied as the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration stockpiling millions of lethal hollow-point bullets, which violate international law. Ironically, while the government continues to push for stricter gun laws for the general populace, the U.S. military’s arsenal of weapons makes the average American’s handgun look like a Tinker Toy.

I is for the INTERNET OF THINGS, in which internet-connected “things” monitor your home, your health and your habits in order to keep your pantry stocked, your utilities regulated and your life under control and relatively worry-free. The key word here, however, is control. This “connected” industry propels us closer to a future where police agencies apprehend virtually anyone if the government “thinks” they may commit a crime, driverless cars populate the highways, and a person’s biometrics are constantly scanned and used to track their movements, target them for advertising, and keep them under perpetual surveillance.

J is for JAILING FOR PROFIT. Having outsourced their inmate population to private prisons run by private corporations, this profit-driven form of mass punishment has given rise to a $70 billion private prison industry that relies on the complicity of state governments to keep their privately run prisons full by jailing large numbers of Americans for petty crimes.

K is for KENTUCKY V. KING. In an 8-1 ruling, the Supreme Court ruled that police officers can break into homes, without a warrant, even if it’s the wrong home as long as they think they may have a reason to do so. Despite the fact that the police in question ended up pursuing the wrong suspect, invaded the wrong apartment and violated just about every tenet that stands between the citizenry and a police state, the Court sanctioned the warrantless raid, leaving Americans with little real protection in the face of all manner of abuses by law enforcement officials.

L is for LICENSE PLATE READERS, which enable law enforcement and private agencies to track the whereabouts of vehicles, and their occupants, all across the country. This data collected on tens of thousands of innocent people is also being shared between police agencies, as well as with government fusion centers and private companies. This puts Big Brother in the driver’s seat.

M is for MAIN CORE. Since the 1980s, the U.S. government has acquired and maintained, without warrant or court order, a database of names and information on Americans considered to be threats to the nation. As Salon reports, this database, reportedly dubbed “Main Core,” is to be used by the Army and FEMA in times of national emergency or under martial law to locate and round up Americans seen as threats to national security. There are at least 8 million Americans in the Main Core database.

N is for NO-KNOCK RAIDS. Owing to the militarization of the nation’s police forces, SWAT teams are now increasingly being deployed for routine police matters. In fact, more than 80,000 of these paramilitary raids are carried out every year. That translates to more than 200 SWAT team raids every day in which police crash through doors, damage private property, terrorize adults and children alike, kill family pets, assault or shoot anyone that is perceived as threatening—and all in the pursuit of someone merely suspected of a crime, usually possession of some small amount of drugs.

O is for OVERCRIMINALIZATION and OVERREGULATION. Thanks to an overabundance of 4500-plus federal crimes and 400,000 plus rules and regulations, it’s estimated that the average American actually commits three felonies a day without knowing it. As a result of this overcriminalization, we’re seeing an uptick in Americans being arrested and jailed for such absurd “violations” as letting their kids play at a park unsupervised, collecting rainwater and snow runoff on their own property, growing vegetables in their yard, and holding Bible studies in their living room.

P is for PATHOCRACY and PRECRIME. When our own government treats us as things to be manipulated, maneuvered, mined for data, manhandled by police and other government agents, mistreated, and then jailed in profit-driven private prisons if we dare step out of line, we are no longer operating under a constitutional republic. Instead, what we are experiencing is a pathocracy: tyranny at the hands of a psychopathic government, which “operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups.” Couple that with the government’s burgeoning precrime programs, which will use fusion centers, data collection agencies, behavioral scientists, corporations, social media, and community organizers and by relying on cutting-edge technology for surveillance, facial recognition, predictive policing, biometrics, and behavioral epigenetics in order to identify and deter so-called potential “extremists,” dissidents or rabble-rousers. Bear in mind that anyone seen as opposing the government—whether they’re Left, Right or somewhere in between—is now viewed as an extremist.

Q is for QUALIFIED IMMUNITY. Qualified immunity allows police officers to walk away without paying a dime for their wrongdoing. Conveniently, those deciding whether a cop should be immune from having to personally pay for misbehavior on the job all belong to the same system, all cronies with a vested interest in protecting the police and their infamous code of silence: city and county attorneys, police commissioners, city councils and judges.

R is for ROADSIDE STRIP SEARCHES and BLOOD DRAWS. The courts have increasingly erred on the side of giving government officials—especially the police—vast discretion in carrying out strip searches, blood draws and even anal and vaginal probes for a broad range of violations, no matter how minor the offense. In the past, strip searches were resorted to only in exceptional circumstances where police were confident that a serious crime was in progress. In recent years, however, strip searches have become routine operating procedures in which everyone is rendered a suspect and, as such, is subjected to treatment once reserved for only the most serious of criminals.

S is for the SURVEILLANCE STATE. On any given day, the average American going about his daily business will be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears. A byproduct of the electronic concentration camp in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether the NSA or some other entity, is listening in and tracking your behavior. This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere.

T is for TASERS. Nonlethal weapons such as tasers, stun guns, rubber pellets and the like have been used by police as weapons of compliance more often and with less restraint—even against women and children—and in some instances, even causing death. These “nonlethal” weapons also enable police to aggress with the push of a button, making the potential for overblown confrontations over minor incidents that much more likely. A Taser Shockwave, for instance, can electrocute a crowd of people at the touch of a button

U is for UNARMED CITIZENS SHOT BY POLICE. No longer is it unusual to hear about incidents in which police shoot unarmed individuals first and ask questions later, often attributed to a fear for their safety. Yet the fatality rate of on-duty patrol officers is reportedly far lower than many other professions, including construction, logging, fishing, truck driving, and even trash collection.

V is for VIRUSES AND FORCED VACCINATIONS. What started out as an apparent effort to prevent a novel coronavirus from sickening the nation (and the world) has become yet another means by which world governments (including the U.S.) can expand their powers, abuse their authority, and further oppress their constituents. With millions of dollars in stimulus funds being directed towards policing agencies across the country, the federal government plans to fight this COVID-19 virus with riot gear, gas masks, ballistic helmets, drones, and hi-tech surveillance technology. The road we are traveling is paved with lockdowns, SWAT team raids, mass surveillance and forced vaccinations. Now there’s talk of mobilizing the military to deliver forced vaccinations, mass surveillance in order to carry out contact tracing, and heavy fines and jail time for those who dare to venture out without a mask, congregate in worship without the government’s blessing, or re-open their  businesses without the government’s say-so.

W is for WHOLE-BODY SCANNERS. Using either x-ray radiation or radio waves, scanning devices and government mobile units are being used not only to “see” through your clothes but to spy on you within the privacy of your home. While these mobile scanners are being sold to the American public as necessary security and safety measures, we can ill afford to forget that such systems are rife with the potential for abuse, not only by government bureaucrats but by the technicians employed to operate them.

X is for X-KEYSCORE, one of the many spying programs carried out by the National Security Agency that targets every person in the United States who uses a computer or phone. This top-secret program “allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals.”

Y is for YOU-NESS. Using your face, mannerisms, social media and “you-ness” against you, you are now be tracked based on what you buy, where you go, what you do in public, and how you do what you do. Facial recognition software promises to create a society in which every individual who steps out into public is tracked and recorded as they go about their daily business. The goal is for government agents to be able to scan a crowd of people and instantaneously identify all of the individuals present. Facial recognition programs are being rolled out in states all across the country.

Z is for ZERO TOLERANCE. We have moved into a new paradigm in which young people are increasingly viewed as suspects and treated as criminals by school officials and law enforcement alike, often for engaging in little more than childish behavior or for saying the “wrong” word. In some jurisdictions, students have also been penalized under school zero tolerance policies for such inane “crimes” as carrying cough drops, wearing black lipstick, bringing nail clippers to school, using Listerine or Scope, and carrying fold-out combs that resemble switchblades. The lesson being taught to our youngest—and most impressionable—citizens is this: in the American police state, you’re either a prisoner (shackled, controlled, monitored, ordered about, limited in what you can do and say, your life not your own) or a prison bureaucrat (politician, police officer, judge, jailer, spy, profiteer, etc.).

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the reality we must come to terms with is that in the post-9/11 America we live in today, the government does whatever it wants, freedom be damned.

We have moved beyond the era of representative government and entered a new age.

You can call it the age of authoritarianism. Or fascism. Or oligarchy. Or the American police state.

Whatever label you want to put on it, the end result is the same: tyranny.

Minority Report (2002) Esoteric Analysis

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By Jay Dyer

Source: Jay’s Analysis

Spielberg’s Minority Report is now an important film to revisit.  Based on the short story by visionary science fiction author Phillip K. Dick, Spielberg’s film version implements an important number of predictive programming elements not found in Dick.  Both are worth a look, but the film is important for JaysAnalysis, since now 13 years later, we are actually seeing the implementation of the total technocratic takeover, including pre-crime tracking systems.

Although the film and the short story present the precognition as a metaphysical mystery by telepathic individuals who can see into the aether, the real pre-crime systems are based on A.I. and the digitizing of all records under total information awareness.  And as I’ve said, this was DARPA’s plan for the Internet all along.

In fact, a good friend of mine worked for a few years digitizing mass medical records, and while most are aware of Google’s attempts to digitize all books, most do not know why.  I’ve warned for several years now the end goal of all this digitization is not for “efficiency” and trendy techy cool iWatches to monitor heart rates and location.  The ultimate goal is total mind control, loss of free will and the complete rewrite of all past reality.

Consider, for example, the power the system will wield with the ability to “delete” all past versions of literature – religious texts, Shakespeare, 1984, nothing will be sacred and unable to be “revised.”  Remember that in 2009 Amazon erased Orwell’s 1984.  Your own past may even be deleted, subject to revision or altered to make you the next villain!  All this is revealed in detail in Minority Report.  Thus, while the public adopts “Kindles,” print itself is assigned the doom of the kindled fire – like Farenheit 451, as Richard Grove has said.

Minority Report’s setting is a 2055 dystopic D.C., where Agent John Anderton (Tom Cruise) is framed for two murders from within his own PreCrime Corporation ranks by the CEO, Lamar Burgess (Max Von Sydow). (Note: The existing system appears to be a merger of private and government sectors.)   I’m sure most readers have seen the film, so I’ll spare you detailed plot recaps and hit the highlights for the sake of our purposes.

The film’s PreCrime alerts a private corporation to a predetermined murder event ahead of time, giving the Agents of the corporation time to save victims.  Hailed as a perfect system, the infallibility of PreCrime has made D.C. the safest city in the world, with no murders for several years.  As a result, the PreCrime test requires a total surveillance society, something akin to complete panopticism.  In fact, the advertising in D.C. is user specific, targeting pedestrian’s personal desires based on retina scans – and all travel requires retinal scanning and mass microchipping.

We are now on the verge of the implementation of retinal scanning, as the U.S. military has engaged in retinal scanning in occupied territories for several years now.  It is important to understand that the action of the military abroad are often a test ground for the implementation of such surveillance and tracking technology at “home.”  In October 2010, the Guardian reported of U.S. troops stationed in Afghanistan:

“With each iris and fingertip scanned, the device gave the operator a steadily rising percentage chance that the goat herder was on an electronic “watch list” of suspects. Although it never reached 100%, it was enough for the man to be taken to the nearest US outpost for interrogation.

Since the Guardian witnessed that incident, which occurred near the southern city of Kandahar earlier this year, US soldiers have been dramatically increasing the vast database of biometric information collected from Afghans living in the most war-torn parts of southern and eastern Afghanistan. The US army now has information on 800,000 people, while another database developed by the country’s interior ministry has records on 250,000 people.”

Wired Magazine reported millions were the goal.  The goal is not millions, but the entire globe, where any and all information is now currency for “big data.”  This is exactly the world Minority Report foresaw, and for those curious about Phillip K. Dick, whispers are his foresight was due to being well-connected with the Silicon Valley elites.  This is how Ubik foresaw the “Internet of Things” I’ve written about many times, and probably in part why Dick went insane (or was targeted).  Slate writes of Ubik:

“Samsung, the world’s largest manufacturer of televisions, tells customers in its privacy policy that “personal or other sensitive” conversations “will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party” through the TV’s voice-recognition software. Welcome to the Internet of Things.

Sci-fi great Philip K. Dick warned us about this decades ago. In his classic 1969 novel Ubik, the characters have to negotiate the way they move and how they communicate with inanimate objects that monitor them, lock them out, and force payments.”

Just as the predictive algorithm in Asimov’s Foundation was able to track mass movements, so now the same algorithmic tracking is in place across the “web of things” that are capable of being recorded and tracked – and that’s most things.  The Pentagon has a virtual “you” in a realtime 3D interface that updates its data consistently from everything done on the web.  The Register reported in 2009 about this simulated warfare and predictive software:

“Defense analysts can understand the repercussions of their proposed recommendations for policy options or military actions by interacting with a virtual world environment,” write the researchers.

“They can propose a policy option and walk skeptical commanders through a virtual world where the commander can literally ‘see’ how things might play out. This process gives the commander a view of the most likely strengths and weaknesses of any particular course of action.”

It’s not telepathic Samantha Morton’s in a tub of goo, it’s Google and DARPA developing highly advanced technology along the lines of what William Binney exposed, as a former NSA employee.  Think here of War Games (1983), where the A.I. bot was able to war game future scenarios of global thermonuclear war, but thankfully Ferris Bueller was there to save us.  If this was displayed in 1983 in pop culture, imagine how far that technology has come 30 years later.  Lest anyone think the “precrime” is merely for security and weekend Xbox enjoyment, recall what I wrote two years back:

“Capitalism, communism, nationalism, 401ks, blah blah blah, all of these things are basically obsolete. Why?  Because of the nature of the real secret high-tech and plans for mega SmartCities that are to come.  You see, you think you are getting ahead and climbing the scum social ladder, and you aren’t even aware that the CEO of IBM Ginni Rommety gives lectures about SmartCities where everything you do will be rationed, tracked and traced by the central supercomputers, with pre-crime determining whether you are guilty of crimethink.  So everything you are trusting in is already obsolete.  You think I’m exaggerating?  On the contrary, you and your children’s futures are determined (you don’t have a future), and if you are allowed to live past the great culling, you will essentially be boxed into a giant WalmartTargetGameStopUniversity City that will literally be run by a supercomputer. Watch for yourself:”

And lest anyone think PreCrime is a thing of the future, consider that it has been used for two years in the U.K.  The New Scientist and 21stCenturyWire report:

“That’s the hope of police in the US, who have begun using advanced software to analyse crime data in conjunction with emails, text messages, chat files and CCTV recordings acquired by law enforcement. The system, developed by Wynyard, a firm based in Auckland, New Zealand, could even look at social media in real time in an attempt to predict where the gang might strike next.

“We’re trying to get to the source of the mastermind behind the criminal activity, that’s why we’re setting up a database so everybody can provide the necessary information and help us get higher up the chain,” says Craig Blanton of the Marion County Sheriff’s Office in Indiana. Because Felony Lane Gang members move from state to state to stay one step ahead, the centralised database is primed to aggregate historical information on the group and search for patterns in their movements, Blanton says.

“We know where they’ve been, where they are currently and where they may go in the future,” he says. “I think had we not taken on this challenge, we along with the other 110 impacted agencies would be doing our own thing without better knowledge of how this group operates.”

It’s not the only system that police forces have at their disposal. PredPol, which was developed by mathematician George Mohler at Santa Clara University in California, has been widely adopted in the US and the UK. The software analyses recorded crimes based on date, place and category of offence. It then generates daily suggestions for locations that should be patrolled by officers, depending on where it calculates criminal activity is most likely to occur.”

Returning to the film, an interesting tidbit occurs about three times that I noticed.  Any time Anderton or his fellow Agents access the “Temple,” the holding site of the telepathic PreCogs, the sound made is distinctly the iPhone power on sound.  The first iPod premiered in 2001, so I’m assuming it’s the same sound for turning on, but readers can correct me.  I find it curious if not, since the sound would likely be chosen for a reason. This puts the infamous 1984 Apple ad in a new, ominous light.

If you’ve seen the important Spike Jonze film, Her, you’ll see why.  In Her, lead character Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) falls in love with an iOS – his operating system.  The iOS of his future is an intelligent software system with capability for learning (like the A.I. in War Games), and ultimately transcends its own limitations.

I bring this up because Minority Report is distinctly dominated by eye imagery.  While seemingly insignificant, it is my opinion that Siri and Apple in particular are crucial in the implementation of the coming new order.  Apple ads have contained a distinctly esoteric and significant cultural referent.  This is not to say Microsoft or any of the other tech giants are insignificant, on the contrary, I believe they are all arms of one entity and the appearance of competition is largely illusory.

There is only one military industrial complex, and DARPA and Google and Apple and Microsoft are all its children.  The façade of competition is enough to advance the technology by the tech nerds that serve it, but in the end, it all serves the same system.  My point here is that the iPhone is much more than an iPhone. It is actually an EYEphone, functioning as the eye of Sauron himself, as A.I. reconnaissance before the takeover.

I have mentioned before the whispers are the iPhone of the next few years will contain a Siri that communicates with you like a personal assistant.  I have finally found an article on this here, which describes it directly in connection to Her, like I said here.  “Viv” will do the following:

“On the other hand, not only will Viv recognize disparate requests, she will also be able to put them together. Basically, Viv is Siri with the ability to learn. The project is being kept heavily under wraps, but the guys at Viv have hinted that they’re working towards creating a “global brain,” a shared source of artificial intelligence that’s as readily accessible as heat or electricity.  It’s unclear how soon a breakthrough of this magnitude can happen. But if this team made Siri, you can bet their next project is going to blow the tech world to pieces.”

In order to endear the public to that idea, a prototype Siri had to be offered.  While this may be a rumor, it will eventually come.  And the dystopic scenario presented in Her will meet the nightmare of Minority Report.  For now, it all seems harmless (though we are seeing a generation of youth destroyed by screens and pads – Steve Jobs didn’t let his own kids play with an iPad!), but the end goal I assure is nefarious.

The dominant ideology of these tech giants is pure and total dysgenics (not eugenics).  In order for the total rewrite to come, the existing structure must be destroyed.  The “old way” of doing things will be scapegoated as the technocracy replaces it, offering utopia and salvation, but the synthetic rewrite is a Trojan horse.  Humanity will be enslaved in the same virtual Matrix Anderton is enslaved in, in the film.

The film’s tag line, which pops up numerous times in the story, is about running.  “Everybody runs,” and John spends most of the film on the run from the very system he operated.  The film asks the question multiple times, “Can you see?” and when we think of this on a deeper level in terms of predictive programming, I think we are intended to look beyond the immediate narrative.  There are also numerous hat tips to Blade Runner, where again the “running” imagery comes to the fore.  Can we run from the panopticon?  Do we have eyes to see the iEYES that are “infallibly” surveilling us perpetually?

Future Crimes

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By John Steppling

Source: CounterPunch

“Precrime Analytical Wing: Contains the precognitives and the machinery needed to hear and analyze their predictions of future crimes.”

Philip K. Dick, Minority Report

“I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice…”

Martin Luther King

“The intellectuals are the dominant group’s ‘deputies,’ exercising the subaltern functions of social hegemony and political government”.

Gramsci

There was a jaw dropping but not unexpected article at The Guardian this week. It was actually part of a series of pieces at that paper that have sought to manufacture a legacy for Obama, the outgoing president, since his actual legacy is one of imperialist foreign policy, CIA support of jihadists, right wing coups, and most acutely, perhaps, a massive subverting of free speech and civil liberties. What Robert Parry has called a ‘war on dissent’. The Guardian piece took the form of asking novelists, public intellectuals {sic} and TV hacks what they perceived to be Obama’s legacy — and even the use of that word, *legacy* is a loaded indicator of the direction this piece was headed. What struck me most was not the predictable support for Obama policy (more on that later) but the utter banality of the writing. There were writers in this group who I have admired (Richard Ford for one, Marilynne Robinson, as well) but the sentiments were so stupefyingly superficial, so fatuous and fawning that it was hard not to see this as a kind of mini referendum on the state of Western culture.

Joyce Carol Oates (for whom ten words is usually better than the right word) described Obama as…“Brilliant and understated, urbane, witty, compassionate, composed..”. Siri Hutsvedt (who honestly I had to look up…finding her most notable achievement was being married to Paul Auster) wrote…“For eight years, we have been represented by an elegant, well-spoken, funny, highly educated, moderate, morally upright, preternaturally calm black man”. Richard Ford wrote…“This cold morning, when I think about Obama, immersed in what must be a decidedly mixed brew of emotions – mixed about his deeds, mixed about his effects on the US, decidedly mixed about our future – I’m confident he is thinking, right to his last minute in the office, as the president, and not much about, or for, himself. That’s what I expected when I voted for him – that he’d be a responsible public servant who’d try to look out for the entire country.” I know, I know, but that’s what he wrote. Look it up if you don’t believe me. Perhaps this is what a career of University teaching does to one. Edmund White called him one of our great presidents (love the use of *our*).

Jane Smiley, who at the least mentioned TPP and drones, but ended with…“As a national leader, he has engendered more chaos, but it is necessary chaos – a loud and meaningful return to the question of what constitutes the real America.” A necessary chaos? The fuck does that mean? I ask that sincerely, sort of. By the time I reached the end of this saccharine mind numbing bathos I thought back to the 1968 Democratic Convention and to Esquire Magazine, in its golden era, who sent William Burroughs, Jean Genet, Terry Southern and John Sack to cover the convention. I thought back to Robert Bly and his organizing of Writers against the Vietnam war. The readings he gave with Galway Kinnell and Ginsburg, and a dozen others. And to the way Bly spoke of art and the role of art in a society. In an interview with Michael Ventura, around the time of the Iraq invasion…

Bly:I don’t think we believe that a Great Mother is lying to us. It’s a father who’s lying to us. Thee whole system, in a way, is a father system.
Ventura: It’s a patriarchy, so it’s a father who’s lying.
Bly: Exactly. And we eventually get the sense that our own
father is lying to us. { } Whenever you have a culture completely run by gross
capitalism, all of the gods are driven away. Well, then what?
What does that mean when those gods are not present?

Later Bly says…

“When I talk about the world being mad, I tell people,
“You won’t believe how bad television is going to be in ten years.
You’re going to literally have to protect your children from it.”
And we’re not going to be able to change that. The only thing
we can do is recognize that it’s mad, and reach inside ourselves
and bring out our own genuine madness in the form of art,
and then teach our children to do the same.”

In 68, a corporate owned magazine, and hardly a socialist magazine, thought it reasonable to ask Genet or Burroughs to discuss a political convention. I mean even Norman Mailer wrote intelligently on Kennedy for Esquire, and Mailer isn’t exactly Gramsci. My point is, or I hope my first point, is that it is not always crucial to demand ideological analysis. For art’s radical nature is outside ideology. Just speaking from a radical perspective, an anti bourgeois perspective, can be enough. But in 1968 the U.S. still had artists. What artist could you invite today? What public intellectual? The Guardian picked Sarah Churchwell (who again, I’d never heard of) who wrote…

“The Obamas changed the rules for what it means to inhabit the White House, and not only because they were the first black family to do so. They were also the first modern family to do so, to be informal yet classy, upright yet kind, and, most important, themselves.”

That’s it then, just be yourself. But the lesson here, if there is one, is that the radical tradition in American life has been rendered invisible. Just as the history of labor and unions and strikes has been erased. There are plenty of great artists out there, actually. Tons of intellectuals, but they aren’t invited by corporate media. Was anyone from Black Agenda Report asked to comment? Or from, well, CounterPunch? Was Harry Belefonte asked? The manufacturing of an image of a culture, rather than an actual culture, is what organs of disinformation such as The Guardian are in the business of doing. And this is also what Hollywood does, of course. Look at the stuff that gets on in the flagship theatres of the U.S. What is the season at Lincoln Center? Does it matter? No, it really doesn’t. And running across all of this discussion is the question of class. In fact, that may be the most important aspect in all of this. The working class voice is erased. In total. And this is hugely significant. Even fifty years ago the stages of American theatres were filled by work from playwrights who did not have MFAs. Novels were written by criminals and outsiders. This is no less true, really, in the U.K. From Brendan Behan to Martin Amis is the road travelled. Now of course one can site exceptions to this, I think anyway. There are always celebrity outsiders, branded renegades. Usually this takes the form of a confessional. My time on oxycodone while writing Sit Coms. I was a teenage prostitute and was addicted to anti depressants, but then I found a higher power. But god forbid you express condemnation of the bourgeoisie. For that is the greatest of all crimes.

When I worked in Hollywood, I felt the class estrangement acutely. But I did get work and had some modest success. And I remember when a major cable producer of the era asked me, during a pitch meeting, for the names of writers I thought would be good to employ for an anthology series they wanted to put together. I said, well, Iceberg Slim (Robert Beck) and John Rechy. A silence fell on the room. I was very very naive. Hollywood today seems infested with lawyers, former political interns, and business school graduates. Most from Ivy league schools. And the world that is manufactured is one that reflects their class. And the effect this has had is to alienate the younger artists who do not come from affluent backgrounds. It has also normalized the a vision of the world that belongs to perhaps ten per cent of the population. The rest are strangers in their own land. Strangers to the official sanctioned culture. And in that sense, Hollywood has sort of merged with Madison Avenue.

The class divide is being starkly revealed this last few months. And it has also served to put in stark relief the real impetus of U.S. foreign policy (and to domestic policy, too, only not as drastically). After WW2 and the formation of the CIA, the shaping of a political intention was being finalized. This came from George Kennan and the Dulles Brothers. And Henry Kissinger was the premier exemplar of this thinking. Kissinger, who supported the Shah and his death squads in Iran, and chaired the Presidential Commission on Central America in the 1980s,(employing Ollie North) and which unleashed an unimaginable terror on that region, and who orchestrated the Pinochet coup in Chile to protect ITT and, as a side bar, to teach a lesson to any government not readily obedient. This has been the seamless and never changing foreign policy of the U.S. for seventy some years. Punish the disobedient (meaning anything smacking of socialism or any nation even the tiniest bit resistant to Western business) and to continue toward global hegemony, and at the same time perpetuating conflicts which make both defense contractors and giant service providers such as Halliburton a lot of money.

The U.S. has cultivated compliant nations (Australia, the U.K. most notably) to enforce its policy (think East Timor, Iraq and Libya et al) and now owns a complient organization with international standing: NATO. And NATO serves as a legitimizing international (sic) institution of pacification.

John Pilger writes…

“The other day, an Indonesian friend took me to his primary school where, in October 1965, his teacher was beaten to death, suspected of being a communist.
The murder was typical of the slaughter of more than a million people: teachers, students, civil servants, peasants. Described by the CIA as “one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century”, it brought to power the dictator Suharto, the west’s man. Within a year of the bloodbath, Indonesia’s economy was redesigned in America, giving western capital access to vast mineral wealth, markets and cheap labour. “

Stephan Gowans writes…

“The United States had waged a long war against Syria from the very moment the country’s fiercely independent Arab nationalist movement came to power in 1963. Assad and his father Hafez al-Assad were committed to that movement. Washington sought to purge Arab nationalist influence from the Syrian state and the Arab world more broadly. It was a threat to Washington’s agenda of establishing global primacy and promoting business-friendly investment climates for US banks, investors and corporations throughout the world.”

The rise of the neo cons, which rather officially began with Project for a New American Century (just prior to Bush Jr’s presidency) was really just an extension of that original plan for global domination. At that time this was articulated by a seething nearly hysterical hatred of the Soviet Union. And the structural aspect of this remains in place with today’s rabid and massive propaganda campaign directed at Putin. And indeed even on the left one hears the echoes of a Russophobic sensibility. It is as if these faux leftists can not allow a critique of U.S. imperialism (in Syria for example) without off handedly smearing Russia, too. One need only look at who is surrounding whom with military bases. And the same holds true, with slightly less hysteria, for China.

In 2012 Ed Herman, speaking in a radio interview, said

“…humanitarian intervention {has} been used strictly for the interests of the United States and other Western powers and Israel. Strictly. So there’s no intervention in Saudi Arabia or Israel or Yemen or Bahrain. There was none in Egypt…And there was Egypt, here you had a miserable dictator for decades, and then you had an uprising where a lot of people were being beaten and killed in the streets, and you never had Mrs. Clinton ever asking for any application of humanitarian intervention. Not once. Never. They’re getting away with the most unbelievable double standard imaginable.”

This is, none of it, new. And yet, despite the obvious record of Obama in furthering exactly this world vision, the liberal organs of *real* news continue to paint their revisionist narratives of American heroism and goodness. And it is breathtaking in a way to read this new class of quisling artist, the court eunuchs for the Democratic Party establishment. And Obama’s apparent anger and petulance belies, certainly, descriptions such as ‘preternaturally calm’, and ‘dignified’. But there is a thread of liberal guilt running through this as well. Obama’s race (and his perfect wife and kids — and one longs for Ron Reagan Jr or to go back to James Madison’s son John, and shit, even the Bush girls might be a relief from these Stepford children.) is the psychological glue for a visibly excessive adoration. And this is a white liberal class that is haunted, I suspect, in their heart of hearts, by the knowledge of their own privilege and that that privilege has resulted in oceans of blood, and the knowledge, if they were ever to question themselves, that they would sell out anyone to retain that privilege. They love Obama and Obama is black, therefore…etc.

As Ajamu Baraka noted

“In the face of the Neo-McCarthyism represented by this legislation and the many other repressive moves of the Obama administration to curtail speech and control information — from the increased surveillance of the public to the use of the espionage act to prosecute journalists and whistleblowers — one would reasonably assume that forces on the left would vigorously oppose the normalization of authoritarianism, especially in this period of heightened concerns about neo-fascism.
Unfortunately, the petit-bourgeois “latte left” along with their liberal allies have been in full collaboration with the state for the past eight years, with the predictable result that no such alarm was issued, nor has any critique or even debate been forthcoming.”

The openly Imperialist U.S. state has tortured, illegally kidnapped, and simply murdered both leaders of sovereign states as well as countless innocent victims. That Samantha Power’s motorcade in rushing through a village in Cameroon happened to run over a ten year old boy, and didn’t stop — this barely made the evening news at all (but hey, they did send the family fifteen hundred dollars by way of an apology). They have acted covertly to destabilize governments and have manufactured enemies at a rate that is staggering to contemplate. Obama’s tight relationship with the most odious autocratic and murderous country on earth, Saudi Arabia, speaks to the cynicism of the political elite.

And yet, the artistic communities by and large continue to focus on identity issues (once they have attended to their career moves and spoken with their agents), most of which affect their own class. The dire suffering of the poor makes good voyeuristic source material, but the segregation of classes is enforced zealously. Token exceptions are simply that.

How is it possible to become so alarmed by Trump, while supporting Democrats? Those millions on the street protesting the looming invasion of Iraq must have noticed that every single Democrat in government voted FOR the invasion (save for the honorable Barbara Lee). And yet here they all are wringing their hands in dismay that Hillary lost. Here they are constantly repeating the litanies of Trump evil and never noticing the crimes of earlier democratic presidents and administrations. So, yes Trump’s appointments are awful. But I refuse to even dig into that until a discussion of Obama’s appointments are dissected. First came Rahm Emanuel, former memeber of the IDF, all around thug and bully and lover of never ending war to help expand Israeli power. Penny Pritzker, heiress and elitist and friend to the 1%, or Robert Rubin or Tim Geithner (!!!) or Tom Daschle, the senator from Citibank. I’m just scratching the surface. Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton. The point is that I am coming to feel that almost any focus on Trump feels misplaced. Certainly now it does since he isn’t even president yet. The deconstruction of liberal Obama is far from complete and the propaganda apparatus is working overtime to rewrite not just recent history, but the present. And the anti Russian propaganda is so absurd, so transparent, that this feels far more important than the predictable stupidity of Trump. I mean Obama is massing troops near the Russian border. Obama is ramping up the building of purpose built navel bases near China. Obama is still looking to prosecute Chelsea Manning and every other whistleblower. And he is still signing draconian legislation to curb free speech and institutionalize legitimacy for the new McCarthyism. Talking about Trump is a form of forgetting. I can’t do it. And if there is an easier target for parody or even non parodic narrative than Donald Trump, I havent met them. And easy is never an act of rigorous self examination.

Thomas Bates writes, discussing Gramsci…

“Gramsci retained a skepticism towards these alienated fils de bourgeois, a
skepticism which was not, however, mere prejudice, but was an historical
judgment informed by the experience of the Italian labor movement. How was
one to explain the passing of entire groups of left-wing intellectuals into the
enemy camp? More precisely, how was one to explain the phenomena of socialists
entering into bourgeois governments and of revolutionary syndicalists
entering into the nationalist and then the Fascist movement? Gramsci viewed
these puzzling events as the continuation on a mass scale of the ‘trasformismo’
of the nineteenth century. The “generation gap” within the ruling class had resulted
in a large influx of bourgeois youth into the popular movements, especially
during the turbulent decade of the 1890’s. But in the war-induced crisis
of the Italian State in the early twentieth century, these prodigal children
returned to the fold…”

And Gramsci adds..

“The bourgeoisie fails to educate its youth (struggle of generations). The youth
allow themselves to be culturally attracted by the workers, and right away
they … try to take control of them (in their “unconscious” desire to impose
the hegemony of their own class on the people), but during historical crises
they return to the fold.”

White affluent self identifying liberals believe they are the decision makers. That is their destiny. They believe that. One must build a new culture. Not endlessly ratify a decrepit and atrophying one. One must stop perceiving *liberals* as being on the side of change. For they are not. Guy Debord began his situationist masterpiece (1967) by quoting Feuerbach, Preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity:

“But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence… illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness. “

 

John Steppling is an original founding member of the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival, a two-time NEA recipient, Rockefeller Fellow in theatre, and PEN-West winner for playwriting. Plays produced in LA, NYC, SF, Louisville, and at universities across the US, as well in Warsaw, Lodz, Paris, London and Krakow. Taught screenwriting and curated the cinematheque for five years at the Polish National Film School in Lodz, Poland. A collection of plays, Sea of Cortez & Other Plays was published in 1999, and his book on aesthetics, Aesthetic Resistance and Dis-Interest was published this year by Mimesis International.