Jan 29, 2015

The Future of Freedom






A 36-year veteran of America’s Intelligence Community, William Binney resigned from his position as Director for Global Communications Intelligence (COMINT) at the National Security Agency (NSA) and blew the whistle, after discovering that his efforts to protect the privacy and security of Americans were being undermined by those above him in the chain of command. The NSA data-monitoring program which Binney and his team had developed -- codenamed ThinThread -- was being aimed not at foreign targets as intended, but at Americans (codenamed as Stellar Wind); destroying privacy here and around the world. Binney voices his call to action for the billions of individuals whose rights are currently being violated. William Binney speaks out in the above feature-length interview with Tragedy and Hope's Richard Grove, focused on the topic of the ever-growing Surveillance State in America. 

Resist the darkness...

OneLove

:::MME:::

 

The Digital Arms Race: NSA Preps America for Future Battle


===>Cyber-War<==  

There is now the capacity to make tyranny total in America. Only law ensures that we never fall into that abyss—the abyss from which there is no return.
― James Bamford


Not enough people know or understand just how little freedom we have left.”
― Korban Blake


 We are moving rapidly into a world in which the spying machinery is built into every object we encounter.
-Howard Rheingold
 
 The way things are supposed to work is that we're supposed to know virtually everything about what they [the government] do: that's why they're called public servants. They're supposed to know virtually nothing about what we do: that's why we're called private individuals.
― Glenn Greenwald
 
 What do you call someone who watches you in your private moments? They used to be called a pervert, but now they’re called an NSA agent.
 ― Jarod Kin
 
When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions!
 William Shakespeare
 
When the Rule of Law disappears, we are ruled by the whims of men.
― Tiffany Madison
 
The Social Engineers wet dream is to be able to surveil us in our sleep
― Dean Cavanagh 
 
 Under observation, we act less free, which means we effectively are less free.
― Edward Snowden
 
The most sacred thing is to be able to shut your own door.
― G.K. Chesterton
 
Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order [...] and the like.”
― William O. Douglas
 
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
― United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights 
 
 It is just when people are all engaged in snooping on themselves and one another that they become anesthetized to the whole process. Tranquilizers and anesthetics, private and corporate, become the largest business in the world just as the world is attempting to maximize every form of alert. Sound-light shows, as new cliché, are in effect mergers, retrievers of the tribal condition. It is a state that has already overtaken private enterprise, as individual businesses form into massive conglomerates. As information itself becomes the largest business in the world, data banks know more about individual people than the people do themselves. The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.
― Marshall McLuhan
 
OneLove
 
:::MME:::
 

Jan 27, 2015

Chris Hedges: 'American Sniper' Caters to a Deep Sickness Rippling Through Society

 

$200 million in box office receipts is a measure of how messed up this country is.



“American Sniper” lionizes the most despicable aspects of U.S. society—the gun culture, the blind adoration of the military, the belief that we have an innate right as a “Christian” nation to exterminate the “lesser breeds” of the earth, a grotesque hypermasculinity that banishes compassion and pity, a denial of inconvenient facts and historical truth, and a belittling of critical thinking and artistic expression. Many Americans, especially white Americans trapped in a stagnant economy and a dysfunctional political system, yearn for the supposed moral renewal and rigid, militarized control the movie venerates. These passions, if realized, will extinguish what is left of our now-anemic open society.

The movie opens with a father and his young son hunting a deer. The boy shoots the animal, drops his rifle and runs to see his kill.

“Get back here,” his father yells. “You don’t ever leave your rifle in the dirt.”

“Yes, sir,” the boy answers.

“That was a helluva shot, son,” the father says. “You got a gift. You gonna make a fine hunter some day.”

The camera cuts to a church interior where a congregation of white Christians—blacks appear in this film as often as in a Woody Allen movie—are listening to a sermon about God’s plan for American Christians. The film’s title character, based on Chris Kyle, who would become the most lethal sniper in U.S. military history, will, it appears from the sermon, be called upon by God to use his “gift” to kill evildoers. The scene shifts to the Kyle family dining room table as the father intones in a Texas twang: “There are three types of people in this world: sheep, wolves and sheepdogs. Some people prefer to believe evil doesn’t exist in the world. And if it ever darkened their doorstep they wouldn’t know how to protect themselves. Those are the sheep. And then y
ou got predators.”

The camera cuts to a schoolyard bully beating a smaller boy.

“They use violence to prey on people,” the father goes on. “They’re the wolves. Then there are those blessed with the gift of aggression and an overpowering need to protect the flock. They are a rare breed who live to confront the wolf. They are the sheepdog. We’re not raising any sheep in this family.”

The father lashes his belt against the dining room table.

“I will whup your ass if you turn into a wolf,” he says to his two sons. “We protect our own. If someone tries to fight you, tries to bully your little brother, you have my permission to finish it.”

There is no shortage of simpletons whose minds are warped by this belief system. We elected one of them, George W. Bush, as president. They populate the armed forces and the Christian right. They watch Fox News and believe it. They have little understanding or curiosity about the world outside their insular communities. They are proud of their ignorance and anti-intellectualism. They prefer drinking beer and watching football to reading a book. And when they get into power—they already control the Congress, the corporate world, most of the media and the war machine—their binary vision of good and evil and their myopic self-adulation cause severe trouble for their country. “American Sniper,” like the big-budget feature films pumped out in Germany during the Nazi era to exalt deformed values of militarism, racial self-glorification and state violence, is a piece of propaganda, a tawdry commercial for the crimes of empire. That it made a record-breaking $105.3 million over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday long weekend is a symptom of the United States’ dark malaise.

“The movie never asks the seminal question as to why the people of Iraq are fighting back against us in the very first place,” said Mikey Weinstein, whom I reached by phone in New Mexico. Weinstein, who worked in the Reagan White House and is a former Air Force officer, is the head of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which challenges the growing Christian fundamentalism within the U.S. military. “It made me physically ill with its twisted, totally one-sided distortions of wartime combat ethics and justice woven into the fabric of Chris Kyle’s personal and primal justification mantra of ‘God-Country-Family.’ It is nothing less than an odious homage, indeed a literal horrific hagiography to wholesale slaughter.”

Weinstein noted that the embrace of extreme right-wing Christian chauvinism, or Dominionism, which calls for the creation of a theocratic “Christian” America, is especially acute among elite units such as the SEALs and the Army Special Forces.

The evildoers don’t take long to make an appearance in the film. This happens when television—the only way the movie’s characters get news—announces the 1998 truck bombings of the American embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi in which hundreds of people were killed. Chris, now grown, and his brother, aspiring rodeo riders, watch the news reports with outrage. Ted Koppel talks on the screen about a “war” against the United States.

“Look what they did to us,” Chris whispers.

He heads down to the recruiter to sign up to be a Navy SEAL. We get the usual boot camp scenes of green recruits subjected to punishing ordeals to make them become real men. In a bar scene, an aspiring SEAL has painted a target on his back and comrades throw darts into his skin. What little individuality these recruits have—and they don’t appear to have much—is sucked out of them until they are part of the military mass. They are unquestioningly obedient to authority, which means, of course, they are sheep.

We get a love story too. Chris meets Taya in a bar. They do shots. The movie slips, as it often does, into clichéd dialogue.

She tells him Navy SEALs are “arrogant, self-centered pricks who think you can lie and cheat and do whatever the fuck you want. I’d never date a SEAL.”

“Why would you say I’m self-centered?” Kyle asks. “I’d lay down my life for my country.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s the greatest country on earth and I’d do everything I can to protect it,” he says.

She drinks too much. She vomits. He is gallant. He helps her home. They fall in love. Taya is later shown watching television. She yells to Chris in the next room.

“Oh, my God, Chris,” she says.

“What’s wrong?” he asks.

“No!” she yells.

Then we hear the television announcer: “You see the first plane coming in at what looks like the east side. …”

Chris and Taya watch in horror. Ominous music fills the movie’s soundtrack. The evildoers have asked for it. Kyle will go to Iraq to extract vengeance. He will go to fight in a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, a country that columnist Thomas Friedman once said we attacked “because we could.” The historical record and the reality of the Middle East don’t matter. Muslims are Muslims. And Muslims are evildoers or, as Kyle calls them, “savages.” Evildoers have to be eradicated.

Chris and Taya marry. He wears his gold Navy SEAL trident on the white shirt under his tuxedo at the wedding. His SEAL comrades are at the ceremony. 

“Just got the call, boys—it’s on,” an officer says at the wedding reception.

The Navy SEALs cheer. They drink. And then we switch to Fallujah. It is Tour One. Kyle, now a sniper, is told Fallujah is “the new Wild West.” This may be the only accurate analogy in the film, given the genocide we carried out against Native Americans. He hears about an enemy sniper who can do “head shots from 500 yards out. They call him Mustafa. He was in the Olympics.”

Kyle’s first kill is a boy who is handed an anti-tank grenade by a young woman in a black chador. The woman, who expresses no emotion over the boy’s death, picks up the grenade after the boy is shot and moves toward U.S. Marines on patrol. Kyle kills her too. And here we have the template for the film and Kyle’s best-selling autobiography, “American Sniper.” Mothers and sisters in Iraq don’t love their sons or their brothers. Iraqi women breed to make little suicide bombers. Children are miniature Osama bin Ladens. Not one of the Muslim evildoers can be trusted—man, woman or child. They are beasts. They are shown in the film identifying U.S. positions to insurgents on their cellphones, hiding weapons under trapdoors in their floors, planting improvised explosive devices in roads or strapping explosives onto themselves in order to be suicide bombers. They are devoid of human qualities

“There was a kid who barely had any hair on his balls,” Kyle says nonchalantly after shooting the child and the woman. He is resting on his cot with a big Texas flag behind him on the wall. “Mother gives him a grenade, sends him out there to kill Marines.”

Enter The Butcher—a fictional Iraqi character created for the film. Here we get the most evil of the evildoers. He is dressed in a long black leather jacket and dispatches his victims with an electric drill. He mutilates children—we see a child’s arm he amputated. A local sheik offers to betray The Butcher for $100,000. The Butcher kills the sheik. He murders the sheik’s small son in front of his mother with his electric drill. The Butcher shouts: “You talk to them, you die with them.”

Kyle moves on to Tour Two after time at home with Taya, whose chief role in the film is to complain through tears and expletives about her husband being away. Kyle says before he leaves: “They’re savages. Babe, they’re fuckin’ savages.”

He and his fellow platoon members spray-paint the white skull of the Punisher from Marvel Comics on their vehicles, body armor, weapons and helmets. The motto they paint in a circle around the skull reads: “Despite what your momma told you … violence does solve problems.”

“And we spray-painted it on every building and walls we could,” Kyle wrote in his memoir, 
“American Sniper.” “We wanted people to know, we’re here and we want to fuck with you. …You see us? We’re the people kicking your ass. Fear us because we will kill you, motherfucker.”

The book is even more disturbing than the film. In the film Kyle is a reluctant warrior, one forced to do his duty. In the book he relishes killing and war. He is consumed by hatred of all Iraqis. He is intoxicated by violence. He is credited with 160 confirmed kills, but he notes that to be confirmed a kill had to be witnessed, “so if I shot someone in the stomach and he managed to crawl around where we couldn’t see him before he bled out he didn’t count.”

Kyle insisted that every person he shot deserved to die. His inability to be self-reflective allowed him to deny the fact that during the U.S. occupation many, many innocent Iraqis were killed, including some shot by snipers. Snipers are used primarily to sow terror and fear among enemy combatants. And in his denial of reality, something former slaveholders and former Nazis perfected to an art after overseeing their own atrocities, Kyle was able to cling to childish myth rather than examine the darkness of his own soul and his contribution to the war crimes we carried out in Iraq. He justified his killing with a cloying sentimentality about his family, his Christian faith, his fellow SEALs and his nation. But sentimentality is not love. It is not empathy. It is, at its core, about self-pity and self-adulation. That the film, like the book, swings between cruelty and sentimentality is not accidental. 

“Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel,” James Baldwin reminded us. “The wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.”

“Savage, despicable evil,” Kyle wrote of those he was killing from rooftops and windows. “That’s what we were fighting in Iraq. That’s why a lot of people, myself included, called the enemy ‘savages.’… I only wish I had killed more.” At another point he writes: “I loved killing bad guys. … I loved what I did. I still do … it was fun. I had the time of my life being a SEAL.” He labels Iraqis “fanatics” and writes “they hated us because we weren’t Muslims.” He claims “the fanatics we fought valued nothing but their twisted interpretation of religion.”

“I never once fought for the Iraqis,” he wrote of our Iraqi allies. “I could give a flying fuck about them.”

He killed an Iraqi teenager he claimed was an insurgent. He watched as the boy’s mother found his body, tore her clothes and wept. He was unmoved.

He wrote: “If you loved them [the sons], you should have kept them away from the war. You should have kept them from joining the insurgency. You let them try and kill us—what did you think would happen to them?”

"People back home [in the U.S.], people who haven’t been in war, at least not that war, sometimes don’t seem to understand how the troops in Iraq acted,” he went on. “They’re surprised—shocked—to discover we often joked about death, about things we saw."

He was investigated by the Army for killing an unarmed civilian. According to his memoir, Kyle, who viewed all Iraqis as the enemy, told an Army colonel: “I don’t shoot people with Korans. I’d like to, but I don’t.” The investigation went nowhere.

Kyle was given the nickname “Legend.” He got a tattoo of a Crusader cross on his arm. “I wanted everyone to know I was a Christian. I had it put in red, for blood. I hated the damn savages I’d been fighting,” he wrote. “I always will.” Following a day of sniping, after killing perhaps as many as six people, he would go back to his barracks to spent his time smoking Cuban Romeo y Julieta No. 3 cigars and “playing video games, watching porn and working out.” On leave, something omitted in the movie, he was frequently arrested for drunken bar fights. He dismissed politicians, hated the press and disdained superior officers, exalting only the comradeship of warriors. His memoir glorifies white, “Christian” supremacy and war. It is an angry tirade directed against anyone who questions the military’s elite, professional killers.

“For some reason, a lot of people back home—not all people—didn’t accept that we were at war,” he wrote. “They didn’t accept that war means death, violent death, most times. A lot of people, not just politicians, wanted to impose ridiculous fantasies on us, hold us to some standard of behavior that no human being could maintain.”

The enemy sniper Mustafa, portrayed in the film as if he was a serial killer, fatally wounds Kyle’s comrade Ryan “Biggles” Job.  In the movie Kyle returns to Iraq—his fourth tour—to extract revenge for Biggles’ death. This final tour, at least in the film, centered on the killing of The Butcher and the enemy sniper, also a fictional character. As it focuses on the dramatic duel between hero Kyle and villain Mustafa the movie becomes ridiculously cartoonish.

Kyle gets Mustafa in his sights and pulls the trigger. The bullet is shown leaving the rifle in slow motion. “Do it for Biggles,” someone says. The enemy sniper’s head turns into a puff of blood.
“Biggles would be proud of you,” a soldier says. “You did it, man.”

His final tour over, Kyle leaves the Navy. As a civilian he struggles with the demons of war and becomes, at least in the film, a model father and husband and works with veterans who were maimed in Iraq and Afghanistan. He trades his combat boots for cowboy boots.

The real-life Kyle, as the film was in production, was shot dead at a shooting range near Dallas on Feb. 2, 2013, along with a friend, Chad Littlefield. A former Marine, Eddie Ray Routh, who had been suffering from PTSD and severe psychological episodes, allegedly killed the two men and then stole Kyle’s pickup truck. Routh will go on trial next month. The film ends with scenes of Kyle’s funeral procession—thousands lined the roads waving flags—and the memorial service at the Dallas Cowboys’ home stadium. It shows fellow SEALs pounding their tridents into the top of his coffin, a custom for fallen comrades. Kyle was shot in the back and the back of his head.  Like so many people he dispatched, he never saw his killer when the fatal shots were fired.

The culture of war banishes the capacity for pity. It glorifies self-sacrifice and death. It sees pain, ritual humiliation and violence as part of an initiation into manhood. Brutal hazing, as Kyle noted in his book, was an integral part of becoming a Navy SEAL. New SEALs would be held down and choked by senior members of the platoon until they passed out. The culture of war idealizes only the warrior. It belittles those who do not exhibit the warrior’s “manly” virtues. It places a premium on obedience and loyalty. It punishes those who engage in independent thought and demands total conformity. It elevates cruelty and killing to a virtue. This culture, once it infects wider society, destroys all that makes the heights of human civilization and democracy possible. The capacity for empathy, the cultivation of wisdom and understanding, the tolerance and respect for difference and even love are ruthlessly crushed. The innate barbarity that war and violence breed is justified by a saccharine sentimentality about the nation, the flag and a perverted Christianity that blesses its armed crusaders. This sentimentality, as Baldwin wrote, masks a terrifying numbness. It fosters an unchecked narcissism. Facts and historical truths, when they do not fit into the mythic vision of the nation and the tribe, are discarded. Dissent becomes treason. All opponents are godless and subhuman. “American Sniper” caters to a deep sickness rippling through our society. It holds up the dangerous belief that we can recover our equilibrium and our lost glory by embracing an American fascism.

                                                                    **********

OneLove

:::MME:::

Jan 25, 2015

Black Robed Tyrants


(SOBs)


(SOURCE)Thom Hartmann calls them “five unelected, unaccountable kings in black robes.” I call them five results-oriented corporatists who will twist their legal arguments into any pretzel logic necessary to recognize, and expand, the legal and Constitutional rights of corporations and the very wealthy, and to limit or take away completely the legal and Constitutional rights of natural human beings.

Whatever you call them, on the five-year anniversary of the Citizens United decision this week, it should be clear to any objective observer that the five Justices in the Conservative majority on the United States Supreme Court — Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Anthony Kennedy and Samuel Alito — are arguably the most radical extremists ever to sit on the Supreme Court bench.

You have to look back to the Supreme Courts of the now-infamous Lochner era (1897 to 1937) to find a group of judicial extremists to rival today’s “felonious five” in their disregard for precedent and their willingness to “legislate from the bench” as they impose highly unpopular – and nationally damaging – laissez-faire economic theories on the country.

Like the Lochner era Courts, which created spurious legal doctrines such as “substantive due process” and “liberty of contract,” and then used those newly-invented legal doctrines to strike down any legislation that burdened corporations or disturbed the existing economic hierarchy, today’s Supreme Court has expanded its own spurious legal doctrines. “Corporate constitutional rights” and “money as speech” have bestowed inalienable Constitutional rights, and legal rights, on corporations and the moneyed elites who profit from them.

Five years after Citizens United, corporations continue to run roughshod over the rights of We the People, and as a result, our small “d” small “r” democratic republic is being legally changed, before our eyes, into a corporate plutocracy.

A Little Recent History
The pro-corporatist activism on today’s Supreme Court has its roots in a 1971 memorandum written for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce by a tobacco industry lobbyist named Lewis Powell. The memo, which was entitled “Attack on the American Free Enterprise System,” called on the Chamber to engage in a sustained and concerted campaign to use an “activist-minded Supreme Court” to shape big business-friendly social, economic and political change. This document is often referred to as “The Powell Memo.”

That same year, Richard Nixon nominated Powell to the U.S. Supreme Court. Once on the Court, Justice Powell (a Democrat) put the plan that he had laid out in “The Powell Memo” into full effect. He joined the Court’s per curium decision in Buckley v. Valeo (1976), in which the Court created the spurious legal doctrine of “money equals speech,” and then used that legal doctrine to strike down the federal government’s first ever attempt at regulating political fundraising and political spending through the use of comprehensive campaign finance reform.
Two years later, Justice Powell took his plan one step further, in the decision he wrote in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti (1978). In that case, the Court struck down a Massachusetts law that prohibited corporate donations in ballot initiatives unless the corporation’s interests were directly at stake in the election. The Court’s rationale for the decision was based on the Court’s findings that corporations have an inalienable right, under the First Amendment, to make contributions to ballot initiative campaigns. Conservative Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote a scathing dissent arguing against “corporate personhood” in this case.
When Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito were elevated to the Supreme Court in 2005, the all-out judicial assault on the rights and the interests of the American people began in earnest. Here is a short, non-inclusive list of the havoc-wreaking cases that the ultra-corporate Roberts Court has decided:

District of Columbia v. Heller (2008): At the urging of well-funded lobbyists from the National Rifle Association, the Supreme Court “found” an individual has the right to keep and bear arms under the 2nd Amendment. The court’s landmark 5-4 decision wiped away years of lower court decisions holding that the clear intent of the Second Amendment was to tie the right of gun possession to service in a “well-regulated militia.”

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010): The Supreme Court, again in a 5-4 decision, ignored decades of legal precedent to strike down those parts of the McCain/Feingold campaign finance reform law that regulated “independent expenditures” and “electioneering communications” made by corporations. The Supreme Court based its decision on the specious “finding” that corporations, including nonprofit corporations such as Citizens United, Inc., have inalienable rights of free speech under the First Amendment.

Shelby County v. Holder (2013): The Supreme Court again overstepped Constitutional boundaries when, in a 5-4 decision, it overturned Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which requires certain states and local governments to obtain federal preclearance before implementing any changes to their voting laws or practices. The Supreme Court’s decision is unprecedented in that it was a flagrant violation of the separation of powers. After holding extensive hearings on the matter, Congress reauthorized the Voting Rights Act in 2006 because it found that the protections of the Voting Rights Act were still necessary to protect minority voters from being disenfranchised by state and local governments, and that “preclearance” was an effective tool in preventing discrimination.

The Supreme Court is an appellate court. It is supposed to decide cases by applying the law to the existing facts. The Supreme Court has no fact-finding power of its own. The decision in Shelby County is based on the Supreme Court’s own finding of fact that Voting Rights Act was no longer necessary. This was one of the most egregious examples of a Court legislating from the bench in American history.

McCutcheon v. FEC (2014): In another landmark campaign finance case, the Supreme Court struck down Section 441 of the Federal Election Campaign Act, which imposed a biennial aggregate limit on individual contributions to national party and federal candidate committees. In so doing, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority decided that the First Amendment, for all intents and purposes, gives wealthy donors carte blanche to buy our public elections.

Harris v. Quinn (2014): Again in a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that home-care workers in Illinois cannot be forced to pay dues to a union if they’re not union members, because they aren’t full-fledged public employees like cops, firefighters and teachers. The Harris decision appears to be limited to home-care workers, so it is not the “knock-out punch” to public-employee unionism that many people feared was coming. But it is a step in the direction of overturning the 1977 decision in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, which essentially made “right-to-work-for-less” the law of the land. Justice Alito, who wrote the Harris decision, suggested in that opinion that the Conservatives had Abood in their sights.

Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014): Finally, the Supreme Court found that for-profit corporations were exempt from laws their owners religiously object to if there is a less restrictive means of furthering the law’s interest. The decision was based on an interpretation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, so it did not address whether such corporations are protected by the free-exercise-of-religion clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution. It was the first time the Supreme Court had ever held that Corporations had legal rights to freedom of religion.

This nonsense, quite frankly, has got to stop. The Supreme Court is systematically stripping Constitutional Rights from real, live human beings and giving those rights to Corporations and a very small group of plutocrats. There are a lot of living, breathing human beings who belong to a lot of issue advocacy groups and whose “oxen were gored” in the decisions discussed above. It’s time for those groups, and so many more, to begin working together to take back the political power that the Supreme Court has stolen from the American people. The only decisive way to do that is, for starters, to amend the U.S. Constitution so that it clearly and unequivocally states that 1) inalienable rights protected under the Constitution belong to human beings, and 2) money is not speech.

Together, we can MOVE TO AMEND!

                                                                  ************

OneLove

:::MME:::
.

Searching for Radical Democracy In the Ruins of Capitalism




The future demands a new political consciousness. We can’t just wait for neoliberal economics to tear apart society and then build from scratch. In this interview, cultural critic Henry Giroux both condemns the scourge of neoliberalism and its poisonous cynicism and attack on the critical imagination and argues for a radical democracy that has to be truly participatory and willing to give power to all people so that they can intervene in and shape values, policies, the practices that shape their lives. For Giroux, resistance is impossible without education and a critical formative culture that addresses both the creation of new historical and political agents as well as the possibility of a new society. He also argues that resistance if it’s to be successful, it needs to go beyond the fragmentation, sectarianism, and political purity that has plagued the left. In pointing to a politics of hope, he argues that now is the time to develop systemic reforms, develop alternative public spheres, and a social movement that embraces a comprehensive view of politics and change~~Chuck Mertz

OneLove

:::MME:::

Jan 24, 2015

Dangerous Delusions




World leaders and business executives will be meeting at Davos to discuss how they want to run our economy - in their own best interests. We're led to believe that without their entrepreneurial talent that we would all be worse off than we are now. The myths of this elite class have become so deeply engrained in society, that it can be difficult to challenge the power that they hold. So we've collected 7 myths to show that in reality, things are quite different...
  1. The poor are getting richer
  2. Big business runs things better
  3. We need to have faith in the financial markets to solve our problems
  4. All you need is growth
  5. Everyone wins under free trade
  6. Africa needs our help
  7. Aid makes the world a fairer place

Myth 1: The poor are getting richer 

Inequality doesn’t matter because the poor are getting richer. This is the story the political and economic elite at Davos would like us to believe. But this story is a fantasy. The reality is that while executive pay goes through the roof, there are more people living in extreme poverty in sub-Saharan Africa than ever before.
>>> Read more

Myth 2: Big business runs things better 

Our political elites say they love the private sector because it’s so much more efficient than the public sector. But the truth is that the private sector only works by scrounging billions of pounds of public money in the form of subsidies and support. This shows that it is the corporate elite, not the poor, who are the real scroungers in our society.
>>> Read more

Myth 3: We need to have faith in the financial markets to solve our problems 

We live in the age of big finance. Despite the 2008 crash exposing the dangers of handing over too much power to bankers, more and more of our lives are influenced by the whims of the stock market. Now plans are in place to create markets in nature itself. But if we look at the facts, the evidence shows that we should reconsider our blind faith in the ability of markets to solve the world’s problems.
>>> Read more

Myth 4: All we need is growth 

Economic growth is the panacea of our age. All too often, the strategy for fighting poverty can be summed up in just three letters: GDP. But growth, while important, isn’t enough. Unless action is taken to ensure that the poor get their fair share, simply making the economic pie bigger is a terribly inefficient way of reducing poverty.
>>> Read more

Myth 5: Everyone wins under free trade 

Toilet paper shortages, bread queues, black markets, North Korea – we are told that all of these things are what we face if we abandon free trade. But the truth is very different. Some of the countries that have most zealously pursued free trade have suffered while others who have resisted opening up their markets have done very well indeed.
>>> Read more

Myth 6: Africa needs our help 

For decades, the dominant image of Africa has been that it is poor and helpless. This image is wrong. Most people in Africa may be poor, but the continent itself is one of the richest in terms of natural resources. Far from being helpless and dependent on our help, Africa pays more money to rich countries than it receives in aid. We need to face up to the uncomfortable truth: Africa is aiding us.
>>> Read more

Myth 7: Aid makes the world a fairer place 

Aid isn’t working. Instead of helping to rectify injustice, aid is being used to support multinational corporations, build shopping centres and force poor countries to privatise their public services. Aid urgently needs to stop being a corporate cash cow and start being used as a radical tool for real justice and social change.
>>> Read more

Source

OneLove

:::MME:::

 

The Poisoning of Democracy





Billionaires David and Charles Koch have been handed the ability to buy our democracy in the form of giant checks to the House, Senate, and soon, possibly even the Presidency.

 Let's chase these devils out of our sphere. Rise up!

OneLove

:::MME:::



Jan 23, 2015

Maureen Dowd's Clueless White Gaze: What's Really Behind the 'Selma' Backlash by Brittney Cooper



New York Times critic Maureen Dowd saw “Selma” last week “in a theater of full of black teenagers.” Her ethnographic impressions of the “stunned” emotional responses that these D.C. teenagers had to seeing four little girls blown up in an Alabama church basement and watching civil rights leaders viciously clubbed during a march in Selma reek of the kind of voyeuristic and clueless white gaze often used to devalue and pathologize urban youth.  They become fascinating objects of study to those who don’t get to spend a lot of time with them.
And it is precisely these kinds of impressions from white people, the inability to make sense of genuine black emotion, the inability to recognize what filmic representations that respect the interior lives of black people actually might look like, that have contributed to the disingenuous backlash against the Selma film.
This magnificent and powerful film has, at this point, been endlessly derided by white and black critics alike who say it fails to get the story just right. Among white critics, its cardinal sin is failure to pay proper homage to Lyndon B. Johnson for being a champion of black voting rights. He’s represented in the film as a reluctant ally in the civil rights struggle, as one whose racial views evolve over time.
Dowd rips what she calls Ava’s DuVernay’s “artful falsehood,” for having the potentially and apparently regrettable result of making the “young moviegoers [now] see L.B.J.’s role in civil rights through DuVernay’s lens.”
“Artful falsehood,” Dowd tells us, “is more dangerous than artless falsehood, because fewer people see through it.”
But the truth is, a new racial lens is exactly what America needs. In “Selma,” we learn what films look like when directors and cinematographers who love and respect black people turn their gaze on us. “Selma” artfully displaces a white gaze, and it is this unnamed and unsettling anxiety that sits at the heart of so many of the critiques of the film.
This white racial anxiety of not being at the center feels to me far more dangerous to black youth than seeing a film that tells them a story about themselves and their history. Having taught in D.C. public schools, I know D.C. youth aren’t checking for any kind of saviors, white or black. Like most adolescents, they are looking to find their path and make their mark.
And they have far too few representations of what that might look like.
Among black teenagers who have acutely felt the pain of the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis and Michael Brown, this film offers a long history and genealogy for black pain and black resistance. The film moves us beyond the mere spectacle of black death. For instance, we don’t just see the killing of Jimmie Lee Jackson; we are forced to watch and reckon with his grieving grandfather identifying his body at the morgue. The shot of Jimmie’s mother’s grief-stricken face at her son’s funeral could be superimposed with the face of Mamie Till Mobley, or Coretta Scott King or Sybrina Fulton or Lesley McSpadden, mothers and wives of boys and men gone too soon. As the final Selma march commences, the film cuts to a shot of Jimmie’s grieving mother rocking, crying.
That kind of storytelling is haunting and deliberate. Long after you walk away, it clings to you.
“Selma” achieves both narrative breadth and affective depth. DuVernay added 27 new characters to a screenplay heavily focused on LBJ and MLK, most of them women. That sense of elasticity in the storytelling stretches us, demanding of us a more inclusive, less-sexist vision of the black freedom struggle. Beyond that, the movie asks us to understand the spiritual weight, the indignity, the brutality, the visceral pain of racial injustice and the vision, perseverance  and digging deep required every day to stand up, fight back and keep moving.
Many white people missed this, because they need the civil rights movement to be fewer dirges and more redemption songs. Just as there has been a failure of white people to truly grasp the singularity of the racial atrocities committed against black people (and indigenous people) in the name of white supremacy, there remains a studied indifference to the ways that we are, 50 years later, feeling these pains of democracy aborted all over again.
Mothers cry out and grandfathers weep that our nation’s past sins are revisited upon another undeserving generation of black people vulnerable to injustice by a system and a people that forget their capacity for brutality far too quickly.
Blood spilling from out stretched palms, the perpetrators demand absolution. Without confession. Or repentance. Or restitution.
“LBJ was good to you,” they tell us. They expect us to be solicitous in our gratitude. Gratuitous. That one wrong among many was righted, even from a man known for his gratuitous use of the N-word, deserves our scopic memorialization. White folks forget that even the abolitionists did not necessarily think black people were equal human beings. Granting our rights, as if rights are the property of white people, has never been a guarantor of white respect for black humanity.
Black youth sense these indignities even when they lack a full language of articulation. They live them daily. Especially in a massively failing public school district like D.C. Especially in a moment, when despite desegregation being the center piece of the civil rights movement, we have been reminded that more than half of all public school children live below the poverty line. That those children are disproportionately black is no accident.
Perhaps Dowd is hypersensitive about the alleged “artful falsehood” in “Selma” because racial politics in this country are a frequent and unrelenting exercise in “artful falsehoods.” That electing a black president signaled the end of racism is an artful falsehood. That police really care to protect and serve black and brown communities is artful falsehood. That racial progress is linear is an artful falsehood. These are the pretty little lies we tell ourselves to make the fictive narrative of America–the land of life, liberty and justice for all– cohere.
As I have listened in my blackademic circles to the various critiques of the ways that “Selma” did not get the story right, I am reminded that for those who are caretakers and guardians of black history, artistic license feels too risky. The real stories have yet to be fully told. How dare we subject them to the tools of representation, which often seem to be more hammer than chisel when it comes to carving out the beauty of our lives? Couldn’t we just have more Diane Nash and more Amelia Boynton? In a world where black lives and black histories mattered, they’d have their own films, alongside Ida B. Wells, and SNCC, and Fannie Lou Hamer.
But how will we ever have any of those stories if we can’t trust a black woman to tell this story? We don’t trust black women to be our philosophers and theorists, our political strategists, or our film directors. Directing, like quarterbacking, we are told to believe is the province of white men.  This is why the Oscar nomination “Selma” received for best picture feels hollow—the academy clearly does not respect DuVernay’s directorial vision. Save Steve McQueen, black folks, men included, are rarely deemed fitting of recognition in any kind of academy, except music. White women are not respected as directors either. It is precisely that intersection, that double jeopardy, of blackness and womanhood that gives so many black women the exceptional ability to artfully render black life, to see it in all its fullness, to move beyond the perspectival limits of whiteness and maleness. That same intersection often becomes a liability in the quest for institutional recognition of black female genius.
Ava DuVernay surely knows that. So she made the film she wanted to make. One that features Amelia Boynton and Coretta Scott King having a conversation about what it means to be prepared, as we hear Coretta talking about her desire for a more active role in the strategy and organizing side of the movement. One in which Diane Nash reassures the men, on their car ride into Selma, that this is the next big place for movement building. One in which Annie Lee Cooper slaps the policeman who manhandles her.
In this film, we see black women resisting, organizing, strategizing and cajoling. That we want to see even more of this tells us that “Selma” is akin to being gifted a few acres of our own after too many years gleaning cotton in fields that have not belonged to us.
A black woman has gifted this to us.  Ava DuVernay ushers us in “Selma” into the interior and affective lives of black people. In her directorial approach, I hear echoes of Anna Julia Cooper’s famous statement, “when and where I enter in the undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence, suing, or special patronage, then and there the whole race enters with me.”
Black men don’t tell race stories like this. This kind of film is the unique result of what black feminist scholars call the “visionary pragmatism” of black women filmmakers.
And this is what feels so false and condescending and egregious about Maureen Dowd admonishing Ava DuVernay, that “On matters of race—America’s original sin—there is an even higher responsibility to be accurate.” She didn’t levy such a critique of “Lincoln’s” failure to include Frederick Douglass, a trusted adviser of the president. But more than that, there is this.
Being more accurate does not mean one has told more truth. Read any Toni Morrison novel, and you’ll learn that novels often tell far more truth than autobiography. DuVernay tells us many truths in this film about the affective and emotive dimensions of black politics, about the intimacy of black struggle, about the spirit of people intimately acquainted with daily assaults on their humanity. The recent tragic killings of unarmed youth have surely taught us that if we don’t work from a presumption of black humanity, facts don’t mean very much in our interpretation of events.
More than that, those in power choose the “facts” that matter.
What I hope those D.C. high school students and every high school student that will get to see this film learn is that ours is a beautiful struggle. I hope they learn that despite our defeats, we’ve had our triumphs, too. I hope they see how integral women were to this struggle. I hope they have a clearer picture of what revolutionary leadership looks like – that these people ate and slept, loved and fought, shaved and got help putting on neckties, struggled with the right words to say and sometimes made mistakes. They rose to meet the challenges of their times. And we can, too.

                                                  *************

OneLove
:::MME:::



Jan 22, 2015

From MLK to Anonymous, the State Targets Dissenters Not Just "Bad Guys"




(The following is an excerpt,from Glenn Greenwald's latest book, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State)

A prime justification for surveillance – that it's for the benefit of the population – relies on projecting a view of the world that divides citizens into categories of good people and bad people. In that view, the authorities use their surveillance powers only against bad people, those who are "doing something wrong", and only they have anything to fear from the invasion of their privacy. This is an old tactic. In a 1969 Time magazine article about Americans' growing concerns over the US government's surveillance powers, Nixon's attorney general, John Mitchell, assured readers that "any citizen of the United States who is not involved in some illegal activity has nothing to fear whatsoever".
   
the point was made again by a White House spokesman, responding to the 2005 controversy over Bush's illegal eavesdropping programme: "This is not about monitoring phone calls designed to arrange Little League practice or what to bring to a potluck dinner. These are designed to monitor calls from very bad people to very bad people." And when Barack Obama appeared on The Tonight Show in August 2013 SaveFrom.net and was asked by Jay Leno about NSA revelations, he said: "We don't have a domestic spying programme. What we do have is some mechanisms that can track a phone number or an email address that is connected to a terrorist attack."

For many, the argument works. The perception that invasive surveillance is confined only to a marginalised and deserving group of those "doing wrong" – the bad people – ensures that the majority acquiesces to the abuse of power or even cheers it on. But that view radically misunderstands what goals drive all institutions of authority. "Doing something wrong" in the eyes of such institutions encompasses far more than illegal acts, violent behaviour and terrorist plots. It typically extends to meaningful dissent and any genuine challenge. It is the nature of authority to equate dissent with wrongdoing, or at least with a threat.

The record is suffused with examples of groups and individuals being placed under government surveillance by virtue of their dissenting views and activism – Martin Luther King, the civil rights movement, anti-war activists, environmentalists. In the eyes of the government and J Edgar Hoover's FBI, they were all "doing something wrong": political activity that threatened the prevailing order.

The FBI's domestic counterintelligence programme, Cointelpro, was first exposed by a group of anti-war activists who had become convinced that the anti-war movement had been infiltrated, placed under surveillance and targeted with all sorts of dirty tricks. Lacking documentary evidence to prove it and unsuccessful in convincing journalists to write about their suspicions, they broke into an FBI branch office in Pennsylvania in 1971 and carted off thousands of documents.

Files related to Cointelpro showed how the FBI had targeted political groups and individuals it deemed subversive and dangerous, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, black nationalist movements, socialist and communist organizations, anti-war protesters and various rightwing groups. The bureau had infiltrated them with agents who, among other things, attempted to manipulate members into agreeing to commit criminal acts so that the FBI could arrest and prosecute them.

Those revelations led to the creation of the Senate Church Committee, which concluded: "[Over the course of 15 years] the bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of first amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence."

These incidents were not aberrations of the era. During the Bush years, for example, documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) revealed, as the group put it in 2006, "new details of Pentagon surveillance of Americans opposed to the Iraq war, including Quakers and student groups". The Pentagon was "keeping tabs on non-violent protesters by collecting information and storing it in a military anti-terrorism database". The evidence shows that assurances that surveillance is only targeted at those who "have done something wrong" should provide little comfort, since a state will reflexively view any challenge to its power as wrongdoing.

The opportunity those in power have to characterise political opponents as "national security threats" or even "terrorists" has repeatedly proven irresistible. In the past decade, the government, in an echo of Hoover's FBI, has formally so designated environmental activists, broad swaths of anti-government rightwing groups, anti-war activists, and associations organised around Palestinian rights. Some individuals within those broad categories may deserve the designation, but undoubtedly most do not, guilty only of holding opposing political views. Yet such groups are routinely targeted for surveillance by the NSA and its partners.

One document from the Snowden files, dated 3 October 2012, chillingly underscores the point. It revealed that the agency has been monitoring the online activities of individuals it believes express "radical" ideas and who have a "radicalising" influence on others. The memo discusses six individuals in particular, all Muslims, though it stresses that they are merely "exemplars".

The NSA explicitly states that none of the targeted individuals is a member of a terrorist organisation or involved in any terror plots. Instead, their crime is the views they express, which are deemed "radical", a term that warrants pervasive surveillance and destructive campaigns to "exploit vulnerabilities".

Among the information collected about the individuals, at least one of whom is a "US person", are details of their online sex activities and "online promiscuity" – the porn sites they visit and surreptitious sex chats with women who are not their wives. The agency discusses ways to exploit this information to destroy their reputations and credibility.

The NSA's treatment of Anonymous, as well as the vague category of people known as "hacktivists", is especially troubling and extreme. That's because Anonymous is not actually a structured group but a loosely organised affiliation of people around an idea: someone becomes affiliated with Anonymous by virtue of the positions they hold. Worse still, the category "hacktivists" has no fixed meaning: it can mean the use of programming skills to undermine the security and functioning of the internet but can also refer to anyone who uses online tools to promote political ideals. That the NSA targets such broad categories of people is tantamount to allowing it to spy on anyone anywhere, including in the US, whose ideas the government finds threatening.


Gabriella Coleman, a specialist on Anonymous at McGill University, said that the group "is not a defined" entity but rather "an idea that mobilises activists to take collective action and voice political discontent. It is a broad-based global social movement with no centralised or official organised leadership structure. Some have rallied around the name to engage in digital civil disobedience, but nothing remotely resembling terrorism."

Yet Anonymous has been targeted by a unit of GCHQ that employs some of the most controversial and radical tactics known to spycraft: "false flag operations", "honeytraps", viruses and other attacks, strategies of deception and "info ops to damage reputations".

One PowerPoint slide presented by GCHQ surveillance officials at the 2012 SigDev conference describes two forms of attack: "information ops (influence or disruption)" and "technical disruption". GCHQ refers to these measures as "Online Covert Action", which is intended to achieve what the document calls "The 4 Ds: Deny/Disrupt/Degrade/Deceive".

Another slide describes the tactics used to "discredit a target". These include "set up a honeytrap", "change their photos on social networking sites", "write a blog purporting to be one of their victims" and "email/text their colleagues, neighbours, friends, etc". In accompanying notes, GCHQ explains that the "honeytrap" – an old cold war tactic involving using attractive women to lure male targets into compromising, discrediting situations – has been updated for the digital age: now a target is lured to a compromising site or online encounter. The comment added: "a great option. Very successful when it works." Similarly, traditional methods of group infiltration are now accomplished online.

Another technique involves stopping "someone from communicating". To do that, the agency will "bombard their phone with text messages", "bombard their phone with calls", "delete their online presence," and "block up their fax machine".

GCHQ also likes to use "disruption" techniques in lieu of what it calls "traditional law enforcement" such as evidence-gathering, courts and prosecutions. In a document entitled Cyber Offensive Session: Pushing the Boundaries and Action Against Hacktivism, GCHQ discusses its targeting of "hacktivists" with, ironically, "denial of service" attacks, a tactic commonly associated with hackers.

The British surveillance agency also uses a team of social scientists, including psychologists, to develop techniques of "online HUMINT" (human intelligence) and "strategic influence disruption". The document The Art of Deception: Training for a New Generation of Online Covert Operations is devoted to these tactics. Prepared by the agency's HSOC (Human Science Operation Cell), the paper claims to draw on sociology, psychology, anthropology, neuroscience and biology, among other fields, to maximize GCHQ's online deception skills.

The document then lays out what it calls the "Disruption Operational Playbook". This includes "infiltration operation", "ruse operation", "false flag operation", and "sting operation". It vows a "full roll out" of the disruption programme "by early 2013" as "150+ staff [are] fully trained".

Under the title Magic Techniques & Experiment, the document references "Legitimisation of violence", "Constructing experience in mind of targets which should be accepted so they don't realise", and "Optimising deception channels".

Such government plans to monitor and influence internet communications and disseminate false information online have long been a source of speculation. The GCHQ documents show for the first time that these controversial techniques have moved from the proposal stage to implementation.

All of the evidence highlights the implicit bargain that is offered to citizens: pose no challenge and you have nothing to worry about. Mind your own business, and support or at least tolerate what we do, and you'll be fine. Put differently, you must refrain from provoking the authority that wields surveillance powers if you wish to be deemed free of wrongdoing.

This is a deal that invites passivity, obedience and conformity. The safest course, the way to ensure being "left alone", is to remain quiet, unthreatening and compliant.

                                                           ***********

OneLove

:::MME:::

Jan 20, 2015

Poet's Nook: "love flows down" by Jelalludin Rumi





Love comes with a knife, not some 
shy question, and not with fears 
for its reputation! I say 
these things disinterestedly. Accept them 
in kind. Love is a madman 

working his wild schemes, tearing off his clothes, 
running through the mountains, drinking poison, 
and now quietly choosing annihilation. 

You've been walking the ocean’s edge, 
holding up your robes to keep them dry. 
You must dive naked under and deeper under, 
a thousand times deeper! Love flows down. 

The ground submits to the sky and suffers 
what comes. Tell me, is the earth worse 
for giving in like that? 

Don’t put blankets over the drum! 
Open completely. Let your spirit-ear 
listen to the green dome’s passionate murmur. 

Let the cords of your robe be untied. 
Shiver in this new love beyond all 
above and below. The sun rises, but which way 
does night go? I have no more words. 

Let soul speak with the silent 
articulation of a face.



OneLove

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Musings


OneLove

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America’s Surveillance State (Inside The NSA: How Do They Spy?)

The Eye of God sees all.... OneLove :::MME:::

A Musical Reflection of a Kingly Character







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Great essay: A Radical Revolution of Values: Martin Luther King and the Black  
    Revolutionary Tradition 



OneLove

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The New Corporation

  The New Corporation ​is a 2020 documentary directed by Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan, law professor at the University of British Columb...