No problem Cal. I appreciate your discussing it with me even if I find the idea to be incredibly far fetched.
Quote:
But the truth is, I don't know. I know we're lied to. I know things are rarely as they seem. I know if you follow the money you find the head of the snake. I know nobody here knows for sure.
You claim to know a lot of things, but the smoking gun is still evading us, even in this post. What I'm really seeing is cherry picking, outright lies, and fear mongering. Perhaps the most head scratching is your claim that big pharma is part of a shadow govt because "profit is the only motivation." That's not shadow govt. That's capitalism. Do I agree that Big Pharma is a problem? Yes. Are they linked to FEMA and the Illuminati? Show me the connection!
I'm more than willing to read what you have to say, but until you can show me where A leads to B, there is no proof here. Only conjecture and suspicion. And that is not enough to sell me (and hopefully no one else.)
Originally Posted By: CalDawg
I have to ask, how do these individuals or group of companies become empowered to do this?
You suggest a deep state, and that is one possible answer. Unchecked capitalism, lobbying, and individual corruption is another. Why are you convinced that there has to be a puppet master?
Originally Posted By: CalDawg
You say you want proof? Dig into it.
The burden of proof of a deep state existing falls to you, since you made the allegation in the first place.
Burden of proof is a tall order. Perhaps if we were heading for a court of law that would be reasonable because there would be resources for an investigative team and deep investigation. If I had hard evidence, we’d probably be looking at indictments. If this were a trial at best we’d be looking at a case based on circumstantial evidence, likely to be decided on a preponderance of that evidence. I don’t think we will ever find a smoking gun. But I understand what you’re getting at.
If you’re mind is made up, it’s unlikely anything I post will change it. If you’re open to the idea that colluded manipulation happens, then maybe I can put a few things in front of you that opens your thinking.
Again, let me lay a few things out so you understand where my head is at.
First, I don’t love the term “Deep State” because of its subversion by Trump politics, and it’s government only connotation. And terms like Illuminati, New World Order, and Shadow Government are strongly associated with the lunatic fringe. Conspiracy theories in general imply skewed thinking. Until they’re proven correct. Also, these terms imply that the tentacles of the conspiracy answer to a single governing body. I would tend to think that there are factions, which can sometimes be at odds with each other. So I don’t necessarily believe there is a single puppet master.
There are many arguments, social studies and psychological profiles that debunk even the possibility of major conspiracies. That puts the notion at an immediate disadvantage. People rather believe conspiracies are crackpot theories. That may be the case in some instances. I’d further state that without definitive proof, and given the wide spread nature of the things we discuss, it makes sense to believe that on some level. Being skeptical is healthy. No one wants to believe we live in a world where we have no control.
I have a few questions for you.
Historically the wealthy and those in power have dictated the directions of their societies regardless of the will of the people. Can we agree on that?
If so, why would now be different?
With regard to unchecked capitalism, lobbying, individual corruption, etc. It makes sense that these things happen, and even happen independently of oversight, but I believe that, for example, unchecked capitalism, lobbying, and deregulation are allowed to proliferate because that is the will of “the few”. The logic being if these things were counter productive to the interests of those who sit at the heads of Big Banking and other “industries” they would not happen.
I know that postulating my theories won’t do much to shed light on the discussion, and frankly, I’m very interested in seeing what type of “proof” is actually out there. So I decided to do some digging, looking specifically for articles by reputable writers, documentation, and testimony that allows us to draw reasonable conclusions. So bare with me. This will take a while.
Start with The Bilderberg Group (one among several secretive but known groups of elite).
What we know:
The Bilderberg Group, Bilderberg conference, Bilderberg meetings or Bilderberg Club is an annual private conference of 120 to 150 people of the European and North American political elite, experts from industry, finance, academia and the media. About two thirds are European, the rest are from North America; one third from politics and government and the rest from other fields. The meeting is a forum for informal discussions about megatrends and major issues facing the world. The meetings are held under the Chatham House Rule, which states that participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s) nor of any other participant may be revealed. Thanks to the private nature of the meeting, the participants are not bound by the conventions of their office or by pre-agreed positions. As such, they can take time to listen, reflect and gather insights.
They go to great length to make clear there is no detailed agenda, no resolutions are proposed, no votes are taken, and no policy statements are issued.
According to Andrew Kakabadse, (Professer, Henley Business School) the Bilderberg Group's theme is to "bolster a consensus around free market Western capitalism and its interests around the globe"
We know where these meeting are held, we know who attends them, we can usually discover their proposed topics, and that the meetings are tightly secured. We never learn what is said in those meetings. This year, for example, it will be held in June in Venice, Italy.
The key topics in 2017 were:
1. The Trump Administration: A progress report 2. Trans-Atlantic relations: options and scenarios 3. The Trans-Atlantic defence alliance: bullets, bytes and bucks 4. The direction of the EU 5. Can globalization be slowed down? 6. Jobs, income and unrealized expectations 7. The war on information 8. Why is populism growing? 9. Russia in the international order 10. The Near East 11. Nuclear proliferation 12. China 13. Current events
The attendees were:
CHAIRMAN STEERING COMMITTEE
Castries, Henri de (FRA), President of Institut Montaigne; Former Chairman and CEO, AXA
PARTICIPANTS Achleitner, Paul M. (DEU), Chairman of the Supervisory Board, Deutsche Bank AG; Treasurer, Bilderberg Meeting Adonis, Andrew (GBR), Chair, National Infrastructure Commission Agius, Marcus (GBR), Chairman, PA Consulting Group Akyol, Mustafa (TUR), Senior Visiting Fellow, Freedom Project at Wellesley College Alstadheim, Kjetil B. (NOR), Political Editor, Dagens Næringsliv Altman, Roger C. (USA), Founder and Senior Chairman, Evercore Arnaut, José Luis (PRT), Managing Partner, CMS Rui Pena & Arnaut Barroso, José M. Durão (PRT), Chairman, Goldman Sachs International Bäte, Oliver (DEU), CEO, Allianz SE Baumann, Werner (DEU), Chairman, Bayer AG Baverez, Nicolas (FRA), Partner, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher Benko, René (AUT), Founder and Chairman of the Advisory Board, SIGNA Holding GmbH Berner, Anne-Catherine (FIN), Minister of Transport and Communications Botín, Ana P. (ESP), Executive Chairman, Banco Santander Brandtzæg, Svein Richard (NOR), President and CEO, Norsk Hydro ASA Brennan, John O. (USA), Senior Advisor, Kissinger Associates Inc. Bsirske, Frank (DEU), Chairman, United Services Union Buberl, Thomas (FRA), CEO, AXA Bunn, M. Elaine (USA), Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Burns, William J. (USA), President, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Çakiroglu, Levent (TUR), CEO, Koç Holding A.S. Çamlibel, Cansu (TUR), Washington DC Bureau Chief, Hürriyet Newspaper Cebrián, Juan Luis (ESP), Executive Chairman, PRISA and El País Clemet, Kristin (NOR), CEO, Civita Cohen, David S. (USA), Former Deputy Director, CIA Collison, Patrick (USA), CEO, Stripe Cotton, Tom (USA), Senator Cui, Tiankai (CHN), Ambassador to the United States Döpfner, Mathias (DEU), CEO, Axel Springer SE Elkann, John (ITA), Chairman, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles Enders, Thomas (DEU), CEO, Airbus SE Federspiel, Ulrik (DNK), Group Executive, Haldor Topsøe Holding A/S Ferguson, Jr., Roger W. (USA), President and CEO, TIAA Ferguson, Niall (USA), Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University Gianotti, Fabiola (ITA), Director General, CERN Gozi, Sandro (ITA), State Secretary for European Affairs Graham, Lindsey (USA), Senator Greenberg, Evan G. (USA), Chairman and CEO, Chubb Group Griffin, Kenneth (USA), Founder and CEO, Citadel Investment Group, LLC Gruber, Lilli (ITA), Editor-in-Chief and Anchor "Otto e mezzo", La7 TV
Guindos, Luis de (ESP), Minister of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness
 Haines, Avril D. (USA), Former Deputy National Security Advisor Halberstadt, Victor (NLD), Professor of Economics, Leiden University; Hamers, Ralph (NLD), Chairman, ING Group Hedegaard, Connie (DNK), Chair, KR Foundation Hennis-Plasschaert, Jeanine (NLD), Minister of Defence, The Netherlands Hobson, Mellody (USA), President, Ariel Investments LLC Hoffman, Reid (USA), Co-Founder, LinkedIn and Partner, Greylock Houghton, Nicholas (GBR), Former Chief of Defence Ischinger, Wolfgang (INT), Chairman, Munich Security Conference Jacobs, Kenneth M. (USA), Chairman and CEO, Lazard Johnson, James A. (USA), Chairman, Johnson Capital Partners Jordan, Jr., Vernon E. (USA), Senior Managing Director, Lazard Frères & Co. LLC Karp, Alex (USA), CEO, Palantir Technologies Kengeter, Carsten (DEU), CEO, Deutsche Börse AG Kissinger, Henry A. (USA), Chairman, Kissinger Associates Inc. Klatten, Susanne (DEU), Managing Director, SKion GmbH Kleinfeld, Klaus (USA), Former Chairman and CEO, Arconic Knot, Klaas H.W. (NLD), President, De Nederlandsche Bank Koç, Ömer M. (TUR), Chairman, Koç Holding A.S. Kotkin, Stephen (USA), Professor in History and International Affairs, Princeton University Kravis, Henry R. (USA), Co-Chairman and Co-CEO, KKR Kravis, Marie-Josée (USA), Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute; President, American Friends of Bilderberg Kudelski, André (CHE), Chairman and CEO, Kudelski Group Lagarde, Christine (INT), Managing Director, International Monetary Fund Lenglet, François (FRA), Chief Economics Commentator, France 2 Leysen, Thomas (BEL), Chairman, KBC Group Liddell, Christopher (USA), Assistant to the President and Director of Strategic Initiatives Lööf, Annie (SWE), Party Leader, Centre Party Mathews, Jessica T. (USA), Distinguished Fellow, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace McAuliffe, Terence (USA), Governor of Virginia McKay, David I. (CAN), President and CEO, Royal Bank of Canada McMaster, H.R. (USA), National Security Advisor Micklethwait, John (INT), Editor-in-Chief, Bloomberg LP Minton Beddoes, Zanny (INT), Editor-in-Chief, The Economist Molinari, Maurizio (ITA), Editor-in-Chief, La Stampa Monaco, Lisa (USA), Former Homeland Security Officer Morneau, Bill (CAN), Minister of Finance Mundie, Craig J. (USA), President, Mundie & Associates Murtagh, Gene M. (IRL), CEO, Kingspan Group plc Netherlands, H.M. the King of the (NLD) Noonan, Peggy (USA), Author and Columnist, The Wall Street Journal O'Leary, Michael (IRL), CEO, Ryanair D.A.C. Osborne, George (GBR), Editor, London Evening Standard Papahelas, Alexis (GRC), Executive Editor, Kathimerini Newspaper Papalexopoulos, Dimitri (GRC), CEO, Titan Cement Co. Petraeus, David H. (USA), Chairman, KKR Global Institute Pind, Søren (DNK), Minister for Higher Education and Science Puga, Benoît (FRA), Grand Chancellor of the Legion of Honor and Chancellor of the National Order of Merit Rachman, Gideon (GBR), Chief Foreign Affairs Commentator, The Financial Times Reisman, Heather M. (CAN), Chair and CEO, Indigo Books & Music Inc. Rivera Díaz, Albert (ESP), President, Ciudadanos Party Rosén, Johanna (SWE), Professor in Materials Physics, Linköping University Ross, Wilbur L. (USA), Secretary of Commerce Rubenstein, David M. (USA), Co-Founder and Co-CEO, The Carlyle Group Rubin, Robert E. (USA), Co-Chair, Council on Foreign Relations and Former Treasury Secretary Ruoff, Susanne (CHE), CEO, Swiss Post Rutten, Gwendolyn (BEL), Chair, Open VLD Sabia, Michael (CAN), CEO, Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec Sawers, John (GBR), Chairman and Partner, Macro Advisory Partners Schadlow, Nadia (USA), Deputy Assistant to the President, National Security Council Schmidt, Eric E. (USA), Executive Chairman, Alphabet Inc. Schneider-Ammann, Johann N. (CHE), Federal Councillor, Swiss Confederation Scholten, Rudolf (AUT), President, Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue Severgnini, Beppe (ITA), Editor-in-Chief, 7-Corriere della Sera Sikorski, Radoslaw (POL), Senior Fellow, Harvard University Slat, Boyan (NLD), CEO and Founder, The Ocean Cleanup Spahn, Jens (DEU), Parliamentary State Secretary and Federal Ministry of Finance Stephenson, Randall L. (USA), Chairman and CEO, AT&T Stern, Andrew (USA), President Emeritus, SEIU and Senior Fellow, Economic Security Project Stoltenberg, Jens (INT), Secretary General, NATO Summers, Lawrence H. (USA), Charles W. Eliot University Professor, Harvard University Tertrais, Bruno (FRA), Deputy Director, Fondation pour la recherche stratégique Thiel, Peter (USA), President, Thiel Capital Topsøe, Jakob Haldor (DNK), Chairman, Haldor Topsøe Holding A/S Ülgen, Sinan (TUR), Founding and Partner, Istanbul Economics Wahlroos, Björn (FIN), Chairman, Sampo Group, Nordea Bank, UPM-Kymmene Corporation Wallenberg, Marcus (SWE), Chairman, Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken AB Walter, Amy (USA), Editor, The Cook Political Report Weston, Galen G. (CAN), CEO and Executive Chairman, Loblaw Companies Ltd and George Weston Companies White, Sharon (GBR), Chief Executive, Ofcom Wieseltier, Leon (USA), Isaiah Berlin Senior Fellow in Culture and Policy, The Brookings Institution Wolf, Martin H. (INT), Chief Economics Commentator, Financial Times Wolfensohn, James D. (USA), Chairman and CEO, Wolfensohn & Company Wunsch, Pierre (BEL), Vice-Governor, National Bank of Belgium Zeiler, Gerhard (AUT), President, Turner International Zients, Jeffrey D. (USA), Former Director, National Economic Council Zoellick, Robert B. (USA), Non-Executive Chairman, AllianceBernstein L.P.
Source: Wikipedia & Bilderberg Website
Through this lens we can clearly see at least the potential for colluded manipulation.
"I am undeterred and I am undaunted." --Kevin Stefanski
"Big hairy American winning machines." --Baker Mayfield
The Pentagon has never been audited. That's astonishing
Thomas Hedges

On Thursday, Donald Trump released a preliminary budget proposal that calls for a $52bn increase in military spending. But just last December, a Washington Post investigation found that the Pentagon had buried a report that outlines $125bn in waste at the Department of Defense. That gap between lawmakers’ calls to blindly increase spending at DoD versus those of internal auditors to curtail its waste isn’t a new problem, and it’s one that, without pressure, won’t be resolved any time soon. That’s because although it’s required to by law, the DoD has never had an audit, something every American person, every company and every other government agency is subject to. The result is an astounding $10tn in taxpayer money that has gone unaccounted for since 1996.
“Over the last 20 years, the Pentagon has broken every promise to Congress about when an audit would be completed,” the director of the Audit the Pentagoncoalition, Rafael DeGennaro, told the Guardian. “Meanwhile, Congress has more than doubled the Pentagon’s budget.”
Legislation in the early 1990s demanded that all government agencies had annual audits, but the Pentagon has exempted itself without consequence for 20 years now, telling the Government Accountability Office (GAO) that collecting and organizing the required information for a full audit is too costly and time-consuming.
In the meantime, the GAO and Office of the Inspector General (IG) have published an endless stream of reports documenting financial mismanagement: $500m in aid to Yemen lost here, $5.8bn in supplies lost there, $8,000 spent on helicopter gears that really cost $500.
As reports and news articles about waste and abuse at the Pentagon pile up, prominent voices from across the political spectrum – from Bernie Sanders to Ted Cruz to Grover Norquist – are expressing support for a full audit of DoD. In a 2013 video message to the whole of the defense department, then secretary of defense Chuck Hagel told employees that the department’s non-compliance was “unacceptable”. During this past election cycle, both the Democratic and Republican platforms called for the Pentagon’s audit.
But despite broad support, the issue has remained stagnant in Washington. “I really can’t figure it out,” Democratic party representative for California Barbara Lee told the Guardian. When legislators get around to tackling waste, they “go after domestic agencies and community organizations, but they never go after the Pentagon,” she said. Since 2013, she has introduced bipartisan legislation that would financially penalize DoD for not receiving a clean audit.
“Quite frankly, they should have been audit-ready decades ago, after Congress passed the initial audit law in the early 90s,” Republican representative for Texas Michael Burgess, co-sponsor of the Audit the Pentagon Act along with Lee, told the Guardian. People have “accepted that the Department of Defense is expensive and that that’s how business has to be done. But I don’t accept that.”
Others say the problem goes beyond bureaucracy. William Hartung is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, and he says private contractors have found a way to make use of the Pentagon’s struggle to get its books in order. Contractors, he says, will “periodically intervene to try to stop practices that would make them more accountable”.
Specifically, the defense industry has sought to weaken the office of the director, operational test and evaluation (DOT&E) at the Department of Defense, which evaluates weapons systems before they’re manufactured on a larger scale. “It’s one of the few places that’s revealed a lot of problems,” says Hartung. The DOT&E, for example, has uncovered flaws in Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter jet programamong a slew of other contracts. “The concept is: benefit from a dysfunctional system because they can charge however much they want and there’s not a lot of quality control,” says Hartung.
Another issue is the proximity between DoD and the private sector, something that appears to touch even the department’s inspector general’s office. In 2014, the Pentagon celebrated the Marine Corps’s success at being the first military agency to pass an audit. But a year later it was found that the private accounting firm hired to carry out the audit, Grant Thornton, had not been thorough. The Marine Corps had desperately wanted to achieve a “clean” status, due to pressure from then defense secretary Leon Panetta to get its books in order.
In a scathing response to the debacle, Republican senator for Iowa Chuck Grassley said that the actions of the DoD IG showed a “lack of independence and flagrant disregard for audit ethics”, calling the deputy IG for auditing “a Grant Thornton lapdog”.
Washington’s revolving door also touches the agency, with a number of high-profile individuals moving to the private sector after leaving their jobs, something that is perfectly within the law and government regulations.
In the end, Hartung says that the military’s stature and almost holy status make focusing on accountability difficult. If lobbying doesn’t work, he says, they can always “wrap themselves in the flag and say this is necessary for defense. But if people don’t poke into the details,” they won’t “find out that, in fact, not every penny being spent is sacrosanct”.
This nature of this story implies that it's possible is money for funding of black ops being siphoned from the military budget.
Covert action. Surveillance. Counterintelligence. The U.S. “black budget” spans over a dozen agencies that make up the National Intelligence Program. Explore the budget here:
Mike Lofgren is an American author and a former Republican U.S. Congressional aide. He retired in May 2011 after 28 years as a Congressional staff member. His writings, critical of politics in the United States and in particular The Republican Party,[1] were published after his retirement and garnered widespread attention. (Source: Wikipedia)
Essay: Anatomy of the Deep State
February 21, 2014 by Mike Lofgren
Rome lived upon its principal till ruin stared it in the face. Industry is the only true source of wealth, and there was no industry in Rome. By day the Ostia road was crowded with carts and muleteers, carrying to the great city the silks and spices of the East, the marble of Asia Minor, the timber of the Atlas, the grain of Africa and Egypt; and the carts brought out nothing but loads of dung. That was their return cargo.
— The Martyrdom of Man by Winwood Reade (1871)
There is the visible government situated around the Mall in Washington, and then there is another, more shadowy, more indefinable government that is not explained in Civics 101 or observable to tourists at the White House or the Capitol. The former is traditional Washington partisan politics: the tip of the iceberg that a public watching C-SPAN sees daily and which is theoretically controllable via elections. The subsurface part of the iceberg I shall call the Deep State, which operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power. [1]
During the last five years, the news media have been flooded with pundits decrying the broken politics of Washington. The conventional wisdom has it that partisan gridlock and dysfunction have become the new normal. That is certainly the case, and I have been among the harshest critics of this development. But it is also imperative to acknowledge the limits of this critique as it applies to the American governmental system. On one level, the critique is self-evident: In the domain that the public can see, Congress is hopelessly deadlocked in the worst manner since the 1850s, the violently rancorous decade preceding the Civil War.
As I wrote in The Party is Over, the present objective of congressional Republicans is to render the executive branch powerless, at least until a Republican president is elected (a goal that voter suppression laws in GOP-controlled states are clearly intended to accomplish). President Obama cannot enact his domestic policies and budgets: Because of incessant GOP filibustering, not only could he not fill the large number of vacancies in the federal judiciary, he could not even get his most innocuous presidential appointees into office. Democrats controlling the Senate have responded by weakening the filibuster of nominations, but Republicans are sure to react with other parliamentary delaying tactics. This strategy amounts to congressional nullification of executive branch powers by a party that controls a majority in only one house of Congress.
Despite this apparent impotence, President Obama can liquidate American citizens without due processes, detain prisoners indefinitely without charge, conduct dragnet surveillance on the American people without judicial warrant and engage in unprecedented — at least since the McCarthy era — witch hunts against federal employees (the so-called “Insider Threat Program”). Within the United States, this power is characterized by massive displays of intimidating force by militarized federal, state and local law enforcement. Abroad, President Obama can start wars at will and engage in virtually any other activity whatsoever without so much as a by-your-leave from Congress, such as arranging the forced landing of a plane carrying a sovereign head of state over foreign territory. Despite the habitual cant of congressional Republicans about executive overreach by Obama, the would-be dictator, we have until recently heard very little from them about these actions — with the minor exception of comments from gadfly Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Democrats, save a few mavericks such as Ron Wyden of Oregon, are not unduly troubled, either — even to the extent of permitting seemingly perjured congressional testimony under oath by executive branch officials on the subject of illegal surveillance.
These are not isolated instances of a contradiction; they have been so pervasive that they tend to be disregarded as background noise. During the time in 2011 when political warfare over the debt ceiling was beginning to paralyze the business of governance in Washington, the United States government somehow summoned the resources to overthrow Muammar Ghaddafi’s regime in Libya, and, when the instability created by that coup spilled over into Mali, provide overt and covert assistance to French intervention there. At a time when there was heated debate about continuing meat inspections and civilian air traffic control because of the budget crisis, our government was somehow able to commit $115 million to keeping a civil war going in Syria and to pay at least £100m to the United Kingdom’s Government Communications Headquarters to buy influence over and access to that country’s intelligence. Since 2007, two bridges carrying interstate highways have collapsed due to inadequate maintenance of infrastructure, one killing 13 people. During that same period of time, the government spent $1.7 billion constructing a building in Utah that is the size of 17 football fields. This mammoth structure is intended to allow the National Security Agency to store a yottabyte of information, the largest numerical designator computer scientists have coined. A yottabyte is equal to 500 quintillion pages of text. They need that much storage to archive every single trace of your electronic life.
Yes, there is another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose. My analysis of this phenomenon is not an exposé of a secret, conspiratorial cabal; the state within a state is hiding mostly in plain sight, and its operators mainly act in the light of day. Nor can this other government be accurately termed an “establishment.” All complex societies have an establishment, a social network committed to its own enrichment and perpetuation. In terms of its scope, financial resources and sheer global reach, the American hybrid state, the Deep State, is in a class by itself. That said, it is neither omniscient nor invincible. The institution is not so much sinister (although it has highly sinister aspects) as it is relentlessly well entrenched. Far from being invincible, its failures, such as those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, are routine enough that it is only the Deep State’s protectiveness towards its higher-ranking personnel that allows them to escape the consequences of their frequent ineptitude. [2]
How did I come to write an analysis of the Deep State, and why am I equipped to write it? As a congressional staff member for 28 years specializing in national security and possessing a top secret security clearance, I was at least on the fringes of the world I am describing, if neither totally in it by virtue of full membership nor of it by psychological disposition. But, like virtually every employed person, I became, to some extent, assimilated into the culture of the institution I worked for, and only by slow degrees, starting before the invasion of Iraq, did I begin fundamentally to question the reasons of state that motivate the people who are, to quote George W. Bush, “the deciders.”
Cultural assimilation is partly a matter of what psychologist Irving L. Janis called “groupthink,” the chameleon-like ability of people to adopt the views of their superiors and peers. This syndrome is endemic to Washington: The town is characterized by sudden fads, be it negotiating biennial budgeting, making grand bargains or invading countries. Then, after a while, all the town’s cool kids drop those ideas as if they were radioactive. As in the military, everybody has to get on board with the mission, and questioning it is not a career-enhancing move. The universe of people who will critically examine the goings-on at the institutions they work for is always going to be a small one. As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
A more elusive aspect of cultural assimilation is the sheer dead weight of the ordinariness of it all once you have planted yourself in your office chair for the 10,000th time. Government life is typically not some vignette from an Allen Drury novel about intrigue under the Capitol dome. Sitting and staring at the clock on the off-white office wall when it’s 11:00 in the evening and you are vowing never, ever to eat another piece of takeout pizza in your life is not an experience that summons the higher literary instincts of a would-be memoirist. After a while, a functionary of the state begins to hear things that, in another context, would be quite remarkable, or at least noteworthy, and yet that simply bounce off one’s consciousness like pebbles off steel plate: “You mean the number of terrorist groups we are fighting is classified?” No wonder so few people are whistle-blowers, quite apart from the vicious retaliation whistle-blowing often provokes: Unless one is blessed with imagination and a fine sense of irony, growing immune to the curiousness of one’s surroundings is easy. To paraphrase the inimitable Donald Rumsfeld, I didn’t know all that I knew, at least until I had had a couple of years away from the government to reflect upon it.
The Deep State does not consist of the entire government. It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department. I also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street. All these agencies are coordinated by the Executive Office of the President via the National Security Council. Certain key areas of the judiciary belong to the Deep State, such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose actions are mysterious even to most members of Congress. Also included are a handful of vital federal trial courts, such as the Eastern District of Virginia and the Southern District of Manhattan, where sensitive proceedings in national security cases are conducted. The final government component (and possibly last in precedence among the formal branches of government established by the Constitution) is a kind of rump Congress consisting of the congressional leadership and some (but not all) of the members of the defense and intelligence committees. The rest of Congress, normally so fractious and partisan, is mostly only intermittently aware of the Deep State and when required usually submits to a few well-chosen words from the State’s emissaries.
I saw this submissiveness on many occasions. One memorable incident was passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act of 2008. This legislation retroactively legalized the Bush administration’s illegal and unconstitutional surveillance first revealed by The New York Times in 2005 and indemnified the telecommunications companies for their cooperation in these acts. The bill passed easily: All that was required was the invocation of the word “terrorism” and most members of Congress responded like iron filings obeying a magnet. One who responded in that fashion was Senator Barack Obama, soon to be coronated as the presidential nominee at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. He had already won the most delegates by campaigning to the left of his main opponent, Hillary Clinton, on the excesses of the global war on terror and the erosion of constitutional liberties.
As the indemnification vote showed, the Deep State does not consist only of government agencies. What is euphemistically called “private enterprise” is an integral part of its operations. In a special series in The Washington Post called “Top Secret America,” Dana Priest and William K. Arkin described the scope of the privatized Deep State and the degree to which it has metastasized after the September 11 attacks. There are now 854,000 contract personnel with top-secret clearances — a number greater than that of top-secret-cleared civilian employees of the government. While they work throughout the country and the world, their heavy concentration in and around the Washington suburbs is unmistakable: Since 9/11, 33 facilities for top-secret intelligence have been built or are under construction. Combined, they occupy the floor space of almost three Pentagons — about 17 million square feet. Seventy percent of the intelligence community’s budget goes to paying contracts. And the membrane between government and industry is highly permeable: The Director of National Intelligence, James R. Clapper, is a former executive of Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the government’s largest intelligence contractors. His predecessor as director, Admiral Mike McConnell, is the current vice chairman of the same company; Booz Allen is 99 percent dependent on government business. These contractors now set the political and social tone of Washington, just as they are increasingly setting the direction of the country, but they are doing it quietly, their doings unrecorded in the Congressional Record or the Federal Register, and are rarely subject to congressional hearings.
Washington is the most important node of the Deep State that has taken over America, but it is not the only one. Invisible threads of money and ambition connect the town to other nodes. One is Wall Street, which supplies the cash that keeps the political machine quiescent and operating as a diversionary marionette theater. Should the politicians forget their lines and threaten the status quo, Wall Street floods the town with cash and lawyers to help the hired hands remember their own best interests. The executives of the financial giants even have de facto criminal immunity. On March 6, 2013, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Eric Holder stated the following: “I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy.” This, from the chief law enforcement officer of a justice system that has practically abolished the constitutional right to trial for poorer defendants charged with certain crimes. It is not too much to say that Wall Street may be the ultimate owner of the Deep State and its strategies, if for no other reason than that it has the money to reward government operatives with a second career that is lucrative beyond the dreams of avarice — certainly beyond the dreams of a salaried government employee. [3]
The corridor between Manhattan and Washington is a well trodden highway for the personalities we have all gotten to know in the period since the massive deregulation of Wall Street: Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, Henry Paulson, Timothy Geithner and many others. Not all the traffic involves persons connected with the purely financial operations of the government: In 2013, General David Petraeus joined KKR (formerly Kohlberg Kravis Roberts) of 9 West 57th Street, New York, a private equity firm with $62.3 billion in assets. KKR specializes in management buyouts and leveraged finance. General Petraeus’ expertise in these areas is unclear. His ability to peddle influence, however, is a known and valued commodity. Unlike Cincinnatus, the military commanders of the Deep State do not take up the plow once they lay down the sword. Petraeus also obtained a sinecure as a non-resident senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. The Ivy League is, of course, the preferred bleaching tub and charm school of the American oligarchy. [4]
Petraeus and most of the avatars of the Deep State — the White House advisers who urged Obama not to impose compensation limits on Wall Street CEOs, the contractor-connected think tank experts who besought us to “stay the course” in Iraq, the economic gurus who perpetually demonstrate that globalization and deregulation are a blessing that makes us all better off in the long run — are careful to pretend that they have no ideology. Their preferred pose is that of the politically neutral technocrat offering well considered advice based on profound expertise. That is nonsense. They are deeply dyed in the hue of the official ideology of the governing class, an ideology that is neither specifically Democrat nor Republican. Domestically, whatever they might privately believe about essentially diversionary social issues such as abortion or gay marriage, they almost invariably believe in the “Washington Consensus”: financialization, outsourcing, privatization, deregulation and the commodifying of labor. Internationally, they espouse 21st-century “American Exceptionalism”: the right and duty of the United States to meddle in every region of the world with coercive diplomacy and boots on the ground and to ignore painfully won international norms of civilized behavior. To paraphrase what Sir John Harrington said more than 400 years ago about treason, now that the ideology of the Deep State has prospered, none dare call it ideology. [5] That is why describing torture with the word “torture” on broadcast television is treated less as political heresy than as an inexcusable lapse of Washington etiquette: Like smoking a cigarette on camera, these days it is simply “not done.”
After Edward Snowden’s revelations about the extent and depth of surveillance by the National Security Agency, it has become publicly evident that Silicon Valley is a vital node of the Deep State as well. Unlike military and intelligence contractors, Silicon Valley overwhelmingly sells to the private market, but its business is so important to the government that a strange relationship has emerged. While the government could simply dragoon the high technology companies to do the NSA’s bidding, it would prefer cooperation with so important an engine of the nation’s economy, perhaps with an implied quid pro quo. Perhaps this explains the extraordinary indulgence the government shows the Valley in intellectual property matters. If an American “jailbreaks” his smartphone (i.e., modifies it so that it can use a service provider other than the one dictated by the manufacturer), he could receive a fine of up to $500,000 and several years in prison; so much for a citizen’s vaunted property rights to what he purchases. The libertarian pose of the Silicon Valley moguls, so carefully cultivated in their public relations, has always been a sham. Silicon Valley has long been tracking for commercial purposes the activities of every person who uses an electronic device, so it is hardly surprising that the Deep State should emulate the Valley and do the same for its own purposes. Nor is it surprising that it should conscript the Valley’s assistance. Still, despite the essential roles of lower Manhattan and Silicon Valley, the center of gravity of the Deep State is firmly situated in and around the Beltway. The Deep State’s physical expansion and consolidation around the Beltway would seem to make a mockery of the frequent pronouncement that governance in Washington is dysfunctional and broken. That the secret and unaccountable Deep State floats freely above the gridlock between both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue is the paradox of American government in the 21st century: drone strikes, data mining, secret prisons and Panopticon-like control on the one hand; and on the other, the ordinary, visible parliamentary institutions of self-government declining to the status of a banana republic amid the gradual collapse of public infrastructure.
The results of this contradiction are not abstract, as a tour of the rotting, decaying, bankrupt cities of the American Midwest will attest. It is not even confined to those parts of the country left behind by a Washington Consensus that decreed the financialization and deindustrialization of the economy in the interests of efficiency and shareholder value. This paradox is evident even within the Beltway itself, the richest metropolitan area in the nation. Although demographers and urban researchers invariably count Washington as a “world city,” that is not always evident to those who live there. Virtually every time there is a severe summer thunderstorm, tens — or even hundreds — of thousands of residents lose power, often for many days. There are occasional water restrictions over wide areas because water mains, poorly constructed and inadequately maintained, have burst. [6] The Washington metropolitan area considers it a Herculean task just to build a rail link to its international airport — with luck it may be completed by 2018.
It is as if Hadrian’s Wall was still fully manned and the fortifications along the border with Germania were never stronger, even as the city of Rome disintegrates from within and the life-sustaining aqueducts leading down from the hills begin to crumble. The governing classes of the Deep State may continue to deceive themselves with their dreams of Zeus-like omnipotence, but others do not. A 2013 Pew Poll that interviewed 38,000 people around the world found that in 23 of 39 countries surveyed, a plurality of respondents said they believed China already had or would in the future replace the United States as the world’s top economic power.
The Deep State is the big story of our time. It is the red thread that runs through the war on terrorism, the financialization and deindustrialization of the American economy, the rise of a plutocratic social structure and political dysfunction. Washington is the headquarters of the Deep State, and its time in the sun as a rival to Rome, Constantinople or London may be term-limited by its overweening sense of self-importance and its habit, as Winwood Reade said of Rome, to “live upon its principal till ruin stared it in the face.” “Living upon its principal,” in this case, means that the Deep State has been extracting value from the American people in vampire-like fashion.
We are faced with two disagreeable implications. First, that the Deep State is so heavily entrenched, so well protected by surveillance, firepower, money and its ability to co-opt resistance that it is almost impervious to change. Second, that just as in so many previous empires, the Deep State is populated with those whose instinctive reaction to the failure of their policies is to double down on those very policies in the future. Iraq was a failure briefly camouflaged by the wholly propagandistic success of the so-called surge; this legerdemain allowed for the surge in Afghanistan, which equally came to naught. Undeterred by that failure, the functionaries of the Deep State plunged into Libya; the smoking rubble of the Benghazi consulate, rather than discouraging further misadventure, seemed merely to incite the itch to bomb Syria. Will the Deep State ride on the back of the American people from failure to failure until the country itself, despite its huge reserves of human and material capital, is slowly exhausted? The dusty road of empire is strewn with the bones of former great powers that exhausted themselves in like manner.
But, there are signs of resistance to the Deep State and its demands. In the aftermath of the Snowden revelations, the House narrowly failed to pass an amendment that would have defunded the NSA’s warrantless collection of data from US persons. Shortly thereafter, the president, advocating yet another military intervention in the Middle East, this time in Syria, met with such overwhelming congressional skepticism that he changed the subject by grasping at a diplomatic lifeline thrown to him by Vladimir Putin. [7] Has the visible, constitutional state, the one envisaged by Madison and the other Founders, finally begun to reassert itself against the claims and usurpations of the Deep State? To some extent, perhaps. The unfolding revelations of the scope of the NSA’s warrantless surveillance have become so egregious that even institutional apologists such as Senator Dianne Feinstein have begun to backpedal — if only rhetorically — from their knee-jerk defense of the agency. As more people begin to waken from the fearful and suggestible state that 9/11 created in their minds, it is possible that the Deep State’s decade-old tactic of crying “terrorism!” every time it faces resistance is no longer eliciting the same Pavlovian response of meek obedience. And the American people, possibly even their legislators, are growing tired of endless quagmires in the Middle East.
But there is another more structural reason the Deep State may have peaked in the extent of its dominance. While it seems to float above the constitutional state, its essentially parasitic, extractive nature means that it is still tethered to the formal proceedings of governance. The Deep State thrives when there is tolerable functionality in the day-to-day operations of the federal government. As long as appropriations bills get passed on time, promotion lists get confirmed, black (i.e., secret) budgets get rubber-stamped, special tax subsidies for certain corporations are approved without controversy, as long as too many awkward questions are not asked, the gears of the hybrid state will mesh noiselessly. But when one house of Congress is taken over by tea party Wahhabites, life for the ruling class becomes more trying.
If there is anything the Deep State requires it is silent, uninterrupted cash flow and the confidence that things will go on as they have in the past. It is even willing to tolerate a degree of gridlock: Partisan mud wrestling over cultural issues may be a useful distraction from its agenda. But recent congressional antics involving sequestration, the government shutdown and the threat of default over the debt ceiling extension have been disrupting that equilibrium. And an extreme gridlock dynamic has developed between the two parties such that continuing some level of sequestration is politically the least bad option for both parties, albeit for different reasons. As much as many Republicans might want to give budget relief to the organs of national security, they cannot fully reverse sequestration without the Democrats demanding revenue increases. And Democrats wanting to spend more on domestic discretionary programs cannot void sequestration on either domestic or defense programs without Republicans insisting on entitlement cuts.
So, for the foreseeable future, the Deep State must restrain its appetite for taxpayer dollars. Limited deals may soften sequestration, but agency requests will not likely be fully funded anytime soon. Even Wall Street’s rentier operations have been affected: After helping finance the tea party to advance its own plutocratic ambitions, America’s Big Money is now regretting the Frankenstein’s monster it has created. Like children playing with dynamite, the tea party and its compulsion to drive the nation into credit default has alarmed the grown-ups commanding the heights of capital; the latter are now telling the politicians they thought they had hired to knock it off.
The House vote to defund the NSA’s illegal surveillance programs was equally illustrative of the disruptive nature of the tea party insurgency. Civil liberties Democrats alone would never have come so close to victory; tea party stalwart Justin Amash (R-MI), who has also upset the business community for his debt-limit fundamentalism, was the lead Republican sponsor of the NSA amendment, and most of the Republicans who voted with him were aligned with the tea party.
The final factor is Silicon Valley. Owing to secrecy and obfuscation, it is hard to know how much of the NSA’s relationship with the Valley is based on voluntary cooperation, how much is legal compulsion through FISA warrants and how much is a matter of the NSA surreptitiously breaking into technology companies’ systems. Given the Valley’s public relations requirement to mollify its customers who have privacy concerns, it is difficult to take the tech firms’ libertarian protestations about government compromise of their systems at face value, especially since they engage in similar activity against their own customers for commercial purposes. That said, evidence is accumulating that Silicon Valley is losing billions in overseas business from companies, individuals and governments that want to maintain privacy. For high tech entrepreneurs, the cash nexus is ultimately more compelling than the Deep State’s demand for patriotic cooperation. Even legal compulsion can be combatted: Unlike the individual citizen, tech firms have deep pockets and batteries of lawyers with which to fight government diktat. This pushback has gone so far that on January 17, President Obama announced revisions to the NSA’s data collection programs, including withdrawing the agency’s custody of a domestic telephone record database, expanding requirements for judicial warrants and ceasing to spy on (undefined) “friendly foreign leaders.” Critics have denounced the changes as a cosmetic public relations move, but they are still significant in that the clamor has gotten so loud that the president feels the political need to address it.
When the contradictions within a ruling ideology are pushed too far, factionalism appears and that ideology begins slowly to crumble. Corporate oligarchs such as the Koch brothers are no longer entirely happy with the faux-populist political front group they helped fund and groom. Silicon Valley, for all the Ayn Rand-like tendencies of its major players, its offshoring strategies and its further exacerbation of income inequality, is now lobbying Congress to restrain the NSA, a core component of the Deep State. Some tech firms are moving to encrypt their data. High tech corporations and governments alike seek dominance over people though collection of personal data, but the corporations are jumping ship now that adverse public reaction to the NSA scandals threatens their profits.
The outcome of all these developments is uncertain. The Deep State, based on the twin pillars of national security imperative and corporate hegemony, has until recently seemed unshakable and the latest events may only be a temporary perturbation in its trajectory. But history has a way of toppling the altars of the mighty. While the two great materialist and determinist ideologies of the twentieth century, Marxism and the Washington Consensus, successively decreed that the dictatorship of the proletariat and the dictatorship of the market were inevitable, the future is actually indeterminate. It may be that deep economic and social currents create the framework of history, but those currents can be channeled, eddied, or even reversed by circumstance, chance and human agency. We have only to reflect upon defunct glacial despotisms such as the USSR or East Germany to realize that nothing is forever.
Throughout history, state systems with outsized pretensions to power have reacted to their environments in two ways. The first strategy, reflecting the ossification of its ruling elites, consists of repeating that nothing is wrong, that the status quo reflects the nation’s unique good fortune in being favored by God and that those calling for change are merely subversive troublemakers. As the French ancien régime, the Romanov dynasty and the Habsburg emperors discovered, the strategy works splendidly for a while, particularly if one has a talent for dismissing unpleasant facts. The final results, however, are likely to be thoroughly disappointing.
The second strategy is one embraced to varying degrees and with differing goals, by figures of such contrasting personalities as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Charles de Gaulle and Deng Xiaoping. They were certainly not revolutionaries by temperament; if anything, their natures were conservative. But they understood that the political cultures in which they lived were fossilized and incapable of adapting to the times. In their drive to reform and modernize the political systems they inherited, their first obstacles to overcome were the outworn myths that encrusted the thinking of the elites of their time.
As the United States confronts its future after experiencing two failed wars, a precarious economy and $17 trillion in accumulated debt, the national punditry has split into two camps. The first, the declinists, sees a broken, dysfunctional political system incapable of reform and an economy soon to be overtaken by China. The second, the reformers, offers a profusion of nostrums to turn the nation around: public financing of elections to sever the artery of money between the corporate components of the Deep State and financially dependent elected officials, government “insourcing” to reverse the tide of outsourcing of government functions and the conflicts of interest that it creates, a tax policy that values human labor over financial manipulation and a trade policy that favors exporting manufactured goods over exporting investment capital.
All of that is necessary, but not sufficient. The Snowden revelations (the impact of which have been surprisingly strong), the derailed drive for military intervention in Syria and a fractious Congress, whose dysfunction has begun to be a serious inconvenience to the Deep State, show that there is now a deep but as yet inchoate hunger for change. What America lacks is a figure with the serene self-confidence to tell us that the twin idols of national security and corporate power are outworn dogmas that have nothing more to offer us. Thus disenthralled, the people themselves will unravel the Deep State with surprising speed.
[1] The term “Deep State” was coined in Turkey and is said to be a system composed of high-level elements within the intelligence services, military, security, judiciary and organized crime. In British author John le Carré’s latest novel, A Delicate Truth, a character describes the Deep State as “… the ever-expanding circle of non-governmental insiders from banking, industry and commerce who were cleared for highly classified information denied to large swathes of Whitehall and Westminster.” I use the term to mean a hybrid association of elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the United States without reference to the consent of the governed as expressed through the formal political process.
[2] Twenty-five years ago, the sociologist Robert Nisbet described this phenomenon as “the attribute of No Fault…. Presidents, secretaries and generals and admirals in America seemingly subscribe to the doctrine that no fault ever attaches to policy and operations. This No Fault conviction prevents them from taking too seriously such notorious foul-ups as Desert One, Grenada, Lebanon and now the Persian Gulf.” To his list we might add 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.
[3] The attitude of many members of Congress towards Wall Street was memorably expressed by Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL), the incoming chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, in 2010: “In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks.”
[4] Beginning in 1988, every US president has been a graduate of Harvard or Yale. Beginning in 2000, every losing presidential candidate has been a Harvard or Yale graduate, with the exception of John McCain in 2008.
[5] In recent months, the American public has seen a vivid example of a Deep State operative marketing his ideology under the banner of pragmatism. Former Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates — a one-time career CIA officer and deeply political Bush family retainer — has camouflaged his retrospective defense of military escalations that have brought us nothing but casualties and fiscal grief as the straight-from-the-shoulder memoir from a plain-spoken son of Kansas who disdains Washington and its politicians.
[6] Meanwhile, the US government took the lead in restoring Baghdad’s sewer system at a cost of $7 billion.
[7] Obama’s abrupt about-face suggests he may have been skeptical of military intervention in Syria all along, but only dropped that policy once Congress and Putin gave him the running room to do so. In 2009, he went ahead with the Afghanistan “surge” partly because General Petraeus’ public relations campaign and back-channel lobbying on the Hill for implementation of his pet military strategy pre-empted other options. These incidents raise the disturbing question of how much the democratically elected president — or any president — sets the policy of the national security state and how much the policy is set for him by the professional operatives of that state who engineer faits accomplis that force his hand.
Monsanto already dominates America’s food chain with its genetically modified seeds. Now it has targeted milk production. Just as frightening as the corporation’s tactics–ruthless legal battles against small farmers–is its decades-long history of toxic contamination.
Gary Rinehart clearly remembers the summer day in 2002 when the stranger walked in and issued his threat. Rinehart was behind the counter of the Square Deal, his “old-time country store,” as he calls it, on the fading town square of Eagleville, Missouri, a tiny farm community 100 miles north of Kansas City.
The Square Deal is a fixture in Eagleville, a place where farmers and townspeople can go for lightbulbs, greeting cards, hunting gear, ice cream, aspirin, and dozens of other small items without having to dr
"I am undeterred and I am undaunted." --Kevin Stefanski
"Big hairy American winning machines." --Baker Mayfield
IN the narrative that has governed American commercial life for the last quarter-century, saving companies from their own mistakes was not supposed to be part of the government’s job description. Economic policy makers in the United States took swaggering pride in the cutthroat but lucrative form of capitalism that was supposedly indigenous to their frontier nation.
Through this uniquely American lens, saving businesses from collapse was the sort of thing that happened on other shores, where sentimental commitments to social welfare trumped sharp-edged competition. Weak-kneed European and Asian leaders were too frightened to endure the animal instincts of a real market, the story went. So they intervened time and again, using government largess to lift inefficient firms to safety, sparing jobs and limiting pain but keeping their economies from reaching full potential.
There have been recent interventions in America, of course — the taxpayer-backed bailout of Chrysler in 1979, and the savings and loan rescue of 1989. But the first happened under Jimmy Carter, a year before Americans embraced Ronald Reagan and his passion for unfettered markets. And the second was under George H. W. Bush, who did not share that passion.
So it made for a strange spectacle last weekend as the current Bush administration, which does cast itself in the Reagan mold, hastily prepared a bailout package to offer the government-sponsored mortgage companies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The reasoning behind this rescue effort — like the reasoning behind the government-induced takeover of Bear Stearns by J. P. Morgan Chase just a month before — sounded no different from that offered in defense of many a bailout in Japan and Europe:
The mortgage giants were too big to be allowed to fail.
Big indeed. Together, Fannie and Freddie own or guarantee nearly half of the nation’s $12 trillion worth of home mortgages. If they collapse, so may the whole system of finance for American housing, threatening a most unfortunate string of events: First, an already plummeting real estate market might crater. Then the banks that have sunk capital into American homes would slip deeper into trouble. And the virus might spread globally.
The central banks of China and Japan are on the hook for hundreds of billions of dollars worth of Fannie’s and Freddie’s bonds — debts they took on assuming that the two companies enjoyed the backing of the American government, argues Brad Setser, an economist at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Commercial banks from South Korea to Sweden hold investments linked to American mortgages. Their losses would mount if American homeowners suddenly couldn’t borrow. The global financial system could find itself short of capital and paralyzed by fear, hobbling economic growth in many lands.
Nobody with a meaningful office in Washington was in the mood for any of that, so the rescue nets were readied. The treasury secretary, Henry Paulson Jr., announced that the government was willing to use taxpayer funds to buy shares in Fannie and Freddie. The chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, said the central bank would lend them money.
The details were up in the air as the week ended, but some sort of bailout offer was on the table — one that could ultimately cost hundreds of billions of dollars. Whatever the dent to national bravado, or to the free-enterprise ideology, the phrase “too big to fail” suddenly carried an American accent.
“Some institutions really are too big to fail, and that’s the way it is,” said Douglas W. Elmendorf, a former Treasury and Federal Reserve Board economist who is now at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “There are no good options.”
Still, there are ironies. Since World War II, the United States has been the center of global finance, and it has used that position to virtually dictate the conditions under which many other nations — particularly developing countries — can get access to capital. Letting weak companies fail has been high on the list.
Mr. Paulson, who announced the bailout, made his name as chief executive of Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street investment giant, where he pried open new markets to foreign investment. As treasury secretary, he has served as chief proselytizer for American-style capitalism, counseling the tough love of laissez-faire. In particular, he has leaned on China to let the value of its currency float freely, and has criticized its banks for shoveling money to companies favored by the Communist Party in order to limit joblessness and social instability.
All through Japan’s lost decade of the 1990s and afterward, American officials chided Tokyo for its unwillingness to let the forces of creative destruction take down the country’s bloated banks and the zombie companies they nurtured. The best way out of stagnation, Americans counseled, was to let weak companies die, freeing up capital for a new crop of leaner entrants.
But as Japan’s leaders engaged in bailouts and bookkeeping fictions to keep banks and companies breathing, they offered those words of justification now heard here: The companies were too big to fail.
In 2002, the government engineered the rescue of Daiei, a huge, debt-laden grocery chain. In 2003, it injected some $17 billion into Resona Bank to keep it upright. Each time, Japan’s leaders said failure was not an option. It would pull too many others into a downward spiral.
Today, among strict adherents of laissez-faire economics, the offer to bail out Fannie and Freddie is already being criticized as a trip down the Japanese path of putting off immediate pain while loading up the costs further along.
For one thing, this argument goes, taxpayers — who now confront plunging house prices, a drop on Wall Street and soaring costs for food and fuel — will ultimately pay the costs. To finance a bailout, the government can either pull more money from citizens directly, or the Fed can print more money — a step that encourages further inflation.
“They are going to raise the cost of living for every American,” said Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital Inc., a Connecticut-based brokerage house that focuses on international investments. “The government is debasing the value of our money. Freddie and Fannie need to fail. They are too big to save.”
Using public money to spare Fannie and Freddie would increase the public debt, which now exceeds $9.4 trillion. The United States has been financing itself by leaning heavily on foreigners, particularly China, Japan and the oil-rich nations of the Persian Gulf. Were they to become worried that the United States might not be able to pay up, that would force the Treasury to offer higher rates of interest for its next tranche of bonds. And that would increase the interest rates that Americans must pay for houses and cars, putting a drag on economic growth.
Meanwhile, as American debts swell and foreigners hold more of it, nervousness grows that, some day, this arrangement will end badly. The dollar has been declining in value against other currencies. Some foreigners have begun to hedge their bets by buying more euros. “Obviously, this is going to come to an end,” Mr. Schiff said. “Foreigners are not charitable organizations, and they’re going to demand that we pay them back.”
No single country owning large amounts of dollar-based investments is inclined to dump them abruptly; nobody aims to start a panic. But fears have begun to grow that one day a country may get spooked that another is about to dump its dollars — and that could trigger pre-emptive panic selling.
RESCUE Christopher Cox, the S.E.C. chairman, left, and Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, center, hear Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson tell senators he wants authority to help save Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Credit Joshua Roberts/Bloomberg News “Foreigners could decide it’s just not worth the risk and sell,” says Andrew Tilton, an economist at Goldman Sachs. “The really dire scenarios have become a lot more likely than they were a year or two ago.”
Still, as Mr. Tilton and others are aware, one fundamental reality continues to offer assurances that foreigners will still buy American debt:
In the global economy of the moment, the United States itself is too big to fail.
The logic for that assurance goes like this:
The American consumer has for decades served as the engine of world commerce, using borrowed cash to snap up the accoutrements of modern living — clothes and computers and cars now manufactured, in whole or in part, in factories from Asia to Latin America. Eliminate the American wherewithal to shop, and the pain would ripple out to multiple shores.
Globalization, in other words, allowed China and Japan to amass the fortunes they have been lending to the United States.
But globalization also emboldened American capitalists to take huge risks they might have otherwise avoided — like borrowing to erect forests of unsold homes from California to Florida, delivering the speculative disaster of the day. They were operating with bedrock confidence that money would never run out. Someone would always buy American debt, delivering more cash for the next go.
And this same interconnectedness appears to have reassured regulators in Washington about the health of the American financial system, as they declined to intervene against highly speculative lending during the real estate boom. Mortgages were being distributed to investors around the globe, and so were the risks, the regulators reasoned. Anyone who bought into that risk would have a strong interest in seeing that the American financial system stayed upright.
In other words, in the estimation of people in control of money, the United States cannot be allowed to collapse, just as Fannie and Freddie cannot be allowed to fail. Too much is riding on their survival.
The central truth of that logic still seems to be apparent as the Treasury keeps finding takers for American debt.
So the government offers its rescue of the mortgage companies, and foreigners keep stocking the government’s coffers. “They don’t want the U.S. to go into the worst downturn since the Depression,” Mr. Tilton says.
But all the while, the debt mounts along with the costs of an ultimate day of reckoning. Debate grows about the wisdom of leaning on foreign credit, and about how much longer Americans will retain the privilege of spending and investing money that isn’t really theirs.
Bailouts amount to mortgaging the future to stave off the wolf howling at the door. The likelihood of a painful reckoning is diminished, while the costs of a reckoning — should one come — are increased.
When the economy crashed in the fall of 2008, the wealthiest Americans lost the most money.
From the time the Great Recession started in late 2007 until it officially ended in 2009, the richest 1 percent of America saw its income drop 36.3 percent, according to a new report by economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty [PDF]. Collectively, the top 1 percent lost 49 percent of the billions in wealth that vanished like so much Lehman Brothers stock.
But before you start writing that sympathy card to your favorite hedge fund manager, remember that the U.S. is now in its sixth-longest economic expansion in history — 51 months and counting — and most of the benefits are trickling up to the wealthy.
According to Saez, the top 1 percent (earning at least $394,000 a year) saw its income rise 31.4 percent between 2009 and 2012. And because the income of the bottom 99 percent of earners rose an anemic 0.4 percent in that same period, the top 1 percent captured 95 percent of the total growth in American wealth during the economic recovery.
As the chart shows, it's nothing new for the super-rich to reap the lion's share of the growth in income (before then losing a small amount of their gains). But 95 percent is a pretty eye-popping number. Even when the top 1 percent saw its income skyrocket 98.7 percent during the Clinton administration, Saez notes, they only accrued 45 percent of the new wealth generated.
Where does that leave us in terms of the haves and have-nots? In a place we haven't been in at least 100 years. For the first time since the government started collecting the relevant data in 1917, the wealthiest 10 percent (earning at least $114,000 a year in 2012 dollars) is earning more than half — 50.4 percent — of U.S. income. The top 1 percent is eating nearly a quarter of the American income pie:
In 2007, before the recession, the top 1 percent brought in 23.5 percent of the money, about the same percentage as in 1928, right before the stock market crash that precipitated the Great Depression. But income disparity flattened out considerably in the post–World War II years, as this chart from The New York Times illustrates:
By 1973, the top 1 percent earned only 7.7 percent of U.S. income. But the percentage has been rising in fits and starts since the 1980s, and now it's clear that "even after the recession the country remains in a new Gilded Age," says Annie Lowrey at The New York Times. And like the last Gilded Age, a lot of the explanation can be found in the stock market. Lowrey explains:
Generally, richer households have disproportionately benefited from the boom in the stock market during the recovery, with the Dow Jones industrial average more than doubling in value since it bottomed out early in 2009. About half of households hold stock, directly or through vehicles like pension accounts. But the richest 10 percent of households own about 90 percent of the stock....
The economy remains depressed for most wage-earning families. With sustained, relatively high rates of unemployment, businesses are under no pressure to raise their employees' incomes because both workers and employers know that many people without jobs would be willing to work for less. The share of Americans working or looking for work is at its lowest in 35 years. [New York Times]
As Slate's Matthew Yglesias notes, the Great Recession was egalitarian in that everybody lost some money, but "the catastrophic recession approach to reducing inequality doesn't look so good" right now.
‘Superclusters’ is just another name for more corporate welfare
MARK MILKE
PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 18, 2018 UPDATED FEBRUARY 18, 2018
Mark Milke has authored multiple reports on subsidies to business for several policy think tanks over the past 20 years.
Here we go again: Almost $1-billion in new corporate welfare for the newest political interference in the marketplace, this for so-called "superclusters," i.e., for locales where politicians hope industries and universities will create the next Silicon Valley.
For those who missed it, the federal Department of Innovation, Science and Economic Development was behind this recently announced lottery. In it, winners from oil and gas, manufacturing, robotics and agriculture, among other sectors, secured $950-million in taxpayer-financed supercluster funding. The department, formerly known as Industry, and thus a more accurate description for a ministry devoted to funnelling tax cash to politically favoured industries, offered the usual cliché justification for more taxpayer-funded lolly directed to corporations. The department forecast the public's cash will "create tens of thousands of middle-class jobs."
Problem: Superclusters, if one must use such corporate PR-speak, are not new. Economist Jack Mintz addressed the love affair with "clusters" two decades ago in a report for then-finance minister Paul Martin's Finance department. Nor are clusters likely to be super in the results for taxpayers or net employment gains.
The employment creation claim is empirically flawed. It is akin to a Ponzi scheme, where the proponent guarantees above-market returns if. Of course, great returns are possible only if some other mark has already funnelled her savings into the illicit scheme. Taxpayer-funded subsidies to businesses are exactly that: a diversion of money from elsewhere. It is why the political announcements of new jobs are inevitably a triumph of hope over empirical realities.
It's not that spending $950-million won't have an effect on the economy or employment; it will. But dropping bags of cash from the CN Tower would also result in increased economic activity and employment.
But one key flaw in the surface assertion is always the lack of attention to the underlying substitution effect. That's where money is taken from others (individuals and businesses), and which prevents new economic activity elsewhere. In economic language, that's called an opportunity cost. That's why in terms of economic impact, corporate welfare is always a wash at best, or worse, negative.
To grasp this more clearly, the federal government is "targeting" specific sectors and geographic areas for taxpayer-financed support. But one of the best, most comprehensive analyses of such targeting and the subpar studies that undergird the political and industry rationale once summarized it this way: "Targeting is based on poor data, unsound social-science methods and faulty economic reasoning and is largely a political activity." The author, Terry Buss, now a professor of public policy at Carnegie Mellon University in Adelaide, Australia, did recommend that targeting studies (not necessarily corporate-welfare outcomes) "could be improved somewhat" if transparency in how such conclusions are reached were made public. But such transparency has always been lacking, including in Canada.
For example, Cliff Oldridge, an Industry department project officer now retired has, for years, tried to pry out the supporting justifications, data and estimated results for previously announced job-creation estimates from his former department. He has been at this for years through Access to Information requests. Other than some spotty disclosure in 2011, the department has refused such empirical-friendly useful transparency ever since, similar to most government departments. Even if Innovation provided the basis for indulged-in past corporate-welfare schemes and the methods by which they arrived at their previous numbers, never mind the new ones, such claims might still suffer from the flaws that Prof. Buss discovered when he examined past industry and government studies: correlation-causation errors, exaggerated benefit claims, double counting and ignored opportunity costs. Prof. Buss characterized such studies as "simplistic" and "non-scientific."
A more recent paper also looked at what they characterized as "new" and also old industrial policy (another name for corporate welfare). They found little justification for it. The authors concluded that "Over all, there appears to be little empirical support for an activist government policy even though market failures exist …"
Back to Prof. Buss, who characterized government attempts to target specific sectors for gains as "nothing more than central planning." That's as charitable as one can be about such political, civil-servant and business collusion. An even better description: another billion-dollar, government-engineered Ponzi scheme.
A standard critique of the capitalist system going all the way back to Chesterton and Belloc is the accusation that in our current system we have neither a domination by Big Government as the conservatives are constantly drumming nor an enslavement by Big Business as the liberals fear, but rather a collusion between Big Government and big Business, a collusion that allows each to benefit the other and work for the aims of the other, something in such a direct way that the folks running government and running business are the same people. This is what Chesterton referred to as the dilemma of Hudge and Gudge in What's Wrong With the World. While most in the west take the side of Hudge against Gudge or Gudge against Hudge, the informed Distributist understands that Hudge and Gudge are two sides of the same coin, two faces of liberalism that are both moving us toward the Servile State.
As time goes by, this collusion between the state and big business, united by the bonds of big finance, is becoming more and more explicit. In this article, we will examine some ways in which Big Business and Big Government are in bed together and discuss possible solutions for remedying this situation within a Distributist context.
Disparity in Sentencing
This collusion between government and big business is especially evident in the case of the way the government treats the criminals of big financial firms, men who steal billions of dollars, wreck the economy, cost thousands of people their jobs, destroy retirement funds and yet go unpunished. With few exceptions, they are gifted not merely with leniency, but full-scale immunity from criminal punishment.
Glenn Greenwald, whose book With Liberty and Justice for Some has thoroughly documented the plutocratic inequalities in our justice system, has noted that while the rich have always had a disproportionate influence in the American justice system. the flagrancy with which this principle is now touted is a troubling novelty:
"Obviously, those with money and power always enjoyed substantial advantages in the US justice system, but lip service was at least always paid to the core precept of the rule of law: that - regardless of power, position and prestige - all stand equal before the blindness of Lady Justice.
It really is the case that this principle is now not only routinely violated, as was always true, but explicitly repudiated, right out in the open. It is commonplace to hear US elites unblinkingly insisting that those who become sufficiently important and influential are - and should be - immunized from the system of criminal punishment to which everyone else is subjected." [1]
The reason that the rich are routinely not subject to criminal prosecution gets right to the heart of the issue of collusion between government and business. The reason cited by the government for why these crimes are not prosecuted is because it would be too inconvenient to the economy and the aims of the government if justice were served. Greenwald cites the case of HSBC, one of the world's largest banks. In 2012, United States federal investigators found that HSBC washad spent years committing many serious crimes, involving money laundering for terrorists; "facilitat[ing] money laundering by Mexican drug cartels"; and "mov[ing] tainted money for Saudi banks tied to terrorist groups". Those investigations uncovered substantial evidence "that senior bank officials were complicit in the illegal activity."[2]
Yet, the United Stats decided not to prosecute the bank on the grounds that the bank is simply too big, too important, and too integral to the well-being of the financial market for its operations to be disrupted by something as petty as a federal criminal investigation. The Justice Department ultimately opted for a very small fine instead of prosecution. Their rationale is quite amazing and merits to be quoted at length:
"US authorities defended their decision not to prosecute HSBC for accepting the tainted money of rogue states and drug lords on Tuesday, insisting that a $1.9bn fine for a litany of offences was preferable to the 'collateral consequences' of taking the bank to court. . . .
"Announcing the record fine at a press conference in New York, assistant attorney general Lanny Breuer said that despite HSBC"s 'blatant failure' to implement anti-money laundering controls and its wilful flouting of US sanctions, the consequences of a criminal prosecution would have been dire.
"Had the US authorities decided to press criminal charges, HSBC would almost certainly have lost its banking licence in the US, the future of the institution would have been under threat and the entire banking system would have been destabilised.
"HSBC, Britain's biggest bank, said it was 'profoundly sorry' for what it called 'past mistakes' that allowed terrorists and narcotics traffickers to move billions around the financial system and circumvent US banking laws. . . .
"As part of the deal, HSBC has undertaken a five-year agreement with the US department of justice under which it will install an independent monitor to assess reformed internal controls. The bank's top executives will defer part of their bonuses for the whole of the five-year period, while bonuses have been clawed back from a number of former and current executives, including those in the US directly involved at the time.
The bank processed cash for Mexico's Sinaloa cartel, regarded as the most powerful and deadly drug gang in the world, among others. At least $881 million in drug trafficking money was laundered throughout HSBC accounts. In order to handle the "staggering amounts of cash", the bank even widened the windows at some branches to allow tellers to accept larger boxes of money.
HSBC also helped rogue states including Libya, Sudan, Burma and Iran to work around US rules banning them from using US financial system in a scheme that went on for decades." [3]
Prosecuting such a large bank could have potentially "destabilized" the market, and therefore the United States has settled for nothing more than a promise from HSBC that they will behave, with some additional internal monitoring, plus a the executives forgoing part of their bonuses. Thus, they walk away scot free after having laundered almost a billion dollars for one of the world's most violent drug cartels for over a decade in a scam that many high level bankers were knowingly involved in.
What would have happened, by contrast, if a single poor black woman was caught with a small fraction of cocaine? They would have thrown the book at her; in fact, they did - Stephanie George of Pensacola, Florida was sentenced to life in prison at age 27 for possessing some cocaine in a lockbox stored in her attic. [4]
In stating that prosecution of big banks is undesirable because the banks are so big that prosecution could destabilize the economy, the government implicitly aids the banks in their immoral activities by creating a moral hazard, that is, a circumstance where reckless financial activity is encouraged due to a real or perceived (in this case real) immunity from punishment. The government allows the financial criminals to operate without worrying about the consequences of their actions, as they know the government deems them too big and important to disturb with petty matters like justice. Conversely, in being allowed this freedom, the mammoth financial institutions aid the government by continuing the farce that is our economy and not disturbing the apple cart.
Local Collusion
This sort of collusion happens at the local level as well through the granting of tax abatements. A tax abatement is a remission of either all or part of the property taxes a company owes to a municipality and may be granted for varying amounts of time; the standard municipal tax abatement in Michigan, for example, is a 50-75% abatement of all property taxes in a new development for a period of 12 years; sometimes, 100% abatements are granted for special projects meeting certain criteria set by the state. These abatements thus function almost as indulgences for businesses, remitting either all (plenary) or some (partial) of their tax burden!
These abatements are usually done for admirable motives; companies that get abatements usually are larger employers whose expansions will create new jobs. In addition to this, municipalities covet the large tax revenues that they will reap from multi-million dollar investments once the abatement period has expired. However, because state laws allow these to granted only under certain conditions (usually the company has to demonstrate that it will create a certain number of jobs and the "investment" in the community has to be sufficiently large) only very large companies are eligible for these abatements - companies whose expansions are projects in the tens of millions of dollars. Though the abatements are technically available to any applicant, the guidelines ensure that only sufficiently capitalized applicants will ever qualify to receive them. Thus the big companies that can most afford to pay their taxes are granted breaks while small companies for whom taxes are a greater burden have no escape from them.
In typical consequentialist fashion, these unfortunate inequalities are justified in light of the eventual good that will accrue to the community by the new jobs and new tax revenue the corporate development will eventually produce. The real irony is that even these supposed benefits are ephemeral; there is no way for the company to ensure that only local persons are hired - in many cases, workers hired as a result of the development are from out of town or transferred in from another factory. And what about the taxes that will come into local coffers after the abatement period ends? Usually, a company that receives a 12 year abatement will file a property tax appeal in year 13 and fight tooth and nail in expensive lawsuits at the state tax tribunals that municipalities cannot afford to fight, eventually securing further tax concessions.
Thus, local governments grant tax exemptions to big corporations to get them into their towns while corporations play cities against each other, seeing who will give the most lucrative deal. In the end, the big corporations cooperate with the community only long enough to enjoy the fruits of their abatement before suing the same city that granted them the abatement to get their taxes lowered again. Meanwhile small businesses, who do not have the benefit of having laws written for them that allow them to qualify for abatements, have no recourse. This is a prime example of a very common form of government-corporate collusion that goes on all the time at the local level and rewards big corporations while doing nothing for the small businesses.
Not to mention that abatements are only available for new businesses or expansions; existing businesses, even if they have been faithfully serving the community for decades, cannot apply for them unless they build an expansion or open up a new building.
The Revolving Door
This collusion is perpetuated by a phenomenon that social scientists have dubbed "the revolving door." The revolving door refers to the way state and federal legislators and other government bureaucrats freely move from elected office into cozy corporate lobbying positions. This mains that the persons making the laws and those advocating on behalf of big businesses are literally the same people. Lobbying firms hire outgoing lawmakers because the legislators know the inner working of Washington and can bring this knowledge to the advantage of the lobbying firms; legislators, for their part, know that firms they advocated on behalf of during their tenure can be counted on to provide them with a snug, secure position when their term of office is over. The cozy relationship between lobbyists and legislators, and the real crossing over of persons between both groups, ensures that legislation is written that is oriented in favor of business interests - that is, after all, the end of all corporate lobbying.
This phenomenon is fairly universal; in the past decade, 400 lawmakers and 5,400 staffers have made the jump from Capitol Hill to private lobbying firms advocating on behalf of big businesses. Likewise, 605 lobbyists have taken up jobs on Capitol Hill in the same frame of time. [5] The relationship between lobbyists and lawmakers has been described as "symbiotic" [6]. Lawmakers and lobbyists each have something to offer the other, and the collusion between representatives of public and private interests leave us with big corporations effectively writing legislation and legislation written for big corporations.
In case it is not clear, I single out "big corporations" because, of course, mom and pop shops do not have the funding to employ full time lobbyists, nor spend their valuable time lobbying in person. As with abatements at the local level, this form of collusion open to the big players.
"Virtual Lobbying" for Small Business?
It could be objected that lobbying is not as inaccessible to small businesses as we are one might think. Small businesses might not have the funds to hire their own lobbyist, but they may participate in a sort of "virtual lobbying" by joining and paying dues to organizations that are big enough to lobby. So, for example, a corner shoe store that sells locally made shoes could never hope to pay for its own full-time lobbyist might become a dues-paying member of the Chamber of Commerce, knowing that the Chamber advocates for business in general and is a very powerful voice on Capitol Hill. The shoe store, while not represented directly, is represented virtually through the Chamber, and thus is able to lobby, in a certain way.
This concept of "virtual lobbying" suffers from two major flaws: first, it can hardly be said that a massive umbrella organization like the Chamber, representing so many distinct forms of business, can effectively lobby for the specific needs of any particular sort of businesses, especially if the aims of its members might be contradictory. For example, the Chamber might advocate for free trade with China, knowing that many of its larger, industrial members will approve of the continued ability to get cheap-labor for their manufacturing. Yet this same free trade that pleases one Chamber member is detrimental to our above mentioned shoe store, whose smaller, off-brand and locally produced stock cannot compete with the low-cost junk made by Adidas, Nike and Reebok in the Chinese sweatshops. Free trade is actually burden to this store.
Related but more important is the inequality of donations within a large umbrella group like the Chamber. So while smaller businesses certainly can join the Chamber, so can large corporations like McDonalds, Exxon, etc., allowing for a situation in which the donations of big dollars outweighs small dollars.
Lest one think this accusation unfounded, a 2010 investigation by the New York Times found that "while the chamber boasts of representing more than three million businesses, and having approximately 300,000 members, nearly half of its $140 million in contributions in 2008 came from just 45 donors." [7] Dow Chemical, for example, made a $1.7 million donation [4]. Do we really believe that the $150 paid by a local restaurant for Chamber dues carries the same weight as $1.7 million from Dow Chemical? Goldman Sachs and Texaco are among some of the Chamber's other top donors. James Carter, founder of a smaller, alternate business advocacy group called the "Green Chamber of Commerce," observed that the Chamber is "dominated by oil companies, pharmaceutical giants, automakers and other polluting industries." [8]
The fact of the revolving door and the inequality in virtual lobbying by umbrella groups demonstrate what a sham the whole lobbying network is: Big companies with big budgets employ full-time lobbyists who cozy up to lawmakers to ensure laws are written with corporate ends in mind; in exchange, lawmakers get information and advice from lobbyists and can count on cushy lobbying jobs themselves when they end their elected terms. Meanwhile, small businesses who cannot afford to lobby are relegated to making their opinions heard through participating in large umbrella groups to whom they pay dues year after year only to have the wishes of a handful of large donors (the same ones employing the full-time lobbyists) dominate the organization. The result is that law is written for corporations, corporations write law, and small businesses get the shaft, paying dues to organizations that do not represent them and receiving no real representation at the same time. No mafia boss ever had a racket so profitable or well-organized!
An End to Corporate-Government Collusion
The classic definition of fascism is a situation in which Big Business and Big Government are formally united in their aims and in many aspects of their administration; government gives business direction in what and how much to produce, and business seeks the authority of government to establish and protect its interests, which are subordinated to the direction of the state. Unlike communism, where the state owns industry, in fascism, the state is independent from industry, but becomes its biggest customer. The aims of the two coalesce. In Mussolini's Italy, government officials and corporate heads would have regular conferences to decide what "they" were going to do with production in a given period. Because of this legal collusion, fascism has been defined, even by its own adherents, as "national corporatism." [9]
We certainly do not have de jure fascism in this country, but when we have so much collusion between the public and private spheres at every level of government, and in many cases the same individuals running things in both spheres with identical aims, can it not be legitimately argued that what we have in the United States is de facto quasi-fascist system, a system which only resembles fascism more and more as both government and business get larger and as subsidiarity is stamped out?
How can we reverse this trend? How can we restore true subsidiarity to our economy and end the hijacking of government for corporate ends and the concomitant influence of corporations on government? This is a tall order, but I think we can propose a few changes that would be keeping in the spirit of Distributism and would go a long way towards rectifying the problems we have highlighted.
1. First and foremost, we need to restore justice in the way corporate crimes are dealt with. Too often petty criminals are handed down harsh sentences for stealing paltry amounts of money or possessing nominal amounts of drugs, while corporate criminals who squander and steal billions of dollars, wreck the economy and cost thousands of people their jobs frequently get away with only minimal punishment, if go scot-free altogether. Those who steal billions and drive the economy into the ground should be held criminally liable for their recklessness with prison terms at least as harsh as those meted out to small-time crooks; if this country ever moves towards corporal punishment again, I would recommend flogging in addition to said prison terms.
2. Legally we need to revisit the concept of limited liability, which goes hand in hand with the point above. While limited liability is helpful in encouraging entrepreneurs to take the risks inherent in starting a company, there should be limits to its extension. The sorts of calculations an entrepreneur starting a small business will make are very different from those an executive in a Fortune 500 company would make. If the millionaire hedgefund managers and bankers who orchestrated the 2008 meltdown knew they could be held, to some extent, personally liable for taking wrecking their clients' portfolios with reckless investments against best business practices, the meltdown might not have went down the way it did. I am not proposing abolishing limited liability altogether, but its extension should not be unlimited.
3. Regarding local abatements, if an abatement is to be granted as an incentive, it should be available to every business owner, not just very large. The lucrative and absurd 100%-12 year abatements should be done away with altogether; instead, abatements should be capped at 10%, and this should simply be a flat rate for any new business starting up in town, or an existing business that, say, merits an abatement by having been in operation continually for a decade or more. The duration of the abatement ought to be seven years, rather than twelve.
Another option might be to get rid of abatements altogether, or at least for businesses grossing over $2 million in sales annually. This would ensure that decisions aren't made only for the behest of the largest. If a business does get an abatement, it should be forbidden from challenging its taxes at the state tax tribunals for a period of at least five years from the termination of the abatement; this would put an end to the practice of the local government granting a large corporation a lucrative abatement only to have the corporation turn around and sue the municipality at the tax tribunal the year the abatement ends.
But one way or another, either small businesses should have abatements available to them, or else they should not be available at all.
4. Ending the influence of lobbyists might prove to be the biggest challenge. Of course, one could simply ban lobbying altogether. "But how would corporations make their needs known to their duly elected representatives!?" some might argue. Easy. The same way everybody else does: write letters to your representatives, make phone calls, sign petitions, send emails. We all communicate this way without having recourse to professional hired lobbyists. This would make sure corporations did not have special access to government unavailable to the rest of us.
However, this idea does suffer from a major drawback in that it is practically unenforceable. How would we tell who was a lobbyist and who was not, and what sort of communication would constitute lobbying, and what sort of gargantuan enforcement mechanism would we need to construct in order to catch offenders? No, it is impracticable. to ban the activity entirely. But it could be regulated much more severely: for one thing, the revolving door needs to end. Many businesses already have "non-compete" forms that employees must sign, and this principle could be extended to lobbying - no legislator would be permitted to work as a lobbyist for ten years after the expiration of his legislative term (similar to the law they used to have in the Roman Republic), while any registered lobbyist would have to wait a similar period before he could stand for public office. This would do much towards breaking down the revolving door phenomenon.
Furthermore, there could be inaugurated a graduated system of lobbying fees for registering lobbyists. For companies whose tax returns show a gross annual income of $500,000 or less, there would be no fee. This at least ensures that, theoretically, smaller businesses can afford to register a lobbyist if they wanted to. But the biggest benefit of a graduated system of fees is not what it does for smaller businesses, but rather how it deals with the large. Companies grossing between $500K-$1million, the fee could be $1,000 annually (akin to what most states charge now). Then we could go up:
$1 million-$3 million: $5,000 annually $3 million-$5 million: $10,000 annually $5 million-$10 million: $20,000 annually $10 million - $20 million: $50,000 annually $20 million-$50 million: $100,000 annually $50 million - $75 million: $150,000 annually $75 million - $100 million: $250,000 annually $100 million-$250 million: $500,000 annually $250 million - $500 million: $1 million annually $500 million - $1 billion: $5 million annually $1 billion - $100 billion: $10 million annually $100 billion and above: $25 million annually
This fee would be simply to register an individual as a lobbyist and does not take into account the salary the company would have to pay them. Furthermore, these fees are for each, individual lobbyist - so if Wal-Mart wanted to hire ten lobbyists to represent it in Washington for a five years, we would take a look Wal-Marts gross annual sales, which are around $405 billion [10]. This puts Wal-Mart in the highest category, at $25 million per lobbyist per year. That would be $25 million x 10 lobbyists = $250,000,000 in fees Wal-Mart would have to spend to register these lobbyists. But then, since the registration needs to be renewed every year and Wal-Mart wants these lobbyists working on a five-year timetable, this brings their total registration fees to $1.25 billion dollars to hire ten lobbyists for five years.
This scale would no doubt discourage large companies from flooding Washington with gobs of lobbyists and would encourage middle sized businesses to get into the game. But the best part is, a percentage of these fees (50%?) would be returned to the state, county and municipality where the company is headquartered, in order to make sure that if the company is going to spend money on lobbying, a portion of that money is going to be reinvested in the community that hosts that corporation. So, for example, in my hometown we have a large multinational corporation that grosses about $35 million every year. If this corporation hired a lobbyist, $50,000 of their registration would come back to the community every single year.
No doubt there are many different ways things could go, and what I have provided here are just a few random thoughts on the subject. But the bottom line is that in our current state of affairs, we do indeed have a real and vital collusion between Big Government and Big Business united by Big Finance. This is an inherently dangerous position for our society to be in, as the common good is subordinated to the private good of business through business's intimate relationship with government.We can't trust our economy and society to the whims of big businesses, nor our government when they make decisions in the interest of these corporate behemoths.
Google Is Helping the Pentagon Build AI for Drones
Kate Conger and Dell Cameron Today 10:15am
Google has partnered with the United States Department of Defense to help the agency develop artificial intelligence for analyzing drone footage, a move that set off a firestorm among employees of the technology giant when they learned of Google’s involvement.
Google’s pilot project with the Defense Department’s Project Maven, an effort to identify objects in drone footage, has not been previously reported, but it was discussed widely within the company last week when information about the project was shared on an internal mailing list, according to sources who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the project.
Some Google employees were outraged that the company would offer resources to the military for surveillance technology involved in drone operations, sources said, while others argued that the project raised important ethical questions about the development and use of machine learning.
Google’s Eric Schmidt summed up the tech industry’s concerns about collaborating with the Pentagon at a talk last fall. “There’s a general concern in the tech community of somehow the military-industrial complex using their stuff to kill people incorrectly,” he said. While Google says its involvement in Project Maven is not related to combat uses, the issue has still sparked concern among employees, sources said.
Project Maven, a fast-moving Pentagon project also known as the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team (AWCFT), was established in April 2017. Maven’s stated mission is to “accelerate DoD’s integration of big data and machine learning.” In total, the Defense Department spent $7.4 billion on artificial intelligence-related areas in 2017, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The project’s first assignment was to help the Pentagon efficiently process the deluge of video footage collected daily by its aerial drones—an amount of footage so vast that human analysts can’t keep up, according to Greg Allen, an adjunct fellow at the Center for a New American Security, who co-authored a lengthy July 2017 report on the military’s use of artificial intelligence. Although the Defense Department has poured resources into the development of advanced sensor technology to gather information during drone flights, it has lagged in creating analysis tools to comb through the data.
“Before Maven, nobody in the department had a clue how to properly buy, field, and implement AI,” Allen wrote.
Maven was tasked with using machine learning to identify vehicles and other objects in drone footage, taking that burden off analysts. Maven’s initial goal was to provide the military with advanced computer vision, enabling the automated detection and identification of objects in as many as 38 categories captured by a drone’s full-motion camera, according to the Pentagon. Maven provides the department with the ability to track individuals as they come and go from different locations.
Artificial intelligence is already deployed in law enforcement and military applications, but researchers warn that these systems may be significantly biased in ways that aren’t easily detectible. For example, ProPublica reported in 2016 that an algorithm used to predict the likelihood of recidivism among inmates routinely exhibited racial bias.
Although Google’s involvement stirred up concern among employees, it’s possible that Google’s own product offerings limit its access to sensitive government data. While its cloud competitors, Amazon and Microsoft Azure, offer government-oriented cloud products designed to hold information classified as secret, Google does not currently have a similar product offering.
A Google spokesperson told Gizmodo in a statement that it is providing the Defense Department with TensorFlow APIs, which are used in machine learning applications, to help military analysts detect objects in images. Acknowledging the controversial nature of using machine learning for military purposes, the spokesperson said the company is currently working “to develop polices and safeguards” around its use.
“We have long worked with government agencies to provide technology solutions. This specific project is a pilot with the Department of Defense, to provide open source TensorFlow APIs that can assist in object recognition on unclassified data,” the spokesperson said. “The technology flags images for human review, and is for non-offensive uses only. Military use of machine learning naturally raises valid concerns. We’re actively discussing this important topic internally and with others as we continue to develop policies and safeguards around the development and use of our machine learning technologies.”
The Defense Department set an aggressive timeline for Maven—the project was expected to be up and running just six months after it was founded, and reportedly has been deployed in the fight against the Islamic State since December.
To meet the aggressive timetable, the Defense Department partnered with AI experts in the tech industry and academia, working through Defense Information Unit Experimental, the department’s tech incubation program, and the Defense Innovation Board, an advisory group created by former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter to bridge the technological gap between the Pentagon and Silicon Valley.
Schmidt, who stepped down as executive chairman of Google parent company Alphabet last month, chairs the Defense Innovation Board. During a July meeting, Schmidt and other members of the Defense Innovation Board discussed the Department of Defense’s need to create a clearinghouse for training data that could be used to enhance the military’s AI capability. Board members played an “advisory role” on Project Maven, according to meeting minutes, while “some members of the Board’s teams are part of the executive steering group that is able to provide rapid input” on Project Maven.
Maven is overseen by the undersecretary for defense intelligence and Lt. Gen. John Shanahan was selected as the project’s director. Maven was designed to be the spark, according to Shanahan, that would kindle “the flame front of artificial intelligence” across the entire Defense Department.
By summer 2017, the team set out to locate commercial partners whose expertise was needed to make its AI dreams a reality. At the Defense One Tech Summit in Washington, Maven chief Marine Corps Col. Drew Cukor said a symbiotic relationship between humans and computers was crucial to help weapon systems detect objects.
Speaking to a crowd of military and industry technology experts, many from Silicon Valley, Cukor professed the US to be in the midst of AI arms race. “Many of you will have noted that Eric Schmidt is calling Google an AI company now, not a data company,” he said, although Cukor did not specifically cite Google as a Maven partner.
Recent Video from Gizmodo VIEW MORE > Gross Toys Are Awesome 2/23/18 9:50 am “There is no ‘black box’ that delivers the AI system the government needs, at least not now,” he continued. “Key elements have to be put together … and the only way to do that is with commercial partners alongside us.”
A spokesperson for the Defense Department declined to say whether Google was its only private industry partner on Project Maven or to clarify Google’s role in the project.
“Similar to other DOD programs, Project Maven does not comment on the specifics of contract details, including the names and identities of program contractors and subcontractors,” the spokesperson said.
NSA paying U.S. companies for access to communications networks
By Craig Timberg and Barton Gellman August 29, 2013
The National Security Agency is paying hundreds of millions of dollars a year to U.S. companies for clandestine access to their communications networks, filtering vast traffic flows for foreign targets in a process that also sweeps in large volumes of American telephone calls, e-mails and instant messages.
The bulk of the spending, detailed in a multi-volume intelligence budget obtained by The Washington Post, goes to participants in a Corporate Partner Access Project for major U.S. telecommunications providers. The documents open an important window into surveillance operations on U.S. territory that have been the subject of debate since they were revealed by The Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper in June.
New details of the corporate-partner project, which falls under the NSA’s Special Source Operations, confirm that the agency taps into “high volume circuit and packet-switched networks,” according to the spending blueprint for fiscal 2013. The program was expected to cost $278 million in the current fiscal year, down nearly one-third from its peak of $394 million in 2011.
Voluntary cooperation from the “backbone” providers of global communications dates to the 1970s under the cover name BLARNEY, according to documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. These relationships long predate the PRISM program disclosed in June, under which American technology companies hand over customer data after receiving orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
In briefing slides, the NSA described BLARNEY and three other corporate projects — OAKSTAR, FAIRVIEW and STORMBREW — under the heading of “passive” or “upstream” collection. They capture data as they move across fiber-optic cables and the gateways that direct global communications traffic.
View select pages from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's top-secret 2013 budget with key sections annotated by The Washington Post.
The documents offer a rare view of a secret surveillance economy in which government officials set financial terms for programs capable of peering into the lives of almost anyone who uses a phone, computer or other device connected to the Internet.
Although the companies are required to comply with lawful surveillance orders, privacy advocates say the multimillion-dollar payments could create a profit motive to offer more than the required assistance.
“It turns surveillance into a revenue stream, and that’s not the way it’s supposed to work,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington-based research and advocacy group. “The fact that the government is paying money to telephone companies to turn over information that they are compelled to turn over is very troubling.”
Verizon, AT&T and other major telecommunications companies declined to comment for this article, although several industry officials noted that government surveillance laws explicitly call for companies to receive reasonable reimbursement for their costs.
Previous news reports have made clear that companies frequently seek such payments, but never before has their overall scale been disclosed.
The budget documents do not list individual companies, although they do break down spending among several NSA programs, listed by their code names.
There is no record in the documents obtained by The Post of money set aside to pay technology companies that provide information to the NSA’s PRISM program. That program is the source of 91 percent of the 250 million Internet communications collected through Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, which authorizes PRISM and the upstream programs, according to an 2011 opinion and order by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
Several of the companies that provide information to PRISM, including Apple, Facebook and Google, say they take no payments from the government when they comply with national security requests. Others say they do take payments in some circumstances. The Guardian reported last week that the NSA had covered “millions of dollars” in costs that some technology companies incurred to comply with government demands for information.
Telecommunications companies generally do charge to comply with surveillance requests, which come from state, local and federal law enforcement officials as well as intelligence agencies.
Former telecommunications executive Paul Kouroupas, a security officer who worked at Global Crossing for 12 years, said that some companies welcome the revenue and enter into contracts in which the government makes higher payments than otherwise available to firms receiving reimbursement for complying with surveillance orders.
These contractual payments, he said, could cover the cost of buying and installing new equipment, along with a reasonable profit. These voluntary agreements simplify the government’s access to surveillance, he said.
“It certainly lubricates the [surveillance] infrastructure,” Kouroupas said. He declined to say whether Global Crossing, which operated a fiber-optic network spanning several continents and was bought by Level 3 Communications in 2011, had such a contract. A spokesman for Level 3 Communications declined to comment.
In response to questions in 2012 from then-Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), who was elected to the Senate in June, several telecommunications companies detailed their prices for surveillance services to law enforcement agencies under individual warrants and subpoenas. AT&T, for example, reported that it charges $325 to activate surveillance of an account and also a daily rate of $5 or $10, depending on the information gathered. For providing the numbers that have accessed cell towers, meanwhile, AT&T charged $75 per tower, the company said in a letter.
No payments have been previously disclosed for mass surveillance access to traffic flowing across a company’s infrastructure.
Lawyer Albert Gidari Jr., a partner at Perkins Coie who represents technology and telecommunications companies, said that surveillance efforts are expensive, requiring teams of attorneys to sift through requests and execute the ones deemed reasonable. Government agencies, meanwhile, sometimes balk at paying the full costs incurred by companies
“They lose a ton of money,” Gidari said. “And yet the government is still unsatisfied with it.”
The budget documents obtained by The Post list $65.96 million for BLARNEY, $94.74 million for FAIRVIEW, $46.04 million for STORMBREW and $9.41 million for OAKSTAR. It is unclear why the total of these four programs amounts to less than the overall budget of $278 million.
Among the possible costs covered by these amounts are “network and circuit leases, equipment hardware and software maintenance, secure network connectivity, and covert site leases,” the documents say. They also list in a separate line item $56.6 million in payments for “Foreign Partner Access,” although it is not clear whether these are for foreign companies, foreign governments or other foreign entities.
Some privacy advocates favor payments to companies when they comply with surveillance efforts because the costs can be a brake on overly broad requests by government officials. Invoices also can provide a paper trail to help expose the extent of spying.
But if the payments are too high, they may persuade companies to go beyond legal requirements in providing information, said Chris Soghoian, a technology expert with the American Civil Liberties Union who has studied government payments related to surveillance requests.
“I’m worried that the checks might grease the wheels a little bit,” he said.
Cocaine, Conspiracy Theories and the CIA in Central America
by Craig Delaval
Delaval is a freelance writer and filmmaker and was a production assistant for "Drug Wars." This article was edited by Lowell Bergman, series reporter for "Drug Wars."
Since its creation in 1947 under President Harry Truman, the CIA has been credited with a number of far-fetched operations. While some were proven - the infamous LSD mind-control experiments of the 1950s - others, like the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the crash of the Savings and Loans industry, have little or no merit. In 1996 the agency was accused of being a crack dealer.
A series of expose articles in the San Jose Mercury-News by reporter Gary Webb told tales of a drug triangle during the 1980s that linked CIA officials in Central America, a San Francisco drug ring and a Los Angeles drug dealer. According to the stories, the CIA and its operatives used crack cocaine--sold via the Los Angeles African-American community--to raise millions to support the agency's clandestine operations in Central America.
The CIA's suspect past made the sensational articles an easy sell. Talk radio switchboards lit up, as did African-American leaders like U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Los Angeles, who pointed to Webb's articles as proof of a mastermind plot to destroy inner-city black America.
One of the people who was accused in the San Jose Mercury-News of being in the midst of the CIA cocaine conspiracy is one of the most respected, now retired, veteran D.E.A. agents, Robert "Bobby" Nieves.
"You have to understand Central America at that time was a haven for the conspiracy theorists. Christic Institute, people like Gary Webb, others down there, looking to dig up some story for political advantage," Nieves said. "No sexier story than to create the notion in people's minds that these people are drug traffickers."
But in the weeks following publication, Webb's peers doubted the merit of the articles. Fellow journalists at the Washington Post, New York Times and Webb's own editor accused him of blowing a few truths up into a massive conspiracy.
Amongst Webb's fundamental problems was his implication that the CIA lit the crack cocaine fuse. It was conspiracy theory: a neat presentation of reality that simply didn't jibe with real life. Webb later agreed in an interview that there is no hard evidence that the CIA as an institution or any of its agent-employees carried out or profited from drug trafficking.
Still, the fantastic story of the CIA injecting crack into ghettos had taken hold. In response to the public outcry following Webb's allegations--which were ultimately published in book form under the title Dark Alliance--the CIA conducted an internal investigation of its role in Central America related to the drug trade. Frederick Hitz, as the CIA Inspector General-- an independent watchdog approved by Congress--conducted the investigation. In October 1998, the CIA released a declassified version of Hitz's two-volume report.
The IG's report cleared the CIA of complicity with the inner-city crack cocaine trade. It refuted charges that CIA officials knew that their Nicaraguan allies were dealing drugs. But, the report said that the CIA, in a number of cases, didn't bother to look into allegations about narcotics And the Hitz report describes how there was little or no direction for CIA operatives when confronted by the rampant traffic in drugs in Central American during the 1980s.
What follows is a closer look at the Hitz report, drawing on interviews with Frederick Hitz and others interviewed for FRONTLINE's "Drug Wars" series.
The War on Communism
When the Marxist Sandinistas overthrew the government of longtime dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979, U.S. approval soured when it became clear that the new regime saw itself as a satellite of Cuba, if not the Soviet Union. When Ronald Reagan became president soon after, he quietly began sending aid to those fighting the Marxist government. They were known as the Nicaraguan Resistance, or more simply, the Contras.
As with Burma, Laos and Afghanistan before it -- where the U.S. had helped fight wars -- Nicaragua had a narcotics trade--a fact which was brought to the CIA's attention while the Contra effort was barely off the ground. In 1981 members of the Nicaraguan Revolutionary Democratic Alliance (ADREN) were working alongside CIA officers to overthrow the new Sandinista government.. As noted in the Hitz report, a cable to CIA headquarters stated that ADREN leadership had decided to "engage in drug smuggling to the United States in order to finance its anti-Sandinista operations." The cable stated that an "initial trial run" had taken place in July 1981, when drugs were transported via plane to Miami. In what would prove common during the Contra war, the CIA never followed up on the allegations, or bothered to verify whether the "initial run" had taken place, according to the Hitz report. ADREN disbanded in 1982. But some members joined the Nicaraguan Democratic Force (FDN), which worked with the CIA.
In another instance, the CIA received allegations that five members of the Democratic Revolutionary Alliance (ADREN) -- those fighting along the border of Nicaragua and Costa Rica - were involved in drug trafficking. The five were allegedly working with known drug trafficker Jorge Morales.
Although the CIA broke off contact with the ARDE in 1984, it continued to have contact with four of the five members who associated with Sr. Morales until 1987.
"In the context of this struggle between the Contras and the Sandinistas, there were accusations flying left and right, some of which were probably meritorious, and a good many of which were part of the battle they were involved in," Hitz said. The question for the CIA officer in the field was, how do you deal with those accusations?
"And what they did was, for the most part, attempt to track them down," Hitz said. "But on several cases, no action appears to have been taken. And that's the part that we find in our report."
Around the same time--the early 1980s--a letter between Attorney General Smith and CIA Director Casey was made official, creating what some considered a convenient loophole for the CIA
The Letter
In the winter of 1982, as the United States was plotting how to overthrow the Sandinista government that came to power in Nicaragua, a letter - a "Memorandum of Understanding" [MOU] was being drafted in Washington, D.C. The presumptive author was the U.S. Attorney General, the late William French Smith. The recipient was the Central Intelligence Agency Director William Casey.
The subject was a list of offenses that CIA field officers in the field were required to report if they witnessed or became aware of a crime -- particularly if it involved an informant or someone the CIA officer wanted to recruit as an "agent". The letter of understanding listed all kinds of crimes from murder to passport fraud. But it omitted narcotics violations.
The oversight was too glaring, apparently, to leave without comment. Weeks later a follow up letter based on some internal discussion in the Justice Department was sent to the CIA
"I have been advised that a question arose regarding the need to add all narcotics violations to the list of "non-employee" crimes," Smith wrote to Casey in his February 11, 1982 letter. But instead of adding drugs to the list, Smith cited existing federal policy on narcotics enforcement, and wrote:
"In light of these provisions and in view of the fine cooperation the Drug Enforcement Administration has received from CIA, no formal requirement regarding the reporting of narcotics violations has been included in these procedures." In effect, the agreement meant that CIA officers were not required to report narcotics violations back to headquarters. As the CIA's Inspector General Fred Hitz told us, it was at best a "mixed message."
Was the omission of a requirement to report narcotics violations a conscious decision designed to provide cover for CIA agents caught in the midst of the thriving drug business in Central America? Fred Hitz refuses to speculate. Hitz insists he finds it hard to believe that any CIA agent in the field would be involved, especially since " it was well known during this period that if the CIA was linked to any drug shipment, the political damage [to the Contra cause] would be irreparable."
"It was fairly clear, and all of the officers whom we questioned on it, and some whom we didn't but whom the House questioned, realized that if drugs were intermixed with this program, it would fail, it would kill it," Hitz said. "They knew perfectly well because of past accusations in previous theaters that that would be the kiss of death."
Yet there was a lack of narcotics-related direction from CIA headquarters during the Contra war, as indicated when the issue of reporting suspected narcotics violations arose again in 1987. Acting CIA director Robert Gates sent a 1987 memorandum to CIA Deputy Director for Operations Clair George stating that it was imperative that CIA officers cease relations with Contras who were "even suspected of involvement in narcotics trafficking," according to the Hitz report.
Gates' memorandum instructed George to vet names of air crews, air services companies and subcontractors with the DEA, U.S. Customs and the FBI to ensure that none of the contractors used by the CIA were involved in narcotics. For some reason, this memorandum "was not issued in any form that would advise Agency employees generally of this policy," Hitz stated in his report. It never got to the field agents who were supposed to use it as a guide.
Hitz interprets both the omission of narcotics from the MOU and the fact that Gates' memo did not ever make it to the agents who needed it as the failings of a vast bureaucracy. These events, however, as well as others documented in the report, have provided fodder to those interpreting the agency's behavior less sympathetically.
Jonathan Winer was a staffer on a Senate Committee Investigation led by Senator Kerry of Massachusetts, and is a former deputy assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics Matters. "If you're focused on winning an ideological war, you're probably not focused at the same time on the law enforcement consequences of what you're doing," Winer said. "And certainly, our government in the 1980s was not focused on that problem. It actively resisted being focused on that problem."
Others believe that the U.S. espionage agency was simply covering its tracks.
The Ilopango Air Base
The story of Ilopango air base in San Salvador has become a favorite anecdote among those backing the claim that the CIA protected Contras neck-deep in the drug trade. The Hitz report states that by 1985, the DEA was watching Carlos Albert Amador. He was a former pilot for the Southern Front Contras, a group that operated along the northern border of Costa Rica and in the southern regions of Nicaragua. Carlos Alberto Amador had previously flown secret Contra missions out of the airfield. But, in 1985 , he came under suspicion for transporting drugs from Costa Rica to Miami. The CIA cable noted that Amador "had access to Hanger 4 at Ilopango air base."
The cable quoted a DEA source who "stated that Amador was probably picking up cocaine in San Salvador to fly to Grand Caymen [sic] and then to south Florida," adding that the DEA was going to ask San Salvadorian police to investigate Amador and anyone associated with Hanger 4.
But Hanger 4 -- as the author of the cable would later tell CIA investigators -- was also thought to be associated with Oliver North, who was under commission from the White House to secretly carry out aid to the Contras.
When CIA headquarters responded to the cable, it told its local station that it "would appreciate Station advising DEA not to make any inquiries to anyone re Hanger [sic] no. 4 at Ilopango since only legitimate....supported operations were conducted from this facility."
Former DEA field agent Nieves denied the suggestion that CIA objectives overrode DEA drug enforcement during the Contra War.
"I was given carte blanche to do my job," Nieves said. "Never once did anybody ever say anything to me about anything I was doing that was nothing but supportive. There was no interference. There was no overriding priority, there was no competition, there was no anything except for support of the DEA's mission. And that's a fact."
But others say the CIA's loose grip on its contacts certainly didn't help the DEA's cause.
"I believe that elements working for the CIA were involved in bringing drugs into the country," said Hector Berrellez, DEA field agent.
"I know specifically that some of the CIA contract workers, meaning some of the pilots, in fact were bringing drugs into the U.S. and landing some of these drugs in government air bases. And I know so because I was told by some of these pilots that in fact they had done that."
While most D.E.A. veterans we interviewed dismiss allegations of any conscious CIA activity or involvement in drug trafficking, a number are suspicious, and a handful like Berrellez claim they had hard evidence of "CIA contract employees" being involved. With the exception of the Venezuela National Guard case we were unable to find any evidence that any CIA agent was ever considered a potential target of a grand jury investigating drug trafficking.
Drug policy: MIA
"If it's your job to check out food at the supermarket counter ... you're not worrying about the person who's supposed to be stocking the shelves. It's not your job," said Jonathan Winer, explaining the CIA's minimal attention to drug trafficking in Central America.
It is clear from interviews with former D.E.A. agents, CIA officials and former Colonel Oliver North that the CIA did not ignore narcotics in Central America. Injecting the United States into a Nicaraguan civil war was hardly an easy sell to Capitol Hill, with nightmares of Vietnam still fresh from the 1970s. Any hint of collusion with the drug trade would be like handing a loaded gun to opponents aiming to kill the effort.
But the degree to which that point was communicated to CIA agents in the field, according to the Hitz investigation, does not inspire confidence.
"There was no directorate of operations instruction about how to deal with drug allegations during the whole period of the Contra effort," Hitz said. "They were in process. They were working on some kind of guidance. But they never published it in black letter and sent it to the field." In Nicaragua, the Smith-Casey letter basically excused CIA officers from reporting drug trafficking among their contacts. Even when it became clear that narcotics could cast a pall on the effort, the CIA appeared unwilling to react.
As early as 1980, a handbook had been developed with a section instructing CIA officers how to deal with contacts suspected of trafficking drugs. But those regulations were ruled inapplicable to the Contra affair, because they were meant for CIA personnel who were specifically collecting narcotics intelligence -- not the case in Central America. Inexplicably, the handbook wasn't formally published until 15 years later.
In addition, in the mid-1980s, any effort to keep the CIA out of the world of drug trafficking was made more difficult by the decision of its boss, Director Casey, to activate what became known as the "off-the books" operation of Oliver North.
Along with a leading role in the Iran/Contra scandal - in which North helped sell arms to Iran to fund the Contra War - North is also said to have employed air and sea transport companies moonlighting as drugs carriers.
When the Kerry Commission released its report in 1988, the company Frigorificos De Puntarenas was listed as receiving $261,000 in funds from the Nicaraguan Humanitarian Assistance Office, an organization established in 1985 to spend $27 million in congressional humanitarian aid to the Nicaraguan resistance.
Frigorificos' owner, Luis Rodriguez, also operated Ocean Hunter/Mr. Shrimp out of Miami, Florida.
In 1986 the DEA seized 400 pounds of cocaine hidden in yucca addressed to Ocean Hunter. Rodriguez later testified that both companies were used to launder drug money between Costa Rica and Miami.
North has categorically denied that anybody in his operation was trafficking drugs. But in 1987, a co-owner of the shrimp companies pointed the finger at the National Security Council. Moises Nunez told the CIA that he had had a clandestine relationship with the National Security Council since 1985.
"If we have a foreign policy that says we're going to oppose the spread of Communism, that's not inconsistent with the (drug) policy,' North said in an interview with FRONTLINE. "We're not going to tolerate the flow of drugs into this country. Unfortunately you've got members of Congress up there who want to beat the drum and blame the problem of narcotics in America on the Nicaraguan resistance. And that's just not the case."
"He is either misinformed or lying," Winer says. "Oliver North's diaries are filled with references to drug trafficking and people associated with his enterprise drug trafficking--filled with it. Oliver North can say, 'I never hired or worked with any drug traffickers.' His organization did."
While the Kerry report listed several companies used by the Nicaraguan Humanitarian Assistance Office that had drug ties, it failed to pass definitive judgement on how much government agencies knew about those ties.
"At best, these incidents represent negligence on the part of U.S. government officials responsible for providing support to the Contras," the Hitz report stated. 'At worst, it was a matter of turning a blind eye to the activities of companies who use legitimate activities as a cover for their narcotics trafficking."
Situation Unresolved
That statement sums up the debate remaining over the CIA's involvement in the Contra War. The Hitz report gives an abundance of anecdotal evidence showing that drugs were low on the list of intelligence priorities in the Contra war. It shows that allegation after allegation were either partially investigated or not investigated at all.
To this day, Fred Hitz denies that the CIA had any intentional ties to drug trafficking. But he also admits that the Agency in many cases took a rain check on specifically addressing narcotics activity within its allies' ranks.
Some say that's expected when fighting ideological wars in countries where drugs have historically fueled not only conflict, but entire economies as well.
"You're always going to be having drug traffickers, gun runners, people who are alien smugglers ... as some of the kinds of people that you're going to be relying on to carry out a covert war," Winer observes. "And that's true of any government anywhere--whether you're talking Afghanistan, Colombia, Southeast Asia, Burma. Your operatives tend to be people who are involved in other illicit activities. These things tend to go together."
If you put aside conspiracy theories of crack peddling, that still leaves the question of why the Agency has repeatedly found itself associated with drug traffickers.
To add to the list of theories and speculations, Fred Hitz has his own.
"I would call them bureaucratically challenged," Hitz said. "(The CIA) didn't get it done. Having studied the agency over a period of eight years and the bureaucracy that is involved, it grieves me but doesn't surprise me that nobody grasped the nettle and got the right information to the field."
"No conspiracy," he said. "That's ineptitude. Yes, there are lots of things going on. There is congressional testimony. There are crises in other parts of the world. There are things that are keeping the individuals who write these regulations busy; but that's no excuse. You've got to get to it."
If you’re mind is made up, it’s unlikely anything I post will change it. If you’re open to the idea that colluded manipulation happens, then maybe I can put a few things in front of you that opens your thinking.
I'm a pragmatic person by nature, so for me I need the evidence. Still, I don't mind discussing
Originally Posted By: CalDawg
Again, let me lay a few things out so you understand where my head is at.
First, I don’t love the term “Deep State” because of its subversion by Trump politics, and it’s government only connotation. And terms like Illuminati, New World Order, and Shadow Government are strongly associated with the lunatic fringe. Conspiracy theories in general imply skewed thinking. Until they’re proven correct. Also, these terms imply that the tentacles of the conspiracy answer to a single governing body. I would tend to think that there are factions, which can sometimes be at odds with each other. So I don’t necessarily believe there is a single puppet master.
If we're talking about factions though, and not a single governing body, are we not possibly then discussing government bodies and agencies?
Originally Posted By: CalDawg
I have a few questions for you.
Historically the wealthy and those in power have dictated the directions of their societies regardless of the will of the people. Can we agree on that?
If so, why would now be different?
I can absolutely agree to this. Our founding fathers had large amounts of wealth. Washington was one of the wealthiest men in the colonies.
Originally Posted By: CalDawg
With regard to unchecked capitalism, lobbying, individual corruption, etc. It makes sense that these things happen, and even happen independently of oversight, but I believe that, for example, unchecked capitalism, lobbying, and deregulation are allowed to proliferate because that is the will of “the few”. The logic being if these things were counter productive to the interests of those who sit at the heads of Big Banking and other “industries” they would not happen.
Is it not at all possible then, that given how capitalism works, that those individuals in power at these individual banks and other institutions come to the same end point? That capitalism by it's very nature leads to using whatever means is needed to make more money? My argument is simply that the "easier" answer is that these individuals appeared to act in a concerted fashion because they had the same jobs/risk/desires/needs. And that like a genetic algorithm, they appeared to act in unison, but in reality were only aware of their own self preservation.
Originally Posted By: CalDawg
Start with The Bilderberg Group (one among several secretive but known groups of elite).
I'm familiar with this group. I've had both left and right leaning acquaintances of mine bemoan it's existence. I have a hard time believing a secretive group like this would operate quite so... openly... with a website and everything.
If we're talking about factions though, and not a single governing body, are we not possibly then discussing government bodies and agencies?
We're talking about a group of the wealthiest individuals and families who control the greatest portion of the world's wealth and wield the greatest amount of power and influence.
Quote:
I can absolutely agree to this. Our founding fathers had large amounts of wealth. Washington was one of the wealthiest men in the colonies.
Correct. It is a large misconception that this country was founded on the principles of freedom. It was founded on the principles of capitalistic freedom. The Revolutionary War happened largely because of taxes, not because the colonies were worried about unlawful search and seizure or freedom of religion and speech, (though they were certainly issues the colonists were concerned about due to increasing British interference.)
Quote:
My argument is simply that the "easier" answer is that these individuals appeared to act in a concerted fashion because they had the same jobs/risk/desires/needs. And that like a genetic algorithm, they appeared to act in unison, but in reality were only aware of their own self preservation.
See the article below:
Quote:
I have a hard time believing a secretive group like this would operate quite so... openly... with a website and everything.
Why not? They have nothing to fear, there is no transparency, and nothing said in any of these meetings is ever made public.
"I am undeterred and I am undaunted." --Kevin Stefanski
"Big hairy American winning machines." --Baker Mayfield
US pension funds are suing 6 of world's largest banks for allegedly colluding on a $1 trillion market
Daniel Wiessner, Reuters Aug. 17, 2017, 5:25 PM 5,567
The world's biggest banks are coming under fire from pension funds.
Three U.S. pension funds sued six of the world's largest banks on Thursday, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc and JP Morgan Chase & Co, accusing them of conspiring to stifle competition in the more than $1 trillion stock lending market. In the lawsuit filed in a Manhattan federal court, the funds accused the banks of boycotting start-up lending platforms by threatening and intimidating their potential clients. The defendants include Bank of America Corp, Credit Suisse AG, Morgan Stanley, UBS AG, Goldman and JP Morgan.
The Iowa Public Employees' Retirement System, Orange County Employees' Retirement System and Sonoma County Employees' Retirement Association said in the lawsuit that the banks have cornered the market on stock lending in violation of federal antitrust law.
"Through various improper means, the likes of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have for years colluded to maintain their power over this little-known-but-lucrative corner of Wall Street," said Michael Eisenkraft, a lawyer for the funds and partner with Cohen Milstein.
Representatives of Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan declined to comment. The other banks did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The pension funds said collusion by the banks harms investors and retirees by forcing them to pay high fees to engage in stock lending.
Stock lending is related to short selling and involves lending a stock to an investor or firm through a broker or dealer. Pension funds and other institutional investors frequently lend stock to hedge funds.
In short selling, a security that is not owned or has been borrowed is sold with the idea that it can be bought at a future date at a lower price.
The funds claimed in the lawsuit that the defendants conspired to take down upstart stock lending platforms AQS, which was developed by Quadriserv Inc, and SL-x, which would have allowed lenders and borrowers to interact directly.
The lawsuit claimed that in 2012 Goldman Sachs threatened to stop doing business with Bank of New York (BNY) Mellon if it continued to support the AQS platform and that the bank agreed to stop using it. BNY Mellon declined to comment.
The lawsuit said that through a joint project called EquiLend LLC, the banks purchased SL-x's intellectual property and shelved it, according to the lawsuit. The funds accused the banks of establishing EquiLend in 2001 to safeguard their interests in the stock lending market.
A spokesman for EquiLend, which is also named as a defendant in the lawsuit, declined to comment. (Reporting by Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York; Editing by Marcy Nicholson)
"The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself." Ralph Waldo Emerson offered that observation in 1837, but his words echo with painful prescience in today's very different United States. Americans are in serious intellectual trouble -- in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.
This is the last subject that any candidate would dare raise on the long and winding road to the White House. It is almost impossible to talk about the manner in which public ignorance contributes to grave national problems without being labeled an "elitist," one of the most powerful pejoratives that can be applied to anyone aspiring to high office. Instead, our politicians repeatedly assure Americans that they are just "folks," a patronizing term that you will search for in vain in important presidential speeches before 1980. (Just imagine: "We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain . . . and that government of the folks, by the folks, for the folks, shall not perish from the earth.") Such exaltations of ordinariness are among the distinguishing traits of anti-intellectualism in any era.
The classic work on this subject by Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," was published in early 1963, between the anti-communist crusades of the McCarthy era and the social convulsions of the late 1960s. Hofstadter saw American anti-intellectualism as a basically cyclical phenomenon that often manifested itself as the dark side of the country's democratic impulses in religion and education. But today's brand of anti-intellectualism is less a cycle than a flood. If Hofstadter (who died of leukemia in 1970 at age 54) had lived long enough to write a modern-day sequel, he would have found that our era of 24/7 infotainment has outstripped his most apocalyptic predictions about the future of American culture.
Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture (and by video, I mean every form of digital media, as well as older electronic ones); a disjunction between Americans' rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism.
First and foremost among the vectors of the new anti-intellectualism is video. The decline of book, newspaper and magazine reading is by now an old story. The drop-off is most pronounced among the young, but it continues to accelerate and afflict Americans of all ages and education levels.
Reading has declined not only among the poorly educated, according to a report last year by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1982, 82 percent of college graduates read novels or poems for pleasure; two decades later, only 67 percent did. And more than 40 percent of Americans under 44 did not read a single book -- fiction or nonfiction -- over the course of a year. The proportion of 17-year-olds who read nothing (unless required to do so for school) more than doubled between 1984 and 2004. This time period, of course, encompasses the rise of personal computers, Web surfing and video games.
Does all this matter? Technophiles pooh-pooh jeremiads about the end of print culture as the navel-gazing of (what else?) elitists. In his book "Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter," the science writer Steven Johnson assures us that we have nothing to worry about. Sure, parents may see their "vibrant and active children gazing silently, mouths agape, at the screen." But these zombie-like characteristics "are not signs of mental atrophy. They're signs of focus." Balderdash. The real question is what toddlers are screening out, not what they are focusing on, while they sit mesmerized by videos they have seen dozens of times.
Despite an aggressive marketing campaign aimed at encouraging babies as young as 6 months to watch videos, there is no evidence that focusing on a screen is anything but bad for infants and toddlers. In a study released last August, University of Washington researchers found that babies between 8 and 16 months recognized an average of six to eight fewer words for every hour spent watching videos.
I cannot prove that reading for hours in a treehouse (which is what I was doing when I was 13) creates more informed citizens than hammering away at a Microsoft Xbox or obsessing about Facebook profiles. But the inability to concentrate for long periods of time -- as distinct from brief reading hits for information on the Web -- seems to me intimately related to the inability of the public to remember even recent news events. It is not surprising, for example, that less has been heard from the presidential candidates about the Iraq war in the later stages of the primary campaign than in the earlier ones, simply because there have been fewer video reports of violence in Iraq. Candidates, like voters, emphasize the latest news, not necessarily the most important news.
No wonder negative political ads work. "With text, it is even easy to keep track of differing levels of authority behind different pieces of information," the cultural critic Caleb Crain noted recently in the New Yorker. "A comparison of two video reports, on the other hand, is cumbersome. Forced to choose between conflicting stories on television, the viewer falls back on hunches, or on what he believed before he started watching."
As video consumers become progressively more impatient with the process of acquiring information through written language, all politicians find themselves under great pressure to deliver their messages as quickly as possible -- and quickness today is much quicker than it used to be. Harvard University's Kiku Adatto found that between 1968 and 1988, the average sound bite on the news for a presidential candidate -- featuring the candidate's own voice -- dropped from 42.3 seconds to 9.8 seconds. By 2000, according to another Harvard study, the daily candidate bite was down to just 7.8 seconds.
The shrinking public attention span fostered by video is closely tied to the second important anti-intellectual force in American culture: the erosion of general knowledge.
People accustomed to hearing their president explain complicated policy choices by snapping "I'm the decider" may find it almost impossible to imagine the pains that Franklin D. Roosevelt took, in the grim months after Pearl Harbor, to explain why U.S. armed forces were suffering one defeat after another in the Pacific. In February 1942, Roosevelt urged Americans to spread out a map during his radio "fireside chat" so that they might better understand the geography of battle. In stores throughout the country, maps sold out; about 80 percent of American adults tuned in to hear the president. FDR had told his speechwriters that he was certain that if Americans understood the immensity of the distances over which supplies had to travel to the armed forces, "they can take any kind of bad news right on the chin."
This is a portrait not only of a different presidency and president but also of a different country and citizenry, one that lacked access to satellite-enhanced Google maps but was far more receptive to learning and complexity than today's public. According to a 2006 survey by National Geographic-Roper, nearly half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is being made. More than a third consider it "not at all important" to know a foreign language, and only 14 percent consider it "very important."
That leads us to the third and final factor behind the new American dumbness: not lack of knowledge per se but arrogance about that lack of knowledge. The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American adults who, according to the National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it's the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place. Call this anti-rationalism -- a syndrome that is particularly dangerous to our public institutions and discourse. Not knowing a foreign language or the location of an important country is a manifestation of ignorance; denying that such knowledge matters is pure anti-rationalism. The toxic brew of anti-rationalism and ignorance hurts discussions of U.S. public policy on topics from health care to taxation.
There is no quick cure for this epidemic of arrogant anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism; rote efforts to raise standardized test scores by stuffing students with specific answers to specific questions on specific tests will not do the job. Moreover, the people who exemplify the problem are usually oblivious to it. ("Hardly anyone believes himself to be against thought and culture," Hofstadter noted.) It is past time for a serious national discussion about whether, as a nation, we truly value intellect and rationality. If this indeed turns out to be a "change election," the low level of discourse in a country with a mind taught to aim at low objects ought to be the first item on the change agenda.
This article is a bit fringe for my tastes, but makes several valid points:
The Dumbing Down of America – By Design
The last thing the elite wants is an informed, empowered public mobilizing any grassroots movement to oppose government tyranny.
By Joachim Hagopian
This presentation focuses on the myriad ways in which the powers-that-be in the United States have been systematically dumbing down Americans as a society for a very long time – all by meticulously calculated design. Originally the term dumbing down was used as a slang expression in 1933 by film screenwriters to mean “revising [the script] so as to appeal to those of lower education or intelligence.”
The most obvious example of how Americans have been dumbed down is through this nation’s failed public education system. At one time not that long ago America reigned supreme as a leading model for the rest of the world providing the best quality free public K-12 education system on the planet. But over the last many decades while much of the rest of the world has been passing us by, it seems an insidious federal agenda has been implemented to condition and brainwash a population of mindless, robotic citizenry that simply does what it’s told, and of course the brainwashing commences early in America’s schools.
But prior to delving into the many ways we’ve been duped and dumbed down through the years, a cold hard look at the devastating result seems very much in order here. With doom and gloom warnings of impending collapse, the US economy is floundering still mired in recession, emaciated and cut off from life support, as a consequence of waging too many wars around the world (be they the longest running costly defeats in US history or the fast rising dirty little Special Ops wars secretly raging on every corner of the globe or Obama’s personal favorite, state sponsored terrorism from drone-filled skies). As a pawn to the military industrial complex, the US government has chosen permanent war over its own people. This treasonous decision has decimated the middle class and created a college educated indentured class struggling in heavy debt to find any means to stay afloat. With an outsourced, now vanished manufacturing base, upward mobility and the American dream have become tragic casualties of modern life, now a sad, nostalgic bygone reminder of the once greatness of America.
With the US the biggest debtor nation on earth, Americans are drowning in debt as hopelessly trapped collateral damage from a rapidly sinking, overextended Empire desperate to remain the sole global superpower even if it means death to the whole human race. At home the hapless American population has become increasingly the victim of its own government’s tyranny and oppression under the constant roving eyeball of criminal surveillance and a brutal militarized security state, leaving its citizens defenseless without any security, liberty, freedom or place to hide. After centuries of carefully orchestrated design, oligarchs of the banking cabal have finally gotten what they’ve been plotting and scheming, globally enforced austerity and impoverishment reducing life in America and around the world to near Third World status, and absolute control. The oligarchs are counting on a dumbed down population too busy addicted to their video games or watching sports or Kim Kardashian’s latest wardrobe malfunction to even notice that a longtime oligarch eugenics plan is already well underway.
But this dismal outcome has long been in the making on many fronts. Over numerous decades a grand experiment engaging in social engineering with America’s youth has been steadily working to homogenize a lowest common denominator product of sub par mediocrity, creating generations of young Americans who can neither read nor write, nor think for themselves in any critical manner. According to a study last year by the US Department of Education, 19% of US high school graduates cannot read, 21% of adults read below 5th grade level and that these alarming rates have not changed in the last ten years.
The international test results from the 2012 PISA indicate American students are lagging behind virtually all developed nations even more than in the past. China topped all 65 nations while US teenagers again scored at or below average in math, reading and science. That is because the current educational system is no longer about learning the basic A-B-C’s but simply cranking out a subclass of work force laborers. This tragic fall from grace of America’s once great educational system has education researcher Cynthia Weatherly referring to America’s current education system as “limited learning for lifelong labor.”
But this planned system of a New World Order (NOW) featuring a planned global economy and a planned global education system has been promoted for well over a century. The Carnegie Foundation outlined its explicit roadmap for absolute oligarch control way back in the 1930’s. Department of Education whistleblower Charlotte Iserbyt exposes the conspired downfall of America’s educational system in her well documented chronicle The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America.
It turns out that America’s “father of modern education” John Dewey, an unabashed admirer of Stalin and his educational system, proclaimed his NWO agenda in 1947:
“… establishment of a genuine world order, an order in which national sovereignty is subordinate to world authority…”
As the first elected UNESCO Director-General British ProfessorJulian Huxley (brother of Brave New World’s Aldous), in 1949 had the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization pumping out pamphlets expounding the importance that children be educated devoid of any national allegiance, patriotism or family loyalties identified as the biggest barriers to their demonic ambitions:
“As long as the child breathes the poisoned air of nationalism, education in world-mindedness can only produce precarious results.”
Based on my personal experience working with America’s broken child welfare system, several weeks ago I wrotean article on the current child welfare system’s assault on the modern American family. That assault is but part of a wider, across-the-boards assault by the entire US government. The federalist fascists in Washington have been busily mounting an assault on the American family through the state run public education system as well. Like the separation of church and state, the Constitution explicitly calls for specific delineation between the federal government to stay out of the business of education, traditionally leaving it within the sovereignty of the states and local communities to govern. However, just as the US Constitution has been under assault, Washington is now unlawfully dictating mandates to the 1600 US school districts that they must comply with in order to avoid the cutoff of federal dollars. Thus, local school districts throughout this nation are presently under a subversive assault from the long arm of our authoritarian totalitarian government.
Second only to the Department of Defense in its annual budget, more US taxpayer dollars are funneled into the Department of Education than any other public sector. The discretionary budget for Education as of 2015 is $68.6 billion. And these days most of those dollars are being squandered to bankroll the privatization of an already failed educational system. Through privately run charter schools and federally mandated programs like Common Core, control has been snatched away from parents, teachers and elected local school boards.
In the Orwellian double speak deception of “school choice,” public tax funded privatized programs like Common Core have been sold as answering the need for higher educational standards. Should a school district accept even $1 from the federal government, it automatically relinquishes control to the feds, thus providing no choice to the locals. With 43 out of the 50 states already signed up for Common Core, public education run by local communities and states is clearly under siege. The federal agenda is to abolish local run school boards, abandon the letter grade system of A through F’s and seize control over the curriculum. Concealed in the fine print is the not so thinly veiled Trojan Horse promoting that same New World Order that Dewey and Huxley were driving at nearly seven decades earlier. Like it or not, even the nation’s home schoolers, private schools and students in the seven states not adopting Common Core are being impacted as textbook companies have rushed to align their books according to the dogma of the Common Core standards.
The embedded Common Core doctrine handed down from Dewey’s Progressive Education is designed to program and prepare children’s impressionable minds toward accepting the notion of collectivism. The group mind is deemed far more important than the individual mind to the extent that a child’s value is only as good as the value the child can bring to the group. As an individual one carries little intrinsic value as a human life without the greater context as the worker bee sacrificing for the maintenance of the group.
The heavy focus of public education today is primarily limited to standardized test performance and the proliferation of privatized charter schools complete with private contractors teaching the tests, usurping the authority at all levels from state, to local communities, to individual teacher’s lesson plans, to home schooling parents, largely replaced by instructional software programs.
Little thought or consideration by today’s education top down policymakers is ever given to those students who happen to score low on all these tests. To make matters worse scores are being made public access now which will only traumatize those children and schools scoring far below average. Being branded as less than carries stigmatizing effects of shame and low self-esteem that can both hurt and haunt a person their entire life. Test scores determine placement and too often those scoring lower in the youngest grades again can easily be branded for the remainder of their public education years and beyond for life. Tests always possess limitations on what they mean and measure. Many super intelligent individuals experience test anxiety and perform poorly. Yet with so much riding on test scores today, and the damaging baggage that results from lower scores and lower placements, this current system appears to be doing far more harm than good. But then that is rarely if ever taken into account when the powerful few control the lives of so many.
The New World Order educational system of the twenty-first century has been ushered in by the likes of former President Bush’s No Child Left Behind program as a transparent corporatized privatization takeover. Bush’s younger brother Neil after being banned from the banking industry after his savings and loan scandal in the late 1980’s has been making a killing with his educational software company Ignite that promises higher test scores. Behind the double speak deceit of No Child Left Behind, Washington began blackmailing school districts across America with the threat of cutting off federal funds should their test scores fail to make the cut.
This governmental design for public education to move away from actual academic learning to becoming a mere pipeline for training a docile and obedient future workforce has only accelerated on steroids during the Obama regime. With Obama’s current Secretary of Education and former CEO of Chicago public schools Arne Duncan, and current Chicago Mayor’s Rahm Emmanuel as both Obama and Duncan’s strong-arm enforcer, the scenario being played out in the murderous mean streets of Chicago is igniting the growing national debate.
The federal government busily ramrods its agenda pushing standardized tests and test performance as the packaged panacea in the form of Common Core standards and privatized charter schools under the guise of tax paid public education. Of course school privatization in many districts around this Christian nation also means Creationism is now being taught instead of evolution. Of course this systemic dumbing down of our educational system also permeates a parallel process in the dumbing down of textbooks sold to the schools. The omission of truth and inclusion of false disinformation and propaganda in school textbooks are just another form of indoctrinated mind control. This lopsided war between fascist run propaganda schools brainwashing a Brave New World youth and the local school boards, teachers and parents battling for their lives to maintain what little choice they still have left with their children is yet another pathetic cautionary tale of what the oligarch agenda is doing to destroy America today.
When those who are endowed with optimal energy and often become restless and bored with the dullard tedium of their common denominator factory education, and especially if they freely exercise an individual mind or will of their own in the classroom, they are customarily misdiagnosed and branded with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and given drug lobotomies for control purposes so the school staff can manage the herd more easily, something is diabolically wrong with the system. When teachers are burdened with overcrowding in their classrooms with 30 or more students as is extremely common today, it is a setup for failure to provide an enriching learning environment and typically leads to the above scenario of a false ADHD-drug pushing classroom culture. Yet this is typically what happens to children and young people who are generally sharper in intellect and creativity, and are inadequately engaged, stimulated and challenged in the classroom.
Instead of encouraging the gifted by teaching to their strengths, too often they are responded to punitively by either overly frustrated and/or rigid, authoritarian adults bent on maintaining some semblance of control. As a longtime therapist of children and adolescents, I have repeatedly observed this over-reactivity by adults in our educational system often caused by the fatally flawed system more than the overloaded teacher entrusted to educate and develop the intellectual capacity of our young people. Instead they too frequently squelch, impede and destroy it. The one size fits all cookie cutter system stifles learning, cognitive and intellectual development and creativity, rewarding those who acquiesce and simply do what they are told as good little boys and girls on their way to being good little employees and citizens who are so easily manipulated, controlled and subdued. They become the lifeless, walking dead who merely go through the daily motions on autopilot, too beaten down, numb and/or fearful.
A substantive quality education should teach the curious developing mind to be critical and discriminating, willing to ask questions, challenging the status quo of preconceived suppositions and accepted dogma. But then when we have a leader like President Obama telling the graduating seniors last year at Ohio State University to “reject” what they may hear about their government’s tyranny, in effect dictating how they as college educated adults should think, especially when it’s a complete and utter lie, again another disturbing warning sign that there is something extremely wrong with both the educational as well as political system. And again, more overwhelming evidence of the systematic and relentless dumbing down of America.
With an educational system that purposely misinforms and indoctrinates young people to respond as Skinnerian rats to a positive reinforcement schedule of operant conditioning, children as future adults are being shaped and programmed to become little robots easily controlled by their oligarch masters.
It is worth mentioning that the world wide web offers people around the globe much needed access to important information and knowledge. Though there is much on the internet that also is of little value regarding enrichment of website users’ minds and lives, with some effort and discriminative appraisal, people can increase their awareness and understanding by leaps and bounds if tapping the best that the internet can provide. Yet as much as it can be a valuable disseminator of truth and knowledge, the internet can also potentially empower individuals and groups of individuals to greater heights of achievement for the collective good of all humanity with its instantaneous capacity to share and communicate vital, even life saving information. The old expression that “information is power” is true.
Because of this fact that information is power, the last thing the elite wants is an informed, empowered public mobilizing any grassroots movement to oppose government tyranny. Thus, the net neutrality that Obama had promised in his campaign was met with yet more betrayal of the American people when he appointed high powered telecom exec Thomas Wheeler as head of the FCC. And in no time at all as the next predictable move, the internet is now in process of both censoring sites and charging internet consumers additional fees for individual site access.
With so many people struggling financially just to survive, pending changes to the internet would hamper and block access to whatever potential good the internet offers the public. However, in case of an emergency or crisis under martial law conditions, Obama has already stipulated that in the interest of national security, the buzzword deception used ever since 9/11 to justify all constitutional violations of civil liberties and privacy rights, access to theinternet will be cut off. This obviously would instantly sabotage and likely reverse any progress that people, groups and a potential worldwide movement might make through the vital connection network that computers provide. And with the US government planning and preparing long in advance of such an emergency, it will deploy all security apparatus and resources using police and armed forces to quell any political, social and economic unrest or revolt against the government. This power to deny internet access is also the ultimate strategy to ensure that the American public stays deaf and dumbed and powerless.
Another primary means of dumbing down America is through mass media. If the public is busily preoccupied with the superficial garbage spoon-fed to the masses every single day via television, movies, music, internet, video games that all act just as effective as the most potent drug dulling the senses and the brain, again an enormous control over the population is achieved and maintained. With so much entertainment as the modern day opiate to the masses to divert people’s attention, these weapons of mass distraction easily render people oblivious to see what is really happening in the world. Compound that with the lowest common denominator appealing to the most prurient interests such as pornography, crass materialism (using mind control techniques to manipulate consumers into spending money on false promises of sex, status and happiness), entertainment that dually serves as propaganda along with the mesmerizing effects captivated by sports that also draw enormous amounts of money, and the oligarchs have us right where they want us – numbed and dumbed.
Even the flicker rates of televisions, videos, computers and cinema by design are all programmed to contain hidden properties that physically resonate and alter the human brain’s alpha wave state to induce a hypnotic, mesmerizing, trancelike state of mind. This literally drugs and distorts the cognitive processes of the mass audience being subliminally fed input that modify and shape values, moral and ethical messages and multiple autosuggestions that carry powerful binding effects on people’s unconscious minds and future behavior. This too is another form of calculated brainwashing, mind control as well as behavior control that the media as vehicles of propaganda and disinformation constantly utilize. The constant 24/7 sensory bombardment that media puts on humans is one highly effective means of control over both culture and population.
With the consolidation of mass media in recent years limited now to just a handful of transnational giant media corporations merging with national governments, a monopoly of thought, beliefs, perceptions of reality and core values are instilled into the masses and covertly maintained. Thus, entire populations of countries and regions of the earth are easily influenced and controlled by the elite through powerful mass media outlets. Add the outright lies spewing forth nonstop from the government and mainstream media as state sponsored propaganda and mind control and the oligarchs have absolute control over a deluded, impotent and hopelessly oblivious population. With the homogenizing effects of mass media these days possessing a global outreach that is unprecedented in recorded human history and people on this planet fast become programmed sheeple and unthinking automatons under complete power and control of the oligarchs.
Along with war criminal Henry Kissinger, perhaps the most emboldened globalist associated with a prominent role in a US president’s innermost circle is Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. For years he has regularly come out with very matter-of-fact yet incredibly astute and even prophetic observations about the oligarch agenda. Way back in 1970 in his book Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technotronic Era, Brzezinski envisioned:
“The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities.” Welcome to the twenty-first century. Brzezinski goes on to conclude that the American people will become brainwashed in giving up control of their lives to the elite that they will reach a point when they are so dumbed down and confused, they are unable to even think individually for themselves. So they can only repeat that which is downloaded into them by the constant repetition of what is driven into their heads by the mainstream media outlets. In effect, people defer the task of cognitive assessment and analysis of what is most important and real to what is simply communicated and propagated to them by the media.
Mentioned earlier in describing the addictive properties of the enticing media outlets, all drugs whether illicit or legal by their very nature dumb down people’s minds and impair their brain functioning. Yet both prescription and over-the-counter drugs are commonly addictive, always smothering symptoms be they physical, mental or emotional, acting as a quick escape or quick fix for whatever ails you. Currently an incredible near 70% of all Americans are taking at least one prescription drug. Between the multibillion dollar alcohol and tobacco industries and the multibillion dollar Big Pharma industry, these corporate entities wield colossal amounts of power in America, buying off politicians, spending billions on advertising, often times killing people whose addiction overpowers them. To a considerable extent, so called lesser drugs like caffeine and sugar also possess addictive features that also impair and endanger the mind and health if excessively consumed.
And though alcohol consumption around the world does far more damage than any and all of the so called illegal substances combined, obviously all of them create a widespread culture and practice of extremely high rates of addiction in North America and globally that both dumb users down as well as destroy their health and lives. The fact that the oligarchs, banking cabal of the West and US government working hand in hand with the drug cartels virtually control the entire international drug smuggling market, making billions if not trillions of dollars off of drugging and dumbing the masses down to easily ensure that those incapacitated pose little threat to the power elite. Rampant drug addiction in US society becomes yet another very effective means of control over millions of humans who struggle daily with their very real demons. The number of deaths related to drug overdose has jumped 540% since 1980. And whatever collateral damage results from those who die as well as those who engage in criminal activity to support their habit, with both a privatized prison industrial complex and privatized medical system, again the only profiteers feeding off the misfortunes of the afflicted are that same power elite. It’s another win-win for them.
The same damage and dumbing down effects are only added on when considering the detrimental and often lethal effects that chemically processed foods, chemical and hormone injected meat products, genetically altered organisms (GMO’s) and pesticide-ridden foods that virtually the entire American population consumes on a daily basis. The masses are poisoning themselves to death with built up toxins in their bodies. Yet because they have little choice about what they eat due most often to an inability to afford purchasing higher priced organic food, of course exacerbated by Monsanto willfully, maliciously obstructing their access to information when profit is deemed far more valuable than human life. Thus far, despite Vermont’s passage of law as the first state requiring GMO labeling in 2016, Monsanto has had its way bribing the Food and Drug Administration and court system to maintain its impunity in its monumental damage to the health and well being of humans, a dying bee population and a multitude of life forms on the planet.
The same can be said for the known toxin fluoride that is added to America’s drinking water from the tap. One of the most researched side effects is diminished intelligence. The list goes on and on how the power elite continue to endanger and harm the public. Vaccines loaded with mercury and other known toxic metals cause major health problems that also kill people. Chemtrails of more toxic metals raining down everyday for decades on defenseless people from military planes cannot possibly have a positive impact on human health. Manmade as well as the earth’s electromagnetic waves can also have the capacity to alter the electromagnetic activityin the human brain which in turn can alter thoughts, emotions and behavior. For years “black ops” have been experimenting to fine tune and harness this phenomenon as a military weapon. Yet unsurprisingly the powers-that-be continue denying and lying to the public maintaining that no ill effects from any of these controversial sources pose any real danger. Yet many even among the dumbed down US population can discern and suspect that all these actions committed by the powerful do in fact cause harm. Due to the government’s ultra-secrecy, the extent of that harm is still largely unknown.
The totality of destructive damage that transnational corporations have perpetrated against all forms of planetary life has destroyed the eco-systems of thousands upon thousands of animal and plant species. Of the five times that life on earth has become massively extinct in the past, we humans are rapidly causing the sixth great cycle of mass extinction and the first and fastest due to manmade effects in the form of rising global air and water temperatures and over-polluted water, air and soil. The dead zones across the planet are spreading faster rates of extinction amongst plant and animal life than at any prior time in the earth’s known history. Destruction of our living habitat and eco-system carries perhaps the most damning, ultimate dumbing down effect that the oligarchs have caused. But then they no doubt have laid out their own contingency plan utilizing a hidden technology that can save them when the lights go out on mother earth for the rest of us lowly expendables.
Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer. He has written a manuscript based on his unique military experience entitled “Don’t Let The Bastards Getcha Down.” It examines and focuses on US international relations, leadership and national security issues. After the military, Joachim earned a masters degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field for more than a quarter century. He now concentrates on his writing.
My schedule gets really crazy starting tomorrow. I may not be able to continue our discussion for a few week or so. I'll post relevant articles as I come across them if I can though. I appreciate the chats!
"I am undeterred and I am undaunted." --Kevin Stefanski
"Big hairy American winning machines." --Baker Mayfield
Senate Passes Bill To Deregulate Banks With Democrats’ Help
Small banks, big banks and even credit monitoring companies like Equifax score with this legislation.
By Arthur Delaney and Igor Bobic
WASHINGTON ― The Senate on Wednesday passed a bill so friendly to banks that even a Republican worried it goes too far.
By a vote of 67-to-31, the Senate passed the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act, which is aimed at reducing the regulatory burden on struggling community banks ― even though most such banks are thriving. Supporters also argued that the bill would make it easier for Americans to buy a home by increasing their access to capital.
The measure would also exempt 25 of America’s biggest banks from regulations created in response to the financial crisis that contributed to the Great Recession a decade ago. The Congressional Budget Office warned that the risk of another financial crisis “would be slightly greater under the legislation.”
The prospect of helping Wall Street while increasing the likelihood of a bailout situation was unsavory enough to prompt one Republican on the Senate Banking Committee to try to make the bill less favorable to huge banks. The amendment from Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) never had much of a chance, however. While dozens of changes to the bill were proposed, party leaders were unable to reach an agreement to vote on any of them.
Part of the legislation could allow JPMorgan Chase and Citibank, two of the very biggest banks in the U.S., to hold less capital relative to their assets, undercutting one of the 2010 Dodd-Frank law’s safety measures. Corker wanted to strike that provision.
“Capital standards matter and leverage ratios matter a great deal to me,” Corker told HuffPost.
The bill sailed through the Senate thanks in large part to backing from a mix of centrist and red-state Democrats, who argued that small and regional banks had nothing to do with the excesses of Wall Street prior to the 2008 recession.
Those Democrats also touted several new “consumer protections” in the bill. While the legislation delivers favors to banks, it ostensibly cracks down on credit monitoring companies like Equifax, which exposed millions of consumers’ financial information to hackers last year. One provision would require such firms to give customers free credit freezes, although critics have complained that measure would also pre-empt more generous state laws and still allow employers and insurance companies to look at otherwise frozen credit reports. The bill also gives Equifax and other credit monitoring firms a leg up in the mortgage business.
It’s unclear whether the House would vote to pass the Senate bill as is or amend it with other items. Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, told reporters last week that the current Senate bill didn’t satisfy him and that he looked forward to attaching several other provisions.
“I’m really pleased with what the Senate accomplished, but I actually think our legislation is better,” Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said Wednesday.
Major changes to the bill, however, could threaten its support among Senate Democrats.
Democrats themselves had proposed a range of amendments, some to improve the bill and some that were more about messaging. One proposal from Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) would have reined in corporate stock buybacks, which have surged since Congress passed a huge corporate tax cut in December.
“The Senate functions best when people’s ideas can get a full debate,” Baldwin told HuffPost.
The provision that caught Corker’s attention would allow “custodial” banks, which hold assets on behalf of other institutions, to not count certain assets for purposes of calculating additional leverage requirements on banks with more than $250 billion in assets. Though they’re not custodial banks, the Congressional Budget Office has said that JPMorgan and Citibank could benefit from the provision depending on its regulatory interpretation. Corker’s amendment would have taken away that uncertainty by deleting the entire section.
Corker told HuffPost that he has talked about the issue with the Federal Reserve, which is one of the bank regulators that enforces the supplementary leverage ratio, as the Dodd-Frank provision is known. He suggested that simply having his proposed amendment in the Congressional Record would be a signal to bank regulators and also to the lawmakers whose job it will be to merge the different bills from the House and Senate.
“We’re just trying to create some legislative history here,” Corker said. “I want to make sure that we give the Fed plenty of room to do what they feel is appropriate in that regard.”
This article has been updated to reflect that the bill passed the Senate.
US government spent over $500m on fake Al-Qaeda propaganda videos that tracked location of viewers
The Pentagon hired a UK-based PR firm to produce and disemminate videos during the Iraq War
by Feliks Garcia
A former contractor for a UK-based public relations firm says that the Pentagon paid more than half a billion dollars for the production and dissemination of fake Al-Qaeda videos that portrayed the insurgent group in a negative light.
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported that the PR firm, Bell Pottinger, worked alongside top US military officials at Camp Victory in Baghdad at the height of the Iraq War. The agency was tasked with crafting TV segments in the style of unbiased Arabic news reports, videos of Al-Qaeda bombings that appeared to be filmed by insurgents, and anti-insurgent commercials – and those who watched the videos could be tracked by US forces.
The report of Bell Pottinger’s involvement in the video hearkens back to more than 10 years ago, when the Washington-based PR firm Lincoln Group was revealed to have produced print news stories and placed them in Iraqi newspapers. According to the Los Angeles Times, who obtained the 2005 documents, the stories were intended to tout the US-led efforts in Iraq and denounce insurgent groups.
Bell Pottinger was first tasked by the interim Iraqi government in 2004 to promote democratic elections. They received $540m between May 2007 and December 2011, but could have earned as much as $120m from the US in 2006.
Lord Tim Bell, a former Bell Pottinger chairman, confirmed the existence of the contract with the Sunday Times. The Pentagon also confirmed that the agency was contracted under the Information Operations Task Force, but insisted that all material distributed was “truthful”.
However, former video editor Martin Wells, who worked on the IOTF contract with Bell Pottinger, said they were given very specific instructions on how to produce the fake Al-Qaeda propaganda films.
“We need to make this style of video and we’ve got to use Al-Qaeda’s footage,” Mr Wells told the Bureau, recalling the instructions he received. “We need it to be 10 minutes long, and it needs to be in this file format, and we need to encode it in this manner.”
According to Mr Wells’ account, US Marines would then take CDs containing the videos while on patrol, then plant them at sites during raids.
“If they’re raiding a house and they’re going to make a mess of it looking for stuff anyway, they’d just drop an odd CD there,” he said.
The CDs were encoded to open the videos on RealPlayer software that connects to the Internet when it runs. It would issue an IP address that could then be tracked by US intelligence.
“If one if looked at in the middle of Baghdad … you know there’s a hit there,” Mr Wells said. “If one, 48 hours or a week later shows up in another part of the world, then that’s the more interesting one, and that’s what they’re looking for more, because that gives you a trail.”
Mr Wells said the CDs were viewed in countries like Iran, Syria, and the United States.
The programmes produced by Bell Pottinger would move up the chain of command, often requiring the signatures of high level generals, including Gen David Petraeus, and could sometimes go as high up as the White House for approval.
Lord Bell maintains that Bell Pottinger’s work in Iraq was beneficial to the overall effort.
Was the war in Iraq worth it? Even after ten years, it's still too early to tell “We did a lot to help resolve the situation,” he said. “Not enough. We did not stop the mess which emerged, but it was part of the American propaganda machinery.”
But Mr Wells is not quite as convinced.
“I mean if you look at the situation now, it wouldn’t appear to have worked,” he said. “But at the time, who knows, if it saved one life it [was] a good thing to do."
'CIA created ISIS', says Julian Assange as Wikileaks releases 500k US cables
By JON AUSTIN
WIKILEAKS founder Julian Assange today said the CIA was responsible for paving the way for ISIS as the whistle blowing organisation released more than half a million formerly confidential US diplomatic cables dating back to 1979.
On the sixth anniversary of the first infamous "Cablegate" by WikiLeaks, when it releases its first batch of sensitive US files, on November 28 2010, it has expanded its Public Library of US Diplomacy (PLUSD) with 531,525 new diplomatic cables from 1979.
In a statement to coincide with the release of the cables, known as "Carter Cables III", Mr Assange explained how events which unfolded in 1979, had begun a series of events that led to the rise of ISIS.
He said: "If any year could be said to be the "year zero" of our modern era, 1979 is it."
Mr Assange said a decision by the CIA, together with Saudi Arabia, to plough billions of dollars into arming the Mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan to tackle the Soviet Union, had led to the creation of terror group al-Qaeda.
This, in turn, he said led to the 9/11 terror strikes, the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq by the US, and the creation of ISIS.
Speaking about how 1979 shaped current global events, Mr Assange said: "In the Middle East, the Iranian revolution, the Saudi Islamic uprising and the Egypt-Israel Camp David Accords led not only to the present regional power dynamic but decisively changed the relationship between oil, militant Islam and the world.
"The uprising at Mecca permanently shifted Saudi Arabia towards Wahhabism, leading to the transnational spread of Islamic fundamentalism and the US-Saudi destabilisation of Afghanistan."
He said at this point Osama bin Laden left his native Saudi Arabia for Pakistan to support the Afghan Mujahideen.
He added: "The invasion of Afghanistan by the USSR would see Saudi Arabia and the CIA push billions of dollars to Mujahideen fighters as part of Operation Cyclone, fomenting the rise of al-Qaeda and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union.
Other events of the year included in the cables are papers on the Irish Republican Army (IRA), who in 1979 killed Lord Mountbatten, cousin of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth, and the Iranian hostage crisis, which saw 66 Americans taken hostage after 3,000 Iranian students raided the US embassy in Tehran.
Mr Assange added: "In 1979 it seemed as if the blood would never stop.
"Dozens of countries saw assassinations, coups, revolts, bombings, political kidnappings and wars of liberation."
The Carter Cables III bring WikiLeaks' total published US diplomatic cable collection to 3.3 million documents.
That bipartisan budget deal was loaded with bipartisan corporate welfare
by Timothy P. Carney
If anything is more bipartisan than massive overspending, it’s corporate welfare. That’s why the 2-year budget deal Congress passed and President Trump signed last week was a perfect piece of bipartisan swampiness.
The bill’s budget-busting price tag made headlines, as did the dismantling of the Tea Party-era spending caps known as sequestration. But all the attention on the Republican Party’s hypocrisy on deficits left insufficient attention for the other deplorable aspect of the bill: the revival of expired special-interest tax breaks.
One subtitle of the bill is “Incentives for Growth, Jobs, Investment, and Innovation.” When you hear the word “incentives” on Capitol Hill, or in state or local government, it usually means "subsidies and corporate welfare.” Politicians claim these measures aren’t mere handouts, but are instead ways to “incentivize” businesses into socially or economically desirable activities.
Setting aside the fatal conceit in that mindset, the Bipartisan Budget Act’s “incentives” don’t even meet that definition, because they apply to the past. A bill that passes today giving you a tax break for something you did last year doesn’t create incentives, unless a time travel or clairvoyance tax credit is the issue.
The bill includes an extension of the “7-year recovery period for motorsports entertainment complexes.” In other words, it’s a special tax break that applies only to NASCAR tracks and the like. The “7-year recovery period” means that the owner of a racetrack gets to divide its cost over only 7 years for tax deduction purposes. By contrast, if you’re a landlord, you have to divide the cost of your rental home over 30 years. The speedway provision pretends, in effect, that a racetrack survives only 7 years.
Maybe you can justify this special tax break as an “incentive” to stimulate local economies? No. Because the break “shall apply to property placed in service after December 31, 2016,” the bill reads. In other words, this is a tax break for speedways built last year.
The same is true for films and television shows produced in the U.S. in 2017: They will get special expensing rules, giving them a tax “incentive” for something they did earlier even without that incentive.
The green-energy industry won big with retroactive extensions of “fuel cell property” tax credits for “solar electric property,” “solar water heating property,” “small wind energy property,” and “geothermal heat pump property,” that go forward until 2021.
Fuel-cell vehicles get a special tax credit under this bill. If you buy a two-wheeled electric vehicle (a plug-in-scooter you could call it), this bill gives you a tax credit on 10 percent of the purchase price.
The refinery industry also got a retroactive extension of the dollar-per-gallon biodiesel tax credit — basically a rebate to refiners. That credit expired at the end of 2016, but the bipartisan budget bill extended it.
Some fellow free-market and small-government types object to the words “subsidy” or “corporate welfare” to describe special tax breaks. Tax cuts, after all, are merely about you — or some new speedway, or some owner of new geothermal heat pump property — keeping more of your own money.
That’s true enough if you consider tax cuts in the abstract. But consider a targeted tax cut that goes to one specific class of people or companies, together with the high tax rates on people who don’t engage in the favored activities. Then you see that taking money from Sam if he doesn’t do business with Joe, and leaving Julie alone because she does business with Peter is, on net, subsidizing Julie and Peter.
When those tax cuts are retroactive, as many of them in this bipartisan budget deal are, then it’s clearly just a handout to well connected special interests for doing what they would have done anyway.
You mean the one that goes away in seven years? GMAFB the paltry amounts most of us see is simply pablum for the masses so corporations can avoid the bulk of their tax responsibility. I’ve been a mod con my entire life, don’t try to sell me that nonsense. If you want to blindly swallow the swill you’re fed, go ahead, but eventually we’re all going to choke on it. The infrastructure is in shambles, public education is in the crapper, the arts are dead, and the buracracy is bloated like a vampire tick. But hey, I get an extra $600 bucks a year for the next seven years. In case you’re not paying attention, this isn’t a party issue, it’s corporate rape.
"I am undeterred and I am undaunted." --Kevin Stefanski
"Big hairy American winning machines." --Baker Mayfield
Is your homophobic name calling and simplistic outlook supposed to intimidate and impress me? That's nice, you got your senator's vote for the tax package that allows corporate greed to continue to suck us dry. Congratulations, Jethro.
This a perfect illustration of the type of tiny minded partisan thinking that keeps us divided. You're so wrapped up in protecting your self-righteous positioning you can't see the thieves stealing your wallet while you stand on your principles. It's so important for you to be right you are unable to understand you have bigger problems than a race track and who votes on what.
"I am undeterred and I am undaunted." --Kevin Stefanski
"Big hairy American winning machines." --Baker Mayfield
Is your homophobic name calling and simplistic outlook supposed to intimidate and impress me? That's nice, you got your senator's vote for the tax package that allows corporate greed to continue to suck us dry. Congratulations, Jethro.
This a perfect illustration of the type of tiny minded partisan thinking that keeps us divided. You're so wrapped up in protecting your self-righteous positioning you can't see the thieves stealing your wallet while you stand on your principles. It's so important for you to be right you are unable to understand you have bigger problems than a race track.
Nancy was referring to Nancy Pelosi and her comment on tax cuts being crumbs.
Reality dictates how these things work. Without votes, nothing gets done. Sometimes you need to grease a wheel in Washington.
I fail to understand why you stopped posting under your old name PDF.
I don't know who PDF is, I've had this screen name since I joined the old board. You're obviously reaching and I'm through bickering with you. Your petty arguments are pointless and mind numbing. Let me know if you ever want to have a serious discussion. Back to the topic at hand.
Bipartisan political system only serves to distract and divide
By GRACE WINFIELD
Before reading my morning briefing last Wednesday, I glanced at the front page of the New York Times, and was not surprised to see that four of the five headlines were political. With the media’s ever-growing political obsession, it seems as though nothing in American politics is getting resolved, or will be. As my mind was flooded with thoughts of FBI investigations, gridlock, and scandal-galore, I really questioned our political system.
The question isn’t only if our political system is still effective, but if it serves the public interest—the short answer is no. The reason? America’s political duopoly and voter manipulation.
We can’t say we haven’t been warned. Most people are familiar with George Washington’s farewell address, where he cautions the formation of political parties and expresses his detestation. There’s also John Adams, who said “there is nothing which I dread so much as a division in two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.”
The two-party system is killing our democracy.
Party affiliation is a mere distraction that the government has successfully composed to keep us, the people, in an ongoing battle against one another. Political leaders are skilled actors. They learn their audience, they say the right things and make empty promises along the way only to ever truly have their own personal gain in mind in their conspiracies to seize power and fame.
Washington was right—political parties have created power-hungry monsters as leaders, those he described as “…cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men [that] will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”
Slowly, the system has been reconfigured to benefit only major political parties, and their private interests. The current duopoly has created a political competition that only those a part of the major parties’ political agenda and corporate America can benefit from. More specifically, the industrial allies and courteous donors that party leaders and representatives heavily rely on to support their campaigning.
The parties have established their own rules in the political system to further enhance their power while diminishing our democracy. One way we supposedly can preserve this democracy is by voting.
We are told that our vote serves as our voice—but what about those who have their voice taken from them? The people that choose not to affiliate as either Republican nor Democratic are known as independents. Approximately half of the states in the US prohibit independent party affiliates from voting in the primary elections. Does this not contradict the very definition of democracy?
An issue that certainly hinders democracy, pertaining to voting in particular, would be partisan gerrymandering. Partisan gerrymandering, according to NPR, “is the practice of drawing legislative and congressional district lines to maximize and perpetuate the power of an incumbent political party.” Essentially, this means that politicians have the unfair advantage of picking their voters, instead of voters picking their politicians, this goes for both the left and the right. The major goal is for a political party to manipulate district lines around a set of voters that will likely elect a certain party’s candidate based on the party affiliations of the people within a certain district.
You may wonder who draws these unfair boundaries. The process varies from state to state, though in most cases, a state’s district lines are redrawn by the state legislature, and the majority party control the process. While some states require bi-partisan or non-partisan commissions to oversee line-drawing, the state governor and majority party leaders control who is appointed to these commissions, according to Redistricting the Nation, a site ran by a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software design and development firm that specializes in web-based geographic analysis and modeling applications for the government, known as Azavea.
Reform starts with congressional districts. State-houses across the United States re-draw congressional districts every 10 years. To ensure one party gets elected over another, districts are made to elect one candidate further on the left or the right. Compromise is seen less and less, two sides of the ideological spectrum distance further apart.
Sure, there are third parties. But are they viable? Even if they are, it’s not as though they have a fair chance. These single seat districts, as previously mentioned, are to blame. There were once multi-seat Congressional districts, districts that could have two or more elected representatives. With the passage of the Uniform Congressional Districts Act, Congress eliminated multi-seat districts in 1967. The system allowed candidates from minor parties to win office and gain political traction.
The two major political parties appeal to their partisan supporters based on ideology, not policies that work. Parties divide voters based on hostility toward the other side, pushing voters to feel that they must choose between the left and the right. In turn, the two-party system successfully creates straight ticket voters, meaning, voters that will always vote in preference of the party, not the candidate.
We need to make up our own minds about how we feel toward certain issues. We shouldn’t feel the need to define ourselves as either liberal or conservative; we as people should not be defined by party affiliation, but rather by our individual convictions. The problem isn’t necessarily the existence of parties, but the political competition that the major parties have created only between themselves, not allowing new competition in the race that could potentially better serve the public interest.
The nation is granting money the power to slowly tear down the democracy that once built America. The great influence of money misrepresents competition, creating biased elections. The politics industry (yes, industry), and its chokehold on legislature is nullifying democracy.
It’s time for our voting mechanics and redistricting processes to receive some serious attention, to appeal the Uniform Congressional Districts Act and kill the two-party system, to eliminate partisan control; though even those are only some steps toward the major political realignment that America needs.
America's health is declining -- and corporations are stoking this crisis
By Jeffrey Sachs
Jeffrey Sachs is a professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.
(CNN)America's powerful corporations made a killing with the passage of the Republican tax cuts. The tax cuts will hand trillions of dollars to the companies and their moneyed owners following a massive corporate lobbying campaign.
Yet the US government announced this month an even graver corporate killing. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), US life expectancy fell again last year for the second straight year, declining 0.1 year between 2015 and 2016.
And make no mistake -- America's health crisis is the result of greedy corporations and their reckless practices.
The US life expectancy is slipping further and further behind other high-income countries. According to the most recent comparative data of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, US life expectancy in 2015 (at 78.7 years) ranked 27th out of 35 OECD countries, more than five years behind the leader, Japan (83.9 years), and roughly four years behind the next three countries, Spain (83.0), Switzerland (83.0) and Italy (82.6).
Yet Americans pay on average almost $10,000 per person per year for health care -- twice or even three times the cost in Canada and many European countries. So, then, what accounts for America's shorter life span?
One problem is the low value for money in America's healthcare spending. Unlike the highly regulated health systems abroad, America leaves much more of the pricing for drugs, procedures and hospital stays in the hands of the private sector, which exploits its market power by charging outrageous prices and leaving millions of Americans without coverage.
US life expectancy drops for second year in a row
Another cause of America's lagging life expectancy is the nation's rising inequality of income. America's poor die much younger on average than America's rich, with a discrepancy of up to 10-15 years on average. The combination of overpriced American health care and poverty is lethal.
Two corporate-caused US epidemics -- obesity and opioid addictions -- add to the misery.
America's obesity epidemic is shortening the lives of Americans and burdening them with a range of chronic diseases, including coronary heart disease, type-II diabetes, hypertension and certain cancers. Obesity is also a risk factor for the onset of depression, while depression, in turn, contributes to the onset of obesity.
America's opioid epidemic is leading to soaring deaths from drug overdoses, and substance abuse more generally is contributing to soaring rates of suicide, addiction and suffering. The CDC calculates that there were 63,600 deaths from drug overdoses in 2016, and more than a tripling in the age-adjusted rate of drug-overdose deaths from 1999 to 2016.
Why are opioids so addictive?
While the obesity and opioid epidemics are sometimes written off as "bad life choices," these epidemics are largely the handiworks of an irresponsible corporate sector. As University of California pediatric endocrinologist and neuroscientist Dr. Robert Lustig describes in his remarkable book, The Hacking of the American Mind, America's soaring obesity reflects a fast-food diet that has been deliberately stuffed with high-fructose corn syrup and various processed meats and grains that cause obesity.
American are being killed slowly and painfully by their own food industry. Yet instead of taking responsibility for the epidemic and doing something about it, most of the leaders of the food industry actively resist a change of direction and the needed changes in public-health regulation. The beverage industry, for example, is fighting strenuously against public health measures aimed at cutting America's deadly over-consumption of sugar-packed sodas. Sad to say, things -- human health, for one -- do not go better with soft drinks.
The corporate hidden-hand is also present in the opioid epidemic. A recent expose in the New Yorker and lawsuits filed against Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, allege that the company pursued a marketing campaign that pushed OxyContin onto doctors. According to the article, Purdue allegedly did not adequately study the risks of OxyContin, paid off doctors to ignore them and pushed aggressive advertising despite growing concerns and evidence of an addiction crisis. While the company rejects this characterization and denies the allegations, drug makers -- at the very least -- failed to respond adequately to the growing alarm bells as the opioid epidemic soared. (Purdue has since issued a statement saying it is committed to helping in the fight against prescription opioid abuse and to supporting the recommendations of the Food and Drug Administration's Opioid Action Plan.)
Corporate power has run amok in American politics. Yet the mortality crisis is even worse. The health of the American people depends on restoring democratic oversight and regulation over powerful food and drug companies blinded by greed and arrogance.
Andrew Hartman is professor of history at Illinois State University and author of two books: "A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars" and "Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School."
The question of how U.S. teens learn history in public schools is the latest flash point in a liberal-conservative fight over national curriculums — one that has helped shatter bipartisan support for public education. (Rick Wilking/Reuters) The end of summer is an exciting time for millions of children, parents, teachers and administrators who embark on a new academic year. And yet the turbulent debates about race, civil rights, immigration, science and American identity — which have played out from the streets of Charlottesville to the corridors of the West Wing and across the country — will continue to rile American schools.
Just last year, a Morton, Ill., school board member protested the purchase of a science textbook that favored an “Old Earth” origin story. Conservative parents in suburban Chicago opposed a day-long seminar intended to foster discussion about the persistence of racial division in American life. And a Republican lawmaker in Arkansas proposed a ban on teaching the late Howard Zinn’s popular left-leaning interpretation of American history, “A People’s History of the United States,” in public classrooms.
These curriculum controversies are not new. At their core is a debate over power and hierarchy in U.S. society. Those individuals and viewpoints that are valued in school curriculums have a decided advantage when it comes to making claims of moral authority. If American children, for example, grow up learning that evolutionary biology is the key to understanding human origins, creationist Americans will have a much more difficult time getting a hearing for their views and will thus lack moral authority in the important realm of science. Yet while curriculum battles shape and are shaped by the nation’s larger cultural wars, they also threaten to undermine a pillar of American democracy that should concern both sides: public education.
Early challenges to public schools came from economic and religious concerns. The Protestant elite who set up the common school system in the 19th century believed schools provided training and acculturation for the poor and working class. The working class decried the invasiveness of compulsory education, and in manufacturing towns such as Beverly, Mass., voted to discontinue the high school in 1860. Catholics also saw the public schools as an attempt to indoctrinate children with Protestant beliefs. They began to build their own network of parochial schools — building institutions to challenge the cultural authority of Protestantism.
In the 20th century, religion continued to play a central role in debates about public schools, but the lines of conflict had changed. As the public square slowly but surely grew more secular, Protestant Christianity lost its grip as the sole arbiter of moral authority in American life.
In this new America, instead of working-class Catholics resisting Protestant control, religious conservatives began protesting the hold that secular liberals had on the school curriculum, epitomized by the fact that an increasing number of schools quit requiring mandatory Bible reading. A few schools even began teaching Darwin’s evolutionary science instead of creationism, a trend that sparked, famously, the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tenn.
The culture war between religious conservatives and secular liberal educators intensified during the 1960s. Cosmopolitan-minded educators believed it to be their job to solidify civil rights gains by making anti-racism manifest in the curriculum. To do so, they took it upon themselves to overturn curriculum materials that, as one left-leaning educator put it, “tend to perpetuate images of white, middle-class, suburban families living in traditional bliss.” As private Christian schools in the South enrolled a growing number of white students whose parents did not want them attending integrated schools, the educational link between secularization and civil rights intensified.
But above and beyond resistance to civil rights, by the 1970s, religious conservatives had valid reason to believe the nation’s public schools no longer represented their moral vision.
The Supreme Court enshrined secularism in the schools with landmark cases, most notably the 1962 Engel v. Vitale decision that declared school prayer unconstitutional. Pedagogical trends were just as distressing. In social studies, students were increasingly challenged to clarify their own values, independent of those instilled by their parents and churches. In science, evolution was taught more than ever. And in health classes, honest discussions of sex replaced moral exhortations.
Religious conservatives fought back to reclaim their moral authority in public schools.
School board hearings became political battlegrounds in the 1970s. One parent protested that a guidance counselor regularly visited her child’s classroom to probe students about whether they believed in God. Another was outraged over the curriculum, which he described as “a very subtle way of teaching our children genocide, homosexuality, euthanasia.”
Legislation was the next step. Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) responded with a “Protection of Pupil Rights” amendment to the 1978 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Grounded in the “family values” rationale, the Hatch Amendment allowed parental supervision of educational materials produced by the federal government. It also stipulated that parents had the right to shield their children from any such materials they found objectionable. They, not President Jimmy Carter’s newly created Department of Education, had the final say over what their children learned.
Such early gains emboldened religious conservatives and reinforced the belief that they could turn back the tides of a secular and liberal curriculum and reclaim the days of school prayer. Overturning liberal reforms seemed possible.
Yet since the 1970s, religious conservatives have witnessed one defeat after another in the realm of educational politics. President Ronald Reagan failed to pass his promised school prayer amendment. Efforts by some states and districts to teach creationism, or what later came to be called “intelligent design,” were defeated in the courts time and again. Even in periods when conservatives controlled the White House and Congress, the school curriculum remained secular and liberal.
Why? Because the left has largely won the culture wars that pitted secular and cosmopolitan liberals against religious and traditionalist conservatives in a pitched struggle over what it means to be an American.
This victory has changed the nature and purpose of the public-school curriculum. But this seeming victory by the left has had a damaging unintended consequence: Defeat has led many religious conservatives, like 19th-century Catholics, to abandon the public schools.
Networks of private Christian schools have expanded across the country since the 1960s, and the ranks of the home-schooled have grown from 250,000 in 1985 to well over 1 million by 1999. An estimated 90 percent of those who home-school their children are conservative white evangelicals.
But whereas the 19th-century public schools were too scattered to be weakened by the Catholic exodus, the conservative abandonment and the ongoing curriculum wars put our schools at risk. By weakening public trust in the schools, such conservative activism fosters the notion that schools are in crisis, ultimately making them vulnerable to a variety of education reformers who are ultimately more threatening to American public education than religious conservative activists.
Powerful people from across the ideological spectrum — from Bill Gates to Betsy DeVos — favor standardization, testing, accountability, union busting and charters. These reforms strip power and autonomy from teachers, dull creativity in the classroom and threaten to undermine much-needed critical thinking and analytical skills. They are the true threats to public education, and all parents should oppose them no matter their political ideology.
Given that the public-school curriculum continues to represent cultural power, it is probably too much to hope people quit fighting the culture wars in education and instead focus on retaking the schools from the education reformers. So as we begin another school year, brace for yet more curriculum wars.
Regan, with help of The Nation At Risk report, helped get us on this awful path. Obama did no favors either when he selected the unqualified and incompetent Arne Duncan, either.
People fail to realize we educate many more children at various ability levels. We're one of maybe a handful of nations that require compulsory education till age 18. It's pretty much unfair to compare us to other systems as other countries remove lower performing students from education.
Standardized Testing: The Monster That Ate American Education
by MEGAN ERICKSON
As the Assistant Secretary of Education in the first Bush administration, Educational historian Diane Ravitch became known for her push to establish national standards for K-12 education. From 1997-2004, she served as a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, overseeing the federal testing program.
Now, as the author of The Life and Death of the Great American School System, she’s taking it all back. Well, sort of. Watch the video:
Public education is under attack, says Ravitch. We are living through a movement in which schooling is being radically re-envisioned as a private rather than a public enterprise, with little debate over whether the ideology of the free market belongs in American schools in the first place. Proponents of the movement see standardized tests as a way to evaluate student and teacher performance.
Of course, testing has its uses—in theory, it’s one of the most useful tools for figuring out “this child really needs more time with fractions, this one needs more time understanding this concept or that concept in science or history”—but too many education reformers have come to see test scores as the goal of learning, rather than as an instrument for assessing student understanding.
In practice, test scores are not being used for diagnostic purposes but as a clumsy and myopic way to evaluate (and penalize) American schools, teachers, and students. Since the bipartisan passage of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in 2001, students have been required to demonstrate "Adequate Yearly Progress" in reading and math, based solely on test performance. Failure means being held back a grade.
Given the historic resistance of Americans to the idea of a "national curriculum," NCLB stopped short of dictating what content students would learn -- that is decided at the state and local level -- but it did mandate that states develop tests which children would take in grades 3-8 and at least once in high school. These tests would be used to "compare schools" and districts. Schools must also meet AYP or risk being closed.
The legislation was designed to address the growing achievement gap between rich and poor students in American schools. "The problem," as Ravitch writes in The Life and Death of the Great American School System, "was the misuse of testing for high-stakes purposes, the belief that tests could identify with certainty which students should be held back, which teachers and principals should be fired or rewarded, and which schools should be closed--and the idea that these changes would inevitably produce better education."
The fundamental issue today is not choice or standards or accountability, but poverty -- a topic which the national conversation about education has so far failed to address. We know that socio-economic status is positively correlated with academic achievement, meaning that the higher a students' socio-economic status is, the more likely he or she is to do well in school. But neither NCLB specifically, nor the broader testing and accountability movement, considers this factor in evaluations of AYP.
Despite its name, the bipartisan 2001 No Child Left Behind act has done little to improve the learning of children from low-income families, says Ravitch: “I used to think that our society and schools could use tests to improve. But what’s happened with the test – and I don’t think I understood this until No Child Left Behind really went into full implementation -- is that tests have now become the linchpin of education."
We are so test-obsessed that schools are being closed based on test scores, even when those scores reflect that the schools have a heavy enrollment of very poor kids or children with disabilities. We don't evaluate the problems that need to be solved in that school. We say, "We have to close the school."
And just as standardized tests can never give us a full picture of where students are coming from, they also fail to convey the full scope of a student's strengths and weaknesses.
"If we think about what our needs are for the twenty-first century, and not just how do we compete in the world but how do we live in the world, how do we survive in the world, we need a generation of people who will succeed us who are thoughtful, who can reflect, who can think," says Ravitch. The question is, does testing really provide us with a measure of how well students utilize higher-order thinking skills? If not, perhaps it's time to reconsider the use of standardized tests as a monolithic means of evaluation in K-12 education.
Government and Corporations Collude Against the People: Ohio Is a Corporate State
By Ben Price
It's no exaggeration to say that we live in a corporate state, where the country, the states and our local communities are indirectly governed by those who control wealthy corporations. But belief in the myth of an American Way of Life based on the authority of self-governing people and the consent of the governed has deep roots. What will it take to convince the skeptics that those roots have been torn up and that democracy is withering on the vine?
There is a growing undercurrent of discontent over the ability of corporate money to choose the political candidates we're allowed to vote for. That discontent extends to the creation and hustling of state and federal laws by corporate front groups, like ALEC and the Chamber of Commerce, that we and not they will have to obey. Hypocrisies such as corporateexemptions from federal, state and local taxes, on the pretense that this will help "create jobs" for the citizens who do haveto pay taxes, and corporate exemptions from environmental laws like those that make up the "Halliburton Loophole" for oil and gas corporations, are noticed and complained about from time to time. But few say out-loud that to be exempt from laws that apply to everyone else is to be above the law. And to be above the law is to be outside the law - an "outlaw" in fact.
Judicial decisions like Citizens United and Hobby Lobby have people scratching their heads looking for the justice in the decrees of Supreme Court justices. But so-far all these connivances against democracy have failed to yield a general outcry that carries with it not just the rolling thunder of diffused and de-fused discontent, but also the lightening strike of popular outrage.
Maybe Ohio's state-subsidized corporate attack on people attempting to govern in their own communities will do the trick.
The story in Ohio is a dandy. Like communities in a handful of other states, people in the cities and counties of the buckeyestate have decided not to idly accept what corporate interests would like us to believe is inevitable: the complete silencing of the people when their interests come into conflict with corporate interests. People in the cities of Athens, Youngstown, Broadview Heights and Columbus, as well as in Medina, Athens, Meigs and Fulton Counties, have flexed their right of local self-governance and proposed new local laws to secure community rights above corporate power and privilege.
In November, 2012, when folks in Broadview Heights concluded that ninety fracking wells sited in back yards, playgrounds and near schools in their residential community had wreaked more than enough damage to their rights and quality of life, they voted to enact a Community Bill of Rights amendment to their home rule charter by a 67 percent margin. The measure outlawed the siting of new extraction wells.
Soon afterward, attorneys John K Keller and Lisa Babish Forbes of the prestigious law firm Vorys, Sater, Seymour and Pease, LLP, were brought in by Bass Energy and Ohio Valley Energy, to sue Broadview Heights in Cuyahoga County Court. They were successful in their attempt to overturn the will of the solid majority of voters. During that legal contest, the mayor and city council weakly "defended" the Community Bill of Rights in court, after opposing it all the way to the ballot, while Judge Michael K. Astrab denied the right of the petitioners for the amendment to be parties in the lawsuit. The peoplenever got a chance to argue that the drilling companies were violating their basic rights under the protection of state permits. And their city officials swept the issue under the bed. The people were effectively silenced. The people running Bass Energy and Ohio Valley Energy Corporations were not.
This year, when the Secretary of State of Ohio, Jon Husted, received complaints against three proposed Community Bill of Rights county charters being placed on the ballot for the November 2015 election, he claimed "unfettered authority" tonullify the successfully submitted petitions of thousands of residents in those counties. He claimed to be "unmoved" by the petitioners' plea that their state constitutional right to amend and alter their county governments be respected.
When the people of Fulton, Athens and Medina Counties turned to the state Supreme Court for relief from this violation of their democratic rights, the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, the American Petroleum Institute, various arms of the Farm Bureau, the County Commissioners Association of Ohio and other interested corporate front groups were joined by the OhioOil and Gas Association and the Ohio Gas Association, represented by attorneys John K Keller and Lisa Babish Forbes, the same Vorys, Sater, Seymour and Pease, LLP lawyers employed by Bass Energy and Ohio Valley Energy to nullify the will of 67 percent of Broadview Heights voters.
Meanwhile, citizens in Youngstown, OH successfully placed a Community Bill of Rights banning fracking and related infrastructure on the ballot four different times, beginning in 2012, despite attempts by corporate players to block thepeople's vote. When they couldn't block it from appearing on the ballot, the friends of fossil fuel spent heavily to defeat the measure each time it went to a vote. One of their key arguments against the measure claimed that the City would have tospend tens of thousands of dollars defending against lawsuits brought by the energy corporations to overturn the measure, if passed. And they claimed that the amendment's proponents would be responsible to the taxpayers for costing them so much money in legal fees to defend the Community Bill of Rights against those same corporations warning against adopting the community rights protections. Those energy corporations, "good corporate neighbors" as their public relations departments like to say, would be blameless.
This year is different. Pointing to Secretary Husted's "unfettered authority" (as he put it) to ignore the limits of his power in deference to state laws and the constitution, members of the Mahoning County Board of Elections voted to keep the Youngstown amendment proposal off the ballot. In defending their anti-democracy stance against the people they work for, the Mahoning County Board didn't turn to the county prosecutor, who gets paid for his legal services to the County. In a conversation with attorneys for the amendment proponents, the prosecutor stated that because the Board of Elections declined to follow his explicit advice to put the Community Bill of Rights on the ballot, he told them he has a conflict and they would have to retain counsel. And so they hired, you guessed it, John K Keller and Lisa Babish Forbes, the same Vorys, Sater, Seymour and Pease, LLP lawyers employed by the Oil and Gas Associations to support Jon Husted's "unfettered authority" to block the constitutional right of the people to change their county governments. Recall that Keller and Babish Forbes were also hired by Bass Energy and Ohio Valley Energy to nullify the will of 67 percent of Broadview Heights voters.
As of this writing, the Mahoning County Board of Elections has set aside $25,000 to pay the same attorneys working for the oil and gas industry for their services to stand against the right of the people in Mahoning County to vote on a legally petitioned measure. The same taxpayer money that industry PR flacks claimed would have to be spent to defend the Community Bill of Rights if it passed is now being spent to ensure the people never even get to vote on it. Apparently, spending public money to cover legal fees to protect the interests of wealthy corporations is acceptable. Using the people's money to protect their own rights is not.
If only that were the end of it. But the manure pile of disinformation and PR balderdash hiding the corporate state in plain sight is beginning to erode. The stark truth is gradually being exposed. When the people of Fulton, Athens and Medina Counties challenged Jon Husted's unilateral decision to strip their democratic rights, he didn't turn to the Ohio Attorney General's office to defend his imperial claim. The attorney general is, of course, paid by the people to represent agents of the state. Instead, Secretary Husted hired the law firm of Bricker and Eckler, the same company that is representing Spectra Energy, whose plans to build the "Nexus Pipeline" would cross two of the counties (Fulton and Medina) that the county charters Mr. Husted hopes to kill were drafted in part to prevent. This is the same law firm that has regularly gone to court toharass residents in counties throughout Ohio with the threat of lawsuits if residents don't allow the Spectra surveyors onto their property to lay the route for a pipeline that no one wants. Many of those land owners are members of the Farm Bureau, which is asking the state Supreme Court to stand up for the gas drillers - not the farmers. The briefs filed by the Farm Bureau argue that the proposed County Charters are anti-agriculture. But will the court hear from real farmers, or just agribusiness front groups like the Farm Bureau?
Not only does the state strip the people of their inalienable right of local self-government by preempting municipalities from adopting local laws that govern corporate behavior when they come to town. Not only does the state issue permits to allow wealthy corporations to violate the rights of the people under color of law. Now the state and its officers and subdivisions are using the same powerhouse law firms, and the same attorneys from those firms, to wield the law against the people, on behalf of those corporations, and is either using taxpayer dollars to pay these law firms or, worse yet, getting their services for free. To say we live under a corporate state is not hyperbole. It is a simple fact.
Access to information sheds needed light on government secrets
By SANDY DAVIDSON
Sunshine Week this year is March 11-17. The “sunshine” refers to access to government information. Journalists value access, but it’s a right that belongs to everyone — the right to know what your government is doing, or maybe failing to do.
A clear indicator of whether a government is more totalitarian or more democratic is the amount of access to information on how the government is functioning. Secrecy helps dreadful schemes go from dreadful dreams in perverted minds to perverted reality.
Granted, sometimes knowing about vicious plots in the making is not going to stop the onslaught of tragedy or brutality. Knowing about less pernicious plots may not avoid future silliness. But not knowing about the plotting leaves a vulnerability that knowledge can sometimes repair.
The United States is not immune to mad endeavors conducted in secrecy, and the U.S. Supreme Court is not always a friend to sunshine. An example of the Supreme Court’s complicity in secrecy is the case of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) v. Sims, decided in 1985.
The case unleashed an ongoing saga for some U.S. military veterans, but first some details are important to set the stage for what, in many respects, was a stupid tragedy.
CIA v. Sims has a plot similar to the movie “The Manchurian Candidate.” The original movie, released in 1962 and starring Frank Sinatra, Angela Lansbury and Laurence Harvey, is about a Communist plot to employ mind-control over a poor soldier captured by the Soviets during the Korean War and taken to Manchuria.
After brainwashing, the soldier, when he sees a queen of diamonds playing card, turns into a virtual automaton and does whatever he is commanded to do. Spoiler alert: After the war is over, he returns to the United States, where he murders even the woman he loves, but he does not murder a presidential candidate he was ordered to assassinate.
The former prisoner’s wicked mother (Lansbury) is somehow involved with these brainwashing Communists to plot her son’s mind-controlled assassination of the candidate. It doesn’t quite make sense, but it’s Hollywood.
Hollywood can be forgiven for its far-fetched plots. From “Dracula” to “Aliens” to “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids,” flights of fantasy become entertainment. But when the U.S. government sponsors flights of fantasy, the result can be deadly.
The CIA is the heavy in the unfortunately real-life adventure of twisted individuals armed with governmental power — and secrecy. The CIA program in question is called MKULTRA (pronounced “MK-ULTRA”).
In CIA v. Sims, the Supreme Court described the CIA’s broad MKULTRA program as follows: “Between 1953 and 1966, the Central Intelligence Agency financed a wide-ranging project, code-named MKULTRA, concerned with ‘the research and development of chemical, biological, and radiological materials capable of employment in clandestine operations to control human behavior.’ The program consisted of some 149 subprojects that the agency contracted out to various universities, research foundations and similar institutions. At least 80 institutions and 185 private researchers participated.”
The Supreme Court explained that “MKULTRA was established to counter perceived Soviet and Chinese advances in brainwashing and interrogation techniques. Over the years the program included various medical and psychological experiments, some of which led to untoward results.”
As for those “untoward results,” the Court said, “Several MKULTRA subprojects involved experiments where researchers surreptitiously administered dangerous drugs, such as LSD, to unwitting human subjects. At least two persons died as a result of MKULTRA experiments, and others may have suffered impaired health because of the testing.”
The Supreme Court unanimously ruled against ordering the CIA to release information identifying researchers and their institutions in its program to attorney John C. Sims and a doctor who were both working for Public Citizen, a Ralph Nader group. The Court upheld the CIA’s refusal to disclose names of MKULTRA institutions and researchers, invoking the “national security” exemption for “intelligence sources.”
Thus, CIA v. Sims demonstrates the power of “national security” as an exemption to the federal Freedom of Information Act.
Years later, a group of veterans sued the CIA in federal court for information about alleged experiments on veterans. They feared that they were some of the persons described by the Supreme Court as “unwitting human subjects.” Perhaps “unwitting guinea pigs” would be an apt translation of the subjects’ statuses.
In July 2015, in Vietnam Veterans of America v. CIA, the Ninth Circuit upheld a win by the veterans. Veterans sued the CIA in California to receive information about their health and to receive health care.
Granted, some secrecy in government is necessary. As Justice Robert H. Jackson said in 1949, “The Constitution is not a suicide pact.” But national security should not be used as a broad talisman to ward off requests for information.
In the mid-1970s, several committees looked into abuses by intelligence agencies, including a committee chaired by Sen. Frank Church, the U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities.
A permanent U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, established in 1976, is now supposed to provide some oversight of intelligence activities. Calling activities such as MKULTRA “intelligence activities,” however, seems a misnomer.
MKULTRA proved tragic. If only more sunshine had penetrated this CIA adventure before it was implemented, maybe this real-life “Manchurian candidate” scenario would never have materialized. Maybe someone with a little sanity and humanity would have stopped the tragedy in its incipiency. At least, one can hope that more rational minds would have prevailed.
However, too much secrecy not only prevailed then but arguably was also condoned after the fact by the Supreme Court. For anyone who believes that ours is a truly open society, CIA v. Sims probably would be sobering reading. It’s certainly something to reflect upon as “Sunshine Week” nears.
Sandy Davidson teaches communications law at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. She is a curators’ distinguished teaching professor and the attorney for the Columbia Missourian.
We are a brainwashed nation and the political energy of “resisters” is expended in outrage or, at best, fending off the latest assault on immigrants, the poor, civil liberties.
The United States is immersed in a political St. Vitus’s dance typical of empires in convulsion. The confident colossus that watched its arch-rival disintegrate from 1989-1991 now has its highest office occupied by a malevolent clown enabled by supporters befitting a casting call for a Hieronymous Bosch panel. The liberal class gnashes its teeth and blames Trump, the Koch brothers, the Tea Party. But the shock is hardly credible. The current political trap befits a country that internalized its own Cold War propaganda campaign from 1945-1991. The unrelenting flow of messages aimed at keeping Americans fearful and accommodating debased our public discourse and political process. The campaign was so successful that the most persuasive and enduring lies came to be those we told ourselves.
Propaganda and American ideology
Totalitarian states use propaganda to crush spirits and minds, backed by the iron fist of secret police, informants, “re-education” campaigns, imprisonment, and torture. The United States, with legitimate traditions of freedom and debate (however compromised), took a different route. After World War II, a faction of wealthy, conservative leaders made a concerted effort to keep the nation on a war-footing by presenting the Soviet Union and “godless” Communism as the post-Nazi totalitarian threat to American freedom. Anything could be justified for the sake of the “free world”; this included relocating high-ranking Nazis to Latin America and using the Nazi intelligence service as the basis of our post-war European spy network, decisions with severe impact on U.S. foreign policy. The Soviet world-view was never acknowledged or explained. Yes, Stalin was a vicious brute, but he died in 1953 and his foreign policy was not aimed at destroying the United States. Nor did the U.S. differentiate between the socialism of small agricultural countries and Soviet Bolshevism. Peace and compromise were never on the table. The world was split into White and Red, Good and Evil, with god on our side and der roter teufel on theirs.
American Cold War propaganda was gentler than Soviet and Chinese, but forceful nonetheless. Oh, occasionally a dissenter with too strong a following – the Kennedys, Martin Luther King Jr., Patrice Lumumba, Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, student protesters at Kent State and Jackson State, Salvador Allende, Orlando Letelier, civil rights workers, villagers all over Latin America – needed to be killed, or protesters beaten or Latin American death squads trained, but it’s not like millions of us were carted off to the gulag. Oh, maybe one or two million African-, Latino-, and Native Americans jailed at any given time on low-level or trumped-up crimes to serve as free labor on roads and plantations. Millions died from our imperial ventures, including tens of thousands of Americans, with many millions more wounded and traumatized. Trillions of dollars up in the smoke of war. A nation blissfully spraying fire on cities, forests, weddings and “militants” alike. A nation losing its soul even as it professed its own earnest innocence, its devotion to democracy, its self-anointed role as moral arbiter among nations, its protection of rapacious corporate interests.
This Cold War mindset drew from an already vibrant ideology that was distilled and honed into a rationale for our emerging imperial designs. By the turn of the 19th century into the 20th, America’s scientific and political leaders believed in: 1) the superiority of the “Anglo-Saxon/Teutonic race” and its mission to civilize the world; 2) militant evangelical Christianity and its mission to civilize the world; and 3) laissez-faire capitalism as the most progressive, wealth-producing system ever devised and its mission to civi-….right. America’s ruling class saw this ideology as validated by the success, in economic terms, of Euro-American colonial conquests (including the destruction of Native American “heathen” civilizations) and the progress of industrial technology. A Social Darwinist spin on the Protestant Ethic anointed the wealthy as elected by both God and nature to be stewards of the planet and its global civilization. Hence, resource extraction and wealth creation were synonymous with spreading civilization and God’s word. Offshoot ideas such as eugenics, the white man’s burden, “virile” masculinity, and extermination of resistant populations prevailed in this “muscular” America. Leading scientists and intellectuals accepted the innate inferiority of women; ranked races according to their primitive, brutish natures; viewed Jews with mistrust that bled over into disgust. They lectured on the shape of the “Negroid” skull and its similarities to those of criminals and apes. The racial, religious, and commercial rationale for colonial supremacy over Asia and Africa and across three oceans was ready-made and seemingly irrefutable, and this ethic and the robust imperialism that it justified directly influenced what later became Nazi ideology and South African apartheid.
During the 1930s Depression, conservative corporate leadership hated Franklin Roosevelt for his New Deal of a graduated income tax and guaranteed safety net for the poor and middle classes. Even today, 80 years later, the graduated tax and “welfare”, both already decimated from decades of rollbacks, are still number one on the Republican hit list. One might argue abortion and guns top the list but they‘re just red capes used to enrage and activate the faithful in service to their masters’ broader agenda, which is the transfer of trillions of dollars in wealth from the lower 90% to the upper .1% (with a 10-20% buffer in between to appease the managerial class). This also involves privatizing the federal treasury and pension funds.
After FDR’s death and the end of World War II, John Foster Dulles, soon to be President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, toured the United States to galvanize business leaders into adopting a stance of open enmity towards our recent ally, the Soviet Union. His brother Allen, head of the new CIA, promoted an aggressive (and disastrous) campaign of violent covert operations behind the “Iron Curtain” and set the CIA on a course of covert ops, black budgets, and criminal activities that has utterly compromised its legitimate mission. This feverish anti-Communism went arm-in-arm with the anti-New Deal politics of the wealthy. Whereas President Truman and his advisors at first discussed sharing our atomic secrets with the USSR to help assure peace, a faction of powerful Americans urged us to nuke the Soviets. When the Soviets got the bomb and Mao won China, mistrust was whipped into McCarthyist hysteria whose centerpiece was the show-trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
The agreed-upon narrative took shape. We are America, hero of WW II and the Marshall Plan, the benevolent, democratic, free-market wonder-child of the West, leader of the free world. All who renounce Communism receive our benediction however brutal your regime. Our corporations will come to you and receive your huddled masses yearning to work for next to nothing, and in return we shall arm you to the teeth so you can smite your enemies (who happen to be your own people but what the hell). We’ll even train your government death squads. We should have been confident and secure. Instead, we were bombarded with lurid fantasies of Communist infiltration, of being outgunned and outfoxed, and a national paranoia was cultivated that has never abated.
In this missile-bristling world to be “soft” on Communism was to seem a child next to the hard-core realists and men of action who understood the real world and saw the threat first-hand, up-close, etc. That too was part of the propaganda campaign: the military and intelligence organizations’ referencing their heroic defense of the homeland. This psychologically potent theme has a timeless, magnetic appeal, but in an era of extreme asymmetric, highly technological warfare, it becomes just another propaganda meme. That war has been glorified throughout history is old news, but it is also obvious that there is a difference between appreciating those engaged in a war brought about by necessity and fetishistic a military machine that functions as an extension of a government that serves the interests of a particular self-aggrandizing group. A soldier’s personal sacrifice alone does not justify the moral or strategic case for a war. Framing peacemakers as “pussies” is a playground gambit intended to belittle any analysis of moral issues and the complexities of situational realities. (Bumper sticker: a peace sign with the words “Footprint of the American chicken”). The attraction of the tough-guy mode, and the fear of being rejected by the tough guys, is uncannily effective as a call to arms. This theme is blasted via countless TV shows, movies, and video games. It goes well beyond a healthy appreciation for the soldier’s task. The comradeship of the battlefield is now treated with the tenderness and schmaltzy background music once reserved for love scenes. Every NFL game contains about half a dozen odes to the military (which the military pays the “patriotic” teams to host!). Their mission is to “keep us safe”, a strange overlay of the maternal and the military that infantile the civilian population.
Still, we might forgive such excesses because the nation-state is a fragile thing, a mutant adolescent on the historical stage whose instabilities often provoke it to a berserk violent rampage. Maintaining allegiance to this basically abstract nationalist ideal takes constant effort, as nations contain powerful internal forces that always threaten to tear them apart. The nation-state was born out of a centuries-long percolation in the unique environment of central and western Europe, nurtured by a technological revolution begun with the proliferation of gear-and-drive-train based water- and windmills. In Europe by about 1000 C.E., the amount of work done by machines, for the first time in known human history, exceeded that done by human labor. This led, over the centuries, to previously unfathomable leaps in productivity and wealth. Coalescing around a centralized monarchy, the nation emerged as the political instrument for seizing, and justifying the seizure of, this new wealth across a relatively vast land area. These newly concentrated riches, in turn, allowed the state to invest in achieving a competitive military advantage over other states or proto-states. Victory led to annexations of wealth-producing regions, resource appropriation, trade route domination, colonial seizures, and indemnities, i.e., even more wealth (after the bankruptcies and losses of war faded against the unrelenting momentum of demographics, politics, and technology). This open feedback loop led to a rapid progression of political, technological, economic, and military innovation.
Nation-states differ from the vast, sprawling, loosely bound empires of yesteryear. They are tighter constructs, demanding from their citizens a fealty the old empires never required. Empires were conglomerates of distinct tribal and regional groups; there was no pretense that these groups shared a history, values, or destiny. If they did not rebel against the imperial program – taxes, military service, state rituals – they maintained their cultures. For complex reasons, the nation state, upon becoming the new modern game in town, required a stronger sense of central identity. Unlike most empires, nations have shown themselves murderously intolerant of indigenous cultures within their borders (the British Empire loosely followed both patterns, using classic imperial strategies overseas and brutally repressing the Irish and Scottish within Great Britain’s borders). As a few nations grew to immense, imperial size and power – the U.S., China, Russia – the comparison to empires became more germane, especially as these super-powers behave less and less like nations based on an intrinsic social contract and more like empires ruled by an emperor’s or oligarchy’s fiat.
Imperial propaganda was rather crude but impressive, mainly there to let everyone know that some distant stone giant, who tramples on his enemies and builds temples, tombs, and palaces, possesses an army that could level their city or village and burn their farms. It was also aimed at spreading the ruler’s glory, a primary motivation in the ancient world that transmuted itself into national glory in the modern era.
National propaganda, however, has another objective. Fealty to a lord was the core principle that knit together medieval society. In the early nation-state period (14th-17th centuries), national identity was used to transfer loyalty from a local or ducal authority to the central authority represented by an often more distant monarch. We see this in the countless struggles between monarchs – Philip the Fair and Louis XIV of France, Ivan the Terrible in Russia, the war of the Roses in England – and the nobility. Once the British Parliamentary Revolution (a gradual but often violent affair) and American and French Revolutions ushered in the era of citizenship, personal attachment to the nation became a state of mind central to individual identity. In return, the citizens expected the state to secure a better life for them. Our current a historical, jaded mind-set can lose sight of the exhilaration unleashed throughout the world by this new promise of freedom and individual rights. It is today still the “better part of our natures”: freedom and the idea of “rights” the touchstone for movements seeking to improve the lives of the dis-empowered and oppressed.
The nation is supposed to feel as intimate a part of one’s life as one’s home, that little green valley or small town where neighbors smiled and waved, or the urban neighborhood where everybody knows your name. But it often does not feel like home. Governments and other institutions exploit people ruthlessly. Business and courts are rigged for the wealthy or, in the U.S., for the white. The nation often does not measure up to its pitch. What to do?
Like empires but on a far more rigorous basis, the solution was an unrelenting stream of messages extolling the glory of the national undertaking. To understand the power of this type of campaign, let us first examine the basic character of propaganda.
Propaganda
Propaganda is the unrelenting transmission of a group of thematically related, simplistic and emotional linguistic and visual messages aimed at a specific target audience. The messages are not intended to encourage thought or debate but to condition the mind like a dart and to condition the mind to respond in an emotionally consistent way that suits the objectives of the originating group. A sporadic outflow of propagandist messages is not propaganda per se but merely occasional outbursts. Propaganda consists of rapid-fire, repetitive signals that aim to hammer the target population into a state of malleable submissiveness. The ultimate goal is to convince the targets that: there is one source of truth; truth is defined by the institutions broadcasting the propaganda; resistance is hopeless; and the propaganda itself defines the parameters of acceptable public discourse.
There is a long-standing debate over whether propaganda can serve democratic ends, for instance, by promoting democratic instead of authoritarian values. Certainly one can imagine the form such an effort might take, but the core assumptions of democracy and propaganda are in absolute conflict. Democracy requires an aware, tolerant society of informed citizenry capable of debating and considering, and ultimately compromising over, a broad range of often entangled issues each with its nuances and numerous stakeholders. Propaganda is generated by a group with narrow, selfish goals; it seeks to override political process and reflective discourse; and its aim is total victory for its animating ideas. Propaganda’s ultimate triumph occurs when the target population internalizes propaganda’s messages to where it becomes the common language of everyday life. At that point the targets become the transmitters and proliferates of propaganda.
Every message is a product of the cognitive environment, the mental structures and content, of the person or persons who constructed it. The cognitive environment embedded in propaganda reproduces itself in its targets, remaining their sense of reality to reflect the aims, simplicity, emotionally, and exclusivity of the propaganda itself, as if the propaganda were a virus injecting itself into the target’s cognitive map. The degree to which a democratic society’s political processes are governed by propaganda is the degree to which it has abdicated its democratic character and democratic charter.
Brainwashing as popularly understood refers to the takeover of the target’s mind by an intensive program of isolation, bombardment with propaganda and behaviorally suggestive statements, physical abuse ranging from discomfort to torture, and the instilling of a mind-set in utter accord with the brain washers’ views and purposes. At its extreme, as in The Manchurian Candidate, the idea is that a person can be triggered by a per-programmed cue to carry out actions they would not otherwise perform. The success of these “old-school” brainwashing programs has generally been discredited, although the sheer duress endured can certainly compel someone to temporarily renounce their loyalties. Nonetheless, governments, including that of the United States, have not given up seeing ways to exert control over the minds of enemies, the public, or their own operatives. Brainwashing is carried out on an individual in isolation rather than an in situ population.
Brainwashing aside, propaganda does have a powerful effect on the brain – not just the mind but the brain itself. That is not to raise the specter of masses of “Manchurian candidates” ready to be triggered by a simple cue such as a playing card. Rather, over time, as the propaganda is internalize, the brain is trained to function according to the certainties and emotional release provided by a long-term propaganda campaign.
The American moment
American culture is an historical singularity, not simply unique as all societies are, but a strange, spoiled, tormented behemoth whose inconceivable wealth, size, complexity, and world-destroying military power, have imposed a burdensome responsibility upon its population. In an era of inconceivable technological wizardry once anticipated as utopian in its impact, many Americans are afflicted with a fevered medieval religiosity, obsession with firearms, and historical levels of substance abuse. The population is increasingly sub-literate while our natural environment and societal infrastructure are at the threshold of implosion. And our government is now in the hands of a racist, misogynistic, homophobic, militaristic, theocratic, and socially repressive cabal whose main concern is maximizing the transfer of wealth from the middle and poorer classes to a thin sliver of the very wealthiest.
This virtual coup is momentous because this behemoth carries far more destructive potential than other similarly inclined nations. In addition, America’s historic role in framing humanity’s dreams of a just, tolerant, benevolent society, for all its betrayals, contradictions, and myths, is still “the better part of our nature” and provides the moral authority, world-wide, for campaigns against abuses of power. Its loss is a tragedy for the entire globe. Whether we are headed for a terrifying, tragic crash or restore a measure of viability to our system, depends upon our ability to formulate effective strategies for reversing current trends.
History exhibits many successful campaigns waged by the dis-empowered and disenfranchised, and it is extraordinary how many were met with the most brutal violence and how many failed. It’s a risky undertaking. Despite many revolts and catastrophes, the European nobility held sway over almost all the continent from Rome’s fall (ca. 500 C.E.) until the 19th and 20th century, depending on the nation. Everything wrung from the American system – emancipation of slaves; the New Deal safety net; decent wages, working conditions, shorter work days and weeks, and retirement packages; black America’s civil rights revolution; feminism, gay liberation, Native American legal victories to preserve autonomy over their own land; access to education and medical care; the countless human service workers who are funded to alleviate the hardships of this society – none were simply achieved by peaceful mutual agreement. All were won by struggle and protest.
But now we are working against the clock. It is ironic that visions of apocalypse – via environmental destruction; weapons of mutual mass destruction; climate change; technological vulnerability; and potential pandemics – are no longer the quaint purview of medieval pulpits. Rather, they now appear as the sober assessments of scientific journals, with thousands and thousands of data points to support each forecast. Time is running out.
A propaganda of our own
Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) was so far ahead of his time that he’s still ahead of his time. McLuhan’s great insight was that the medium of communication shapes our lives more profoundly than message content. His was a specialized statement of a theme advanced by William Blake, Karl Marx, Lewis Mumford, Herbert Marcuse, Jane Jacobs, John Berger, and Jacques Ellul, among others – that technology and market relations stamp their own rhythms, demands, and character upon society. For example, clocks acclimated late medieval people to a new, abstract, precise sense of time suitable to an emerging complex commercial society. More recent examples include the dehumanizing effect of assembly lines; the disquiet of parents and psychologists over video games’ impact on children’s personalities; and social media’s impact on human relations.
But McLuhan recognized a more radical alchemy: that the changes occasioned by electronic media go beyond improvements in speed, data volume, and cost provided by electronic hardware; it is the nature of electricity itself, the medium, that will have the greatest impact on human life. Electricity pervades our lives, merging our identities with the ghostly, networked, decentralized, replicate, instantaneous qualities of a quantum-based medium. Worsening schools; dumbing down of mass media; corporate interference in cultural life; under-funding of science and the arts, are all on the content, “message” side of the equation. From the medium standpoint, the brilliant colors, pixillated photons, hypnotically beamed marketing and political harangues, sensory chaos of movies and video games, instant gratification, illusion of empowerment—of course the new medium prevailed over its boring, abstract, textual, reflective, interpretive, audited, papery predecessor! As the medium’s currents flood our lives, they dictate the rhythms and textures of our lives—relationships, jobs, conversations, politics, and thoughts.
Currents
The digital revolution greatly increased the global circulation of currency and wealth set in motion by the Reagan deregulation “Revolution”. Deregulation prepared the way for a derivative-based economy in which, no longer satisfied merely to dis-empower labor and monopolize resources and production, global financiers manage national currencies and societal debt as a wealth-cloning mechanism. The financial system makes its greatest profits when money bypasses the messy realities of production and reproduces itself via an intricate global shell game. Traditional economic activities and assets provide a game-board for the much more lucrative derivative wealth-extraction schemes that led to the crash of 2008-09 and that are in full swing again today.
This accelerated movement of huge blocs of wealth is one of several forces undermining the centuries-old primacy of the nation-state in public affairs. The nation, of course, is still the defining category upon which the global system stands, so much so that we forget it arose in response to the need to re-organize the administration of new levels of collective wealth. Of course it did not come out of a vacuum but retained many of the guiding principles and assumptions of the previous systems that it over-rode or replaced. The larger the system that is in the process of being superseded, the more social disruption is likely to occur, as we see in the movement towards the nation-state and earlier, for example, in the demise of the western Roman Empire which devastated European civilization for centuries. Currently the nation-state is proving itself obsolete in an era where instantly mobile wealth dwarfs the assets of most of the world’s nations; where the movement and reach of highly destructive weapons has become almost liquid in its fluidity; and in which supra-national organizations such as linked-up cartels and terrorist groups; mega-corporations that control much of the media and hundreds of brands each; huge financial institutions that operate beyond, behind, and unbeknownst to the public and their national governments; intelligence agencies that are only nominally attached to their government and its stated policies; and private military and police forces indicate. The Internet by its very nature, and for better as well as worse, has blurred national boundaries for the sake of online communities. Hence, in reaction, we have seen a desperate clutching at certitude: literal, fundamentalist religious movements; hyper-nationalistic movements that draw upon racial antagonisms towards immigrants; and a shrill patriotism that can never compensate for a loss of faith in the concept of the nation itself. In the U.S. it is odd that the same people who present themselves as “true patriots” often identify with the Confederacy which tried to break away from the country and almost always believe that government, especially the federal government, is evil and an impingement on their freedoms and contrary to everything the “founding fathers” stood far. In this they are profoundly ignorant of the exacting debate and consideration on the critical role of government that the framers of the Constitution were wholly committed to. At the time, the anti-Federalist position raised valid concerns about maintaining the power of the states over the Federal government, but their arguments have never been separated from a defense first of slavery and later of Jim Crow apartheid.
A structure as powerful and integral as the nation-state does not yield its hold on us because of merely abstract reasons, such as those noted above might appear to be. The movement and manipulation of currency, etc., does not necessarily mean that nations will become obsolete. It is rather than such factors literally render the nation impotent to sustain their citizens interests in large part because the power has shifted from national governments to financiers, shadow governments, cartels, and the like. This loss of power to help their citizens is the ultimate wound in the gut for national feeling. Once the population stops believing, central authority comes more and more to rely on force, and the splintered interests groups that fill the power vacuum act with more and more license and, in general, rapacity.
The extreme right’s financial moguls have used their new profit margins to fund evermore far-reaching and extreme propaganda with evermore ambitious goals, filling the national vacuum rather efficiently. For decades, radio show hosts have spewed vitriol that infused bland terms such as “liberal” and “government” with all the loathing once reserved for “Bolsheviks” and “outside agitators”. Right wing hacks produce screeds that corporate-owned media promote as thoughtful reflection and whose public relations campaigns propel onto best-seller lists. The “birther” movement, Michelle Obama really being a man and Hillary (a literal) demon, and the myth of a secret Democratic pedophile ring run out of a Washington D.C. pizzeria, are elements of a weirdly perverse narrative intended to inflame the ignorant and superimpose garish fantasy over reality. Right-wing lobbyists and propagandists such as ALEC write bills for specific clients that state legislatures and Congress shepherd into law. As Nancy MacLean’s America in Chains documents, the far right has for decades planned and carried out a focused campaign of deception and propaganda on behalf of an agenda that has nothing to do with traditional Republicanism and openly expresses contempt for the Constitution and the interests and lives of the vast majority of Americans. Hundreds of political campaigns at the state and federal levels have been turned rightward by overwhelming infusions of cash. The propaganda machine keeps spitting out the same crazy message for their followers: “Liberals and big government want to take your guns away. They won’t let you pray in school or say Merry Christmas. They’re taxing you to death so they can give hand-outs to urban thugs and welfare queens and illegal immigrants (i.e., “non-whites”). They plan to herd you into prison camps in remote desert locations. The secret Muslim black president put death-committees into his Stalinist health plan. Our government has made baby-murder a mass industry and denies the word of god with the heresy of fake-science’s evolution.” Since the first warnings against labor “agitators” in late 19th century America, propaganda against “reds”, whether internal or in the form of the USSR or China, has always been instantaneously transferred to domestic issues such as unions, guns, race, and freedom of expression and protest. And the mainstream media, hog-tied by its corporate ownership and an emphasis on marketing and audience satisfaction, fails to address the agendas that lie below the surface and repeats the formulations of the extreme right as if they are serious political ideas, in effect broadcasting propaganda designed not to enlighten but to confuse and manipulate.
Assault on the brain
The primary ground of contention in American politics and society is neither political nor even psychological: it is neurological. Brains change under the impact of constant electronic over-stimulation, intellectual under-stimulation, and immersion in a state of rage. The right-wing media moguls and their ranting hirelings; the rise of a strongly politicized fundamentalist Christianity that preaches a puerile biblical literalness; the erosion of education; and a society-wide degeneration in the quality of public discourse have all reshaped not only the American mind, but millions of brains as well.
For the first time in American history, our government is controlled by a cabal whose program is to monopolize wealth; impose theocratic values; intimidate the population by militarizing the police; privatize the military so it can bypass Congress and public scrutiny in conducting overseas adventures; plunder national resources while slashing any government program – medical, educational, nutritional, environmental, worker safety, etc. – that serves the public good; destroy our civil liberties; and ultimately eradicate the notion of the United States as a constitutional republic governed through a give-and-take of diverse points of view. That a large portion of Americans voted for this demonstrates a collective neuropathy as surely as did German Nazism, the 1960s Chinese Cultural Revolution, and other fascistic movements. And despite the many Americans who reject racism and the idea of imperium, we all participate in the system’s distortions. Those of us horrified at our current circumstances are nonetheless inevitably prey to its influence, transfixed by the awful momentum driving it to its logical conclusion.
This all affects the brain itself, as distinct from mind. In this golden age of brain research, scientists continually demonstrate how virtually every experience affects brain morphology and function. Pursuits as diverse as chess, writing in cursive, exercise, meditation, juggling, music, pleasurable physical contact, good nutrition, owning a pet, and learning a language stimulate the growth of neurons, integrate left and right brain function, generate new neurological patterns and pathways, and even reverse brain atrophy. Stress, mindless repetition, isolation, substance abuse, poor nutrition, constant anger and fear, loud noise, and lack of sleep all inhibit brain function. The brain behaves more like a coral reef than an organ of the body. Not surprisingly, whatever affects the brain often has a parallel impact on the body’s other systems.
A sustained propaganda campaign maximizes anger, helplessness, and fear in order to produce a primitive, closed Pavlovian loop within the brain’s circuitry. This happens at a cellular level. When the brain receives powerful repetitive signals over time, it responds by speeding up the neurological pathways that carry those signals by building up the myelin sheathe that coats a neuron’s axons and dendrites, a sort of violation of “brain neutrality”. The most insistent signals not only are delivered more efficiently, but their pathways actually attract traffic away from alternative routes and destinations. Evidence, logic, and even appeals to self-interest are processed by the brain’s circuitry into a reinforcement of its dominant bias. The brain, and with it the mind and emotions, responds as predictably and unthinkingly as Pavlov’s salivating dogs. In addition, simplistic, “loud”, repetitive signals limit neuronal activity and growth and disturb the brain’s chemical balance. The result is a form of cognitive dissonance in which the frame of reference that governs one’s responses has little relationship to reality. Indeed, propaganda’s aim is to convince us that there is no reality other than the matrix of simplistic ideas and emotional impulses it is designed to advance, haunting the victim’s perceptions with spectres and shadows.
A population experiencing widespread dysfunctional brain activity can be convinced, by the application of the right stimuli, to vote against its own interests. It learns to scapegoat others for all the evils their imaginations, or others’ imaginations, can provide. Their anger and propensity towards violence can be stoked and stroked to target whomever their brainwashing has prepared them to despise. So how does one devise a political framework and language to shift the positions of people who are, in a thorough but less spectacular sense, brainwashed?
The ineluctable modality of American racism This question cannot be answered without considering the role racism plays both in U.S. propaganda campaigns and in so many Americans’ vulnerability to its influence. The unholy union of racism, resource exploitation, violence, and religious fundamentalism was shaped by Euro-Americans’ immediate and unremitting hostility to Native Americans. Concurrent with the assault on Native American life, slavery bred a white ideology of contempt and a political system based on violent oppression. And although the North won the Civil War (1861-1865), massacres of former slaves and assassinations of southern black leaders began before the Civil War ended and intensified during Reconstruction (ca. 1865-1877), when the Northern victors insisted on political and civil rights for blacks. The massacres and intimidation of black Americans led to reinstatement of severe apartheid and slave-like exploitation. The poison is strong today because a sufficient antidote was never applied; perhaps there is none.
Our education system ignores the fact that the racism of slavery remained as virulent as ever after the Civil War while adopting an aggrieved, piteous tone that blamed Reconstruction for a century of murder and violently enforced segregation (an argument of the so-called “Dunning School” of post-Civil War history). We forget that the men and women photographed celebrating the lynchings of black people, the children and grandchildren of Confederate veterans, were raised on a gospel of unreconstructed racism. There was no break between slavery and later American racism. Many people have abandoned the racism of their forebears, but attitudes among millions of others seem to have hardened and the “race card” has played a role in every Republican presidential victory since Nixon’s. Nor does this history absolve the northern states of their racist tradition, especially in that tier across the Midwest and the mid-Atlantic states that so strongly supported the 20th century “reborn” Ku Klux Klan.
As so many school textbooks have it, the U.S. was once racist but then Martin Luther King, Jr., came along and oh my, what progress we have made! Of course, no sooner was the blood on that Memphis balcony dry than Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign adopted a “southern strategy” to break the Democratic Party’s hold over southern politics. The “Dixiecrats” were the party of reconstituted Confederation that rolled back Reconstruction’s (1865-1877) post-Civil War reforms in the 1870s and violently enforced racial apartheid. After Democratic President Lyndon Johnson signed 1964’s Civil Rights and 1965’s Voting Rights Acts ushered through Congress by LBJ in partnership with black Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Republicans won over the Dixiecrats by replacing traditional racist language (no longer acceptable in the mainstream) with a coded racist vocabulary. The “code” was a form of covert propaganda that could be safely broadcast in public media and from church pulpits. It won over not only the overtly racist, but those harboring more general resentments at hippies, blacks, anti-war protesters, and others whose vision of America they could not understand. By then, the shotgun marriage of militant Christianity and militant Capitalism had matured into an ideology whose anger, simplicity, and profit-based lure inspired a devout following. God was not just on our side, he also had his own tax, anti-labor, and free trade policies and his own private schools for whites wanting to avoid racial integration.
The 9/11 attacks and subsequent wars and the billionaire-funded Tea Party’s takeover of the Republican Party brought to the fore such themes as national security, religious fundamentalism, racism, and paranoia that were fertile with propagandist potential. The malevolent animus directed at Muslims easily bled over into anti-immigration rhetoric and infused new energy into the long-standing racist scapegoating of American blacks and Native Americans. Donald Trump has played all the race cards available, not even bothering to encode some of his remarks. Neo-Nazi groups openly support Trump who just as openly avoids disavowing them. Hate crimes have risen dramatically in the wake of his election. Voting regulations only recently put in place throughout the old Confederacy, combined with an aggressive gerrymandering effort, have thrown millions of blacks and urban poor off the voting lists or made their votes redundant, making it virtually impossible for moderate and liberal voices to win election in many districts and guaranteeing that those states go Republican in presidential elections. In place of a Constitution- and rights-based, trans-actional government, the party in control of all three branches of government is fully committed to a racist, misogynistic, homophobic, militaristic, theocratic, and socially repressive agenda.
Racism and other forms of collective hatred are not weird intruders into otherwise healthy individuals and communities. They are a dominant, defining feature of any cognitive, political, and social terrain. The language of bigotry is actually a form of propaganda injected into the everyday thoughts and conversations of a community. Bigotry create allusions, epithets, and coded terminology that infect an entire mental framework. Language and public discourse suffer a sort of trauma when the rhetoric of hatred is normalized, tilting towards the simplistic, reactive, impulsive, and angry, and dismissive of any contrary evidence. Encoded racist language cloaks blatantly racist policy in a veneer of rationality and legality. (For example, via the mass incarceration of blacks and Latinos; Congress’s current assault on the Voting Rights Act; gerrymandering of election districts; cutting medical, educational, counseling, and nutritional programs; voter intimidation; police violence against people of color). Yet one of the central prevailing national narratives on race holds that the civil rights movement solved the problem; whites have been counter-discriminated against by welfare and Affirmative Action; some blacks hate whites, some whites hate blacks and it all evens out in the end; and other such glib denials of reality. A mantra of white supremacy, “we’re tired of white people being pushed around”, is the aggrieved lament of those who cannot accept that their own leaders betrayed them. Better to blame a scapegoat than one’s own gullibility and beliefs.
The denial of racial and political realities reinforces the denial of reality. Whether denying climate change and science or sinking into the narcissism and celebrity worship pumping through all media, or the truly delusional devotion of Trump supporters in the face of all evidence of corruption, ineptitude, and political betray, too many people have been taught not just to drink, but to crave, the Kool-Aid. The viral “fake news” meme allows Trump and his minions to deny anything and promote “alternative facts” whether they concern evolution, racism, global warming, Trump’s debt to Russian gangsters, or the size of Trump’s inaugural crowds or his groping hands.
The electronic, digital medium, the world of currents and currency, is Exhibit A in this tilt towards universal deniability. Anything digitized can be hacked, morphed, photo-shopped, and overwhelmed with a blizzard of false data and manufactured “memes”, undermining our faith in the very same mediated reality we depend on for work and social connection. Disinformation is now a growth industry, with cadres of hackers, trolls, and hack writers churning out fake facts and political attacks. As reality crumbles, we become disoriented, desperate, and destructive.
We are a brainwashed nation and the political energy of “resisters” is expended in outrage or, at best, fending off the latest assault on immigrants, the poor, civil liberties. We have lost the ability to mobilize an effective resistance. The five million-strong women’s march of January 21, 2017, was magnificent and did have a palpable impact on the media and the Democratic party. But such marches offer diminishing returns with each iteration. We have been lulled: we are too comfortable, we have too much to lose.
Particularized local action is not enough to reverse brainwashing’s effects. Only a cultural wave driven by an alternative vision of power and outcomes is strong enough to challenge ingrained mental and neurological patterns, much as 20th century social activism transformed America. The Democrats offer little hope of such change. Democratic control of at least one house of Congress after the 2018 elections would pull us back from the brink of fascism, but the Democratic Party is still controlled by Wall Street and still beholden to the military-industrial complex—its triumph would leave us as vulnerable to a proto-fascist electoral coup 4 or 6 years down the road as we were in 2016.
The Occupy movement left behind a vision of social activism that is transforming, challenging to both political parties, and capable of uniting young activists with the unemployed, the poor, and the sinking middle class. The current movement among women to call out their abusers, even allowing for the unfortunate flavor of witch-hunting that it manifests at times, has caught fire and is disrupting norms in place, literally, for millennia. And the parade of gun massacres, unique in the world and perhaps history, may yet provoke a similarly powerful response in favor of gun control; certainly the impotence of speeches, outcry, and bills has been amply displayed in regard to this issue.
The distortions and outrage marshaled against “Black Lives Matter” demonstrates anti-black racism’s enduring ability to mobilize the American right. Yet one has to expect challenges to racism to be met by the most debased tactics, as they always have been. We might have predicted the whining “What about white lives?”, “What about police lives?”, “Blue matters” reaction which did blunt the power of Black Lives Matter. Of course no one even implied that whites and officers’ lives don’t matter: the real message was that society as a whole already broadcasts the message that they matter, while black deaths are often ignored, or the victim smeared, or excuses made for trigger-happy cops (“he went for his cellphone; he kept running; she became hysterical; he had a knife”, etc.). But that was too subtle a distinction to catch hold and thus these glib, empy sound bytes took a toll on Black Lives Matter.
The battle for hearts and minds, when one side is fundamentally authoritarian, is always littered with the spent shells of a vigorous propaganda campaign. Brainwashed brains cannot respond to reasoned argument or appeals to a better nature because propaganda contains a built-in assurance that it represents reason and the moral high ground. It is a deviously designed virus.
The challenge by Americans capable of seeing the profound threat represented by our current regime is how to generate a transforming political movement. The present situation should not blind us to the success of the civil rights and liberation movements of the past 60 years or the #MeToo, Occupy, and Black Lives Matter campaigns. While deriving energy from reactions against oppression and injustice, they all received their true inspiration from a positive vision of a (relatively) liberated life. Ironically, the rise of the extreme right was also animated with by inspiring visions: an America ruled by fine upstanding white men backed by the guns dangling from their belts, free to bulldoze the earth while driving without speed limits on highways maintained by…um, the federal government? Inspiration rains alike on the just and unjust, which goes to the core of the problem: what differentiates such opposite visions which so often are compared with the media’s false equivalencies, their incoherent notion of objectivity. Are there moral and pragmatic standards that can be applied to political action and policies? How do we persuade people whose brains have been trained to respond to the instant gratification that propaganda accustoms them to that their vision is a dead-end? To some extent, we need to fight fire with fire with themes and language that tap a deeper emotional well than that provided by propaganda. Without these deeper level strategies and tactics, we will continue to find ourselves facing the intractable commitment of fanatics armed only with the same sad, tired pablum of dismay and confusion that the Democrats offered in the last election.
Barton Kunstler, Ph.D., writes about creativity, social justice, education, technology, and leadership. His book, The Hothouse Effect, describes the dynamics behind history's most creative communities. Other published work includes poetry, numerous academic articles, and fiction (currently, see www.northwindmagazine.com). His monograph for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence addresses leadership's future in light of the human singularity. He writes for www.huffingtonpost.com and his writings, including a column on communication strategy, appear at www.bartonkunstler.com. He can be reached at barleeku@comcast.net.
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