Black Americans Got Left Out Of This New Deal Policy and Program

nakedcapitalism |  Hookworm, a disease of extreme poverty thought largely to have been eradicated in the United States, persists as a public health problem in some populations, according to a peer-reviewed paper, Human Intestinal Parasite Burden and Poor Sanitation in Rural Alabama, published yesterday in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

The disease affects 430 million people worldwide, largely in Africa and Asia, causing iron deficiency, impaired cognitive development, and stunting in children, and is considered a neglected tropical disease (NTD).

As reported by The Guardian in Hookworm, a disease of extreme poverty, is thriving in the US south. Why? :

The study, the first of its kind in modern times, was carried out by the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in conjunction with Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise (ACRE), a nonprofit group seeking to address the root causes of poverty. In a survey of people living in Lowndes County, an area with a long history of racial discrimination and inequality, it found that 34% tested positive for genetic traces of Necator americanus.

As recently as the 1930s, the southern United States had a high prevalence of hookworm infections, which affected intellectual performance and caused lethargy, according to How a Worm Gave the South a Bad Name. Initial surveys of populations at that time found that as much as three-quarters of the populations of certain areas were infected.

“Hookworm is a 19th century disease that should by now have been addressed, yet we are still struggling with it in the United States in the 21st century,” said Catherine Flowers, ACRE’s founder, as quoted in The Guardian.

New Deal Eradication Efforts

During the New Deal, the federal government launched a public health initiative to control hookworm infections:

To control the disease, thousands of individuals were treated, decreasing prevalence to 39%. After these interventions, there were increases in school enrolment, attendance, and literacy, and those within the treated cohort had substantial gains in long-term incomes. However, because of posttreatment reinfection and widespread transmission, hookworm infection and disease continued to persist in the southern United States, especially in areas of extreme poverty. According to a study in the 1950s, rural Alabama still suffered from a high prevalence of hookworm infection in schoolchildren, with some counties having 60% infection. With improved sanitation and waste disposal infrastructure, in association with aggressive economic development in the southern United States, the prevalence of hookworm infection decreased (paper, p. 2, citations omitted).

The conditions that cause hookworm infections have not vanished, yet contemporary researchers have largely failed to investigate how prevalent they may remain:

The Culture Wars and Public Education

WaPo  |  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 violently 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 American 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 like Beverly, Mass., voted to discontinue the high school in 1860. Catholics also saw 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.

Growing Neglect of the Incubator or Citizens

theatlantic |  Public schools have always occupied prime space in the excitable American imagination. For decades, if not centuries, politicians have made hay of their supposed failures and extortions. In 2004, Rod Paige, then George W. Bush’s secretary of education, called the country’s leading teachers union a “terrorist organization.” In his first education speech as president, in 2009, Barack Obama lamented the fact that “despite resources that are unmatched anywhere in the world, we’ve let our grades slip, our schools crumble, our teacher quality fall short, and other nations outpace us.”

President Donald Trump used the occasion of his inaugural address to bemoan the way “beautiful” students had been “deprived of all knowledge” by our nation’s cash-guzzling schools. Educators have since recoiled at the Trump administration’s budget proposal detailing more than $9 billion in education cuts, including to after-school programs that serve mostly poor children. These cuts came along with increased funding for school-privatization efforts such as vouchers. Our secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, has repeatedly signaled her support for school choice and privatization, as well as her scorn for public schools, describing them as a “dead end” and claiming that unionized teachers “care more about a system, one that was created in the 1800s, than they care about individual students.”

A System Designed to Regiment Large Groups of People

fee |  Hardly anyone disputes the contention that the modem public school is seriously flawed. Test scores continue to be poor while metal detectors are found in the more violent schools. Welfare-state liberals argue that schools in poor areas need more money to place them on an equal footing with their richer counterparts. Conservatives usually reply that the solution is a voucher system that would break the government monopoly on education by restoring choice and control to parents. But virtually all participants on both sides of the debate concede the nobility of the original reformers; in their view, the “good intentions” of such school champions as Horace Mann and John Dewey led to “unintended consequences.”

Such admiration is misplaced. As historian Michael Katz writes, “The crusade for educational reform led by Horace Mann . . . was not the simple, unambiguous good it had long been taken to be; the central aim of the movement was to establish more efficient mechanisms of social control, and its chief legacy was the principle that ‘education was something the better part of the community did to the others to make them orderly, moral, and tractable.’ ”¹

I Don't Trust Vice Or Anonymous But This Seems Worth Pursuing

motherboard.vice |  It is an absolute certainty that, with sufficient thought, a new mechanism may someday be designed, capable of integrating thousands of talented individuals and existing organizations into a sort of parallel civic ecosystem.

What is the proper role, then, for the citizen who takes citizenship seriously, and counts it a duty to defend the rights not just of Americans but of those populations abroad who ultimately bear the brunt of our civic failings? For many, the answer is to continue the hard work of engaging within the system—voting, working for better candidates, donating time and money to the organizations that do what they can to prevent things from deteriorating even further. This is entirely appropriate. But even the reformers are likely to recognize, now, that this may not be sufficient in the face of the political conditions we face—and that the consequences of a morally failed American republic, continuing on its present course for even just another decade, would be irreparable. No competent observer of our current trajectory can today disregard this scenario, or others far worse.

That this problem is now widely recognized is the first of two reasons why a solution is now in reach.

Here we have the second reason why a solution is now within reach. The most important fact of the 21st century is that any individual can now collaborate with any other individual on the planet. This has happened with extraordinary suddenness, in historical terms; by the same accounting, it has also happened quite recently, and so remains largely unexplored. We cannot hope to know what this means as of yet, then, any more than someone who observed the advent of the printing press or gunpowder could have predicted, respectively, the Reformation or Europe's eventual seizure of much of the world. Nonetheless, the implications are becoming clearer as the years proceed; the internet itself has quickened the pace of our history, even as it makes the future more unpredictable.

pursuanceproject |  For the first time in history, any individual may now collaborate with any other individual. One may get a sense of the implications of this by considering how different human history would have been had early man possessed some psychic ability to find and communicate with anyone else across the world. We now have something very similar, and in some ways more powerful. 

It's easy to underestimate the significance of this in part because it's also easy to overestimate it and, worse, to romanticize it. The advent of the internet was immediately followed by triumphalist manifestos setting out the great and positive changes that were now afoot. That much of what was predicted didn't immediately come to pass has led some to challenge the entire premise of the internet as a potentially revolutionary force for good. 

Certainly the utopian predictions of the early ‘90s were off the mark; indeed the clearest picture we have today contains seeds of actual dystopia. Meanwhile, the trivial uses to which the internet is commonly put can make it difficult to take seriously as a transcendental factor in our civilization. But then gunpowder was originally used to make fireworks. And a technology that may be used to oppress may also be used to liberate. Again, gunpowder comes to mind. 

The way in which events have proceeded in our society since the advent of the internet tells us less about the internet than it does about our society. There are a few lessons we can glean, though. In the large, we know that mass connectivity does not automatically lead to mass enlightenment. We know that states will sometimes seek to use the internet to further their control over information, and that they will sometimes be successful in this. We know many things of this sort. But none of this tells us what the internet will ultimately mean for human civilization. That will be determined on the ground, in the years to follow.

CIA Ford Foundation Architect of Multiculturalism

salon |  Identity politics was conceived and executed from the beginning as a movement of depoliticization. Feminism has become severed from class considerations, so that for the most part it has become a reflection of what liberal identitarians themselves like to call “white privilege.” Feminism, like the other identity politics of the moment, is cut off from solidarity with the rest of the world, or if it deals with the rest of the world can only do so on terms that must not invalidate the American version of identity politics. 

For example, because all identities are equally sacrosanct, we must not critique other cultures from an Enlightenment perspective; to each his own, and race is destiny, etc. (Which certainly validates the “alt-right,” doesn’t it?) This failure was noted by neoconservatives some decades ago, a breach into which they stepped with a vigorous assertion of nationalism that should have had no place in our polity after the reconsiderations brought about by Vietnam and Watergate. But it happened, just as a perverted form of white patriotism arose to fulfill the vacuum left by liberal rationality because of the constraints of identity politics. 

To conclude, identity politics — in all the forms it has shown up, from various localized nationalisms to more ambitious fascism — desires its adherents to present themselves in the most regressive, atavistic, primitive form possible. The kind of political communication identity politics thrives on is based on maximizing emotionalism and minimizing rationality. Therefore, the idea of law that arises when identity politics engenders a reaction is one that severs the natural bonds of community across differences (which is the most ironic yet predictable result of identity politics) and makes of the law an inhuman abstraction. 

This depoliticization has gone on so long now, about 30 years, that breaking out of it is inconceivable, since the discourse to do so is no longer accessible. For anyone trained to think outside the confines of identity politics, those who operate within its principles — which manifests, for example, in call-out culture (or at least it did before Trump) — seem incomprehensible, and vice versa. We are different generations divided by unfathomable gaps, and there is no way to bridge them. The situation is like the indoctrination in Soviet Russia in the 1930s, so that only an economic catastrophe that lays waste to everything, resulting from imperial misadventures, can possibly break the logjam. Short of that, we are committed to the dire nihilism of identity politics for the duration of the imperial game.

CIA Infiltration of Journalism Curriculum and Instruction

collective-evolution |  The agency had definite plans to infiltrate academia and change/influence the curriculum, specifically journalism.

As Emma Best from Muckrock reports, recently Tweeted by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, memos from the CIA Inspector General’s (IG) office reveal the agencies perspective on the press and how to handle them. It’s from 1984, approximately three decades prior to when the Agency declared Wikileaks a hostile non-state intelligence service. It shows how the CIA viewed the media the same way.

Are organizations like Wikileaks really a threat to National Security? Or are they simply a threat to a small group of powerful people who make millions, billions, or even trillions of dollars via government secrecy? Are they a threat to the global national security agenda that is taking place, disguised under the guise of globalisation? Was president Vladimir Putin right when he said “imaginary” and “mythical” threats are being used to impose the Deep State’s way on the entire world? Perhaps truth and transparency are a threat yes, but not to national security. If we continue to ignore these questions, the national security state will continue to be heightened, one in which our rights are constantly violated, with our right to privacy being one of many great examples.

Several weeks prior, CIA Director Casey had asked the IG to weigh in on officer Eloise Page’s paper on unauthorized disclosure. The IG passed the task onto someone on his staff, who produced a four page SECRET memo for IG James Taylor, who passed it on to Director Casey. The IG specifically endorsed the proposal for a program where the Agency would intervene with journalism schools.

See for yourself - you can view the full document here.

In the document, the press are also viewed as “principal villains:”

“To the Inspector General’s office, the reason that the press were the “principal villains” was simple: “absolute power corrupts absolutely” and “the power of the media to publish in this country is nearly absolute.” As a result of the media’s “absolute power,’ argued the Agency that had been involved in mind control attempts, illegal surveillance, tampering in foreign elections and dozens of assassinations, assassination attempts and coups, they had been corrupted absolutely. The member of the IG’s staff then suggested that they compare the media to the “opposition,” a reference to hostile intelligence services. This could be backed up by citing “precise parallels in methods and results, if not in motivations, between the media’s attempts to penetrate us and the opposition’s attempts to do the same.” – Emma Best

The document then goes on to list some proposed “do’s and don’ts,” as well as expresses the belief that “a sanitized list of foolish media disclosures that have cost the country or individuals substantially.” But again, as discussed above, have they really cost the citizenry, or have they simply cost some powerful interests?

The document also urges the Director to “remember” that “the organization has official contacts with influential people outside the Community –  people in leadership posts in this society; academia and the media concluded; and remember that we undoubtedly have in the organization many who know such people unofficially and who could help provide access if needed.”

Quite revealing isn’t it?

Banksters Not About To Surrender Their Drug Money Laundering Profits...,

wolfstreet |  Under the US Patriot Act, handling money from marijuana is illegal and violates measures to control money laundering and terrorist acts. However, US regulators have made it clear that banks will not be prosecuted for providing services to businesses that are lawfully selling cannabis in states where pot has been legalized for recreational use. Some cannabis businesses have been able to set up accounts at credit unions, but major banks have shied away from the expanding industry, deciding that the burdens and risks of doing business with marijuana sellers are not worth the bother.

But that may not be their only motive. There are also the huge profits that can be reaped from laundering the proceeds of the global narcotics trade. According to Antonio María Costa, the former Under-Secretary of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, over $350 billion of funds from organized crime were processed by European and US banks in the wake of the global financial crisis.

“Inter-bank loans were funded by money that originated from the drugs trade and other illegal activities… There were signs that some banks were rescued that way,” Costa said. To date, no European government or bank has publicly denied Costa’s charges. Meanwhile, numerous big banks on both sides of the Atlantic have been caught and fined, some repeatedly, for laundering billions of dollars of illicit drugs money — in direct contravention of the US anti-drugs legislation.

Whatever the banks’ real motives in denying funds to the Uruguayan pharmacies, the perverse irony, as the NY Times points out, is that applying US regulations intended to crack down on banks laundering the proceeds from the illegal sale of drugs to the current context in Uruguay is likely to encourage, not prevent, illicit drug sales:

Fighting drug trafficking was one of the main reasons the Uruguayan government gave for legalizing recreational marijuana. Officials spent years developing a complex regulatory framework that permits people to grow a limited supply of cannabis themselves or buy it at pharmacies for less than the black market rate. Lawmakers hoped that these legal structures would undercut illicit marijuana cultivation and sales.
“There probably isn’t a trade in Uruguay today that is more controlled than cannabis sale,” said Pablo Durán (a legal expert at the Center of Pharmacies in Uruguay, a trade group).

Despite that fact, the pressure continues to be brought to bear on Uruguay’s legal cannabis businesses. Banco República has already announced that it will close the accounts of the pharmacies that sell cannabis in order to safeguard its much more valuable dollar operations.

In other words, a state-owned bank of a sovereign nation just decided to put draconian US legislation before a law adopted by the Uruguayan parliament authorizing the sale and production of marijuana. The law’s prime sponsor, Uruguay’s former president, José Mujica, is furious. During a session of the country’s Senate, he accused the banks of directly attacking democracy.

Racism is an Integral, Permanent, and Indestructible Component of America

aljazeera | The distinguished novelist and Nobel Prize laureate Tony Morrison has keenly observed: "All immigrants to the United States know (and knew) that if they want to become real, authentic Americans they must reduce their fealty to their native country and regard it as secondary, subordinate, in order to emphasize their whiteness."

But the question is not fealty to any "native country". The question is rather the systematic subordination of all immigrants, regardless of how they have been colour-coded, to the myth of the "white people" and the violent fantasies of their civilizing missions. No brown, black, or any other thus coloured person can ever be completely "white". But their trying to pass as white is a mechanism of humiliation and denigration they willingly play to presume they are part of the power structure and a more "normal" human being. 

In How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America (1998), Karen Brodkin has put forward one line of argument as to how since World War II American Jews began to pose and perform themselves as "white". The practice is not peculiar to American Jews, of course. Upon their arrivals and one generation into a successful economic status, other recent immigrants, Muslims and Hindus alike, have also sought to posit and pass themselves as (almost) white.

Becoming white has always been the most potent way for racialised "minorities" to overcome their violently alienated personhood in order to become something they could (and should) never be. 

By replicating and reenacting the racial politics of their European origin and now their US benefactors upon Arabs in general and the Palestinians in particular, the Zionists are the living testimonials as to how racial hatred is manufactured and sustained as means of political domination. The term "Israeli Arab" invented by Zionists for Palestinians in their own homeland is the epitome of European racism carried to its most obscene colonial conclusions. 

Struggle for racial justice must commence and continue with the full knowledge of how racial divides were socially manufactured and politically sustained before we can learn how to overcome them. The full acknowledgment of the murderous history of racism in the US and Europe is the first step towards dismantling it. No postmodern or poststructuralist dismantling of race can disregard the sustained history of racism as coterminous with capitalist modernity. It must acknowledge, sublate, in order to overcome it.

The Invention of the White Race

Counterpunch |  Theodore W. Allen’s two-volume The Invention of the White Race, republished by Verso Books in a New Expanded Edition, presents a full-scale challenge to what Allen refers to as “The Great White Assumption” – “the unquestioning, indeed unthinking acceptance of the ‘white’ identity of European-Americans of all classes as a natural attribute rather than a social construct.” Its thesis on the origin and nature of the “white race” contains the root of a new and radical approach to United States history, one that challenges master narratives taught in the media and in schools, colleges, and universities. With its equalitarian motif and emphasis on class struggle it speaks to people today who strive for change worldwide.

Allen’s original 700-pages magnum opus, already recognized as a “classic” by scholars such as Audrey Smedley, Wilson J. Moses, Nell Painter, and Gerald Horne, included extensive notes and appendices based on his twenty-plus years of primary source research. The November 2012 Verso edition adds new front and back matter, expanded indexes, and internal study guides for use by individuals, classes, and study groups. Invention is a major contribution to our historical understanding, it is meant to stand the test of time, and it can be expected to grow in importance in the 21^st century.

“When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no ‘white’ people there; nor, according to the colonial records, would there be for another sixty years.”

That arresting statement, printed on the back cover of the first (1994) volume, reflected the fact that, after poring through 885 county-years of Virginia’s colonial records, Allen found “no instance of the official use of the word ‘white’ as a token of social status” prior to its appearance in a 1691 law. As he explained, “Others living in the colony at that time were English; they had been English when they left England, and naturally they and their Virginia-born children were English, they were not ‘white.’” “White identity had to be carefully taught, and it would be only after the passage of some six crucial decades” that the word “would appear as a synonym for European-American.”

Allen was not merely speaking of word usage, however. His probing research led him to conclude – based on the commonality of experience and demonstrated solidarity between African-American and European-American laboring people, the lack of a substantial intermediate buffer social control stratum, and the “indeterminate” status of African-Americans – that the “white race” was not, and could not have been, functioning in early Virginia.

It is in the context of such findings that he offers his major thesis — the “white race” was invented as a ruling class social control formation in response to labor solidarity as manifested in the later, civil war stage of Bacon’s Rebellion (1676-77).  To this he adds two important corollaries: 1) the ruling elite, in its own class interest, deliberately instituted a system of racial privileges to define and maintain the “white race” and 2) the consequences were not only ruinous to the interests of African-Americans, they were also “disastrous” for European-American workers, whose class interests differed fundamentally from those of the ruling elite.  The Invention of the White Race Volume II

America's Current Political Crisis Started 50 Years Ago in Detroit

npr |  The event is often referred to as a "boiling point" of racial and economic inequality in the city. And at its center was tension between the police and black Detroiters.

"There was an undeniable sense that the police were there to protect some, and to contain and intimidate others," says Scott Kurashige, who teaches American and ethnic studies at the University of Washington Bothell. He notes in his book The Fifty-Year Rebellion: How the U.S. Political Crisis Began in Detroit that in 1967, 95 percent of the Detroit police department was white.

While many of the facts of that week have long been documented by historians, one big question remains: What should the chaos of that summer be called?

"Everybody who saw this, everybody who heard these stories has a different take on exactly what happened," says Joel Stone, senior curator at the Detroit Historical Society. "Drawing all these different perspectives together, we realized everybody had a different term for it, too."

Last month, the museum opened an exhibit titled "Detroit '67: Perspectives," part of a massive community engagement project that's gathered over 400 oral histories of people who were there or have been living in the city since 1967.

Part of the exhibit explores the tension around what to call the July '67 events. Before they walk in, visitors are asked: "What do you call it?" Responses range from riot to revolution.

"If you use the word 'riot,' you're really putting the onus for whatever bad happened on the people who were looting, the people who were lighting the fires, the people doing the vandalism ..." Stone explains. "Whereas, if you turn to the word 'rebellion,' there's a sense that the people who are doing that stuff are pushing back against some force. In this case it was a government force, a police force and that they had a good reason for pushing back against that."

The most common term to describe what happened is "riot." On July 24, 1967, the lead headline in the Free Press declared: Mobs Burn and Loot 800 Stores; Troops Move In; Emergency Is On.

The Grand Canyon Wide Narrative Divide

Counterpunch |  Much of this turn toward no authority beyond one’s own opinion, truth as a narrative, alternative facts, and reality and reason as self-designed came to fruition cataclysmically with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and his election, most stupefying for some and exhilarating for others. I refer to a cataclysm because regardless of what Trump narrative you are in, his election is an event both surprising and momentous. The narrative divide here is not over policy but personality as those on both the Democrat and Republican side wonder how such a man can be president and what kind of people would vote for him as president. Although there have been countless armchair psychiatric exams of Trump, he yet remains outside an established political frame of understanding. You have to switch jump into another story frame to make him real, a jump to the spinscape of Reality TV and the hyperreal of celebrity and enormous wealth that infects the American cultural imaginary.

This is a jump every Trump supporter made; into a world narrated in the same way they narrate the world. It is not a jump that all those who voted for Hillary were able to make, not by choice but because they were already living elsewhere. Both narrative realms are variously plotted and valued but the grounding force separating them seems clearly to be an enormous wealth divide and the long term consequences of that. In a simplified and also over generalized way, we have a meritocratic, professionalized, dividend recipient story/reality frame over here and over there we have a narrative world we’ve not been inclined to narrate until Trump won the election.

The disinclination or disinterest has of course been on the side of those who have been before the advent of The Web in a gatekeeper position to narrate the world we are all in from their perspective. What that has meant in terms of the politics of narrative is that a good deal of frustration was built up in those whose stories of the world were impeded by not being disseminated. At the same time it meant that the Impeding Gatekeepers had encased themselves in a bubble of their own selective narrating, confining themselves to a selective vision of things which excluded, as we now know, those 78% who live on wages that have remained flat forever.

The fact that Donald J. Trump is now president of the United States is astounding and troubling to this rarefied zone faction unacquainted with the lines of the story he seems to be following. They are, however, more unacquainted with those who are loyal to Trump and remain so. These Trumpians live in a life-world that remains opaque and unknown to those whose own life-world distinguishes itself by excluding such recognition and such knowledge.

Those who are not drawn to the slogan “Make America Great Again” are already enjoying the present America. And if they live in gated communities, one of the reasons they do so is avoid contact with those unhappy, disgruntled by their present status in America. In a politics of narrative world, this unacquaintance signals surprise if this unhappy faction reaches visibility on the national stage. More accurately, they have reached that visibility via both Trump and The Web of cyberspace. Trump continues to communicate with his followers on Twitter because he did not reach the presidency and they did not reach visibility by the paths of “governing principles” already cordoned off to them.

Whose Agenda Profits From the Violence-as-Beauty Rhetoric?

truthdig |  What took place in Charlottesville, like what took place in February when antifa and Black Bloc protesters thwarted UC Berkeley’s attempt to host the crypto-fascist Milo Yiannopoulos, was political theater. It was about giving self-styled radicals a stage. It was about elevating their self-image. It was about appearing heroic. It was about replacing personal alienation with comradeship and solidarity. Most important, it was about the ability to project fear. This newfound power is exciting and intoxicating. It is also very dangerous. Many of those in Charlottesville on the left and the right were carrying weapons. A neo-Nazi fired a round from a pistol in the direction of a counterprotester. The neo-Nazis often carried AR-15 rifles and wore quasi-military uniforms and helmets that made them blend in with police and state security. There could easily have been a bloodbath. A march held in Sacramento, Calif., in June 2016 by the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Worker Party to protest attacks at Trump rallies ended with a number of people stabbed. Police accused counterprotesters of initiating the violence. It is a short series of steps from bats and ax handles to knives to guns.

The conflict will not end until the followers of the alt-right and the anti-capitalist left are given a living wage and a voice in how we are governed. Take away a person’s dignity, agency and self-esteem and this is what you get. As political power devolves into a more naked form of corporate totalitarianism, as unemployment and underemployment expand, so will extremist groups. They will attract more sympathy and support as the wider population realizes, correctly, that Americans have been stripped of all ability to influence the decisions that affect their lives, lives that are getting steadily worse.

The ecocide by the fossil fuel and animal agriculture industries alone makes revolt a moral imperative. The question is how to make it succeed. Taking to the street to fight fascists ensures our defeat. Antifa violence, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out, is a “major gift to the right, including the militant right.” It fuels the right wing’s paranoid rants about the white race being persecuted and under attack. And it strips anti-capitalists of their moral capital.

Many in the feckless and bankrupt liberal class, deeply complicit in the corporate assault on the country and embracing the dead end of identity politics, will seek to regain credibility by defending the violence by groups such as antifa. Natasha Lennard, for example, in The Nation calls the “video of neo-Nazi Richard Spencer getting punched in the face” an act of “kinetic beauty.” She writes “if we recognize fascism in Trump’s ascendance, our response must be anti-fascist in nature. The history of anti-fascist action is not one of polite protest, nor failed appeals to reasoned debate with racists, but direct, aggressive confrontation.”

This violence-as-beauty rhetoric is at the core of these movements. It saturates the vocabulary of the right-wing corporate oligarchs, including Donald Trump. Talk like this poisons national discourse. It dehumanizes whole segments of the population. It shuts out those who speak with nuance and compassion, especially when they attempt to explain the motives and conditions of opponents. It thrusts the society into a binary and demented universe of them and us. It elevates violence to the highest aesthetic. It eschews self-criticism and self-reflection. It is the prelude to widespread suffering and death. And that, I fear, is where we are headed.

Does Clarkisha Identify White Supremacy With the Shooter or the Manufacturer?

theroot |  My interest in tackling this all started with this post Jessica Chastain retweeted, which talked about the so-called alt-left “being a problem.” My annoyance at yet another visible white celebrity acting all fake deep about a concept she or he clearly doesn’t have the juice or credentials to discuss (i.e., anti-fascists are in no way the same as actual Nazis, and to portray them as such is sympathizing with fascists) aside, I was once again bombarded with the fake word “alt-left.”

I’m not sure how the word even came to be (but I’m pretty sure the New York Times had something to do with it, since they’ve been back on their bullshit for the last couple of weeks with these terrible hot takes), but the irony of it popping up right as anti-fascist groups (antifa) have become more visible recently, and are putting themselves on the line to defend people from white supremacists, does not escape me.

Confused? You shouldn’t be. And here’s why:

1. White media branding antifa (and other resistance groups) “the alt left” changes the conversation.

In the case of “alt-left,” there’s a lot to unpack in it. As it stands, white media named it such to stand as the opposite of “alt-right.” It’s supposed to exist as a dichotomy. Two extremes that exist in this world. One apparently cannot exist without the other. One’s ying and one’s yang. Destined to fight each other until the end of all time ...

... except that’s bullshit, insidiously brilliant bullshit. You know why? Because “alt-right” itself originally emerged as a baby-soft, Johnson & Johnson-approved synonym for white supremacists and neo-Nazis.

Add that to Mother Jones’ and the Los Angeles Times’ humanizing these assholes by pointing out how “dapper” they are and how they are just like us, and it obviously gave way to the vast resurgence of white supremacists ... just by a different name in order to make them more palatable.

Interestingly enough, however, that actually didn’t work for long. “Alt-right”—as a term, that is—is something black people and other people of color were privy to from jump street, which made anyone using the term “alt-right” seriously look like an insufferable limp goat.

So. It wasn’t too long before “alt-right” meant something negative again (as it should). Which is why calling antifa its antithesis, “alt-left,” is notable. Without the racially critical lens that white supremacy tries to avoid, “alt-right” can be reduced to meaning that one is way too conservative, to the point that it is impolite and problematic. And because white people have shown historically that they are bad with definitions (coincidence? unlikely), most would opt to assume that “alt-left” simply means being way too liberal.

And that’s how antifa goes from fighting Nazis to having to waste time and precious energy distinguishing themselves from them. It’s a similar case with Black Lives Matter and black resistance groups, too. They get lumped in with the Ku Klux Klan, even though that logically makes no sense. These are false equivalencies, of course, but that’s the point. These erroneous comparisons exist for the sole purpose of derailment from taking the fight to white supremacy. Distraction. And also?

Denial.

Toward Ubiquitous Robotic Organisms

bbvaopenmind |  Nature has always found ways to exploit and adapt to differences in environmental conditions. Through evolutionary adaptation a myriad of organisms has developed that operate and thrive in diverse and often extreme conditions. For example, the tardigrade (Schokraie et al., 2012) is able to survive pressures greater than those found in the deepest oceans and in space, can withstand temperatures from 1K (-272 °C) to 420K (150 °C), and can go without food for thirty years. Organisms often operate in symbiosis with others. The average human, for example, has about 30 trillion cells, but contains about 40 trillion bacteria (Sender et al., 2016). They cover scales from the smallest free-living bacteria, pelagibacter ubique, at around 0.5µm long to the blue whale at around thirty meters long. That is a length range of 7 orders of magnitude and approximately 15 orders of magnitude in volume! What these astonishing facts show is that if nature can use the same biological building blocks (DNA, amino acids, etc.) for such an amazing range of organisms, we too can use our robotic building blocks to cover a much wider range of environments and applications than we currently do. In this way we may be able to match the ubiquity of natural organisms.

To achieve robotic ubiquity requires us not only to study and replicate the feats of nature but to go beyond them with faster (certainly faster than evolutionary timescales!) development and more general and adaptable technologies. Another way to think of future robots is as artificial organisms. Instead of a conventional robot which can be decomposed into mechanical, electrical, and computational domains, we can think of a robot in terms of its biological counterpart and having three core components: a body, a brain, and a stomach. In biological organisms, energy is converted in the stomach and distributed around the body to feed the muscles and the brain, which in turn controls the organisms. There is thus a functional equivalence between the robot organism and the natural organism: the brain is equivalent to the computer or control system; the body is equivalent to the mechanical structure of the robot; and the stomach is equivalent to the power source of the robot, be it battery, solar cell, or any other power source. The benefit of the artificial organism paradigm is that we are encouraged to exploit, and go beyond, all the characteristics of biological organisms. These embrace qualities largely unaddressed by current robotics research, including operation in varied and harsh conditions, benign environmental integration, reproduction, death, and decomposition. All of these are essential to the development of ubiquitous robotic organisms.

The realization of this goal is only achievable by concerted research in the areas of smart materials, synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, and adaptation. Here we will focus on the development of novel smart materials for robotics, but we will also see how materials development cannot occur in isolation of the other much-needed research areas.

IoT Extended Sensoria

bbvaopenmind |  In George Orwell’s 1984,(39) it was the totalitarian Big Brother government who put the surveillance cameras on every television—but in the reality of 2016, it is consumer electronics companies who build cameras into the common set-top box and every mobile handheld. Indeed, cameras are becoming commodity, and as video feature extraction gets to lower power levels via dedicated hardware, and other micropower sensors determine the necessity of grabbing an image frame, cameras will become even more common as generically embedded sensors. The first commercial, fully integrated CMOS camera chips came from VVL in Edinburgh (now part of ST Microelectronics) back in the early 1990s.(40) At the time, pixel density was low (e.g., the VVL “Peach” with 312 x 287 pixels), and the main commercial application of their devices was the “BarbieCam,” a toy video camera sold by Mattel. I was an early adopter of these digital cameras myself, using them in 1994 for a multi-camera precision alignment system at the Superconducting Supercollider(41) that evolved into the hardware used to continually align the forty-meter muon system at micron-level precision for the ATLAS detector at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. This technology was poised for rapid growth: now, integrated cameras peek at us everywhere, from laptops to cellphones, with typical resolutions of scores of megapixels and bringing computational photography increasingly to the masses. ASICs for basic image processing are commonly embedded with or integrated into cameras, giving increasing video processing capability for ever-decreasing power. The mobile phone market has been driving this effort, but increasingly static situated installations (e.g., video-driven motion/context/gesture sensors in smart homes) and augmented reality will be an important consumer application, and the requisite on-device image processing will drop in power and become more agile. We already see this happening at extreme levels, such as with the recently released Microsoft HoloLens, which features six cameras, most of which are used for rapid environment mapping, position tracking, and image registration in a lightweight, battery-powered, head-mounted, self-contained AR unit. 3D cameras are also becoming ubiquitous, breaking into the mass market via the original structured-light-based Microsoft Kinect a half-decade ago. Time-of-flight 3D cameras (pioneered in CMOS in the early 2000s by researchers at Canesta(42) have evolved to recently displace structured light approaches, and developers worldwide race to bring the power and footprint of these devices down sufficiently to integrate into common mobile devices (a very small version of such a device is already embedded in the HoloLens). As pixel timing measurements become more precise, photon-counting applications in computational photography, as pursued by my Media Lab colleague Ramesh Raskar, promise to usher in revolutionary new applications that can do things like reduce diffusion and see around corners.(43)

My research group began exploring this penetration of ubiquitous cameras over a decade ago, especially applications that ground the video information with simultaneous data from wearable sensors. Our early studies were based around a platform called the “Portals”:(44) using an embedded camera feeding a TI DaVinci DSP/ARM hybrid processor, surrounded by a core of basic sensors (motion, audio, temperature/humidity, IR proximity) and coupled with a Zigbee RF transceiver, we scattered forty-five of these devices all over the Media Lab complex, interconnected through the wired building network. One application that we built atop them was “SPINNER,”(45) which labelled video from each camera with data from any wearable sensors in the vicinity. The SPINNER framework was based on the idea of being able to query the video database with higher-level parameters, lifting sensor data up into a social/affective space,(46) then trying to effectively script a sequential query as a simple narrative involving human subjects adorned with the wearables. Video clips from large databases sporting hundreds of hours of video would then be automatically selected to best fit given timeslots in the query, producing edited videos that observers deemed coherent.(47) Naively pointing to the future of reality television, this work aims further, looking to enable people to engage sensor systems via human-relevant query and interaction.

Rather than try to extract stories from passive ambient activity, a related project from our team devised an interactive camera with a goal of extracting structured stories from people.(48) Taking the form factor of a small mobile robot, “Boxie” featured an HD camera in one of its eyes: it would rove our building and get stuck, then plea for help when people came nearby. It would then ask people successive questions and request that they fulfill various tasks (e.g., bring it to another part of the building, or show it what they do in the area where it was found), making an indexed video that can be easily edited to produce something of a documentary about the people in the robot’s abode.

In the next years, as large video surfaces cost less (potentially being roll-roll printed) and are better integrated with responsive networks, we will see the common deployment of pervasive interactive displays. Information coming to us will manifest in the most appropriate fashion (e.g., in your smart eyeglasses or on a nearby display)—the days of pulling your phone out of your pocket and running an app are severely limited. To explore this, we ran a project in my team called “Gestures Everywhere”(49) that exploited the large monitors placed all over the public areas of our building complex.(50) Already equipped with RFID to identify people wearing tagged badges, we added a sensor suite and a Kinect 3D camera to each display site. As an occupant approached a display and were identified via RFID or video recognition, information most relevant to them would appear on the display. We developed a recognition framework for the Kinect that parsed a small set of generic hand gestures (e.g., signifying “next,” “more detail,” “go-away,” etc.), allowing users to interact with their own data at a basic level without touching the screen or pulling out a mobile device. Indeed, proxemic interactions(51) around ubiquitous smart displays will be common within the next decade.

The plethora of cameras that we sprinkled throughout our building during our SPINNER project produced concerns about privacy (interestingly enough, the Kinects for Gestures Everywhere did not evoke the same response—occupants either did not see them as “cameras” or were becoming used to the idea of ubiquitous vision). Accordingly, we put an obvious power switch on each portal that enabled them to be easily switched off. This is a very artificial solution, however—in the near future, there will just be too many cameras and other invasive sensors in the environment to switch off. These devices must answer verifiable and secure protocols to dynamically and appropriately throttle streaming sensor data to answer user privacy demands. We have designed a small, wireless token that controlled our portals in order to study solutions to such concerns.(52) It broadcast a beacon to the vicinity that dynamically deactivates the transmission of proximate audio, video, and other derived features according to the user’s stated privacy preferences—this device also featured a large “panic” button that can be pushed at any time when immediate privacy is desired, blocking audio and video from emanating from nearby Portals.

Rather than block the video stream entirely, we have explored just removing the privacy-desiring person from the video image. By using information from wearable sensors, we can more easily identify the appropriate person in the image,(53) and blend them into the background. We are also looking at the opposite issue—using wearable sensors to detect environmental parameters that hint at potentially hazardous conditions for construction workers and rendering that data in different ways atop real-time video, highlighting workers in situations of particular concern.(54)

The Weaponization of Artificial Intelligence

acq |  Recognizing that no machine—and no person—is truly autonomous in the strict sense of the word, we will sometimes speak of autonomous capabilities rather than autonomous systems.2

The primary intellectual foundation for autonomy stems from artificial intelligence (AI), the capability of computer systems to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence (e.g.,
perception, conversation, decisionmaking). 

Advances in AI are making it possible to cede to machines many tasks long regarded as impossible for machines to perform. Intelligent systems aim to apply AI to a particular problem or domain—the
implication being that the system is programmed or trained to operate within the bounds of a defined knowledge base. Autonomous function is at a system level rather than a component level. The study considered two categories of intelligent systems: those employing autonomy at rest and those employing autonomy in motion. In broad terms, systems incorporating autonomy at rest operate virtually, in software, and include planning and expert advisory systems, whereas systems incorporating autonomy in motion have a presence in the physical world and include robotics and autonomous vehicles. 

As illustrated in Figure 1, many DoD and commercial systems are already operating with varying kinds of autonomous capability. Robotics typically adds additional kinds of sensors, actuators, and mobility to intelligent systems. While early robots were largely automated, recent advances in AI are enabling increases in autonomous functionality.

One of the less well-known ways that autonomy is changing the world is in applications that include data compilation, data analysis, web search, recommendation engines, and forecasting. Given the limitations of human abilities to rapidly process the vast amounts of data available today, autonomous systems are now required to find trends and analyze patterns. There is no need to solve the long-term AI problem of general intelligence in order to build high-value applications that exploit limited-scope autonomous capabilities dedicated to specific purposes. DoD’s nascent Memex program is one of many examples in this category.3

Rapid global market expansion for robotics and other intelligent systems to address consumer and industrial applications is stimulating increasing commercial investment and delivering a diverse array of products. At the same time, autonomy is being embedded in a growing array of software systems to enhance speed and consistency of decision-making, among other benefits. Likewise, governmental entities, motivated by economic development opportunities in addition to security missions and other public sector applications, are investing in related basic and applied research.

Applications include commercial endeavors, such as IBM’s Watson, the use of robotics in ports and
mines worldwide, autonomous vehicles (from autopilot drones to self-driving cars), automated logistics and supply chain management, and many more. Japanese and U.S. companies invested more than $2 billion in autonomous systems in 2014, led by Apple, Facebook, Google, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, LinkedIn, NEC, Yahoo, and Twitter. 4

A vibrant startup ecosystem is spawning advances in response to commercial market opportunities; innovations are occurring globally, as illustrated in Figure 2 (top). Startups are targeting opportunities that drive advances in critical underlying technologies. As illustrated in Figure 2 (bottom), machine learning—both application-specific and general purpose—is of high interest. The market-pull for machine learning stems from a diverse array of applications across an equally diverse spectrum of industries, as illustrated in Figure 3.

The Weaponization of Information

RAND |  State-sponsored propaganda and disinformation have been in existence for as long as there have been states. The major difference in the 21st century is the ease, efficiency, and low cost of such efforts. Because audiences worldwide rely on the Internet and social media as primary sources of news and information, they have emerged as an ideal vector of information attack. 

Most important from the U.S. perspective, Russian IO techniques, tactics and procedures are developing constantly and rapidly, as continually measuring effectiveness and rapidly evolving techniques are very cheap compared to the costs of any kinetic weapon system—and they could potentially be a lot more effective.

At this point, Russian IO operators use relatively unsophisticated techniques systematically and on a large scale. This relative lack of sophistication leaves them open to detection. For example, existing technology can identify paid troll operations, bots, etc. Another key element of Russian IO strategy is to target audiences with multiple, conflicting narratives to sow seeds of distrust of and doubt about the European Union (EU) as well as national governments. These can also be detected. The current apparent lack of technical sophistication of Russian IO techniques could derive from the fact that, so far, Russian IO has met with minimal resistance. However, if and when target forces start to counter these efforts and/or expose them on a large scale, the Russians are likely to accelerate the improvement of their techniques, leading to a cycle of counter-responses. In other words, an information warfare arms race is likely to ensue.

A Strategy to Counter the Russian Threat
Because the culture and history of each country is unique and because the success of any IO defense strategy must be tailored to local institutions and populations, the most effective strategies are likely to be those that are developed and managed on a country-by-country basis. An information defense strategy framework for countering Russian IO offensives should be “whole-of-nation” in character. A whole-of-nation approach is a coordinated effort between national government organizations, military, intelligence community, industry, media, research organizations, academia and citizen organized groups. A discreet US Special Operations Force could provide individual country support as well as cross country coordination.

Just as in the physical world, good maps are critical to any IO strategy. In the case of IO, maps show information flows. Information maps must show connectivity in the information environment and help navigate that environment. They exist as computer software and databases. Information cartography for IO is the art of creating, maintaining, and using such maps. An important feature of information maps is that they are constantly changing to reflect the dynamic nature of the information environment. Because they are artificially intelligent computer programs, they can answer questions; provide situation awareness dynamically; and help to plan, monitor, and appropriately modify operations. Information maps are technically possible today and already exist in forms that can be adapted to support the design and execution IO strategy.

As an example, most of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) states, as well as several non-NATO partners, are already subject to concentrated Russian IO and they illustrate ongoing Russian IO techniques. Using information cartography, it is possible to map key Russian sources as part of Russian IO operations against a target state. These sources might include:

• Russian and target country think tanks
• foundations (e.g., Russkiy Mir)
• authorities (e.g., Rossotrudnichestvo)
• television stations (e.g. RT)
• pseudo-news agencies and multimedia services (e.g., Sputnik)
• cross-border social and religious groups
• social media and Internet trolls to challenge democratic values, divide Europe, gather domestic support, and create the perception of failed states in the EU’s eastern neighborhood
• Russian regime–controlled companies and organizations
• Russian regime–funded political parties and other organizations in target country in
particular and within the EU in general intended to undermine political cohesion
• Russian propaganda directly targeting journalists, politicians, and individuals in target
countries in particular and the EU in general.
 

Similarly, the mapping of target state receivers as part of Russian IO against the target state
might include:

• national government organizations
• military
• intelligence community
• industry
• media
• independent think tanks
• academia
• citizen-organized groups.

An effective information defensive strategy would be based on coordinated countering of information flows revealed by information maps. An effective strategy would include methods for establishing trust between elements of the defense force and the public. The strategy also will include mechanisms to detect the continuously evolving nature of the Russian IO threat and rapidly adapt in a coordinated fashion across all defense elements.

Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews of the RAND Corporation observe: “Experimental research in psychology suggests that the features of the contemporary Russian propaganda model have the potential to be highly effective.”14 They present a careful and concise analysis of relevant psychological research results that should inform any information defensive strategy. For example, they describe how propaganda can be used to distort perceptions of reality:

• People are poor judges of true versus false information—and they do not necessarily remember that particular information was false.
• Information overload leads people to take shortcuts in determining the trustworthiness of messages.
• Familiar themes or messages can be appealing even if they are false.
• Statements are more likely to be accepted if backed by evidence, even if that evidence is false.
• Peripheral cues—such as an appearance of objectivity—can increase the credibility of propaganda.15
 

Here is what a typical offensive strategy against a target population might look like. It consists of several steps:

1. Take the population and break it down into communities, based on any number of criteria
(e.g. hobbies, interests, politics, needs, concerns, etc.).
2. Determine who in each community is most susceptible to given types of messages.
3. Determine the social dynamics of communication and flow of ideas within each community.
4. Determine what narratives of different types dominate the conversation in each community.
5. Use all of the above to design and push a narrative likely to succeed in displacing a narrative unfavorable to you with one that is more favorable.
6. Use continual monitoring and interaction to determine the success of your effort and adjust in real time.
 

Technologies currently exist that make it possible to perform each of these steps continuously and at a large scale. However, while current technologies support manual application of the type of psychological research results presented by Paul and Matthews, they do not fully automate it. That would be the next stage in technology development.

These same technologies can be used for defensive purposes. For example, you could use the techniques for breaking down communities described above to detect adversary efforts to push a narrative and examine that narrative’s content. The technology can help researchers focus while searching through massive amounts of social media data.

Information Warfare, Mass Surveillance, Endless War and Control...,

medium |  INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, a new crowd-funded investigative journalism project, breaks the exclusive story of how the United States intelligence community funded, nurtured and incubated Google as part of a drive to dominate the world through control of information. Seed-funded by the NSA and CIA, Google was merely the first among a plethora of private sector start-ups co-opted by US intelligence to retain ‘information superiority.’

The origins of this ingenious strategy trace back to a secret Pentagon-sponsored group, that for the last two decades has functioned as a bridge between the US government and elites across the business, industry, finance, corporate, and media sectors. The group has allowed some of the most powerful special interests in corporate America to systematically circumvent democratic accountability and the rule of law to influence government policies, as well as public opinion in the US and around the world. The results have been catastrophic: NSA mass surveillance, a permanent state of global war, and a new initiative to transform the US military into Skynet.

The origins of the Pentagon’s new innovation initiative can thus be traced back to ideas that were widely circulated inside the Pentagon decades ago, but which failed to take root fully until now. Between 2006 and 2010, the same period in which such ideas were being developed by Highlands Forum experts like Lochard, Zalman and Rendon, among many others, the Office of Net Assessment provided a direct mechanism to channel these ideas into concrete strategy and policy development through the Quadrennial Defense Reviews, where Marshall’s input was primarily responsible for the expansion of the “black” world: “special operations,” “electronic warfare” and “information operations.” 

Marshall’s pre-9/11 vision of a fully networked and automated military system found its fruition in the Pentagon’s Skynet study released by the National Defense University in September 2014, which was co-authored by Marshall’s colleague at the Highlands Forum, Linton Wells. Many of Wells’ recommendations are now to be executed via the new Defense Innovation Initiative by veterans and affiliates of the ONA and Highlands Forum.

Given that Wells’ white paper highlighted the Pentagon’s keen interest in monopolizing AI research to monopolize autonomous networked robot warfare, it is not entirely surprising that the Forum’s sponsoring partners at SAIC/Leidos display a bizarre sensitivity about public use of the word ‘Skynet.’

On a Wikipedia entry titled ‘Skynet (fictional)’, people using SAIC computers deleted several paragraphs under the ‘Trivia’ section pointing out real-world ‘Skynets’, such as the British military satellite system, and various information technology projects.

Hagel’s departure paved the way for Pentagon officials linked to the Highlands Forum to consolidate government influence. These officials are embedded in a longstanding shadow network of political, industry, media and corporate officials that sit invisibly behind the seat of government, yet literally write its foreign and domestic national security policies whether the administration is Democrat of Republican, by contributing ‘ideas’ and forging government-industry relationships.

It is this sort of closed-door networking that has rendered the American vote pointless. Far from protecting the public interest or helping to combat terrorism, the comprehensive monitoring of electronic communications has been systematically abused to empower vested interests in the energy, defense, and IT industries.

The state of permanent global warfare that has resulted from the Pentagon’s alliances with private contractors and unaccountable harnessing of information expertise, is not making anyone safer, but has spawned a new generation of terrorists in the form of the so-called ‘Islamic State’ — itself a Frankenstein by-product of the putrid combination of Assad’s brutality and longstanding US covert operations in the region. This Frankenstein’s existence is now being cynically exploited by private contractors seeking to profit exponentially from expanding the national security apparatus, at a time when economic volatility has pressured governments to slash defense spending.

According to the Securities and Exchange Commission, from 2008 to 2013, the five largest US defense contractors lost 14 percent of their employees, as the winding down of US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan led to lack of business and squeezed revenues. The continuation of the ‘Long War’ triggered by ISIS has, for now, reversed their fortunes. Companies profiting from the new war include many connected to the Highlands Forum, such as Leidos, Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, and Boeing. War is, indeed, a racket.

No more shadows

Yet in the long-run, the information imperialists have already failed. This investigation is based entirely on open source techniques, made viable largely in the context of the same information revolution that enabled Google. The investigation has been funded entirely by members of the public, through crowd-funding. And the investigation has been published and distributed outside the circuits of traditional media, precisely to make the point that in this new digital age, centralized top-down concentrations of power cannot overcome the power of people, their love of truth and justice, and their desire to share.

What are the lessons of this irony? Simple, really: The information revolution is inherently decentralized, and decentralizing. It cannot be controlled and co-opted by Big Brother. Efforts to do so will in the end invariably fail, in a way that is ultimately self-defeating.

The latest mad-cap Pentagon initiative to dominate the world through control of information and information technologies, is not a sign of the all-powerful nature of the shadow network, but rather a symptom of its deluded desperation as it attempts to ward off the acceleration of its hegemonic decline.

But the decline is well on its way. And this story, like so many before it, is one small sign that the opportunities to mobilize the information revolution for the benefit of all, despite the efforts of power to hide in the shadows, are stronger than ever.  READ PART ONE

Subverting Marijuana Legalization While Facilitating Heroin Exfiltration...,

sputniknews |  The hegemonic narrative rules that Washington bombed Afghanistan in 2001 in "self-defense" after 9/11; installed a "democratic" government; and after 16 years never de facto left because this is a key node in the Global War on Terror (GWOT), against al-Qaeda and the Taliban alike.

Washington spent over $100 billion in Afghan reconstruction. And, allegedly, $8.4 billion in "counternarcotics programs". Operation Enduring Freedom — along with the "liberation" of Iraq — have cost an astonishing several trillion dollars. And still the heroin ratline, out of occupied Afghanistan, thrives. Cui bono?

Have a SIGAR

An exhaustive Afghanistan Opium Survey details the steady rise of Afghan opium production as well as the sprawl in production areas; "In 2016, opium production had increased by approximately 25 times in relation to its 2001 levels, from 185 tons in 2001 to 4800 tons in 2016."

Another exhaustive report issued by the delightful acronym SIGAR (Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction) even hints — discreetly — at the crucial connection; Operation Enduring Freedom feeding America's heroin epidemic.

Afghanistan is infested by contractors; numbers vary from 10,000 to tens of thousands. Military and ex-military alike can be reasonably pinpointed as players in the heroin ratline — in many cases for personal profit. But the clincher concerns the financing of US intel black ops that should not by any means come under scrutiny by the US Congress. 

A Gulf-based intel source with vast experience across the Pentagon-designated "arc of instability" tells the story of his interaction with an Australian intel operative who served in Afghanistan; "This was about 2011. He said he gave US Army Intelligence and the CIA reports on the Afghan heroin trade — that US military convoys from the ports of Pakistan were being used to ship the heroin out of Afghanistan — much of it was raw opium — for distribution as their backhaul.

No one answered.

He then cornered the key army intelligence operations and CIA at a meeting and asked why no action was taken. The answer was that the goal of the US was winning the hearts and minds of the population and giving them the poppies to grow won their hearts. He was then warned that if he brought this issue up again he would be returned to Australia in a body bag."

The source is adamant, "CIA external operations are financed from these profits. The charge that the Taliban was using the heroin trade to finance their operations was a fabrication and a form of misdirection."

And that brings us to a key motive behind President Trump's going against his instincts and accepting a new Afghan surge; "In the tradition of the opium wars of perfidious Albion in the 19th century, in which opium paid for tea and silk from India, and the taxes on these silk and tea imports financed the construction of the mighty British Navy which ruled the seas, the CIA has built itself up into a most powerful agent based on the trillion dollar heroin trade. It is impossible for Trump to overcome it as he has no allies to tap. The military are working together with the CIA, and therefore the officers that surround Trump are worthless."