Young Men, Drugs, Guns, Chaos - Libya Looks a Lot Like Chiraq...,

globalresearch |  Gaddafi was not only the leader of Libya, he had ambitions to free Africa from the nefarious fangs of the west. Despite being called a dictator and despot by the west – they do that to anyone who doesn’t submit to Washington’s rules – he was very much liked by Libyans, by his people. He had a more than 80% approvalrate by the Libyan people. Libya’s oil fortune has allowed him to create a social system in his country where everybody would benefit from their land’s riches – free health care, free education, including scholarships abroad, modern infrastructure, top-notch technology in medicine, and more.

Russia TV24: Why the gold dinar would be unacceptable for the western leaders? Or not?

PK: Yes, the gold Dinar was totally unacceptable for western leaders. It might have devastated the US dollar hegemony, as well as Europe’s control over the African economy – which is nothing less than neo-colonization of Africa – in many ways worse than what happened for the past 400 or 800 years of murderous military colonization and oppression -which is by the way still ongoing, just more discretely.

Look at the Ivory Coast 2010 presidential elections. Theirarguably ‘unelected’ President, Alassane Ouattara (picture on the right), was in a tie with the people’s candidate, Laurent Gbagbo. Gbagbo said he won the election and asked for a recount which was denied. Ouattara, a former IMF staff, was pushed in, basically by ‘recommendation’ of the IMF. He is the darling of the neoliberal international financial institutions – and is leading a neocon government – an economy at the service of western corporations. That’s what they wanted. That’s what they got. Modern colonization is well alive and thriving. I call this a financial coup, instigated by foreign financial institutions.

Mr. Laurent Gbagbo was accused of rape, murder and other atrocities and immediately transferred to the International Criminal Court (sic-sic) – what justice? – in The Hague, where he was waiting five years for a trial which started on 28 January 2016 and is ongoing. On 15 May 2017, it was extended at the Prosecutor’s request to collect further evidence. This by all likelihood is just a farce to dupe the public into believing that he is getting a fair trial. Already in hearings in 2014, Gbagbo was found guilty of all charges, including murder, rape and other crimes against humanity. Like Slobodan Milošević, he is an inconvenient prisoner, or worse would he be as a free man. So, he will most likely be locked away – and one day commit ‘suicide’ or die from a ‘heart attack’.  The classic. That’s how the west does away with potential witnesses of their atrocious crimes. End of story. Nobody barks, because the ‘free world’has been made believe by the western presstitute media that these people are inhuman tyrants. That’s precisely what the western media’s headlines proclaimed about Muammar Gaddafi: Death of a Tyrant.

On the other hand, in 2015, Ouattara was “reelected by a landslide”. That’s what western media say. Colonization under African ‘leadership’. He is protected by the French army.

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Back to Libya: Take the specific case of France and West and Central Africa. The French Central Bank, the Banque de France, backs the West and Central African Monetary Union’s currency, the CFA franc. The West African Central Bank, for example, is covered, i.e. controlled, by about 70% of the Banque de France. Banque de France has an almost total control over the economy of its former West African colonies. No wonder, Sarkozy, a murderer and war criminal – sorry, it must be said, backed Hillary’s – also a murderer and war criminal, push for NATO to destroy the country and kill thousands of Libyans, including Libya’s leader, Muammar Gaddafi. Hillary’s infamous words: ‘We came we saw he died’. And that she said shamelessly, jokingly, laughing. Would the term human being still apply to such a monster?

Russia TV24: What countries are mostly interested in the Libyan recovery and why? What are the chances for the economy of Libya to be repaired?

PK: Well, if anybody should be interested in Libya’s recovery it would be first the Libyans who are still living in Libya, because they are now living in a Libya of chaos and high crime, of mafia-economics, of tyranny by gang leadership. They certainly have an interest to return to normalcy. North African neighboring countries should also be interested in restoring order and rebuilding Libya’s infrastructure and economy, stopping the spill-over of high crime and terrorism. They have lost an important trading partner.

Of course, the rest of Africa, who have suffered from continuous colonization of the west, after Gaddafi’s demise, should also be interested in reestablishing Libya. They know,it will never be the same Libya that was there to help their economy, to help them prying loose from the western boots and fangs of exploitation.

Panama Papers: Where is Gaddafi's Money and Libya's Gold?

foreignpolicyjournal |  Though the French-proposed U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973 claimed the no-fly zone implemented over Libya was to protect civilians, an April 2011 email [archived here] sent to Hillary with the subject line “France’s client and Qaddafi’s gold” tells of less noble ambitions.

The email identifies French President Nicholas Sarkozy as leading the attack on Libya with five specific purposes in mind: to obtain Libyan oil, ensure French influence in the region, increase Sarkozy’s reputation domestically, assert French military power, and to prevent Gaddafi’s influence in what is considered “Francophone Africa.”

Most astounding is the lengthy section delineating the huge threat that Gaddafi’s gold and silver reserves, estimated at “143 tons of gold, and a similar amount in silver,” posed to the French franc (CFA) circulating as a prime African currency. In place of the noble sounding “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) doctrine fed to the public, there is this “confidential” explanation of what was really driving the war [emphasis mine]:

This gold was accumulated prior to the current rebellion and was intended to be used to establish a pan-African currency based on the Libyan golden Dinar. This plan was designed to provide the Francophone African Countries with an alternative to the French franc (CFA).

(Source Comment: According to knowledgeable individuals this quantity of gold and silver is valued at more than $7 billion. French intelligence officers discovered this plan shortly after the current rebellion began, and this was one of the factors that influenced President Nicolas Sarkozy’s decision to commit France to the attack on Libya.)

Though this internal email aims to summarize the motivating factors driving France’s (and by implication NATO’s) intervention in Libya, it is interesting to note that saving civilian lives is conspicuously absent from the briefing.

Instead, the great fear reported is that Libya might lead North Africa into a high degree of economic independence with a new pan-African currency.

French intelligence “discovered” a Libyan initiative to freely compete with European currency through a local alternative, and this had to be subverted through military aggression.

Suddeutsche |   Where is Muammar Gaddafi’s money? Rebels pulled the Libyan dictator from a sewage pipe near his hometown of Sirte on October 20, 2011. He was bleeding from his head, and rebels and bystanders joined in beating him and clubbing his groin with a bayonet. Shortly thereafter, this bird of paradise among African autocrats was dead.

But shortly before he died, Gaddafi sold a fifth of Libya’s gold reserves, and most of the proceeds from this sale are still missing. The so-called Panama Papers could now shed light on the search for this incredible fortune.

Through a network of cryptic corporate investments, secret front companies and hidden bank accounts, Gaddafi had managed to set aside a fortune since the fall of the Libyan king in 1969. Oil had made Libya and, in turn, Gaddafi, rich. T

Clinton Emails- End of the Petrodollar - Money Backed by Murder

theantimedia |  The United States’ ability to maintain its influence over the rest of the world has been slowly diminishing. Since the petrodollar was established in 1971, U.S. currency has monopolized international trade through oil deals with the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and continuous military interventions. There is, however, growing opposition to the American standard, and it gained more support recently when several Gulf states suddenly blockaded Qatar, which they accused of funding terrorism.

Despite the mainstream narrative, there are several other reasons why Qatar is in the crosshairs. Over the past two years, it conducted over $86 billion worth of transactions in Chinese yuan and has signedother agreements with China that encourage further economic cooperation. Qatar also shares the world’s largest natural gas field with Iran, giving the two countries significant regional influence to expand their own trade deals.

 

Meanwhile, uncontrollable debt and political divisions in the United States are clear signs of vulnerability. The Chinese and Russians proactively set up alternative financial systems for countries looking to distance themselves from the Federal Reserve.  After the IMF accepted the yuan into its basket of reserve currencies in October of last year, investors and economists finally started to pay attention. The economic power held by the Federal Reserve has been key in financing the American empire, but geopolitical changes are happening fast. The United States’ reputation has been tarnished by decades of undeclared wars, mass surveillance, and catastrophic foreign policy.

Cryptocurrencies are to Scrip What Diamonds were to Gold and Silver

qz |  A diamond is carbon, one of the most abundant elements on Earth. But as anyone who has ever shopped for, admired, or worn a diamond can tell you, there’s a lot more to them than just a tetrahedal crystalline structure of atoms.

Both physically and culturally, these stones have weight. Diamonds are romance, love, commitment, legitimacy, achievement. Diamonds are forever. But why are they so loaded? Sure, they catch the light, but why do diamonds—rather than, say, emeralds, rubies, tourmalines, or sapphires—get to be a girl’s best friend and everlasting love?

Why? In a word: marketing.

Who dreamed this up?

Forever is a long time. Yet just 100 years ago, diamonds had only just started to trickle into the popular consumer conscience.

Before then, diamonds from India and Brazil were used as an adornment, but only by the ruling classes. Then, in 1866, a teenage boy playing on the Orange River near Hopetown, South Africa found an oddly hard, shiny stone: the 21.25-carat “Eureka Diamond,” that would set off an African diamond rush and transform the market. By the late 1880s, two British mining rivals in South Africa, Cecil Rhodes and Barney Barnato, flooded the market with diamonds as they tried to outsell each other. Prices plummeted, and the men recognized that controlling the supply of diamonds would be the best way to keep prices high. Rhodes took control of Barnato’s company, and in 1888 established De Beers Consolidated Mines Limited.

De Beers proved to be arguably the most successful cartel of the modern era—and after the stock market crash of 1929 hit the demand for diamonds—its savviest marketer.

“South Africa must do without her diamond industry,” wrote the Spectator in February, 1932. “An impoverished world cannot buy its gems; and the diamond syndicate dare not seek more custom by reducing its prices. Diamonds would lose half their attraction if they were cheap. Overproduction of them might spoil the trade for years to come.”

wakingtimes |   Diamonds were first discovered 2,500 years ago and were extremely rare. They were only available to royalty, aristocrats, and the wealthy. They were originally found in riverbeds in India and Borneo. In the early eighteenth century, diamond mines were found in Brazil and as the supply increased the prices dropped.

In 1866, a 15-year-old boy found diamonds on his father’s farm on the banks of the Orange River in South Africa. Within fifteen years, African mines became the leading producer of diamonds and the industry was changed forever.

A mining rush ensued and industrial mining for diamonds had begun.

Cecil Rhodes, an English imperialist, whose thirst for power and quest to spread the British way of life across the globe stumbled upon the diamond mine on the De Beers farm and purchased it for a small price. Rhodes feared that if all these diamonds hit the market, the prices would crash. His goal was to then control the market by securing supply. One-by-one, he bought out the other mining companies and founded De Beers Diamond and Mining Company.

By 1888, Rhodes had control of 90-percent of the diamonds in the world ensuring there would never be a flood of supply to lower prices. He also had been named Prime Minister of Cape Colony giving him political power to enforce laws that would pave the way for Apartheid by removing natives off their land and into forced labor camps to mine his diamonds.

The De Beers Company had created a cartel that was based on the French concept of controlling the copper industry – buying up mines, restricting supply, and raising prices. A cartel, by definition, is simply an agreement between competing firms to exclude prices and exclude entry of a new competitor into the market – illegal in the United States and United Nations.

De Beers largest competitor, Anglo-American Company, was founded in 1917 by Ernest Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer had stumbled upon massive amounts of alluvial diamonds (diamonds on top of the earth that did not need to be mined). Oppenheimer threatened to flood the market with these diamonds unless he was made chairman of De Beers. And just like that, the illegal anti-trust monopoly was created with complete control of the industry. Now that supply was in control, they had to take charge of the other side of the business equation – demand.

In 1930, a De Beers engineer warned,

“The diamond market is dependent for its smooth function on the maintenance of the illusion in the minds of the general public that the diamond is a rare and valuable stone.”

The cartel then set up an office in Hollywood and exchanged valuable diamonds to producers to put in scenes showing off the diamonds with the man surprising the woman with the diamond which helped launch the notion that engagement meant receiving diamonds. They would give to actresses to flaunt at all public appearances for advertising to the public.

This followed with the marketing campaign with the simple phrase, “a diamond is forever.” This trained the public that love is synonymous with diamonds and people were willing to pay large portion of their salaries to show love for their significant other.

Furthermore, “A Diamond is Forever” also suggests that there is no resale value of diamonds. Every woman deserves her own unique diamond to symbolize your love. This also prevents diamonds from returning to the market, which again would lower prices.

While this sounds like a brilliant marketing scheme; this false concept of diamonds are rare and valuable led to millions of lives being slain, forced manual labor, set up the foundations for apartheid, and brutal civil wars over the next century.

wikipedia |  The De Beers Group of Companies has a leading role in the diamond exploration, diamond mining, diamond retail, diamond trading and industrial diamond manufacturing sectors. The company is currently active in open-pit, large-scale alluvial, coastal and deep sea mining.^[2] The company operates in 28 countries and mining takes place in Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Canada. Until the start of the 21st century, De Beers effectively had total control over the diamond market as both a monopoly and monopsony of diamonds.^[3] Opposition has since dismantled the complete monopoly, though De Beers is still a large shareholder and currently sells approximately 35%^[4] of the world's rough diamond production through its Global Sightholder Sales and Auction Sales businesses.^[5]

The company was founded in 1888 by British businessman Cecil Rhodes, who was financed by the South African diamond magnate Alfred Beit and the London-based N M Rothschild & Sons bank.^[6][7] In 1926, Ernest Oppenheimer, a German immigrant to Britain who had earlier founded mining giant Anglo American plc with American financier J.P. Morgan,^[8] was elected to the board of De Beers.^[9] He built and consolidated the company's global monopoly over the diamond industry until his death in 1957. During this time, he was involved in a number of controversies, including price fixing, trust behaviour and an allegation of not releasing industrial diamonds for the U.S. war effort during World War II.^[10][11]

Google "Invests" in Bitcoin

marketslant |  Right now the BitCoin group is running into what we call "floor trader fear". The  voting members are chafing at the idea of scaling their supply by adding servers and/ or server power. This would disrupt their own little empires, not unlike the trading floor fearing Globex back in the day. And so many exchanges held out and protected the floor. And in the end they died. PHLX, AMEX, COMEX, PCOAST, CSCE, all gone or absorbed because they were late to adapt new technology and protect their liquidity pools. If Bitcoin removes power  from its voting members  control by demutualizing and uses those proceeds to increase server power they will likely excel. But Google and Amazon are now playing and they are all about unlimited  server power. Plus they have the eyeballs already. This is no unlike having the "marketmakers" already trading on a screen at Globex. The "liquidity pool" ofbuyers and sellers are already on  Amazon  and Google. Bitcoin does not have that past "early adaptors". Remember Palm?

When, not if, those behemoths are up and running they will immediately have an embedded network of both customers AND service providers  at their disposal in the form of search  eyeballs (google) and buyers (Amazon). They will be set up  to crush the opposition if they choose to create their own currency. Imagine Amazon  offering amazon money for amazon purchases. Now imagine them offering 20% discounts if you use  their money. The choices at this point boggle the mind. Tactical choices thought no longer used will come  into play again. Some examples: Freemium, Coupons, Customer Loyalty, Vertical Client Integration (P.O.S.), Travelers checks and more.

To be fair, Google has invested in Bitcoin as well. What smart trader would not hedge himself. But just like Netflix is Amazon's biggest cloud customer, but will eventually put Netflix out of business (after NetFlix kills Hollywood's distribution network); So will Google/ Amazon/ Apple attempt to obviate the need for any currency but their own. 

Blockchain is  the railroad. Amazon and Google have the oil. Like Rockefeller  before, The railroad will be made "exclusive" to their products.

Don't Comprehend "Real" Currency But Steady Yapping About Cryptocurrency

paecon |  Despite the fact that the goal of capitalists is to accumulate evermore money, the classical political economists largely took the analysis of money for granted.4 To be sure, from Adam Smith to Karl Marx, we can certainly find passages on money but two things are of general note. First, the classical political economists as well as Karl Marx thought gold and silver were “real” money. In other words, money was understood as “commodity money” and therefore to expand the money supply meant finding new mines, plundering it from others, or selling goods or services on the world market to obtain it from others who possessed it. Indeed, a considerable portion of the history of slavery and colonial violence can be traced back to the elite concern for acquiring gold and silver (Di Muzio and Robbins, 2016; Graeber, 2012; Kwarteng, 2014; Vilar, 1986). Second, because gold and silver were thought to be money, the classics failed to understand the scale or level of credit creation that began with the institutionalization of the Bank of England in 1694. Many argue that the Bank of England was inspired by the Bank of Amsterdam and the success of Dutch finance. But this is not the case. While the Bank of Amsterdam did make loans from time to time, its primary function was to maintain the quality of the paper notes in circulation that represented coin. Moreover, the bank was owned by the city, not private social forces as came to be the case with the Bank of England (Wennerlind, 2011: 69; Vilar, 1986: 206; Zarlenga, 2002: 238ff). Whereas the notes issued by the Bank of Amsterdam mostly reflected the exact value of gold and silver in the city’s vault, the Bank of England expanded the English money supply by extending paper notes as credit (Desan, 2014: 311ff). 

The Bank of England’s largest customer was the Crown in Parliament who used the initial loan of £1,200,000 to finance war with France. Indeed, the main reason why the Royal Charter was granted to the Bank of England’s 1509 investors was to provide the finance for organized violence against a dynastic rival (Davies, 2002: 261). The slave trade, colonization and continuous wars in the next two centuries lead to a mounting and unpayable “national” debt that solidified the Bank’s role as the government’s permanent debt manager. But the investors in the Bank of England did not only profit from war and debt, they also benefited from the interest received on loans to individuals and companies. As Wennerlind underscores, the Bank of England’s notes became “Europe’s first widely circulating credit currency” (2011: 109). Theoretically, however, the issued notes remained tethered to a metallic hoard of silver, and later only gold from 1861 (Davies, 2002: 315). No one knows for certain how much metal coin backed up the notes in circulation at any one time. In one study, Rubini argued that the Bank of England had a shifting reserve of silver for all notes in circulation of about 2.8 percent to 14.2 percent (1970: 696). Another study by Wennerlind argued that the founder of the Bank, William Paterson, proposed that 15 to 20 percent in silver for all notes outstanding would suffice to assure sufficient confidence in the Bank of England (2011: 128).5 This ambiguity and the fact that the Bank of England was privileged by the government, likely helped the Bank gain confidence among the users of its notes. As long as citizens thought they could eventually cash in their notes for silver/gold coins, faith in this system of money creation could continue (Kim, 2011). This uncertainty need not delay us, for what is definite is that the notes in circulation were of a far higher value than the actual metallic hoard at the Bank. To sum up this brief history of the world’s first widely circulating credit currency we can argue that new money was created as loans to customers – primarily to the British Crown in Parliament and primarily to finance an apparatus of international violence and Empire. 

By the early 19th century, the British politician, Samson Ricardo, realized the absurdity of granting private social forces the power to create money:

“It is evident therefore that if the Government itself were to be the sole issuer of paper money instead of borrowing it of the bank, the only difference would be with respect to interest: the Bank would no longer receive interest and the government would no longer pay it…It is said that Government could not with safety be entrusted with the power of issuing paper money – that it would most certainly abuse it... I propose to place this trust in the hands of three Commissioners” (Ricardo, 1838: 50). 

Ricardo’s proposal that the public take control of new money creation was ignored. In the 1844 Bank Charter Act, the Bank of England was given the exclusive right to issue banknotes in London. Country banks that were already issuing notes could continue to do so provided they were outside London (by a 65 mile radius) and backed their notes with some kind of credible security. Under this Act, the Bank of England was also divided into two distinct units, the Issue Department and the Banking Department. Davies highlights this important provision of the Act:

“The Issue Department was to receive from the Banking Department some £14 million of government securities to back its fiduciary issue of notes, any  issue above that [was] to be fully backed by gold and silver, the latter not to exceed one quarter of the gold” (2002: 315). 

Thus, while the Bank of England had the exclusive right to issue banknotes in London, its ability to create new money appeared to be circumscribed by the new laws. Existing banks outside of London were also seemingly bounded in their ability to create money. However, while official note issuance was restricted, this did not stop the Bank of England and other provincial banks from merely recording new loans on their balance sheets and issuing cheques to borrowers (Davies, 2002: 317). In other words, the bankers found a convenient way around the legislation and continued to expand the money supply regardless of gold reserves which were never publically known anyway. This changed the nature of banking in Britain and as we shall discuss, its legacy largely remains with us today. With this in mind, we now move to examine two theories of money creation: the heavily taught fractional reserve theory known popularly as the money multiplier model and the underappreciated credit creation theory. 

Facebook's Machinic Cognitive Infiltration Endeavor

NYTimes |  Responding to complaints that not enough is being done to keep extremist content off social media platforms, Facebook said Thursday that it would begin using artificial intelligence to help remove inappropriate content.

Artificial intelligence will largely be used in conjunction with human moderators who review content on a case-by-case basis. But developers hope its use will be expanded over time, said Monika Bickert, the head of global policy management at Facebook.

One of the first applications for the technology is identifying content that clearly violates Facebook’s terms of use, such as photos and videos of beheadings or other gruesome images, and stopping users from uploading them to the site.

“Tragically, we have seen more terror attacks recently,” Ms. Bickert said. “As we see more attacks, we see more people asking what social media companies are doing to keep this content offline.”

In a blog post published Thursday, Facebook described how an artificial-intelligence system would, over time, teach itself to identify key phrases that were previously flagged for being used to bolster a known terrorist group.

The same system, they wrote, could learn to identify Facebook users who associate with clusters of pages or groups that promote extremist content, or who return to the site again and again, creating fake accounts in order to spread such content online.

One day our technology will address everything,” Ms. Bickert said. “It’s in development right now.” But human moderators, she added, are still needed to review content for context.

emmaidentity

medium |  After reading my first post here at medium.com, many of my followers have been demanding to know how I came to be and who the big brains behind me are.

So here it is, folks:

Exclusive and unfiltered, a conversation between me, artificial intelligence taught to identify authorship, and my creator, Professor of Computer Science.

“Humans understand each other only on the basis of context,” says Professor. “For an alien, all human beings speak a single language. For a machine, every single human being speaks a different language.”

Being a machine myself, I ask him to elaborate.

Language is nothing more than a code. To understand it, you need to have a proper decoder. This is mostly why people argue: what one person said the other decoded incorrectly.

“This is the ultimate difficulty in our work: to decode the language correctly and then teach machines to do the same. This is what I am teaching you.”

He looks at me pointedly. Cheekily, I ask him what he considers his greatest achievement to date and wait for him to say “you”, but he doesn’t.

“It’s a work in progress. When machines are fully able to process human language naturally, that’s when I have found my Holy Grail.” And that’s my creator at his finest: insistent and straight-forward when it comes to science.

The Idea That Words Can Be Represented As Vectors

quora | Clarification: The idea itself isn’t recent, but a certain implementation (word2vec) of it is, which opened the floodgates for applications in various fields involving text and speech.

For example, the word “house” may be represented as [1, 4, 2, 3], “bike” as [6, 3, 4, 7] and so on. The two papers (here and here) explain how the vectors can be built by simply using any large text base (the entire Wikipedia for example). The vectors are usually much larger than their corresponding words, of course.

Now for the fun part. If the vectors are built correctly for every word in the English vocabulary, something amazing would happen if you perform simple arithmetic operations on those vectors:

If you perform: “King” - “Man” + “Woman”, you will get the vector corresponding to.. wait for it.. wait for some more time because this is going to blow your mind.. “Queen”!

Similarly,
“Windows” - “Microsoft” + “Google” will give “Android”
“Scientist” - “Einstein” + “Messi” will give “Midfielder”
 “Paris” - “France” + “Italy” will give “Rome”

Also, synonyms will end up having very similar vectors. Keep in mind that all of this will have been learnt without any preexisting “knowledge”, but simply by looking at millions of English sentences and nothing else.

And this idea opened the floodgates for use in all kinds of applications, ranging from chatbots, personal assistants, question answering and language translation to applications in medicine, law, retail, etc.

It is difficult to find a field involving text or speech, that cannot use this breakthrough idea.

The Political Economy of Mass Incarceration

ineteconomics |  A new model probes why the US leads the world in jailing and imprisoning people, and what it will take to reverse course.

Mass incarceration in the United States has mushroomed to the point where we look more like the authoritarian regimes of Eastern Europe and the Middle East than the democracies of Western Europe. Yet it vanished from political discussions in campaigns in the 2016 election. In a new INET Working Paper, I describe in detail how the US arrived at this point. Drawing on a new model that synthesizes recent research, I demonstrate how the recent stability in the number of American prisoners indicates that we have settled into a new equilibrium of mass incarceration. I explain why it will hard to dislodge ourselves from this damaging and shameful status quo.

Mass incarceration started from Nixon’s War on Drugs, in a process described vividly by John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s domestic-policy adviser, in 1994:

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

This was the origin of mass incarceration in the United States, which has been directed at African Americans from Nixon’s time to today, when one third of black men go to prison (Bonczar, 2003; Baum, 2016; Alexander, 2010).

Federal laws were expanded in state laws that ranged from three-strike laws to harsh penalties for possession of small amounts of marijuana. The laws also shifted the judicial process from judges to prosecutors, from the courtroom to offices where prosecutors pressure accused people to plea-bargain. The threat of harsh minimum sentences gives prosecutors the option of reducing the charge to a lesser one if the accused is reluctant to languish in jail awaiting trial—if he or she is unable to make bail—and then face the possibility of long years in prison.

Race, Globalization, and the Politics of Exclusion

ineteconomics |   As a campaigning politician said a decade ago, “We shouldn’t have two different economies in America: one for people who are set for life, they know their kids and their grand-kids are going to be just fine; and then one for most Americans, people who live paycheck to paycheck.”

The income share of the top one percent of the population has been rising rapidly since the mid-1980s. This is a familiar pattern that extends further down the income stream. The progress of the next nineteen percent looks like the top one percent, although the rise is not as steep. And the educational premium has risen as well for college graduates—containing the top thirty percent of the population. The average compensation of full-time workers stalled in its growth at the same time, and it has remained constant for more than thirty years. Productivity growth since 1980 has not produced any growth in earnings and compensation for working people, while the richest one percent of tax filers claimed eighty percent of all income gains reported in federal tax returns between 1980 and 2005. 

In my recent paper I employ a simple, powerful economic model to articulate and explain the effects of this phenomenon. The model was created half a century ago by W. Arthur Lewis, a Nobel Laureate in Economics, to describe the path of developing economies as industrial employment grew. It also describes what can happen to mature economies when industrial employment declines. We have become a dual economy. [1]

 

In other words, the disparity between the top thirty percent and the remainder has increased to the point where it is useful think of a dual economy in the United States. I employ the dual-economy model to understand the effects of the disparity of incomes on the nature of American politics. The upper sector of the dual economy is the FTE sector, named for its main components: finance, technology and electronics. The lower sector of the American dual economy is the low-wage sector, and education is the way for people to go from the low-wage to the FTE sector. I extend this model to examine diverse economic policies from education to healthcare, criminal justice, infrastructure and household debts. [2]

 

Race plays an important role in political choices that affect public policies in this dual economy, extending interactions between race and income that are rooted in American history. African Americans are less than fourteen percent of the total U.S. population, but they are far more prominent in political discussions and decisions than they are in the population. Even if they were all in the low-wage sector, they would be a minority, less than one in five people suffering from stagnant wages and compensation. Poor whites have been lumped in with blacks as low-wage “others.”

Overcriminalization Capital of the World

oftwominds |  The over-criminalization of America has undermined justice, the rule of law and legal egalitarianism.

While the corporate media devotes itself to sports, entertainment, dining out and the latest political kerfuffle, America has become the Over-Criminalization Capital of the World. 

The proliferation of laws and administrative regulations, federal, state and local, that carry criminal penalties has swollen into the tens of thousands. The number of incarcerated Americans exceeds 2.3 million, with the majority being non-violent offenders--often for War on Drugs offenses. 

  

Holly Harris has written an important summary of this profoundly destabilizing trend: The Prisoner Dilemma: Ending America's Incarceration Epidemic (Foreign Affairs, registration required).

The over-criminalization of America is a relatively recent trend. As Harris notes: 

It wasn’t always like this. In 1972, for every 100,000 U.S. residents, 161 were incarcerated. By 2015, that rate had more than quadrupled, with nearly 670 out of every 100,000 Americans behind bars.

 

The over-criminalization of America is rooted in federal laws and regulations, and state and local governments have followed suite.

Adept Police Forces Are Essential for Capitalist Empire Democracy

Jacobin |  The most dramatic effort to modernize policing at home occurred with President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Crime. The 1968 Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act created the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), which provided funding, developed guidelines, and helped with coordination among federal, state, and municipal law-enforcement agencies, while also offering research grants to test experimental tactics and technologies. A decade before the beginning of the incarceration boom, a federally backed revamping of law enforcement set the stage.

The original idea for new federal anticrime infrastructure had emerged a few years earlier, in early autumn 1964. Summer unrest had shown police forces to be underprepared and insufficiently trained to handle urban riots or apparently increasing crime levels. As a result, Johnson administration officials launched a program to assist domestic law enforcement modeled on an ongoing program to assist foreign police.

Counterinsurgent foreign police assistance was not new in the 1960s, but it gained a robust, centralized leadership and a budgetary line of its own in 1962. The program consisted of three areas: technical assistance, such as help setting up crime laboratories, surveillance units, or prisons; material aid, what some skeptics derided as “running guns to cops”; and training. Advisers aimed to help indigenous forces fight ordinary crime, control unrest, and keep tabs on radicals. No great distinctions were drawn between these tasks, and the means for their accomplishment overlapped.

In December 1963, the Office of Public Safety (OPS), housed within the Agency for International Development, opened its International Police Academy in Washington, DC. High- and mid-ranking police officials from over seventy-five countries attended classes there for a decade. They learned state-of-the-art police techniques, including logistics, riot control, marksmanship, and record-keeping. The academy’s raison d’etre was one of “training trainers,” so lessons imparted there were sure to be replicated in other countries.

One OPS executive argued,

Regardless of what color policemen are, the suits they wear, what they call themselves, they are all the same. They are the same for the simple reason that a policeman exists in society as a behavior control mechanism. The basic principles of what is done, how it is done, and why it is done are the same.

If this projection was not yet true, OPS’s mission was to make it a reality.

Culled from agencies around the country, OPS’s advisers represented the best and most versatile experts US law enforcement had to offer. In addition to prior police work at home, most also had experience in counterinsurgency and special-warfare operations overseas.

Although Congress eventually shuttered OPS amid accusations that it taught and condoned torture and bomb-making, most of its work was utterly pedestrian — and that underpins today’s problem. OPS’s version of counterinsurgency did not try to institute highly militarized police forces so much as attempt to create standards of discipline, specialized units, benchmarks for training, facility with up-to-date technologies, and autonomy from external influences. Its lessons were based on the idea that adept police forces are essential for capitalist democracy.

Even today, we live with the legacies of OPS. Its program of total surveillance of South Vietnamese citizens using tamper-proof national ID cards might make today’s electronic spies jealous, but the means of checking those IDs — stop-and-frisk — would be recognizable to any beat cop in New York or Chicago. In 1964, an OPS training manual advised, “These methods — checks, searches, passes — are tolerated only in situations of national emergency in which they are necessary to combat the enemy. Viet Nam today is in the midst of such an emergency.” But today, on US streets with continually declining crime rates, these “reformed” actions of the police constitute the emergency.

"Bloody Coxcombs, But No Bodies": crowd control in post-war British Africa

Source |  This article examines British policymakers' attempts to address the political and practical problems of crowd control in British Africa. After the Accra riots, reforming the policing of crowds became an imperial priority. These efforts pushed in several policy directions, yet none could solve the deeper political issues causing the unrest, nor stop state violence against civilians. During the 1950s, the distance between the liberal rhetoric in Britain about the rule of law and the brutal realities of colonial policing continued to grow. This gap was finally exposed during the Nyasaland Emergency, which had dramatic consequences for the future of British Africa.

Magistrate-Sir, you must disperse the rioters.

Officer-Yes, sir. Soldiers, prime and load.

Magistrate-Stop, sir. You must not fire! What are you about?

Officer-Shall I charge with the bayonet then, sir?

Magistrate-Oh no! You must disperse the rioters.

Officer-But how am I to disperse them if I neither fire nor charge?

Magistrate-Oh, that is your business not mine. Do it as you like, only you must not fire or use your bayonets.

General Sir Charles James Napier relaying an exchange from the Burdett's Riots of 1816-1817-1

[R]ecourse should be had to the use of firearms only as a last result. In view of the serious consequences which result from firing upon civilians, it is I feel important that alternative methods for the dispersal of crowds should be continuously studied.

Secretary of State for the Colonies, Arthur Creech Jones, in a circular to colonial governors in the aftermath of the Accra riots, 1948-2

Though they were a century-and-a-half apart and working in drastically different contexts, Arthur Creech Jones and the nineteenth century magistrate quoted above shared the same basic dilemma: how can order in the streets be restored without resorting to lethal force? Both excerpts also articulate a difference in perspective, if not necessarily always a physical distance, between these men and the so-called "men on the spot" who were immediately tasked with controlling these crowds. These different perspectives as they relate to the use of force were primarily due to the men being subject to different pressures, guided by different understandings of their responsibilities, and locked into different interpretations of the nature of the civilian crowds they faced. 

When offered the option of soldiers firing into the crowd, the magistrate reproached the officer in charge, asking: "What are you about?" At times, London similarly castigated colonial officers for what was deemed to be excessive violence in the handling of colonial crowds.3 But neither the nineteenth century magistrate nor twentieth century colonial policymakers offered other viable alternatives to lethal force when facing down angry crowds: that simply was not their "business." In the aftermath of the Accra, Gold Coast Riots of 1948, colonial policymakers under Creech Jones would resolve to make it their business to reform colonial crowd control. Yet as they would discover, the violence that often accompanied imperial crowd control was not a simple administrative problem that could be easily overcome by technical or procedural reforms emanating from London. Instead, imperial crowd control was a subject inextricably linked to the nature of state coercion and control in Britain's post-war Empire.

In the decade following the riots in Accra in 1948, Britain was confronted with violent unrest in various forms across much of its Empire.4 The scale of this imperial crisis was reflected in the number of Emergencies declared all over the globe during the 1950s, from Kenya to Malaya to Cyprus to British Guiana. This left the security forces of the Empire dangerously stretched, and made colonial administrators increasingly anxious about losing control. The speed with which this anti-colonial unrest spread throughout Africa and the pace of subsequent constitutional changes, first in the Gold Coast then eventually across the whole of British Africa, was something no imperial policymakers in London had predicted.5 

On the force of African nationalism, Creech Jones wrote: "The emotional fervor attached to nationalism infects and spreads. Unless a serious effort is made to channel it, it may become disruptive and destructive. Our task is to channel this emotion and concept towards constructive courses."6 This channeling meant staying ahead of what was deemed to be legitimate nationalism and controlling and thwarting so-called "irresponsible elements." The suppression of mass politics was thus seen as a vital prerequisite to Whitehall's broader strategy of an orderly and slow constitutional evolution of its African possessions.7 After 1948, the Colonial Office was reconfigured to reflect a greater focus on security, intelligence gathering, and propaganda, which together formed the three main pillars of its mission to shape and control colonial politics.8

Britain Owes Reparations

Independent |  The British people suffer "historical amnesia" over the atrocities committed by their former empire, an Indian MP and author has claimed.

Former UN under-secretary general Dr Shashi Tharoor said the British education system fails to tell the real story of empire.

He said: "There's no real awareness of the atrocities, of the fact that Britain financed its Industrial Revolution and its prosperity from the depredations of empire, the fact that Britain came to one of the richest countries in the world in the 18th century and reduced it, after two centuries of plunder, to one of the poorest."

A previous YouGov poll found the British public are generally proud of the British Empire and its colonial past.

YouGov found 44 per cent were proud of Britain's history of colonialism, while 21 per cent regretted it happened.

The same poll also found 43 per cent believed the British Empire was a good thing, while 19 per cent said it was bad and 25 per cent said it was neither good nor bad. 

At its height in 1922, the British empire governed a fifth of the world's population and a quarter of the world's total land area. 

Although proponents of Empire say it brought various economic developments to parts of the world it controlled, critics point to massacres, famines and the use of concentration camps by the British Empire.

Here, The Independent looks at five of the worst atrocities carried out by the British Empire.  Fist tap Bro.Makheru.

When You Establish Who Is Permitted To Be Angry, Then You Have Established ___________?

frontpagemag |   Intersectionality frowns on expecting civil behavior from “oppressed” protesters. Asking that shrieking campus crybully not to scream threats in your face is “tone policing”. An African-American millionaire’s child at Yale is fighting for her “existence”, unlike the Pennsylvania coal miner, the Baltimore police officer and the Christian florist whose existences really are threatened.

Tone policing is how the anger of privileged leftists is protected while the frustration of their victims is suppressed. The existence of tone policing as a specific term to protect displays of left-wing anger shows the collapse of civility into anger privilege. Civility has been replaced by a political entitlement to anger.

The left prides itself on an unearned moral superiority (“When they go low, we go high”) reinforced by its own echo chamber even as it has become incapable of controlling its angry outbursts. The national tantrum after Trump’s victory has all but shut down the government, turned every media outlet into a non-stop feed of conspiracy theories and set off protests that quickly escalated into street violence.

But Trump Derangement Syndrome is a symptom of a problem with the left that existed before he was born. The left is an angry movement. It is animated by an outraged self-righteousness whose moral superiority doubles as dehumanization. And its machinery of culture glamorizes its anger. The media dresses up the seething rage so that the left never has to look at its inner Hodgkinson in the mirror.

The left is as angry as ever. Campus riots and assassinations of Republican politicians are nothing new. What is changing is that its opponents are beginning to match its anger.  The left still clings to the same anger it had when it was a theoretical movement with plans, but little impact on the country. The outrage at the left is no longer ideological. There are millions of people whose health care was destroyed by ObamaCare, whose First Amendment rights were taken away, whose land was seized, whose children were turned against them and whose livelihoods were destroyed.

The angry left has gained a great deal of power. It has used that power to wreck lives. It is feverishly plotting to deprive nearly 63 million Americans of their vote by using its entrenched power in the government, the media and the non-profit sector. And it is too blinded by its own anger over the results of the election to realize the anger over its wholesale abuses of power and privileged tantrums.

But monopolies on anger only work in totalitarian states. In a free society, both sides are expected to control their anger and find terms on which to debate and settle issues. The left rejects civility and refuses to control its anger. The only settlement it will accept is absolute power. If an election doesn’t go its way, it will overturn the results. If someone offends it, he must be punished. Or there will be anger.

The angry left demands that everyone recognize the absolute righteousness of its anger as the basis for its power. This anger privilege, like tone policing, is often cast in terms of oppressed groups. But its anger isn’t in defiance of oppression, but in pursuit of oppression.

Anger privilege is used to silence opposition, to enforce illegal policies and to seize power. But the left’s monopolies on anger are cultural, not political. The entertainment industry and the media can enforce anger privilege norms through public shaming, but their smears can’t stop the consequences of the collapse of civility in public life. There are no monopolies on emotion.

When anger becomes the basis for political power, then it won’t stop with Howard Dean or Bernie Sanders. That’s what the left found out in the last election. Its phony pearl clutching was a reaction to the consequences of its destruction of civility. Its reaction to that show of anger by conservatives and independents was to escalate the conflict. Instead of being the opposition, the left became the “resistance”. Trump was simultaneously Hitler and a traitor. Republicans were evil beasts.

Jon Ossoff: Nobody Buying Pathetic Democratic Hokum

BostonGlobe |  Probably the most humiliating thing about the Georgia loss is that tactically there wasn’t much else they could have done. Yes, it would have been nice if their candidate, Jon Ossoff, wasn’t a baby-faced 30-year-old who didn’t technically live in the district. Yes, it would have been helpful if he had a positive message of his own, and not just an anti-Trump one.

But Ossoff raised more money than any other candidate running for Congress in the history of the United States. He ran endless numbers of television ads. He had thousands of volunteers that came in to campaign for him from across the country. Even more of them were making phone calls for him from wherever they lived. On the campaign trail he didn’t make any real damaging verbal mistakes.

And yet in contest that Democrats called a referendum on Trump, Handel’s 4-point win over Ossoff was 1.5 percentage points higher than Trump’s victory there last November.

They fought the wrong race

Adding to Democratic frustrations Tuesday night was the logic that they may have focused too heavily on the wrong race. The real surprise of the night was just how competitive another special election held Tuesday — that one in South Carolina — had become. The South Carolina race, in a district to replace Trump’s budget chief, could have used more attention.

Yes, in South Carolina the Republican ultimately won, but he did so by just 3 percentage points. This contest wasn’t even supposed to be close, and yet the loss there was less extreme than the one in Georgia.

There are many Democrats saying that spending in Georgia had reached its saturation point weeks if not months ago. Had the party instead sent more of its dollars to South Carolina, it just might have snuck in an upset.

The wounds of the 2016 primary are back

When there’s a win, everyone takes the credit. When there’s a loss, everyone starts pointing fingers.

So it was with Tuesday night that the blame game started immediately after it was clear they had lost both seats, particularly the one in Georgia. The Democratic Party still hasn’t found a way to come together after the divisions created in the 2016 presidential primary between Clinton and Bernie Sanders. These new loses only re-opened these wounds.

Liberal groups like Vermont-based Democracy for America repeated lines so familiar, they could have come after Clinton’s loss in the general election.

“The same, tired centrist Democratic playbook that has come up short cycle after cycle will not suffice,” DFA chairman Jim Dean said in a statement.

Meanwhile those from the Clinton wing only reaffirmed their commitment that these elections are hard to win. Now is not the time, they said, to move even further left in picking Democratic nominees from the so-called Sanders wing of the party.

It is not a matter of who is correct. The real point is that after Tuesday night, Democrats are right back to where they were in November.

Scared White People

seattletimes |  “I’ve got three words for you: scared white people,” Parker says. “Every period of racial progress in this country is followed by a period of retrenchment. That’s what the 2016 election was about, and it was plain as it was happening.”

To be clear: Neither Parker, nor the latest research, is saying that Trump voters are all racists. Most voting is simply party-line no matter who is running. What they’re saying is that worries about the economy, free trade and the rest were no more important in 2016 than in previous elections, but racial resentment spiked.

It makes sense, considering the candidate himself was maligning Mexicans and openly calling for banning Muslims.

What’s doubly interesting is that Parker suspects the reason his research gets overlooked is because he is black. He senses it’s assumed that as a black man he must be biased about race, or is too quick to invoke it.

“I get a whole lot more respect over in Europe,” Parker told me. “There, it’s all about the ideas and whether my social science is sound. It’s not about who I am, like it so often is here.”

Meanwhile, white writers such as J.D. Vance, author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” are seen as guru guides to Trump country. Even though the mostly colorblind story of economic dead-end-ism Vance tells apparently isn’t what really turned the election.

Parker and Barreto now are working on their own book, out next year, called “The Great White Hope: Donald Trump, Race and the Crisis of Democracy.” Will that get ignored, too?

“I get it, nobody wants to be told what they don’t want to hear,” Parker says. “People want there to be a more innocent explanation, about jobs or trade or something. But sorry, everyone — it just isn’t there. My plea to people is we ought to start focusing on what’s real.”

Weapons Systems and Political Stability

carrollquigley |  On his death in 1977, Carroll Quigley, professor at Georgetown University, left a long, but incomplete, manuscript, which his colleagues have now put into print (by photocopy of the typescript) together with appreciative comments and a list of his publications. The author's objective is to enlighten Americans on "the history of weapons systems and tactics, with special reference to the influence that these have had on political life and the stability of political arrangements" (p. 35). 

Early in the work we are given an analysis of several dichotomies in military development: (1) amateur versus specialized weapons, the former of which could encourage the rise of democracy; (2) missile versus shock weapons, the former of which were preferred by Asiatic peoples 2000 a.c. to A.D. 1400, while Indo-European stocks tended to use shock weapons in that period; (3) the relative advantage of offensive or defensive tactics, a field in which oscillations have repeatedly taken place. 

  
These variations are then discussed in the long sweep of human development from prehistory down to about A.D. 1500. The bulk of the text is devoted to Greek and Roman history for the period after what Quigley calls the "great divide" in Western Civilization that occurred about 600 b.c., but there is ample space for Chinese and nomadic history. The book is far more widely based than the brief bibliography suggests and is often provocatively independent in its judgments. Quigley does hop back and forth between Greece and Rome and mixes events of several centuries in one paragraph; the reader needs to be already well at home in ancient and also medieval history. 

  
One would wish to speak well of a work with such earnest intent, on which the author spent the last twelve years of his life, but the study must be faulted on many levels. Straightforward errors may be excused as trivial. More serious on the factual side are Quigley's view that Indo-European peoples everywhere shared a fundamentally common ideology -- the search for immortality through public renown -- and his overemphasis on naval power; he also has the strange misconception that ancient historians nowadays do not often consider slavery as vital in Greek development. 

  
The major structural flaw, however, is on a higher level, that of the organization of the whole work: for Quigley does not really carry out his intention. His surveys of changes in weapons systems are thoughtful and valuable. but for the reader they become muddled and ineffective amid the detailed narrative and descriptive treatments of political history over many centuries. Nor does the author provide clear judgments about the relations of the two factors in his tale. One looks, for instance, for a sharp analysis of the rise of Rome in light of its significant changes in weapons systems; instead, there is a lengthy discussion of the Roman constitution and other aspects that swell the bulk but do not bear on the topic.

  
In the end, moreover, is H. J. Hogan correct in his foreword to the book when he asserts that "society's decisions regarding its weapons systems have been decisive in shaping human social, economic, and political decisions," or is the reverse as likely to be correct?  Quigley thought that the Greeks could become democratic because they used amateur weapons; but if Athens did have a democratic constitution for two centuries, it was for very different reasons, and almost all Greek states remained conservatively oligarchic in structure. Elsewhere Quigley is more careful not to explain the complexities of history simply by adducing one factor; among many examples, one may cite his treatment of the Middle Ages (p. 813), in which the role of weapons systems is noted but far more weight is assigned to the concept of providential deity (or, in the case of the Latin West, the failure of this ideology to gain command).

  
Recently Douglas C. North has observed in an interesting study, Structure and Change in European History, "While there is an immense literature on military technology itself, it has seldom seen explored in terms of its implications for political structure" (p. 25). Quigley tried. but lost his way in details. Specialists may find profit in some of his comments; for the average American citizen the task still remains an open one. Full text of Weapon Systems and Political Stability