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
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.
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.
“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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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
carrollquigley | I am going to give you an
historical view of the American democratic tradition with analytical
overtones showing how democracy has changed over the course of our history.
The United States is a democracy. I think there is no doubt of that — but
the American democratic tradition is largely a myth.
First, a few definitions. I define democracy as majority rule and
minority rights. Of these the second is more important than the
first. There are many despotisms which have majority rule. Hitler held
plebiscites in which he obtained over 92 percent of the vote, and most of
the people who were qualified to vote did vote. I think that in China today
a majority of the people support the government, but China is certainly not
a democracy.
The essential half of this definition
then, is the second half, minority rights. What that means is that a
minority has those rights which enable it to work within the system and to
build itself up to be a majority and replace the governing majority.
Moderate deviations from majority rule do not usually undermine democracy.
In fact, absolute democracy does not really exist at the nation-state level.
For example, a modest poll tax as a qualification for voting would be an
infringement on the principle of majority rule but restrictions on the
suffrage would have to go pretty far before they really abrogated democracy.
On the other hand relatively slight restrictions on minority rights — the
freedoms of speech, assembly, and other rights — would rapidly erode
democracy.
Another basic point. Democracy is not the
highest political value. Speeches about democracy and the democratic
tradition might lead you to think this is the most perfect political system
ever devised. That just isn't true. There are other political values which
are more important and urgent—security, for example. And I would suggest
that political stability and political responsibility are also more
important.
In fact, I would define a good government as
a responsible government. In every society there is a structure of power. A
government is responsible when its political processes reflect that power
structure, thus ensuring that the power structure will never be able to
overthrow the government. If a society in fact could be ruled by a minority
because that elite had power to rule and the political system reflected that
situation by giving governing power to that elite, then, it seems to me, we
would have a responsible government even though it was not democratic.
Some of you are looking puzzled. Why do we have democracy
in this country? I'll give you a blunt and simple answer, which means, of
course, that it's not the whole truth. We have democracy because around 1880
the distribution of weapons in this society was such that no minority could
make a majority obey. If you have a society in which weapons are cheap, so
that almost anyone can obtain them, and are easy to use — what I call
amateur weapons — then you have democracy. But if the opposite is true,
weapons extremely expensive and very difficult to use — the medieval knight,
for example, with his castle, the supreme weapons of the year 1100 — in such
a system, with expensive and difficult-to-use weapons, you could not
possibly have majority rule. But in 1880 for $100 you could get the two best
weapons in the world, a Winchester rifle and a Colt revolver; so almost
anyone could buy them. With weapons like these in the hands of ordinary
people, no minority could make the majority obey a despotic government.
Now there are some features of democracy that many people
really do not understand. It is said, for example, that our officials are
elected by the voters, and the one that gets the most votes is elected. I
suggest that this is misleading. The outcome of an election is not
determined by those who vote, but by those who don't vote. Since 1945 or so,
we have had pretty close elections, with not much more than half of the
people voting. In the 1968 election about 80 million voted, and about 50
million qualified to vote did not. The outcome was determined by the 50
million who didn't vote. If you could have got 2 percent of the nonvoters to
the polls to vote for your candidate, you could have elected him. And that
has been true of most of our recent elections. It's the ones who don't vote
who determine the outcome.
Something else we tend to
overlook is that the nomination process is much more important than the
election process. I startle a lot of my colleagues who think they know
England pretty well by asking them how candidates for election are nominated
in England. They don't have conventions or primary elections. So the
important thing is who names the candidates. In any democratic country, if
you could name the candidates of all parties, you wouldn't care who voted or
how, because your man would be elected. So the nominations are more
important than the elections.
A third point is one I
often make in talking with students who are discouraged about their
inability to influence the political process. I say this is nonsense. There
never was a time when it was easier for ordinary people to influence
political affairs than today. One reason, of course, is that big mass of
nonvoters. If you can simply get 2 or 3 percent of them to the polls — and
that shouldn't be too difficult — then you can elect your candidate, whoever
he is.
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