Monday, April 16, 2018

The Nazi Role In Indian Independence


wikipedia |  The integral association of the Free India Legion with Nazi Germany and the other Axis powers means its legacy is seen from two viewpoints, similarly to other nationalist movements that were aligned with Germany during the war, such as the Russian Vlasov movement. One viewpoint sees it as a collaborationist unit of the Third Reich; the other views it as the realisation of a liberation army to fight against the British Raj.[31]

Unlike the Indian National Army, conceived with the same doctrine,[13] it has found little exposure since the end of the war even in independent India. This is because it was far removed from India, unlike Burma, and because the Legion was so much smaller than the INA and was not engaged in its originally conceived role.[31] Bose's plans for the Legion, and even the INA, were too grandiose for their military capability and their fate was too strongly tied to that of the Axis powers.[32] Looking at the legacy of Azad Hind, however, historians consider both movements' military and political actions (of which the Legion was one of the earliest elements, and an integral part of Bose's plans) and the indirect effect they had on the era's events.

In German histories of the Second World War, the Legion is noted less than other foreign volunteer units. Filmmaker and author Merle Kröger, however, made the 2003 mystery novel Cut! about soldiers from the Legion in France. She said she found them an excellent topic for a mystery because scarcely any Germans had heard of the Indians who volunteered for the German Army.[31] The only Indian film to mention the Legion is the 2011 Bollywood production Dear Friend Hitler, which portrays the Legion's attempted escape to Switzerland and its aftermath.

Perceptions as collaborators

In considering the history of the Free India Legion, the most controversial aspect is its integral link to the Nazi Germany, with a widespread perception that they were collaborators with Nazi Germany by the virtue of their uniform, oath and field of operation. The views of the founder and leader of the Azad Hind movement, Subhas Chandra Bose, were somewhat more nuanced than straightforward support for the Axis. During the 1930s Bose had organised and led protest marches against Japanese imperialism, and wrote an article attacking Japanese imperialism, although expressing admiration for other aspects of the Japanese regime.[33] Bose's correspondence prior to 1939 also showed his deep disapproval of the racist practices and annulment of democratic institutions by the Nazis.[34] He nonetheless expressed admiration for the authoritarian methods which he saw in Italy and Germany during the 1930s, and thought they could be used in building an independent India.[35]

Bose's view was not necessarily shared by the men of the Free India Legion, and they were not wholly party to Nazi ideology or in collaboration with the Nazi machinery. The Legion's volunteers were not merely motivated by the chance to escape imprisonment and earn money. Indeed, when the first POWs were brought to Annaburg and met with Subhas Chandra Bose, there was marked and open hostility towards him as a Nazi propaganda puppet.[36] Once Bose's efforts and views had gained more sympathy, a persistent query among the POWs was 'How would the legionary stand in relation to the German soldier?'.[36] The Indians were not prepared to simply fight for Germany's interests, after abandoning their oath to the King-Emperor. The Free India Centre—in charge of the legion after the departure of Bose—faced a number of grievances from legionaries. The foremost were that Bose had abandoned them left them entirely in German hands, and a perception that the Wehrmacht was now going to use them in the Western Front instead of sending them to fight for independence.[37]

The attitude of the Legion's soldiers was similar to that of the Italian Battaglione Azad Hindoustan, which had been of dubious loyalty to the Axis cause—it was disbanded after a mutiny.[7][8] In one instance, immediately prior to the first deployment of the Legion in the Netherlands in April 1943, after the departure of the 1st Battalion from Königsbrück, two companies within the 2nd Battalion refused to move until convinced by Indian leaders.[37] Even in Asia, where the Indian National Army was much larger and fought the British directly, Bose faced similar obstacles at first. All of this goes to show that many of the men never possessed loyalty to the Nazi cause or ideology; the motivation of the Legion's men was to fight for India's independence.[37] The unit did allegedly participate in atrocities, especially in the Médoc region in July 1944,[38] and in the region of Ruffec[28] and the department of Indre during their retreat,[39] and in addition, some elements of the unit undertook anti-partisan operations in Italy.

Role in Indian independence

However, in political terms Bose may have been successful, owing to events that occurred within India after the war.[7][8] After the war, the soldiers and officers of the Free India Legion were brought as prisoners to India, where they were to be brought to trial in courts-martial along with Indians who were in the INA. Their stories were seen as so inflammatory that, fearing mass revolts and uprisings across the empire, the British government forbade the BBC from broadcasting about them after the war.[28] Not much is known of any charges made against Free India Legion soldiers, but the Indian National Army trials that were initiated had the sentences they issued commuted or charges dropped, after widespread protest and several mutinies. As a condition of independence readily agreed to by the INC, members of the Free India Legion and INA were not allowed to serve in the post-independence Indian military, but they were all released before independence. Once the stories reached the public, there was a turnaround in perception of the Azad Hind movement from traitors and collaborators to patriots. Although the authorities expected to improve the morale of their troops by prosecuting the Azad Hind volunteers, they only contributed to the sentiment among many members of the military that they had been on the wrong side during the war.[40][41] According to historian Michael Edwardes, the "INA and Free India Legion thus overshadowed the conference that was to lead to independence, held in the same Red Fort as the trials".[40]

Inspired to a large extent by the stories of the soldiers at trial, mutiny broke out in the Royal Indian Navy, and received widespread public support. While the troops who fought for the Allies were being demobilised, the Navy mutiny was followed up by smaller mutinies in the Royal Indian Air Force, and a mutiny in the Indian Army that was suppressed by force. In the aftermath of the mutinies, the weekly intelligence summary issued on 25 March 1946 admitted that the Indian military was no longer trustworthy, and for the Army, "only day to day estimates of steadiness could be made".[42][8] The armed forces could not be relied upon to suppress unrest as they had been before, and drawing from experiences of the Free India Legion and INA, their actions could not be predicted from their oath to the King-Emperor.[43][44] Reflecting on the factors that guided the British decision to relinquish their rule in India, Clement Attlee, then the British Prime Minister, cited as the most important reason the realisation that the Indian armed forces might not prop up the Raj.[45] Although the British government had promised to grant dominion status to India at the end of the war,[46][47] the views held by British officials after the war show[citation needed] that although militarily a failure the Indians who fought for the Axis likely accelerated Indian independence. This is contrary to the usual narrative of India's independence struggle, which focuses only on the INC and Mahatma Gandhi.[citation needed]

Germany Plots With The Kremlin: The Madrid Circular


spitfirelist | by T. H. Tetens
1953, Henry Schuman, 294 pages
Download Pt. 1 | Download Pt. 2

T.H. Tetens’ Germany Plots with the Kremlin (1953) treats the pivotally important German “Ostpolitik,” which German power structure has traditionally exploited in order expand and develop its influence. The German threat to either remain neutral during the Cold War, or to ally with the USSR, was a significant factor in persuading conservative American power brokers to go along with the reinstatement in Germany of the Nazi elements that prosecuted World War II. Under the circumstances, some of these conservatives felt that permitting Nazi elements to return to power behind a democratic façade was the lesser of two evils, although many would have preferred a more traditionally conservative German political establishment. This German “Ostpolitik,” in turn, is characteristic of the geopolitical foresight and cynicism with which pan-Germanists have successfully pursued their goal of world domination through the centuries.

An authority on pan-Germanism employed by the U.S. government during World War II, Tetens analyzes German Ostpolitik in the aftermath of the war in the context of centuries of German policy toward Russia and the former Soviet Union. Tracing the roots of Ostpolitik, Tetens begins with Frederick the Great’s secret pact of 1762 with Czar Peter III, which disrupted the European coalition that almost crushed Prussia in the Seven Years War. This pact saved Prussia from total defeat and led to the first partition of Poland. In 1867, German chancellor Otto von Bismarck made a secret pact (called a “re-insurance treaty”) with Russia, which secured Germany’s Eastern frontier, helping to make Germany the strongest military power on the continent. Following in the footsteps of their predecessors, General Hans von Seeckt (head of the German general staff) created a new army after the German defeat in World War I. That army trained and armed in Soviet Russia after the Rapallo Treaty between Germany and the USSR in 1922. While German Chancellor Gustav Stresemann feigned neutrality, von Seeckt contemplated “war against the West in alliance with the East.” Perhaps the best-known example of Ostpolitik was the Hitler Stalin pact of 1939, which secured Germany’s Eastern border on the eve of World War II.

After World War II, the German geopoliticians (acting at the direction of the leaders of the Underground Reich under Martin Bormann) pursued a similar tack. Threatening neutrality, or even an alliance with the Soviets, the Germans were able to manipulate the U.S. into wooing Germany as an ally- –granting it renewed economic and military power and re-installing Nazis in positions of great influence. Kevin Coogan’s remarkable text Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker and the Postwar Fascist International contains an excellent contemporary account of this phenomenon. Listeners are emphatically encouraged to read the Coogan text as a supplement to the Tetens book (which was published in 1953.)

In 1950, the Madrid Geo-political Center (a Nazi think tank operating in exile under the friendly auspices of fascist dictator Franco) discussed the successful realization of the Reich’s plan to go underground. (These plans were described by Curt Reiss in The Nazis Go Underground. The Nazi grooming and installation of Franco, whose country was an important base for the postwar Reich activities, is discussed in Falange by Alan Chase.) The following passage appears on page 73 of the Tetens text: “According to the Madrid Circular Letter, referred to above, the German planners have never ceased their political warfare against the Allies. They admit that they had ‘blueprinted the bold plan and created a flexible and smoothly working organization,’ in order to safeguard Germany from defeat and to bring Allied post-war planning to nought. They boast that they were able to create total confusion in Washington, and that they saved German heavy industry from destruction: ‘By no means did the political and military leadership of the Third Reich skid into the catastrophe in an irrational manner as so many blockheads and ignoramuses often tell us. The various phases and consequences of the so-called ‘collapse’ . . . were thoroughly studied and planned by the most capable experts . . . Nothing occurred by chance; everything was carefully planned. The result of this planning was that, already a few months after Potsdam, the coalition of the victors went on the rocks.’. . .”

The Madrid Circular Letter goes on to set forth the course to be pursued by Germany, more startlingly relevant from the vantage point of early 2006 than in it was in 1950. The following is from page 52 of Tetens’ book:

“ ‘In view of the present political situation . . . the policy of orientation towards the West has lost all meaning or sense. . . . We must not forget that Germany has always considered orientation towards the West as a policy of expedience, or one to be pursued only under pressure of circumstances. Such was the case in Napoleon’s time, after 1918, and also after 1945. All of our great national leaders have constantly counseled the long-range policy of close cooperation with the East . . . .’” Fear of this dynamic drove the U.S. to accede to all of Germany’s demands for renewed power. “Anti-Communism Uber Alles!”

A stunning measure of the success of the Underground Reich and German Ostpolitik can be obtained by reading Dorothy Thompson’s analysis of Germany’s plans for world dominance by a centralized European economic union. (In this, we can see the plans of pan-German theoretician Friedrich List, as realized by the European Monetary Union.) Ms. Thompson was writing in The New York Herald Tribune on May 31, 1940! Her comments are reproduced by Tetens on page 92.
“The Germans have a clear plan of what they intend to do in case of victory. I believe that I know the essential details of that plan. I have heard it from a sufficient number of important Germans to credit its authenticity . . . Germany’s plan is to make a customs union of Europe, with complete financial and economic control centered in Berlin. This will create at once the largest free trade area and the largest planned economy in the world. In Western Europe alone . . . there will be an economic unity of 400 million persons . . . To these will be added the resources of the British, French, Dutch and Belgian empires. These will be pooled in the name of Europa Germanica . . .”
“The Germans count upon political power following economic power, and not vice versa. Territorial changes do not concern them, because there will be no ‘France’ or ‘England,’ except as language groups. Little immediate concern is felt regarding political organizations . . . . No nation will have the control of its own financial or economic system or of its customs. The Nazification of all countries will be accomplished by economic pressure. In all countries, contacts have been established long ago with sympathetic businessmen and industrialists . . . . As far as the United States is concerned, the planners of the World Germanica laugh off the idea of any armed invasion. They say that it will be completely unnecessary to take military action against the United States to force it to play ball with this system. . . . Here, as in every other country, they have established relations with numerous industries and commercial organizations, to whom they will offer advantages in co-operation with Germany. . . .”
Again, check out the current European Monetary Union and the “borderless” EU against the background of what Ms. Thompson forecast in 1940 and Mr. Tetens reproduced in 1953.

Sunday, April 15, 2018

It's Mueller's War and the Evil of It is Near at Hand...,


davidstockmanscontracorner |  America First is an existential threat to the Deep State.
 
It turns the clock back to April 2, 1917---the date when the Woodrow Wilson foolishly declared war on Germany and led America into a bloody cauldron on the Western Front that had absolutely no bearing on its national security; and thereafter into a destructive "peace" at Versailles that guaranteed perpetual war.

America First, when followed to its logical and correct conclusion, would put the War Capital of the world out of business; it would result in a massive slashing of the hideously bloated national security budget; it would ash-can the endless complex of think-tanks, NGOs, intelligence contractors and lobbyists for foreign interests.

We refer, of course, to the likes of the Podesta brothers, Paul Manafort and 20,000 more like and similar operators and racketeers. Indeed, having it way with the Warfare State, America First would bring a hair-curling recession to the Imperial City which would make Youngstown Ohio look like a model of prosperity.

To be sure, we seriously doubt that the Donald had any idea of where American First was leading him when he stumbled upon the slogan; and we are afraid that his xenophobic fear-mongering about the Mexican border would have distracted him, anyway.

But the Deep State was taking no chances. That's why the partisan shills who ran the CIA and FBI under Obama were able to launch their insidious anti-Trump witchunt as an "insurance policy" in July 2016; and it's also why the Obama Administration pulled out all the stops in its waning days in office to insure that the verdict of November 8 would be re-litigated on the back of the Russian Meddling story.

In Part 3 we intend to summarize the ludicrously threadbare nature of the whole Mueller investigation, but suffice it here to note the Smoking Bunker Buster that puts the lie to the whole scam.

To wit, it is absolutely the fact that neither Donald Trump, nor his sons, nor his daughter and son-in-law went to Russia at any time after the Donald's unlikely campaign was launched in June 2015. At that time no one including Vlad Putin gave him a snowball's chance of ending up in the Oval Office; and since then Trump has proven that no one matters in his comings and goings except the Donald and his family.

So if there was any collusion after the announcement, it had to be by email or phone between the Trumps and high state officials in the Kremlin. That is to say, every word of such conversations would be stored in the vast NSA (national security agency) server farms where everything which crosses the worldwide web gets snatched and stored.

Needless to say, if Robert Mueller were truly doing god's work in behalf of the rule of law and American democracy, he would have ordered-up the NSA taps on day one, and resolved the matter of "collusion" with the Russians within one week's time.

That he didn't do because no such taps exist and no such conversations between the Trumps and the Russian state ever happened. Period. Full stop.

To the contrary, the entire prolonged, ballyhooed, ever-expanding, leak-ridden, media-fueling Mueller investigation is designed to mortally wound Donald Trump and drive him from office. That is, to crush America First in its infancy and to obliterate even the crude and half-baked form in which its emerged from the modest gray matter nested under the Orange Comb-Over.  The Deep State Closes In On The Donald Part 1

 

Saturday, April 14, 2018

The Empire Now Plainly A Terminal Case....,


thesaker |   Frankly, I have already said everything I had to say about the so-called ‘West’ in the following articles:
and I don’t have much to add on substance.

Tonight all I ask you to follow the advice I gave in this article:

EVERYBODY WAIT! DO NOT JUMP TO CONCLUSIONS!
We have no facts. What US politicians (including generals – US generals are all politicians) say does not matter and is not “fact”.  The truth is that we won’t know for sure for at least 24 hours what took place.  The aggressors will present the attack as a huge success.  Don’t believe it!  The last time around it took several days to find out what really happened.

This is still my best advice to you:  wait for the facts and don’t listen to the Ziocon propaganda machine!

None of the above should distract us from what is by far the biggest danger currently facing us all – the risks of a US-Russian war in Syria. In fact, this reality seems to be slowly dawning even on the most obtuse of presstitutes who are now worrying about a spill-over effect. No, not in Europe or the USA, but on Israel, of course. Still, the fact that there are folks who understand that Israel might not survive a superpower clash on its doorstep is a good thing. Maybe the Israel lobby in the USA, or a least the part of it which cares for Israel (many/most only pretend to), will be more vocal than all the silent Anglo shabbos-goyim who don’t seem to be able to muster even a minimal amount of self-preservation instinct? Bibi Netanyahu felt the need to call Putin after the Israeli ambassador to Russia was read the riot act by Russian officials following the (admittedly rather lame) Israeli airstrike on the T-4 Syrian air force base. Not much of a hope, I admit..

This is not about good guys versus bad guys anymore. It’s about sane versus insane. I think that we can safely place Trump, Bolton, Haley and the rest of them in the “terminally delusional” camp. But what about the top US generals? I asked two well-informed friends, and they both told me that there is probably nobody above the rank of Colonel with enough courage left to object to the Neocon’s insanity, even if that means WWIII. Again, not much hope here either…

There is a sura (Al-Anfal 8:30) of the Qur’an which Sheikh Imran Hosein often mentions which I want to quote here: And [remember, O Muhammad], when those who disbelieved plotted against you to restrain you or kill you or evict you [from Makkah]. But they plan, and Allah plans. And Allah is the best of planners. And since we are talking about Syria where Iran and Hezbollah are targets as much (or more) as the Russians, it is also fitting here to quote a very popular Shia slogan which calls to remember that the battle against oppression must be fought ceaselessly and everywhere: “Every Day Is Ashura and Every Land Is Karbala”. And, of course, there are the words of Christ Himself: “And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.” (Matt 10:28).

Such religious references will, no doubt, irritate the many “enlightened” westerners for whom such language reeks of obscurantism, fanaticism, and bigotry. But in Russia or the Middle-East, such references are very much part of the national or religious ethos. To illustrate my point I want to quote from Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah’s “Divine Victory Speech” spoken in 2006 following the crushing victory by a relatively small Hezbollah force of the combined might of the Israeli ground, air and naval forces:
We are today celebrating a big strategic, historic, and divine victory. How can the human mind imagine that a few thousand of your Lebanese resistance sons – if I wanted, I would give the exact number – held out for 23 days in a land exposed to the skies against the strongest air force in the Middle East, which had an air bridge transporting smart bombs from America, through Britain, to Israel; against 40,000 officers and soldiers – four brigades of elite forces, three reserve army divisions; against the strongest tank in the world; and against the strongest army in the region? How could only a few thousand people hold out and fight under such harsh conditions, and [how could] their fighting force the naval warships out of our territorial waters? By the way, the army and the resistance are capable of protecting the territorial waters from being desecrated by any Zionist. [Applause] [And how could their fighting] also lead to the destruction of the Mirkava tanks, which are an object of pride for the Israeli industry; damage Israeli helicopters day and night; and turn the elite brigades – I am not exaggerating, and you can watch and read the Israeli media – into rats frightened by your sons? [How did this happen] while you were relinquished by the Arabs and the world and in light of the political (human solidarity was profound though) division around you? How could this group of mujahidin defeat this army without the support and assistance of Almighty God? This resistance experience, which should be conveyed to the world, depends – on the moral and spiritual level – on faith, certainty, reliance [on God], and readiness to make sacrifices. It also depends on reason, planning, organization, armament, and, as is said, on taking all possible protective procedures. We are neither a disorganized and sophistic resistance, nor a resistance pulled to the ground that sees before it nothing but soil, nor a resistance of chaos. The pious, God-reliant, loving, and knowledgeable resistance is also the conscious, wise, trained, and equipped resistance that has plans. This is the secret of the victory we are today celebrating, brothers and sisters.
These words could also be used to describe the relatively small Russian task force in Syria. In fact, there are numerous parallels which could be made between Hezbollah’s role and position in the Middle-East and Russia’s role and position in the world. And while both are well-trained, well-armed and well-commanded, it is their spiritual power which will decide the outcome of the wars waged against them by the Hegemony. AngloZionist secularists will never understand that – they just can’t – and that will bring their inevitable downfall. The only question is the price mankind will have to pay to have that last Empire finally bite the dust.

Friday, April 13, 2018

Hush Now Bout Digital Tricknology..., Bill Gates Talkin Bout Gene-Editing For the 3rd World!!


foreignaffairs |  Today, more people are living healthy, productive lives than ever before. This good news may come as a surprise, but there is plenty of evidence for it. Since the early 1990s, global child mortality has been cut in half. There have been massive reductions in cases of tuberculosis, malaria, and HIV/AIDS. The incidence of polio has decreased by 99 percent, bringing the world to the verge of eradicating a major infectious disease, a feat humanity has accomplished only once before, with smallpox. The proportion of the world’s population in extreme poverty, defined by the World Bank as living on less than $1.90 per day, has fallen from 35 percent to about 11 percent.

Continued progress is not inevitable, however, and a great deal of unnecessary suffering and inequity remains. By the end of this year, five million children under the age of five will have died—mostly in poor countries and mostly from preventable causes. Hundreds of millions of other children will continue to suffer needlessly from diseases and malnutrition that can cause lifelong cognitive and physical disabilities. And more than 750 million people—mostly rural farm families in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia—still live in extreme poverty, according to World Bank estimates. The women and girls among them, in particular, are denied economic opportunity.

Some of the remaining suffering can be eased by continuing to fund the development assistance programs and multilateral partnerships that are known to work. These efforts can help sustain progress, especially as the world gets better at using data to help guide the allocation of resources. But ultimately, eliminating the most persistent diseases and causes of poverty will require scientific discovery and technological innovations.

That includes CRISPR and other technologies for targeted gene editing. Over the next decade, gene editing could help humanity overcome some of the biggest and most persistent challenges in global health and development. The technology is making it much easier for scientists to discover better diagnostics, treatments, and other tools to fight diseases that still kill and disable millions of people every year, primarily the poor. It is also accelerating research that could help end extreme poverty by enabling millions of farmers in the developing world to grow crops and raise livestock that are more productive, more nutritious, and hardier. New technologies are often met with skepticism. But if the world is to continue the remarkable progress of the past few decades, it is vital that scientists, subject to safety and ethics guidelines, be encouraged to continue taking advantage of such promising tools as CRISPR.

Blockchain Is Not Only Crappy NSA Technology...,


medium |  Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future. Its failure to achieve adoption to date is because systems built on trust, norms, and institutions inherently function better than the type of no-need-for-trusted-parties systems blockchain envisions. That’s permanent: no matter how much blockchain improves it is still headed in the wrong direction.

This December I wrote a widely-circulated article on the inapplicability of blockchain to any actual problem. People objected mostly not to the technology argument, but rather hoped that decentralization could produce integrity.

Let’s start with this: Venmo is a free service to transfer dollars, and bitcoin transfers are not free. Yet after I wrote an article last December saying bitcoin had no use, someone responded that Venmo and Paypal are raking in consumers’ money and people should switch to bitcoin.

What a surreal contrast between blockchain’s non-usefulness/non-adoption and the conviction of its believers! It’s so entirely evident that this person didn’t become a bitcoin enthusiast because they were looking for a convenient, free way to transfer money from one person to another and discovered bitcoin. In fact, I would assert that there is no single person in existence who had a problem they wanted to solve, discovered that an available blockchain solution was the best way to solve it, and therefore became a blockchain enthusiast.
There is no single person in existence who had a problem they wanted to solve, discovered that an available blockchain solution was the best way to solve it, and therefore became a blockchain enthusiast.
The number of retailers accepting cryptocurrency as a form of payment is declining, and its biggest corporate boosters like IBM, NASDAQ, Fidelity, Swift and Walmart have gone long on press but short on actual rollout. Even the most prominent blockchain company, Ripple, doesn’t use blockchain in its product. You read that right: the company Ripple decided the best way to move money across international borders was to not use Ripples.

A blockchain is a literal technology, not a metaphor

Why all the enthusiasm for something so useless in practice?

People have made a number of implausible claims about the future of blockchain—like that you should use it for AI in place of the type of behavior-tracking that google and facebook do, for example. This is based on a misunderstanding of what a blockchain is. A blockchain isn’t an ethereal thing out there in the universe that you can “put” things into, it’s a specific data structure: a linear transaction log, typically replicated by computers whose owners (called miners) are rewarded for logging new transactions.

themaven |  I completely agree with much of what you wrote here. I’d like to point out a couple things:

First, in regards to “There is no single person in existence who had a problem they wanted to solve, discovered that an available blockchain solution was the best way to solve it, and therefore became a blockchain enthusiast.” There is in fact at least one such person: me. In 2010 I was looking for a payment system which did not have any possibility for chargebacks. It turns out that bitcoin is GREAT for that, and I became a blockchain enthusiast as a result.

The ugly truth about blockchain is that it is immensely useful, but only when you are in some way trying to circumvent an authority of some sort. In my case, I wanted to take payments for digital goods without losing any to chargebacks. It’s also great for sending money to Venezuela (circumventing the authority of the government of Venezuela, which would really rather you not). It’s great for raising money for projects (ICOs are really about circumventing various regulatory authorities who make that difficult). It’s great for buying drugs, taking payment for ransomware, and any number of terrible illegal things related to human trafficking, money laundering, etc.

Frankly, the day that significant trading of derivatives (gold futures, oil futures, options, etc) starts happening on blockchain, I expect a bubble that will make previous crypto bubbles look tiny in comparison. This is not because blockchain is an easier way to trade these contracts! It is because some percentage of rich traders would like to do anonymous trading and avoid pesky laws about paying taxes on trading profits and not doing insider trading.

I sum it up like this: are you trying to do something with money that requires avoiding an authority somewhere? If not, there is a better technical solution than blockchain. That does NOT mean that what you are doing is illegal for you (it’s perfectly legal for me to send money to Venezuela). It just means that some authority somewhere doesn’t like what you are doing.

Blockchain is inherently in opposition to governmental control of the world of finance. The only reason governments aren’t more antagonistic towards blockchain is that they don’t truly understand how dangerous it is. I wrote at length about this back in 2013 in an article called “Bitcoin’s Dystopian Future”:

Thursday, April 12, 2018

Bezos Got No Dogs In The Section 230 Of The Communications Decency Act Hunt...,


WaPo  |  You might think cracking down on child sex traffickers would be a legislative layup. You’d be wrong. The bill — authored by Republican Sens. Rob Portman (Ohio), John McCain (Ariz.) and John Cornyn (Tex.) and Democrats Richard Blumenthal (Conn.), Claire McCaskill (Mo.) and Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.) — was hard to pass. (Full disclosure: My wife works for Portman.) 

The act faced a wall of opposition from Silicon Valley because it amended Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which gave blanket immunity to online entities that publish third-party content from civil and criminal prosecution. Big Tech wanted to preserve that blanket immunity, even if it gave legal cover to websites that were using it to sell children for sex. When child sex trafficking survivors tried to sue Backpage, and state attorneys general tried to prosecute the owners, federal courts ruled against them, specifically citing Section 230. This did not move Big Tech. Chief among the culprits was Google, which apparently forgot its old corporate motto of “Don’t Be Evil” and lobbied fiercely against the bill. 

How did the senators overcome Big Tech’s lobbying campaign? First, Portman and McCaskill, the chairman and then-ranking minority-party member of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, used their subpoena power to gather corporate files, bank records and other evidence that Backpage knowingly facilitated criminal sex trafficking of vulnerable women and children, and then covered up that evidence. They fought Backpage all the way to the Supreme Court to enforce their subpoenas. The subcommittee then published a voluminous report detailing the findings of its 20-month investigation, including evidence that Backpage knew it was facilitating child sex trafficking and that it was not simply a passive publisher of third-party content. Instead the company was automatically editing users’ child sex ads to strip them of words that might arouse suspicion (such as “lolita,” “teenage,” “rape,” “young,” “amber alert,” “little girl,” “fresh,” “innocent” and “school girl”) before publishing them and advised users on how to create “clean” postings.

Then Portman, McCaskill and their co-authors used the result of their investigation to craft a narrow legislative fix that would allow bad actors such as Backpage to be held accountable. The bill they produced allows sex trafficking victims to sue the websites that facilitated the crimes against them and allows state law enforcement officials, not just the Justice Department, to prosecute websites that violate federal sex trafficking laws. The committee also turned over all its raw documents to the Justice Department last summer, urging it to undertake a criminal review, which Justice did.

Despite all the Silicon Valley money against them, the senators never wavered. Through the sheer power of the testimony of trafficking survivors; Mary Mazzio’s documentary “I Am Jane Doe;” the evidence of crimes committed by Backpage; and the support of law enforcement, anti-trafficking advocates, 50 state attorneys general, the civil rights community and faith-based groups — as well as carefully negotiated language — they wore down most of Big Tech’s opposition. In November, Facebook finally came on board. But Google shamefully never relented in its opposition. Despite this, the act overwhelmingly passed both chambers of Congress.

You Don't Own and Cannot Access or Control Facebook's Data About You



theatlantic |  But the raw data that Facebook uses to create user-interest inferences is not available to users. It’s data about them, but it’s not their data. One European Facebook user has been petitioning to see this data—and Facebook acknowledged that it exists—but so far, has been unable to obtain it.

When he responded to Kennedy, Zuckerberg did not acknowledge any of this, but he did admit that Facebook has other types of data that it uses to increase the efficiency of its ads. He said:
My understanding is that the targeting options that are available for advertisers are generally things that are based on what people share. Now once an advertiser chooses how they want to target something, Facebook also does its own work to help rank and determine which ads are going to be interesting to which people. So we may use metadata or other behaviors of what you’ve shown that you’re interested in News Feed or other places in order to make our systems more relevant to you, but that’s a little bit different from giving that as an option to an advertiser.
Kennedy responded: “I don’t understand how users then own that data.” This apparent contradiction relies on the company’s distinction between the content someone has intentionally shared—which Facebook mines for valuable targeting information—and the data that Facebook quietly collects around the web, gathers from physical locations, and infers about users based on people who have a similar digital profile. As the journalist Rob Horning put it, that second set of data is something of a “product” that Facebook makes, a “synthetic” mix of actual data gathered, data purchased from outsiders, and data inferred by machine intelligence.

With Facebook, the concept of owning your data begins to verge on meaningless if it doesn’t include that second, more holistic concept: not just the data users create and upload explicitly, but all the other information that has become attached to their profiles by other means.

But one can see, from Facebook’s perspective, how complicated that would be. Their techniques for placing users into particular buckets or assigning them certain targeting parameters are literally the basis for the company’s valuation. In a less techno-pessimistic time, Zuckerberg described people’s data in completely different terms. In October 2013, he told investors that this data helps Facebook “build the clearest models of everything there is to know in the world.”

Facebook puts out a series of interests for users to peruse or turn off, but it keeps the models to itself. The models make Facebook ads work well, and that means it helps small and medium-size businesses compete more effectively with megacorporations on this one particular score. Yet they introduce new asymmetries into the world. Gullible people can be targeted over and over with ads for businesses that stop just short of scams. People prone to believing hoaxes and conspiracies can be hit with ads that reinforce their most corrosive beliefs. Politicians can use blizzards of ads to precisely target different voter types.

As with all advertising, one has to ask: When does persuasion become manipulation or coercion? If Facebook advertisers crossed that line, would the company even know it? Dozens of times throughout the proceedings, Zuckerberg testified that he wasn’t sure about the specifics of his own service. It seemed preposterous, but with billions of users and millions of advertisers, who exactly could know what was happening?

Most of the ways that people think they protect their privacy can’t account for this new and more complex reality, which Kennedy recognized in his closing remark.

“You focus a lot of your testimony ... on the individual privacy aspects of this, but we haven’t talked about the societal implications of it ... The underlying issue here is that your platform has become a mix of ... news, entertainment, and social media that is up for manipulation,” he said. “The changes to individual privacy don’t seem to be sufficient to address that underlying issue.”

Wednesday, April 11, 2018

Did I Miss Eric Schmidt's Testimony Before the Senate?


antimedia |  With all the attention paid to Facebook in recent weeks over ‘data breaches’ and privacy violations (even though what happened with Cambridge Analytica is part of their standard business model), it’s easy to forget that there are four other Big Tech corporations collecting just as much — if not more — of our personal info. Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft are all central players in “surveillance capitalism” and prey on our data. New reports suggest that Google may actually harvest ten times as much as Facebook.
Curious about just how much of his data Google had, web developer Dylan Curran says he downloaded his Google data file, which is offered by the company in a hub called “My Account.” This hub was created in 2015, along with a tool called “My Activity.” The report issued is similar to the one Facebook delivers to its users upon request. Whether or not these reports are comprehensive is still up in the air, but Curran says his was 5.5 GB, which is almost ten times larger than the one Facebook offered him. The amount and type of data in his file, Mr. Curran says, suggests Google is not only constantly tracking our online movements but may also be monitoring our physical locations.

Curran’s Google report contained an incredible amount documentation on his web activity, going back over a decade. But perhaps more importantly, Google had also been tracking his real-life movements via his smartphone device or tablet. This included fairly random places he’d frequented, many of the foreign countries and cities he visited, the bars and restaurants he went to while in these countries, the amount of time he spent there, and even the path he took to get there and back.
This, of course, is not new. It has been well-known for some time that Google silently tracks you everywhere you go and creates a map of your physical movements through its Location History feature. You can deactivate it by going to your timeline and adjusting the preferences.
Another Google user downloaded his file and discovered the company had been archiving his data even when he browsed in Incognito mode, a setting that advertises itself as one that does not save browsing history.

Like Facebook, Google gathers your info for sale to 3rd-party advertisers, including your name, email address, telephone number, credit card, specific ways you use Google’s services, your mode of interaction with any website that uses Google technology (such as AdWords), your device, and your search queries. And if you don’t enter your account and make adjustments, pretty much anything you do online while deploying a Google tool is tracked. Google’s policy states:
If other users already have your email, or other information that identifies you, we may show them your publicly visible Google Profile information, such as your name and photo.
But much of the location data stems from the use of Google apps like Maps or Now, which broadcast your location. If you want to stop this information from being shared, you have to go into your account settings and make adjustments.
The ostensible purpose of this data-sharing is to fine-tune your user experience, but who is benefitting more is arguable. The same year it released its new activity hub, Google also unveiled a new program that shares your email with high-value advertisers. Called Customer Match, this system streamlines consumer info so that an advertiser’s “brand is right there, with the right message, at the moment your customer is most receptive.”

Google’s policy also lists the three major categories of data collection: Things you do; Things you create; and Things that make you “you.”

The Underlying Nature of the Divide in American Politics


medium |  For several years now, political journalists, analysts, and pundits have been arguing that U.S. politics has increasingly turned into a struggle between urban and rural voters. Regional differences were once paramount, Josh Kron observed in the Atlantic after the 2012 election. “Today, that divide has vanished,” he declared. “The new political divide is a stark division between cities and what remains of the countryside.” Two years later, the Washington Post’s Philip Bump wrote that there are “really two Americas; an urban one and a rural one,” going on to observe that since Iowa was growing more urban, Democrats could count on doing better there. Instead, an ever-more urbanized and diverse nation turned not just toward Republicans, but also toward the authoritarian nationalism of Donald Trump, prompting further hand-wringing over the brewing civil war. “It seems likely that the cracks dividing cities from not-cities will continue to deepen, like fissures in the Antarctic ice shelf, until there’s nothing left to repair,” concluded a lengthy New York story on the phenomena this April.

I don’t disagree that the United States is in crisis, with fissures breaking apart our facade of national unity and revealing structural weaknesses of the republic. Our federation — and, therefore, the world — is in peril, and the stakes are enormous. As the author of American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, however, I strongly disagree with the now-conventional narrative that what ultimately divides us is the difference between metropolitan and provincial life. The real divide is between regional cultures — an argument I fleshed out at the outset of this series—as it always has been. And I now have the data to demonstrate it.

So do we know whether targeted fake news helped swing the election to Donald Trump?


scientificamerican |  When I was a teenager, my parents often asked me to come along to the store to help carry groceries. One day, as I was waiting patiently at the check-out, my mother reached for her brand new customer loyalty card. Out of curiosity, I asked the cashier what information they record. He replied that it helps them keep track of what we’re buying so that they can make tailored product recommendations. None of us knew about this. I wondered whether mining through millions of customer purchases could reveal hidden consumer preferences and it wasn’t long before the implications dawned on me: are they mailing us targeted ads?

This was almost two decades ago. I suppose the question most of us are worried about today is not all that different: how effective are micro-targeted messages? Can psychological “big data” be leveraged to make you buy products? Or, even more concerning, can such techniques be weaponized to influence the course of history, such as the outcomes of elections? On one hand, we’re faced with daily news from insiders attesting to the danger and effectiveness of micro-targeted messages based on unique “psychographic” profiles of millions of registered voters. On the other hand, academic writers, such as Brendan Nyhan, warn that the political power of targeted online ads and Russian bots are widely overblown.

In an attempt to take stock of what psychological science has to say about this, I think it is key to disentangle two prominent misunderstandings that cloud this debate.

First, we need to distinguish attempts to manipulate and influence public opinion, from actual voter persuasion. Repeatedly targeting people with misinformation that is designed to appeal to their political biases may well influence public attitudes, cause moral outrage, and drive partisans further apart, especially when we’re given the false impression that everyone else in our social network is espousing the same opinion. But to what extent do these attempts to influence translate into concrete votes? 

The truth is, we don’t know exactly (yet). But let’s evaluate what we do know. Classic prediction models that only contain socio-demographic data (e.g. a person’s age), aren’t very informative on their own in predicting behavior. However, piecing together various bits of demographic, behavioral, and psychological data from people, such as pages you’ve liked on Facebook, results from a personality quiz you may have taken, as well as your profile photo (which reveals information about your gender and ethnicity) can improve data quality. For example, in a prominent study with 58,000 volunteers, a Stanford researcher found that a model using Facebook likes (170 likes on average), predicted a whole range of factors, such as your gender, political affiliation, and sexual orientation with impressive accuracy.

In a follow-up study, researchers showed that such digital footprints can in fact be leveraged for mass persuasion. Across three studies with over 3.5 million people, they found that psychologically tailored advertising, i.e. matching the content of a persuasive message to an individuals’ broad psychographic profile, resulted in 40% more clicks and in 50% more online purchases than mismatched or unpersonalized messages. This is not entirely new to psychologists: we have long known that tailored communications are more persuasive than a one-size-fits all approach. Yet, the effectiveness of large-scale digital persuasion can vary greatly and is sensitive to context. After all, online shopping is not the same thing as voting!

So do we know whether targeted fake news helped swing the election to Donald Trump?

Tuesday, April 10, 2018

According To The Washington Post, Trump Is America's First African President...,


WaPo  |  President Trump says that in many ways, the United States’ infrastructure is like “a Third World country” and is an “embarrassment.” I don’t often agree with our Twitter warrior in chief, but the guy’s got a point. America’s roads are crumbling. Our airports are retrograde: Only four are in the global top 50, and Denver’s takes the top U.S. spot at No. 29. Sad!

This gives me an idea. If Trump thinks that the United States is truly like “a Third World country,” maybe it’s time to start treating him the same way we treat the leaders of such nations. My immodest proposal: Let’s save America from itself and the ravages of this presidency by offering Trump a big bundle of money to leave. I’m serious. There’s an African precedent for this. Let me explain.

As I said, America does resemble a developing country in many ways. It is embarrassing that one of the most powerful countries in the world still can’t get clean drinking water to citizens in Flint, Mich. Our maternal mortality rate is the worst among wealthy nations. We are awash in gun violence. Extreme poverty is so bad in parts of Alabama that some communities are testing positive for hookworm, long thought to be eradicated from the United States.

But back to Trump. Comedian Trevor Noah once said Trump, then a candidate, would be America’s first African president. He compared Trump to some of Africa’s most notorious leaders and dictators. Like former South African president Jacob Zuma, Trump blames migrants for crime. Like Gambia’s former president Yahya Jammeh, who claimed he had an herbal cure for AIDS, Trump has cast doubt on vaccines. As president, Trump has attacked the press, run a Cabinet mired in corruption scandals and given his children incredible — and undeserved — political power and access. That’s a familiar story in Africa: If you think Ivanka Trump is getting a sweet deal out of her father’s presidency, read about Angola’s Isabel Dos Santos, who was given the control of the country’s state oil firm and became Africa’s richest woman. Noah was right: Trump, not Barack Obama, is America’s first African president.

Confronting Concentrated, Autocratic Economic Power Is What Democrats Used To Do


Guardian |  In threatening a single business because of some personal quarrel with its CEO – apparently in order to squeeze friendlier coverage out of a newspaper that the CEO happens to own – Donald Trump has clearly violated the basic rules of democratic government. But it is also important to remember that the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. Amazon has been the subject of critical reporting for a number of years; anyone who reads the Guardian or the New York Times knows about the company’s alarming labour practices and its imperial economic ambitions.

Yet some critics of the president took his tweets as a signal to rally round Amazon and its chief executive. They joked about how jealous Trump must be of Bezos’s billions. They fantasised about how Bezos might contrive to humiliate the president by buying still more media properties. They clucked over Trump’s stupidity on the matter of the postal service. They snickered at his inability to understand modern internet enterprises.

Given the chance to remind the public of American liberalism’s instinctive tendency to defend cyber-oligarchs like Bezos against the claims of those it sees as uncomprehending luddites, Team Liberal jumped at it.

Along the way, they gave us a vivid reminder of why modern liberalism keeps generating – and losing to – unbelievably awful antagonists such as Trump. Put it this way: yes, Trump hates Amazon, and its chief executive, and his newspaper the Washington Post. But Trump’s blustering animosity doesn’t make Amazon an admirable company. Nor does it make the Washington Post a temple of objectivity, untainted by the capital’s culture of influence-peddling.

Take the matter of the postal service’s contract with Amazon – the cause of so much self-assured guffawing among the know-better set. Guess what? The president’s complaint here is kind of legit. While it might be technically correct that the US postal service makes a “profit” on its current arrangement with Amazon, it would also be correct to say that it could easily be making a lot more.
If you care about the postal service workforce, maybe you too might want to show some concern about the question rather than brush it off as yet more idiocy from the comb-over caudillo.

Or take the larger question of Amazon’s overwhelming and unaccountable market power, which journalists and scholars have documented painstakingly and at great length – and yet which many commentators seem to have forgotten the instant Trump started bad-mouthing Bezos. “Amazon is the shining representative of a new golden age of monopoly,” is how the Atlantic journalist Franklin Foer put it in 2014, and what he said then is even truer today.

Monday, April 09, 2018

Bet You Didn't Know That Predatory Eviction Is An American Business Model


NYTimes |  Before the first hearings on the morning docket, the line starts to clog the lobby of the John Marshall Courthouse. No cellphones are allowed inside, but many of the people who’ve been summoned don’t learn that until they arrive. “Put it in your car,” the sheriff’s deputies suggest at the metal detector. That advice is no help to renters who have come by bus. To make it inside, some tuck their phones in the bushes nearby.

This courthouse handles every eviction in Richmond, a city with one of the highest eviction rates in the country, according to new data covering dozens of states and compiled by a team led by the Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond.

Two years ago, Mr. Desmond turned eviction into a national topic of conversation with “Evicted,” a book that chronicled how poor families who lost their homes in Milwaukee sank ever deeper into poverty. It became a favorite among civic groups and on college campuses, some here in Richmond. Bill Gates and former President Obama named it among the best books they had read in 2017, and it was awarded a Pulitzer Prize.

But for all the attention the problem began to draw, even Mr. Desmond could not say how widespread it was. Surveys of renters have tried to gauge displacement, but there is no government data tracking all eviction cases in America. Now that Mr. Desmond has been mining court records across the country to build a database of millions of evictions, it’s clear even in his incomplete national picture that they are more rampant in many places than what he saw in Milwaukee.

Now We Know EXACTLY How Blacks Were Left Out Of Federal Middle Class Creation...,


NYTimes |  Critics of the Fair Housing Act have glibly attempted to dismiss attempts to end segregation as “social engineering” — as if rigid racial segregation in housing were a natural phenomenon. In fact, the residential segregation that is pervasive in the United States today was partly created by explicit federal policies that date back at least to World War I. It is now widely acknowledged that the federal insistence on segregated housing introduced Jim Crow separation in areas of the country outside the South where it had previously been unknown. It stands to reason that dismantling a system created by a set of government policies will require an equally explicit set of federal policies.

The scholar Richard Rothstein exposed the roots of this shameful process in his recent book “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.” He reported that the government’s first effort to build housing for defense workers near military installations and factories during World War I was founded on the premise that African-American families would be excluded “even from projects in northern and western industrial centers where they worked in significant numbers.”

The same toxic pattern prevailed under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, when the government created the first public housing projects for nondefense workers, building separate projects for black people, segregating buildings by race or excluding African-Americans entirely. Particularly telling is the fact that racially integrated communities were razed to make way for Jim Crow housing.

The federal insistence on rigid racial separation found its most pernicious expression in the Federal Housing Administration, created in 1934 to promote homeownership by insuring mortgages. As the sociologists Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton document in “American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass,” the government typically denied mortgages to African-Americans, shutting out even affluent black people from the suburban homeownership boom that remade the residential landscape during the middle decades of the 20th century.

Government at all levels embraced racial covenants that forbade even well-to-do African-Americans from purchasing homes outside of black communities. Cut off from homeownership — the principal avenue of wealth creation — African-Americans lost the opportunity to build the intergenerational wealth that white suburban families took for granted. The vast wealth gap that exists today between whites and African-Americans has its roots in this era.

The argument for what became the Fair Housing Act emerged forcefully in the 1968 Kerner Commission report, which blamed segregation in large measure for the riots that ravaged the country in the 60s and called for national fair housing legislation. The housing law might well have died in committee had the country not erupted in fresh violence after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968. It was signed into law a week later.

The housing act put the federal government on record as supporting open housing and prohibiting the pervasive discrimination that had locked most African-Americans out of decent accommodations and homeownership. But the version that passed in 1968 had been declawed — stripped of enforcement provisions that would have given HUD strong authority to root out discrimination. Nearly a quarter-century would pass before Congress strengthened the law. So during that time, African-Americans were left subject to the harsh discrimination the original act was supposed to preclude.

This progressive sounding law — which requires entities that receive federal money to “affirmatively further” fair housing goals — was consistently undermined by officials of both parties who had little appetite for confronting entrenched segregation.


Now We Know EXACTLY Why Black Students Were Left Out Of #NeverAgain


wlrn |  At Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School’s Black History Month Show, a student walked out on stage to read a one-page statement defending the Black Lives Matter movement.

This part of the show was not rehearsed ahead of time, it was a last-minute decision by some of the black student organizers to respond to a letter that ran in the school’s paper. 

The headline was “All Lives Matter.” In the letter, a student wrote Black Lives Matter was “ridiculous” and “they seem to be good for nothing but creating mistrust between civilians and police.”

The black students planned on submitting their rebuttal to the school paper, but they also saw an opportunity to read their response at the Black History Month Show.

“The rebuttal was pretty much saying that that the Black Lives Matter movement is a respected movement,” said Mei-Ling Ho-Shing, a junior who helped plan the Feb. 9 show.

She said she wanted to address the very real threat of police violence against black bodies.
“Just because you don't have to experience it doesn't mean that it's absurd and ridiculous,” she said.
The message wasn’t fully delivered at the assembly. A teacher had the speakers’ microphone cut off and asked the student to leave the stage before she could finish reading it.

Kyrah Simon, a junior, was watching from the audience.

“They just didn't handle it in the way that I thought would be compassionate to all the minorities,” she said of the school.

The Black Lives Matter statement was an unapproved presentation that was not rehearsed as part of the show, explained a Broward County Public School spokesperson in an email to WLRN.

“Due to the potential for disruption and breach in protocol, the student was asked to stop and leave the stage.” The email goes on to state the school “is committed to providing learning environments that foster inclusion and respect.”

Sunday, April 08, 2018

Another Musty Old War Criminal Calls Trump Fascist...,



NYTimes |  If freedom is to prevail over the many challenges to it, American leadership is urgently required. This was among the indelible lessons of the 20th century. But by what he has said, done and failed to do, Mr. Trump has steadily diminished America’s positive clout in global councils.

Instead of mobilizing international coalitions to take on world problems, he touts the doctrine of “every nation for itself” and has led America into isolated positions on trade, climate change and Middle East peace. Instead of engaging in creative diplomacy, he has insulted United States neighbors and allies, walked away from key international agreements, mocked multilateral organizations and stripped the State Department of its resources and role. Instead of standing up for the values of a free society, Mr. Trump, with his oft-vented scorn for democracy’s building blocks, has strengthened the hands of dictators. No longer need they fear United States criticism regarding human rights or civil liberties. On the contrary, they can and do point to Mr. Trump’s own words to justify their repressive actions.

At one time or another, Mr. Trump has attacked the judiciary, ridiculed the media, defended torture, condoned police brutality, urged supporters to rough up hecklers and — jokingly or not — equated mere policy disagreements with treason. He tried to undermine faith in America’s electoral process through a bogus advisory commission on voter integrity. He routinely vilifies federal law enforcement institutions. He libels immigrants and the countries from which they come. His words are so often at odds with the truth that they can appear ignorant, yet are in fact calculated to exacerbate religious, social and racial divisions. Overseas, rather than stand up to bullies, Mr. Trump appears to like bullies, and they are delighted to have him represent the American brand. If one were to draft a script chronicling fascism’s resurrection, the abdication of America’s moral leadership would make a credible first scene.

Equally alarming is the chance that Mr. Trump will set in motion events that neither he nor anyone else can control. His policy toward North Korea changes by the day and might quickly return to saber-rattling should Pyongyang prove stubborn before or during talks. His threat to withdraw from the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement could unravel a pact that has made the world safer and could undermine America’s reputation for trustworthiness at a critical moment. His support of protectionist tariffs invites retaliation from major trading partners — creating unnecessary conflicts and putting at risk millions of export-dependent jobs. The recent purge of his national security team raises new questions about the quality of advice he will receive. John Bolton starts work in the White House on Monday.

What is to be done? First, defend the truth. A free press, for example, is not the enemy of the American people; it is the protector of the American people. Second, we must reinforce the principle that no one, not even the president, is above the law. Third, we should each do our part to energize the democratic process by registering new voters, listening respectfully to those with whom we disagree, knocking on doors for favored candidates, and ignoring the cynical counsel: “There’s nothing to be done.”

Motives for the Skripal Poisoning Narrative and Sanctions Regime


CounterPunch |  In this episode we discuss the economic and political implications of the attempted murder of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal. We also touch upon the long history of collaboration between Russian oligarchs and Western banks and how it fits into the larger neoliberal project pursued after the collapse of the Soviet Union. 

Michael Palmieri: Professor Hudson welcome back to the third episode of The Hudson report. It’s great to have you here.

Michael Hudson:It’s good to be here.

Michael Palmieri: So everyone who’s been following the news media for the last week or so has become–even if they didn’t want to be–pretty familiar with the case of Sergei Skripal and his daughter. He was once a double agent for British intelligence and recently there’s been allegations that he’s been poisoned by or attempted to be poisoned by Russian intelligence services. Although much of the coverage seems to be pretty breathless in condemning Russia for an attempted assassination. You seem to have a different perspective or perhaps believe that we should be looking somewhere else and the kind of larger implications of what this may mean. So can you start us off and kind of explain what you see to be going on here right now?

Michael Hudson: Well I was puzzled at first about the whole treatment of the affair of poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter because the treatment is so out of proportion–the reaction is so out of proportion–that it’s obvious that the issue is not about the poisoning itself. First of all there’s no evidence to show Russian involvement. But the important thing to realize is that even if there were a government assassination attempt, the reaction is entirely different things. It’s really about international diplomacy and NATO maneuvering for a military posturing and the reaction has no connection at all according to the poisoning, they’re only using the poisoning as an excuse to wrap a policy that was already thought of and sort through before the actual Skripel Gate occurred. I think anyone who’s seen James Bond movies knows that 07 can kill enemies. And the U.S. assassinates people all the time. It’s killed foreign leaders like the president Allende in Latin America and the whole wave of political terrorism that followed–killing tens of thousands of union leaders, and university professors, and land reformers, and the Obama administration targeted foreigners for drone strikes. Even when this kills large numbers of civilians as collateral damage.

No foreign country broke relations with Britain, or the United States, or Israel, or any other countries using targeted assassination as a policy. So this pretense that Russia has killed someone even without any evidence or with any trial is implausible on the very surface.

So, the question is why are they doing this with Russia? Why are they imposing sanctions and mounting a great publicity campaign? And I think the answer has to lie in looking at why are they doing this now. Timing is the key. So let’s step back a minute and note what seems to be out of the ordinary in the British and US and NATO reaction.

Fuck Robert Kagan And Would He Please Now Just Go Quietly Burn In Hell?

politico | The Washington Post on Friday announced it will no longer endorse presidential candidates, breaking decades of tradition in a...