Democracy Now Suspect? Say It Isn't So...,

strategic-culture |  The following report exposes one faux-‘progressive’ war-monger and propagandist for U.S. invasions of countries that never invaded nor even threatened the U.S.: Amy Goodman, and her “Democracy Now!” ‘alternative’ ’news’ media for Democratic Party billionaires’ international operations (such as for regime-change in Syria). These propaganda-operations (just like the acknowlegedly mainstream ones, such as TIME) promote using U.S. taxpayers’ money (the U.S. military, which is the most respected institution amongst Americans and thus receives “the benefit of the doubt” regarding any atrocities it may perpetrate — such as its having poisoned Iraq with depleted uranium, for example) — using taxpayers’ money for so-called ‘humanitarian’ reasons that are actually just sales-angles for American billionaires’ bloody conquests of resistant foreign countries (in this case, Syria). This propaganda is aimed at fooling liberals, or even “peaceniks,” into supporting what are actually hidden financial benefits for these behind-the-scenes billionaires.

Exposed here will be the depths that hypocrisy and psychopathy (both of which are pervasive at the very top of society, amongst the aristocrats and their retainers) plunge down to, in American ‘news’. This type of operation can be done only by taking advantage, especially, of well-intentioned Democrats, in order for billionaires to become enabled to use taxpayers’ money, to boost actually the private wealth not only of Democratic Party billionaires, but even of Republican Party billionaires — even of ‘the political opposition.’ The example that will be presented in detail here, typifies a depraved scheme for the warfare-state (not the welfare-state, which instead becomes proportionately reduced as the warfare-state becomes increased), a scheme (support of the military-industrial complex, or “MIC,” and its permanent-war-for-permanent-peace economy) which largely controls America, in order to build and maintain the public’s support for obscenely high ‘defense’ spending and billionaires’ ‘defense’ profits, which government-spending produces catastrophes for the victim-nations, such as Iraq 2003, Libya 2011, and Syria 2012-, all of which invasions are especially profitable for the owners of America’s ‘defense’ contractors such as General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin, which depend upon war in order to funnel money from the domestic masses, to the domestic classes, via taxes. And, of course, American resource-extraction corporations, such as oil-and-gas giants, also benefit handsomely from it, by grabbing foreign resources. Megabanks benefit, too. After all: it’s the U.S. aristocracy that’s behind this, the ultimate paymasters for these propaganda-operations (and some details of this fact of aristocratic sponsorship will be documented here).

On Second Thought, Propagation of the Faith May Be Even More Fundamental...,

vanityfair |  When I first came out to L.A. [in 1968], my friend [photographer] Joel Bernstein found an old book in a flea market that said: Ask anyone in America where the craziest people live and they’ll tell you California. Ask anyone in California where the craziest people live and they’ll say Los Angeles. Ask anyone in Los Angeles where the craziest people live and they’ll tell you Hollywood. Ask anyone in Hollywood where the craziest people live and they’ll say Laurel Canyon. And ask anyone in Laurel Canyon where the craziest people live and they’ll say Lookout Mountain. So I bought a house on Lookout Mountain. —Joni Mitchell

jaysanalysis |  It seems more and more as if we are living in a bad B movie, replete with cheesy set pieces and a Casio keyboard score – and the reason for that is because we are.  We have focused on Hollywood and propaganda often at JaysAnalysis, but we have not looked at the music industry, aside from brief mentions and a few shows.  When it comes to the score for that B movie we all live in, the best analysis I’ve read in a good while is none other than recently deceased Dave McGowan’s excellent work, Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream.  I also have the honor of Amazon classing my book, Esoteric Hollywood, with McGowan’s, in the “readers also purchased” section.  I get emails on  daily basis requesting book recommendations (which is much harder to choose than you’d expect), so I think for the spirit of my site, no better book could be suggested for a reading list than Weird Scenes (aside from my own book, of course).

McGowan’s thesis is simple: The 1960s counter-culture movement was not what it appeared to be.  In a purple haze of pot smoke, free love, booze and LSD tabs, the fog of the 60s is believed by most baby-boomers to be a genuine (monstrous for faux conservatives) reaction against the system.  From student protests to politically active musicians, the anti-war, anti-establishment ethos of the 60s was, so the story goes, a natural, organic reaction to a hawkish, greedy corporate demon, embodied in “the man,” opposed by all those revolutionaries who love freedom, expressing themselves in the “arts.”  After reading McGowan’s analysis (a self-confessed fan of this era), it would appear the mainstream view is only slightly correct – some artists were political and genuinely anti-establishment, but the big names, and the movements as a whole, were promoted and directed by design, for large-scale social engineering.

McGowan begins his argumentation by pointing to Jim Morrison’s father, Navy Admiral George Stephen Morrison, who played a central role in the Gulf of Tonkin’s false flag event.  Morrison, curiously, avoided this association, stating his parents were dead, adding fuel to his mythical narrative of having no musical training and supposedly becoming a musical shaman following ghostly encounters and hallucinogenic trips.  While some of that may have been the case (such as the trips and witchcraft initiation, for example, as shown in Oliver Stone’s The Doors), the real story is likely much closer to McGowan’s analysis – Morrison was promoted and made into an icon by the system because of these high level connections.  However, being well-connected was not the only explanation – the establishment had a specific motive of derailing any legitimate anti-war activism or artwork, as well as moving the culture into a more degenerate state for social engineering.

Protecting Profit Is The Fundamental Objective

RollingStone |  For years, YouTube profited off all kinds of extremist content; its three-strike policy was directed at copyright infringement. Its current and newly aggressive posture towards content stems from the advertiser revolt that erupted following Trump’s surprise victory. Within weeks of the 2016 election, brands like Johnson & Johnson, and ad-tech companies like AppNexus, began taking steps to distance themselves from Breitbart and other purveyors of "fake news" and extremist content. In early 2017, companies like Starbucks and Walmart started pulling their ads from YouTube, worried that their marketing was sandwiched between clips featuring foaming-at-the-mouth racists and child abusers. In a watershed moment, the global buying agency Havas pulled its ads from Google/YouTube U.K., after the Times of London detailed how ads for well-known charities were supporting Neo-Nazi articles and videos. When the influential research group Pivotal downgraded Google stock from a buy to a hold, Google suddenly grew concerned about the kind of content its proprietary algorithms had been promoting for years – intentionally and by design.

This is not a conspiracy theory worthy of a "strike," but the testimony of a former YouTube engineer named Guillaume Chaslot, who was profiled by the Guardian in early February. Chaslot, a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence, explained how his team at YouTube was tasked with designing algorithms that prioritized “watch time” alone. “Watch time was the priority,” he told the paper. “Everything else was considered a distraction… There are many ways YouTube can change its algorithms to suppress fake news and improve the quality and diversity of videos people see… I tried to change YouTube from the inside, but it didn’t work.” 

When Chaslot conducted an independent study of how his algorithms worked in the real world, he found that during recent elections in France, Germany and the U.K., YouTube "systematically amplifie[d] videos that are divisive, sensational and conspiratorial." (His findings can be seen at Algotransparency.org.) At the height of the advertising revolt, in March of last year, YouTube announced that it was "taking a hard look at our existing community guidelines to determine what content is allowed on the platform – not just what content can be monetized." CEO Susan Wojcicki announced the company would hire thousands of human moderators to watch and judge all content on the site.

YouTube's new policies were part of an industry-wide course correction. Over the past year, under the banner of combatting hate speech and fake news, Google and Facebook began to cut off search traffic and monetized content-creator accounts, not only to dangerous scam-artists like Jones, but to any site that garnered complaints or didn't meet newly enforced enforced and vaguely defined criteria of "credible" and "quality."

The Internet "Defeated Censorship"? What A Quaint Notion...,

oftwominds |  This opaque corporate censorship amounts to a private-sector Stasi, pursuing an Orwellian world of profits reaped from the censorship and suppression of dissent

My longtime friend GFB recently suggested I revisit my position on RussiaGate, the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US election.

I have been dismissive of the investigation because the idea that a pinprick of Facebook advertising ($100,000) could influence the sprawling ocean of public opinion struck me as preposterous.

But GFB suggested I look a bit deeper and consider the consequences of the Russian interference, however modest it might have been; and I have taken his sage advice and reconsidered.

I've reached the conclusion that Facebook, Google and Twitter should be operated as public utilities, not as for-profit corporations beholden solely to their shareholders and managers.

Here is my thinking:

1. As GFB so insightfully observed, Facebook says it sells advertising, as this is uncontroversial. But what Facebook is actually selling is data on its users. This enables enterprises to deliver adverts to highly specific audiences (surfers between the ages of 18 and 34 with an interest in traveling overseas, etc.), campaigns that are known only to the advertiser and Facebook, not to the targeted users. But it also enabled the Russian crew to target audiences most likely to be receptive to divisive, inflammatory content.

2. If we follow this dynamic to its conclusion, we realize that these for-profit corporations are threats to democracy, or incompatible with democracy, if you prefer that wording, as they directly enable the relatively affordable and easy sowing of intentionally divisive content. 

A recent wired.com article, Inside the Two Years that Shook Facebook--and the World, describes Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's realization that the technology he'd assumed was both incredibly profitable and helpful could be used as a force for exploitation and propaganda.

3. In response, the social media/online advertising quasi-monopolies--Facebook, Google and Twitter-- have all pursued censorship as their "solution" to "fake news."

But as we all know, censorship isn't quite as easy as the corporate technocrats reckoned; algorithms designed to sort out "fake news" inevitably end up axing legitimate content, particularly legitimate dissent, which often shares certain traits with what's conveniently labeled "fake news," that is, anything that veers from supporting the conventional status quo.

As the failure of the quick-and-dirty algorithms has became painfully visible, the for-profit quasi-monopolies have hired humans to sort the wheat of legitimate "news" (and what exactly defines legitimate news?) from the chaff of "fake news," and discovered to their dismay that the people they hired are biased against various dissenting views.

4. This opaque corporate censorship amounts to a private-sector Stasi, pursuing an Orwellian world of profits reaped from the censorship and suppression of dissent, all in the name of "getting rid of bad players."

5. Democracy depends on the free and open distribution of a wide spectrum of opinion, and an electorate which is skeptical enough to decide for themselves what's inflammatory nonsense and what contains kernels of truth that deserve further inquiry. The dominance of corporations seeking to maximize profits via selling user data invites the sort of private censorship we are now witnessing--a trend that is poisonous to a free press and democracy.

What Was Up Until Valodya Discussed His NextGen Hypersonic Weapons...,

strategic-culture |  Like was shown in the movie 1984, in its two-minute section “Two Minutes of Hate,” the US-installed Ukrainian regime on Russia’s doorstep, will soon be debating a bill to make hate of Russia obligatory to be inculcated into all Ukrainian children.

The Hill, on 9 November 2017, had the extraordinary courage to publish an opinion-piece that condemned the mainstream news-media’s charges that reports of widespread “neo-Nazi formations in Ukraine” are nothing but “Russian propaganda.” An editor who would accept a submission like that at such media as the Washington Post, New York Times, New Yorker, The Atlantic, or just about any other in America, would probably be fired or else re-assigned, so as to prevent a repeat. It’s the way to achieve mass-indoctrination, which the Ministry of Truth specializes in. Thus, among the reader-comments to that bold article, the top-listed one under “sort by best” (in other words, the most popular) was the anti-Russian “Have you counted how many neo-Nazis are in the Russian army as well?”

But there is actually nothing at all in Russia which even begins to approach the outright nazi displays and rallies that are routine in today’s Ukraine, and some of which Ukrainian marches are publicly displaying symbols from Hitler’s regime — in fact, it’s all outright illegal in Russia, which had lost (by far) more of its citizens to Germany’s Nazis (13,950,000, or 12.7% of its population) than did any other country (except Belarus — another state within the Soviet Union — which lost 25.3% of its population). (The US, which might be where the obvious bigot who wrote that reader-comment resides, lost 419,400, or 0.32% of its population.) Metaphorically spitting like that, onto such millions of victims’ corpses, is to be expected from bigots, and from the fools who “up-vote” them. Furthermore, the US CIA provided protection and employment in Germany for top members of Hitler’s equivalent to the CIA, the Gehlen Organization. (America’s CIA continues flagrantly to violate the law and hide from Congress and the American people crucial details of its relationship with the Gehlen Organization.) By contrast, the Soviet Union was unremitting in killing Nazis whom it captured. Understandably, Hitler is admired far less in Russia than in today’s far-right United States, despite any lie such as “Have you counted how many neo-Nazis are in the Russian army as well?”

You Can Already Tell That A Wrinkle In Time Is Gonna Suck And Flop

NYTimes  |  The Oscars are here: the first Oscars since powerful men started falling to #MeToo, a Trump-era Oscars, a #TimesUp Oscars, an Oscars in the shadow of “Black Panther.” Some big chairs will be empty. Some big secrets will stalk the red carpet, newly unleashed.

In an America where the ruling party seems willing to sacrifice many things — including decency and justice — to reassert white Christian masculinity as the tentpole of the universe, the best picture category offers a contrasting vision: a flaw-free indictment of that same colonial pathology (“Get Out”), a blazing affirmation of young womanhood (“Lady Bird”) and an aching gay romance (“Call Me by Your Name”), among others.

Jordan Peele has the chance to become the first black person ever to win best director; Greta Gerwig would be only the second woman. Yance Ford, whose film “Strong Island” is up for best documentary feature, would be the first trans director to win an Oscar. Vulture reported last week that some older Academy voters refused to even watch “Get Out,” calling it “not an Oscar film,” a dismissal more air horn than dog whistle. Identity politics loom large over the 90th Academy Awards, as well they should.

TV and film are in the thick of an unprecedented sociopolitical reckoning, the first ever of such scale and ferocity, a microcosm of our ever-more-literal national culture war. But to make that reckoning stick, we have to look ahead and ask ourselves what we want of this new Hollywood, and look back to avoid repeating the past.

Hollywood is both a perfect and bizarre vanguard in the war for cultural change. Perfect because its reach is so vast, its influence so potent; bizarre because television and movies are how a great many toxic ideas embedded themselves inside of us in the first place.

The Opinion Control Monopolies Are Finished

SOCIAL MEDIA FREEWAY

Twitter In The Crosshairs: Is We Sick Boss?

Stakes is High with all these global governance challenges....,

WaPo  |  Twitter is sick. And it’s sorry for infecting you. Oh, and — do you have an aspirin?

That was the gist of Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey’s mea culpa this week. In a series of tweets Thursday, Dorsey confessed that the company “didn’t fully predict or understand the real-world negative consequences” of the instant, public and global messaging it pioneered. “We aren’t proud of how people have taken advantage of our service, or our inability to address it fast enough,” he said. “We’ve focused most of our efforts on removing content against our terms, instead of building a systemic framework to help encourage more healthy debate, conversations, and critical thinking.” 

Dorsey is asking the public to help Twitter get better. It is inviting outside experts to submit proposals for ways to define and measure the “health” of conversation on the platform, presumably as a first step toward improving it. As a first attempt, Dorsey has suggested four metrics based on the work of an MIT-affiliated nonprofit: shared attention (is there overlap in what we’re talking about?); shared reality (are we using the same facts?); variety (are we exposed to different opinions grounded in shared reality?); and receptivity (are we open, civil and listening to different opinions?). 

It is good to see that Twitter is finally acknowledging its ill health. It is even better to hear it’s open to intervention. The problem is that the service may be too far gone to recover — and it is unclear whether this initiative is a last gasp or a real attempt to change.

The reasoning behind this proposal is probably not just a noble commitment to public health. Platforms such as Twitter have clearly realized that if they don’t begin to self-correct, the government is going to do it for them through regulations that may not be as gentle as those they would impose on themselves. And in the long run, the flaws in their systems represent an existential threat worth getting ahead of. Being seen as a destroyer of democracy and a net negative to public trust isn’t exactly great branding. A short-term cure, if painful, might offer the inoculation that platforms such as Twitter need for long-term survival.

#Resistance Just So Much Astroturfed Bullshit...,

I watched 2 hrs of MSNBC last night to see if there would be any criticism of Dems voting to give Trump vast spying powers: [https://t.co/AQ4qD3NHyP]. @maddow ignored it & only opinion voiced on it was @benjaminwittes praising Congress for doing "the right thing": #TheAssistance pic.twitter.com/Xm6Lh2XtGL

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) January 12, 2018

 

medium |  Anti-Trumpism has never been about opposing Trump. It’s about killing off what remains of the true left in America by bullying them into falling in line with the establishment and accusing them of supporting an evil Nazi traitor if they don’t. It’s about manufacturing support for new cold war escalations with Russia. It’s about manufacturing support for internet censorship to quash anti-establishment ideas. It’s about rescuing the career of every MSM pundit who’s been proven wrong about everything since 2015. It’s about distracting from the DNC scandal which proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that democracy does not exist in America in any meaningful way. It’s about pacing rank-and-file Democrats into alignment with Bush era neoconservatives. Opposing Trump has nothing to do with it.

No, when it comes to actual policies that actually matter, Trump and those who McResist him are playing for the same exact team. Same expansion of the US war machine, same expansion of unaccountable Orwellian surveillance networks, same increasing government opacity and persecution of whistleblowers, same increasingly militarized police state, same soul-crushing Walmart economy, same subversion of anything resembling democracy, same oligarchy, same agenda. Same play, different masks.

The two parties are both lying to you and the entire show is fake. US politics is a WWE performance with the audience deeply invested in the outcome of the match, each side of the stadium screaming for their favorite wrestler when the only determining factor is what will make Vince McMahon the most money. It’s all a fake spectacle, and it’s designed to screw you over.

Ignore the political theater and watch what actually happens, and you will see a very, very different America than the one you are told to see by proponents of mainstream narratives. Ignore their words and watch their actions, and oppose everyone who’s on the side of the machine.

Why Would The U.S. Govt Fund TOR/Dark Web If These Limited Its Power?

The Tor Project, a private non-profit that underpins the dark web and enjoys cult status among privacy activists, is almost 100% funded by the US government. In the process of writing my book Surveillance Valley, I was able to obtain via FOIA roughly 2,500 pages of correspondence — including strategy and contracts and budgets and status updates — between the Tor Project and its main funder, a CIA spinoff now known as the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). These files show incredible cooperation between Tor and the regime change wing of the US government. The files are released to the public here. —Yasha Levine

surveillancevalley |  I obtained the documents in 2015. By then I had already spent a couple of years doing extensive reporting on Tor's deeply conflicted ties to the regime change wing of the U.S. government. By following the money, I discovered that Tor was not grassroots. I was able to show that despite its radical anti-government cred, Tor was almost 100% funded by three U.S. national security agencies: the Navy, the State Department and the BBG. Tor was military contractor with its own government contractor number — a privatized extension of the very same government that it claimed to be fighting. 

This was a shocking revelation. 

For years, the Tor Project — along with other government-funded crypto tools like Signal — has been seen in almost religious terms by the privacy community as the only way to protect people from government spying online. 

The Electronic Frontier Foundation held up Tor as the digital equivalent of the First Amendment. The ACLU backed it. Fight for the Future, the hip Silicon Valley activist group, declared Tor to be “NSA-proof.” Edward Snowden held it up as an example of the kind of grassroots privacy technology that could defeat government surveillance online, and told his followers to use it. Prominent award-winning journalists from Wired, Vice, The Intercept, The Guardian and Rolling Stone — including Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald and Andy Greenberg — all helped pump up Tor's mythical anti-state rebel status. Even Daniel Ellsberg, the legendary whistleblower, was convinced that Tor was vital to the future of democracy. Anyone who questioned this narrative and pointed to Tor's lavish government support was attacked, ridiculed, smeared and hounded into silence. I know because that's what Tor supporters tried to do to me. 

But the facts wouldn't go away. 

The initial evidence that I had gathered in my reporting left little room for doubt about Tor's true nature as foreign policy weapon of the U.S. government. But the box of FOIA documents I received from the BBG took that evidence to a whole new level.

Why would the U.S. government fund a tool that limited its own power? The answer, as I discovered, was that Tor didn't threaten American power. It enhanced it. 

The FOIA documents showed collaboration between the federal government, the Tor Project and key members of the privacy and Internet Freedom movement on a level that was hard to believe:

The documents showed Tor employees taking orders from their handlers in the federal government, including hatching plans to deploy their anonymity tool in countries that the U.S. was working to destabilize: China, Iran, Vietnam, Russia. They showed discussions about the need to influence news coverage and to control bad press. They featured monthly updates that described meetings and trainings with the CIA, NSA, FBI, DOJ and State Department. They also revealed plans to funnel government funds to run "independent" Tor nodes. Most shockingly, the FOIA documents put under question Tor's pledge that it would never put in any backdoors into their software. (See below.)

Snitches Don't Get Stitches, They Get Gubmint Jobs....,

theintercept |  Patrick Ryan, a congressional candidate from New York, is leaning on his experience as a small business entrepreneur to establish his readiness for office, but he has curiously failed to mention the business he used to work in: domestic surveillance.

Seven years ago, Ryan, then working at a firm called Berico Technologies, compiled a plan to create a real-time surveillance operation of left-wing groups and labor unions, hoping business lobbyists would pay top dollar to monitor and disrupt the actions of activist groups across the country. At one point, the proposal included the idea to spy on the families of high-profile Democratic activists and plant fake documents with labor unions in a bid to discredit them.

The pitch, a joint venture with a now-defunct company called HBGary Federal and the Peter Thiel-backed company Palantir Technologies, however, crumbled in 2011 after it was exposed in a series of news reports. 

Years later, Ryan pivoted to a startup called Dataminr, a data analytics company that provided social media monitoring solutions for law enforcement clients. Dataminr, which received financial support from the CIA’s venture capital arm, produced real-time updates about activists for law enforcement. For example, according to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union of California and reported by The Intercept for the first time, Dataminr helped track social media posts relating to Black Lives Matter.

The candidate’s history of spying on progressive groups has been conspicuously absent from the personal history he has presented to voters.

The biography section of Ryan’s campaign website references only another technology business he helped found, called Second Front Systems. That company deploys “cutting-edge data analytics software to our troops on the front lines,” according to the site. Ryan continues to own a 10 percent stake in the firm, valued between $15,000 and $50,000, and has discussed his work with the startup as part of his experience of building a business and providing jobs.

But that business venture appears not to have been as successful as Ryan’s domestic surveillance work — at least not from a moneymaking perspective. His candidate ethics disclosure, which covers money made in 2016 and 2017, does not list any income from Second Front Systems — of which he is still a director — but it reveals that in 2016, Ryan collected $325,510 as a vice president of Dataminr. 

In an hourlong presentation to local Democratic voters with Ulster Activists and Move Forward New York, Ryan stressed his experience as a small business entrepreneur. At one moment during the January 7 event, Ryan referenced his job at Dataminr, but did not mention the company’s name or the type of work it engaged in. In a question about whether taking a job in Congress would constitute a pay cut, Ryan said yes and that he had taken work at another “another tech company” in which he “leads the government team.” In terms of his business career, Ryan talked at length about his efforts to employ former veterans.

South Africa and American Cities Have Much In Common

go-ogle |  Deindustrialization, disinvestment in urban public infrastructure, the expanding criminal justice system, and the privatization of correctional facilities create the nexus in which the school-to-prison pipeline is the logical outgrowth. The relationship between urban public schools and the criminal justice system was fostered by a variety of forces that systematically excluded black populations from participation in economic and social development. The economization of incarceration has further influenced a political environment where crime control is the reigning logic of governance of the urban poor. Residential and school segregation spatially and socially marked the urban poor and the black population was targeted and object of social ill.

De-industrialization of inner cities in the 1940's marked a new era in racial and social disparity. Facilitated and accelerated by government subsidies, the movement of resources out of urban centers was a precondition of poor urban isolation. As manufacturing jobs shifted out into the suburbs, and later abroad, employment opportunity for inner city folks dwindled. Federal subsidies such as FHA and VA facilitated suburbanization beginning in the late 1940's, creating a mass exodus of middle-income and white households. There is an established pattern of discretionary action on behalf of banks and public institutions that excluded black folks from partaking in these opportunities to move out into the suburbs. Access to superior living conditions, better funded schools, and higher-paying work was significantly limited. White flight signaled the beginning of a systemic disinvestment in public urban institutions. With homeowners now mobilized in America's suburbs, local politicians were advocating for resources that privileged their propertied constituents. Meanwhile, in cities, high unemployment rates compounded with low performing urban schools further ossified the color line. City schools as public institutions are thus situated within a larger political economy of post-industrial urban change. In Ghetto Schooling, Jean Anyon writes:

In the years between 1945 and 1960, a number of developments coincided to lay the foundation for the isolation and alienation of the urban poor that characterize our cities-and our city schools-today. the migration to cities of southern blacks fleeing poverty, segregation, inadequate education, federally subsidized suburbanization of white families and manufacturing firms leaving these same cities, federal and state policies that did not adequately address the problems festering in urban neighborhoods, corporate disinterest, and local political patronage and corruption.

Within two decades, major American cities had drastically transformed from predominantly manufacturing to white collar industry. In the early 1940's, New York's manufacturing industry employed a little over 40 percent of the total working population. By the 1960's, the vast majority of those jobs had been displaced by employment opportunities in the corporate, real estate, banking, financial, legal, and insurance industries, as well as civil service jobs in the growing bureaucracy of New York. Under the auspices of Fiorello LaGuardia and Robert Moses, New York was transformed from an industrial working-class city to a corporate center with a booming middle-class. Investments shifted from the funding and supporting of urban infrastructure, including city schools, to financing middle-class housing and a growing service industry. Meanwhile, in 1950's New Jersey, the dispersal of manufacturing jobs from urban centers to the suburbs (and later abroad) accelerated the pace. The relocation of the manufacturing sector outside the reach of poor urban communities of color was aided by federal subsidies worth a little over 120 billion dollars. Resources for sustaining a viable community in poor areas, many of which were predominantly black or latino, were increasingly scarce. White flight and deindustrialization shifted good jobs away from them, creating a socially isolated superfluous population without the means to access white-collar jobs.

The effects of white flight and urban disinvestment would have generational reverberations, many youth of color were effectively shut out from jobs in the high-tech industry through the lack of educational preparedness available to them. Public schools in poor urban communities did little more than warehouse children in poor conditions. The institution funneled these youth into positions of subordination in the new economuy. Urban schools prepared youth for low-wage service sector jobs through a curriculum that emphasized discipline and conformity. They also pushed insubordinate youth into the juvenile justice system. City schools just did not have the adequate resources to provide a contemporary and quality education for its poor children.

Ruthless Afrikaner and ANC Predation Configured South African Apocalypse...,

News24 |  It completely makes sense for someone to be impatient when, 23 years after the dawn of democracy, he still feels excluded from our country’s economy, while some foreigners are relatively well of.

I must also quickly hint that the issues raised by some protestors that 1) foreigners are taking their jobs; 2) foreigners shut their businesses through illicit operations; and 3) foreigners promote drug and human trafficking, are simply symptoms of our real problem. Our real problem is general lack of loyalty by the rich, who are mostly white. For example, for many of our people to be unemployed, it is mainly because of the failure by business to promote broad-based black economic empowerment. For our young sisters to be slaves of prostitution, it is because of joblessness and poverty. And for many of our foreign nationals, especially Africans, to come to South Africa, it is because of the desperate conditions in their countries, which are still reeling in the effects of neo-colonialism.

In their paper Capital flight From South Africa, 1980 – 2000, (2004), Seeraj Mohamed and Kade Finnof argue that if capital flight is not addressed, it will impede the country’s “ability to deal with structural issues such as high unemployment and concentration of wealth.” According to the paper, between 1980 and 2000, capital outflows amounted to an average of 6.6% of GDP per annum. But the paper also strangely finds that during the relatively politically stable, post-Apartheid period from 1994 until 2000, capital outflows increased to an average of 9.2% of GDP per annum.

“We suggest that the higher capital flight observed in the relatively more politically and economically stable period 1994 to 2000 (compared to the pre-democracy period 1980 to 1993) is reflective of the attitudes of wealthy white South Africans about the transition to democracy rather than political and economic uncertainty”, the paper states. Such increased outflows are strange because, in a normal environment, capital outflows are understood to be choices by individuals or firms to move money offshore because of fears of political or economic instability. But the South African experience shows that racial prejudice, anger at loss of power and sheer lack of patriotism played a more significant role in these on-going outflows. 

Guardian |  Jacob Zuma, South Africa’s unpopular president, has finally been removed. Yet the terms of his departure were deeply problematic. In what was a painfully tortuous process, the ANC could not even agree on a timeframe for his departure.

Although Zuma was embroiled in many scandals – acquitted of rape after being accused by the daughter of a friend; refusing to pay for a massive building project at his palatial home; a questionable friendship with a family alleged to have benefited from corrupt state tenders – the ANC failed to act against him for years. When asked “Why now?”, party leaders seemed dumbstruck – exemplified by the stumbling response of Ace Magashule, the new ANC secretary general, after he was pressed to explain what exactly Zuma had done to provoke the recall procedure.

A recent leak of files linked to the Gupta family, close associates of Zuma and his family, showed the depth of the patronage network. Many members of his cabinet and those responsible for state-owned enterprises and ancillary services had been sponsored by the Guptas for holidays to Dubai. It was evident that the hypocrisy would rankle the public. Even Malusi Gigaba, the minister of finance appointed by Zuma and a man closely associated with both the president and the Guptas, appeared on TV to issue Zuma an ultimatum. Many political observers noted the irony.

None of this bodes well for the fortunes of the party. The disastrous Zuma years are over, but the ANC’s renewal is far from certain. In addition to purging the party of corrupt individuals – many in the ranks of the senior leadership – Cyril Ramaphosa, the new president of the party, will have to address the corruption of the party’s internal processes. Since Zuma’s ascent, charges of vote rigging and the manipulation of the electoral system at all levels – from branches to the national executive – have been rife. Re-energising the party’s base will be an uphill battle, and some voters may choose to punish the once mighty ANC at the polls.

Still, politics in South Africa continues to be defined by history. The Democratic Alliance, the largest opposition party, continues to be seen as a party that serves the interests of the minority white population despite the fact that it is led by a young black man and has increased its black membership significantly. The rising Economic Freedom Fighters may gain at the polls, but for the moment they remain marginal in terms of electoral politics. The ANC is still likely to prevail at next year’s elections, but this certainty should not deter Ramaphosa, the country’s new leader, from enacting wide-scale party reforms.

Speaking of Heavily-Armed Citizens: Apocalypse Imminent in South Africa?

dailymail |  White South African farmers will be removed from their land after a landslide vote in parliament.

The country's constitution is now likely to be amended to allow for the confiscation of white-owned land without compensation, following a motion brought by radical Marxist opposition leader Julius Malema.

It passed by 241 votes for to 83 against after a vote on Tuesday, and the policy was a key factor in new president Cyril Ramaphosa's platform after he took over from Jacob Zuma in February.

Mr Malema said the time for 'reconciliation is over'. 'Now is the time for justice,' News24 reported.

'We must ensure that we restore the dignity of our people without compensating the criminals who stole our land.'

Mr Malema has a long-standing commitment to land confiscation without compensation. In 2016 he told his supporters he was 'not calling for the slaughter of white people - at least for now'.

A 2017 South African government audit found white people owned 72 per cent of farmland.

Rural affairs minister for the ruling African National Congress party said 'The ANC unequivocally supports the principle of land expropriation without compensation'.

'There is no doubt about it, land shall be expropriated without compensation.' 

Freedom Front Plus party leader Pieter Groenewald said the decision to strip white farmers of their land would cause 'unforeseen consequences that is not in the interest of South Africa'.

The deputy chief executive of civil rights group Afriforum said the motion was a violation of agreements made at the end of apartheid.  Fist tap Big Don.

 

Who Are America's Enemies In Africa?

strategic-culture |  Although AFRICOM is mandated to conduct “stability operations,” there is evidence that the command has engaged in fomenting military coups in Africa. In 2009, a group of Guinean army officers who attempted to assassinate Guinea's President, Captain Moussa Dadis Camara, were operating under orders of US Special Forces assigned to the US Africa Command (AFRICOM) and French military intelligence personnel. Camara, himself, seized power in a December 2008 coup in following the death of Guinea's President Lansana Conte.

Camara had apparently signed a deal with China for that nation to take over bauxite mining contracts from US and French companies with the promise that China would refine bauxite into aluminum by building a factory in Guinea. The Americans and French previously exported raw bauxite to smelters abroad. The offer of the Chinese to smelter bauxite in Guinea, with the promise of well-paying jobs for the impoverished nation, was too much for France and the United States and a "hit" was ordered on Camara, using assets in the Guinean military trained by AFRICOM in Guinea, Germany, and the United States.

The National Security Agency, America’s top signals intelligence (SIGINT)-gathering agency, has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in training intercept operators in a number of languages, including those spoken in Africa. AFRICOM has operated a redundant and dual linguist training program, mirroring the NSA program. AFRICOM has spent millions needlessly duplicating the NSA in training speakers and to be fluent in Bemba, Bete, Ebira, Fon, Gogo, Kalenjin, Kamba, Luba-Katanga, Mbundu/Umbundu, Nyanja, Sango, Sukuma, Tsonga/Tonga, Amharic, Dinka, Somali, Tigrinya, and Swahili. This is just one of many examples by which AFRICOM has served as a complete waste of money in duplicative efforts undertaken by other government agencies and elements.

The June 4, 2017 strangling death in Bamako, Mali of US Army Green Beret Staff Sgt. Logan Melgar by two US Navy SEALs, all deployed under AFRICOM’s direction, was linked to Melgar’s discovery that the two Navy personnel were pocketing official funds used by AFRICOM to pay off informants in the West African country. The fraud was yet another example of the culture of malfeasance present among AFRICOM’s ranks.

Counterinsurgency Governance vs Heavily Armed Citizens

thenation |  Governing through the counterinsurgency warfare paradigm has, since 9/11, been distilled into three core strategies. 

First, bulk collect everything about everyone in the population. This is the model of NSA’s TREASURE MAP program: “every single end device that is connected to the Internet somewhere in the world—every smartphone, tablet and computer” must be known. The data of everyone, especially the neutral or passive majority, is crucial because that is the only way to identify accurately the active minority. This has been turned on the American population since 9/11. 

Second, identify and eradicate the revolutionary minority. Total information about the entire population is what makes it possible to discriminate between friend and foe. Once suspicion attaches, individuals must be treated severely to extract all possible intelligence, with enhanced interrogation techniques if necessary; and if they are revealed to belong to the active minority, they must be disposed of through detention, rendition, deportation, or targeted assassination. Unlike conventional soldiers, these minorities are dangerous not because of their physical presence on a battlefield, but because of their ideology and allegiances. 

Third, the passive majority must be assuaged. Remember, in this new way of seeing, the population is the battlefield. Its hearts and minds must be assured. In the digital age, this can be achieved, first, by offering distractions and entertainment: a rich new environment of YouTubes and NetFlix, Facebook posts and Tweets, Amazon Prime, Second, by targeting enhanced content (such as sermons by moderate imams) to deradicalize susceptible persons—in other words, by deploying new digital techniques of psychological warfare and propaganda. Third, now, with a reality-TV presidential style that turns every new day into, in Donald Trump’s words, “a new episode of a television show.” 

These three maxims have been deployed aggressively in the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. But in a historical development that can only be described, tragically, as poetic justice, this counterinsurgency paradigm has been domesticated. Gradually—and increasingly—these strategies have come to shape the way that we, in the United States, govern ourselves domestically. It is Americans who have become the target of their own counterinsurgency strategies: total-information awareness, targeted extraction of minority suspects, and the continuous effort to prevent majority citizens from sympathizing in any way with any minorities.

Anti-Soros Equals Anti-Semite?

thenation |  The word “bizarre” does not begin to capture the everyday craziness of our politics in the Trump era. Here’s the opening paragraph of a column in National Review, titled “An Epidemic of Dishonesty on the Right,” by bona fide right-winger Kevin D. Williamson:

First it was the Holocaust, now Parkland—is there any act of depravity to which the less respectable right-wing media cannot imagine a connection for George Soros?
David Clarke, the sheriff of Fox News, insisted that the Florida students’ reaction to the shooting ‘has GEORGE SOROS’ FINGERPRINTS all over it,’ idiotic capitalization in the original and, one assumes, in his soul. The idiots at Gateway Pundit suggested that one of the student survivors was a fraud because—get this—he’d been interviewed on television before about an unrelated incident.

Had I written the above in The Nation, I would not change a word, except perhaps to add that, roughly simultaneously to all of the above, the head of the Missouri Republican Party was blaming Soros for the indictment of the state’s governor, Eric Greitens, who is accused of taking surreptitious nude photos of his mistress for the purpose of blackmail. 

The desire to attach Soros’s name to virtually everything that Trumpists seek to denounce of late is inextricably tied to the fact that the liberal Jewish billionaire/philanthropist has been turned into a bogeyman for anti-Semites the world over. Soros is today’s stand-in for the time-honored anti-Jewish slanders sensationalized in Europe and elsewhere in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. That’s why Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary practically turned Soros—whom he blames for “destroy[ing] the lives of millions of Europeans”—into his opposition party in that nation’s recent elections. It’s why, in Macedonia, a group called Stop Operation Soros, or SOS, emerged to try to defend that nation’s corrupt right-wing party. It’s why Poland’s ruling party leader, Jarosław Kaczyński, said he believes that Soros views cosmopolitan societies as “extremely easy to manipulate.” Right-wing idiots have been setting fire to effigies and portraits representing Soros in rallies from Warsaw to Tbilisi. 

One of the gifts that Trump and his “alt-right” acolytes have brought to American politics is the mainstreaming of this particular political poison. It’s no coincidence that the most recent report by the Anti-Defamation League showed a nearly 60 percent spike in anti-Semitic incidents in the US in 2017. “The president’s retweeting of white supremacists and anti-Semitic memes during the campaign and, more recently, sharing tweets from a UK racist group—those are alarming. Those tweets and rhetoric have emboldened and given encouragement to the worst anti-Semites and bigots,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League.

Russians (and Of Course One Very Prolific Israeli-American Teenager)

slate |  A new report from the Anti-Defamation League has found that the number of anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. spiked in 2017, increasing by an unprecedented 57 percent from the year before. 

The ADL report cited 1,986 incidents of harassment, threats, and vandalism targeting Jews in the country. It was the most dramatic increase since the organization started tracking these incidents in the 1970s and the second-highest number on the record. 

According to the ADL, this increase resulted in part from a near doubling of incidents on schools and college campuses. The results may also have been influenced in part by more widespread reporting. But the report also specifically cited the white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and it noted a “rising climate of incivility, the emboldening of hate groups, and widening divisions in society.” 

The rise in incidents took the form of vandalism and harassment, including 163 bomb threats against Jewish institutions. (Physical assaults against Jews actually fell, according to the report.) Two people were arrested in 2017 for repeated bomb threats. One, an Israeli American teenager, was arrested in March for making more than 150 of those threats to Jewish community centers and other Jewish institutions. “[R]egardless of the motivation of any specific perpetrator, Jewish communities were repeatedly traumatized by these assaults on their institutions and threats to their safety,” the ADL wrote in the report. “The bomb threats sowed fear and anxiety among Jews across the country.”

Moloch Doesn't Tolerate Truthful (Diverse) Political Views

qz | Earlier this month, when L’Oréal Paris UK hired British beauty blogger Amena Khan to be the face of its new hair care line, Elvive, the cosmetics company—the largest in the world—was celebrated for choosing a model wearing a hijab to front a hair campaign.

“How many brands are doing things like this? Not many,” Khan told Vogue UK at the time, noting that just because you don’t see someone’s hair doesn’t mean that they don’t take care of it. “They’re literally putting a girl in a headscarf…in a hair campaign.” It was an important step towards representation on the brand’s part.

But less than two weeks after that Vogue UK interview, Khan found out that L’Oréal Paris didn’t want her voice after all. She was asked to step down after tweets in which she condemned Israel resurfaced from 2014. Khan made the announcement personally on her Instagram:
L’Oréal Paris UK also released a statement:

We have recently been made aware of a series of tweets posted in 2014 by Amena Khan, who was featured in a U.K. advertising campaign. We appreciate that Amena has since apologised for the content of these tweets and the offense they have caused. L’Oréal Paris is committed to tolerance and respect towards all people. We agree with her decision to step down from the campaign.

This is not the first time that L’Oréal Paris UK has severed its relationship with a model because of personal views expressed on social media. In September 2017, the company dropped British transgender DJ and activist Munroe Bergdorf, who was the face of their YoursTruly True Match campaign. Bergdorf, it seems, had expressed controversial views on race and privilege.

“Honestly I don’t have energy to talk about the racial violence of white people any more,” she wrote in August on Facebook. “Most of ya’ll don’t even realise or refuse to acknowledge that your existence, privilege and success as a race is built on the backs, blood and death of people of colour.” The post was deleted shortly afterwards.

Like with Khan, L’Oréal Paris released a statement explaining their diversity policy upon firing Bergdorf:

We support diversity and tolerance towards all people irrespective of their race, background, gender and religion. […] We believe that the recent comments by Munroe Bergdorf are at odds with those values, and as such we have taken the decision to end the partnership with her.

Beauty brands claim to celebrate diversity—but they often want to pretend that that diversity doesn’t come with diverse political views.

Protocols Do NOT Require Overseers To Protect Or Serve You Peasants...,

rutherford |  In the American police state, police have a tendency to shoot first and ask questions later.
In fact, police don’t usually need much incentive to shoot and kill members of the public.

Police have shot and killed Americans of all ages—many of them unarmed—for standing a certain way, or moving a certain way, or holding something—anything—that police could misinterpret to be a gun, or igniting some trigger-centric fear in a police officer’s mind that has nothing to do with an actual threat to their safety.

So when police in Florida had to deal with a 19-year-old embarking on a shooting rampage inside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., what did they do?
Nothing.
There were four armed police officers, including one cop who was assigned to the school as a resource officer, on campus during that shooting. All four cops stayed outside the school with their weapons drawn (three of them hid behind their police cars).

Not a single one of those cops, armed with deadly weapons and trained for exactly such a dangerous scenario, entered the school to confront the shooter.

Seventeen people, most of them teenagers, died while the cops opted not to intervene.

Let that sink in a moment.

Now before your outrage bubbles over, consider that the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed (most recently in 2005) that police have no constitutional duty to protect members of the public from harm.

Yes, you read that correctly.

According to the U.S. Supreme Court, police have no duty, moral or otherwise, to help those in trouble, protect individuals from danger, or risk their own lives to save “we the people.”
In other words, you can be outraged that cops in Florida did nothing to stop the school shooter, but technically, it wasn’t part of their job description.

This begs the question: if the police don’t have a duty to protect the public, what are we paying them for? And who exactly do they serve if not you and me?

Why do we have more than a million cops on the taxpayer-funded payroll in this country whose jobs do not entail protecting our safety, maintaining the peace in our communities, and upholding our liberties?

Facebook and Youtube Seek to Suppress Crisis Actors

NYTimes |  On Wednesday, one week after the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., Facebook and YouTube vowed to crack down on the trolls.

Thousands of posts and videos had popped up on the sites, falsely claiming that survivors of the shooting were paid actors or part of various conspiracy theories. Facebook called the posts “abhorrent.” YouTube, which is owned by Google, said it needed to do better. Both promised to remove the content.

The companies have since aggressively pulled down many posts and videos and reduced the visibility of others. Yet on Friday, spot searches of the sites revealed that the noxious content was far from eradicated.

On Facebook and Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, searches for the hashtag #crisisactor, which accused the Parkland survivors of being actors, turned up hundreds of posts perpetuating the falsehood (though some also criticized the conspiracy theory). Many of the posts had been tweaked ever so slightly — for example, videos had been renamed #propaganda rather than #hoax — to evade automated detection. And on YouTube, while many of the conspiracy videos claiming that the students were actors had been taken down, other videos that claimed the shooting had been a hoax remained rife.

Facebook faced renewed criticism on Friday after it was revealed that the company showcased a virtual reality shooting game at the Conservative Political Action Conference this week. Facebook said it was removing the game from its demonstration of its new virtual reality products.

The resilience of misinformation, despite efforts by the tech behemoths to eliminate it, has become a real-time case study of how the companies are constantly a step behind in stamping out the content. At every turn, trolls, conspiracy theorists and others have proved to be more adept at taking advantage of exactly what the sites were created to do — encourage people to post almost anything they want — than the companies are at catching them.

Crisis Actors And The Gateway Pundit Smell Test

WaPo |  The bloodshed had barely ended in Parkland, Fla., last week when the Gateway Pundit added its own unique take on the students who had quickly become media-friendly gun-control advocates.

“EXPOSED,” read its headline. “School Shooting Survivor Turned Activist David Hogg’s Father in FBI, Appears To Have Been Coached On Anti-Trump Lines.” It later doubled down, asserting — without any evidence to support it — that operatives linked to liberal billionaire George Soros had “selected anti-Trump kids to be the face” of the massacre.

The stories helped spread a debunked conspiracy theory about the students being paid “crisis actors.” This was a few days after the site initially claimed that the suspected shooter was “a registered Democrat.” A few hours later, it realized it had zeroed in on the wrong Nikolas Cruz but soft-pedaled its correction, merely amending its story to say he wasn’t a Democrat, as “some sources had reported” — a group that seemed to include news sites that had cited Gateway Pundit’s story.

Gateway Pundit didn’t stop there. Reporter Lucian Wintrich, who wrote the Parkland stories, took to Twitter to denounce the protesting students as “little pricks.”

The take-no-prisoners approach — not to mention the conspiratorial tone and dubious assertions — has been the trademark of Gateway Pundit since its founding by a former corporate executive named Jim Hoft in 2004. Despite this, its influence has grown both among the fringe right and more mainstream conservatives. In 2016, it championed Donald Trump’s candidacy; Wintrich eventually received White House press credentials in the new Trump administration.

Hoft — who declined an in-person interview and only responded briefly to questions via email — rejected the label often applied to his creation: far right. The term, he said, is “used by Democrats and far left media to smear anyone who opposes the leftist narrative.”

Could Banks Restrict Gun Sales In The U.S.?

LibertyBlitzKrieg |  What Sorkin is suggesting is more of the same, although perhaps with worse consequences. If banks take action where policymakers do not or cannot, they are essentially putting themselves above the law. And if banks start playing that role, where does it end?

What if, for example, banks and credit card companies decided to stop processing payments for any retail purchase of cigarettes? After all, cigarettes are demonstrably bad for all consumers, and secondhand smoke can harm innocent people. Should banks step in to help protect society at large?

Or what if banks decided to stop processing payments for abortion clinics because they believed the practice was immoral? Is it fair for financial institutions to make abortion effectively illegal? What if President Trump called on financial firms to cut off access to environmental groups he believed were delaying projects that could bring jobs to local economies? Maybe banks should freeze Colin Kaepernick’s checking account until he stops kneeling during the national anthem?

Many of these examples are extreme, but you get my point. Just because banks can be used to have a dramatic impact on our society doesn’t mean they should be.

– From the American Banker piece: Call for Bank Crackdown on Gun Sales Is Deeply Misguided

Even in today’s world replete with plutocrat public relations masquerading as journalism, it’s rare to encounter an article simultaneously pandering, authoritarian, childish and dumb. Nevertheless, I found one, and it was unsurprisingly published in The New York Times.

The title of the piece more or less says it all, How Banks Could Control Gun Sales if Washington Won’t, but let’s go ahead and examine some of the author’s suggestions in greater detail.

Bank of America Calls Its Gunmaking Clients...,

reuters |  Bank of America Corp on Saturday became the latest financial heavyweight to take aim at gunmakers, saying it would ask clients who make assault rifles how they can help end mass shootings like last week’s massacre at a Florida high school. 

Bank of America, the second-biggest U.S. bank by assets, said its request to makers of the military-style weapons was in line with those taken by other financial industry companies to help prevent deadly gun rampages.  

“An immediate step we’re taking is to engage the limited number of clients we have that manufacture assault weapons for non-military use to understand what they can contribute to this shared responsibility,” the Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank said in a statement.