Chutzpah, thy name is Putin

David Seaton's News Links

"We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal." Vladimir Putin

"What a crazy world we are living in when Russia sounds more sane and responsible than our own government on a serious international crisis. It's as if I have blundered into some bizarre parallel universe." NYT reader, "John C", commenting on Putin's Op-Ed

Many decades from now, a historian looking at where America lost its way could use This Town as a primary source. Fareed Zakaria - CNN

The Syrian poison gas affair has been running its course while I have been reading Mark Leibovich's bestseller on how today's Washington works, "This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral-Plus, Plenty of Valet Parking!-in America's Gilded Capital", which I still haven't finished yet, because I have to put it down every few pages to keep from throwing up. However Leibovich's portrayal (undressing really) of today's Washington was a great help in understanding what Russia's Vladimir Putin has just pulled off.

Even more than Leibovich, what Putin has done, cynical cad that he is, is to have undressed Washington and after having undressed the poor lady, has "had his way with her", and then has run straight off to tell all his drinking buddies all about it and they all have had a big hairy chested laugh at Washington's expense. Vlad, "the impaler"!

What has really given me the key to where Putin is taking all of this is the closing line of his New York Times Op-Ed, "We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.". Not only does he quote Thomas Jefferson, he talks about "the Lord’s blessings", all in one phrase.

Younger readers or those with a very short memories, may not know, or may have forgotten, that during the ideological struggles of the Cold War, the United States not only defended the capitalist system, it also portrayed itself as the staunchest of defenders of religion and traditional values in the face of "godless communism". This was a smart move since, although very few people in the world have any capital, much, perhaps most, of the world's population, especially in those traditional societies, rich in natural resources, are "believers" and socially conservative. And not only in "backward" countries: this was even true in the Soviet Union itself!

During the years of glasnost, before the collapse of the USSR, I was much surprised to learn from Spanish friends who were dealing on a daily basis with Soviet officials that all these loyal Communist apparatchiks confessed that they had been baptized and indoctrinated in the forbidden Christian practices by their grandmothers from childhood. The babushkas had kept religion alive in Russia. I think that was when I first realized that the Soviet system's goose was really cooked.

What Putin is doing is to turn the entire Cold War paradigm inside out like a glove and make Russia the world's defender of social conservatism and the USA as the center of newfangled depravity.

Americans may not realize, or rightly may not care, that with reforms such as gay marriage, we have left much of the developing world behind us, scandalized, offended, or simply scratching their heads. And not just the developing world, even in Paris, a city celebrated over centuries for its sexual tolerance...

Tens of thousands of people have rallied in Paris against a new French law allowing same-sex marriage. Police estimate that up to 150,000 people joined marches that converged on the city centre, but organisers put the figure close to one million. Clashes erupted after the rally finished between far-right activists and riot police. The authorities said nearly 100 people were arrested. On Saturday 50 people were detained for blocking the Champs-Elysees. The same-sex marriage bill, which also legalises gay adoption, was signed into law by President Francois Hollande last week, after months of heated debate. French people have been bitterly divided over the issue. On Tuesday, a far-right historian shot himself dead in Notre Dame cathedral, leaving messages in which he denounced gay marriage. BBC

This is not to suggest we should change or that we don't have a right to do and think as we wish, but at the same time we should realize that this principled stand may offer openings for opportunist adversaries to exploit. This is precisely what Putin is doing:

On July 3, Mr. Putin signed a law banning the adoption of Russian-born children not only to gay couples but also to any couple or single parent living in any country where marriage equality exists in any form. A few days earlier, just six months before Russia hosts the 2014 Winter Games, Mr. Putin signed a law allowing police officers to arrest tourists and foreign nationals they suspect of being homosexual, lesbian or “pro-gay” and detain them for up to 14 days.(...) Earlier in June, Mr. Putin signed yet another antigay bill, classifying “homosexual propaganda” as pornography. The law is broad and vague, so that any teacher who tells students that homosexuality is not evil, any parents who tell their child that homosexuality is normal, or anyone who makes pro-gay statements deemed accessible to someone underage is now subject to arrest and fines. Even a judge, lawyer or lawmaker cannot publicly argue for tolerance without the threat of punishment. New York Times

As deeply shocking and offensive as we may find the above, you can believe that it plays very well in Africa, the Middle East, India, most of Asia... and perhaps in places much, much nearer home than that.

To me the sequence of events all falls together neatly: the reactionary anti-gay laws, the Snowden revelations, the Syrian ballet... the objective is to degrade the image and the narrative that USA has created for itself and for the world. If this is all coincidence and not part of a plan and he has just cleverly taken advantage of these random events, then Putin is the greatest improvisor since Charlie Parker died.

Why is he doing this?

Simply because he is a Russian nationalist and he wants Russia to again be the great power it was less than a generation ago and not have rules dictated to it from Leibovich's Washington ... and all is fair in love and war. DS

Obama's war - II: Putin toys with Obama

David Seaton's News Links

What I think distinguishes Obama from all the presidents in my lifetime, (I’m 69) is his lack of any previous experience of leadership.

Even lackluster performers such as Bush II and Carter had been governors of important states. Ronald Reagan had been two term governor of America’s most complex and important state. Even JFK, who time has proved to have been quite mediocre, had been in the Senate much longer than Obama… And Eisenhower? And Nixon And Johnson? Massive experience.

Obama had never even led a boyscout troop before entering the White House.

I think Putin, who, as to experience, is an ex-colonel of the KGB, f’crissake, is playing him like a fish. I think that this is the key to the story…

I believe that there is a direct connection between the timing of Snowden’s revelations, (which are alienating allied public opinion) and the Syrian crisis and the object of all of it is to hamstring and degrade American influence for the next two years at least.

Why? Because the Russians won’t tolerate being ruled from Washington. That simple. DS

Obama's War

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Everything about "Obama's War" is like a bad dream after a heavy meal or some sort of zombie film. It all reeks of decadence and idiocy. So stupid that I have problems writing about it.

They say that history repeats itself. I said that this was all like "a bad dream after a heavy meal", but I think it would be more accurate to have compared "Obama's war" to an endless series of belches after said meal. Forget the Cruise missiles, bring on the Eno's Fruit Salts! DS

Summertime - blogger's rest

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The endless south Europe August is well underway and I am "busy" sleeping off a a very hard year, which seems to be ending better than I expected. Before it's over I may even get a little beach in, who knows? I probably wont post much of anything till mid-September. So the best to all of you from all of me. DS

Support the fast food workers strike!

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Hundreds of fast food workers in seven cities across the U.S. walked out on their jobs Monday demanding a “living wage,” or double what many are making now. More strikes are expected this week in what’s become one of the biggest pushes to organize the industry’s historically disjointed workforce. Time Magazine

This is the message of the strikers:

We can't survive on $7.25!

In America, people who work hard should be able to afford basic necessities like groceries, rent,childcare and transportation.

While fast food corporations reap the benefits of record profits, workers are barely getting by— many are forced to be on public assistance despite having a job.

Raising pay for fast food workers will benefit workers and strengthen the overall economy. http://www.fastfoodforward.org

This is a moment of truth for anyone who calls him/herself a "progressive", this is the real thing, this is about the basics, the sort of thing the left came into existence for, it is about hard working people mired and trapped in poverty, men and women who are trying to organize, form unions and fight for decent pay and working conditions... 

This is certainly a defining, "put up or shut up" moment for the what is left of the left. These workers should not be left to struggle alone, theirs is the fight of everyone, everywhere, who works for wages. It would be beautiful if the Occupy Movement came out and all other progressive organizations came out en masse in their support. The real thing, the old fashioned, shoulder to shoulder, slogan shouting left... all about the dignity of work and workers.

Sign their petition:

Today, fast food workers from across New York City are marking the 45th anniversary of the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. by standing up for what's right and going on strike to demand better wages and the right to form a union without intimidation. Like the sanitation workers who Dr. King marched with in Memphis before his death, we are standing up for dignity and respect for all workers. Standing up takes courage. Your support helps us know we are doing what's right and we cannot be ignored. Please join us today!http://www.fastfoodforward.org/en/petition

The image/message below is making the rounds of Facebook

For me, this message from the "Mental Health Awareness Week" relates directly to the Fast Food Strikes.

Imagine the "depression, anxiety and panic attacks" suffered while trying to raise a family on an American minimum wage. 

The final exhortation also applies: ""Share the support! Let those who struggle know they are not alone..." DS

Whither Weiner's Weeny?

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Asked how he would explain the incidents to his son, Weiner said "First of all, the kid's going to grow up in Gracie Mansion. So I'm going to say, 'Kid, don't complain.'" Huffington Post

The saga of Anthony Weiner is beyond caricature. What redeeming feature does this poor creature possess that anybody should be obliged to read about him, much less be asked to vote for him to take possession of  one of the United State's most important elective offices? The Democratic party letting him run in their mayoral primary reminds me of when the Roman Emperor Caligula made his horse, Incitatus, a senator.

America has always had a wacky side and the world has always been packed with creeps exposing themselves, but what really worries me is that there are people in New York -- supposedly the world's most important city -- who were willing to vote for this guy and there were people donating money to fund his run.

What ever happened to "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind"?

Or is this just New York City's way of flipping the world the bird? DS

The "North Korean Propaganda" film: a discussion

David Seaton's News Links

A YouTube video purported to be a leaked North Korean propaganda film has been making the Internet rounds. The film, which has been called scarily accurate, criticizes Western capitalism, consumerism and celebrity culture. Update: The clip is actually from a 2012 documentary about North Korean propaganda made by New Zealand filmmaker Slavko Martinov, which has its U.S. premiere on July 31. In These Times

I am putting this up to hear your comments... I'd like to start a discussion or an argument, whatever.

Personally I think that we should have made this film about ourselves, as perhaps we have. I imagine many of us would agree with much of it. DS

PS: The full movie is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-25HOVRtaMk

Snowden... what if?

David Seaton's News Links

Disclaimer: I would start off by saying that whoever or whatever Edward Snowden is, I believe that he has performed an important and useful service to America and to the world by revealing the extent of the National Security Agency's spying programs.  This universal surveillance must be universally talked about, because for it to remain in the dark would be more hurtful to civilization than any damage that could result from it being brought to light. What follows in no way devalues the usefulness of Snowden's revelations.

Having said that... I have this possible hypothesis of what could be going on that I would like to trot out.

I have probably read too many spy novels and this may have twisted my mind all out of shape, but I keep asking myself, could Snowden be a Russian mole?

Because if he were a mole and he really took with him what he claims he took with him when he left the States, he would be an even more important mole than Kim Philby.

"Beyond technical systems, U.S. officials are deeply concerned that Snowden used his sensitive position to read about U.S. human assets, for example spies and informants overseas as well as safe houses and key spying centers. They worry this recent quote from Snowden was not an exaggeration: ” I had access to the full rosters of everyone working at the NSA, the entire intelligence community, and undercover assets all over the world. The locations of every station, we have what their missions are, and so forth.”  ABC News

The question would be, if he were really a mole, why not just run off to Russia with his stuff and retire to a nice Dasha outside Moscow and draw a fat pension for the rest of his life?

The answer would be, the Cold War is over and the USA and Russia have friendly relations and to have openly stolen the Crown Jewels, (really more the family jewels) of US intelligence, would validate Mitt Romney's campaign claim the Russia was America's "number one geopolitical foe", an affirmation much derided at the time. Obviously if Snowden had just disappeared with all his hard drives and turned up in Moscow to a hero's welcome, American-Russian relations would be "reset" to somewhere pre-Gorbachev.

Such an open rupture is something that Vladimir Putin would much like to avoid and if (big if) Edward Snowden is a mole, Putin would obviously like to have his cake and eat it too.

On a trip to Chita in Eastern Siberia on Wednesday, President Vladimir Putin reiterated that Mr Snowden would have to stop any anti-American activity if he wished to receive asylum in Russia. “We warned Mr Snowden that any action by him that could cause damage to Russian-American relations is unacceptable for us,” Mr Putin said on Wednesday. He added that the Kremlin considered good relations with Washington to be “a national objective”. “Bilateral relations, in my opinion, are far more important than squabbles about the activities of the secret services,” the president said.  Financial Times 

In order to do have and eat the cake simultaneously, Putin would have to "launder" Edward Snowden, just like laundering money. How is this done? Wikipedia explains:

Money laundering is commonly defined as occurring in three steps: first, cash is introduced into the financial system by some means ("placement"); the second involves carrying out complex financial transactions in order to camouflage the illegal source ("layering"); and, the final step entails acquiring wealth generated from the transactions of the illicit funds ("integration"). 

If Putin is laundering Snowden then "placement" would have been Hong Kong and (layering) his first revelations in the Washington Post and The Guardian, which have caused a worldwide anti-American reaction, especially among America's closest allies and a near total loss of America's moral authority to scold anyone about anything. This "layering" continued with his "where is Wally?" stay in Moscow's airport with offers of asylum from Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua. "Integration" would be his being granted asylum in Russia and the hard drives being returned to the USA (after everything on them has been read, of course). Triple play, checkmate, carom shot.

If my tentative hypothesis is correct, Vladimir Putin is perhaps the greatest spymaster of all time, and if Edward Snowden has just landed in his lap by chance, with all the damage he has done to America's human rights moral authority, then Putin is even luckier than Gloria C. MacKenzie.  DS

The death of Trayvon Martin

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Taking the whole thing into account, taking as given America's history of racial tension, thus taking as given the practical inevitability of "racial profiling" I think the root cause of Trayvon Martin's death was that George Zimmerman was allowed to carry a pistol.

Racial profiling works both ways, I don't believe that Zimmerman would have ever dared get out of his car and accost a young, black male in a hoody even to comment the weather or to ask for a light, if he hadn't been armed.

The more racist he was, the more frightened he would have been and the less willing he would have been to approach Martin. Without a gun he would have waited, safely locked in his car, for the police to arrive.

So for me it is clear: letting people carry pistols in the street caused the death of Trayvon Martin as it is the cause of death of thousands of Americans, of every possible color, every year. DS

PS: If you wanted to make a really cynical reading of Trayvon Martin’s death, think what it would have been like if “Zimmerman”, who is Hispanic, had been named “Sánchez”. None of it would probably have made the national press. Zimmerman sounds white and the whole story is of a white man killing a young black man. Latino kills black is not news.

Could a Nobel Peace Prize injure the sphincter muscle?

David Seaton's News Links

"None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available pursuant to this act shall be obligated or expended to finance directly any assistance to any country whose duly elected head of government is deposed by military coup or decree." - Foreign Operations, Export Financing, and Related Programs Appropriations Act, 2006

Obamachev

It is getting harder and harder to write about all of this stuff nowadays, every time I start, the old gag reflex kicks in.

This would all be simpler if we conceded that gradually after WWII and picking up speed dramatically after 9-11, the United States has evolved into a corporate-military-security state... in short a "regime".

And like our fellow old Cold Warriors, the Soviet Union, (which also was a corporate-military-security state-regime), we need to wrap our realpolitik in millenarian ideology... "We are building global democratic capitalism comrades".

The "end of history" and all that... while we force-feed political prisoners in our Guantanamo gulag, kill American citizens without trial, etc, etc.

The present news cycle: with the absurd "where's Wally?" of the Snowden affair... and the Egyptian coup d'etat that is not a coup d'etat, where an army that literally lives off American aid (in exchange for not troubling Israel) massacres the supporters of a legitimate, democratically elected government that they have overthrown manu militari, without the White House even giving them a sharp tug on their leash... impossible for anyone, anywhere to believe that the USA has not colluded in all of this... all of this brings us face to face with our hypocrisy... rubs our noses in it really.

Perhaps hypocrisy is to be preferred to cynicism, because as La Rochefoucauld famously said, "Hypocrisy is the homage which vice pays to virtue", which means that if good didn't exist, bad people wouldn't have to pretend to be good... Which is probably the best you can say about America's present performance on the world stage.

America’s post-September 11th national-security state has become so well financed, so divided into secret compartments, so technically capable, so self-perpetuating, and so captured by profit-seeking contractors bidding on the next big idea about big-data mining that intelligence leaders seem to have lost their facility to think independently. Who is deciding what spying projects matter most and why? The New Yorker

These days, President Obama reminds me a bit of Mikhail Gorbachev, more by the hopes that so many people around the world misplaced in both men and their Nobel Peace Prizes, rather than any personal resemblance between them. 

Gorbachev, when he was in power, was infinitely more experienced, not only politically, but though his life trajectory and with a much deeper understanding of the system he wanted to reform and also a much more sincere commitment to reforming that system and not just making beautiful speeches filled with "soaring rhetoric" about how nice "change" and "hope" were.

Gorbachev, unlike Obama, didn't just "talk the talk", he "walked the walk" and in so doing proved that intervening in huge, complex and corrupted systems, is likely to end in disaster. Obama has proved that talking is much more personally productive than walking. But like a great African American said, many years ago, "he can run, but he can't hide".

Another wise old fellow once said something to the effect that the present cannot judge itself anymore than we can judge a person by what he thinks of himself, that time alone will be the judge of our present affairs, but that old man also said that the present is always pregnant with the future and in time it will be clear that everything that is to come tomorrow was present in some form today, right now, under our noses waiting to come to fruition. Sobering thought that... nu? DS

Alexis de Tocqueville defines Barack Obama

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Alexis de Tocqueville

Quote of the day:

"Very few monarchs, from Augustus to our day, have failed to keep up the outward forms of freedom while they destroyed its substance, in the hope that they might combine the moral power of public approval with the peculiar conveniences of despotism. But the experiment has usually failed, and it has soon been found impossible to maintain a deceitful semblance of that which really has no existence."

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805- 1859) - "The Old Regime and the Revolution"

Gotcha!  

DS

Wouldn't it be nice to actually see Edward Snowden?

David Seaton's News Links

"Beyond technical systems, U.S. officials are deeply concerned that Snowden used his sensitive position to read about U.S. human assets, for example spies and informants overseas as well as safe houses and key spying centers. They worry this recent quote from Snowden was not an exaggeration: ” I had access to the full rosters of everyone working at the NSA, the entire intelligence community, and undercover assets all over the world. The locations of every station, we have what their missions are, and so forth.”  ABC News

We have the word of Vladimir Putin that Edward Snowden is alive and well, but we don't even have a picture of him holding up today's edition of Pravda to prove it.

Putin is a former KGB colonel and it is rumored that Snowden entered Russia carrying with him all the crown jewels of American intelligence.

Americans have such short memories, Russians no... Reagan had a Soviet mole that absolutely eviscerated Russia's worldwide intelligence network when Gorbachev was in power, which had quite a bearing on the collapse of the USSR... I think ex-KGB colonel and spymaster, Putin, who must have lived all that intensely, is about is about to return the favor.

If  Snowden is in Moscow, his veins are probably filled right now with sodium pentothal, and he is revealing all the places he has information hidden in the cloud and the passwords that unlock his computer, after which he just might have a "heart attack" or fall out of a window, "trying to escape". DS

Looking at the world through a PRISM

David Seaton's News Links

There is no reverse gear on the machine of governmental power. If power exists, it will be seized and exploited. To do what? That will be revealed in the course of this power’s employment. Its potential uses will automatically be discovered by those who have it or seize it, and may provide surprises. William Pfaff

Many people are asking the following question: why has the United States government been massively spying on nearly everyone in the world?

The answer is very simple: because now they can, that's why.

What was once a labor intensive trade (spying) has been made affordable thanks to recent progress in the crunching of mega-data. More and more is being done in our world with fewer and fewer people. And of course a small number of people are making huge fortunes from all of this.

Thus we can see that PRISM is a metaphor for how technology is eliminating jobs in all the developed world and subcontracting what were once lifetime jobs of total commitment to an organization and its core competencies, pension included, to under-qualified temps of unknown and questionable loyalty, while creating wealth for those who manage all of it.

To get the sort of surveillance that NSA is trying to achieve, the East German Stasi had half of the population spying and informing on the other half and on each other and they had the ministries of the West German capital, Bonn, filled with handsome young East German spies that wooed and bedded the spinster typists of the West German ministers... all of this was very labor intensive.

Sinister?

You bet, but hey, with probably a smaller expenditure percentage-wise of their GDP on black arts than the USA, the DDR had full employment.

But what the godless communists who ruled the German Democratic Republic never figured out was how to get really rich doing this stuff. Here again, America leads the way.

Of the estimated $80 billion the government will spend on intelligence this year, most is spent on private contractors. It is highly doubtful, however, that American taxpayers are getting their money’s worth. The basic justification for outsourcing government work is to get a job done better and cheaper. Outsourcing intelligence does not appear to achieve either aim. Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group, cited research from 2008 showing that the government paid private contractors 1.6 times what it would have cost to have had government employees perform the work. That may help reduce the government head count. But employing fewer government workers at greater cost to taxpayers is not downsizing. Such outsourcing simply shifts taxpayer dollars to private hands, where it can wind up in lavish executive pay packages and greater shareholder returns.(...) On top of all these problems is one that makes it hard to acknowledge, let alone solve, any of them: the revolving door between government intelligence agencies and private-sector contractors that conflates public and private interests and entrenches the status quo.   New York Times

Americans like to think of ourselves as the "good guys", a "light unto the gentiles", a "city on the hill", an example and a standard for all humanity to follow. This is getting to be much like an aging person, with eyebrows arched from botox, a dyed hairpiece and lips enhanced to ducklike proportions from injections of bovine collagen, gazing into the mirror and thinking how young they look. They are fooling themselves (which is the object of the exercise) but they aren't fooling anybody else.

Today the USA is a corporate-financial-military security state... in short a "regime".

Where is all this heading? What is to be done?

I opened with a quote from favorite international affairs commentator William Pfaff and I can think of nothing better than ending with another quote of his.

How is this system to be checked and reversed? It is a form of increasingly authoritarian state capitalism practiced by a government that rather than controlling it is controlled by it, because of the development in the past twenty years of an electoral system dominated by money and commercial television. Both parties must conform to their exigencies. All its decisive actors, government, corporate business, and communications industry, have a powerful interest in its perpetuation. Historically, such systems have fallen only to wars or revolution. William Pfaff

Will there ever be an "American Spring" like Turkey's or Brazil's? DS

Edward Snowdon, China's American dissident

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Snowdon's Hong Kong Judges

The real risk to our democracy is what this situation does to potential dissenters, whistle-blowers, investigative journalists, and anyone else who thinks that some aspect of government policy might be boneheaded, unethical, or maybe even illegal. If you are one of those people -- even on just a single issue -- and you decide to go public with your concerns, there's a possibility that someone who doesn't like what you are doing will decide to see what they can find out about you.(...) Unless you've lived an absolutely pristine online and cellular life, you might wake up to discover that some regrettable moment from your past is suddenly being plastered all over the blogosphere or discussed in the New York Times. Stephen Walt

The more we learn about PRISM, the more it seems like something dreamed up by Glenn Beck mainlining speedballs after dropping acid. And I'm sure that what we know now is only the proverbial tip of the iceberg, or the proverbial drop in the proverbial bucket or the other shoe waiting to be proverbially dropped. And for me what is coming down the proverbial pipe explains what for many is a mystery: why Snowdon has gone to ground in Hong Kong.

It appears that Hong Kong's English-legacy legal system is very robust, with a lot of guarantees that Snowdon will get a full hearing of his case. If he wants all the information he has in his possession heard in an open court filled with journalists and all in the English language, he has gone to the right place. This and not escaping from American justice seems to be his apparent goal.

It may be a very shrewd strategy... The more we know about the nuts and bolts of "Big Brother" the more sympathy and gratitude Snowdon may garner. President Obama will be wondering, "world hero... profitable to martyr?"

Many commentators are saying that the Chinese will surely want to hand him over quietly to the USA to avoid "souring" relations...Why should they do that? Think about it... How would the US treat a famous Chinese "dissident" that appeared on its shores, if China demanded his extradition? Think about how much space the American media devote to any Chinese protest or dissident.

I imagine that the Chinese must be pissing themselves with laughter! Rubbing their hands together with glee. Especially when the US has recently been accusing them of all sorts of cyber crimes. I'm sure that having the Americans hoist by their own petard having their dirtiest laundry washed in English in China will prove irresistible to the Chinese. What will the Chinese man in the street think of it all? This is not for internal Chinese consumption, but rather to erode America's "moral" authority world wide, another reason for it to play out in Hong Kong.

So I think the Chinese are going to allow Snowdon to drag the US over the coals in Hong Kong courts and expose what for the Chinese must be America's endless hypocrisy. Also the US might do a deal... drop all charges against Snowdon in exchange for him not revealing all he knows in an open court. However I think Snowdon wants to reveal all and have the transcripts of his hearing available for the whole world to read public and online. That is why he got into this mess in the first place.

Being a hero is his best life-insurance policy, but just in case, I also imagine Snowdon has placed a copy of his information somewhere safe where it will all come out if something "nasty" happens to him.

Interesting character Edward Snowdon, I'd like to learn more about him. DS

NSA scandal... I got algorithm

David Seaton's News Links

When separate streams of data are integrated into large databases — matching, for example, time and location data from cellphones with credit card purchases or E-ZPass use — intelligence analysts are given a mosaic of a person’s life that would never be available from simply listening to their conversations. Just four data points about the location and time of a mobile phone call, a study published in Nature found, make it possible to identify the caller 95 percent of the time. “We can find all sorts of correlations and patterns,” said one government computer scientist. New York Times

If the search for those planning terror attacks is like looking for a needle in a haystack, however, then first thing one needs is a haystack. Haaretz

Now that we are envisioning some guy in a National Security Agency warehouse in Fort Meade, Md., going through billions of cat videos and drunk-dialing records of teenagers, can the Ministries of Love and Truth be far behind? Maureen Dowd - NYT

Reading Jason Lanier's important new book, "Who Owns the Future", shortly before the NSA scandal broke, helped me to get a better understanding of what has happened.  Lanier says that we are giving away very valuable marketing information (data) about ourselves, our tastes, our ideas, our location from moment to moment, in exchange for free email, and places to meet others of similar tastes, etc. This is the significance of "Big Data", the masses of personal information that Amazon, Google and Facebook gather from their users, which allows them to place an ad on the page you are reading, like the CIA places a Hellfire rocket from a drone.

And Lanier maintains that the most powerful individuals and companies in the near future will be the ones with the biggest servers, "Siren-Servers", he calls them, those that amass and can process more data about their customer's (just about everyone's) lives. What the NSA has been doing naturally follows from that: the US government owns the biggest servers and they are milking the "Siren-Servers" like a herd of milch cows.

You thought that in the new Internet world that maybe Sergey Brin and Mark Zuckerberg were going to be bigger swinging dicks than the head of the CIA? Think again.

What the NSA appears to be doing is to correlate almost all the big social data that American firms possess. I don't know if at that point we really have a reason to complain, as Lanier points out in his book, we are giving all that valuable information about ourselves away for free to people like "don't be evil", Google, in exchange for "free" email, cloud space, etc.

If you took the trouble (which nobody ever does) to read the lengthy texts that come above the "AGREE" button that we eagerly click on in order to get all the free stuff, you would probably find buried in it some lawyerly little clause where you agree to let them share it with the government. Therefore this marketing and location information (not the contents of the emails) probably IS public domain.

What we really have to investigate is how the government correlates what Haaretz calls the "haystack", what are the algorithms that the NSA is using, how are threats defined, what the correlations might be. One thing is Amazon figuring out what books you might enjoy or Facebook thinking you might be interested in deep-dish pizza and quite another thing is the FBI thinking you are a threat to national security. In short we need to know how the system works, what criteria the government agencies are employing in processing all this data that we have given away for free.

What sort of results has it produced? What plots have been foiled? Whose lives have been saved? This information is essential for the public in a democracy to evaluate the tradeoffs involved. The resulting "safety" may not justify the loss of trust in those sworn to protect us.

It seems to me, with the meager information I possess, that this kind of data correlating might easily lead to discovering a network of child pornographers or cannibals, but I'm a bit skeptical about the value of what they are collecting if it is for catching serious terrorists, spies and criminals. The really serious ones are not that generous with their data. 

Back at the turn of the century, I remember reading the legendary East German spymaster, Markus Wolf's fascinating autobiography, "Man Without A Face". Way back then, Wolf laughed at anyone who would digitize any serious information so that a "schoolboy in Kansas" could access it from his bedroom and he wrote that he kept the names of his agents in his head and didn't even commit them to paper. We also know from our readings that capo mafiosi and Sea Org Scientologists do all their phoning from payphones and have masses of quarters on hand for this purpose. And who can forget that the greatest terrorist in history, Osama bin Laden probably managed to survive as long as he did after 9-11 because he only communicated using couriers.

So just to recap, we had better hurry and check to see that if "in a fit of absent mindedness " we haven't actually happily given Facebook and Google permission to give all our "secrets" to the security state. And then we should demand to know in detail what criteria are used in determining what minute flotsam in this endless ocean of data might cause any individual (presumed innocent till proven guilty) to be singled out for intense surveillance by the security forces of a democracy. DS

A new angle on fracking

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I had an interesting conversation about fracking today with a very knowledgeable Spanish executive in the energy sector.

We weren't asking ourselves about the ecological questions that arise with fracking, but more about the geopolitical-strategic factors of this technology.

This person remarked that there seemed to be a contradiction between fracking being a sort of silver bullet that was going to make the USA totally independent in energy and reduce the influence of the major producers of natural gas, which just happen to be Russia and Iran and the curious fact that most of this business is being carried out by smaller companies.

Contradictory, this person said, because energy is economically, politically and militarily strategic and if fracking is going to be the key technology in the sector, it is going to have to be tightly regulated and the government wants to have a very clear idea of who to call for quick action in an emergency: chief executive officers, associations, lobbyists, etc. This means big, multinationals, not a multitude of middle and small size outfits.

I asked what this might mean.

The executive replied that it might mean that fracking as America's "secret weapon" was all some sort of bubble created for propaganda purposes for dealing with Iran and Russia and the rapid disintegration of America's influence in the Middle East. 

In this person's opinion that would explain the multitude of small companies... because they are not "too big to fail", and when the crisis abates the government can pull the plug on them and send them crashing with none of the consequences of doing something like that to the "majors", whose leaders and shareholders would have the scalp of any politician that caused them to lose serious money in a geostrategic ploy.

This argument made a lot of sense to me and I thought I would pass it on to my readers. DS

Israel: the fiddler fiddles while the roof burns

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Samson pulls down the temple (in Gaza, no less)

Henry Kissinger famously wished that the Bible had been written in Uganda...

Israel has never been richer, safer, more culturally productive or more dynamic. Terrorism is on the wane. Yet the occupation grinds on next door with little attention to its consequences. Moreover, as the power balance has shifted from the European elite, Israel has never felt more Middle Eastern in its popular culture, music and public displays of religion. Yet it is increasingly cut off from its region, which despises it perhaps more than ever.(...) Some have likened Israel to the deck of the Titanic. That may not be right, but you can’t help wondering about that next iceberg. EthanBronner - New York Times

In this post I simply want to note my sense of foreboding, which this snippet from the New York Times encapsulates.

Readers of my blog will remember that I spent a very formative year of my youth working, living and loving in Israel... Henry Kissinger's wish that Israel had been established anywhere but the Middle East fits my sentiments exactly. What a wonderful country it could have been if it had truly been "a land without people, for a people without land" instead of the result of an ethnic cleansing and ongoing repression and humiliation whose ensuing rage has awakened the world of Islam from its slumbers and united millions of disparate peoples in their thirst for revenge.

The energy, the vivaciousness, the creativity of a people central to the narrative of civilization, are day by day creating a massive tragedy for themselves and the rest of humanity.

Here is how the American Heritage Dictionary defines "tragedy"

A drama or literary work in which the main character is brought to ruin or suffers extreme sorrow, especially as a consequence of a tragic flaw, moral weakness, or inability to cope with unfavorable circumstances.

The NYT article gives a perfect description of the curious, Club Med world of its own, where the Israelis contemplate their navels in the shadows of a sun kissed "Götterdämmerung", a word which Merriam Webster defines as:

A collapse (as of a society or regime) marked by catastrophic violence and disorder

I believe that it will be impossible for the world to assimilate or process what is about to unfold. It is difficult for me to express the heaviness of my heart. DS

My European Union Rant

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Now it is the European Union itself that is in danger, mainly but not entirely because of the economic crisis inherited from Wall Street abuses. (...) A new Europe-wide report by correspondents of the Paris newspaper Le Figaro reveals mounting disillusionment with the European Union itself among the voters of its member states. (...) Britain has made the most news about possible withdrawal from the union since the country’s most recent local elections gave the United Kingdom Independence Party nearly as high a popular vote as the ruling Conservative Party, led by Prime Minister David Cameron. (...) There was an immediate rise in demand among Conservative Party members for a referendum on quitting the EU – which the Ukip promises. William Pfaff

The British are talking about leaving the European Union... to put this conversation in perspective, I would trot out the famous quote of Mahatma Gandhi's, who, when asked what he thought of western civilization replied, "It would be a good idea".

If we agree that the heartland of western civilization is comprised of the countries, including Britain, that make up the European Union and we then consider the millions of Europeans that have been killed (by each other) over centuries in Europe's countless wars, religious and otherwise, and its assorted genocides and the millions of its inhabitants that were forced to emigrate to the ends of the earth to escape poverty and tyranny, and then contemplate its record outside Europe of: slavery, exploitation of natural resources, ethnic cleansings and genocides of peoples of color and then consider that so recently having renounced killing one another and so recently, if reluctantly, also laid down the white man's burden, then it might be a tad early and a trifle frivolous to quibble about an institution which might loosely fit Gandhi's description of a "good idea", namely the European Union?

Really all this talk makes me think of a chain smoker, who having been diagnosed with advanced lung cancer and that after having had a lung removed and undergoing intense radiation and ghastly chemotherapy, upon being told that he is in remission goes out and buys a pack of cigarettes. DS

The military sexual abuse scandal

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It would seem to me that the current, quite justified uproar about sexual violence in the US armed forces sheds a very bright light on the cognitive dissonance produced by America's view of itself as a democratic, enlightened and inclusive society that serves as a model for the world to emulate, which contrasts with the reality of a worldwide empire which is maintained by the most powerful military establishment in history and that has been at war continuously for over ten years with no positive results.

Transforming the military’s entrenched culture of sexual violence will require new approaches and a much stronger effort than what the Pentagon has done so far. That is the depressing truth of a Defense Department study released on Tuesday estimating that about 26,000 people in the military were sexually assaulted in the 2012 fiscal year, up from about 19,000 in the same period a year before. Those who thought that the crisis could not get any worse have been proved wrong. As in other years, only a small fraction of assaults were reported — 3,374 in 2012 compared with 3,192 in 2011. The study, based on anonymous surveys, suggests that the great majority of sexual assault victims do not report the attacks for fear of retribution or lack of faith that the military will prosecute these crimes. Just two days before the report’s release, the officer in charge of sexual assault prevention programs for the Air Force, Lt. Col. Jeffrey Krusinski, was arrested in Arlington County, Va., and charged with sexual battery, compounding the sense that the military is incapable of addressing this crisis. Editorial - New York Times

I would suggest that the sexual violence should be viewed in the same context as the suicide epidemic in the US armed forces:

A 2009 U.S. Army report indicates military veterans have double the suicide rate of non-veterans, and more active-duty soldiers are dying from suicide than in combat in the Iraq War (2003-2011) and War in Afghanistan (2001–present). Colonel Carl Castro, director of military operational medical research for the Army noted "there needs to be a cultural shift in the military to get people to focus more on mental health and fitness. Wikipedia

An astonishing 6,500 former military personnel (...) killed themselves in 2012, roughly equivalent to one every 80 minutes.(...) Contrary to widely held assumptions, it is not the fear and the terror that service members endure in the battlefield that inflicts most psychological damage, Nash has concluded, but feelings of shame and guilt related to the moral injuries they suffer. The Guardian

What is our armed force's job, what do they do?

Simply put, they kill people and blow things up.

What is the object of our armed forces killing people and blowing things up?

The object of war is to force an adversary by violence or threat of violence to do something they would otherwise not wish to do except to avoid that violence: in short to violently bend the will of the adversary to suit our interests.

Let us now look at a rough and ready definition of "rape", from Wordnet:

1. rape, colza, Brassica napus -- (Eurasian plant cultivated for its seed and as a forage crop)
2. rape, rapine -- (the act of despoiling a country in warfare)
3. rape, violation, assault, ravishment -- (the crime of forcing a woman to submit to sexual intercourse against her will)

I think, then, that without forcing the metaphor, you could say that the United States armed forces have, for example, "raped", Iraq, Panama and Vietnam in recent memory (all for their own good of course).

Now, who are the soldiers?

For hundreds, for thousands, of years soldiers have been very young men, brimming with testosterone, horny as chimpanzees, taught to kill people and blow things up, who spend most of their time bored to death and short periods frightened to death, and often just plain dead.

General William Tecumseh Sherman famously said that "war is hell". 

Here is picture of what he meant.

This is a famous picture, but what is on view is nothing that extraordinary in the context of war, simply that latter-Afghanistan is the first war in history where soldiers carry cellphones with cameras that can upload pictures to Internet... imagine if somebody had had a cellphone at the My-Lai massacre.

Now use your imagination and try to visualize American women soldiers urinating on dead Taliban and you get an idea of how complicated it is to fit women into this culture... as much physically as anything else. Awkward to say the least. You would ask yourself why any women in her right mind would want to be there and do that. To which a feminist could quite rightly ask in turn why any man in his right mind would want to either. Why indeed?

Which brings to one of the sorest points in the entire business: in the increasingly immobile American class structure, practically the only way a young person from a poor family can access to higher education or first class vocational training is to join the armed forces. In most developed countries all these things can be obtained for free without having to risk death or physical and mental mutilation. DS

The First of May... mayday, mayday

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May Day - Margaret Scott

"Don't waste any time in mourning. Organize..."

Joe Hill

The first of May, commemorating bloody labor unrest in Chicago, is celebrated all over the world as the universal holiday of labor... except in the USA of course.

The same USA where "red", the eternally universal color of the world's left, is now, unlike the days of Joseph McCarthy, the color of the Tea Party driven, ultra-conservative, Republican party... Often America's love of deceptive language and euphemism is beyond parody.  

It's no wonder then that many Americans are more than a little confused by now about what the left is actually about and have it confused with many worthy, but traversal, social issues.

In case anybody is interested, the left is really about worker's rights and worker's needs: everything else follows from that.

Most men and women in this world spend most of their lives working, if they can find work, and have little or nothing but their labor to exchange for the necessities of life, therefore: unemployment or bad working conditions + poor pay = a bad life for most people in the world. The left was born to change that equation.

Since the industrial revolution began, working men and women have joined together to force the owners of industry to give them better pay and working conditions, better schools for their children, affordable housing, medical care and pensions. Almost all betterment of working conditions, pay, pensions and all the rest come from that joining together and pressuring, often at the cost of blood. Little or none of it was ever given up gladly by those with the power to grant it.

This joining together and applying pressure is called "the Left". This struggle for better conditions is really what separates the "Left" from the "Right". Other things, however worthy, are mostly extraneous to this division.

For example: if you quizzed many wealthy followers of Ayn Rand or libertarians such as Rand Paul, I'm sure that you would find most of them either supportive or indifferent to gender and racial equality, to gay marriage and legalizing marijuana, but totally opposed to raising the minimum wage, regulating industries and the financial sector or raising the taxes of the one-percenters: and very much in favor of "right to work" laws.

One of the best encapsulations of  this confusion as to what the left is and what it is not was in a marvelous, near-poetic rant; one that touches all the main points in a few lines, posted by the blogger, Kurt Sperry the other day in Firedoglake under the title, "Dear Left, Enjoy Your Pot and Gay Marriage Because That’s All You’re Getting".

The establishment right has pretty much come around to the position that you may get gay married or smoke some pot without government interference, but at the same time we’ll steal your retirement, move your job to China, see that the bank can illegally foreclose you out of your home, give all your tax money away to criminal fraudsters who by the way are also our largest campaign contributors, oh and you’ll be put under microscopic total government surveillance and imprisoned or even killed without trial if that’s what we really want in the new police state we’ve created because dark Muslims booga booga. Kurt Sperry - Firedoglake

Today labor unions are weak and much of the new economy appears difficult to organize and millions of jobs have gone overseas, to previously non-industrialized, non-union, rural areas. This movement actually had begun quite some time before the jobs finally left America. 

Way back in the 1960s, the company my father worked for, a Philadelphia carpet manufacturer, moved most of their production from mills in Pennsylvania, buildings that had been in constant occupation for over a hundred years,  all the way down to north Georgia, to the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

These "runaway factories" were looking for tax breaks and unskilled, rural workers, men and women without unions willing to work for much less than the union men and women of Pennsylvania. This was before the worldwide deregulation of globalization, which you might call the "Capitalist International" made moves farther afield possible or even imaginable.

That move to Georgia was a sample of the beginning of a process that has led from American north to the American south, later to Mexico and then to Asia.

The process is just beginning to give the first signs that it might finally be running out of planet.

An event occurred a little over a hundred years ago that was a key for the American left and America's workers achieving many of the improvements in pay and working conditions that the right is doing its best to take away from them to this very day.

The fire at the Triangle Waist Company in New York City, which claimed the lives of 146 young immigrant workers, is one of the worst disasters since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. This incident has had great significance to this day because it highlights the inhumane working conditions to which industrial workers can be subjected. To many, its horrors epitomize the extremes of industrialism. The tragedy still dwells in the collective memory of the nation and of the international labor movement. The victims of the tragedy are still celebrated as martyrs at the hands of industrial greed. Cornell University

One hundred and forty six worker died, most of them young Italian and eastern European Jewish immigrant women, many of whom jumped to their deaths to avoid being burned alive.

Let's put that tragedy into perspective by comparing to a similar tragedy unfolding as this post is being written: the Rana Plaza disaster of Bangladesh.

The collapse of the building, the Rana Plaza, is considered the deadliest accident in the history of the garment industry. It is known to have claimed at least 377 lives, and hundreds more workers are thought to be missing still, buried in the rubble. The Rana Plaza building contained five garment factories, employing more than 3,000 workers, who were making clothing for European and American consumers. New York Times

Emergency workers hauling large concrete slabs from a collapsed 8-story building said Tuesday they expect to find many dead bodies when they reach the ground floor, indicating the death toll will be far more than the official 386. One estimate said it could be as high as 1,400. The illegally constructed Rana Plaza collapsed on the morning of April 24, bringing down the five garment factories inside.  AP - April 30th

One hundred and forty six to possibly ten times that number. You can see the hundred year trajectory of the international garment industry, from importing impoverished cheap labor to work in New York to exporting production to where poor people are a seemingly inexhaustible resource. 

The Triangle Fire awakened the conscience of most Americans that possessed such a thing and showed them that something was terribly wrong and that the clothes on their backs were drenched in blood and ashes. The immigrant girls of New York were no less foreign to the average American of that time than the workers of Bangladesh are today. It wasn't about "us" and "them". Being human beings was all that was needed to be "us".

Perhaps with today's communications, the video, the photographs, the access to their English language newspapers, mean that the Bengali workers  are even closer to us than the Southern Italian and Eastern European Triangle girls were for the Americans of 1911... We did this to them: the inexpensive clothes on our backs are still drenched in blood and ashes.

(T)he retailers of our RMG products in the USA and Europe cannot shirk their part of responsibility in the deaths due primarily to lack of appropriate working conditions and lax safety arrangements. For example, a year and a half before the Tazreen factory fire, the Wal-Mart shareholders had rejected by 50-1 vote a proposal that required the suppliers to report annually on the safety measures of their factories on the grounds that it would ultimately lead to consumers paying higher cost for the product. And some of the buyers have held their retailers squarely responsible for the deaths in Savar.  Editorial - Daily Star - Dhaka, Bangladesh

I said before that the "runaway factory" process is just beginning to give the first signs that it might finally be running out of planet. The workers wise up, their learning curve gets steeper and steeper, even where it is forbidden they organize   Let us see how this is playing out.

China incomes are on the rise, but the pay scale at some professional jobs in China may surprise the average American. Based on 2011 salaries, some Chinese workers are earning as much as their American counterparts. As U.S. wages go down, China wages are going up.(...) Blue collar wages in major cities are all on the rise. Salaries for skilled management positions are approaching or equal to that of developed country wages for similar positions. This will be exacerbated in the near term by the shrinking size of the working-age population. Population growth rates are expected to turn negative before the end of this decade. Forbes

The May Cheong Group, the plant’s owner, plans to cut its headcount from 12,000 a few years ago to 8,500 by the end of the year. At the same time, it is seeking to retain older workers by offering accommodation for married staff and a crèche for their children. In one room, a machine that looks as though it houses a rotating silver Christmas tree undertakes tasks that would once have required 60 workers. Instead, just two people monitor the machine as it spray-paints the chassis of hundreds of little cars. The future of manufacturing in China may well lie in factories such as this. Financial Times

Double-digit wage increases in China and a shortage of labour for factory work have prompted several companies to move to cheaper countries such as Vietnam, Bangladesh and Indonesia(...) As work moves from China to places such as Bangladesh and Cambodia, where wages rise as a result, consumers in the west will have to get used to higher prices for garments and shoes.  Financial Times

This increase in wages and living standards will mean that the Chinese instead of merely being sweated workers will become consumers and the volume of what they could consume is mind boggling. If workers in Bangladesh and Cambodia, aided by American and European consumer and labor organizations fight for their rights, something has got to give and their living standards rise. Perhaps the famous "next historical phase" is staring us right in the face.

What happens as the "runaway factories" run out of planet? As we can see from the May Cheong plant, the answer is robotization... but robots don't consume anything but electricity and not having pockets don't spend anything on clothes or recreation.

Summing up: The Left is about worker's right and needs. Nothing was ever gained without struggle. The front line of today's labor struggle is in the factories of China, Cambodia, Vietnam and Bangladesh and in the shopping malls of America and Europe. 

What should be done? 

Committed individuals and organizations in America and Europe should make every use possible of the new technologies to aid the workers of today's runaway factories to organize and fight for their rights and also to agitate to raise the consciousness of consumers. 

If that is successful and workers in Asia begin to earn decent wages they too will consume. In the countries that the factories ran away from the jobs will begin to return to where the customers with money to spend are and with good jobs those customers will spend more. 

A beneficent circle or an inflationary hell?

Stay tuned, the revolution will be tweeted. DS