The quaint notion that the U.S. political system remotely resembles either a Republic or a Democracy should have been abandoned long ago. Any lingering illusions were surely extinguished last year, when an academic study empirically proved that the USA is nothing more than a corrupt oligarchy. I highlighted this groundbreaking piece of research in the post: New Report from Princeton and Northwestern Proves It: The U.S. is an Oligarchy. Here’s an excerpt from the study itself:
Despite the seemingly strong empirical support in previous studies for theories of majoritarian democracy, our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts. Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.
While having super rich and powerful American oligarchs running the show is one thing, the reality of the situation is actually far worse. Thanks to a recent article in Vice, we now know that foreign governments are aggressively employing their extraordinary wealth to advance their interests here on American soil. In many cases, these are autocratic regimes, which not only do not care about the best interests of the nation, they are often caught actively funding ISIS and even perpetuating 9/11 itself. Here are some excerpts from the piece:
Geithner is at heart a grifter, a petty con artist with the right manners and breeding to lie at the top echelons of American finance at a moment when the government and financial services industry needed someone to be the face of their multi-trillion dollar three card monte. He’s going to make his money, now that he’s done living his life of fantastic power after his upbringing of remarkable mysterious privilege. After reading this book and documenting lie after lie after lie, I’m convinced that there’s more here than just a self-serving corrupt official. There’s an entire culture, of figures at Treasury, the Federal Reserve, in the entire Democratic Party elite structure, and in the world of journalism, a culture in which Geithner is seen as some sort of role model.
Timothy Geithner is likely to go down in American history as one of the most dangerous, destructive cronies to have ever wielded government power. The man is so completely and totally full of shit it’s almost impossible not to notice.
The last thing I’d ever want to do in my free time is read a lengthy book filled with Geithner lies and propaganda, so I owe a large debt of gratitude to former Congressional staffer Matt Stoller for doing it for me. Stoller simply tears Geither apart limb from limb, detailing obvious lies about the financial crisis, and even more interestingly, Geithner’s bizarre bio, replete with mysterious and inexplicable promotions into positions of power.
So without further ado, here are some excerpts from this excellent article. From Vice:
Nothing is more amusing (and sad) than when I see some ignorant out of stater commenting about how nightmarish the legalization of marijuana has been for Colorado. The most high-profile and hilarious example of this came from disgraced New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who I have criticized sharply on several occasions, here, here and here.He foolishly spouted some hysterical nonsense last month when he said:
“See if you want to live in a major city in Colorado, where there’s head shops popping up on every corner and people flying into your airport just to come and get high. To me, it’s just not the quality of life we want to have here in the state of New Jersey and there’s no tax revenue that’s worth that.”
Honestly, what planet does this clown live on? As someone who actually lives in Colorado, I can tell you that the only thing that has changed since legalization is that there is a greater sense of freedom and people are no longer getting arrested in droves for non-violent drug possession charges. Let’s not forget that the police arrest someone every two seconds in America, many of which are for mere drug possession charges. Apparently, Christie thinks this is a good thing and ultimately results in this mythical wonderful “quality of life” that apparently exists in some corner of New Jersey where rainbow farting unicorns roam the countryside.
As someone who spent nearly three decades in the New York metro area, and who has lived in Colorado now for over three years, I can tell you there’s no comparison. I’ve met many, many people who have intentionally left New Jersey for Colorado, yet I’ve never met a single person who has intentionally left Colorado for New Jersey. Perhaps that person exists and is currently flying back east on his unicorn and is therefore unavailable for comment.
Anyway, while we are on the topic, the Huffington Postposted a great article comparing the two states. They note:
It appears the status quo may be finally making its moves to getting control over the heretofore free and open internet. As I and many others have noted previously, the internet is one of the most powerful tools humanity has ever devised. It frees information in a way that was simply unimaginable decades ago and empowers each of us to be as informed or uninformed as we desire.
Just last week in my post, Say Goodbye to “Net Neutrality” – New FCC Proposal Will Permit Discrimination of Web Content, I mused that in so-called “first world” countries like the U.S. the illusion of freedom must be maintained even as civil liberties are eroded. Thus censorship must be administered surreptitiously and slowly. The following plan to implement an “Internet ID” will initially only be rolled out as a pilot program in two states (Michigan and Pennsylvania), and will only deal with government services. That said, we can see where all of this is ultimately headed, and the program, called the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace, should be monitored closely going forward.
Vice reported on this a few days ago:
A few years back, the White House had a brilliant idea: Why not create a single, secure online ID that Americans could use to verify their identity across multiple websites, starting with local government services. The New York Times described it at the time as a “driver’s license for the internet.”
Sound convenient? It is. Sound scary? It is.
The vision is to use a system that works similarly to how we conduct the most sensitive forms of online transactions, like applying for a mortgage. It will utilize two-step authentication, say, some combination of an encrypted chip in your phone, a biometric ID, and question about the name of your first cat.
But instead of going through a different combination of steps for each agency website, the same process and ID token would work across all government services: from food stamps and welfare to registering for a fishing license.
The original proposal was quick to point out that this isn’t a federally mandated national ID. But if successful, it could pave the way for an interoperable authentication protocol that works for any website, from your Facebook account to your health insurance company.
I mean Texans and indictments…it’s like a Texas Bar Mitzvah. My dad was indicted, you know, I have friends that have been indicted, have gone to prison…it happens.
– Barret Brown during an RT Interview, a year before being raided by the FBI and subsequently incarcerated.
Barrett Brown is one of those figures that immediately captured my attention after first learning about him while watching the Anonymous documentary We are Legion.I soon realized that he had been incarcerated a mere three months prior to me serendipitously stumbling upon the film. It wasn’t difficult to see that he must have been onto something very, very big for the Feds to go after him so aggressively. You don’t charge a person with 105 years in prison merely as revenge for a youtube video in which you threaten an FBI agent. No, there was something much deeper going on here.
It was only after the Edward Snowden revelations that I realized exactly what was going on. As we all know by now, Snowden’s last employer was technology consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton. As soon as I read that, I remembered that the first person to bring Booz Allen to my attention as a nefarious corporate entity was none other than Barrett Brown. Barrett was focused, indeed obsessed, with the shady and dangerous relationship between defense/intelligence contractors and the U.S. government. He was getting too close to unearthing things that some of the most powerful people in the world didn’t want to see the light of day, and so he was silenced and put in a cage. Just as tyrants have always historically done to those who are smarter and more courageous and capable than they could ever be.
Anyone that looks at the Barrett Brown case with an unbiased eye will soon realize that the government is engaged in a political witch-hunt, much like what happened to internet prodigy Aaron Swartz. The case is so preposterous that Barrett was beginning to garner considerable media attention. One example of the absurdity of his case was recently highlighted by Vice in an article that points out:
Keep in mind, Barrett is facing a 45-year sentence under one indictment that alleges he shared a link to illegally obtained, hacked information. In contrast, the individual actually found guilty of hacking the data is serving a sentence of ten years.
The government of course doesn’t want people to know about this sort of thing, and so the prosecution recently requested a gag order from Texas district court judge Sam Lindsay. Sadly, last week this request was granted (check out the gag order itself here). Kevin Gosztola of Firedog Lake summarized the dangers of this gag order better than I ever could. He writes:
As the Free Barrett Brown group highlights on its website, at stake is the right to link, because one of the offenses stems from Brown’s decision to share a link to something released online from the Stratfor emails. It also implicates the First Amendment, as Brown is charged with concealing information related to journalistic sources and his own work products. It also raises issues of press freedom and selective prosecution, since it appears that in the three indictments handed down against Brown the government is targeting him for daring to expose the operations of private security and intelligence companies.
The gag order was not pursued to protect the interests of the accused. It was pursued to limit the flow of information to the press because the government has known from the beginning that what they were doing looked like vindictive or selective prosecution.
Gagging Brown and his defense team has the effect of preventing those participating in the trial from speaking to the press about the trial until after the trial has concluded. Once the trial is over, the press may have little interest in what Brown or his lawyers have to say. This means the public is deprived of the opportunity to challenge the government’s handling of the trial when it most matters, especially if the handling is abusive and in violation of Brown’s rights.
It’s ironic and disturbing that in a case where press freedom is at stake, the defendant and his lawyers have been barred from talking to the press. The prosecution asked for a gag order in part because they said articles about Brown’s case contained inaccuracies, but pointed to no articles to prove their point. Seemingly, the problem was the articles were too accurate, and therefore making the prosecution’s case look bad. The fact remains, Brown is being prosecuted for conduct that is central to journalism, and the charges related to linking should be thrown out immediately.
With all that in mind, I provide some excerpts below from the latest issue of Rolling Stone magazine, which profiles Barrett. The article is certainly not a one-sided celebration of him, and in fact I question the author’s undue focus on his drug abuse, considering substance abuse is one of the most common traits exhibited by almost every great writer that has ever lived. In any event, the story will hopefully get Barrett’s case more public attention in the face of this absurd gag order. From Rolling Stone:
Encountering Barrett Brown’s story in passing, it is tempting to group him with other Anonymous associates who have popped up in the news for cutting pleas and changing sides. Brown’s case, however, is a thing apart. Although he knew some of those involved in high-profile “hacktivism,” he is no hacker.His situation is closer to the runaway prosecution that destroyed Aaron Swartz, the programmer-activist who committed suicide in the face of criminal charges similar to those now being leveled at Brown. But unlike Swartz, who illegally downloaded a large cache of academic articles, Brown never broke into a server; he never even leaked a document.His primary laptop, sought in two armed FBI raids, was a miniature Sony netbook that he used for legal communication, research and an obscene amount of video-game playing. The most serious charges against him relate not to hacking or theft, but to copying and pasting a link to data that had been hacked and released by others.
“What is most concerning about Barrett’s case is the disconnect between his conduct and the charged crime,” says Ghappour. “He copy-pasted a publicly available link containing publicly available data that he was researching in his capacity as a journalist. The charges require twisting the relevant statutes beyond recognition and have serious implications for journalists as well as academics. Who’s allowed to look at document dumps?”
Here’s a bothersome trend that seems quite fitting for the smoke and mirrors driven, celebrity obsessed, hologram society that America has become. A company known as Crowds on Demand is actually in the business of providing fake protesters for causes, fake entourages for wanna be celebrities and seemingly even fake supporters for unpopular corporate activities.
This just furthers my feeling that action is far more important than traditional protests in the 21st Century. They key to getting out of the mess we are in is to actively create a parallel economy and even monetary system adjacent to the current terminal one. That way, when this one blows up, we already have the infrastructure in place to move to another paradigm. One characterized by peaceful, voluntary human interaction and dominated by decentralization in virtually all aspects of human existence. From Vice:
Crowds on Demand, as the name suggests, is a company that will organize a crowd for you, on demand.
The two main scenarios that require this service are: 1) You’re an aspiring celebrity who wants to make it seem like people give a shit about you, so you hire some fake fans; or 2) you believe in a cause and want to make it seem like people give a shit about it, so you hire some fake protesters.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t go along to see one of the company’s fake fan events (as they’re super secret,) so I went along to a fake protest they organized in Los Angeles, instead. While there, I sat down for a chat with Crowds on Demand’s founder and CEO, Adam Swart.
How many people are protesting here? About 20.
Are any of these guys real protesters or are they all provided by you? They’re all provided by me.
Can I ask how much they’re getting paid for this? They get $15 an hour.
Your company also provides fake fans for things, right? Yes, we surround people with an entourage. Security guards, paparazzi, fans—all the trappings of celebrity. It’s like the whole experience of being famous. You’ll be walking down the Vegas Strip or the Hollywood Walk of Fame and everyone will think you’re an A-lister.
And who uses that service? A lot of tourists will use it. People in the entertainment industry use it, people who are up-and-coming and want to increase hype for their name.
The quaint notion that the U.S. political system remotely resembles either a Republic or a Democracy should have been abandoned long ago. Any lingering illusions were surely extinguished last year, when an academic study empirically proved that the USA is nothing more than a corrupt oligarchy. I highlighted this groundbreaking piece of research in the post: New Report from Princeton and Northwestern Proves It: The U.S. is an Oligarchy. Here’s an excerpt from the study itself:
