Friday, July 25, 2014
Prohibition For All The Wrong Reasons:
Lee Fang: The Real Reason Pot Is Still Illegal
"Opponents of marijuana-law reform insist that legalization is dangerous—but the biggest threat is to their own bottom line... ...Given that [the Community Anti-Drug Coalition of America] is dedicated to protecting society from dangerous drugs, the event that day had a curious sponsor: Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of Oxy-Contin, the highly addictive painkiller that nearly ruined Kennedy’s congressional career and has been linked to thousands of overdose deaths nationwide. Prescription opioids, a line of pain-relieving medications derived from the opium poppy or produced synthetically, are the most dangerous drugs abused in America, with more than 16,000 deaths annually linked to opioid addiction and overdose. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that more Americans now die from painkillers than from heroin and cocaine combined. The recent uptick in heroin use around the country has been closely linked to the availability of prescription opioids, which give their users a similar high and can trigger a heroin craving in recovering addicts. (Notably, there are no known deaths related to marijuana, although there have been instances of impaired driving.)..."
Income Inequality
Zoë Carpenter: Will Phony Populists Hijack the Fight Against Inequality?
"...These days, every politician wants to be a populist, but few want a class war. The essential question for Democrats is whether or not an effective policy response demands one. Unserious contributions like Schmidt’s, if accepted as “populist” policy, threaten to reduce a question of justice to a discussion of how the 1 percent can have its cake and put its fingers in the populist pie, too. But when progressives like Warren talk about breaking up the “too big to fail” banks, reforming corporate governance structures or tying wages to productivity, they are calling for a deep rupturing of the pact that Democrats have made with the corporate elite. Many party centrists aren’t ready to end the affair. 'The essential problem with the Democratic Party is that you have, for a variety of reasons, a wide number of Democrats who are also dependent on corporate interests for their funding and their support and, you know, have not come down clearly on the side of working families,' says Bernie Sanders, one of the Senate’s most stalwart progressives. Of serious concern now is the prospect that those who don’t really want to address fundamental inequities will push Washington away from even modest reforms at the first possible opportunity. The backlash could come after the fall’s midterm elections, in which Democrats are forecast to fare poorly, due in large part to gerrymandering and a number of Senate swing races happening almost exclusively in red states. The critical task, then, lies in building a national movement strong enough to convince the Democrats that making a real commitment to workers and the poor is not only a moral but a political imperative..."
Lee Fang: The Real Reason Pot Is Still Illegal
"Opponents of marijuana-law reform insist that legalization is dangerous—but the biggest threat is to their own bottom line... ...Given that [the Community Anti-Drug Coalition of America] is dedicated to protecting society from dangerous drugs, the event that day had a curious sponsor: Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of Oxy-Contin, the highly addictive painkiller that nearly ruined Kennedy’s congressional career and has been linked to thousands of overdose deaths nationwide. Prescription opioids, a line of pain-relieving medications derived from the opium poppy or produced synthetically, are the most dangerous drugs abused in America, with more than 16,000 deaths annually linked to opioid addiction and overdose. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that more Americans now die from painkillers than from heroin and cocaine combined. The recent uptick in heroin use around the country has been closely linked to the availability of prescription opioids, which give their users a similar high and can trigger a heroin craving in recovering addicts. (Notably, there are no known deaths related to marijuana, although there have been instances of impaired driving.)..."
Income Inequality
Zoë Carpenter: Will Phony Populists Hijack the Fight Against Inequality?
"...These days, every politician wants to be a populist, but few want a class war. The essential question for Democrats is whether or not an effective policy response demands one. Unserious contributions like Schmidt’s, if accepted as “populist” policy, threaten to reduce a question of justice to a discussion of how the 1 percent can have its cake and put its fingers in the populist pie, too. But when progressives like Warren talk about breaking up the “too big to fail” banks, reforming corporate governance structures or tying wages to productivity, they are calling for a deep rupturing of the pact that Democrats have made with the corporate elite. Many party centrists aren’t ready to end the affair. 'The essential problem with the Democratic Party is that you have, for a variety of reasons, a wide number of Democrats who are also dependent on corporate interests for their funding and their support and, you know, have not come down clearly on the side of working families,' says Bernie Sanders, one of the Senate’s most stalwart progressives. Of serious concern now is the prospect that those who don’t really want to address fundamental inequities will push Washington away from even modest reforms at the first possible opportunity. The backlash could come after the fall’s midterm elections, in which Democrats are forecast to fare poorly, due in large part to gerrymandering and a number of Senate swing races happening almost exclusively in red states. The critical task, then, lies in building a national movement strong enough to convince the Democrats that making a real commitment to workers and the poor is not only a moral but a political imperative..."
Tuesday, July 15, 2014
Domestic Surveillance:
This is a classic example of manipulating online information to 'manufacture consent,' as Noam Chomsky would put it.
Glenn Greenwald: Hacking Online Polls and Other Ways British Spies Seek to Control the Internet
"The secretive British spy agency GCHQ has developed covert tools to seed the internet with false information, including the ability to manipulate the results of online polls, artificially inflate pageview counts on web sites, 'amplif[y]' sanctioned messages on YouTube, and censor video content judged to be 'extremist.' The capabilities, detailed in documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, even include an old standby for pre-adolescent prank callers everywhere: A way to connect two unsuspecting phone users together in a call. The tools were created by GCHQ’s Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG), and constitute some of the most startling methods of propaganda and internet deception contained within the Snowden archive. Previously disclosed documents have detailed JTRIG’s use of 'fake victim blog posts,' 'false flag operations,' 'honey traps' and psychological manipulation to target online activists, monitor visitors to WikiLeaks, and spy on YouTube and Facebook users. But as the U.K. Parliament today debates a fast-tracked bill to provide the government with greater surveillance powers, one which Prime Minister David Cameron has justified as an 'emergency' to 'help keep us safe,' a newly released top-secret GCHQ document called 'JTRIG Tools and Techniques' provides a comprehensive, birds-eye view of just how underhanded and invasive this unit’s operations are. The document—available in full here—is designed to notify other GCHQ units of JTRIG’s 'weaponised capability' when it comes to the dark internet arts, and serves as a sort of hacker’s buffet for wreaking online havoc... ...The 'tools' have been assigned boastful code names. They include invasive methods for online surveillance, as well as some of the very techniques that the U.S. and U.K. have harshly prosecuted young online activists for employing, including 'distributed denial of service' attacks and 'call bombing.' But they also describe previously unknown tactics for manipulating and distorting online political discourse and disseminating state propaganda, as well as the apparent ability to actively monitor Skype users in real-time—raising further questions about the extent of Microsoft’s cooperation with spy agencies or potential vulnerabilities in its Skype’s encryption..."
Economics:
Paul Krugman: Who Wants a Depression?
"...Before the financial crisis, many central bankers and economists were, it’s now clear, living in a fantasy world, imagining themselves to be technocrats insulated from the political fray. After all, their job was to steer the economy between the shoals of inflation and depression, and who could object to that? It turns out, however, that using monetary policy to fight depression, while in the interest of the vast majority of Americans, isn’t in the interest of a small, wealthy minority. And, as a result, monetary policy is as bound up in class and ideological conflict as tax policy. The truth is that in a society as unequal and polarized as ours has become, almost everything is political. Get used to it."
This is a classic example of manipulating online information to 'manufacture consent,' as Noam Chomsky would put it.
Glenn Greenwald: Hacking Online Polls and Other Ways British Spies Seek to Control the Internet
"The secretive British spy agency GCHQ has developed covert tools to seed the internet with false information, including the ability to manipulate the results of online polls, artificially inflate pageview counts on web sites, 'amplif[y]' sanctioned messages on YouTube, and censor video content judged to be 'extremist.' The capabilities, detailed in documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, even include an old standby for pre-adolescent prank callers everywhere: A way to connect two unsuspecting phone users together in a call. The tools were created by GCHQ’s Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG), and constitute some of the most startling methods of propaganda and internet deception contained within the Snowden archive. Previously disclosed documents have detailed JTRIG’s use of 'fake victim blog posts,' 'false flag operations,' 'honey traps' and psychological manipulation to target online activists, monitor visitors to WikiLeaks, and spy on YouTube and Facebook users. But as the U.K. Parliament today debates a fast-tracked bill to provide the government with greater surveillance powers, one which Prime Minister David Cameron has justified as an 'emergency' to 'help keep us safe,' a newly released top-secret GCHQ document called 'JTRIG Tools and Techniques' provides a comprehensive, birds-eye view of just how underhanded and invasive this unit’s operations are. The document—available in full here—is designed to notify other GCHQ units of JTRIG’s 'weaponised capability' when it comes to the dark internet arts, and serves as a sort of hacker’s buffet for wreaking online havoc... ...The 'tools' have been assigned boastful code names. They include invasive methods for online surveillance, as well as some of the very techniques that the U.S. and U.K. have harshly prosecuted young online activists for employing, including 'distributed denial of service' attacks and 'call bombing.' But they also describe previously unknown tactics for manipulating and distorting online political discourse and disseminating state propaganda, as well as the apparent ability to actively monitor Skype users in real-time—raising further questions about the extent of Microsoft’s cooperation with spy agencies or potential vulnerabilities in its Skype’s encryption..."
Economics:
Paul Krugman: Who Wants a Depression?
"...Before the financial crisis, many central bankers and economists were, it’s now clear, living in a fantasy world, imagining themselves to be technocrats insulated from the political fray. After all, their job was to steer the economy between the shoals of inflation and depression, and who could object to that? It turns out, however, that using monetary policy to fight depression, while in the interest of the vast majority of Americans, isn’t in the interest of a small, wealthy minority. And, as a result, monetary policy is as bound up in class and ideological conflict as tax policy. The truth is that in a society as unequal and polarized as ours has become, almost everything is political. Get used to it."
Saturday, July 12, 2014
Domestic Surveillance:
The Guardian (UK) - The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control
"At least 80% of all audio calls, not just metadata, are recorded and stored in the US, says whistleblower William Binney – that's a 'totalitarian mentality'... ...The latest Snowden leaks, featured in the Washington Post, detail private conversations of average Americans with no connection to extremism. It shows that the NSA is not just pursuing terrorism, as it claims, but ordinary citizens going about their daily communications..."
The Guardian (UK) - The open source revolution is coming and it will conquer the 1% - ex CIA spy
"Robert David Steele, former Marine, CIA case officer, and US co-founder of the US Marine Corps intelligence activity, is a man on a mission. But it's a mission that frightens the US intelligence establishment to its core. With 18 years experience working across the US intelligence community, followed by 20 more years in commercial intelligence and training, Steele's exemplary career has spanned almost all areas of both the clandestine world... ...Last month, Steele presented a startling paper at the Libtech conference in New York, sponsored by the Internet Society and Reclaim. Drawing on principles set out in his latest book, The Open-Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth and Trust, he told the audience that all the major preconditions for revolution – set out in his 1976 graduate thesis – were now present in the United States and Britain. Steele's book is a must-read, a powerful yet still pragmatic roadmap to a new civilisational paradigm that simultaneously offers a trenchant, unrelenting critique of the prevailing global order. His interdisciplinary 'whole systems' approach dramatically connects up the increasing corruption, inefficiency and unaccountability of the intelligence system and its political and financial masters with escalating inequalities and environmental crises. But he also offers a comprehensive vision of hope that activist networks like Reclaim are implementing today. 'We are at the end of a five-thousand-year-plus historical process during which human society grew in scale while it abandoned the early indigenous wisdom councils and communal decision-making,' he writes in The Open Source Everything Manifesto. 'Power was centralised in the hands of increasingly specialised 'elites' and 'experts' who not only failed to achieve all they promised but used secrecy and the control of information to deceive the public into allowing them to retain power over community resources that they ultimately looted,'..."
The Guardian (UK) - The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control
"At least 80% of all audio calls, not just metadata, are recorded and stored in the US, says whistleblower William Binney – that's a 'totalitarian mentality'... ...The latest Snowden leaks, featured in the Washington Post, detail private conversations of average Americans with no connection to extremism. It shows that the NSA is not just pursuing terrorism, as it claims, but ordinary citizens going about their daily communications..."
The Guardian (UK) - The open source revolution is coming and it will conquer the 1% - ex CIA spy
"Robert David Steele, former Marine, CIA case officer, and US co-founder of the US Marine Corps intelligence activity, is a man on a mission. But it's a mission that frightens the US intelligence establishment to its core. With 18 years experience working across the US intelligence community, followed by 20 more years in commercial intelligence and training, Steele's exemplary career has spanned almost all areas of both the clandestine world... ...Last month, Steele presented a startling paper at the Libtech conference in New York, sponsored by the Internet Society and Reclaim. Drawing on principles set out in his latest book, The Open-Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth and Trust, he told the audience that all the major preconditions for revolution – set out in his 1976 graduate thesis – were now present in the United States and Britain. Steele's book is a must-read, a powerful yet still pragmatic roadmap to a new civilisational paradigm that simultaneously offers a trenchant, unrelenting critique of the prevailing global order. His interdisciplinary 'whole systems' approach dramatically connects up the increasing corruption, inefficiency and unaccountability of the intelligence system and its political and financial masters with escalating inequalities and environmental crises. But he also offers a comprehensive vision of hope that activist networks like Reclaim are implementing today. 'We are at the end of a five-thousand-year-plus historical process during which human society grew in scale while it abandoned the early indigenous wisdom councils and communal decision-making,' he writes in The Open Source Everything Manifesto. 'Power was centralised in the hands of increasingly specialised 'elites' and 'experts' who not only failed to achieve all they promised but used secrecy and the control of information to deceive the public into allowing them to retain power over community resources that they ultimately looted,'..."
