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FOCUS | It's Memorial Day and the Country Is at War With Itself |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
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Monday, 26 May 2014 11:22 |
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Pierce writes: "This is a country now at war with itself. This is a phrase that is generally tossed about when political debate gets too heated. It was popular to say it back in the 1960s, when it seemed quite possibly to be true, with leaders bleeding out on balconies in Memphis or kitchen floors in Los Angeles, and students bleeding out from gunfire on college campuses, and half-baked revolutionary idiots blowing themselves up in Greenwich Village. But this is not the same thing. This is a country at war with itself for profit."
A makeshift memorial stands in front of the IV Deli yesterday in Isla Vista, California. (photo: David McNew/Getty Images)
It's Memorial Day and the Country Is at War With Itself
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
26 May 14
 t the beginning of this Memorial Day weekend, another American decided to make war on his fellow Americans. Elliot Rodger preceded his hostilities by announcing to the world, in terms so firm and clear as to command its assent, the casus belli under which he presumed to make war. It was as formal, if decidedly twisted, declaration of war, which gives Elliot Rodger's war on his fellow citizens something that no American president has seen fit to request for any military action the country has taken since World War II.
This is a country now at war with itself. This is a phrase that is generally tossed about when political debate gets too heated. It was popular to say it back in the 1960s, when it seemed quite possibly to be true, with leaders bleeding out on balconies in Memphis or kitchen floors in Los Angeles, and students bleeding out from gunfire on college campuses, and half-baked revolutionary idiots blowing themselves up in Greenwich Village. But this is not the same thing. This is a country at war with itself for profit. This is a country at war with itself because its ruling elite is too cowed, or too well-bribed, or too cowardly to recognize that there are people who are getting rich arming both sides, because the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, so you make sure that it's easy for the bad guys to get guns in order to make millions selling the guns to the good guys. This is a dynamic not unfamiliar to the people in countries where brushfire conflicts and civil wars are kept alive because distant people are making a buck off them. In Africa, war is made over diamonds and rare earths. In South America, war is made over cocaine. Here, for any number of reasons - because Adam Lanza went crazy or because Elliot Rodger couldn't get laid - and the only constant in all those wars is the fact somebody gets rich arming both sides.
That is what has come home to roost now. This is a country at war with itself because cynical people have told its citizens that their fellow citizens - all of them, because you can never tell, can you? -- are the enemy. This is a country in which citizens make war on each other because that's what they are being encouraged to do. Someone finds it more profitable to maintain the war than they do to stop it.
It is a guerrilla war, fought on darkened streets against children in hoodies brandishing Skittles, against children in cars who play their music too loudly, against evanescent fears and the ghosts born of ancient prejudice and cultivated dread. Its battles are sudden but, sadly, no longer surprising. The whole country is the battleground now because cynical people have made it so. Our movie theaters are our Wheatfields, our Peach Orchards, or our Bloody Lanes. A quiet college campus is the Hornet's Nest. An elementary school is Cemetery Ridge. Those are the killing zones. The enemy, we are told, is everywhere, and nowhere. This is the country that Wayne LaPierre, that malignant profiteer, talks about when he says, at he did at a conservative conference last spring:
In this uncertain world, surrounded by lies and corruption, there is no greater freedom than the right to survive, to protect our families with all the rifles, shotguns and handguns we want. We know, in the world that surrounds us, there are terrorists and home invaders and drug cartels and car-jackers and knock-out gamers and rapers, haters, campus killers, airport killers, shopping mall killers, road-rage killers, and killers who scheme to destroy our country with massive storms of violence against our power grids, or vicious waves of chemicals or disease that could collapse the society that sustains us all. I ask you. Do you trust this government to protect you?
Wayne LaPierre gets paid when his masters sell guns to the bad guys. Wayne LaPierre gets paid when his masters sell guns to the good guys because of the guns he's already arranged to sell to the bad guys. Wayne LaPierre is the strange white man in the Congo who knows where he can get you some AK's. He's the shadowy fellow in the coffee shop in Kabul who knows where RPG's can be had, cheap. He's the well-dressed, silken-voiced operator, sipping his tea on a cool and breezy veranda outside of Bogota, who smiles at you and shows you on the map where you can pick up your order, because it is time once again for you to make war and him to make money. His look is the smooth and shiny black of the vulture's feathers. He feasts on the carrion of nations.
So that is Memorial Day this year, in a country in which its citizens are encouraged to make war on each other because not enough people care enough to stop it. There are more flowers in more places and there is no peace in sight, because we have chosen as a country to slake our appetite for it with blood. The dead are not honored in this war. Only the instrumentality of their murder is, god help us all.
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Thomas Paine, Our Contemporary |
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Monday, 26 May 2014 08:38 |
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Hedges writes: "Paine's brilliance as a writer—his essay 'Common Sense' is one of the finest pieces of rhetorical writing in the English language—is matched by his clear and unsentimental understanding of British imperial power. "
Thomas Paine. (painting: Auguste Millière)
Thomas Paine, Our Contemporary
By Chris Hedges, TruthDig
26 May 14
 ornel West, Richard D. Wolff and I, along with moderator Laura Flanders, next Sunday will inaugurate “The Anatomy of Revolution,” a series of panel discussions focusing on modern revolutionary theorists. This first event will be part of a two-day conference in New York City sponsored by the Left Forum, and nine other discussions by West, Wolff and me will follow in other venues later this year.
Sunday’s event will be about Thomas Paine, the author of “Common Sense,” “The Rights of Man” and “The Age of Reason”—the most widely read political essays of the 18th century, works that established the standards by which rebellion is morally and legally permissible. We will ask whether the conditions for revolt set by Paine have been met with the rise of the corporate state. Should Paine’s call for the overthrow of British tyranny inspire our own call for revolution? And if it should, to echo Vladimir Lenin, what must be done?
Thomas Paine is America’s one great revolutionary theorist. We have produced a slew of admirable anarchists—Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman, Dorothy Day and Noam Chomsky—and radical leaders have arisen out of oppressed groups—Sitting Bull, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Cornel West and bell hooks—but we don’t have a tradition of revolutionists. This makes Paine unique.
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How the US Institutionalized Surveillance |
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Monday, 26 May 2014 08:16 |
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Weld writes: "The National Security Agency’s surveillance leviathan, funded by a black budget and presided over by a star-chamber court, suctions up almost inconceivable amounts of material from around the world, including your phone and computer. How did this begin, and where will it end?"
National Security Agency Headquarters, Fort Meade, Maryland. (photo: National Security Agency)
How the US Institutionalized Surveillance
By Kirsten Weld, Al Jazeera America
26 May 14
 nformation is power. This is the logic — or at least the aspiration — behind the U.S. government’s current approach to intelligence gathering: the more data (or metadata) in hand, the more control. The National Security Agency’s surveillance leviathan, funded by a black budget and presided over by a star-chamber court, suctions up almost inconceivable amounts of material from around the world, including your phone and computer. How did this begin, and where will it end?
History shows us that this is a story about empire. For more than a century, major innovations in U.S. intelligence-collection capacity have accompanied major expansions of U.S. influence on the world stage. In some cases, U.S. government agencies used distant theaters to test approaches they would later deploy on the home front. Elsewhere, they helped foreign police build internal surveillance systems. The trainers then returned to work in domestic law enforcement, employing the same practices locally. Either way, U.S. residents should worry. The information-management strategies the U.S. has used in projecting its power abroad have usually come home to roost.
It was during the United States’ bloody occupation of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War that U.S. policymakers first yoked intelligence collection to imperial expansion and then repatriated it. As the historian Alfred W. McCoy writes in “Policing America’s Empire,” U.S. colonial police, powered by a nascent information revolution and unfettered by constitutional restrictions, built an elaborate covert surveillance apparatus to help quell resistance. Their system maintained individual file cards on an astonishing 70 percent of the local population.
When the U.S. scaled down the occupation during World War I, veterans of the counterinsurgency effort, including the military intelligence pioneer Ralph Van Deman, returned to lead a large-scale ramp-up of domestic surveillance infrastructure, designed to provide the enforcement muscle for new legislation such as the 1917 Espionage Act and the 1918 Sedition Act. Among Van Deman’s achievements: a collaboration between his military intelligence division and the American Protective League, a private network of 300,000 citizen spies that even after the war spent decades targeting German-Americans, repressing labor militancy, spying on civil rights activists and identifying Hollywood communists for blacklisting. (Van Deman also amassed a personal archive of file cards on a quarter-million suspected U.S. subversives.)
As fears about fascism and communism escalated during the 1930s, U.S. attentions turned outward again. Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, eager to access the intelligence collected by foreign police forces, directed the Federal Bureau of Investigation to develop relationships with its counterparts abroad. The FBI helped countries such as Brazil and Colombia set up secret intelligence services from which the U.S. could profit, both by gaining access to foreign surveillance data and by honing strategies that could later be integrated into domestic police practices.
As the Cold War set in and the Central Intelligence Agency and the NSA were established (in 1947 and 1952, respectively), the U.S. not only stepped up its own intelligence collecting capabilities but also trained police forces in Japan, Greece and Uruguay, among others, in anti-communist counterinsurgency methods. Best dramatized by Costa-Gavras in the film “State of Siege,” this proxy training aimed to build on-the-ground surveillance capacity, allowing local allies to share the work of Cold War containment and simultaneously guaranteeing the U.S. government access to the information their allies could now capture.
Take the case of Guatemala. There, soon after the CIA helped orchestrate the 1954 coup that ousted the democratically elected leftist President Jacobo Arbenz, U.S. trainers arrived to help the new military government consolidate power. Their first order of business, as one U.S. adviser reported back, was to help the Guatemalan police optimize its “almost neurotic hypersensitiveness to communist activity” by updating its “hopelessly inadequate” filing system. Simply put, to hunt down enemies of the state — to track their movements, record their political opinions, identify their associates, map their daily routes and, ultimately, eliminate them — you had to keep good files on them.
U.S. technicians ran daily classes in records management for Guatemalan agents, teaching them the latest information management methods and supervising the creation of a new records bureau. But that wasn’t all. U.S. agencies, most famously the State Department’s now defunct Office of Public Safety, provided filing cabinets for safe document storage, updated the Guatemalans’ dated fingerprinting system, oversaw a transition to the use of three-by-five file cards, compiled blacklists of “subversives” and beefed up the police’s special investigation squads. They also built a telecommunications center (connected to a Central America–wide system) that allowed the country’s various security forces to share intelligence with one another, with neighboring countries and, most important, U.S. officials in the Panama Canal Zone.
Guatemalans soon came to know that center, tellingly, as “the archive.” As the government’s counterinsurgency campaign heated up, the police used its new archival capabilities to murder and disappear tens of thousands of students, trade unionists and opposition politicians — a surgical strategy enabled by modern information technology. Arguably, the most lethal tools sent to Guatemala’s police by the United States were not guns, munitions or helicopters but file cards and filing cabinets.
At the same time, the U.S. trainers — back after stints in Guatemala, Vietnam, Colombia or the other countries where this template was used — adapted their expertise to domestic policing, either as private consultants or by integrating into metropolitan police forces in cities like Detroit and Chicago. According to historians Jeremy Kuzmarov and Stuart Schrader, practices developed by the Office of Public Safety at the peripheries of the U.S. empire were repurposed locally to pacify the social unrest of the 1960s and 1970s. The FBI’s Cointelpro, a series of covert projects to spy on, infiltrate and discredit groups and individuals the FBI deemed suspect (including New Left and civil rights organizations), echoed the programs U.S. trainers had set up abroad. Strategies and tactics thus hopscotched across national borders and back, traveling anywhere the U.S. sought to increase its influence.
After 9/11 and the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, the U.S.’s global intelligence-gathering system went into hyperdrive. In Afghanistan, U.S. forces have aimed to collect extensive biometric data on every single living Afghan for counterinsurgency purposes. Civil liberties watchdogs in the U.S., such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Intelligence, are concerned by how this emphasis on high-tech biometric collection has already taken root in domestic law enforcement. (Biometrics aren’t inherently problematic, but their use can present very real privacy threats, and they can easily be repurposed for state or corporate surveillance.)
Enabled by new technologies, a new modus operandi has emerged as well. As one former U.S. intelligence official explained, “rather than look for a single needle in the haystack” — scanning for information on particular cases of interest — the new strategy is now to “collect the whole haystack.” This began in earnest with the Real Time Regional Gateway program, implemented in Iraq and then in Afghanistan to vacuum up all possible information. The ethos of RTRG appeared in the U.S. in the form of the PRISM data-mining program. Americans were scandalized to learn from former National Security Agency contractor turned whistle-blower Edward Snowden that the whole haystack included their phone calls and emails. They should understand that this will remain the case for as long as the U.S. is permitted to maintain its amorphous campaign against “terror,” the diffuse goals of which are now seen to require a blanket approach to information gathering.
Policing is, at its core, informational and archival in nature. High-octane data mining may have replaced the file card, but the underlying concept is the same. So long as the United States chooses to continue in its self-appointed role as global policeman, it will, necessarily, maintain what Snowden described before fleeing the country as a “massive surveillance machine” — nothing less than an archive of the world, the home front included.
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Is Piketty All Wrong? |
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Sunday, 25 May 2014 12:54 |
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Krugman writes: "Great buzz in the blogosphere over Chris Giles’s attack on Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century. Giles finds a few clear errors, although they don’t seem to matter much; more important, he questions some of the assumptions and imputations Piketty uses to deal with gaps in the data and the way he switches sources/"
Paul Krugman. (photo: NYT)
Is Piketty All Wrong?
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
25 May 14
 reat buzz in the blogosphere over Chris Giles’s attack on Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century. Giles finds a few clear errors, although they don’t seem to matter much; more important, he questions some of the assumptions and imputations Piketty uses to deal with gaps in the data and the way he switches sources. Neil Irwin and Justin Wolfers have good discussions of the complaints; Piketty will have to answer these questions in detail, and we’ll see how well he does it.
But is it possible that Piketty’s whole thesis of rising wealth inequality is wrong? Giles argues that it is:
The exact level of European inequality in the last fifty years is impossible to determine, as it depends on the sources one uses. However, whichever level one picks, the lines in red in the graph show that – unlike what Prof. Piketty claims – wealth concentration among the richest people has been pretty stable for 50 years in both Europe and the US.
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