America's Police State . . .

THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC has mutated into something ugly and carnivorous, not just in its policies with the rest of the world, but in the way it has turned on its poor. It's become a ghastly distortion according to Charles Stross*, who commented on his blog that American police have abandoned Sir Robert Peel's Principles of Policing. As you may know, the London Metropolitan Police was the first professional police force, created in 1829.

These principles are in stark contrast to what we have seen from Ferguson:

1. To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.
2. To recognise always that the power of the police to fulfil their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.
   
3. To recognise always that to secure and maintain the respect and approval of the public means also the securing of the willing co-operation of the public in the task of securing observance of laws.
4. To recognise always that the extent to which the co-operation of the public can be secured diminishes proportionately the necessity of the use of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives.
   
5. To seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws, by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of the public without regard to their wealth or social standing, by ready exercise of courtesy and friendly good humour, and by ready offering of individual sacrifice in protecting and preserving life.
6. To use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient to obtain public co-operation to an extent necessary to secure observance of law or to restore order, and to use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion for achieving a police objective.
   
7. To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.
8. To recognise always the need for strict adherence to police-executive functions, and to refrain from even seeming to usurp the powers of the judiciary of avenging individuals or the State, and of authoritatively judging guilt and punishing the guilty.
   
9. To recognise always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them.

If this is not re-introduced to American police, Charles sees danger: "even if you’re not a member of one of the cultures on the receiving end of the jackboot today, the fact that the jackboot exists means that it may be used against you in future. Beware of complacency and apathy; even if you think you are protected by privilege, nobody is immune. See also Martin Niemoller."

Martin Niemoller's famous warning:

• First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Socialist.
• Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
• Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.
  
• Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

*Charlie is one of my favorite SF writers; I recommend his oeuvre "The Atrocity Archives", the first in his delightful "Laundry" series. Set in a parallel universe, an Earth identical to ours, with one difference: in the early 30's, Alan Turing discovers that certain mathematical processes produce "magic". Problem is, this "magic" is brain-eating dangerous.

Suckage . . .

FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY are steadily eroding, it seems, which has prompted Alex Henderson at AlterNet to post “10 Ways America Has Come to Resemble a Banana Republic”. It's a fascist's wish-list come true.

In the post-New Deal America of the 1950s and '60s, the idea of the United States becoming a banana republic would have seemed absurd to most Americans. Problems and all, the U.S. had a lot going for it: a robust middle-class, an abundance of jobs that paid a living wage, a strong manufacturing base, a heavily unionized work force, and upward mobility for both white-collar workers with college degrees and blue-collar workers who attended trade school.

• • •

In contrast, developing countries that were considered banana republics—the Dominican Republic under the brutal Rafael Trujillo regime, Nicaragua under the Somoza dynasty—lacked upward mobility for most of the population and were plagued by blatant income equality, a corrupt alliance of government and corporate interests, rampant human rights abuses, police corruption and extensive use of torture on political dissidents.

• • •

But 50 years after King’s "I Have a Dream" speech of 1963, poverty has become much more widespread in the U.S.—and the country has seriously declined not only economically, but also in terms of civil liberties and constitutional rights.

Click on the link to ponder the list and listen to Jimmy's observations.

Learning impairment . . .

UNIVERSITY EDUCATION IN AMERICA is turning into an expensive, futile endeavour for the consumer, the student. The rise of “academic capitalism” appears to be the cause, in the opinion of Thomas Frank who has a splendid, insightful essay on a site called The BAFFLER, “Academy Fight Song”. It's a multi-faceted problem facing people who have no choice.

The coming of “academic capitalism” has been anticipated and praised for years; today it is here. Colleges and universities clamor greedily these days for pharmaceutical patents and ownership chunks of high-tech startups; they boast of being “entrepreneurial”; they have rationalized and outsourced countless aspects of their operations in the search for cash; they fight their workers nearly as ferociously as a nineteenth-century railroad baron; and the richest among them have turned their endowments into in-house hedge funds.

Now, consider the seventeen-year-old customer against whom this predatory institution squares off. He comes loping to the bargaining table armed with about the same amount of guile that, a few years earlier, he brought to Santa’s lap in the happy holiday shopping center.

Um, can you say gut-and-fillet? How about “Would you like fries with that?”

An opportunity presents . . .

YOU CAN BECOME PART OF THE PROBLEM, from the perspective of the NSA. MOTHERBOARD runs a site that generates keywords that they suggest the NSA will find magnetic. HELLO, NSA is a kind of oblique, my-hovercraft-is-full-of-eels buzz-word generator that you can click on for a new chunk of jabberwocky.

The government is listening to your internets. Generate a sentence with some of the keywords they're looking for. Tweet or share and you could earn a new follower in Washington.

“They don't bust balls in Juarez. They bust Mexicles.” Now, that's funny, and they say the NSA gets excited about Jarez, bust and Mexicles. Mexicles. Go figure.

Caveat: Now, if you do a lot of travelling into the US, you might reconsider. Look at it this way: if the US government puts you on a list, you might be thankful you were just denied entry, rather than get into their building for a deep cavity search and an orange perp-suit fitting — and that's just for starters.

If you haven't seen it . . .

GO GET A COPY of “Iron Sky”. It's about a Nazi Flying Saucer invasion from the dark side of the Moon. At least, that's what the trailers show.

Set in 2018, it is actually a sizzling satire on the GOP and US presidential politics. Ya gotta see it, I don't want to tell you any more, because the MacGuffin arrives in the first 5 minutes.

Marvelous. The flick even takes a parody on the “Hitler tantrum” scene that you have probably seen parodied on YouTube, like this one, which has some delightful copywriting:

Reality is relative . . .

REAL Women vs. Real Women, as seen by Sonya Bell & Jessie Willms on iPOLITICS. Love it.

A cavalcade of Kafka . . .

LAVABIT IS OFF-LINE FOR NOW. They are-were a pro-privacy email service long used by NSA leaker Edward Snowden. The owner of Lavabit published a letter you should read, in a WIRED article by Kevin Poulson, “Edward Snowden’s Email Provider Shuts Down Amid Secret Court Battle”. From the standpoint of civil rights, this well and truly sucks. America, I mourn for your Republic. Justice for the people by the people has been replaced with a solid-state Star Chamber.

I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know what’s going on–the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise. As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests.

Ralphie nails it . . .

I've always thought Ralph Nader was somewhat wonky, but this observation of his is a rather incisive summation of the Gopper psychopathy, IMHO. Thanks to Reader Supported News, for giving him the space, with a posting worthy of your contemplation, "Love, Corporate-Style".

Mitt Romney famously said during his most recent bid for the presidency: "Corporations are people, my friend." Perhaps nothing else better surmises the state of our country -- even the state of our culture -- than a prominent politician running for the presidency openly advancing such a flawed opinion. It is no secret that corporations now wield immense power in our elections, in our economy, and even in how we spend time with our friends and families. Corporate entities, in their massive, billion dollar efforts to advertise and "brand" themselves, not only want consumers to think of them as people, but even as "friends." If a corporation could hit the campaign trail itself, one could imagine it uttering the phrase: "Corporations are friends, my people."

BUT MOST IMPORTANT, is Ralph's call to the digital dugouts in the web-war for people's hearts and minds:

So let's conduct an experiment. The goal is to send a message to some of these giant corporations who are so obsessed with establishing themselves as your "friends" while taking advantage of our health, our workers, our electoral system, our government, our justice system and our economy. Take to the social media ramparts. Send out a tweet directed at the corporations you feel are the worst perpetrators of this snake-oily style of branding and question their worst offenses. Use the hashtag #corporatelove.

Don't forget Facebook. Go visit Nestlé or Monsanto and say hell-o.

For your shopping list . . .

Like the sign says . . .

Spying, commerce and law . . .

ED SNOWDEN'S REVELATIONS have serious implications for American business and law — and for us. At iPOLITICS, Steve Nixon has an article you should ponder, "What the Snowden revelations mean for business". There are issues, and they are still growing as consequences appear:

When the U.S. government decided to access e-mail traffic, phone calls and smart phone communications without conventional due process it did more damage to U.S. business than can be imagined.

Banks in the U.S. can no longer claim to offer secure financial transactions with their customers. With possible access to personal emails these government agencies have access to personal banking statements, online banking passwords, password reset links and online accounts.

•  • •

Another area that this security breakdown affects is the practice of law in general. With government tracking of private communications it can be legally argued that any communications could have been intercepted and communicated to third party sources. This strikes at the heart of the need for security in legal matters in countless ways. Confidential communications between lawyers, judges and legal clients are fully visible by government agencies through these various types of communication.

Canada was a heartbeat away from falling victim to the same fathomless problems that now plague the U.S. with Bill C-30. 

Constitutional violations . . .

DIGITAL JOURNAL has a disturbing report, "Bush-Cheney began illegal NSA spying before 9/11, says telcom CEO". According to Ralph Lopez,

Contradicting a statement by ex-vice president Dick Cheney on Sunday that warrantless domestic surveillance might have prevented 9/11, 2007 court records indicate that the Bush-Cheney administration began such surveillance at least 7 months prior to 9/11.

And he calls Ed Snowden a traitor . . . perhaps he is, to the American Fourth Reich.

Golden oldies . . .

Evidence shows that Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party
exercised considerable influence over Hollywood,
including what films went unmade and what scenes were cut.

WHEN HOLLYWOOD HELD HANDS WITH HITLER. Really. That's the title of an article by Alex Kafka at the Chronicle of Higher Education. It's worthy of your perusal. According to Alex,

A debate is raging over Hollywood's alleged collusion with the Nazis. At stake: the moral culpability of Jewish studio heads during cinema's golden age.

The catalyst is a forthcoming book from Harvard University Press, The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact With Hitler, by the 35-year-old historian Ben Urwand. The book is still several months from publication, but emotions are running high after an early review in the online magazine Tablet, followed by an exchange of rhetorical fire in The New York Times between Urwand and Thomas Doherty, a professor of American studies at Brandeis University who this spring published his own account of the era, Hollywood and Hitler: 1933-1939 (Columbia University Press). The clash comes during a period of heightened scholarly attention to Nazi infiltration and counterinfiltration in Depression-era Los Angeles, complicating the story of Hollywood's stance toward fascism.

• • •

Largely through the Third Reich's vice consul in Los Angeles, Georg Gyssling, the Nazi-Hollywood relationship gave Hitler and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, effectual power over what films got made, what scenes got cut, which stars and filmmakers were blacklisted, and which Jewish studio employees in Germany were fired. The Germans demanded say not just over American films shown in Germany but over those shown anywhere. Nazi emissaries visited theaters worldwide to report back on whether promised scene cuts had in fact been carried out. If not, the officials scolded the studios and threatened to close German production and distribution markets to them. The studios, year after year, would promptly grovel and comply.

Today's TV world has the NCIS institutionalized paranoia, of terrorists behind every bush. Might there be a similar lickspittle relationship with the powers that be in the American Reich?

A look behind the curtain . . .

THANKS TO ED SNOWDEN, we have a look at the Bush-Cheney paranoia, and it's scary, a GOP/neo-con attempt to create a fourth Reich with a Stasi on steroids. William Saletan has an article in SLATE that's a fascinating read, "The Taming of the Spook", click on the link to check out the whole thing. According to him, it could have been much worse.

On March 24, 2009, the National Security Agency’s inspector general issued a 51-page draft report on the President’s Surveillance Program, the warrantless authority under which NSA had collected phone records and email since 2001. This year, the report, classified as top secret, was leaked to the Guardian by NSA defector Ed Snowden. On Thursday, the Guardian published it.

The Guardian’s correspondents, Glenn Greenwald and Spencer Ackerman, see the report as further evidence of runaway government surveillance. They note that the program extended data collection to U.S. persons, that its use of email metadata went beyond billing records, and that surveillance continued after President Bush left office. “NSA collected US email records in bulk for more than two years under Obama,” says the Guardian’s headline.

But in many ways, the story told in the report is really about the mellowing of the surveillance state. An ill-defined, unilaterally imposed, poorly supervised spying operation was gradually brought under control. The surveillance program didn’t just become domestic. It became domesticated.

Domesticated means built-in, won't go away, and that's the danger. Thanks to Ed Snowden, we have a chance to look at how this bundle of snakes came to be.

The Standing Man . . .

Erdem Gunduz (center) stands in Instanbul's Taksim Square early Tuesday. — Petr David Josek/AP

THAT PROTEST SHALL NOT PERISH, from the creativity of the human spirit embodied in a chap name of Erdem Gunduz, who went to Taksim Square, and just stood there, passively, staring at the Ministry of Culture.

According to NPR's "The 'Standing Man' Of Turkey: Act Of Quiet Protest Goes Viral", it's catching, big-time.  Ghandi would be so pleased with the creativity of the human spirit.

For more than six hours Monday night, Erdem Gunduz stood motionless in Taksim Square, passively ignoring any prodding or harassment from police and people passing by.

His unusual form of protest has inspired activists in Turkey and around the world to assume the same pose. He's even become his own meme, as "standing man" (duran adam, in Turkish) supporters upload their own protest photos to Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere.

Political Science 101 . . .

Yup, that pretty much sums 'er up.

Two years ago . . .

AS THE PERSECUTION of Julian Assange was getting organized, things were in their early stages, and on 23 of June, 2011 a secret five hour meeting took place between Julian and Eric Schmidt, who is the CEO of Google. Wikileaks has the complete transcript. It gets a bit technical, but you can get through that, and ponder.

This meeting discusses the current state-of-things, and gives an interesting look at the facets of the Wikileaks effort around the world. It discusses the power and the vulnerability of the surveillance state, and what concerned citizens might do about it. Mobile phone network freedom may be the key to freedom in the future:

During these revolutionary periods the people involved in the revolution need to be able to communicate. They need to be able to communicate in order to plan quickly and also to communicate information about what is happening in their environment quickly so that they can dynamically adapt to it and produce the next strategy. Where you only have the security services being able to do this, and you turn the mobile phone system off, the security services have such an tremendous advantage compared to people that are trying to oppose them. If you have a system where individuals are able to communicate securely and robustly despite what security services are doing, then security services have to give more ground. It's not that the government is necessarily going to be overthrown, but rather they have to make more concessions.

Well, Julian wound up in the London embassy of Ecuador, as US pressure built up. A key component has been to deny Wikileaks access to the banking system, especially credit cards. This means that you can't support Wikileaks, because you can't donate any money. Well, according to NPR, that's changed:

Iceland's most recent move that lent support to WikiLeaks was an April Supreme Court decision that "ordered Valitor hf, the Icelandic partner of MasterCard Inc. and Visa Inc., to process card payments for [the] anti-secrecy website ... within 15 days or face daily penalties," Bloomberg News says. So, as other nations have tried to put roadblocks in WikiLeaks' way by cutting off its access to funds, Iceland has gone the opposite direction.

Maybe getting one of those mobile phone base stations might be a worthy consideration, but even passing them a few bucks might be crucial; these guys have some heavy lifting to do.

Bradley vs the Beast . . .

THE AMERICAN STATE has become a mutant, vicious beast, beyond its own laws. Julian Assange posted a letter on Wikileaks, commenting about the persecution of Bradley Manning:

Statement by Julian Assange

As I type these lines, on June 3, 2013, Private First Class Bradley Edward Manning is being tried in a sequestered room at Fort Meade, Maryland, for the alleged crime of telling the truth. The court martial of the most prominent political prisoner in modern US history has now, finally, begun.

It has been three years. Bradley Manning, then 22 years old, was arrested in Baghdad on May 26, 2010. He was shipped to Kuwait, placed into a cage, and kept in the sweltering heat of Camp Arifjan.

"For me, I stopped keeping track," he told the court last November. "I didn’t know whether night was day or day was night. And my world became very, very small. It became these cages... I remember thinking I’m going to die."

After protests from his lawyers, Bradley Manning was then transferred to a brig at a US Marine Corps Base in Quantico, VA, where - infamously - he was subjected to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment at the hands of his captors - a formal finding by the UN. Isolated in a tiny cell for twenty-three out of twenty-four hours a day, he was deprived of his glasses, sleep, blankets and clothes, and prevented from exercising. All of this - it has been determined by a military judge - "punished" him before he had even stood trial.

"Brad’s treatment at Quantico will forever be etched, I believe, in our nation’s history, as a disgraceful moment in time" said his lawyer, David Coombs. "Not only was it stupid and counterproductive, it was criminal."

The United States was, in theory, a nation of laws.
But it is no longer a nation of laws for Bradley Manning.

Do click on the link to read the rest. The meanness of spirit reminds me of a similar persecution, 109 years ago, in 1894, when poor Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a young French artillery officer of Alsatian Jewish descent, was charged with treason and wound up on Devil's Island. Like today's "I am Bradley Manning", concerned citizens protested for the captain.

By George . . .

THE ORWELLIAN NIGHTMARE seems to be with us, as we regard the "processing" of Bradley Manning, the hounding of Julian Assange and now Edward Snowden.

There's good news, bad news and really bad news. The good news is, eventually the Fourth Reich will be overthrown. The bad news is, Hollywood will create "The Bradley Manning Story". The really bad news is, the actor who will play Bradley hasn't been born yet. Sure hope I'm wrong.

For the next G20 protest . . .

HARD TIMES IN TURKEY. People are fed up with encroaching fundamentalism of the current government, as civil rights are being whittled away. So, a protest against the demolition of a park has become much, much more.

Tarihinde Yayımlandı has a blog post you should read, "What is Happenning (sic) in Istanbul?", which outlines the situation. Do check it out. Oppression can bring out true creativity, as you see by this brilliant home-made gas mask, used this weekend.

Four days ago a group of people most of whom did not belong to any specific organization or ideology got together in Istanbul’s Gezi Park. Among them there were many of my friends and students. Their reason was simple: To prevent and protest the upcoming demolishing of the park for the sake of building yet another shopping mall at very center of the city. There are numerous shopping malls in Istanbul, at least one in every neighborhood! The tearing down of the trees was supposed to begin early Thursday morning. People went to the park with their blankets, books and children. They put their tents down and spent the night under the trees. Early in the morning when the bulldozers started to pull the hundred-year-old trees out of the ground, they stood up against them to stop the operation.

They did nothing other than standing in front of the machines. No newspaper, no television channel was there to report the protest. It was a complete media black out. But the police arrived with water cannon vehicles and pepper spray. They chased the crowds out of the park.

In the evening the number of protesters multiplied.

The Harper Broadcasting Corporation . . .

STEVIE IS MOVING IN ON THE CBC. According to Lauren Strapagiel at Canada.com with an article, "If Harper ran CBC programming", there is "newly tabled legislation that would give Prime Minister Stephen Harper a tighter grip on Canada’s national broadcaster".

Go read the article, and keep Stevie from turning the CBC into the HBC.

ADDENDUM:

This might happen sooner rather than later. e-activist asks, "What does abuse of power look like?". According to e-activist, a majority of the CBC's Board of Directors have contributed financially to the Conservative Party. Check it out, there's a petition you can sign, as well.