Now it so happened, as Goethe told it, that a sorcerer of superlative technical skills took on an apprentice, eager and diligent in his study of the master’s teachings. One day, while the master was away, the apprentice, perhaps overly confident in his newly-acquired command of certain techniques, decided to use these powers for a practical, if mundane, purpose. As a pupil, he was obligated to perform certain tedious household chores, most detestably the endless hauling of pails of water from the nearby stream. Why not animate, say, a broom to do this tiresome chore? His acquired powers were already sufficient to perform this transformation, and the broom, hurrying off and then returning forthwith, brought back two pails of water. The apprentice, proud of his powers and amazed at the prompt carrying out of his command, was nonetheless startled when the broom quickly hurried off again, and again, and again, speedily delivering a dozen of pails of water. Panicking, the apprentice tried to destroy the broom by cutting it in half–only to witness each half becoming a whole, and both scurrying off now to begin bringing twice as many pails! The house was flooded, with no relief in sight, when the Master suddenly returned. In consternation, he angrily admonished his over-confident pupil for using such powers which wiser ones would willingly refrain from unleashing. The Master, acutely aware of the dangers of such misuse, nonetheless calmly de-animated the brooms back to their original purpose.
Sorcery, a kind of “pre-science,” consists of specific techniques purportedly capable of attaining certain ends. If one wished to destroy a foe, one employed imitative (homeopathic) magic (“like produces like”) — the infamous voodoo doll being the most well-known example. If the victim shortly thereafter sickened and died, the efficacy of the magical technique was “confirmed.”
We now fast-forward to September 30 of this year, when techno-wizard Elon Musk introduced his new “humanoid” robot named Optimus, which promptly demonstrated to a rapt audience the abilities to walk, carry objects, and water plants. Musk announced, with his typical promoter’s enthusiasm, that he wanted to perfect and mass-produce Optimus as soon as possible, predicting that the “humanoid” would prove even more profitable than his Tesla line of electric cars.
Entrepreneurial capitalist Musk is unlikely to question his commitment to a rapidly expanding world of “artificial intelligence.” (An entirely surveilled, behavior-modified and jobless humanity?). At the same time, he has acknowledged some unforeseen dangers, and the urgent necessity for some regulation of their production and use. A techno-futurist with an awareness of what is coming, he has joined with such techno-scientific luminaries as Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates in warning that AI, if insufficiently contained and regulated, constitutes “the largest existential threat to humanity.”
Since perpetual war by now seems (almost) “normalized,” Pentagon contracts promote the myriad capabilities of robot-soldiers on the battlefield. Musk has thus urgently warned of an imminent threat from “killer robots” (The Guardian, 17 July, 2017). Human Rights Watch has long taken this seriously enough to launch their Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, noting that such machines “would be able to select and engage targets without meaningful human control” (The Guardian, 9 Apr. 2015). (One is hard-pressed not to mention that “human control” of unmanned, automated drones, armed with Hellfire missiles, did not restrain their over-use–even by participant-executioner President Obama!) . Self-replicating robots already exist, even “self-reconfigurable modular” ones which can re-arrange their design and self-repair–capacities obviously advantageous under battlefield conditions.
While Goethe’s fable of out-of-control “animated” brooms seems incredibly remote from our present reality, he did prophetically warn of the ease with which empowered instruments can overpower their very creators, wreaking uncontrollable havoc once unleashed. The profiteering hubris of the current “roboteers,” audaciously claiming an entitlement to introduce a never-ending stream of hi-tech assaults on human independence and dignity, uncannily exhibit the same disastrous grandiosity of Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein.
A great deal of attention has been paid to the problems of carceral injustice and the increasing use of AI for things such as predictive policing. Much of this research has revealed that these digital technologies serve to recreate economic disparities, racism, and other forms of social discrimination while removing the stain of human agency toward a flawed ideal of objectivity. Less attention has been paid to the use of these digital technologies in pre-employment background checks. This essay examines the use of AI and algorithmic data analysis and the ways these technologies and procedures create a caste of humans who are barred from employment and rendered economically invalid. In the final analysis, AI and algorithmic data analysis in the service of pre-employment background checks reproduces Foucault’s human monster in a contemporary form, a human monster that bears the stigmata of digital unpredictability.
More than 90 percent of all new hires are subjected to some type of background check prior to employment. These background checks search criminal history and records, including non-convictions, debt history, credit ratings, and other data that can offer a picture of the financial health of a potential new hire.1 The idea behind background checks is to ensure the safety of employees and, in the case of schools and hospitals, students and patients. While many states have laws that limit both the reach and use of background checks, the practice of investigating a potential employee’s background is now standard and widespread. In a short piece in the journal Academe, Ann D. Springer explains that universities might be looking for information that would indicate a potential hire’s “character, general reputation, personal characteristics or mode of living.”2 A university may deem it important to determine exactly what kind of person they are considering, and this may include that person’s “character.”3 While the point of Springer’s article is to reveal the potential dangers of background checks, she also pins down one of the main issues in performing such checks: “What if an employee commits a crime or breaks the law? An employer who knew of such past bad acts may be held responsible for failing to act on that knowledge, even if future actions were and are difficult to predict.” Liability can consist of many things like the risk of theft in the case of people with a criminal history of crimes against property or people who are so financially unstable they pose a theft risk. Liability could also be physical danger from people who have a history of violent offenses. In terms of how to predict potential danger and liability, this has been elusive, and companies have generally decided to err on the side of caution and refuse to hire anyone whose background check reveals something that could be seen as dangerous. But prediction is the key to understanding how background checks function in contemporary culture.
In a sociological study on criminality and recidivism, Devah Pager explains that “there are currently over 12 million ex-felons in the United States, representing roughly 8 percent of the working-age population.”4 If we add the number of people convicted of violent misdemeanors, crimes that are specifically flagged in background check, the number of potentially unemployable people is staggering. Putting this into context with the ever-increasing use of background checks to screen potential hires, this population of ex-felons constitutes a caste of humans who are likely to be deemed unacceptable for hire by most employers. The background check presumably combs criminal histories and assembles this information in a report so employers can evaluate the risks of a potential new hire. Those deemed unacceptable are not considered beyond the initial screening.
Algorithmic data analysis and background checks are becoming more common. Uber now uses the background checking company Checkr to perform their checks. Checkr uses an algorithmic system to search and process information on potential drivers. They claim the use of algorithms and AI in background checks is to increase efficiency, reduce “friction,” which is to say the degree of work and difficulty, on obtaining information, and to remove the problem of human error in evaluating background check information. Checkr offers a guide to how information can legally be used in any given state. They also do international searches of things like global watchlists and criminal history abroad. Checkr provides a full screening of criminal history, education and employment verification, civil search, drug and health, and motor vehicle reports.5 According to Backgroundchecks.com, “Checkr’s system uses AI to perform more than a million background checks per month, including checks for new Uber drivers and annual repeat checks for existing drivers. The checks incorporate multiple searches, including county and national criminal history searches, sex offender registry checks, terrorist watchlist checks, driving record checks, and Social Security Number verifications.”6
An article in Qrius, formerly The Indian Economist, offers a glowing portrait of the potential for using AI algorithmic data analysis in pre-employment background checks. While the article ostensibly touts the efficiency of AI and algorithms, it nevertheless alludes to the predictive capacities of these systems by explaining how AI and algorithmic data analysis make it possible for recruiters and employers “to improve their understanding of the risk of negative behavior patterns.”7 These systems can not only reveal potential risks, but also calculate the level of risk: “AI can help recruiters make more informed decisions by telling them what a candidate’s risk level is.” Algorithmic data analysis offers a way of employers to utilize the same technology that is used for algorithmic policing and the forms of risk analysis utilized by national security agencies. Louise Amoore and Rita Raley point out that it sophisticated forms of algorithmic data analysis that guide military strategies regarding things like lethal drone strikes.8 Even as trade journals and sympathetic news media portray the use of algorithmic data analysis as a welcome and efficient technological improvement to pre-employment screening, a pre-employment background check service such as Checkr seems to take on darker implications.
With the use of algorithmic data analysis, Checkr can scour a person’s life for anything that could flag them as a potential danger or liability. What is more, algorithmic analysis eliminates the problem cited by Springer of the difficulty in predicting potential danger. In fact, algorithmic data analysis is designed to render everything predictable. The purpose of algorithmic data analysis is of course to make it possible to search and make sense of vast amounts of data that are beyond human comprehension, but the goal of this data analysis is to determine patterns and tendencies that can be harnessed and used. This is to say that the algorithm makes it possible to predict behavior based on previous behavior. Algorithms create what Tarleton Gillespie calls cycles of anticipation” in which the vast data collection from sites like Google and Facebook make it possible for businesses (and others) to “thoroughly know and predict their users.”9 It is the predictive capacity of algorithms that is important, and when the algorithmic data analysis is brought to things like employment background checks, the process takes on a new dimension. The background check does not simply offer an account of past crimes, financial problems, and potential character defects that could be problematic, it makes it possible for employers to predict future problems in a potential employee. Algorithms and “information systems produce “shadow bodies” by emphasizing some aspects of their subjects and overlooking others.9 These shadow bodies persist and proliferate through information systems.” The potential hire is both the person who currently exists and the shadow body who the algorithm creates who may exist in the future, which is to say the sum total of who this person is can never be much more than who they have been in the past. What we are, and what we will be, is only ever what we were.
Jackie Wang explores the problem of predicting criminal activity in the digital age to demonstrate that algorithmic and cyber technology has succeeded in re-framing the racism inherent in legal apparatuses and disperse this racist violence so as to obfuscate both its presence and its agents. Wang explains that practices like predictive analysis made possible by advanced forms of data mining and algorithmic analysis are being used to predict crimes before they happen. But Wang points out that these practices “are much more about constructing the future through the present management of subjects categorized as threat risks.”10 In constructing the future, AI and algorithmic analysis reconstructs the inherent inequities and racist tendencies that presently exist. Far from objective and disinterest computerized tools, these tools re-inscribe forms of racial and economic exclusions as they exist in the present into a form of the future that is nothing more than a projection of the past. What is more, “as these technologies of control are perfected, carcerality will bleed into society. In this case the distinction between inside and outside the prison will become blurrier.”11 The pre-employment background check that utilizes AI data analysis exists within this blurry region in which carcerality has begun to diffuse across society. AI and algorithms make it possible to search vast amounts of data for anything that could potentially serve as a red flag for liability and danger. The predictive capabilities believed to inhere in algorithms and data analysis all rely on the capacity for these systems to use relevant data to make these connections and predictions.
There is a vast and infinite sea of data available for AI and algorithms to make use of, but the data that matters for predictive policing and the data that matter for background checks are all of the specific order. The data that these data processing systems flag, process, and order are those bits of information that would indicate some type of danger, whether it be danger in the form of financial liability or danger in the form of a potential threat to life and body. Checkr, and virtually all background services, search specific records like court records. But with algorithmic analysis, they are able to comb anything on the web that might indicate the potential for danger. These processes are in excess of any individual agent since they operate in the realm of digital analysis and numbers. Once programmed and set in motion, it is the algorithm that determines threats and risks, not individuals or living human beings. As Manuel Abreu says, “algorithms escape the laws of cause and effect and operate in a fluid state of exception, encompassing the financial sector, the military-security nexus, and the entertainment industry.”12 Still, following Abreu’s analysis, the state of exception of the algorithm works with forms of data that are rigorously defined. While it is true that the algorithms generate profiles of people that present “reasonable suspicion,” the data that signal reasonable suspicion are of a specific kind. As Wang shows us, this specific kind of data may have more to do with the racisms engrained in society than with any kind of “objective” symptom of threat. This same data also operates as symptoms of other kinds of threats that are not dangerous or even criminal. In the case of background checks, the data that is flagged as symptomatic may be behavioral patterns that demonstrate a bad financial risk. Someone with bad credit history, for example, could potentially be a liability to an employer. In all, the data seized upon by algorithms in the service of background checks and policing are all symptomatic of a potential problem that is increasingly being understood as a present problem. There can be no future problem since the future is decided ahead of time as a mathematical probability based on the past.
All of these techniques amount to Deleuze’s technologies of the society of control in which algorithmic analysis and prediction which “substitutes for the individual or numerical body the code of a ‘dividual’ material to be controlled.”13 The dividual is the atomized and coded image of the individual who no longer matters as algorithmic analysis steps in to provide something more valid than the word of a human. The algorithmic rendering of who one is can be made more predictable based on specific data points that mark the dividual as a liability or a threat. One’s suitability for employment is determined by how one has adjusted one’s life to a societal system that demands that we “behave” according to economic and social standards that are determined by the financial sector more than any older system of morality and ethics.
This morality and ethics, and the endless reconstitution of the past as a mathematically rendered present lacking a future, is bound up with the technologies of control that come out of the debt relation that is threaded through contemporary life. Maurizio Lazzarato makes it clear that the debt relation underpins contemporary life since to engage the world means to engage economically, and to engage economically means to enter into the debt relation. As Lazzarato explains “(d)ebt… is the economic and subjective engine of the modern-day economy,” and this means we are all captured in this system as soon as we enter into the world of money and employment. (Lazzarrato. The Making of Indebted Man. p. 25.)) However, entering into the debt relation is not simply a matter of economics separate from domains like character, liability, and criminality. Debt is a technology of control specific to societies of control. The debt relation makes possible “specific relations of power that entail specific forms of production and control of subjectivity.”14 The purpose of the employment background check is to assess and evaluate precisely this “subjectivity,” a subjectivity that must adhere to standards of behavior and productivity that do not emit signs of risk and liability. Within this system, there is no central agency of discipline or control. Rather, the debt relation initiates a technology of control in which the “debtor is ‘free,’ but his actions, his behavior are confined to the limits defined by the debt he has entered into.”15 In technologies of control, “you are free insofar as you assume the way of life (consumption, work, public spending, taxes, etc.) compatible with reimbursement.”15 The practices of daily life like consumption, work, public spending, taxes, etc. are precisely the forms of data that are analyzed and assessed by algorithms and background checks, these and of course criminal history. What the background checks analyze and assess are the measure of one’s validity and to not measure up as valid necessarily renders one invalid.
In addition to the 12 million ex-felons in the United States, we can add the vast number of people who are increasingly determined to be invalid for failing to measure up to the standards of behavior inscribed by an economic system that prescribes our behavior. The background check and the algorithms that are increasingly a part of the process of background checks are not evaluating just any data points. These systems are written and programmed to hit upon and process very specific bits of information. These are signs that can be interpreted as symptoms. To be rendered invalid, to be assessed and determined to be a criminal or financial threat, demands that the digital systems know which signs to read as symptoms and which to reject. Wang harkens to the older paradigm of discipline in relation to digital technologies of control as she points out that, “(i)f Jeremy Bentham’s eighteenth-century design of the ‘panopticon’ is the architectural embodiment of Michel Foucault’s conception of disciplinary power, then algorithmic policing represents the inscription of disciplinary power across the entire terrain that is being policed.”16 This apparent return to Foucault raises the specter of other features of older paradigms which are buried in the contemporary societies of control. What are these data points, these signs that serve as symptoms if not the same forms of symptomatology of monstrosity that once gave rise to Foucault’s ideas of the abnormal? While algorithmic policing obfuscates rather than supplants the old mechanisms of discipline, the background check and the ways algorithmic analysis have come to influence the background check re-orients the old ideas of the abnormal and the human monster.
Foucault explains that the medicalization—the psychiatrization—of crime as it is expressed through mental illness demanded a sign that marked the criminal, the abnormal, as legible. The emergent discourse of psychiatry, criminology, and social hygiene demanded some kind of visible sign that could be read and understood as the mark of an abnormal, criminal type who is disposed to commit crimes. What was required was something that made it possible for psychiatrists to identify and properly isolate the abnormal and the criminal that stands out over and above the process of abnormal behavior: “What psychiatrists look for in order to demonstrate that they are dealing with someone who can be psychiatrized,… what they need, is not a process, but a permanent stigmata that brand the individual structurally.”17 The practitioners of social hygiene demanded a stigmata, or brand of criminality, of monstrosity, of abnormality that will always render visible and legible not just the criminal potential of the abnormal, but the physical sign of this criminal potential. These lines of thought led, of course, to nonsense like phrenology and criminality, but it also led to an entire scientific taxonomy of criminality that sought to determine features of criminal behavior in the criminal themselves that could allow scientists and law enforcement to predict criminal behavior before it occurs, and it is precisely these processes of prediction which has been thought to be made possible with background checks and algorithmic analysis. The problem of social hygiene is recast as behavioral determinations which adhere to the demands of the debt relation as a measure of one’s validity as a subject and a viable agent in modern life. The data points registered and flagged by the algorithm and the background check operate as the stigmata of abnormality far more efficiently and permanently than the old psychiatric methods. What is more, we have dispensed with the psychiatrist, or any other authority, as the digital mechanisms remove all human agency from the process of invalidating.
Algorithmic analysis and background checks operate as forms of social antiseptic that maintains the purity of the closed system of organizational integrity. Businesses can dispense with liability, both economic and criminal, by utilizing a digital system that reads the stigmata of danger before it can enter into the digital system that stands in for the organizational structure inhabited by living bodies. And they can do this without ever having to dirty themselves by examining pieces of information in criminal records, credit checks, and personality indexes. The algorithm performs these functions, and it is the algorithm that makes the determination of invalidity based on the assigned stigmata. The uncertainty that the criminal and economic invalid could introduce into the sterile integrity of the organization is neutralized. A criminal infraction, a default on a credit card or medical bill, an eviction—all these transgressions become stigmata of invalidity. There can be no risk of future liability or unpredictability since these stigmata render the invalid the present “being” of the past, and this stops the possibility of a future in its tracks. By reading the stigmata of past behavior the algorithm makes it possible to create an image of a present that forecloses the possibility of a future. These systems provide “the mastery of uncertainty” that “proceeds by way of the representation and memory storage of the past,” as Tiqqun explains.18 The algorithmically enhanced background check “aims at making living beings into mechanics, at mastering, programming, determining humans and their life, society and its “future.”19 These processes form part of the cybernetic hypothesis in which the problem is “no longer forecasting the future but reproducing the present.”20 The use of algorithms and background checks ferret out the “risky dividual” toward a “balanced society.”21 The algorithms and background checks, the cybernetic mechanisms, read the stigmata of risk and allow the neutral system to operate as the firewall against risk. Those humans, those living bodies who are now digital renderings in the forms of data points that signal the stigmata of invalidity, remain locked—captured– forever as invalid. Perhaps it makes more sense to use the old terms. These living human bodies that must nevertheless live, as the abnormals– these are the same human monsters. They are the same forms of madness and degeneration that operate as the “bearer of a number of dangers.” They are the same degenerates that operate as the “bearer of risks.”22 They are the same monsters who, since they pose the threats of uncertainty to a cybernetic system of absolute balance, emerge from nature but against nature. Only now they are the isolated dividuals captured within societies of control for whom the algorithm has determined as unpredictable invalids who resist predictability. Bearing the digital stigmata of monstrosity that signals their impending disturbance, these monsters can be safely monitored, tracked, and returned to disciplinary restraint as is economically expedient.
It is the digital realm that finds the invalid intolerable because the invalid present the type of unpredictability that is intolerable to digital systems. While companies, organizations, and universities advertise the justification that the background check is in the interest of safety, it is in fact the intolerable danger of the unpredictable that must be ferreted out by the background check. The primary reason for adding algorithmic technology to background checks can only be toward the elimination of unpredictability, otherwise a simple rap sheet would suffice. The reason a simple rap sheet is insufficient is that a human being must look a list of past offences and make a judgment call as to the likelihood of future danger, and this would only compound the levels of unpredictability with the addition of a secondary human consciousness. Above all else, the system must control, neutralize, and lockout any threats to absolute predictability. Thus, we have a caste of people who are determined to be invalid by a system that is no longer bound by human consciousness. Since no human makes this determination, the status of invalidity is the fault of the invalid who have only themselves to blame for their behavior, be it bad credit or a felony conviction. In the final analysis, we are left with a caste of untouchables who will forever remain both economically externalized, in that they are forbidden entry into economic viability, yet completely captured and internalized since they are digitally quantified and categorized. Their status as invalid is dependent on a detailed record of their failures and transgressions. It is the invalid who have taken over as the abnormal, the moral degenerates, and the human monsters.
Just as the process of abnormalizing individuals who resist the discipline of the factory so as to eliminate what cannot be disciplined, so the process of invalidating the contemporary abnormal serves to isolate and remove individuals who represent forms of unpredictability within the totalizing techniques of societies of control. There is no need to place these kinds of individuals in spaces of discipline and confinement since the mechanisms that isolate them are the very same mechanisms of current financial valorization. The forms of “biocapitalism”described by Marazzi which capture value in social processes themselves are themselves the mechanisms of capture which remove the invalid from the closed cybernetic system of financialization and the creation of indebted man.23 The technology that creates algorithms that drive financial surplus value in the form of the debt relation are also the technology that creates algorithms to remove threats to absolute predictability within global capital where there is no room for forms of flawed human judgment that may allow contagions that produce risk. The system works because it has removes all risk, and the population of invalids, abnormals, and monsters demonstrates that the system works. It is flawless, antiseptic, objective, and removed from the stain of human unpredictability from start to finish. Above all, AI and algorithmic data analysis provide absolute visibility and predictability for digital systems that cannot tolerate the unpredictable. Just as, during the Seventeenth Century and the time of “The Great Confinement,” “madness threatens modern man… with the return of the bleak world of beasts and things, to their unfettered freedom,” the contemporary technologies of control isolate and capture the bleak world of human fallibility and neutralizes the threat of its return to errable weakness.24
“Background Checks and AI.” It is useful to examine industry generated sources on background checks since these are the precise sources used as companies and other organizations design and implement background check processes and policies.
Springer, Ann D. “Legal Watch: Background Checks: When the Past Isn’t Past.” Academe, vol. 89, no. 2, 2003, p. 110–110.
In 2009, The University of Akron implemented a policy that would require potential new hires to submit to a DNA screening as a condition of employment. This came just before passage of the federal Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA). In an essay in The Hastings Center Report details the ethical and legal ramifications of such a policy. While analysis of DNA screening begs obvious questions about the ethics of these kinds of privacy intrusions, the use of AI and algorithms can be performed using information outside the control and even knowledge of those being screened. See Callier, Shawneequa L., John Huss, and Eric T. Juengst. “GINA and Preemployment Criminal Background Checks.” The Hastings Center Report 40, no. 1 (2010): 15–19.
“The Mark of a Criminal Record.” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 108, no. 5, 2003, p. 937–75.
There are no private lives…. This a most important aspect of modern life…. That one of the biggest transformations we have seen in our society is the diminution of the sphere of the private. That we must reasonably now all regard the fact that there are no secrets and nothing is private. Everything is public.
We teeter on the cusp of a cultural, technological and societal revolution the likes of which have never been seen before.
While the political Left and Right continue to make abortion the face of the debate over the right to privacy in America, the government and its corporate partners, aided by rapidly advancing technology, are reshaping the world into one in which there is no privacy at all.
Nothing that was once private is protected.
We have not even begun to register the fallout from the tsunami bearing down upon us in the form of AI (artificial intelligence) surveillance, and yet it is already re-orienting our world into one in which freedom is almost unrecognizable.
AI surveillance harnesses the power of artificial intelligence and widespread surveillance technology to do what the police state lacks the manpower and resources to do efficiently or effectively: be everywhere, watch everyone and everything, monitor, identify, catalogue, cross-check, cross-reference, and collude.
Everything that was once private is now up for grabs to the right buyer.
Governments and corporations alike have heedlessly adopted AI surveillance technologies without any care or concern for their long-term impact on the rights of the citizenry.
As a special report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace warns, “A growing number of states are deploying advanced AI surveillance tools to monitor, track, and surveil citizens to accomplish a range of policy objectives—some lawful, others that violate human rights, and many of which fall into a murky middle ground.”
Indeed, with every new AI surveillance technology that is adopted and deployed without any regard for privacy, Fourth Amendment rights and due process, the rights of the citizenry are being marginalized, undermined and eviscerated.
Cue the rise of digital authoritarianism.
Digital authoritarianism, as the Center for Strategic and International Studies cautions, involves the use of information technology to surveil, repress, and manipulate the populace, endangering human rights and civil liberties, and co-opting and corrupting the foundational principles of democratic and open societies, “including freedom of movement, the right to speak freely and express political dissent, and the right to personal privacy, online and off.”
The seeds of digital authoritarianism were planted in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, with the passage of the USA Patriot Act. A massive 342-page wish list of expanded powers for the FBI and CIA, the Patriot Act justified broader domestic surveillance, the logic being that if government agents knew more about each American, they could distinguish the terrorists from law-abiding citizens.
It sounded the death knell for the freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights, especially the Fourth Amendment, and normalized the government’s mass surveillance powers.
Writing for the New York Times, Jeffrey Rosen observed that “before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity.”
Who could have predicted that 50 years after George Orwell typed the final words to his dystopian novel 1984, “He loved Big Brother,” we would come to love Big Brother.
Yet that is exactly what has come to pass.
After 9/11, Rosen found that “people were happy to give up privacy without experiencing a corresponding increase in security. More concerned about feeling safe than actually being safe, they demanded the construction of vast technological architectures of surveillance even though the most empirical studies suggested that the proliferation of surveillance cameras had ‘no effect on violent crime’ or terrorism.”
In the decades following 9/11, a massive security-industrial complex arose that was fixated on militarization, surveillance, and repression.
Surveillance is the key.
We’re being watched everywhere we go. Speed cameras. Red light cameras. Police body cameras. Cameras on public transportation. Cameras in stores. Cameras on public utility poles. Cameras in cars. Cameras in hospitals and schools. Cameras in airports.
It’s estimated that there are upwards of 85 million surveillance cameras in the U.S. alone, second only to China.
On any given day, the average American going about his daily business is monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways by both government and corporate eyes and ears.
Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it will all be recorded, stored and used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing.
Yet it’s not just what we say, where we go and what we buy that is being tracked.
We’re being surveilled right down to our genes, thanks to a potent combination of hardware, software and data collection that scans our biometrics—our faces, irises, voices, genetics, microbiomes, scent, gait, heartbeat, breathing, behaviors—runs them through computer programs that can break the data down into unique “identifiers,” and then offers them up to the government and its corporate allies for their respective uses.
This is the slippery slope that leads to the thought police.
The technology is already being used “by border guards to detect threats at border checkpoints, as an aid for detection and diagnosis of patients for mood disorders, to monitor classrooms for boredom or disruption, and to monitor human behavior during video calls.”
For all intents and purposes, we now have a fourth branch of government: the surveillance state.
This fourth branch came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum, and yet it possesses superpowers, above and beyond those of any other government agency save the military. It is all-knowing, all-seeing and all-powerful. It operates beyond the reach of the president, Congress and the courts, and it marches in lockstep with the corporate elite who really call the shots in Washington, DC.
The government’s “technotyranny” surveillance apparatus has become so entrenched and entangled with its police state apparatus that it’s hard to know anymore where law enforcement ends and surveillance begins.
“From cameras that identify the faces of passersby to algorithms that keep tabs on public sentiment online, artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tools are opening new frontiers in state surveillance around the world.” So begins the Carnegie Endowment’s report on AI surveillance note. “Law enforcement, national security, criminal justice, and border management organizations in every region are relying on these technologies—which use statistical pattern recognition, machine learning, and big data analytics—to monitor citizens.”
China, the role model for our dystopian future, has been a major force in deploying AI surveillance on its own citizens, especially by way of its social credit systems, which it employs to identify, track and segregate its “good” citizens from the “bad.”
While countries with authoritarian regimes have been eager to adopt AI surveillance, as the Carnegie Endowment’s research makes clear, liberal democracies are also “aggressively using AI tools to police borders, apprehend potential criminals, monitor citizens for bad behavior, and pull out suspected terrorists from crowds.”
Moreover, it’s easy to see how the China model for internet control has been integrated into the American police state’s efforts to flush out so-called anti-government, domestic extremists.
According to journalist Adrian Shahbaz’s in-depth report, there are nine elements to the Chinese model of digital authoritarianism when it comes to censoring speech and targeting activists: 1) dissidents suffer from persistent cyber attacks and phishing; 2) social media, websites, and messaging apps are blocked; 3) posts that criticize government officials are removed; 4) mobile and internet access are revoked as punishment for activism; 5) paid commentators drown out government criticism; 6) new laws tighten regulations on online media; 7) citizens’ behavior monitored via AI and surveillance tools; 9) individuals regularly arrested for posts critical of the government; and 9) online activists are made to disappear.
You don’t even have to be a critic of the government to get snared in the web of digital censorship and AI surveillance.
The danger posed by the surveillance state applies equally to all of us: lawbreaker and law-abider alike.
When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies.
As Orwell wrote in 1984, “You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”
In an age of too many laws, too many prisons, too many government spies, and too many corporations eager to make a fast buck at the expense of the American taxpayer, we are all guilty of some transgression or other.
It won’t be long before we find ourselves looking back on the past with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whomever we wanted, buy whatever we wanted, think whatever we wanted, go wherever we wanted, feel whatever we wanted without those thoughts, words and activities being tracked, processed and stored by corporate giants, sold to government agencies, and used against us by militarized police with their army of futuristic technologies.
Artificial intelligence reaches a new and unexpected milestone while the human condition continues to worsen.
As supply chains are pushed to the brink, working people around the globe struggle with new realities of stagnated wages and out of control inflation. While oil corporations celebrate record profits, the people of Ecuador are fighting back with work stoppages, road blocks, and riots across the country.
Meanwhile, in Tanzania, tensions have flared as the government tries to displace many indigenous Maasai people from their ancestral homelands for yet another playground for capitalist elites.
Finally, we follow up with our coverage of Giannis Michailidis, anarchist prisoner in Greece, who has now been on hunger strike for over a month.
COVID affects economy in China; AI used in constructing hydroelectric power plant in Tibet; and China’s state-owned COMAC C919, a competitor to Boeing 737 and Airbus A320, has already received 815 orders.
Farmerless farms manned by driverless machines, monitored by drones and doused with chemicals to produce commodity crops from patented genetically engineered seeds for industrial ‘biomatter’ to be processed and constituted into something resembling food. Data platforms, private equity firms, e-commerce giants and AI-controlled farming systems.
This is the future that big agritech and agribusiness envisage: a future of ‘data-driven’ and ‘climate-friendly’ agriculture that they say is essential if we are to feed a growing global population.
The transformative vision outlined above which is being promoted by the likes of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation amounts to a power grab. Whether through all aspects of data control (soil quality, consumer preferences, weather, etc), e-commerce monopolies, corporate land ownership, seed biopiracy and patenting, synthetic lab-made food or the eradication of the public sector’s role in ensuring food security and national food sovereignty, the aim is for a relative handful of corporations to gain full control of the entire global food system.
Smallholder peasant farming is to be eradicated as the big-tech giants and agribusiness impose their ‘disruptive’ technologies.
This vision is symptomatic of a reductionist mindset fixated on a narrow yield-output paradigm that is unable or more likely unwilling to grasp an integrated social-cultural-economic-agronomic systems approach to food and agriculture that accounts for many different factors, including local/regional food security and sovereignty, diverse nutrition production per acre, water table stability and boosting rural development based on thriving local communities.
Instead, what is envisaged will lead to the further trashing of rural economies, communities and cultures. A vision that has scant regard for the right to healthy and culturally appropriate food and the right of people to define their own food and agriculture systems.
But is any of this necessary or inevitable?
There is no global shortage of food. Even under any plausible future population scenario, there will be no shortage as evidenced by scientist Dr Jonathan Latham in his paper The Myth of a Food Crisis (2020). Furthermore, there are tried and tested approaches to addressing the challenges humanity faces, not least agroecology.
Reshaping agrifood systems
An organic-based, agrifood system could be implemented in Europe and would allow a balanced coexistence between agriculture and the environment. This would reinforce Europe’s autonomy, feed the predicted population in 2050, allow the continent to continue to export cereals to countries which need them for human consumption and substantially reduce water pollution and toxic emissions from agriculture.
The paper by Gilles Billen et al follows a long line of studies and reports which have concluded that organic agriculture is vital for guaranteeing food security, rural development, better nutrition and sustainability.
For instance, in the 2006 book The Global Development of Organic Agriculture: Challenges and Prospects, Neils Halberg and his colleagues argue that there are still more than 740 million food insecure people (at least 100 million more today), the majority of whom live in the Global South. They say if a conversion to organic farming of approximately 50% of the agricultural area in the Global South were to be carried out, it would result in increased self-sufficiency and decreased net food imports to the region.
In 2007, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) noted that organic models increase cost-effectiveness and contribute to resilience in the face of climatic stress. The FAO concluded that by managing biodiversity in time (rotations) and space (mixed cropping), organic farmers use their labour and environmental factors to intensify production in a sustainable way and that organic agriculture could break the vicious circle of farmer indebtedness for proprietary agricultural inputs.
Of course, organic agriculture and agroecology are not necessarily one and the same. Whereas organic agriculture can still be part of the prevailing globalised food regime dominated by giant agrifood conglomerates, agroecology uses organic practices but is ideally rooted in the principles of localisation, food sovereignty and self-reliance.
The FAO recognises that agroecology contributes to improved food self-reliance, the revitalisation of smallholder agriculture and enhanced employment opportunities. It has argued that organic agriculture could produce enough food on a global per capita basis for the current world population but with reduced environmental impact than conventional agriculture.
In 2012, Deputy Secretary General of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) Petko Draganov stated that expanding Africa’s shift towards organic farming will have beneficial effects on the continent’s nutritional needs, the environment, farmers’ incomes, markets and employment.
A meta analysis conducted by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and UNCTAD (2008) assessed 114 cases of organic farming in Africa. The two UN agencies concluded that organic agriculture can be more conducive to food security in Africa than most conventional production systems and that it is more likely to be sustainable in the long term.
The 2009 report Agriculture at a Crossroads by the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development, produced by 400 scientists and supported by 60 countries, recommended agroecology to maintain and increase the productivity of global agriculture. It cites the largest study of ‘sustainable agriculture’ in the Global South, which analysed 286 projects covering 37 million hectares in 57 countries, and found that on average crop yields increased by 79% (the study also included ‘resource conserving’ non-organic conventional approaches).
In Ethiopia, agroecology has been scaled up across the entire Tigray region, partly due to enlightened political leaders and the commitment of key institutions. But Cuba is the one country in the world that has made the biggest changes in the shortest time in moving from industrial chemical-intensive agriculture to organic farming.
Professor of Agroecology Miguel Altieri notes that, due to the difficulties Cuba experienced as a result of the fall of the USSR, it moved towards organic and agroecological techniques in the 1990s. From 1996 to 2005, per capita food production in Cuba increased by 4.2% yearly during a period when production was stagnant across the wider region.
By 2016, Cuba had 383,000 urban farms, covering 50,000 hectares of otherwise unused land and producing more than 1.5 million tons of vegetables. The most productive urban farms yield up to 20 kg of food per square metre, the highest rate in the world, using no synthetic chemicals. Urban farms supply 50 to 70% or more of all the fresh vegetables consumed in cities such as Havana and Villa Clara.
It has been calculated by Altieri and his colleague Fernando R Funes-Monzote that if all peasant farms and cooperatives adopted diversified agroecological designs, Cuba would be able to produce enough to feed its population, supply food to the tourist industry and even export some food to help generate foreign currency.
Serving a corporate agenda
However, global agribusiness and agritech firms continue to marginalise organic, capture public bodies and push for their chemical-intensive, high-tech approaches. Although organic farming and natural farming methods like agroecology offer genuine solutions for many of the world’s pressing problems (health, environment, employment, rural development, etc), these approaches challenge corporate interests and threaten their bottom line.
In 2014, Corporate Europe Observatory released a critical report on the European Commission over the previous five years. The report concluded that the commission had been a willing servant of a corporate agenda. It had sided with agribusiness on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and pesticides. Far from shifting Europe to a more sustainable food and agriculture system, the opposite had happened, as agribusiness and its lobbyists continued to dominate the Brussels scene.
Consumers in Europe reject GM food, but the commission had made various attempts to meet the demands from the biotech sector to allow GMOs into Europe, aided by giant food companies, such as Unilever, and the lobby group FoodDrinkEurope.
The report concluded that the commission had eagerly pursued a corporate agenda in all the areas investigated and pushed for policies in sync with the interests of big business. It had done this in the apparent belief that such interests are synonymous with the interests of society at large.
Little has changed since. In December 2021, Friends of the Earth Europe (FOEE) noted that big agribusiness and biotech corporations are currently pushing for the European Commission to remove any labelling and safety checks for new genomic techniques. Since the beginning of their lobbying efforts (in 2018), these corporations have spent at least €36 million lobbying the European Union and have had 182 meetings with European commissioners, their cabinets and director generals: more than one meeting a week.
According to FOEE, the European Commission seems more than willing to put the lobby’s demands into a new law that would include weakened safety checks and bypass GMO labelling.
Corporate influence over key national and international bodies is nothing new. From the World Bank’s ‘enabling the business of agriculture’ and the influence of foreign retail on India’s NITI Aayog (the influential policy commission think tank of the Government of India) to the Gates Foundation’s role in opening up African agriculture to global food and agribusiness oligopolies, democratic procedures at sovereign state levels are being bypassed to impose seed monopolies and proprietary inputs on farmers and to incorporate them into a global agrifood chain dominated by powerful corporations.
But there are now also new players on the block. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and others are closing in on the global agrifood sector while the likes of Bayer, Syngenta, Corteva and Cargill continue to cement their stranglehold.
The tech giants entry into the sector will increasingly lead to a mutually beneficial integration between the companies that supply products to farmers (pesticides, seeds, fertilisers, tractors, etc) and those that control the flow of data and have access to digital (cloud) infrastructure and food consumers. In effect, multi-billion dollar agrifood data management markets are being created.
In India, Walmart and Amazon could end up dominating the e-retail sector. These two US companies would also own India’s key consumer and other economic data, making them the country’s digital overlords along with Google and Facebook.
The government is facilitating the dominance of giant corporations, not least through digital or e-commerce platforms. E-commerce companies not only control data about consumption but also control data on production, logistics, who needs what, when they need it, who should produce it, who should move it and when it should be moved.
These platforms have the capacity to shape the entire physical economy. We are seeing the eradication of the marketplace in favour of platforms owned by global conglomerates which will control everything from production to logistics, including agriculture and farming.
The farmer will be told how much production is expected, how much rain is anticipated, what type of soil quality there is, what type of (GM) seeds and proprietary inputs are required and when the produce needs to be ready.
E-commerce platforms will become permanently embedded once artificial intelligence begins to plan and determine all of the above.
In April 2021, the Indian government signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Microsoft, allowing its local partner CropData to leverage a master database of farmers. The MoU seems to be part of the AgriStack policy initiative, which involves the roll out of ‘disruptive’ technologies and digital databases in the agricultural sector.
CropData will be granted access to a government database of 50 million farmers and their land records. As the database is developed, it will include farmers’ personal details, profile of land held, production data and financial details.
In addition to facilitating data harvesting and a data management market, the Indian government is trying to establish a system of ‘conclusive titling’ of all land in the country, so that ownership can be identified and land can then be valued, bought or taken away.
The plan is that, as farmers lose access to land or can be identified as legal owners, predatory global institutional investors will buy up and amalgamate holdings, facilitating the further roll out of high-input, corporate-dependent industrial agriculture.
This is an example of stakeholder-partnership capitalism, much promoted by the likes of the World Economic Forum, whereby a government facilitates the gathering of such information by a private player which can then, in this case, use the data for developing a land market (courtesy of land law changes that the government enacts) for institutional investors at the expense of smallholder farmers who will find themselves displaced.
By harvesting information – under the benign-sounding policy of data-driven agriculture – private corporations will be better placed to exploit farmers’ situations for their own ends.
Imagine a cartel of data owners, proprietary input suppliers and retail concerns at the commanding heights of the global economy, peddling toxic industrial (and lab-engineered) ‘food’ and the devastating health and environmental impacts associated with it.
As for elected representatives and sovereign state governments, their role will be highly limited to technocratic overseers of these platforms and the artificial intelligence tools that plan and determine all of the above.
But none of this is set in stone or inevitable. The farmers victory in India in getting the corporate-friendly farm laws repealed show what can be achieved, even if this is only viewed as a spanner in the works of a global machine that is relentless.
New world order
And that machine comprises what journalist Ernst Wolff calls the digital-financial complex that is now driving the globalisation-one agriculture agenda. This complex comprises many of the companies mentioned above: Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), Apple, Amazon and Meta (Facebook) as well as BlackRock and Vanguard, transnational investment/asset management corporations.
These entities exert control over governments and important institutions like the European Central Bank (ECB) and the US Federal Reserve. Indeed, Wolff states that BlackRock and Vanguard have more financial assets than the ECB and the Fed combined.
To appreciate the power and influence of BlackRock and Vanguard, let us turn to the documentary Monopoly: An Overview of the Great Reset which argues that the stock of the world’s largest corporations are owned by the same institutional investors. This means that ‘competing’ brands, like Coke and Pepsi, are not really competitors, since their stock is owned by the same investment companies, investment funds, insurance companies and banks.
Smaller investors are owned by larger investors. Those are owned by even bigger investors. The visible top of this pyramid shows only two companies: Vanguard and Black Rock.
A 2017 Bloomberg report states that both these companies in the year 2028 together will have investments amounting to 20 trillion dollars. In other words, they will own almost everything worth owning.
The digital-financial complex wants control over all aspects of life. It wants a cashless world, to destroy bodily integrity with a mandatory vaccination agenda linked to emerging digital-biopharmaceutical technologies, to control all personal data and digital money and it requires full control over everything, including food and farming.
If events over the last two years have shown us anything, it is that an unaccountable authoritarian global elite knows the type of world it wants to create, has the ability to coordinate its agenda globally and will use deception and duplicity to achieve it. And in this brave new Orwellian world where capitalist ‘liberal democracy’ has run its course, there will be no place for genuinely independent nation states or individual rights.
The independence of nation states could be further eroded by the digital-financial complex’s ‘financialisation of nature’ and its ‘green profiling’ of countries and companies. If we take the example of India, again, the Indian government has been on a relentless drive to attract inflows of foreign investment into government bonds (creating a lucrative market for global investors). It does not take much imagination to see how investors could destabilise the economy with large movements in or out of these bonds but also how India’s ‘green credentials’ could be factored in to downgrade its international credit rating.
And how could India demonstrate its green credentials and thus its ‘credit worthiness’? Perhaps by allowing herbicide-resistant GMO commodity crop monocultures that the GM sector misleadingly portrays as ‘climate friendly’.
As for concepts such as localisation, food sovereignty, self-reliance and participatory democracy – key tenets of agroecology – these are mere inconveniences to be trampled on.
Olivier De Schutter, former UN special Rapporteur on the right to food, delivered his final report to the UN Human Rights Council in 2011, based on an extensive review of scientific literature. He concluded that by applying agroecological principles to the design of democratically controlled agricultural systems we can help to put an end to food crises and address climate variabilities and poverty challenges.
De Schutter argued that agroecological approaches could address food needs in critical regions and double food production within 10 years. However, he notes there is insufficient backing for organic-based farming which seriously hinders progress.
But it is not just a case of insufficient backing. Global agribusiness and agritech corporations have leveraged themselves into strategic positions and integral to their strategy has been attacks on organic farming as they attempt to cast it as a niche model which cannot feed the world. From the false narrative that industrial agriculture is necessary to feed a growing population to providing lavish research grants and the capture of important policy-making institutions, these firms have secured a thick legitimacy within policy making machinery.
These conglomerates regard organic approaches as a threat, especially agroecology which adheres to a non-industrial, smallholder model rooted in local independent enterprises and communities based on the principle of localisation. When people like De Schutter assert the need for a “democratically controlled” agroecology, this runs counter to the reality of large agribusiness firms, their proprietary products and their globalisation agenda based on long supply chains, market dependency, dispossession and the incorporation of farms and farmers into their agrifood regime. And as we can see, ‘democracy’ has no place in the world of the digital-financial complex.
The 2015 Declaration of the International Forum for Agroecology argues for building grass-root local food systems that create new rural-urban links, based on truly agroecological food production. It says that agroecology should not be co-opted to become a tool of the industrial food production model; it should be the essential alternative to it.
The declaration stated that agroecology is political and requires local producers and communities to challenge and transform structures of power in society, not least by putting the control of seeds, biodiversity, land and territories, waters, knowledge, culture and the commons in the hands of those who feed the world.
According to Pat Mooney of the ETC Group, this involves developing healthy and equitable agroecological production systems, building short (community-based) supply chains and restructuring and democratising governance systems that could take 25 years to accomplish: in effect a ‘long food movement’.
We are currently living through epoch-defining changes and the struggle for the future of food and agriculture is integral to the wider struggle over the future direction of humanity. There is a pressing need to transition towards a notion of food sovereignty based on agroecological principles and the local ownership and stewardship of common resources.
We map out the rising number of high-tech surveillance and deterrent systems facing asylum seekers along EU borders
From military-grade drones to sensor systems and experimental technology, the EU and its members have spent hundreds of millions of euros over the past decade on technologies to track down and keep at bay the refugees on its borders.
Poland’s border with Belarus is becoming the latest frontline for this technology, with the country approving last month a €350m (£300m) wall with advanced cameras and motion sensors.
Who gets to decide when it comes to bodily autonomy?
Where does one draw the line over whose rights are worthy of protecting? And how do present-day legal debates over bodily autonomy, privacy, vaccine mandates, the death penalty and abortion play into future discussions about singularity, artificial intelligence, cloning, and the privacy rights of the individual in the face of increasingly invasive, intrusive and unavoidable government technologies?
Caught up in the heated debate over the legality of abortion, we’ve failed to think about what’s coming next. Get ready, because it could get scary, ugly and overwhelming really fast.
Thus far, abortion politics have largely revolved around who has the right to decide—the government or the individual—when it comes to bodily autonomy, the right to privacy in one’s body, sexual freedom, and the rights of the unborn.
In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause provides for a “right to privacy” that assures a woman’s right to abort her pregnancy within the first two trimesters.
In Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), the Supreme Court reaffirmed its earlier ruling in Roe when it prohibited states from imposing an “undue burden” or “substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion before the fetus attains viability.”
No matter how the Supreme Court rules in Dobbs, it will not resolve the problem of a culture that values life based on a sliding scale. Nor will it help us navigate the moral, ethical and scientific minefields that await us as technology and humanity move ever closer to a point of singularity.
Here’s what I know.
Life is an inalienable right. By allowing the government to decide who or what is deserving of rights, it shifts the entire discussion from one in which we are “endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights” (that of life, liberty property and the pursuit of happiness) to one in which only those favored by the government get to enjoy such rights. The abortion debate—a tug-of-war over when an unborn child is considered a human being with rights—lays the groundwork for discussions about who else may or may not be deserving of rights: the disabled, the aged, the infirm, the immoral, the criminal, etc. The death penalty is just one aspect of this debate. As theologian Francis Schaeffer warned early on: “The acceptance of death of human life in babies born or unborn opens the door to the arbitrary taking of any human life. From then on, it’s purely arbitrary.”
If all people are created equal, then all lives should be equally worthy of protection. There’s an idea embraced by both the Right and the Left according to their biases that there is a hierarchy to life, with some lives worthier of protection than others. Out of that mindset is born the seeds of eugenics, genocide, slavery and war.
There is no hierarchy of freedoms. All freedoms hang together. Freedom cannot be a piece-meal venture. My good friend Nat Hentoff (1925-2017), a longtime champion of civil liberties and a staunch pro-lifer, often cited Cardinal Bernardin, who believed that a “consistent ethic of life” viewed all threats to life as immoral: “[N]uclear war threatens life on a previously unimaginable scale. Abortion takes life daily on a horrendous scale. Public executions are fast becoming weekly events in the most advanced technological society in history, and euthanasia is now openly discussed and even advocated. Each of these assaults on life has its own meaning and morality. They cannot be collapsed into one problem, but they must be confronted as pieces of a larger pattern.”
Beware slippery slopes. To suggest that the end justifies the means (for example, that abortion is justified in order to ensure a better quality of life for women and children) is to encourage a slippery slope mindset that could just as reasonably justify ending a life in order for the great good of preventing war, thwarting disease, defeating poverty, preserving national security, etc. Such arguments have been used in the past to justify such dubious propositions as subjecting segments of the population to secret scientific experiments, unleashing nuclear weapons on innocent civilians, and enslaving fellow humans.
Beware double standards. As the furor surrounding COVID-19 vaccine mandates make clear, the debate over bodily autonomy and privacy goes beyond the singular right to abortion. Indeed, as vaccine mandates have been rolled out, long-held positions have been reversed: many of those who historically opposed the government usurping a woman’s right to bodily autonomy and privacy have no qualms about supporting vaccine mandates that trample upon those very same rights. Similarly, those who historically looked to the government to police what a woman does with her body believe the government should have no authority to dictate whether or not one opts to get vaccinated.
What’s next? Up until now, we have largely focused the privacy debate in the physical realm as it relates to abortion rights, physical searches of our persons and property, and our communications. Yet humanity is being propelled at warp speed into a whole new frontier when it comes to privacy, bodily autonomy, and what it means to be a human being.
We haven’t even begun to understand how to talk about these new realms, let alone establish safeguards to protect against abuses.
Humanity itself hangs in the balance.
Remaining singularly human and retaining your individuality and dominion over yourself—mind, body and soul—in the face of corporate and government technologies that aim to invade, intrude, monitor, manipulate and control us may be one of the greatest challenges before us.
These battles over COVID-19 vaccine mandates are merely the tipping point. The groundwork being laid with these mandates is a prologue to what will become the police state’s conquest of a new, relatively uncharted, frontier: inner space, specifically, the inner workings (genetic, biological, biometric, mental, emotional) of the human race.
Everything we do is increasingly dependent on and, ultimately, controlled by technological devices. For example, in 2007, there were an estimated 10 million sensor devices connecting human utilized electronic devices (cell phones, laptops, etc.) to the Internet. By 2013, it had increased to 3.5 billion. By 2030, there will be an estimated 100 trillion sensor devices connecting us to the internet by way of a neural network that approximates a massive global brain.
The end goal? Population control and the creation of a new “human” species, so to speak, through singularity, a marriage of sorts between machine and human beings in which artificial intelligence and the human brain will merge to form a superhuman mind.
Advances in neuroscience indicate that future behavior can be predicted based upon activity in certain portions of the brain, potentially creating a nightmare scenario in which government officials select certain segments of the population for more invasive surveillance or quarantine based solely upon their brain chemistry.
Clearly, we are rapidly moving into the “posthuman era,” one in which humans will become a new type of being. “Technological devices,” writes journalist Marcelo Gleiser, “will be implanted in our heads and bodies, or used peripherally, like Google Glass, extending our senses and cognitive abilities.”
Transhumanism—the fusing of machines and people—is here to stay and will continue to grow.
In fact, as science and technology continue to advance, the ability to control humans will only increase. In 2014, for example, it was revealed that scientists had discovered how to deactivate that part of our brains that controls whether we are conscious or not. Add to this the fact that increasingly humans will be implanted with microchips for such benign purposes as tracking children or as medical devices to assist with our health.
All of this indicates a new path forward for large corporations and government entities that want to achieve absolute social control.
It is slavery in another form.
Yet we must never stop working to protect life, preserve our freedoms and maintain some semblance of our humanity.
Abortion, vaccine mandates, transhumanism, etc.: these are all points along the continuum.
Even so, there will be others. For instance, analysts are speculating whether artificial intelligence, which will eventually dominate all emerging technologies, could come to rule the world and enslave humans. How will a world dominated by artificial intelligence redefine what it means to be human and exercise free will?
Scientists say the world’s first living robots can now reproduce. What rights are these “living” organisms entitled to? For that matter, what about clones? At the point that scientists are able to move beyond cloning organs and breeding hybrid animals to breeding full-bodied, living clones in order to harvest body parts, who is to say that clones do not also deserve to have their right to life protected?
These are ethical dilemmas without any clear-cut answers. Yet one thing is certain: as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries/dissivoice-20, putting the power to determine who gets to live or die in the hands of the government is a dangerous place to start.
On January 30, 2020, The Brennan Center for Justice sent a letter to the Los Angeles Police Department that began as such:
This is a request under the California Public Records Act (“CPRA”), Cal. Gov’t Code §§ 6250-6270, on behalf of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law (“Brennan Center”). The Brennan Center seeks information relating to the Los Angeles Police Department’s use of social media to collect information about individuals, groups, and activities, described below as “social media monitoring.
If you want to nerd out to the terrifying tech details that were revealed, click here. For just the basics, here goes: A tech startup called Voyager Labs claims to be helping law enforcement agencies like the LAPD “harness social media to help solve and predict crime.” Yes, you just read the words “predict crime.”
“Pulling information from every part of an individual’s various social media profiles, Voyager helps police investigate and surveil people by reconstructing their entire digital lives – public and private,” explains Johana Bhuiyan and Sam Levin in a Nov. 17, 2021, Guardian article. “By relying on artificial intelligence, the company claims, its software can decipher the meaning and significance of online human behavior, and can determine whether subjects have already committed a crime, may commit a crime or adhere to certain ideologies.”
Among many other invasive tactics, Voyager’s data collection involves:
Archiving a targeted person’s deleted social media friends and posts
Monitoring the person’s contacts and all their social media activities
Conducting real-time “sentiment analysis”
Investigating “ideological solidarity”
Analyzing (supposedly) private messages on social media platforms
Creating fake accounts to connect with “suspicious” groups or individuals
If this sounds like a bad sci-fi flick, well…
Minority Report was set in 2054. However, here in 2021, we’re already burdened with much of the “predictive” technology featured in the film; e.g.:
Personalized advertisements
Facial and optical recognition
Voice-controlled homes
Driverless cars
And yes… pre-crime policing
It will never cease to amaze me how people so easily surrender their rights and privacy — allegedly for convenience and safety [sic]. This is why the current battles against mandates and digital tracking are crucial and relevant. No matter where you stand on any given issue, surely you recognize that sovereignty and privacy benefit everyone. Without that, you are powerless.
Spoiler Alert: Neither the government nor the corporations that own it ever have your best interests at heart. You can learn to accept this reality now or have it driven home when you get falsely charged with a “pre-crime” in the future.
The UK government’s Behavioural Insights Team helped to push the public towards accepting the COVID narrative, restrictions and lockdowns. It is now working on ‘nudging’ people towards further possible restrictions or at least big changes in their behaviour in the name of ‘climate emergency’. From frequent news stories and advertisements to soap opera storylines and government announcements, the message about impending climate catastrophe is almost relentless.
Part of the messaging includes blaming the public’s consumption habits for a perceived ‘climate emergency’. At the same time, young people are being told that we only have a decade or so (depending on who is saying it) to ‘save the planet’.
Setting the agenda are powerful corporations that helped degrade much of the environment in the first place. But ordinary people, not the multi-billionaires pushing this agenda, will pay the price for this as living more frugally seems to be part of the programme (‘own nothing and be happy’). Could we at some future point see ‘climate emergency’ lockdowns, not to ‘save the NHS’ but to ‘save the planet’?
A tendency to focus on individual behaviour and not ‘the system’ exists.
But let us not forget this is a system that deliberately sought to eradicate a culture of self-reliance that prevailed among the working class in the 19th century (self-education, recycling products, a culture of thrift, etc) via advertising and a formal school education that ensured conformity and set in motion a lifetime of wage labour and dependency on the products manufactured by an environmentally destructive capitalism.
A system that has its roots in inflicting massive violence across the globe to exert control over land and resources elsewhere.
In his 2018 book The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequalities and its solutions, Jason Hickel describes the processes involved in Europe’s wealth accumulation over a 150-year period of colonialism that resulted in tens of millions of deaths.
By using other countries’ land, Britain effectively doubled the size of arable land in its control. This made it more practical to then reassign the rural population at home (by stripping people of their means of production) to industrial labour. This too was underpinned by massive violence (burning villages, destroying houses, razing crops).
Hickel argues that none of this was inevitable but was rooted in the fear of being left behind by other countries because of Europe’s relative lack of land resources to produce commodities.
This is worth bearing in mind as we currently witness a fundamental shift in our relationship to the state resulting from authoritarian COVID-related policies and the rapidly emerging corporate-led green agenda. We should never underestimate the ruthlessness involved in the quest for preserving wealth and power and the propensity for wrecking lives and nature to achieve this.
Commodification of nature
Current green agenda ‘solutions’ are based on a notion of ‘stakeholder’ capitalism or private-public partnerships whereby vested interests are accorded greater weight, with governments and public money merely facilitating the priorities of private capital.
A key component of this strategy involves the ‘financialisation of nature’ and the production of new ‘green’ markets to deal with capitalism’s crisis of over accumulation and weak consumer demand caused by decades of neoliberal policies and the declining purchasing power of working people. The banking sector is especially set to make a killing via ‘green profiling’ and ‘green bonds’.
According to Friends of the Earth (FoE), corporations and states will use the financialisation of nature discourse to weaken laws and regulations designed to protect the environment with the aim of facilitating the goals of extractive industries, while allowing mega-infrastructure projects in protected areas and other contested places.
Global corporations will be able to ‘offset’ (greenwash) their activities by, for example, protecting or planting a forest elsewhere (on indigenous people’s land) or perhaps even investing in (imposing) industrial agriculture which grows herbicide-resistant GMO commodity crop monocultures that are misleadingly portrayed as ‘climate friendly’.
Offsetting schemes allow companies to exceed legally defined limits of destruction at a particular location, or destroy protected habitat, on the promise of compensation elsewhere; and allow banks to finance such destruction on the same premise.
This agenda could result in the weakening of current environmental protection legislation or its eradication in some regions under the pretext of compensating for the effects elsewhere. How ecoservice ‘assets’ (for example, a forest that performs a service to the ecosystem by acting as a carbon sink) are to be evaluated in a monetary sense is very likely to be done on terms that are highly favourable to the corporations involved, meaning that environmental protection will play second fiddle to corporate and finance sector return-on-investment interests.
As FoE argues, business wants this system to be implemented on its terms, which means the bottom line will be more important than stringent rules that prohibit environmental destruction.
Saving capitalism
The envisaged commodification of nature will ensure massive profit-seeking opportunities through the opening up of new markets and the creation of fresh investment instruments.
Capitalism needs to keep expanding into or creating new markets to ensure the accumulation of capital to offset the tendency for the general rate of profit to fall (according to writer Ted Reese, it has trended downwards from an estimated 43% in the 1870s to 17% in the 2000s). The system suffers from a rising overaccumulation (surplus) of capital.
Reese notes that, although wages and corporate taxes have been slashed, the exploitability of labour continued to become increasingly insufficient to meet the demands of capital accumulation. By late 2019, the world economy was suffocating under a mountain of debt. Many companies could not generate enough profit and falling turnover, squeezed margins, limited cashflows and highly leveraged balance sheets were prevalent. In effect, economic growth was already grinding to a halt prior to the massive stock market crash in February 2020.
In the form of COVID ‘relief’, there has been a multi-trillion bailout for capitalism as well as the driving of smaller enterprises to bankruptcy. Or they have being swallowed up by global interests. Either way, the likes of Amazon and other predatory global corporations have been the winners.
New ‘green’ Ponzi trading schemes to offset carbon emissions and commodify ‘ecoservices’ along with electric vehicles and an ‘energy transition’ represent a further restructuring of the capitalist economy, resulting in a shift away from a consumer oriented demand-led system.
It essentially leaves those responsible for environmental degradation at the wheel, imposing their will and their narrative on the rest of us.
Global agribusiness
Between 2000 and 2009, Indonesia supplied more than half of the global palm oil market at an annual expense of some 340,000 hectares of Indonesian countryside. Consider too that Brazil and Indonesia have spent over 100 times more in subsidies to industries that cause deforestation than they received in international conservation aid from the UN to prevent it.
These two countries gave over $40bn in subsidies to the palm oil, timber, soy, beef and biofuels sectors between 2009 and 2012, some 126 times more than the $346m they received to preserve their rain forests.
India is the world’s leading importer of palm oil, accounting for around 15% of the global supply. It imports over two-thirds of its palm oil from Indonesia.
Until the mid-1990s, India was virtually self-sufficient in edible oils. Under pressure from the World Trade Organization (WTO), import tariffs were reduced, leading to an influx of cheap (subsidised) edible oil imports that domestic farmers could not compete with. This was a deliberate policy that effectively devastated the home-grown edible oils sector and served the interests of palm oil growers and US grain and agriculture commodity company Cargill, which helped write international trade rules to secure access to the Indian market on its terms.
Indonesia leads the world in global palm oil production, but palm oil plantations have too often replaced tropical forests, leading to the killing of endangered species and the uprooting of local communities as well as contributing to the release of potential environment-damaging gases. Indonesia emits more of these gases than any country besides China and the US, largely due to the production of palm oil.
The issue of palm oil is one example from the many that could be provided to highlight how the drive to facilitate corporate need and profit trumps any notion of environmental protection or addressing any ‘climate emergency’. Whether it is in Indonesia, Latin America or elsewhere, transnational agribusiness – and the system of globalised industrial commodity crop agriculture it promotes – fuels much of the destruction we see today.
Even if the mass production of lab-created food, under the guise of ‘saving the planet’ and ‘sustainability’, becomes logistically possible (which despite all the hype is not at this stage), it may still need biomass and huge amounts of energy. Whose land will be used to grow these biomass commodities and which food crops will they replace? And will it involve that now-famous Gates’ euphemism ‘land mobility’ (farmers losing their land)?
Microsoft is already mapping Indian farmers’ lands and capturing agriculture datasets such as crop yields, weather data, farmers’ personal details, profile of land held (cadastral maps, farm size, land titles, local climatic and geographical conditions), production details (crops grown, production history, input history, quality of output, machinery in possession) and financial details (input costs, average return, credit history).
Is this an example of stakeholder-partnership capitalism, whereby a government facilitates the gathering of such information by a private player which can then use the data for developing a land market (courtesy of land law changes that the government enacts) for institutional investors at the expense of smallholder farmers who find themselves ‘land mobile’? This is a major concern among farmers and civil society in India.
Back in 2017, agribusiness giant Monsanto was judged to have engaged in practices that impinged on the basic human right to a healthy environment, the right to food and the right to health. Judges at the ‘Monsanto Tribunal’, held in The Hague, concluded that if ecocide were to be formally recognised as a crime in international criminal law, Monsanto could be found guilty.
The tribunal called for the need to assert the primacy of international human and environmental rights law. However, it was also careful to note that an existing set of legal rules serves to protect investors’ rights in the framework of the WTO and in bilateral investment treaties and in clauses in free trade agreements. These investor trade rights provisions undermine the capacity of nations to maintain policies, laws and practices protecting human rights and the environment and represent a disturbing shift in power.
The tribunal denounced the severe disparity between the rights of multinational corporations and their obligations.
While the Monsanto Tribunal judged that company to be guilty of human rights violations, including crimes against the environment, in a sense we also witnessed global capitalism on trial.
Global conglomerates can only operate as they do because of a framework designed to allow them to capture or co-opt governments and regulatory bodies and to use the WTO and bilateral trade deals to lever influence. As Jason Hickel notes in his book (previously referred to), old-style colonialism may have gone but governments in the Global North and its corporations have found new ways to assert dominance via leveraging aid, market access and ‘philanthropic’ interventions to force lower income countries to do what they want.
The World Bank’s ‘Enabling the Business of Agriculture’ and its ongoing commitment to an unjust model of globalisation is an example of this and a recipe for further plunder and the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of the few.
Brazil and Indonesia have subsidised private corporations to effectively destroy the environment through their practices. Canada and the UK are working with the GMO biotech sector to facilitate its needs. And India is facilitating the destruction of its agrarian base according to World Bank directives for the benefit of the likes of Corteva and Cargill.
The TRIPS Agreement, written by Monsanto, and the WTO Agreement on Agriculture, written by Cargill, was key to a new era of corporate imperialism. It came as little surprise that in 2013 India’s then Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar accused US companies of derailing the nation’s oil seeds production programme.
Powerful corporations continue to regard themselves as the owners of people, the planet and the environment and as having the right – enshrined in laws and agreements they wrote – to exploit and devastate for commercial gain.
Partnership or co-option?
It was noticeable during a debate on food and agriculture at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow that there was much talk about transforming the food system through partnerships and agreements. Fine-sounding stuff, especially when the role of agroecology and regenerative farming was mentioned.
However, if, for instance, the interests you hope to form partnerships with are coercing countries to eradicate their essential buffer food stocks then bid for such food on the global market with US dollars (as in India) or are lobbying for the enclosure of seeds through patents (as in Africa and elsewhere), then surely this deliberate deepening of dependency should be challenged; otherwise ‘partnership’ really means co-option.
Similarly, the UN Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) that took place during September in New York was little more than an enabler of corporate needs. The UNFSS was founded on a partnership between the UN and the World Economic Forum and was disproportionately influenced by corporate actors.
Those granted a pivotal role at the UNFSS support industrial food systems that promote ultra-processed foods, deforestation, industrial livestock production, intensive pesticide use and commodity crop monocultures, all of which cause soil deterioration, water contamination and irreversible impacts on biodiversity and human health. And this will continue as long as the environmental effects can be ‘offset’ or these practices can be twisted on the basis of them somehow being ‘climate-friendly’.
Critics of the UNFSS offer genuine alternatives to the prevailing food system. In doing so, they also provide genuine solutions to climate-related issues and food injustice based on notions of food sovereignty, localisation and a system of food cultivation deriving from agroecological principles and practices. Something which people who organised the climate summit in Glasgow would do well to bear in mind.
Current greenwashed policies are being sold by tugging at the emotional heartstrings of the public. This green agenda, with its lexicon of ‘sustainability’, ‘carbon neutrality’, ‘net-zero’ and doom-laden forecasts, is part of a programme that seeks to restructure capitalism, to create new investment markets and instruments and to return the system to viable levels of profitability.
The they, of course, are the capitalists. The bankers. The mortgage companies. The housing agencies. The alphabet soup of agencies which will squeeze blood from turnips and your progeny’s progeny.
The media is the medium for their poison, all those tricks of the mind, subliminal and overt, messages that cause chaos, the mass hysteria, the constant fear, the rage against the ‘other.’ And, the other are our fellow citizens, victims, most of us, sliding and slipping and slurrying down the proverbial drain.
Housing management companies; i.e., apartment management companies, now property management companies. We are talking about putting people out on the streets management companies. Black Rock or Black Stone, or the top (largest) property management companies in USA are evil doers, in the words of the criminal, George W. Bush. Terrorists in our own land.
Take a look at the number of “units” these thieves “own,”; i.e., manage! National Multifamily Housing Council — 50 Largest Apartment Managers
Again, the ‘they’ in the subheading are those who look at citizens as, well, semi-useless renters, eaters, drivers, patients, breathers, breeders. UNITS as in a person’s home, shelter, abode, gathering place, roof-running water-place-to-raise-a-life-or-a-family. In the hands of management companies, who are in Gucci suits and are beholding to the devils of capitalism: money schemers, bond holders, the top echelon of this Ponzi scheme. No national red alert state by state around eviction moratorium running out, or the exorbitant rents and sickening inflated cost of houses, new or preowned? Instead, this Tweedle-dee and Tweedledum Administration is saber-nuke rattling with China and Russia. Instead, this Brokeback Administration is pushing Jab of the Month on every living mammal in the USA. But real change, real safety, real social contracts? Never in the Art of the Deal shit-hole that is the Democratic and Republican mentality, which is for us, useful idiots, mental disease!
I have dealt with some of these property management (killer) outfits. Recently, with one of my clients — homeless veteran, diabetes, amputated leg from the knee down, other chronic illnesses — I went through email-telephone-snail mail hell. Zero response about his one apartment we landed that needed some ADA addition so he could get out of the bloody apartment in his wheelchair. I’ve written about Pinnacle (number three on that list above with 172,000 ‘units’). My client had a Rotary Club and Boy Scout unit and a construction company ready to put in a sound, safe, nice pathway so he could exit and enter his apartment.
Nothing from Pinnacle after hours spent attempting a two-way communication with them. I did get an apartment manager, in the Portland apartment complex office, who was from Ukraine, and who was, again, in this shit-hole country, afraid of rocking the boat, afraid of really helping me get to the top brass. Even the top brass, via email and snail mail, did not respond. You can’t even pull the old wounded military veteran with chronic illness card to get to their heart-strings, because, they have no heart — just a big set of investment-banking-real estate accounts.
What do nations care about the cost of war, if by spending a few hundred millions in steel and gunpowder they can gain a thousand millions in diamonds and cocoa?
― W.E.B. DuBois
Michael Hudson, again, explains how messed up we are in USA with this rentier system. This system of penury, three steps to poverty hustle. And Corporate/Mainstream Media are in with this scam. Don’t get confused with the title, Super-imperialism, Michael Hudson’s book. He goes to the heart of this USA scam:
So, I am talking about even redneck Texas, Dallas, where working class folk are seeing that $1,100 a month one bedroom apartment rent jump to $1,800 in November. Just like that, oh, that Lone Star Shit Hole State. But wait, that jump is happening all over the land. Every rotten governor who dares go on TV to express their Jab-Jab-Jabberwocky and their Unvaccinated-Going-to-get-sacked-turned-away-from-everywhere-no-medical-help-no-entitlements-no schooling sick fascist soft-shoe Vaudeville Big Pharma Blue Face bullshit, well, they are the Paper-Pharma Tigers, with state legislatures as pimped out by corporations and US Chamber of Commerce shits to the point of massive infrastructure failure, pot holes as big as DMZ craters, dirty water, dirty air, zero housing for the 80 percent, no bus drivers for the kiddos. This is America, the land of the Survival of the Fittest, of Richest, or Most Connected, or Most Sociopathic!
This is what these whippersnappers in the Blue States and Red States do — privatize EVERYTHING, since we are almost useless eaters and useless breathers. Useful, to them, as they call us their “useful idiots.” Title any way you want to: “Retirees Flee City Medicare Program as Deadline Looms for Move to Private Health Plan” or, “New York City Retirees Refusing to Eat the Medicare Advantage Dogfood“
So, no rent control, no national housing plan, no holding the US Chamber of Commerce and the other 10,000 thuggery lobbying groups for the building and paving and clear-cutting industries to the people’s standards. And, yes, a few brethren send me link and story after story and link. It’s what I have been feeling and seeing since age 13. Yes, the ugly reality of kill squads, School of the Americas, in Central America. Yes, in Arizona, age 13, after years overseas, seeing the government, the administrations, and their policy of undocumented folk from US-spit upon countries and their death squads coming over the borderline, illegally. Imagine that, people as illegals, and worse, as aliens, from another planet! Media and the newspapers I worked for, I fought those terms — illegal alien. Sick sick roots of this slaver country. Look at this, 15 years ago, with the old web site, Dissident Voice: “This Land is Their Land, and We Are the Illegal Aliens.”
Here, Ferlinghetti — from that little book, Poetry as Insurgent Art!
What are poets for, in such an age?
What is the use of poetry?
The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it. (A voice in the wilderness!)
If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this means sounding apocalyptic.
You are Whitman, you are Poe, you are Mark Twain, you are Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, you are Neruda and Mayakovsky and Pasolini, you are an American or a non-American, you can conquer the conquerors with words.
— Lawrence Ferlinghetti, pp.2-3
This headline, in the context of housing crisis, job crisis and, well, the supply chain made up crisis, which Michael Hudson talks about above with Blumenthal and Norton. “Biden says US will go to war with China to defend Taiwan”!
US President Biden bluntly declared at a Town Hall meeting on Thursday that the US was committed to going to war against China in defense of Taiwan. The statement is another provocative step that undermines the basis of US-China diplomatic relations and intensifies the already acute tensions between the two countries. (source)
These are not normal human beings, any of them in these dastardly administrations — Nixon-Ford-Carter-Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama-Trump-Biden. Oh, historically, it gets much much worse. Just the health care crises after crises, and get some slice of the National Health Services in Britain which my aunts and cousins and uncles in the old days used as ways to be treated with dignity for medical ailments. It’s all gone the way of dog food, Reagan/Thatcher, on down the line, Blair/Clinton, Obama/Trump/Biden. More news and analyses coming from a hip-hop guy, than anything from the Fox-MSNBC-CNN-Et Al crap:
Speaking of those great health authorities, those alphabet soup acronym junk science folk from our own FDA, get a grip on this during the planned pandemic:
That FDA, even reported on brokeback NBC: ‘Even the website of the approved product, R.J. Reynolds’ Vuse, which offers “7 Bold Colors, 3 Premium Flavors, 3 Nicotine Levels” along with sleek accessories like pretty “racing wraps” and holsters, says on top: “WARNING: This product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical.” But the FDA claimed that with vaping, “the potential benefit to smokers who switch completely or significantly reduce their cigarette use, would outweigh the risk to youth.” Apparently the argument is: It’s OK if young people get addicted to vaping nicotine because they will now be able to buy e-cigarettes to later quit.’
You know, the FDA in cahoots with the other great Pharma Folk, the self reporting Jewish Family, a la Sackler/Purdue:
Oh, it’s on Hulu, and it is a protracted, goofy drama of the St. Elsewhere kind. SO protracted, so long, but from Macy’s book. Oxycontin. Man, that dope in the white-blue-yellow-pink pill. Talk about emblematic of Pfizer/Merck/GSK/The Lot of them!
Curtis Wright was the FDA’s deputy director overseeing anesthetics and addiction products during the time OxyContin was being approved. In this position, Wright played a key role in allowing the deceptive marketing that suggested OxyContin was non-addictive. Particular focus has fallen on a special label issued by the FDA specifically for OxyContin which read “Delayed absorption as provided by OxyContin tablets is believed to reduce the abuse liability of a drug.” As depicted in Dopesick, this label was used by sales representatives to sell OxyContin as a treatment for moderate pain to skeptical doctors like the one played by former Batman star Michael Keaton. However, Purdue had conducted no actual studies to support this claim and Wright knew it. In Dopesick, FDA employees also confirm the person who approved of this label was Curtis Wright. (source)
Nah, we can’t call these people evil. We can’t call their business dealings illegal. We can’t call into question their ethics. We can’t question where they developed such sick marketing. We can’t look at their origins, their friends, their rabbis, their associations with family lines that go way back. That, my kind reader, would be, well, in the words of racists and fascists, anti-Semitic?
Well, I guess I can leave the origins stories up to the, well,
“How the Sackler family built a pharma dynasty and fueled an American calamity”
In ‘Empire of Pain,’ Patrick Radden Keefe details the humble Jewish immigrant roots of Purdue Pharmaceuticals, and how it is evading justice despite being behind the opioid crisis
In the 1960s, esteemed psychiatrist/genius ad man Dr. Arthur Sackler cemented his family’s massive fortune when his marketing strategy transformed diazepam, better known as Valium, from just another drug produced by his client Hoffman-La Roche into the top-selling “wonder” drug in the United States between 1968 and 1982.
Though the Jewish-American Sackler, whose parents immigrated to the US from Eastern Europe, initially encountered antisemitism, the wealth that he brought his family helped change all that.
Along with his psychiatrist brothers Mortimer and Raymond, Sackler would see enormous success marketing pharmaceuticals directly to doctors. The family delved into philanthropy in addition to pharma, and the name once snubbed by antisemites soon adorned prestigious educational and cultural institutions, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Louvre.
Yet more stories coming from friends that define CAPITALISM, and that is the C which is the big Corrupt, Colluding, Conspiratorial, Contagious, Calamitous, Corrosive, Cancerous. That is the soft shoe here — the C-C-C-C-C-C-C of Capitalism, with those Seven Deadly Sinful C’s! And just to make a quick aside, sort of the Robin Leech, The Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous detour, get a load of this set of seven deadly sinful C’s: Living: “The Super-Rich Are Forming a New Exclusive Club. For $180,000, a three-year membership includes investment opportunities, access to West Point generals, confidential support groups and private getaways.” (source, again, the 7 Sinful C’s Bloomberg News [sic])
Nah, never off with their heads!
[Tag: Richard Branson, from left, during an R360 networking tennis match with Michael Cole and Christopher Ryan, a former Tiger 21 chair in Texas and Puerto Rico and chief executive officer of GoBundance, a professional networking group. Courtesy of R360]
And these fella’s are controlling the narrative around 5/6G, Fake Green Capitalism, World Economic Forum’s “The Deplorables/Barely Useful Idiots Will Be Soylent Green” project of massive anal and biometric and cellular surveillance, and, then this bizarrely vapid story about “the only way to save the earth — read, saving/protecting/growing the billionaires’ and millionaires’ wealth, power, ego, land, families — is with, err, the billionaires’ and millionaires’ great know-how and techie future.”
Oh, Canada, the tail and hind teat of USA: “Why we must embrace geoengineering and other technologies to stop the climate crisis” by Jaqueline McLeod Rogers, University of Winnipeg. I’ll quote her, and just the two paragraphs say it all for me, and alas, while I do come from academia, albeit remedial college courses, writing courses, a la adjunct/freeway flyer, I have to say that my dealings with sustainability and green pornography/greenwashing experts over the years (yes, I ‘graduated’ from the University of British Columbia’s Green/Sustainability Summer Institute mumbo-jumbo course) has pretty much gelled the reality: most academicians are very-very much corruptible and corrupting, back to the 7 Very Sinful C’s of Capitalism:
Diplomacy aside, it’s time to do more than agree to cut emissions. Some scientists say an engineered climate recovery must be taken seriously, with aggressive and deliberate management strategies put in place. We need to cultivate citizen interest and government support for research into the development of large-scale geoengineering projects.
As a media and communications scholar, I cannot argue that one science is superior to another. My research examines how Marshall McLuhan’s thinking about technology relates to the current climate crisis. Drawing on the work of McLuhan and others, I believe there are emerging technological options of urgent interest to citizens committed to a sustainable future, and we need to pursue these rather than holding onto remnants of a new normal. (source)
It all comes down to reset after reset, the great openly brazen and powerful Very Seven Very Deadly Very Sinfully C ‘s of the Worst System for Humanity and Earth Ever Devised, Capitalism! Corrupt, Colluding, Conspiratorial, Contagious, Calamitous, Corrosive, Cancerous
So many truths, so many millions of stories, so many people dazed and confused. This is the trickster veil that the overlords of capitalism have dished out for the planet. The USA has taken it hook, line and sinker:
No one group has done more to damage our global agriculture and food quality than the Rockefeller Foundation. They began in the early 1950s after the War to fund two Harvard Business School professors to develop vertical integration which they named “Agribusiness.” The farmer became the least important. They then created the fraudulent Green Revolution in Mexico and India in the 1960s and later the pro-GMO Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa since 2006. Money from the Rockefeller Foundation literally created the disastrous GMO genetically altered plants with their toxic glyphosate pesticides. Now again, the foundation is engaged in a major policy change in global food and agriculture and it’s not good. (source)
There you have it, way before 10 a.m. PST, October 23, eight days before the CDC-Fauci-FDA approved Halloween, this blog to never end all blogs. Blots on us all, and, Plague Upon All Their Houses. Just reread, scroll back up, and you get the idea as to whose heads must roll. And it is just a short list. You’ve read about other heads that must roll in many other of my diatribes or rants. Righteous indignation? Nah, calm forward thinking starting 51 years ago when I was just a wee one.
Oh, shoot, back to the future, again:
Max Blumenthal question: “Are current politicians basing the corona measures on incorrectly established scientific principles?”
Mattias Desmet: I think so. Here, too, we see a kind of naïve belief in objectivity that turns into its opposite: a serious lack of objectivity with masses of errors and carelessness. Moreover, there is a sinister connection between the emergence of this kind of absolutist science and the process of manipulation and totalitarianisation of society. In her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, the German-American political thinker Hannah Arendt brilliantly describes how this process took place in Nazi Germany, among other places. For example, nascent totalitarian regimes typically fall back on a ‘scientific’ discourse. They show a great preference for figures and statistics, which quickly degenerate into pure propaganda, characterized by a radical “disregard for the facts”. For example, Nazism based its ideology on the superiority of the Aryan race. A whole series of so-called scientific data substantiated their theory. Today we know that this theory had no scientific validity, but scientists at the time used the media to defend the regime’s positions. Hannah Arendt describes how these scientists proclaimed questionable scientific credentials, and she uses the word “charlatans” to emphasize this. She also describes how the emergence of this kind of science and its industrial applications was accompanied by an inevitable social change. Classes disappeared and normal social ties deteriorated, with much indefinable fear, anxiety, frustration, and lack of meaning. It is under such circumstances that the masses develop very specific psychological qualities. All fears that haunt society become linked to one ‘object’ – for example, the Jews – so that the masses enter into a kind of energetic struggle with this object. And onto that process of social conditioning of the masses, a completely new political and constitutional organization subsequently grafts itself: the totalitarian state.
Today, one perceives a similar phenomenon. There is widespread psychological suffering, lack of meaning, and diminished social ties in society. Then a story comes along that points to a fear object, the virus, after which the population strongly links its fear and discomfort to this dreaded object. Meanwhile, there is a constant call in all media to collectively fight the murderous enemy. The scientists who bring the story to the population are rewarded with tremendous social power in return. Their psychological power is so great that, at their suggestion, the whole of society abruptly renounces a host of social customs and reorganises itself in ways that no one at the beginning of 2020 thought possible. (source)
Oh? So, this discussions can’t happen because the overlords, their masters, the Seven Sinful C’s of Capitalism, the planned resets, all of that trump us barely useful eaters, readers, watchers, walkers, drivers, patients, renters, dreamers, breathers, sleepers, consumers!
Whew, the realities of so many people as part of the walking wounded in high and low places. The landscape in USA, now Canada, UK and parts of Europe, where the Capitalists buff their gold-plated toilets and polish their collection of cars, there are hundreds of millions of people, rudderless, broken, flayed, laid prostrate from the emptiness of the consumerism, the bright lights and the smoke and mirrors. Everywhere in these lands there are masses of people faking it, living in la-la land. So much mental illness. So many variations on a theme of poor spiritual and intellectual hygiene.
The scriptwriters — the powerful who employ the torturers, the marketers, the legal vultures, all those barkers and salesmen, all those sociologists and psychiatrists, all of them, who are in the business of behavior modification — they too are broken, but in a criminal way. Thugs in Brooks Brothers suits. Hit men and hit women in the boardrooms of defense corporations, in mining corporations, in all the dirty corporations that make up the M.I.C. and the many headed poisons serpent of “contractors,” building roads, offices, runways, towers, systems of chaos as they help the Amerikkkan Empire extract, steal, rob, extort from those in the global south, in developing and under developed countries, from sea to naval cruising sea.
I’m around a lot of trauma, as a teacher, journalist and social services professional. I am right there in the middle of trauma, seeing first hand generational and familial trauma after trauma. There in the middle of epigenetics, I see how civic and cultural trauma mixes with familial trauma; the fact is most people are in various layers of dysfunction. Forget about the self-esteem issue as anything serious, but we do have a deeper discussion around this country’s Collective Stockholm Syndrome, or the General Anxiety Disorders so many young citizens and immigrants have. Yes, there are dark forces here to facilitate the continuation of trauma upon trauma. That rolling trauma creates inflammatory diseases, and a sort of stasis and emotional septicemia.
The warehousing of youth in public K12 gulags, oh, what a continuation of multiple traumas, including dumb-downing and highly sophisticated propaganda and agnotology. The commercialization (privatization) of everything in a child’s life has generated empty vassals for the junk of retail, buy-buy-buy and death of agency. The pimping for companies to gain the attention and the heart and soul of children, that is the order of the day. All those endless vapid hours upon hours on social (unsocial) media, all the rot of Netflix-Amazon Prime-Hulu-Redbox, it facilitates the draining of creativity, chutzpah, and strength. All of the syphilitic “artists” who make noise with groins exposed and skin pummeled with absurd tattoos, they too are part of the soft trauma, but oh killing kids softly. Selling those kids to drive themselves to pot, now, THC, CBD’s, to lobotomize their ability to launch a fight. The kids are already in the loop of trauma after trauma before they punch their first digital time clock. Here, the short list of what is adverse childhood events — No ACES up our sleeves, but the rich and controllers love these traumas since they create broken, half-living, flagging people. These people the rich can make many trillions on:
parents divorcing
one or both parents addicted.
poverty
no real adults who are mentors, kind
criminality or incarceration of adults in their lives
bad food
bad role models
bad birth
bad diet
lack of inquiry or inquisitiveness of those around
a world/households that are addicted to TV, sports, the lizard brain mush of entertainment
physical and verbal abuse
low birth weight
crime in and around the neighborhoods
no public or safe public spaces
parents who are never there
parents who are products of abuse
parents who are children, chronologically or just intellectually
warring criminal elected officials, from the Five Star General all the way to the county commissioner
constant reminders of polluted neighborhoods and lack of investment in public-social spaces.
It is a laundry list, for sure. And, as a professional, working with these realities is part and parcel part of a day. When I clock out, though, I am challenged to meet the same level of trauma informed care and compassion when the criminality, the stupidity, the infantilization, the McDonaldization, the boorishness, the stupidity, criminality, addiction, all of it, hits me in my personal and neighborhood space.
I’ve stated that I am not going to give a criminal Trump or Clinton or Obama or Biden a break just because we know for a fact there are any number of epigenetic defects and familial rot-gut backgrounds, and mental hygiene issues ramrodding these powerful leaders. Trump and his bad daddy and his narcissistic personality disorder or Clinton’s sex addiction or Biden’s dementia. All of that is a given when looking at powerful and rich leaders, from Oprah to Bezos, from Dick Cheney to his daughter, Liz. Those rich and famous and powerful are one hell of a lot of a few hundred million people who are messed up on many levels.
Power, megalomania, egomania, lying, looting, lechery, sure, that is the result of throwing trillions at them, allowing them to break the law, allowing them to subjugate the 80 percent of the world, entire countries/continents with their filthy designs and projects of unlimited power, unlimited criminality.
Sometimes I wake up to a few kudos in my email box after one of my pieces or articles ends up read and appreciated. Other times, I am called stupid, a fool, and depending on the topic, an idiot, as in Covidiot!
Some bloke from Canada sent in to me a long email October 13. You know, inferring out right, stating, no one has a right to question the planned pandemic paradigm as seen by his medical officer in his province, or our grand wizard, Saint Fauci; or none of us at DV has the brains to call mandates criminal, nor to question this concept of lack of informed consent. You know, forced jabs for the greater good of all is what this bloke states. The Canadian is okay with losing your job, your housing, your freedom if you dare not get the jab. Everyone is stupid who might, for a thousand different reasons, question exactly what’s going down with lockdowns, quarantines, lock-ups, terminations, broken supply chains, unimaginable profits for the rich, the drug makers, military in a time of economic downturn. Anyone questioning the origins of the Franken-SARS, or the validity of the mRNA gene hack. God forbid anyone question why so many get put on ventilators, and why simple and inexpensive measures, like nasal sprays with nitric oxide or massive doses of Vitamin C and Zinc and steroids and anti-virials might knock down or knock out the so-called Covid-19.
I can certainly reproduce the email in question, but it meanders, saying that some of what I have written is okay by him, but he’s mad that DV has spiraled down with these writers questioning lock-up/lock-down. But I like the response from another email person/friend, when I forwarded this Canadian’s ire against my rant to him— Back at Ground-Truthing Again and Again and Again
Paul — This fellow’s reaction doesn’t surprise me. Today on the site he refers to as, “writers for the gross fool who runs Global Research out of Montreal” there is an essay about a commercial airline pilot dying in flight. The video is a Stew Peter’s production that is definitely alternative production. The Doctor he interviews is a health economist of right wing persuasion. Stew Peters patterns his production similar to Alex Jones complete with selling products at the end of his videos. There is all kinds of stuff on Global Research that is on the fringe of loopy.
The same can be said of numerous other sites. But because these are alternative sites (Mint Press, Consortium News, Grayzone, Dissident Voice) doesn’t mean that some of what they say might be true or at least something to think about. This fellow who attacks you obviously gets his information from mainstream corporate media which is equally suspect and won’t allow anyone on their broadcasts that question the vaccines. Corporate media has been in lockstep from word go with the emergency use mRNA vaccine manufactures.
I’ve lived long enough to know that sometime the dissenting voices are the ones that turn out to be right. In the last week there has been three small aircraft that have crashed in California for no apparent reason. One was a doctor in southern California. As of yet I haven’t read anything as to the causes of these accidents. There was a military doctor several weeks ago calling for the grounding of military pilots after being vaccinated.
We are starting to see corporate media reports of supply chain collapse. Docks are jammed up with cargo ships, return containers are not being returned to the ports, lack of truck drivers, etcetera. All this in a world of efficient computer programs designed to make everything run smoothly and all of a sudden it doesn’t work. Truckers can’t get their required certifications for drug tests thereby preventing them from driving. The same is happening for just about every industry that moves freight. But Amazon keeps going. The big shippers keep going. The small guys get sidelined.
Doesn’t all this look suspicious to this complainer? Like maybe something else is happening here? Banks are getting free money pumped into the repo market daily from the Federal Reserve and still the supply lines are plugged up like a constipated buffalo. I wonder if Bruce links any of this with economics or is it all just COVID related because some people refuse to get vaccinated because they’ve been hit with a stupid stick as he pontificated?
I noticed this critic started all of his rant with what a environmental warrior he was at a job because he discontinued the use of herbicides to spay weeds around power poles and his sending of transformer to England to be incinerated thirty five years ago. I wonder if he ever thinks for a second that those chemicals he discontinued the use of were all approved by the EPA, FDA or the CDC or at least to be allowed to be used until there was such an outcry by the public that it was impossible for the power companies to continue there use. Or that the BLM and forest service still use some of those chemicals today.
Do you think the Canadian ever wonders why some of those people that don’t want to get the jab might just not trust those agencies approval of these experimental vaccines based on the history of these agencies? I doubt he does.
Arguing with self righteous people like him, Paul, is like wrestling with a pig in the mud. All of a sudden it dawns on you that the pig enjoys it.
There are many many self righteous people who believe only a select few have the right to discuss the prevailing issues around coronavirus, SARS-CoV2, Covid-19, etc. MDs can only discuss the human medical conditions, engineers can only discuss engineering, aerospace scientists have the floor on all things space, economists, all things monetary. This is the bloody collective delusions of the white race, truly, the colonizers, the race that came into these lands, Turtle Island, and raped, ravaged, roiled the land with fire and pesticides. The murdering savages, those Puritans, those Hudson Bay Company men, those Carnegies, those Rockefellers, Oppenheimers, the entire bastards in the 5 percent, they are the true lords of truth, lords of information. Anyone else stepping outside their wheelhouse, well, off with their heads.
Off with their heads, I say: Scientists!
The EU authorities’ assumption that glyphosate does not spread through the air has been disproven. The results of the German study “Pesticide pollution of the air” prove that glyphosate and dozens of other pesticides are traveling through the air for miles into national parks and cities. The analysis was initially published in 2019 and has now been peer-reviewed by independent scientists and published in the journal Environmental Sciences Europe. It was commissioned by the Bündnis für eine enkeltaugliche Landwirtschaft and the Umweltinstitut München and is the most comprehensive data set on pesticide pollution in the air in Germany. However, the EU authorities responsible for the approval process concerning the use of glyphosate have so far excluded air transport.
And, wise words from the email writer who contacted me, again:
“Paul: It has been known for years that Roundup travels through the air. The ag agents in my county in California held seminars for the farmers forty years ago where they said farmers could face fines and have their beloved Roundup restricted if they sprayed it when it was windy, not that any farmer ever faced a fine or stopped doing so. There was spotting on leaves where Roundup droplets had landed that ag agents would point out the cause as being from airborne Roundup. Just more proof of Capitalism killing everything for the profits of a few. ”
An immediate international moratorium on all dual-use gain-of-function research must be instated and all existing experimentation must be autoclaved, only greed and hubris have ever been served by attempting this type of genetic manipulation. Humanity does not need a vaccine against HIV derived from a coronavirus, nor do we need to be tinkering with genetic material that holds the potential to wipe a significant percentage of us off the face of the Earth.
Failure to embrace such a ban may effectively become a death sentence for our species, assuming we aren’t already on our last mile. Reinstate the global moratorium on “gain-of-function” research. Sign the petition here!
Do you want to know how many people in the Western world want to hear that the batty bioengineered SARS-CoV19 was manufactured at the University of North Carolina, and under the auspices of Fauci and His Gang? Read up, study, and learn how this virus was bio-engineered at the spike-protein genes which was already done at UNC to make an extraordinarily virulent coronavirus.
Oh, all the news unfit to print, that is the continuing criminal enterprise system of America, of USA Media, of the Disorientation of the Discourse, and with all those felons and futures thieves and tax evaders and country coup d’état lovers in office, in the senate, congress, executive branch, US military, state department, CIA, all the posts tied to US Patriot Act, and then all the military contractors outright lying and loving their bank accounts, in-house ones, and off-shore. Land, real estate, mutual funds, private stocks, under the table deals, this is the White Savior, man, so anything tied to Pfizer or to any of the scum, it should be a slam dunk to not only doubt their motives and word, but to outright demand their heads.
I lose more people on this stuff, every day, just asking them to listen, read, consider!
Why does Christina Parks, Ph.D., object to the idea that a “vaccine passport” will reduce COVID rates? And why don’t African Americans and Ph.D.’s want the vaccine?
Parks, whose Ph.D. is in cellular and molecular biology, addressed those questions and more on the latest episode of “The Defender Show,” where she told the show’s host, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., that mandating something to be injected into somebody’s body is “just ridiculous,” and vaccine passports are “blatantly illegal.”
Parks said there are two reasons she objects to vaccine mandates and passports: lack of informed consent and lack of science to support them.
In 2018 the influential author and professor Douglas Rushkoff wrote an article titled “Survival of the Richest” in which he disclosed that a year earlier he had been paid an enormous fee to meet with five extremely wealthy hedge funders. Rushkoff says the unnamed billionaires sought out his advice for strategizing their survival after what they called “the event,” their term for the collapse of civilization via climate destruction, nuclear war or some other catastrophe which they apparently viewed as likely enough and close enough to start planning for.
Rushkoff writes that eventually it became clear that the foremost concern of these plutocrats was maintaining control over a security force which would protect their estates from the rabble in a post-apocalyptic world where money might not mean anything. I encourage you to read the following paragraph from the article carefully, because it says so much about how these people see our future, our world, and their fellow human beings:
‘This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers — if that technology could be developed in time.’
Something to keep in mind if you ever find yourself fervently hoping that the world will be saved by billionaires.
LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman has said that more than half of Silicon Valley’s billionaires have invested in some type of “apocalypse insurance” such as an underground bunker to ensure they survive whatever disasters ensue from the status quo they currently benefit so immensely from. ** end quote!
Back to the top — generational trauma, structural violence, environmental racism, killing us all with the military industrial complex, with those neocons and neoliberals, both fucked up parties, Demons and Inquisition, democrats (sic) and republicans (sic). The amount of trauma upon trauma on people now, just a few dozen months after the March 2020 big triple lie of planned pandemic, to mask or not to mask, to quarantine, or not to quarantine. To social distance or not. All the while there were thousands of doctors and others with cures, with ways to weather the corona flu, without hospitalization, intubation, the rest of the sick sick Soylent Green scenario.
Again, War is a Racket, Big Pharma is War, Capitalism is a Continuing Criminal Racket. War is Peace, and Up is Down. Here, Lowkey and Ho, talking about a very slim view of capitalism a la Iraq and Afghanistan. This is it, the big rip off. Oh, if they really wanted to save us from the virus, the pollutants, the antimicrobial resistance, all of it, now wouldn’t these narcissist criminals, Trump and Biden et al, go after all those people who have stolen trillions? Trillions for, hmm, clean water systems for USA and the globe. Clean farms? Great schools? Medical clinics EVERYWHERE? There are many many millions of heads that have to roll to start from scratch, to get the people’s and the planet’s revolution up and running. Could be your senator or your uncle, mom or banker. Many many murderers have to go, no?
Listen/watch: Just one shitty exercise in theft and murder. Imagine all the other rackets!
The consensus is in — no choice, no life, no job, no nothing, without a passport. That medical, DNA scan, the retina scan, all biological systems covered, that all-encompassing passport that lists every move, every moment, every job, every purchase, every fine, penalty, tax, rental, home, significant or insignificant emotional and economic and familial event, captured in a chip. Americans are spoiled, for sure, as are Europeans, and Canadians. That mostly encompasses the Great White Hopes of those respective “countries.” The rest of us, in these “first world” environs are struggling, even with debit and credit and La-La Land accoutrements ad infinitum.
These new times in the west are old times, bubbling up, really, from the early conquest days of razing Indian families, destroying and taking over and plowing through villages, lands, territories. Entire rooms at elite Ivy League universities and museums with drawers and boxes of Native American skulls, bones, skins, eyes, belongings, sacred objects. It is the way of the Egyptologists, and it is the way of the Crusades. Pillage, set villages on fire, and now, set states and countries on fire with fear and terror campaigns in order to exact total compliancy. Services, labor, debt, future payments, extracted from us, capitalism’s marks. Victims. Useless eaters-breeders-breathers-squatters.
Here, from David Rovics, musician and protestor, with some great stuff on Dissident Voice over the years, just coming back from Denmark (and other countries in his gig line). He embraces progressivism and the forced jabs. He is a good fellow, who interviewed me, and we talked about other things tied to the ugly side of leftists and their canceling culture, censorship, etc., but this conversation about jab/mask/remote lockup mandates has not happened yet. I still have room in my brain to listen to what he says, though he misses so many points here:
Despite the prevalence of disinformation platforms like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube being as popular in Denmark as anywhere else that doesn’t have the good sense to ban them, the anti-vaccine movement and anti-lockdown movement in Denmark never grew to the proportions of such movements in the US, Germany, France and elsewhere. But unlike those aforementioned countries, in Denmark most people have a well-founded reason to trust the government on matters of public health and safety.
In Denmark, if anyone jaywalks, they’re usually either a foreigner or an antisocial type. The overwhelming majority of Danes would never do that. This is also true in Germany and some other countries. Americans and Brits and others visiting from abroad tend to make typically American and British individualistic, antisocial assumptions about this conformist behavior. They see a crowd of Germans or Danes standing at a crosswalk, waiting for the “walk” signal, even if there’s no traffic in any direction, and they see something scary, from Children of the Corn or some other horror movie, a bunch of zombies who can’t think for themselves, or are afraid of getting a ticket. (source — David Rovics)
That’s a whole other set of discussion points from this tour he had in Denmark about what democratic socialism is, what society is, how science and government should be trusted (really?). Jaywalking and shoot, tossing banana peels on the side of the road. How dare us lazy, supercilious and egotistical North Americans! Yankees!
The unfolding global hysteria is congealing into even more lovely by-products of Big Pharma as Dictatorship. It comes in many forms and offshoots, for sure. The main functions of Western society are broken — neoliberal and conservative values (sic) have gutted infrastructure, have thrown trillions of bucks-euros to the few, have propped up this society into a very effective kleptocracy, have imbued a dog eat dog set of beliefs into a slew of folks.
We are at the point where billionaires and their lackeys in high places set the narrative, tone, and write the legislation, laws and force zero delimits on corporations and government in this “we the people” system we supposedly “fought” for. There is collapse, after collapse, after collapse, and it is apparent in the lack of governance over decades, and the adventures of imperial overreach, too.
In daily lives, professional managerial class actors are hitting the middle/upper middle class stratum, economically, through the systems of pain, fines, fees, tolls, penalties, regressive taxation, permits and litigation that eat at us, the 80 percent, from the soul and the brain and the body. We are in a time of most people not being able to navigate “the system,” and that can be any system — school, medical, social security, DMV, courts, and any number of systems of oppression and subjugation. So it is a time of chaos, now Covid Chaos, moving into more Chaos.
“People are fed up,” says Winni Paul, a management consultant whose clients have included campuses and higher-education groups. “The graciousness, the compassion, the ‘we do it for the students, we do it for the work’ — that’s gone.”
And I am with a group of teachers from many states, who are now scrambling to figure out what to do with the forced jabs, the forced proof of jabs, the forced masking, all of that, and many will not submit to the experimental mRNA, many have looked into these DNA-alternating medical devices, and they feel alone, big time. Their AFT (American Federation of Teachers) union has caved, and they see in big cities and small, all venues requiring, soon, a passport, CDC-approved vaccination card.
Delta airlines is forcing non-vaccinated employees to pay an additional $200 a month premium, AKA fine for not being jabbed. Oh, that was yesterday (August 25), and that will not be the end of it. Fools like Thom Hartman advocate ER physicians having the right to refuse treatment to anyone coming in — motorcycle accident, heart attack, broken leg, stroke — who are not vaccinated.
This is the Brave New World already outlined by the eugenicists of the 1920s, of the Modest Proposal of Swift’s time, of the middle passage days of tossing overboard hundreds of sick shackled slaves in one one-way crossing. Multiply that by hundreds of ships, tossing human beings for the sharks, alive, shackled in chains. It is the genocidal policies of empires and their corporate thugs (overlords) in despoiling cultures, murdering millions, and enslaving regions for their rubber, silver, gold, lithium, any number of things the capitalists call loot and booty. Pirates compared to the thieves from history and today seem like Fred McFeely Rogers in comparison.
Even a saint, Fauci, he is a titan of terror in his old man’s way — “over his 50-year career with the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to address the cause, to prevent or cure the exploding epidemics of allergies and chronic disease that Congress charged him with curtailing. The chronic disease pandemic is his enduring legacy. Those ailments now debilitate 54% of American children compared to 6% when he joined NIAD.” (source — RFK Jr.)
In this group of teachers, daily there are emails announcing more and more statewide jab mandates, and the teachers that have to pay twice-a-week tests, if not jabbed, well, it is filling up those school districts; and many now in this group want out, since their email boxes are filling up. Teachers, youngish and not, with no money in the bank, really, and no place to go, since I predict all new rental agreements throughout the land (except in some Breaking Bad locales) will require proof of jab x, jab y, jab z, jab infinity.
The playing field shifts hourly, and while I have a literary reading manana, in Portland, for this hour, at least, the restaurant and community room demands all to be masked. There is no shot record demand, YET, but that’s on the horizon, since Oregon is the first state to reinstate mandatory outside masking policies. But the venue’s other locations, well, the rock and roll and progressives, they want to see vax cards or proof of SARS-CoV2 free tests. The Crystal Ballroom
It doesn’t matter how many millions of people worldwide are not happy with mRNA experimental chemicals forced into the bloodstream and across the blood-brain barrier; not happy with the bioweaponry aspect of Operation Warp Speed; not happy with the therapeutics that have been disavowed and censored, which could have saved millions of lives, possibly. One size fits all, baby. This news aggregator and news maker site, well, it is almost scrubbed from all search engines:
These stories above and below are verboten in the minds of tens of millions, hundreds of millions Westerners — even though there are robust stories on other topics, besides Fauci, jabs and mRNA, and fascism in this places.
I am finding people fighting, for sure, against mandates. Hell, my one time with the doctor recently points to this: “While I did get the vaccination, I am against mandates. I am against forcing people against their will to get this. I am of the mind that people have the right to make up their own minds.” He’s older, maybe 70, is a DO, and I know the university where he adjunct taught and matriculated from, Touro University Nevada (TUN) (a private university in Henderson, Nevada. It is part of the Touro College and University System.Touro University Nevada is a branch campus of its sister campus Touro University California.)
My niece is there, in her second year, and my DO stated, his one word of advice for her is, Cash. “Tell her to write notes to family and friends, and state: ‘please send cash.’” The doctor likes me, and he’s a jokester. He told me reads a lot, and that he did work in Amazonian for years, “saving one life at a time.” He is looking at my recent stress test, and alas, getting a cardiologist on board to maybe do more investigation on some electrical anomalies when I got up to 160 beats per minute, that is another example of the failed capitalist system: there are none here on Highway 101 on the central coast, and getting one to see me could take weeks, out of the cities of Salem or Corvallis. This is the state of medicine, after decades of gutting taxation of the rich and the corporations (who are getting us sick) and years turning medicine into a bizarre insurance scam, where doctors spend more time on the computer screen than with the patient.
So, this next reset is all about pushing more and more people into fewer and fewer public spheres, pushing people away from outliers or those defiant and dissident like me and millions. It is about controlling the masses, setting forth sophisticated bandwagon forms of propaganda, and setting afire all forms of community gatherings and robust discussions of the millions of topics of the day.
With this teachers’ group, the messages are coming in:
Governor Pritzker just announced mandatory vax for all IL teachers
Here is Dr. Peter McCullough talking about the dangers of vaccines, among other things: Basically, the vaxxed are projecting all the havoc they themselves are wreaking even as “life is pretty much back to normal among the vaccinated,” as many are bragging onto the unvaxxed. Many op-eds in publications like WaPo and the NYT are filling their pages with doctors martyring themselves and declaring they won’t treat unvaxxed anymore (to cheers from bots and humans alike in the comments section) and normalizing ending friendships based on vaccination status. But they are the super spreaders. They are the ones making children and Grandma sick. This is scapegoating at its finest.
Some great work is being done by Mike Williams @ Sage of Quay. Also, great Common Law shows being done by Crrow777 Radio Alfonso Faggiola and Lena Pu.
Want to see a man stand up to the controllers? Check out Paul Unslaved . You can also gain a little insight from some of the good First Amendment auditors like Long Island Audit.
California AB455 – this bill, if passed, will mandate the C19 vaccine for all CA employees and for CA citizens to enter any establishment except church and grocery stores:
Lastly, ICYMI – Illinois’ Vax Verify – vaccination verification is tied to Experian – meaning residents will have to go through a one-time verification process through Experian to access their vaccination records. So stating the obvious – this is opening the door increasingly towards a social credit system.
Then this from one of the people on this list wanting the mandates and the draconian measures stopped:
Just a quick note: This Sunday will mark 58 years of me being active in the political sphere. Back in ’64, it was as a Goldwater volunteer. Some 6 years later, i switched sides, a consequence of the Vietnam War, the counterculture, ecological crisis,… And became much more of an activist. I have no love whatsoever for the right. But I’ve also seen the “left” act at critical points as a defender of the capitalist status quo, particularly as a consequence of the dominant tendency within the left to accept the state as if it were an institution acting on behalf of society as a whole, rather than the instrument of class power it has been since it emerged in history thousands of years ago. Both left and right (and “center”) are fully on board with the onrushing police state, while each proclaims itself to be defending the interests of humanity against the others. People need to look to themselves for solutions, and learn from historical movements, including anarchists and anti-statist socialists.
I heartily accept the motto,—”That government is best which governs least”; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe,—”That government is best which governs not at all”; and when men and women are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.
— Henry David Thoreau, Resistance to Civil Government, 1849
Succinctly, Communist approaches to anti-statism center on the relationship between political rule and class struggle. Karl Marx defined the state as the institution used by the ruling class of a country to maintain the conditions of its rule. To this extent, the ultimate goal of communist society was theorized as both stateless and classless.
We are at 8 billion, and the planet is run by Blackstone and BlackRock and around 30 financial organizations, and around 140 corporations. The bottleneck is what the planned pandemic was all about — getting people to run away from sanity, common sense, and running into the various insane asylums. For anyone to question why some of us — who are way beyond just coming out from under the Capitalist-Media-Education rock — might doubt the purveyors of capital, scientism, control, policing, finance and corrupt drug companies, well, that is where I am now — “since the majority of people are in line for the jab, what’s your fucking lunatic problem?”
The distortions that go on under capitalism are so obscene it’s hard to wrap your head around it sometimes, on a micro level as well as a macro level. I was riding on the subway and I took a couple of trains and I was looking at the ads. The average American sees about 3,000 ads a day. One ad was for a credit card, and this is the slogan for the credit card—“Less plastic, more human—Discover it is human.” Discover is the card that they were advertising. In other words, you can actually be more human by having this type of credit card. Another ad, and this gets to the quality of life, that I pass by was about online delivery of food—how you can order online instead of having to phone somebody—and the ad read, “You’ve perfected the odds of getting to third base faster. Food delivery date night.” The obscenity and depravity of capitalism knows no depths to which it will not plumb.
This is something that Karl Marx talked about quite a bit. He was speaking at the anniversary of the People’s Paper in 1856, and I think this resonates far more with us now than it did even in his time.
On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces, which no epoch of the former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman Empire.
That kind of sense of decay pervades our world as it is currently structured. He goes on:
In our days, everything seems pregnant with its contrary: Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labor, we behold starving and overworking it; The newfangled sources of wealth, by some strange weird spell, are turned into sources of want; The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character.
At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine but on the dark background of ignorance. All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force.
John Bellamy Foster on ecosocialism: “Ecological resistance in the twenty-first century has more and more been informed by the development of Marxian ecology and ecosocialism more generally. However, as ecosocialist analysis has grown, various divergent branches of thought have emerged, often in conflict with each other. Based on the conviction that clarity about capitalism’s relation to the environment is indispensable for the strategic understanding of present-day struggles, this talk will present some of the new research within Marxian ecology, bringing together the core issues of the expropriation of nature and the metabolic rift, and seeking to unite the ecosocialist movements of our time.”
Another set of notes from another teacher on this V is for Vendetta Vaccines email group — I’m calling it that as a joke:
I just attended a workshop for religious exemptions, and will forward the email for any of those who wish to attend. I am also happy to share insights and notes I took to help out anyone who wishes to take this route. However, I would like to share some notes and important information discussed in this workshop.
First, if you are part a union or teachers union, Collective Bargaining needs to take place. Many unions did not have a seat at the table and have sent cease and desist letters that could delay the mandates. Remember the unions represent both the majority and the minority of their union members and even if there is only 15 percent against the mandates, those individuals should be represented. It was recommended to call your Labor Relations Representative or Union Rep to see if they have sent a cease and desist letter or are planning on it. Key word is the Collective Bargaining aspect of the unions and you may be able to ask them to do so.
Additionally, I think if you are able to file for a religious exemption it is a good way to buy time. The common law approach may be a good option for those who do not have an option. Realistically, for Californians we are a Right to Work state, and employers have the right to fire and hire at will. With either method there is a possibility of job termination which has to be considered, and I do not know exactly how the outcome has been going for individuals who have filed religious vs. common law approaches. That said I do know there have been many religious exemptions accepted and there is an appeals process if denied. If you are on a timetable and need to be vaccinated by a date that is closely approaching, the religious exemption is probably more likely to be one way to hold onto employment a little longer. My understanding of the common law approach is that it can be more time consuming because legal notices have times frames for notices, responses, and actions to take place and may not work with your deadline which again can lead to termination. Because California is an At Will Work state there may be risk to filing for any unemployment as well, so all these things should be considered before deciding which route to take.
I am not saying one option is better than the other, I am just presenting them as Option A or Option B, because I think we all have differences in our personal situations. One may work better for you personally than the other. That said, we should also have our plan B in place if neither work. Helping each other is essential and it will be good to share with one another what has worked and what hasn’t, and I do not want to argue either method, just help out in any way possible. Our differences in ideology are unimportant to me at this time. I believe there is a good portion of us, who are strong personalities, opinionated and intelligence — and these may be the wonderful unifying qualities that have brought us together at this critical time to fight for our humanity.
Take up the White Man’s Burden, send for the best ye breed,
Go bind your sons to exile, to serve your captives need –
new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child…
Take up the White Man’s burden, the savage wars of peace.
The Globalists have semi-clandestinely introduced some kind of “covid-Martial Law” that overrules everything that is an otherwise Constitutional Right. We are in most of the western world a direct dictatorship. In most countries the Constitutional Amendment from “Democracy” to Dictatorship has happened clandestinely or at least semi-clandestinely. That’s what dictators do. Most of the people have no idea. Many of those who do know, don’t agree. They launch initiatives for new laws – that fall by the way side, because they have no teeth under a Martial Law-broken Constitution.
In Switzerland, the situation is slightly different, better of sorts. The Confederation Helvetica (CH) has a semi-direct Democracy. With 50,000 signatures, scrupulously verified for their validity, Swiss citizens can launch a referendum against a specific law. The referendum may eventually come to a popular vote, and a government/Parliament let law may be overruled. Though, this happens very rarely – the money lobby-propaganda is too strong – occasionally the people may have a chance. In these covid-times, it may actually happen.
We are currently undergoing the worst “tyrannification” of society in human history and in all western world countries. Covid-martial law overrules everything. This happened very fast. Within 18 months, from the beginning of 2020 to about mid-2021 citizens have basically no longer the very rights they could otherwise call as a human right. HRs have become worthless. In most cases police and military are under strict orders to obey. Those who don’t may lose their jobs, or worse.
Although, there are vivid and positive signs that the tides are turning. For example, at a London anti-covid-measures, anti-vaxx-certificates rally in London. Dr. Reiner Fuellmich, Corona Committee, spoke via a huge video screen to the crowd on Trafalgar Square, tens of thousands of people, telling them that class actions suits are under way in the US, Canada, and that institutions and individuals, especially those responsible for the invalid PCR-tests, particularly in Europe and the US, that are the basis for governments lying about “cases”, serving to manipulate up-and-down the “infection” figures, leading to false numbers on hospitalization and death, about a virus that is less deadly than the common flu. Yes, you read correctly, less deadly than the common flu. This is the onset to Nuremberg 2.0 – where justice will prevail, as much as light prevails over darkness.
Dr. Fuellmich closed his talk on a positive and encouraging note.
It is humanity, versus inhumanity. We are human. We can laugh, cry, sing and hug. The other side can’t. The other side has no access to the spiritual side. Therefore, the other side, without any doubt, the inhuman side, will lose this inhuman battle for life….
The transformation is beginning to take place. This is the health side, the human side, the most immediately important side – where real science is overcoming “bought” science, in order to avoid a genocide of biblical proportions – which is the eugenists plan, probably developing over the past about 100 years. However, there are two other, complementary plans which also need to be stopped.
The first one of the two is the digitization of everything. It is already descending upon humanity, had actually started already decades ago – and is now in its final round – just so as to coincide with the massive population reduction. It includes not only digitization of all forms of monetary transactions – which is rapidly pushing forward, through Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms and most importantly, the vehicle to drive it all, the worldwide installation of 5G and soon to come 6G. This is foreseen to turn the entire globe into an electromagnetic field. And humans will be turned into “transhumans”, especially those that have survived the experimental, untested messenger spike protein injections called mRNA inoculations, falsely called “vaccines”.
This is not a joke. This is actually the plan already divulged in 2016 by Klaus Schwab, founder and forever CEO of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in an interview with Swiss French TV broadcast, see this 2-min video:
According to Klaus Schwab’s “The Great Reset”, algorithms, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robots will soon rule the masses. By 2025, give or take a year or two, about half of today’s jobs will be run by AI. This electronic technology will in turn be ruled by some dirty-rich individuals, who somehow have given themselves the liberty to “run the world”. And we, the people, have let them.
They – the Deep Dark Statlers – call them Satanists – have planned this for about the last century. With great precision and intensity at times – and – what’s worse, much worse, right in front of our eyes. We have ignored them. Anybody who dared to draw attention to their evil machinations was dismissed with the convenient label “conspiracy theorist”.
Imagine, according to the Great Reset, half of our jobs will be taken over by AI, in just the next 5 years or so. By 2030, only about 5% to 10% of the current jobs will be existing and carried out by humans – maybe “transhumans”. All the others may be gone. Massive unemployment? Maybe. But Schwab tries to tranquilize the world, saying that there will be new jobs for which newly unemployed people will be trained. They may be transhumans, because training is done by, and in partnership with, AI – and for the Epsilon People, the down-to-earth working class, robots will do the supervising.
This may sound depressing, despairing. It ain’t, if we think about the situation which we, pretty much on our own, have allowed to happen. It is not the end of the road, but only a stepping stone, onto which we too can step, when awakened – and not in anger, but with the bright spirit of light – a new world shaped by humans, shaped with the forces of light, Leaving the devil behind. Not even mentioning the beast. No letting it bother our minds. We are up to something much higher, much cleaner, clearer and much nobler. Our project is for humanity, for planet earth with all her sentient beings.
The simple model “Small is Beautiful” may be an appropriate vision forward. It may include another simple principle:
Local production for local consumption with local money, a local community run central bank working with a public banking system. Trade will be practiced with like-minded mostly neighboring sister countries, benefiting from comparative advantages. The money supply will be a reflection of the local economy. It will be backed by the local economy. Quite different from the current globalist-run fiat money pyramid.
This appears like a perfect recipe for de-globalization. And deglobalize we must. We must become again individuals that can and want to bond, not separate, individuals for whom solidarity is not just a term from a rusty vocabulary but means “we do it together”. This is the way to go, we will be satisfied with what we can achieve as a common, as a society with goals that serve the people, with values that do not depend on vertical growth, but rather reflect horizontal expansion of social infrastructure and well-being.
Let’s imagine a new type of economy with novel yardsticks – Happiness Indicators. Actually, not so novel, just not often talked about. In July 2011, the UN General Assembly adopted resolution 65/309 Happiness: Towards a Holistic Definition of Development inviting member countries to measure the happiness of their people and to use the data to help guide public policy. The first Happiness report was issued by the UN in April 2012.
If we are able to abandon the magical concept of “growth” and exchange it for happiness, we not only protect and preserve Mother Earth but will also preserve our human health – our sanity. Our today’s society is sick. It strives for ever more growth, for more possessions, for more affluence, for more control – but happiness that is the basis for a healthy life – is but an abstract term in today’s business-driven world. Happiness is more often than not confused with material wealth.
The no-growth, but social growth concept, is the basis for our escaping from the globalist agenda.
Human wealth comes from the heart. And it is through the heart that we may pass it on, replicate it. How does one define Happiness? There surely is no blueprint for happiness, as we are moving away from the all-modelled sets of values, away from the “musts” and the “Must-nots”.
The website “LifeHack.org” offers a few definitions of Happiness. Among them, the following two:
Happy people find balance in their lives. Folks who are happy have this in common: they’re content with what they have, and don’t waste a whole lot of time worrying and stressing over things they don’t. Unhappy people do the opposite: they spend too much time thinking about what they don’t have,; and,
According to the Dalai Lama, Happiness is not something readymade. It comes from your own actions. And let me add, from our actions driven by our heart and soul.
The General Assembly of the United Nations in its resolution 66/281 of 12 July 2012 proclaimed 20 March the International Day of Happiness recognizing the relevance of happiness and well-being as universal goals and aspirations in the lives of human beings around the world.
How does the UN define “Happiness”? Happiness is not contained in GDP, and less in GDP growth. To the contrary. It’s most important that we start detaching from material wealth, that we see the moral and friendship wealth in our society. That we see and strive for equality, inclusion, solidarity – that we learn to smile at each other, even in adverse situations. This requires an elevated spirit, a mentality of light that defeats satanic darkness.
Happy people abide by the golden rule: They let stuff go. Happy people realize this, are able to take things in stride, and move on – without fear.
That’s what we have to do – shed the fear – and move on, in a higher spiritual mode, floating out of the darkness into the light. It’s possible. Let’s give it a collective try. ‘They’ are blackmailing us into accepting the poisonous jab they fraudulently call vaccine. They may go as far as blocking us from getting food, from entering supermarkets without the vaccine certificate – or getting the test every time you need food. – No worries. They won’t succeed.
Is this ever-more encroaching human rights abuse-tyranny a malicious provocation? See this.
Are they on purpose driving people to the edge? To provoke a revolution? And bring in NATO and maybe even UN troops to subdue the upheavals, personal freedoms, national sovereignty – and even national borders towards a globalist world, a One World Order, a One Government world, led by the WEF and the club of billionaires directed by a satanic cult?
It is possible. But we are stronger. We will defeat this evil cult. Dr. Reiner Fuellmich et al, from the Corona Council, has already launched class action suits in Canada and the US and is taking legal actions against EU institutions and individuals. The tide is turning. Of course, you will not read or hear about it in the mainstream media.
Think small. Think community – your community, think self-sufficiency as much as possible. Think local production for local consumption with local money and local banks for the wellbeing of all within the community. Think trading with friends and with think-alike nations, societies, people.
The latest Corbett Report podcast1 is essentially an update on the developments in genetic engineering, especially in combination with neurological research.
When genetic engineering was first introduced to the public I recall my abhorrence. Unlike many people I do not believe in “neutral” technology. For me a techne is always motivated and developed to transport interests. There are developments by humans that derive from general human needs and those which arise from specific activities. Moreover I believe knowledge and technology are principally derived from organisation and organisation is never neutral.
Genetic engineering — one of the speakers cited compares it albeit favourably with the development of the atomic bomb — is weapons technology and was from the very start.2
It becomes clear among these compulsive technologists that they are interested foremost in any and every kind of control over others. At the same time the entirety of the rhetoric is focused on perceived needs that this weaponry will satisfy.
Social organisation and technology to produce without polluting water, air, or soil is not the objective of these people or their projects. Nor are they interested in supplying safe housing or infrastructure to the masses of the population — all of which require less technology and, of course, less theft.
The best one could say about these people is that they are lazy and want solutions to problems for which they are paid but do not have to work. They spin fantasies of problems solved that only rich or middle class people perceive. The unstated assumption is that more equitable distribution of income and healthy living conditions would impede their own accumulation.
In fact, however, one can see the extent to which all this research has borne fruit in the course of the past two years. The success with which the bulk of the Western population has been induced to wage war on itself — not on the ruling class, of course — is amazing to say the least. The hysteria that launched the Great War was phenomenal; however, nowhere so saturated. Yet it was the Americans who perfected the war propaganda and policing methods essential to perpetuate the war and its profits for DuPont et al.3
There is a scene in Corbett’s presentation where someone tries to show that neural modelling technology can permit people who are completely paralysed to use their brain to perform physical tasks mediated by digital technology and high volume computing capacity. Aside from the hysterical nature of such a show — choosing an extreme medical case to promote the expansion of work for entirely other purposes — one has to ask how, given all the ostensible communication barriers, can anyone actually verify that this person actually is doing anything besides lying as a “dummy” to persuade the observer that she is driving the machine when, in fact, the machine is merely performing on its own.
Then there is another aspect, besides the impossibility of verifying whether the “dummy” is really thinking. The underlying assumption of all these demonstrations is that the “dummy” is thinking and the electromagnetic charges are translation of thoughts. The problem with this assumption is just as in the first case — the stimulus field is limited to peripherals or tools that have specific functions and purposes. Assigning the manipulation of a defined stimulus field as “thought” based on the ability to induce action from electromagnetic pulses just reflects the concept of thought, which these people have. One can reverse the argument and say that the researchers have done nothing but show that certain electromagnetic pulses can be used to drive a machine calibrated to operate on those pulses. Other pulses clearly cannot — or it would be irrelevant where the electrodes are placed.
Hence we return to the point Weizenbaum (Computer Power and Human Reason) made in his study of AI, namely that AI is only the modelling of intelligence based on the needs of operating machines. 4 Any intelligence that might exist but cannot be so used is discounted/discarded. Attention is deliberately focused on humans as beneficiaries but this is a distraction from the machines that are the real centre of activity. This attitude is not new. All warrior/barbarian states have had this focus on humans as mere vehicles for delivering violence. However, that is precisely the point: there is nothing humanistic about AI or genetic engineering. These are technologies rooted in the belief that the mass of humanity has no other purpose than as tools/machines for the benefit of the ruling class.
In short, behind all the flashy lights, song and dance, and pwogish rhetoric, AI and genetic engineering are concepts for reducing humans to the primitive notion of machines that the ruling class applies to valuing the bulk of the species.
Here we see the real damage done by the continuous destruction of the humanities as a component of education. Compulsive technology is fed by people who have been educated to see themselves as more or less efficient machines and not as spiritual beings. The Whitney Webb article5 on Wellcome’s LEAP surveillance program describes the degree to which the machine model of human beings is central to the oligarchy’s control objectives. Children in the thousands are to be monitored electromagnetically in order to generate models of human infant machine behaviour that can then be reverse engineered to produce digital control devices to mechanise children from birth. The reason for this is clear. The more sophisticated AI theorists know that digital control of anything requires very carefully defined parameters. The hyper-volume data is supposed to permit fine modelling to reduce randomness by recognising minuscule “subroutines”– something like photo resolution. There is nonetheless a risk of randomness since the only data that can be processed is that for which there is a device and a measuring parameter. Data, itself, is nothing more than what any given machine makes and as such is meaningless independent of the machine and its user.
Thus the creation of a massive repertoire of human developmental subroutines can only be useful once the new devices — new-born children — are calibrated within the limits of that system. Ideally this would lead to production of children who from birth are controlled by the ruling class ideological priorities and constituted as mere peripherals to the enormous data processing system the elite maintain in lieu of a society. Since they have no way of being certain, however, that this technology will only produce the kind of human machines they program, it will still be necessary to cull those who do not respond according to the user manual.
Only constant purging of the population to remove those who cannot be effectively controlled will assure the stability intended. That is the only purpose of any of this technology. Perhaps there are meanwhile — given the success of the past thirty-odd years of indoctrination — those who feel that their lives would be more fulfilled if they were better machines. Already there are many who believe that their fulfillment comes from having more comprehensive machines rather than a more mature self.
Episode 405 Designing Humans for Fun and Profit (9 July 2021) at Corbettreport.com
George M Church, credited as one of the founders of so-called synthetic biology, as well as his doctoral advisor Walter Gilbert, were entrenched in the transatlantic biological weapons research scene that still operates under cover of health research. Genetic engineering was funded by the State for the same reason basic atomic (weapons) research was supported—the development of weapons of mass destruction and/or control. (See: “The Health which I see is Disease (… if the Hierarchical Church so Defines)“, Dissident Voice, 5 March 2021.) As pertains to the genetic engineering of the SARS and its derivatives. See Dr David Martin, The Fauci/Covid-19 Dossier, available at truthcomestolight.com. Dr Martin shows on the basis of US Patent Office records that all the essentials of the SARS-CoV 2 were patented by November 2019!
Joseph Weizenbaum (1923-2008) Computer Power and Human Reason (1976). This author had the privilege of hearing Weizenbaum speak in Berlin after he had returned to his birthplace in retirement. The moderator introduced him as a computer scientist who while teaching at Case Western Reserve University was told the university needed a computer and so Joseph Weizenbaum built one. Weizenbaum replied scathingly that “Case did not need a computer and in fact nobody needs a computer.” The focus of his talk was simple. Machines process data but they do not produce information—people do. Needless to say his critique of AI has been entirely marginalised and forgotten. This is due mainly to the propaganda of “progress” which leads people to believe that simply because something is young or new it is automatically better or improved. We only need to recall “planned obsolescence” to debunk this cultivated prejudice.
Whitney Webb, A “Leap” toward Humanity’s Destruction, Unlimitedhangout.com. See also her other posts at this site on the military-industrial-financial complex (especially the intelligence sector) role in the events leading to 2020 et seq.
Director Werner Herzog’s documentary Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World (2016) begins with “Internet pioneer” Leonard Kleinrock, who welcomes us into the, yes, actual laboratory where it was “born”! To Wagnerian strains in the soundtrack, Kleinrock complacently calls the place “a holy shrine”– quite a revealing phrase for this acolyte of possibly the last of the false religions. We then hear another “pioneer,” Bob Kahn, who matter-of-factly notes his early involvement in the Pentagon development of Arpanet (DARPA).
Is Herzog’s primary intention satirical? I fear not. As in his other recent documentaries, he seems to wander about, credulously interviewing often eccentric persons — in this case, cyber-tech promoters with obvious vested interests. Herzog’s wandering — I wouldn’t call it a coherent narrative — jumps from one thing to another without any logical continuity, and he passively allows cybertech developers free air time to pronounce, with breathtaking hubris, their enthusiasm for the forthcoming “transhuman” future–the term here referring, not to gender-neutrality (sex presumably redundant), but to the “empowering” extension into (and fusion with) “artificial intelligence.” Despite his prolific churning-out of one documentary after another (after all, they’re cheap to make!), Herzog is not a good documentary filmmaker–and still less, an investigative journalist. (Compare his docs with the best ones made by Alex Gibney or Errol Morris.)
With an almost adolescent naivete, Herzog generally accepts the hype, almost reading verbatim from Silicon press releases. For instance, robotics: teams of robots, he rhapsodizes, will soon be sent on rescue missions to “disaster sites.” (What disasters? Caused by what? Why not prevent them in the first place — but then again, no revenues generated by unemployed robot-teams!). One may add that, with robot-forces, highly lucrative wars can continue (robots in “boots” or as drones) — with no battlefield “casualties” (for our “side”).
We are shown a short promotional video: a small robot pours itself a glass of water, and is then given an “affectionate” hand-squeeze by an admiring woman. This last gesture speaks volumes: the age-old fallacy of animism — fallaciously endowing inorganic forms with sentient “responsiveness.” In short, people, deprived of needed emotional sustenance in their human contacts, are turning — in self-deluding desperation — to the “companionship” of robots. (To be sure, most lonely people today are still sane enough to prefer a mammal — generally dog or cat — as a “beloved companion.”)
But why, in the first place, this mono-maniacal fixation on an artificial substitute for “the human”? One technocrat in the film smugly dismisses human beings as obsolescent: “robots learn faster.” Learn what? And for what purpose? All the “technotopians” interviewed seem to envision sedentism as an inevitable outcome: motionless, confined persons commanding their computers and robots to do things and get things for them. But, as their musculature atrophies and their senses become conditioned and standardized, cyber-”empowered” persons may struggle with an ultimate conundrum: a compelling reason to stay alive. It is a sorry state of affairs when the aforementioned Kleinrock can assure us that such total embedding in an entirely “inter-active” system can be done in “a very humanistic way”(!). (At the same time, with maddening contradiction, Kleinrock is adamant about how the Internet has destroyed the capacity for critical thinking in the young people who’ve grown up with it!). Of course, Kleinrock and the others ignore the ultimate (unasked) questions: What for? To what end?
In an awkward moment, a tense Elon Musk admits that he has dreams — but that he “only remembers the nightmares.” Are such fears — and he has warned us, among other things, of the looming danger of “killer robots” — rooted in the proverbial unpredictability of human behavior? Perhaps control can be secured — if “Artificial Intelligence” maintains an entirely calculated, measured and predicted social order? Or, perhaps such unresolved anxieties can only be assuaged through an ultimate escape–say, to the planet Mars?
Indeed, a competent interviewer might have asked these self-satisfied technophiliacs if they ever enjoyed full emotional intimacy in warmly affectionate, sexual surrender? (See: Wilhelm Reich on “character armor” and its mechanistic, sadistic impulses.) Did they ever stand naked (figuratively speaking) — dropping all poses and neurotic defenses — and share their real deepest emotions with another in all sincerity? In short, one can’t help suspecting that the driving obsession with lifeless machines — engineered to have “human-like” attributes — not only guarantees control but also compensates for their arrested emotional capacities.
After all, walking and carrying, caressing and copulating, touching and laughing, “bringing up” (nurturing) children, admiring and co-inhabiting the earthly landscape with fellow creatures, cultivating an ever-enriched capacity for aesthetic feeling and sympathetic understanding — all these and more enhance biophilia. And thus: a fierce zest in being alive!
More than 100 million Amazon Echoes have already been sold across the globe. Researchers believe many consumers purchase the artificial intelligence device as a “companion.”
A 2019 study, led by the University of Strathclyde’s Dr. Graeme McLean, found that:
Voice assistants may serve as a means of overcoming loneliness in a household with fewer occupants. Individuals converse with voice assistants in the same way as they do with other humans, developing a rapport with the artificial intelligent assistant. Robots can provide a sense of companionship while assisting their users … The additional social presence offered by the voice assistant replaces interaction that may be had with a human counterpart in a larger household.
Besides communing with Alexa, bot lovers also see the voice assistant as a status symbol in their otherwise mundane lives: “As AI technology has become more widely available, embedded as part of our everyday life and somewhat trendy to use, individuals may be adopting and using the technology to enhance their social status to make them appear important within their peer groups.”
Meanwhile, of course, their new friend (sic) is eavesdropping on their conversations and sending such data to third parties. What a time to be alive!
In the age of artificial intelligence (AI), it makes sense that we’re now dealing with artificial intimacy, too. Besides Alexa and Siri, we have sex robots, virtual reality pornography, AI-enhanced sex toys, etc. — not to mention all those clever algorithms that match you up on dating apps. Meanwhile, more than two-thirds of men between the ages of 18 and 24 report having no sex at all in 2020. While, in 2019, more than five billion hours of pornography were watched on Pornhub alone. That’s 500 million years’ worth of hours dedicated to 12 months of artificial intimacy. What a time to be alive!
Before the advent of such digital dysfunction, the average human spent 192 minutes per day interacting — face-to-face — with other humans. Setting aside sleep time, that’s one-fifth of each day. Conversely, the average human in 2021 now surrenders about 153 minutes per day to social media usage. At this rate, it won’t be long before that reaches one-fifth of each day — fully reversing the hard-wired trend we require. And what happens during those 153 daily minutes on social media? Among many things, the robots put us in touch with far more humans than the infamous “Dunbar’s Number” allows.
British anthropologist Robin Dunbar postulates that a human brain can effectively connect with people in groups no larger than 150. We each possess physiology that evolved to negotiate the Stone Age. Inconveniently, we live in the Digital Age. Therein lies the rub. We are urban cavemen and cavewomen — overmatched in our daily crusade to navigate an artificial reality because we have surrendered contact with our deepest nature.
For one thing, we didn’t evolve to be surrounded by this many people. Thus, we attempt a futile search for a manageable tribe within a smartphone/social media culture. Our brains are burdened with trying to make peace and sense with a sudden influx of too many “friends.” The result is a corrupted version of intimacy, a loss of crucial IRL time, and an epidemic of loneliness. Interactions are available at our fingertips but our souls need more. Much more.
I didn’t write this article to share some “interesting” info with you. I also didn’t write it because I “always focus on the negative” (stay tuned for an article about that). This is Paul Revere stuff. It’s a wake-up call. Amidst the headlines about a condo collapse, alleged new Covid variants, and crime rate spikes, all of the above is happening 24/7. It will impact the future far more than the “critical race theory” ever will.
The already-embedded trends described in this article are shaping the lives and minds of children everywhere. But they are not inevitable. They are not unstoppable. In fact, they constitute nothing more than a house of cards. All it takes to tip the structure is for us to begin opting out. Say NO to artificial intimacy. Reclaim your humanity.
To repeat: What a time to be alive! No, I’m not being cynical. I’m simply listening to the sound of opportunity knocking… kicking down the damn door, you might say. When else in all of human history has there been a time when we were in a better position to shape the future? What we do (or don’t do) in the next few years could quite possibly tilt us all toward either the point of no return or a far more sane form of society. In other words, each and every one of us can take part — right now — in creating the most important social changes ever imagined. How lucky are we?
A gladiator (Latin for “swordsman”) was an armed combatant who entertained audiences in the Roman Republic and later in the Roman Empire, in violent confrontations with other gladiators, wild animals, and condemned criminals. The fights were to the people’s delight. At the end of a fight the winner looked to the yelling, hurling and screaming audience or to the “moderator” – what to do next? Thumbs up meant give him mercy, let him live; thumbs down: kill ‘em. A cheering crowd would watch these horrendous games of mostly men fighter. There were some female exceptions. As in today’s world there are also some female gladiators.
Today, there are female competitions in almost all sports. But they are generally in lesser demand than men-events. After all, we live in a macho-world. Wars and other conflict confrontations are mostly led by men, and those who suffer most, are women, children and the elderly.
The Gladiator fights date back to the 3rd Century BC. Nowadays’ gladiator games are adapted to the 21st Century.
The origin of gladiatorial combats is not clear. There is some evidence that they were used in funeral rites during the Punic Wars of the 3rd Century BC. The Punic Wars were a series of confrontations fought between the Roman Republic and the Ancient Empire of Carthage (based in what today is Tunisia and stretching over western North Africa). Those were for pure entertainment of the masses, to deviate from war losses, and to show winner’s ego, pride – propaganda for more fighting and more violence.
The tradition of gladiator games lasted for almost a thousand years, until the 6th Century AD. Their origins appear like ceremonial, but later, when the Roman Republic became the Roman Empire – they served as brutal entertainments for the masses to deviate their attention from what the empire was doing at home, or “cooking” abroad, in foreign lands, with resources – “taxes” – taken from the people. Resources of the people being diverted to causes that served only a small elite.
Not unlike today, where resources from the people, “taxes” from peoples’ earnings are used for purposes that are decided by the elite in power to a large extent, for reasons and projects that do not serve the people at all. Just take the military budgets. They serve a small group — the war and destruction industry — but not the people. People do not want wars.
In the early years of the first millennium (70 AD), the Roman Colosseum was built, where most gladiator games were fought. They were entertaining “compensation-deviation” for the people, so they would not think about what was going on with their monetary resources in foreign lands or even at home against their vital interests of wellbeing. Their attention was focused on small-scale violence, leaving the big behind-the-scenes stuff to the elite.
The gladiator battles that pitted armed combatants against one another in brutal but often highly choreographed duels to the death were by far the most popular kind of entertainment that unfolded in the Colosseum.
Today, modern-day Colosseums are football and soccer stadiums. Thus, modern-day gladiator fights are back. They are not as violent and as deadly as those fought in the ancient Roman Colosseum, but today’s emotion-loaded sports events are also destined to deviating peoples’ attention from the “deadly games”, games played by a minute world elite, well hidden from the entertained masses. So well hidden and prepared for decades that they hit the people like a ton of bricks when they are finally let loose on the innocent masses – masses for years misled by their governments’ propaganda machine.
Right now, the plandemic, called covid-19, has within 18 months already devastated the lives of billions of people throughout the UN’s 193 UN member countries – not by disease (SARS-CoV-2) caused death, but rather by a devastated economy, induced poverty, famine, despair and eventually death from desolation, famine and misery.
Within a year and a half, basic human rights have been stolen, abridged, taken away in warp speed, and what were thought to be at least remnants of democracies, especially in the Global North, have become tyrannies, almost overnight; legalized tyrannies many of them under swiftly and semi-clandestinely passed martial law.
Driven by fake news and lavishly paid false propaganda, people have been lulled into fear – constant fear of death from an invisible enemy “V” for virus – from a monstruous fear-machine – false and fabricated disease figures, that they – and the entire society, what’s left of it — is breaking apart, incapable of living normal lives. Indeed, because normal life has been extinguished with the well-in-advance planned pandemic; i.e., plandemic.
An obscure ultra-rich world elite that pretends to call the shots on everything, ordered governments to submit to The Virus, a corona virus, SARS-Cov-2, the version two of the SARS virus launched principally on China in 2002/2003. The “order” came on 11 March 2020, from the pharma-compromised World Health Organization (WHO) declaring SARS-Cov-2, alias Covid-19, a worldwide pandemic. It is virology 101, no virus strikes naturally the entre world all 193 UN member countries at once. This was the beginning of the UN Agenda 2030, also called Agenda 21.
It’s also the beginning of the modern-days’ gladiator games.
In this ten-year-program, UN Agenda 2030, a complete structural change of society, if not our civilization, is planned to be implemented, leaving behind what the World Economic Forum (WEF) calls “The Great Reset”, a world that belongs to a few diabolical dark, rich beings, served by a drastically reduced world population.
The death knell to bring the population down is a gigantic drive of “vaccination” with precisely what the CDC calls an “experimental gene-therapy”, so-called mRNA jabs. Governments around the globe lie, calling it a vaccine. They spend the peoples’ billions, if not trillions, in tax money to lavishly reward the pharmaceuticals – in return for “vaccines”.
Already the immediate reaction to the coerced jabs is a severe death toll, reaching within the first 6 months of the “vaxx-drive” reported serious injuries and deaths that are exponentially higher than those of regular vaccinations over the past 50 years together.
The European Union reports 1.5 million serious vaccine injuries and 15,500 Deaths from the mRNA-jabs, as of 25 June 2021. See here. And by far, not all injuries are reported.
That already indicates that this tyrannical drive to vaccinate more than 7 billion people on Mother Earth, against a virus which has a proven death rate of no more than 0.3% to 0.8 %, about equivalent to the common flu, has nothing to do with health; absolutely nothing. To the contrary. Its wanton injury, and even better: death. And 193 UN member governments are coopted, either by (deadly) threats or by lush rewards, or simply by being given a placebo instead of a deadly mRNA-experimental toxin.
While all is done to convert the lie – a universal crime of biblical proportions – into the truth, by billions of dollars or euros spent on false propaganda, the real truth does slowly seep through. Real science is exiting the matrix of the bought and corrupted science – and is revealing against all odds and threats, the truth. It is still largely suppressed, but gradually emerging – and ever more of the lulled masses are waking up to life-threatening lies and crimes of their governments.
“It’s time to insert a break” so, the elite, those who shall not be named, but are invisibly commanding the visible elite of our governments. And mind you, those who resist may disappear.
It’s time for the modern-days gladiator games, sports events like soccer championships, the European Cup, the American Cup, a variety of tennis championships, Wimbledon (UK), French Open, US Open, Australian Open, the summer Olympics starting these days in Japan…
Fights between today’s gladiators are normally not about death and life – but they nevertheless let bottled-up emotions explode — like you’d never think humans are capable of letting off so much steam. Just watch the slow-motion replays of a goal in one of these soccer championships matches. It is almost unbelievable the energy let loose by the players as well as by the public. Reality is forgotten. That’s the plan.
Just imagine the shall-remain-unnamed billionaires, and others belonging to the dark and wicked masterminds behind the scenes and above the governments, leaning back in their armchairs watching a soccer game, elated of joy, smiling. We have them where we want them to be. Giv’em another month or two of diversion, then we’ll lock them down again. This time even harsher, so they get used to it, become familiar with the method — with the infamous carrot and stick approach.
And the stick is getting bigger and bigger and the carrot proportionately smaller, just a little piece of sugar, of hope to have you accept the master’s scepter coming down on you, ever more forcefully, bringing ever more hardship, misery, disease and death. You shall learn to be obedient.
Tyrants Don’t Create Tyranny. Our Obedience Does. See also this article.
This may well be the plan. The covid-tyrants will tell the media: After all, it’s their fault. We told them to be careful, to wear masks, keep social distancing; get vaccinated….
And the media go in over-drive: The new strong variants, like the ever-stronger Delta variant is spreading rapidly. It’s affecting sports players as well as spectators. The media is already warning that “infection cases” are rising, related to the sports events, that people were careless in their behavior and may have to bear the consequences at the end of summer, or before, when the virus, or new “variants” of the virus hit and over-burden hospitals.
The Third Wave is in the coming. It is already being announced openly by the media. They never fail to announce their plan in advance. It’s part of the satanic ritual.
In Australia the “Delta Variant” has already locked down Sydney, Brisbane, Perth and maybe other cities. This is scary. Others be prepared, You may be next.
In the meantime, to keep spirits up and going, to incite even more “transgressions” against obedience, marketing outlets (are being sold to) say that flying in the Global North may be back to “normal” by 2022. Giving hope to normalcy. Nothing is more deceiving than one’s hopes being crashed and that for “mea-culpa” because we, the people, transgressed against all precautions, against risks.
The winter may hit us hard. Lower our moral. Make us more obedient. Make us see the stick, the ever-present stick.
They say, the “D” for Delta Variant is so much stronger – they are already developing a new vaccine for it. So, those who have had already their two shots and are still alive, may need to get a third one to ward off the Delta Variant. Such a nonsense. Variants are usually weaker than the original virus and they usually differ no more than 5% from the original in the case of corona viruses.
But in the meantime, and while we live the northern summer, let’s enjoy football, soccer, tennis, Olympics – what have you – all sorts of sports that brings out the animal in us in terms of emotions, and yelling and screaming and mass waving for a team, a player, mass celebrations, thumbs up, and thumbs down. Let’s do, and be, gladiators and enjoy their game.
It’s nothing but a prep for the real killing game, where We, The People, are in the arena, exposed to the “swordsmen” – and those high above us, social media giants, computer moguls, eugenists, bankers of the “chosen ones” – again, they shall remain unnamed – those above the UN and all the member governments, those who are watching us, have been watching us for at least the last century – these un-people, will eventually lift or lower their thumbs when they see us crumbling and already beaten by fear.
Shall we live or die? It really depends on us.
Do we want to wake up, step out of the Matrix and take the Red Pill, taking responsibility for a new world which WE, the People are to create in solidarity? Or do we, as a majority, submit to comfort and to the agenda of the WEF’s Global Resetters, and those that command the Global Resetters, hoping and trusting to be happy at the end when we own nothing.
Mind you, this gladiator game – call it also “the process” — is currently planned to end by 2030 or earlier, if we continue the way we have been. The way it looks right now, from the Global Gladiators vintage point, we will continue to just submitting to massive vaxxing, followed by horrifying “side effects” and death, hoping to survive, being happy as digitized humanoids, owning nothing and being managed by AI robots, becomimg the new norm.
Sold under the pretence of a quest for optimising well-being and ‘happiness’, capitalism thrives on the exploitation of peoples and the environment. What really matters is the strive to maintain viable profit margins. The prevailing economic system demands ever-increasing levels of extraction, production and consumption and needs a certain level of annual GDP growth for large firms to make sufficient profit.
But at some point, markets become saturated, demand rates fall and overproduction and overaccumulation of capital becomes a problem. In response, we have seen credit markets expand and personal debt increase to maintain consumer demand as workers’ wages have been squeezed, financial and real estate speculation rise (new investment markets), stock buy backs and massive bail outs and subsidies (public money to maintain the viability of private capital) and an expansion of militarism (a major driving force for many sectors of the economy).
We have also witnessed systems of production abroad being displaced for global corporations to then capture and expand markets in foreign countries.
The old normal
Much of what is outlined above is inherent to capitalism. But the 1980s was a crucial period that helped set the framework for where we find ourselves today.
Remember when the cult of the individual was centre stage? It formed part of the Reagan-Thatcher rhetoric of the ‘new normal’ of 1980s neoliberalism.
In the UK, the running down of welfare provision was justified by government-media rhetoric about ‘individual responsibility’, reducing the role of the state and the need to ‘stand on your own two feet’. The selling off of public assets to profiteering corporations was sold to the masses on the basis of market efficiency and ‘freedom of choice’.
The state provision of welfare, education, health services and the role of the public sector was relentlessly undermined by neoliberal dogma and the creed that the market (global corporations) constituted the best method for supplying human needs.
Thatcher’s stated mission was to unleash the entrepreneurial spirit by rolling back the ‘nanny state’. She wasted little time in crushing the power of the trade unions and privatising key state assets.
Despite her rhetoric, she did not actually reduce the role of the state. She used its machinery differently, on behalf of business. Neither did she unleash the ‘spirit of entrepreneurialism’. Economic growth rates under her were similar as in the 1970s, but a concentration of ownership occurred and levels of inequality rocketed.
Margaret Thatcher was well trained in perception management, manipulating certain strands of latent populist sentiment and prejudice. Her free market, anti-big-government platitudes were passed off to a section of the public that was all too eager to embrace them as a proxy for remedying all that was wrong with Britain. For many, what were once regarded as the extreme social and economic policies of the right became entrenched as the common sense of the age.
Thatcher’s policies destroyed a fifth of Britain’s industrial base in just two years alone. The service sector, finance and banking were heralded as the new drivers of the economy, as much of Britain’s manufacturing sector was out-sourced to cheap labour economies.
Under Thatcher, employees’ share of national income was slashed from 65% to 53%. Long gone are many of the relatively well-paid manufacturing jobs that helped build and sustain the economy. In their place, the country has witnessed the imposition of a low taxation regime and low-paid and insecure ‘service sector’ jobs (no-contract work, macjobs, call centre jobs – many of which soon went abroad) as well as a real estate bubble, credit card debt and student debt, which helped to keep the economy afloat.
However, ultimately, what Thatcher did was – despite her rhetoric of helping small-scale businesses and wrapping herself in the national flag – facilitate the globalisation process by opening the British economy to international capital flows and allowing free rein for global finance and transnational corporations.
Referring to the beginning of this article, it is clear whose happiness and well-being counts most and whose does not matter at all as detailed by David Rothkopf in his 2008 book Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making. Members of the superclass belong to the megacorporation-interlocked, policy-building elites of the world and come from the highest echelons of finance, industry, the military, government and other shadow elites. These are the people whose interests Margaret Thatcher was serving.
These people set the agendas at the Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg, G-7, G-20, NATO, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization.
And let us not forget the various key think tanks and policy making arenas like the Council on Foreign Relations, the Brookings Institute and Chatham House as well as the World Economic Forum (WEF), where sections of the global elite forge policies and strategies and pass them to their political handmaidens.
Driven by the vision of its influential executive chairman Klaus Schwab, the WEF is a major driving force for the dystopian ‘great reset’, a tectonic shift that intends to change how we live, work and interact with each other.
The new normal
The great reset envisages a transformation of capitalism, resulting in permanent restrictions on fundamental liberties and mass surveillance as livelihoods and entire sectors are sacrificed to boost the monopoly and hegemony of pharmaceutical corporations, high-tech/big data giants, Amazon, Google, major global chains, the digital payments sector, biotech concerns, etc.
Under the cover of COVID-19 lockdowns and restrictions, the great reset is being rolled out under the guise of a ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ in which smaller enterprises are to be driven to bankruptcy or bought up by monopolies. Economies are being ‘restructured’ and many jobs and roles will be carried out by AI-driven technology.
The WEF says the public will ‘rent’ everything they require: stripping the right of ownership under the guise of a ‘green economy’ underpinned by the rhetoric of ‘sustainable consumption’ and ‘climate emergency’.
At the same time new (‘green product’) markets are being created and, on the back of COVID, fresh opportunities for profit extraction are opening up abroad. For instance, World Bank Group President David Malpass has stated that poorer countries will be ‘helped’ to get back on their feet after the various lockdowns that have been implemented in response to the Covid-19 crisis. This ‘help’ will be on condition that neoliberal reforms and the undermining of public services are implemented and become further embedded.
Many people waste no time in referring to this as some kind of ‘Marxist’ or ‘communist’ takeover of the planet because a tiny elite will be dictating policies. This has nothing to do with Marxism. An authoritarian capitalist elite – supported by their political technocrats – aims to secure even greater control of the global economy. It will no longer be a (loosely labelled) ‘capitalism’ based on ‘free’ markets and competition (not that those concepts ever really withstood proper scrutiny). Economies will be monopolised by global players, not least e-commerce platforms run by the likes of Amazon, Walmart, Facebook and Google and their multi-billionaire owners.
Essential (for capitalism) new markets will also be created through the ‘financialisation’ and ownership of all aspects of nature, which is to be colonised, commodified and traded under the fraudulent notion of protecting the environment.
The so-called ‘green economy’ will fit in with the notion of ‘sustainable consumption’ and ‘climate emergency’. A bunch of billionaires and their platforms will control every aspect of the value chain. Of course, they themselves will not reduce their own consumption or get rid of their personal jets, expensive vehicles, numerous exclusive homes or ditch their resource gobbling lifestyles. Reduced consumption is meant only for the masses.
They will not only control and own data about consumption but also control and own data on production, logistics, who needs what, when they need it, who should produce it, who should move it and when it should be moved. Independent enterprises will disappear or become incorporated into the platforms acting as subservient cogs. Elected representatives will be mere technocratic overseers of these platforms and the artificial intelligence tools that plan and determine all of the above.
The lockdowns and restrictions we have seen since March 2020 have helped boost the bottom line of global chains and the e-commerce giants and have cemented their dominance. Many small and medium-size independent enterprises have been pushed towards bankruptcy. At the same time, fundamental rights have been eradicated under COVID19 government measures.
Politicians in countries throughout the world have been using the rhetoric of the WEF’s great reset, talking of the need to ‘build back better’ for the ‘new normal’. They are all on point. Hardly a coincidence. Essential to this ‘new normal’ is the compulsion to remove individual liberties and personal freedoms given that, in the ‘green new normal’, unfettered consumption will no longer be an option for the bulk of the population.
It has long been the case that a significant part of the working class has been deemed ‘surplus to requirements’ – three decades ago, such people were sacrificed on the altar of neo-liberalism. They lost their jobs due to automation and offshoring. They have had to rely on meagre state welfare and run-down public services.
But what we are now seeing is the possibility of hundreds of millions around the world being robbed of their livelihoods. Forget about the benign sounding ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ and its promised techno-utopia. What we are witnessing right now seems to be a major restructuring of capitalist economies.
With AI and advanced automation of production, distribution and service provision (3D printing/manufacturing, drone technology, driverless vehicles, lab grown food, farmerless farms, robotics, etc), a mass labour force – and therefore mass education, mass welfare, mass healthcare provision and entire systems that were in place to reproduce labour for capitalist economic activity – will no longer be required. As economic activity is restructured, labour’s relationship to capital is being transformed.
In a reorganised system that no longer needs to sell the virtues of excessive individualism (consumerism), the levels of political and civil rights and freedoms we have been used to will not be tolerated.
Neoliberalism might have reached its logical conclusion (for now). Making trade unions toothless, beating down wages to create unimaginable levels of inequality and (via the dismantling of Bretton Woods) affording private capital so much freedom to secure profit and political clout under the guise of ‘globalisation’ would inevitably lead to one outcome.
A concentration of wealth, power, ownership and control at the top with large sections of the population on state-controlled universal basic income and everyone subjected to the discipline of an emerging biosecurity surveillance state designed to curtail liberties ranging from freedom of movement and assembly to political protest and free speech.
Perception management is, of course, vital for pushing through all of this. Rhetoric about ‘liberty’ and ‘individual responsibility’ worked a treat in the 1980s to help bring about a massive heist of wealth. This time, it is a public health scare and ‘collective responsibility’ as part of a strategy to help move towards near-monopolistic control over economies by a handful of global players.
And the perception of freedom is also being managed. Once vaccinated many will begin to feel free. Freer than under lockdown. But not really free at all.
I advocate the thesis which holds that the tendency towards totalitarianism is part of the essence of the machine, and originally proceeded from the realm of technology; that the tendency, inherent to every machine as such, to subjugate the world, to parasitically seize upon the fragments that have not yet been subjugated, to merge with other machines and to operate with them as pieces of a single, total machine: I maintain that this tendency represents the fundamental fact and that political totalitarianism, as horrible as it is, only represents an effect and variant of this fundamental technological fact. While the spokesmen of the technologically advanced world powers have been claiming for decades that they are engaged in resistance against the principle of totalitarianism (in the interest of the “free world”), their claims are fraudulent or, in the best cases, are the effect of a lack of intelligence, for the principle of totalitarianism is a technical principle and, as such, is not fought—nor will it ever be fought—by the “anti-totalitarians” From the times of the dictatorship we know that, from the moment when one considers that it is possible that one is under surveillance, one feels and behaves differently than one did before, that is, in a more conformist way, when not in an absolutely conformist way. The unverifiable possibility of being under surveillance has a decisive capacity for molding: it molds the entire population.
The acceleration of innovation, made possible by an exponential increase in calculating power, led straight to a hyper-technological Ancien Regime where the positions to be occupied in the hierarchy of jobs, incomes, assets, education, living spaces, etc., depend on birth exactly as they did before the French Revolution. Thus, from the transhumanism of Silicon Valley there emerges not a post-human self but a very familiar figure, the aristocrat, having become cyber and with a head, cut off in 1789, that has grown back. Confidence in technology as a means of creating more liberty, more democracy, and less enslavement is belied once more by the truly deplorable actual results of this reproduction of power relations.
It is tempting to think that free-will exists. Unfortunately, it does not, particularly in America (tip of the hat to Baruch Spinoza writing in his Ethics). Taste in music (rap, rock, pop, etc.), fashion and food; political orientation whether left, right or center; what sports team to support, or vehicle to drive, or television series to watch is all supplied by media/corporations to American brains that are as malleable as silly putty. The mind easily succumbs to the totalitarian machinations of the American domestic/global capitalist network as its marketers, advertisers, and politicians/ideologues pound content into the brain via television news, hand-held computers/telephones, the world wide web, social media, and legacy media. Alberto J. L. Carrillo Canan believes that “the dominant technological forms determine the way we conceive reality, human life and mind.”
How does one account for a meaningful life in American society? What would be contained in a meaningful life’s ledger? How do you determine if you are free and not programmed? Two days of administered freedom at the end of the workweek? A new car? A two-week vacation at the beach? A mammoth flat screen television? A new iPhone? A new season of a television series on Netflix? A college degree? A mortgage on the house? A yearly bonus for productivity? The ability to vote for only two candidates for the President of the United States? An opinion you really believe is yours?
All these “things” are supplied to you and all courtesy of the bio-capitalist, totalitarian machine. No one can escape it. Young or old, the American mind is captive to the totalitarian technological order. Ideas, products, news, and opinions are supplied, recycled/rehashed and delivered. But what about the spontaneous protests and demands of, say, Black Lives Matter (BLM), you ask? Notice how quickly BLM’s agenda was absorbed by the entire totalitarian capitalist enterprise who made easy money available via donations to BLM activists, advertised their cause, and promised to hire more Blacks. BLM is now a fading blip on the American capitalist radar shot down by the capitalist totalitarian system. Indeed, BLM has cashed in. The same story/process is repeated over and over again no matter the issue or the protest or the time.
Not Your Opinion, Your Meaningless Life
“It does not matter whether someone who is expressing himself thinks that his expression is his own bona fide expression, or even if he asks himself ‘is this my opinion or not?’, or even if he does not even understand the question; in any case, what is not permitted is that what he expresses should be his own opinion; it must always be a supplied opinion. Even when it seems to be advisable to allow variations, they must be predictable variations on the pre-established theme…Most of those who lead meaningless lives are not even conscious of their misfortune. By way of the life that is imposed upon them they are prevented from perceiving its lack of meaning. That is why they cannot do anything to counteract this lack of meaning, either. Or, more precisely: even what they do to counteract it is something that is done to them, that is, something that is supplied to them,” claims Anders.
According to Lazaratto, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft (plus consolidated media) are the masters guiding the behaviors of the governed. “By constantly soliciting one’s attention—giving rise to an activity as absurd as compulsively consulting one’s smartphone…they tirelessly fabricate and information designed to affect subjectivities circulating through billions of telephones, televisions, computers, tablets, whose connections envelop the planet in a thicker and thicker net.”
It is not just the corporations, though. Republicans, Democrats, the US Military, interest groups, and lobbyists (collectively, the neoliberal order) all get their products/messages on the airwaves and into the minds of the American human herd. The “masters” would likely be happier automating/digitizing American citizens/slaves.
Glutaraldehyde Fixation: Duh, What?
The digital dissection of the human being, individually and collectively, is proceeding apace. Uploading “the human” is no longer the stuff of science fiction. In a few generations, a parent may say to a child, “Hey, let’s upload great grandpa and see/hear what he has to say.” Why not pull the brain out of a dead body, preserve it in a special solution, and then mine it for memories that can be turned into 0’s and 1’s.
Macabre, you likely say, but the research is underway and funded. Ah, the beauty of capitalism. Consider the enterprising company Nectome. They are in the business of preserving the brains of the dead in hopes of digitally retrieving long term memories.
According to MIT Technology Review, “Nectome has received substantial support for its technology, however. It has raised $1 million in funding so far, including the $120,000 that Y Combinator provides to all the companies it accepts. It has also won a $960,000 federal grant from the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health for “whole-brain nanoscale preservation and imaging,” the text of which foresees a “commercial opportunity in offering brain preservation” for purposes including drug research.”
Tracking digital footprints and then converting them into behavioral models able to predict the next set of keystrokes, online and offline habits/geolocations, and spending preferences are well known practices undertaken by companies like Alphabet-Google. For example, today’s software programs learn what words and individual uses to compose letters, articles, emails and once enough verbiage has been collated by the machine, a human writer can cut out the thought process used to seek out an adjective, a noun or verb. Just one more human function taken away from the brain and absorbed by the software in the machine.
In some not to distant future, the human mind/person will be digitized and exist in a bio-machine.
Artificial Intelligence: Youngsters
What kind of adults are being created by the totalitarian technological education system? I used to believe that an innovative education based on critical thinking and systems analysis, beginning from about 4th grade level through high school, might provide a check on the monstrous technology/system that is dominating every facet of life.
But having experience education as a teacher in both public and private settings, I have stopped believing that youngsters are going to be anything more than unconscious routers, servers, or surveillance sensors for the totalitarian machine. They will be more conformist than their parents or the adults that are nominally in charge of the United States.
The teachers/system set a pace that is relentless which means there is no time for a pause or a gaze into thoughtfulness/thinking. It is not learning but programming that the students are subjected to.
I asked an 8th grader recently what he would change about school if he could. “I would not teach boring,” he responded. “All the students I know don’t like school because it is so boring. Teachers need to change. We are not learning anything,” he said in frustration. Add to this the crazy reality that the World Wide Web is barely used by teachers for science, math, politics, history, or geography. It is largely a cut and paste enterprise with teachers selecting documents from the Web, printing them out in paper form, and distributing them to their classes.
The public and private schools I have been in (K-12) are a dizzying mish-mash of things and frenetic human activity: wires, electronic white boards; non-ergonomic 19th Century desks and chairs (plastic and aluminum); Apple iPads; robotic parts; Lego’s; classrooms adorned with cardboard signs with annoying cliches (You’re Special or The Future Starts Here); laptops; boxes of crayons and pencils; decade old paper files in equally old file cabinets; hallway banners proclaiming “Award Winning School, 2020”; half empty classrooms due to the COVID19 Pandemic; virtual students on Microsoft Teams at home who log in and leave the class, never responding to a teacher’s question; layers of management (assistant principals); constant teacher meetings/professional development courses; waves of substitute teachers; and curriculum focused solely on achieving high scores on a State’s Standards of Learning.
Many of the software programs used for learning, particularly in grades K-8, are equivalent to an arcade game or pinball machine: carnival music accompanies the student through, say, a science lesson. Answer correctly and the sound of a bell or whistle can be heard. Answer a question wrong and later a “power up” function gives you a chance to correct your mistake and add points. There are also competitive learning games that students participate in. Cartoonish software programs like Kahoot, Nearpod, Gizmo, Quizizz, Brain Pop all amp up the level of excitement to create an experience similar to a popular video game.
I was substituting in an 8th grade science class recently where the subject being taught was weather. I asked the students if the teacher was using the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA.GOV) website to help them learn about the subject. They looked at me like I was an alien creature. “What’s that,” one student responded. I explained but to no avail as I had to get to the instructions left by the teacher that I was to follow.
Red Guards
I was substitute teaching in a classroom full of 8th graders (12-13 years old, I am 65) not long ago. I was talking about something or other and inadvertently pulled my mask down below my lips for a few moments exposing my face. It was an error in judgment, a mistake for which I had no excuse (I am fully vaccinated for COVID-19 and was 6 feet away from the nearest student). When I was finished speaking to the class, I pulled my mask back up and thought nothing of it.
Turns out that I was surreptitiously being recorded by a student who turned the video over to an assistant principal. I was nearly released for the mistake but the assistant principal that first received the video argued on my behalf to the principal and I was kept on staff. My punishment was to write a memo for record/file explaining what I had done. The next step was to apologize to the 8th graders in person.
I thought immediately of Mao’s Red Guards: “The first Red Guards groups were made up of students, ranging from as young as elementary school children up to university students…The Red Guards also publicly humiliated teachers, monks, former landowners or anyone else suspected of being “counter-revolutionary.”
What happened to, “Hey, Mr. Stanton, you need to put your mask back up.”
Not long ago, I was in a class with a new substitute teacher, fresh out of college. He politely asked the class of 6th graders what time the class ended. What he got was this from a student, “You are the substitute, you should know.”
I advocate the thesis which holds that the tendency towards totalitarianism is part of the essence of the machine, and originally proceeded from the realm of technology; that the tendency, inherent to every machine as such, to subjugate the world, to parasitically seize upon the fragments that have not yet been subjugated, to merge with other machines and to operate with them as pieces of a single, total machine: I maintain that this tendency represents the fundamental fact and that political totalitarianism, as horrible as it is, only represents an effect and variant of this fundamental technological fact. While the spokesmen of the technologically advanced world powers have been claiming for decades that they are engaged in resistance against the principle of totalitarianism (in the interest of the “free world”), their claims are fraudulent or, in the best cases, are the effect of a lack of intelligence, for the principle of totalitarianism is a technical principle and, as such, is not fought—nor will it ever be fought—by the “anti-totalitarians” From the times of the dictatorship we know that, from the moment when one considers that it is possible that one is under surveillance, one feels and behaves differently than one did before, that is, in a more conformist way, when not in an absolutely conformist way. The unverifiable possibility of being under surveillance has a decisive capacity for molding: it molds the entire population.
The acceleration of innovation, made possible by an exponential increase in calculating power, led straight to a hyper-technological Ancien Regime where the positions to be occupied in the hierarchy of jobs, incomes, assets, education, living spaces, etc., depend on birth exactly as they did before the French Revolution. Thus, from the transhumanism of Silicon Valley there emerges not a post-human self but a very familiar figure, the aristocrat, having become cyber and with a head, cut off in 1789, that has grown back. Confidence in technology as a means of creating more liberty, more democracy, and less enslavement is belied once more by the truly deplorable actual results of this reproduction of power relations.
It is tempting to think that free-will exists. Unfortunately, it does not, particularly in America (tip of the hat to Baruch Spinoza writing in his Ethics). Taste in music (rap, rock, pop, etc.), fashion and food; political orientation whether left, right or center; what sports team to support, or vehicle to drive, or television series to watch is all supplied by media/corporations to American brains that are as malleable as silly putty. The mind easily succumbs to the totalitarian machinations of the American domestic/global capitalist network as its marketers, advertisers, and politicians/ideologues pound content into the brain via television news, hand-held computers/telephones, the world wide web, social media, and legacy media. Alberto J. L. Carrillo Canan believes that “the dominant technological forms determine the way we conceive reality, human life and mind.”
How does one account for a meaningful life in American society? What would be contained in a meaningful life’s ledger? How do you determine if you are free and not programmed? Two days of administered freedom at the end of the workweek? A new car? A two-week vacation at the beach? A mammoth flat screen television? A new iPhone? A new season of a television series on Netflix? A college degree? A mortgage on the house? A yearly bonus for productivity? The ability to vote for only two candidates for the President of the United States? An opinion you really believe is yours?
All these “things” are supplied to you and all courtesy of the bio-capitalist, totalitarian machine. No one can escape it. Young or old, the American mind is captive to the totalitarian technological order. Ideas, products, news, and opinions are supplied, recycled/rehashed and delivered. But what about the spontaneous protests and demands of, say, Black Lives Matter (BLM), you ask? Notice how quickly BLM’s agenda was absorbed by the entire totalitarian capitalist enterprise who made easy money available via donations to BLM activists, advertised their cause, and promised to hire more Blacks. BLM is now a fading blip on the American capitalist radar shot down by the capitalist totalitarian system. Indeed, BLM has cashed in. The same story/process is repeated over and over again no matter the issue or the protest or the time.
Not Your Opinion, Your Meaningless Life
“It does not matter whether someone who is expressing himself thinks that his expression is his own bona fide expression, or even if he asks himself ‘is this my opinion or not?’, or even if he does not even understand the question; in any case, what is not permitted is that what he expresses should be his own opinion; it must always be a supplied opinion. Even when it seems to be advisable to allow variations, they must be predictable variations on the pre-established theme…Most of those who lead meaningless lives are not even conscious of their misfortune. By way of the life that is imposed upon them they are prevented from perceiving its lack of meaning. That is why they cannot do anything to counteract this lack of meaning, either. Or, more precisely: even what they do to counteract it is something that is done to them, that is, something that is supplied to them,” claims Anders.
According to Lazaratto, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft (plus consolidated media) are the masters guiding the behaviors of the governed. “By constantly soliciting one’s attention—giving rise to an activity as absurd as compulsively consulting one’s smartphone…they tirelessly fabricate and information designed to affect subjectivities circulating through billions of telephones, televisions, computers, tablets, whose connections envelop the planet in a thicker and thicker net.”
It is not just the corporations, though. Republicans, Democrats, the US Military, interest groups, and lobbyists (collectively, the neoliberal order) all get their products/messages on the airwaves and into the minds of the American human herd. The “masters” would likely be happier automating/digitizing American citizens/slaves.
Glutaraldehyde Fixation: Duh, What?
The digital dissection of the human being, individually and collectively, is proceeding apace. Uploading “the human” is no longer the stuff of science fiction. In a few generations, a parent may say to a child, “Hey, let’s upload great grandpa and see/hear what he has to say.” Why not pull the brain out of a dead body, preserve it in a special solution, and then mine it for memories that can be turned into 0’s and 1’s.
Macabre, you likely say, but the research is underway and funded. Ah, the beauty of capitalism. Consider the enterprising company Nectome. They are in the business of preserving the brains of the dead in hopes of digitally retrieving long term memories.
According to MIT Technology Review, “Nectome has received substantial support for its technology, however. It has raised $1 million in funding so far, including the $120,000 that Y Combinator provides to all the companies it accepts. It has also won a $960,000 federal grant from the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health for “whole-brain nanoscale preservation and imaging,” the text of which foresees a “commercial opportunity in offering brain preservation” for purposes including drug research.”
Tracking digital footprints and then converting them into behavioral models able to predict the next set of keystrokes, online and offline habits/geolocations, and spending preferences are well known practices undertaken by companies like Alphabet-Google. For example, today’s software programs learn what words and individual uses to compose letters, articles, emails and once enough verbiage has been collated by the machine, a human writer can cut out the thought process used to seek out an adjective, a noun or verb. Just one more human function taken away from the brain and absorbed by the software in the machine.
In some not to distant future, the human mind/person will be digitized and exist in a bio-machine.
Artificial Intelligence: Youngsters
What kind of adults are being created by the totalitarian technological education system? I used to believe that an innovative education based on critical thinking and systems analysis, beginning from about 4th grade level through high school, might provide a check on the monstrous technology/system that is dominating every facet of life.
But having experience education as a teacher in both public and private settings, I have stopped believing that youngsters are going to be anything more than unconscious routers, servers, or surveillance sensors for the totalitarian machine. They will be more conformist than their parents or the adults that are nominally in charge of the United States.
The teachers/system set a pace that is relentless which means there is no time for a pause or a gaze into thoughtfulness/thinking. It is not learning but programming that the students are subjected to.
I asked an 8th grader recently what he would change about school if he could. “I would not teach boring,” he responded. “All the students I know don’t like school because it is so boring. Teachers need to change. We are not learning anything,” he said in frustration. Add to this the crazy reality that the World Wide Web is barely used by teachers for science, math, politics, history, or geography. It is largely a cut and paste enterprise with teachers selecting documents from the Web, printing them out in paper form, and distributing them to their classes.
The public and private schools I have been in (K-12) are a dizzying mish-mash of things and frenetic human activity: wires, electronic white boards; non-ergonomic 19th Century desks and chairs (plastic and aluminum); Apple iPads; robotic parts; Lego’s; classrooms adorned with cardboard signs with annoying cliches (You’re Special or The Future Starts Here); laptops; boxes of crayons and pencils; decade old paper files in equally old file cabinets; hallway banners proclaiming “Award Winning School, 2020”; half empty classrooms due to the COVID19 Pandemic; virtual students on Microsoft Teams at home who log in and leave the class, never responding to a teacher’s question; layers of management (assistant principals); constant teacher meetings/professional development courses; waves of substitute teachers; and curriculum focused solely on achieving high scores on a State’s Standards of Learning.
Many of the software programs used for learning, particularly in grades K-8, are equivalent to an arcade game or pinball machine: carnival music accompanies the student through, say, a science lesson. Answer correctly and the sound of a bell or whistle can be heard. Answer a question wrong and later a “power up” function gives you a chance to correct your mistake and add points. There are also competitive learning games that students participate in. Cartoonish software programs like Kahoot, Nearpod, Gizmo, Quizizz, Brain Pop all amp up the level of excitement to create an experience similar to a popular video game.
I was substituting in an 8th grade science class recently where the subject being taught was weather. I asked the students if the teacher was using the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA.GOV) website to help them learn about the subject. They looked at me like I was an alien creature. “What’s that,” one student responded. I explained but to no avail as I had to get to the instructions left by the teacher that I was to follow.
Red Guards
I was substitute teaching in a classroom full of 8th graders (12-13 years old, I am 65) not long ago. I was talking about something or other and inadvertently pulled my mask down below my lips for a few moments exposing my face. It was an error in judgment, a mistake for which I had no excuse (I am fully vaccinated for COVID-19 and was 6 feet away from the nearest student). When I was finished speaking to the class, I pulled my mask back up and thought nothing of it.
Turns out that I was surreptitiously being recorded by a student who turned the video over to an assistant principal. I was nearly released for the mistake but the assistant principal that first received the video argued on my behalf to the principal and I was kept on staff. My punishment was to write a memo for record/file explaining what I had done. The next step was to apologize to the 8th graders in person.
I thought immediately of Mao’s Red Guards: “The first Red Guards groups were made up of students, ranging from as young as elementary school children up to university students…The Red Guards also publicly humiliated teachers, monks, former landowners or anyone else suspected of being “counter-revolutionary.”
What happened to, “Hey, Mr. Stanton, you need to put your mask back up.”
Not long ago, I was in a class with a new substitute teacher, fresh out of college. He politely asked the class of 6th graders what time the class ended. What he got was this from a student, “You are the substitute, you should know.”
A Cursory Examination of Modern-Day Policing and the Consequences it Poses for the Marginalized
Since the brutal murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis Police at the onset of last summer, there has been a resurgence of political energy amongst the American population centered on significantly reforming policing in the United States. Ranging from demilitarization to defunding, there has been no shortage of policy proposals issued by an endless assortment of governmental bodies, academic institutions, think tanks, non-profits, etc., as a means to promote greater accountability amongst a public institution that has fully exerted its monopoly on violence upon the American people. A critical area of policing that is in desperate need of stringent regulation is the seemingly unfettered use of surveillance tools. Specifically, surveillance tools that are embedded with artificial intelligence and machine-learning, algorithmic functioning. Some of these tools include but are not limited to: predictive policing software, facial recognition, automated license plate readers (ALPRs), and risk assessment scoring.
The utility of these kinds of surveillance technologies is seen in a few ways. First, it allows for a mass extraction of data points from various sources. Second, it allows for automated processes of analyses such as pattern recognition and data point linkage and connection. Third, based on the machine-learning of patterns and connections, it allows for predictive analysis and the alerting and signaling to end users (police) of the technology of potential risks or threats. These tools have be used to inform law enforcement which people and places to monitor. Moreover, they have assisted law enforcement in determining which people are potential threats to public safety and order. Consequently, people will have interactions with police, will be arrested, will be charged, and will be imprisoned based on the application of these surveillance technologies.
To this point it may be unclear as to what the problem is in regard to these police using these surveillance technologies. Surely, law enforcement is in need of some tools in order to root out and investigate crime. But before we fully address the problem with these tools we need further background regarding the functionality and utility of policing. To start, it must be acknowledged that the presence of an elite grouping of people, or a ruling class, who hold a disproportionate amount of political and socioeconomic power relative to the rest of the population has been a constant theme since the inception of the nation. Institutions and structures (of the government and economy) that form the backbone of the American state have been historically designed by and for the exclusive benefit of certain individuals: namely white, land-owning, generally wealthy males.
One of the most prominent of these institutions is law and the criminal justice system, in relating these institutions to that of the powerful, sociologist Richard Quinney argues in his book The Social Reality of Crime that, “Although law is supposed to protect all [residents], it starts as a tool of the dominant class and ends by maintaining the dominance of that class. Law serves the powerful over the weak…Yet we are all bound by that law, and we are indoctrinated with the myth that it is our law.” Consequently, there is a robust history of non-privileged classes and groups in American society challenging this unequal distribution of power through various resistance methods. Examples of these challenges include, but are not limited to: the abolitionist movement, organized labor movements, women’s rights movement, civil rights movements, anti-war movements, and most recently the resurgence of criminal justice reform and anti-police brutality movements. Unsurprisingly, all of these challenges have been met with immense pushback from the ruling class, expressed through government, i.e. the police, due to the significant threat they impose on their source of power. Sociologist Alex Vitale, thoroughly documents these episodes throughout his book The End of Policing and perhaps one the best takeaway points from this work is this: “The myth of policing in a liberal democracy is that the police exist to prevent political activity that crosses the line into criminal activity, such as property destruction and violence. But they have always focused on detecting and disrupting movements that threaten the economic and political status quo, regardless of the presence of criminality.”
The authority of the government is vested into the police to enforce the law, which itself is typically crafted to meet the interest of the ruling class. Thus the police serve as an extension, or more fittingly, a weapon and a shield of this power dynamic. Each iteration of the police has been imbued with the authority to use force as both a weapon of repression and as a shield to protect power and privilege from challenges and threats. As a result certain techniques and tools are used by the police to counter and neutralize these threats. One such tool is surveillance technology.
Perhaps one of the most succinct passages that captures the essence of this idea comes from a report entitled “Before the Bullet Hits the Body: Dismantling Predictive Policing in Los Angeles,” authored by the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition wherein they state, “Communities of color, immigrants and the economically marginalized are the primary targets of these modes of surveillance… It is yet another tool, another practice built upon the long lineage including slave patrols, lantern laws, Jim Crow, Red Squads, war on drugs, war on crime, war on gangs, war on terror, Operation Hammer, SWAT, aerial patrols, Weed and Seed, stop and frisk, gang injunctions, broken windows, and Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR).”
Finally, in contemporary society it is not a secret (especially since the Snowden revelations) that surveillance is ubiquitous in the US. It is ostensibly utilized for the promotion of national security and public safety and there is a truth to this claim. Yet, in a society that remains highly unequal with the existence of an incredibly privileged ruling class it remains relevant to point out, as privacy scholar Jeffrey Vagle argues in his article “Surveillance is still about power”, “…surveillance is, at its core, about the establishment, use, and maintenance of power…even the most common surveillance practices have a power dynamic that too often shifts from generally beneficial to abusive.” In sum, surveillance is an expression of power. It is also a tool wielded by the institution of law enforcement, itself an arm of the ruling class. Surveillance mechanisms are designed and have been utilized to preempt organized dissent from the status quo: which is the highly unequal distribution of political and socioeconomic power.
With this political and historical context in mind, we can now return to the issue at hand: police use of surveillance technologies embedded with artificial intelligence and machine-learning, algorithmic functioning. Rather than outlining each of the surveillance technologies listed in the introduction in regard to their various features and components, I will summarize some of the major concerns that have been put forward in the literature surrounding this topic. Sociologist Sarah Brayne has shown in her work, most notably her article entitled “Big Data Surveillance: The Case for Policing” that there are noteworthy implications for the reproduction of inequality through the utilization of these technologies. For example, historical crime data serves as one of the primary components of information that is fed into these surveillance tools.
This is significant because historical crime data is embedded with bias and discrimination which leads to the reinforcement and reproduction of criminal justice and legal biases but on a much wider scale given this expansive and proliferating surveillance architecture. As one report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation finds “Police are already policing minority neighborhoods and arresting people for things that may have gone unnoticed or unreported in less heavily patrolled neighborhoods. When this already skewed data is entered into a predictive algorithm, it will deploy more officers to the communities that are already overpoliced.” Another related issue that would feed into this reproduction of inequality is the unequal distribution and deployment of the physical surveillance technology. They will proliferate in areas already subject to higher police activity (areas that include residents primarily of color and low-income). Allowing for an even wider dragnet over a historically targeted population.
One example of this is the tool ShotSpotter, which is a sensor for gunshots that sends immediate alerts to nearby police units, and its proliferation in certain Chicago neighborhoods. As discussed in this article from The Intercept documenting ShotSpotter’s use in what led up to the recent death of 13 year old Adam Toledo, the author states that “ShotSpotter is operative only in low-income Black and Hispanic neighborhoods and is coupled with software, also sold by ShotSpotter, that guides deployment decisions. The inevitable rejoinder will be: That’s where the crime is. Here, we encounter the circular logic of predictive policing by which supposedly scientific methods yield racist results, as overpolicing of communities of color drives an “evidence-based” dynamic that produces more overpolicing and attendant harms.”
Lastly, these surveillance technologies present a daunting future for civil liberties and rights such as right to privacy, speech, due process, etc. In regard to privacy, given a near total absence of guidelines and regulation, essentially all types of digital data, no matter how identifiable or private, is fair game to be collected, aggregated, and analyzed for any sort of prosecution, raising critical questions about what privacy is protected. The British media scholar John Fiske in the article entitled “Surveilling the City: Whiteness, the Black Man and Democratic Totalitarianism” asserts that surveillance and its affront on privacy is a crucial component of the larger power struggle between the rulers and the ruled in which, “Privacy maintains the area where the less powerful can exert control over the immediate conditions of their lives and bodies, reducing it decreases the localizing power of the weak and increases the imperializing power of the strong, [the ruling class, the state, the totalitarian].” In regard to speech, there are also negative implications for the ability to peacefully dissent against the rule of power structures if there is a wide-scale surveillance architecture monitoring these challenges. This is especially relevant for historically oppressed and marginalized groups who as mentioned already, have been systematically targeted and repressed by law enforcement when attempting to challenge power and attain greater rights.
The increasing reliance on AI-generated algorithms to replace human-led oversight of potentially life-altering events and interactions with police spells grave dangers for society’s most vulnerable as has been documented above. The complete degradation of our most basic democratic ideals and values and the erosion of government transparency and accountability are plausible consequences with the widespread adoption of these kinds of surveillance technologies. Ultimately, this technology is nothing more than a tool. Tools are imbued with the intention of those who create and wield them. They can be designed and/or used for ostensibly beneficial purposes, conversely they can be used for malevolent purposes as well. This is why it is then critical to understand the political and historical context in which the tools are birthed into existence. Given the extensive and current sordid utilization of surveillance tools by its wielder, the police, as a means to oppress and control masses of people, we should analyze every subsequent tool designed for our ‘security’ and ‘safety’ with scrutiny and a critical eye.
Over the past year there has been a heightened level of scrutiny and due criticism, resulting in numerous victories in regard to regulating this police surveillance. Various local and municipal governments around the US have banned predictive policing and facial recognition technologies after experiencing strong pushback from well-organized community coalitions. But this is only a start and we must continue to resist the implementation of this algorithmic oppression in its shaping of group behavior towards dehumanized obedience and conformity. We have to seize upon this energy to stay mobilized, organized, and to articulate our demands for more and more police reform. There is an urgent need to address the worst police abuses and it is incumbent upon all of us to stand in solidarity with those who experience the brunt of this abuse.
Levi Gonzalez is a researcher of various topics and issues regarding politics and history including: criminal justice, American foreign policy, surveillance, and public policy. He recently received a Master’s degree in Public Policy, with an emphasis on poverty and inequality, from the University of California, Riverside. Levi is a fierce opponent of systemic oppression, state sanctioned violence, imperialism, and exploitation. Learning from those who embrace the challenge of confronting their oppressor serves as a source of inspiration. Read other articles by Levi.
Now it so happened, as Goethe told it, that a sorcerer of superlative technical skills took on an apprentice, eager and diligent in his study of the master’s teachings. One day, while the master was away, the apprentice, perhaps overly confident in his newly-acquired command of certain techniques, decided to use these powers for a practical, if mundane, purpose. As a pupil, he was obligated to perform certain tedious household chores, most detestably the endless hauling of pails of water from the nearby stream. Why not animate, say, a broom to do this tiresome chore? His acquired powers were already sufficient to perform this transformation, and the broom, hurrying off and then returning forthwith, brought back two pails of water. The apprentice, proud of his powers and amazed at the prompt carrying out of his command, was nonetheless startled when the broom quickly hurried off again, and again, and again, speedily delivering a dozen of pails of water. Panicking, the apprentice tried to destroy the broom by cutting it in half–only to witness each half becoming a whole, and both scurrying off now to begin bringing twice as many pails! The house was flooded, with no relief in sight, when the Master suddenly returned. In consternation, he angrily admonished his over-confident pupil for using such powers which wiser ones would willingly refrain from unleashing. The Master, acutely aware of the dangers of such misuse, nonetheless calmly de-animated the brooms back to their original purpose.
A great deal of attention has been paid to the problems of carceral injustice and the increasing use of AI for things such as predictive policing. Much of this research has revealed that these digital technologies serve to recreate economic disparities, racism, and other forms of social discrimination while removing the stain of human agency toward a flawed ideal of objectivity. Less attention has been paid to the use of these digital technologies in pre-employment background checks. This essay examines the use of AI and algorithmic data analysis and the ways these technologies and procedures create a caste of humans who are barred from employment and rendered economically invalid. In the final analysis, AI and algorithmic data analysis in the service of pre-employment background checks reproduces Foucault’s human monster in a contemporary form, a human monster that bears the stigmata of digital unpredictability. 
Digital authoritarianism, as the Center for Strategic and International Studies cautions, involves the use of information technology to surveil, repress, and manipulate the populace, endangering human rights and civil liberties, and co-opting and corrupting the foundational principles of democratic and open societies, “including freedom of movement, the right to speak freely and express political dissent, and the right to personal privacy, online and off.”
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The Globalists have semi-clandestinely introduced some kind of “covid-Martial Law” that overrules everything that is an otherwise Constitutional Right. We are in most of the western world a direct dictatorship. In most countries the Constitutional Amendment from “Democracy” to Dictatorship has happened clandestinely or at least semi-clandestinely. That’s what dictators do. Most of the people have no idea. Many of those who do know, don’t agree. They launch initiatives for new laws – that fall by the way side, because they have no teeth under a Martial Law-broken Constitution.
Since the brutal murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis Police at the onset of last summer, there has been a resurgence of political energy amongst the American population centered on significantly reforming policing in the United States. Ranging from demilitarization to defunding, there has been no shortage of policy proposals issued by an endless assortment of governmental bodies, academic institutions, think tanks, non-profits, etc., as a means to promote greater accountability amongst a public institution that has fully exerted its monopoly on violence upon the American people. A critical area of policing that is in desperate need of stringent regulation is the seemingly unfettered use of surveillance tools. Specifically, surveillance tools that are embedded with artificial intelligence and machine-learning, algorithmic functioning. Some of these tools include but are not limited to: predictive policing software, facial recognition, automated license plate readers (ALPRs), and risk assessment scoring.
