radiofree.asia

Category: Surveillance

  • Australia Struggles to Find an Independent Voice

    Australia has always struggled to present an independent foreign policy to the world. For example, during its early days as a British colony its soldiers fought in the Crimean war in the mid 19th century, although it would be impossible to identify any Australian interest in that conflict. World War One saw a similar eagerness to die on behalf of the British Empire. To this day the most solemn day in the Australian calendar is 25th April, ANZAC Day, when Australian and New Zealand troops were sacrificed by their incompetent British officers to a hopeless campaign in Turkey during World War One.

    The same saga was repeated during World War II when Australian troops were rushed to North Africa to fight Rommel’s desert army. They were only withdrawn from that theatre following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when defending home territory from the Japanese superseded defending Britain in its European war.

    The fall of Singapore to the Japanese had a profound effect on Australian military thinking. Foremost was the realisation that they could no longer rely on Britain for their safety.  Rather than formulating a plan for having a uniquely Australian tinge to their defence, Australia simply switched its allegiance from the British to the Americans. That allegiance has continued to the present day and is essentially a bipartisan affair, with both the major political parties swearing undying allegiance to the Americans.

    What did not change from the days of allegiance to a participation in Britain’s wars, was an affinity simply transferred to the Americans to join their wars, regardless of the merits, military or otherwise, of doing so.

    Thus Australia was an eager participant in the first post-World War II exercise in American imperialism when it joined the war in Korea. Australian troops later joined in the invasion of North Korea, contrary to the terms of the United Nations resolution authorising the conflict. After the Chinese joined the war when the western forces reached the North Korea – China border, they were quickly expelled back to the southern portion of the Korean peninsula.

    As is well known, the Americans used their aerial domination to bomb the North until the armistice was finally signed in 1953. During that air war every city in the North suffered severe damage. More than 600,000 civilians died, which was greater than the military losses of around 400,000. To this day the war remains technically alive as no peace treaty has been signed. Of the 17,000 Australian troops that served in Korea, there were 340 fatalities and more than 1400 injured, a comparatively small number for a war that lasted three years.

    In 1962 Australian troops arrived in South Vietnam and remained there until January 1973 when they were withdrawn by the Whitlam Labor government. It was Australia’s longest war up until that time. The withdrawal of Australian troops by the Whitlam government incensed the Americans, on whose behalf they were there. The withdrawal drew the enmity of the Americans and was a major factor in the American role in the overthrow of the Whitlam government in November 1975. It is a fact barely acknowledged in Australian writing on the demise of the Whitlam government. It did, however, have a profound effect on Australian political and military thinking. Since November 1975 there has been no recognisable Australian difference from United States belligerence throughout the world.

    The next miscalculation was Australia joining the United States led war in Afghanistan. That is now Australia’s longest war, rapidly approaching 20 years of involvement with no sign or political talk about withdrawing. It is a war that has largely passed out of mainstream media discussion. This ignorance was briefly disrupted by revelations in late 2020 that Australian troops had been involved in war crimes in Afghanistan, specifically, the killing of innocent Afghanistan civilians.

    The brief publicity given to this revelation rapidly passed and Australia’s involvement in its longest war once more faded from public view. The mainstream media remains totally silent on Australia’s involvement on behalf of the Americans in protecting the poppy crop, source of 90% of the world’s heroin supply and a major source of uncountable illicit income for the CIA.

    Australia’s next foreign intervention on behalf of the Americans was in the equally illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. They have simply ignored demands by the Iraqi government in 2020 that all uninvited foreign troops should leave. The involvement of Australian troops in that country, and indeed in adjoining Syria where they have been since at least 2015 is simply ignored by the mainstream media.

    Australia also plays a role in the United States war machine through the satellite facility at Pine Gap in the Northern Territory. That base is one of a number of United States military facilities in the country, another topic that is deemed by the mainstream media as being unfit for public discussion.

    Another unsung role of the Australian Navy is to be part of the United States confrontation with China in the South China Sea where they protect so-called freedom of navigation exercises, despite the complete absence of any evidence of Chinese interference with civilian navigation in those waters. Equally unexplained is the Australian Navy’s presence in the narrow Straits of Malacca, a vital Chinese export waterway.

    Last year the Trump administration resurrected the “gang of four” that is, India, Japan, the United States and Australia, a blatantly anti-China grouping designed to put pressure on the Chinese government in the Indo Pacific region. The measure is doomed to fail, not least because both India and Japan have more attractive opportunities as part of the burgeoning cooperation in trade among multiple countries in the Asia-Pacific who see better opportunities arising from a friendly relationship with China than the blatantly antagonistic options offered by the Americans.

    Australia seems impervious to these signals. It has already suffered major setbacks to its trade with China, not to mention a diplomatic cold shoulder. The political leadership is silent on this development, perhaps unable to grasp the implications of its changing relationship with China. The inability of the Labor Opposition to grasp the implications of the consequences of Australia clinging to the fading American coattails is of profound concern.

    All the signs are that the relationship with its largest trading partner, by a big margin, will continue to deteriorate. Australians seem unable or unwilling to grasp the lesson that its economic problems are intimately linked to its subservient role to the United States.

    There is every indication that their fortunes in Asia will sink together.

    The post Australia Struggles to Find an Independent Voice first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Sentient Vision Systems announces first ViDAR VMS pod flight

    Australian search and surveillance specialist Sentient Vision Systems has announced the first flight of its ViDAR pod system, the VMS-5 (ViDAR Maritime Surveillance) Day/Night Optical Radar pod. The VMS-5 Day/Night pod is the first of a range of ViDAR surveillance pods configured for different missions and aircraft types. VMS pods will be available for customer […]

    The post Sentient Vision Systems announces first ViDAR VMS pod flight appeared first on Asian Military Review.

    This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.

  • Content Control

    Historically, the state and religion have been the institutions that control what people can and cannot say, punishing people for their thoughts, for their actions, and for their words. Silicon Valley companies have emerged as a third institution. They have put forth a new set of parameters. On their platforms, the people who make the decisions about our speech are not people that we elected, or that we trust for their faith, but people like Mark Zuckerberg. They surround themselves with “yes” people.

    In the early days when Facebook was taking up this role, the rooms where decisions were made about what could and couldn’t be said were more diverse than I thought they would be, at least in terms of gender. But there was a lot less diversity in other ways. Most policymakers come from middle-to-upper-class backgrounds and many are Ivy League graduates.

    The post Content Control appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Will Drones Really Protect Us?

    I’m seated in the police Zoom briefing with other council representatives for my small seaside town in England. Our Chief Inspector is telling us about the crisis we have with soaring heroin addiction in the town. The recent surge is contributing to a general increase in crime. The next section of the briefing is about the future use of police surveillance drones, and how they could become useful in combating crime.

    A few months ago, Nigel Farage, a far-right politician, arrived in my town to film himself on our tourist beaches; aiming to drum up hate and hostility toward migrants and refugees arriving in the UK on precarious inflatables, having just traversed the channel of water between England and France. Farage complains that the new arrivals are taking up hotel spaces, he triggers the public by saying it’s all coming out of the public purse, we can’t afford to look after our own citizens let alone refugees, and that these people will one day take their homes and jobs. The Home Office considers proposals to use water cannons on the migrant sea crossers, while Home Secretary, Priti Patel suggests the transportation of migrants and refugees to Ascension Island in the South Pacific, harking back to the 18th century, when Britain deported convicts to the penal colony of Australia.

    The British Army Watchkeeper drone has been commissioned to help with surveillance of people crossing the Channel. The Watchkeeper was initially developed when the British military requested £1 billion to develop a military drone. An Israeli arms company, Elbit Systems, was awarded the contract to design and develop the drone. When completed in 2014, it was transported to Afghanistan for ‘field testing’.

    Was a ‘field testing’ in Afghanistan part of the tragic mistake made when a U.S. weaponized drone killed my friend Raz Mohammed’s brother-in-law and five of his friends? The young men were enjoying an early evening gathering in their orchard in Wardak province Afghanistan. All the men were unarmed, none of them were involved with the Taliban. Their instant deaths were the result of a ‘signature strike’ – a targeted killing based on racial profiling, the men ‘fitted’ the demographic of the Taliban – they were wearing Pashtoon clothing, in a Pashtoon village, men of fighting age – that was enough to get them killed.

    Our local Chief Inspector finishes talking about police surveillance drones. At present, in my area of  Sussex, they are mainly using surveillance drones for traffic and ‘operations’, though elsewhere in the UK they have so far been used to survey a Black Lives Matter protest and another at an immigration centre.

    Knowing how I would come across to others in the Zoom room, I decided to take the risk of sounding like a ‘conspiracy loon’ and plunged in – I highlighted the military method of ‘racial profiling’ during surveillance and targeted assassinations, how the US police have started using drones armed with non-lethal weapons (tasers, pepper spray, rubber bullets) against their own civilians, often anti-war, environmental and anti-racist protestors. The chief inspector was a little taken aback but quickly started to respond that British police were not like the military or the US police, that drones are really useful for helping lost people on mountain tops, and that having a drone operator walking around town, while flying a surveillance drone, would be great for community engagement.

    I suddenly recollect a fight which broke out in our town centre and wonder how a drone would have helped. Some sort of argument had arisen amongst the ‘street community’, a mixture of people who gravitate on the street to drink, to buy or take heroin and crack, or wait for their methadone subscription from the local rehab centre based above an arcade of shops which shadows the street community and the raucous outbreak. Shoppers walked past, some looking at the commotion, others head down, not wanting to inadvertently get dragged into a drug fueled hullabaloo. A young woman, weathered skin, tattered clothing, decaying teeth, aged beyond her years screams obscenities at another member of the community. Her gaunt face reminded me of people I’ve seen in Kabul who have become addicted to heroin, the people who live under a bridge, huddled in small groups, heads under a scarf as they cook up opium on a spoon. Their eyes are distant – friends and family say they are gone.

    Heroin addiction in impoverished British towns has soared in the last 10 years. At the crime briefings I attend as a Councillor, no one ever talks about where this cheap high-quality opium has flooded in from, the root cause probably considered ‘too political’. But in reality, heroin supply to Britain has careened in the last decade, namely due to the ‘solar revolution’ in Afghanistan. This has enabled farmers to use electricity generated from solar panels to pump untapped water from 100 meters under the desert. Now, where there was once an arid dust belt, there are now fields of thriving poppy, punches of colour lighting up the desert, too much of a lucrative cash crop for Afghan farmers to pass up.

    Many of the newly blooming fields are in Helmand, the Afghan province where Britain was assigned to fight the Taliban. Britain was also delegated, at the 2001 International Bonn Conference on Afghanistan, the responsibility of counter narcotics in Afghanistan. Considering Afghanistan was the first country in the world where weaponized drones were used – the 2001 unsuccessful assassination of Osama Bin Laden – and thereafter used as a “playground for foreign nations to kill Afghans like a video game” — as one of my young Afghan friends once described to me; it’s highly unlikely British Intelligence Agencies were unaware of the newly blossoming industry, much of which is growing in Helmand, a ‘hotspot’ for drone strikes and aerial surveillance. Today Afghanistan produces 90% of the world’s heroin, 3% of the Afghan population are addicts, and production of the crop has more than doubled, from 3,700 tonnes in 2012, to 9,000 tonnes in 2017.

    And so, in my home town, deprivation, crime, conflict and all the ills associated deepen. Drones are sent in to ‘solve’ the problem. To date, at least 40 UK police forces  have either purchased a drone or have access to using one. In the area of Sussex and Surrey, there are 23 drones and, according to a recent Freedom of Information, they were used 108 times between January- June 2020.

    Afghans are amongst the refugees washed up upon our beaches in flimsy dinghies, their channel crossing overseen by the very same Watchkeeper drone used to exacerbate war which drove them from their homeland. The most vulnerable in our society, from Britain to Afghanistan, are seized by the scourge of heroin and the conflagration of violence caused by war. The vaunted “eyes in the skies,” the surveillance drones, won’t help us understand these realities. The proliferation of weaponized drones will unleash more misery.

    Momentum for campaigns to ban land mines, cluster bombs and nuclear weapons began with grassroots efforts to tell the truth about militarism and war. I hope a surveillance drone will get the message painted on large banners we’ve held, standing along our seacoast, proclaiming a welcome for refugees and a longing for peace.

    The post Will Drones Really Protect Us? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Will Drones Really Protect Us?

    I’m seated in the police Zoom briefing with other council representatives for my small seaside town in England. Our Chief Inspector is telling us about the crisis we have with soaring heroin addiction in the town. The recent surge is contributing to a general increase in crime. The next section of the briefing is about the future use of police surveillance drones, and how they could become useful in combating crime.

    A few months ago, Nigel Farage, a far-right politician, arrived in my town to film himself on our tourist beaches; aiming to drum up hate and hostility toward migrants and refugees arriving in the UK on precarious inflatables, having just traversed the channel of water between England and France. Farage complains that the new arrivals are taking up hotel spaces, he triggers the public by saying it’s all coming out of the public purse, we can’t afford to look after our own citizens let alone refugees, and that these people will one day take their homes and jobs. The Home Office considers proposals to use water cannons on the migrant sea crossers, while Home Secretary, Priti Patel suggests the transportation of migrants and refugees to Ascension Island in the South Pacific, harking back to the 18th century, when Britain deported convicts to the penal colony of Australia.

    The British Army Watchkeeper drone has been commissioned to help with surveillance of people crossing the Channel. The Watchkeeper was initially developed when the British military requested £1 billion to develop a military drone. An Israeli arms company, Elbit Systems, was awarded the contract to design and develop the drone. When completed in 2014, it was transported to Afghanistan for ‘field testing’.

    Was a ‘field testing’ in Afghanistan part of the tragic mistake made when a U.S. weaponized drone killed my friend Raz Mohammed’s brother-in-law and five of his friends? The young men were enjoying an early evening gathering in their orchard in Wardak province Afghanistan. All the men were unarmed, none of them were involved with the Taliban. Their instant deaths were the result of a ‘signature strike’ – a targeted killing based on racial profiling, the men ‘fitted’ the demographic of the Taliban – they were wearing Pashtoon clothing, in a Pashtoon village, men of fighting age – that was enough to get them killed.

    Our local Chief Inspector finishes talking about police surveillance drones. At present, in my area of  Sussex, they are mainly using surveillance drones for traffic and ‘operations’, though elsewhere in the UK they have so far been used to survey a Black Lives Matter protest and another at an immigration centre.

    Knowing how I would come across to others in the Zoom room, I decided to take the risk of sounding like a ‘conspiracy loon’ and plunged in – I highlighted the military method of ‘racial profiling’ during surveillance and targeted assassinations, how the US police have started using drones armed with non-lethal weapons (tasers, pepper spray, rubber bullets) against their own civilians, often anti-war, environmental and anti-racist protestors. The chief inspector was a little taken aback but quickly started to respond that British police were not like the military or the US police, that drones are really useful for helping lost people on mountain tops, and that having a drone operator walking around town, while flying a surveillance drone, would be great for community engagement.

    I suddenly recollect a fight which broke out in our town centre and wonder how a drone would have helped. Some sort of argument had arisen amongst the ‘street community’, a mixture of people who gravitate on the street to drink, to buy or take heroin and crack, or wait for their methadone subscription from the local rehab centre based above an arcade of shops which shadows the street community and the raucous outbreak. Shoppers walked past, some looking at the commotion, others head down, not wanting to inadvertently get dragged into a drug fueled hullabaloo. A young woman, weathered skin, tattered clothing, decaying teeth, aged beyond her years screams obscenities at another member of the community. Her gaunt face reminded me of people I’ve seen in Kabul who have become addicted to heroin, the people who live under a bridge, huddled in small groups, heads under a scarf as they cook up opium on a spoon. Their eyes are distant – friends and family say they are gone.

    Heroin addiction in impoverished British towns has soared in the last 10 years. At the crime briefings I attend as a Councillor, no one ever talks about where this cheap high-quality opium has flooded in from, the root cause probably considered ‘too political’. But in reality, heroin supply to Britain has careened in the last decade, namely due to the ‘solar revolution’ in Afghanistan. This has enabled farmers to use electricity generated from solar panels to pump untapped water from 100 meters under the desert. Now, where there was once an arid dust belt, there are now fields of thriving poppy, punches of colour lighting up the desert, too much of a lucrative cash crop for Afghan farmers to pass up.

    Many of the newly blooming fields are in Helmand, the Afghan province where Britain was assigned to fight the Taliban. Britain was also delegated, at the 2001 International Bonn Conference on Afghanistan, the responsibility of counter narcotics in Afghanistan. Considering Afghanistan was the first country in the world where weaponized drones were used – the 2001 unsuccessful assassination of Osama Bin Laden – and thereafter used as a “playground for foreign nations to kill Afghans like a video game” — as one of my young Afghan friends once described to me; it’s highly unlikely British Intelligence Agencies were unaware of the newly blossoming industry, much of which is growing in Helmand, a ‘hotspot’ for drone strikes and aerial surveillance. Today Afghanistan produces 90% of the world’s heroin, 3% of the Afghan population are addicts, and production of the crop has more than doubled, from 3,700 tonnes in 2012, to 9,000 tonnes in 2017.

    And so, in my home town, deprivation, crime, conflict and all the ills associated deepen. Drones are sent in to ‘solve’ the problem. To date, at least 40 UK police forces  have either purchased a drone or have access to using one. In the area of Sussex and Surrey, there are 23 drones and, according to a recent Freedom of Information, they were used 108 times between January- June 2020.

    Afghans are amongst the refugees washed up upon our beaches in flimsy dinghies, their channel crossing overseen by the very same Watchkeeper drone used to exacerbate war which drove them from their homeland. The most vulnerable in our society, from Britain to Afghanistan, are seized by the scourge of heroin and the conflagration of violence caused by war. The vaunted “eyes in the skies,” the surveillance drones, won’t help us understand these realities. The proliferation of weaponized drones will unleash more misery.

    Momentum for campaigns to ban land mines, cluster bombs and nuclear weapons began with grassroots efforts to tell the truth about militarism and war. I hope a surveillance drone will get the message painted on large banners we’ve held, standing along our seacoast, proclaiming a welcome for refugees and a longing for peace.

    The post Will Drones Really Protect Us? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Will Drones Really Protect Us?

    I’m seated in the police Zoom briefing with other council representatives for my small seaside town in England. Our Chief Inspector is telling us about the crisis we have with soaring heroin addiction in the town. The recent surge is contributing to a general increase in crime. The next section of the briefing is about the future use of police surveillance drones, and how they could become useful in combating crime.

    A few months ago, Nigel Farage, a far-right politician, arrived in my town to film himself on our tourist beaches; aiming to drum up hate and hostility toward migrants and refugees arriving in the UK on precarious inflatables, having just traversed the channel of water between England and France. Farage complains that the new arrivals are taking up hotel spaces, he triggers the public by saying it’s all coming out of the public purse, we can’t afford to look after our own citizens let alone refugees, and that these people will one day take their homes and jobs. The Home Office considers proposals to use water cannons on the migrant sea crossers, while Home Secretary, Priti Patel suggests the transportation of migrants and refugees to Ascension Island in the South Pacific, harking back to the 18th century, when Britain deported convicts to the penal colony of Australia.

    The British Army Watchkeeper drone has been commissioned to help with surveillance of people crossing the Channel. The Watchkeeper was initially developed when the British military requested £1 billion to develop a military drone. An Israeli arms company, Elbit Systems, was awarded the contract to design and develop the drone. When completed in 2014, it was transported to Afghanistan for ‘field testing’.

    Was a ‘field testing’ in Afghanistan part of the tragic mistake made when a U.S. weaponized drone killed my friend Raz Mohammed’s brother-in-law and five of his friends? The young men were enjoying an early evening gathering in their orchard in Wardak province Afghanistan. All the men were unarmed, none of them were involved with the Taliban. Their instant deaths were the result of a ‘signature strike’ – a targeted killing based on racial profiling, the men ‘fitted’ the demographic of the Taliban – they were wearing Pashtoon clothing, in a Pashtoon village, men of fighting age – that was enough to get them killed.

    Our local Chief Inspector finishes talking about police surveillance drones. At present, in my area of  Sussex, they are mainly using surveillance drones for traffic and ‘operations’, though elsewhere in the UK they have so far been used to survey a Black Lives Matter protest and another at an immigration centre.

    Knowing how I would come across to others in the Zoom room, I decided to take the risk of sounding like a ‘conspiracy loon’ and plunged in – I highlighted the military method of ‘racial profiling’ during surveillance and targeted assassinations, how the US police have started using drones armed with non-lethal weapons (tasers, pepper spray, rubber bullets) against their own civilians, often anti-war, environmental and anti-racist protestors. The chief inspector was a little taken aback but quickly started to respond that British police were not like the military or the US police, that drones are really useful for helping lost people on mountain tops, and that having a drone operator walking around town, while flying a surveillance drone, would be great for community engagement.

    I suddenly recollect a fight which broke out in our town centre and wonder how a drone would have helped. Some sort of argument had arisen amongst the ‘street community’, a mixture of people who gravitate on the street to drink, to buy or take heroin and crack, or wait for their methadone subscription from the local rehab centre based above an arcade of shops which shadows the street community and the raucous outbreak. Shoppers walked past, some looking at the commotion, others head down, not wanting to inadvertently get dragged into a drug fueled hullabaloo. A young woman, weathered skin, tattered clothing, decaying teeth, aged beyond her years screams obscenities at another member of the community. Her gaunt face reminded me of people I’ve seen in Kabul who have become addicted to heroin, the people who live under a bridge, huddled in small groups, heads under a scarf as they cook up opium on a spoon. Their eyes are distant – friends and family say they are gone.

    Heroin addiction in impoverished British towns has soared in the last 10 years. At the crime briefings I attend as a Councillor, no one ever talks about where this cheap high-quality opium has flooded in from, the root cause probably considered ‘too political’. But in reality, heroin supply to Britain has careened in the last decade, namely due to the ‘solar revolution’ in Afghanistan. This has enabled farmers to use electricity generated from solar panels to pump untapped water from 100 meters under the desert. Now, where there was once an arid dust belt, there are now fields of thriving poppy, punches of colour lighting up the desert, too much of a lucrative cash crop for Afghan farmers to pass up.

    Many of the newly blooming fields are in Helmand, the Afghan province where Britain was assigned to fight the Taliban. Britain was also delegated, at the 2001 International Bonn Conference on Afghanistan, the responsibility of counter narcotics in Afghanistan. Considering Afghanistan was the first country in the world where weaponized drones were used – the 2001 unsuccessful assassination of Osama Bin Laden – and thereafter used as a “playground for foreign nations to kill Afghans like a video game” — as one of my young Afghan friends once described to me; it’s highly unlikely British Intelligence Agencies were unaware of the newly blossoming industry, much of which is growing in Helmand, a ‘hotspot’ for drone strikes and aerial surveillance. Today Afghanistan produces 90% of the world’s heroin, 3% of the Afghan population are addicts, and production of the crop has more than doubled, from 3,700 tonnes in 2012, to 9,000 tonnes in 2017.

    And so, in my home town, deprivation, crime, conflict and all the ills associated deepen. Drones are sent in to ‘solve’ the problem. To date, at least 40 UK police forces  have either purchased a drone or have access to using one. In the area of Sussex and Surrey, there are 23 drones and, according to a recent Freedom of Information, they were used 108 times between January- June 2020.

    Afghans are amongst the refugees washed up upon our beaches in flimsy dinghies, their channel crossing overseen by the very same Watchkeeper drone used to exacerbate war which drove them from their homeland. The most vulnerable in our society, from Britain to Afghanistan, are seized by the scourge of heroin and the conflagration of violence caused by war. The vaunted “eyes in the skies,” the surveillance drones, won’t help us understand these realities. The proliferation of weaponized drones will unleash more misery.

    Momentum for campaigns to ban land mines, cluster bombs and nuclear weapons began with grassroots efforts to tell the truth about militarism and war. I hope a surveillance drone will get the message painted on large banners we’ve held, standing along our seacoast, proclaiming a welcome for refugees and a longing for peace.

    This article was posted on Monday, March 29th, 2021 at 5:44pm and is filed under Afghanistan, Drones, Exploitation, Heroin Addiction, Surveillance, United Kingdom, War on Terror.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • More Surveillance Won’t Stop White Supremacy. It Will Target Activists of Color.

    A man is arrested by way more police than necessary for an arrest

    For mainstream lawmakers, the January 6 attack was a wake-up call to a simmering threat. No longer able to pretend white nationalist violence is a fringe remnant of a bygone era, some elected officials have drawn attention to law enforcement’s negligence to prevent the violence at the capitol and are calling for new approaches.

    However, some of their calls to action point toward old approaches that have only entrenched the forces of white supremacy: domestic terrorism laws. In the immediate aftermath of the January 6 attack, President Joe Biden expressed support for a domestic terrorism law. Brian O’Hare, the president of the FBI Agents Association, called on Congress to make domestic terrorism a federal crime. In a February USA Today op-ed, O’Hare said such a new law would criminalize acts of political violence that run counter to the constitution. But opponents of creating new laws point to existing criminal statutes often overlooked by law enforcement.

    Calls for new domestic terrorism laws raise numerous concerns for Black communities and other communities of color. While treated as a distant dark history, the surveillance and scrutiny of our communities leads to more than a healthy skepticism of local and federal law enforcement.

    “White nationalist violence has been at the root of this country since its inception,” Maha Hilal, co-director of the Justice for Muslims Collective, told Truthout. The collective organizes to dismantle institutionalized Islamophobia and the long-term impacts of the war on terror.

    “It is abhorrent that after all this time the only intervention that the government has been willing to consider — domestic terrorism charges — is one that will end up hurting Black and Brown communities,” Hilal continued. “This fact demonstrates a lack of willingness on the part of the government to actually confront white nationalist violence on its own and stands in stark contrast to how violence from marginalized groups is dealt with immediately and with the harshest of consequences.”

    While reports have shown the rising threat of white nationalist violence for years, the focus of law enforcement’s attention to popular movements has often centered on Black activists and other activists of color.

    During a press conference held by MediaJustice and partner organizations, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) said the priority should not be on expanding national security powers at the expense of human and civil rights, as this step would undermine an already fragile democracy.

    “The intelligence failure that allowed the capitol siege to occur was not the result of insufficient national security or surveillance powers,” said Tlaib. “If our government and the previous administration had focused more on the threat of white nationalist terrorism, and less on harassing Black Lives Matter, civil rights and left-wing protesters, they would have seen this coming a mile away and taken action to prevent it.”

    During a panel discussion, Adjoa Aiyetoro of the Black and Brown Activism Defense Collective said that any useful response to the January 6 attack will require a historical grounding. Aiyetoro said the attack was devastating, but people needed to stop treating it as a special incident.

    “The difference in treatment of white nationalists and Black and Brown people is historic,” said Aiyetoro. “Black and Brown people have always been the targets. They were the others. And we continue to be other[ed] even though we’ve had civil rights laws and [other laws passed].”

    The impacts of surveillance on targeted communities are often lost in mainstream debates on the issue. Although current and former FBI officials and legal experts recount the FBI’s history of COINTELPRO under J. Edgar Hoover as an example of how surveillance can go “wrong,” they often gloss over the continuation of various forms of domestic surveillance.

    A few years ago, leaked documents showed the FBI engaging in a familiar pattern of targeting Black activism as “extremism,” justifying surveillance and investigation into Black organizing around police killings. In 2017, an FBI intelligence assessment claimed that “Black Identity Extremists” were a growing threat and motivated to kill law enforcement. Various civil rights organizations, including Media Justice and the ACLU, demanded the FBI explain not only the use of the term but reveal which individuals and groups were being targeted. The groups sued in 2019 to compel compliance with previously submitted freedom of information act (FOIA) requests. After national backlash, the FBI claimed to stop using the term in mid-2019. Instead, the agency began using the umbrella term “racially motivated violent extremist,” lumping in Black and other organizers of color with white nationalists.

    In June 2020, in the middle of racial justice uprisings across the country, Media Justice and partner organizations discovered that the FBI continued using the “Black Identity Extremist” label internally. Black self-determination has been treated as a national security threat since the country’s inception. Similar concerns have been raised by Muslim communities, particularly after 9/11. Indigenous advocates and communities have also challenged targeted surveillance and other tactics such as efforts during the Standing Rock protests.

    No one should be shocked at the presence of white supremacists within law enforcement and the military, activists say. They are not lone-wolf “terrorists;” rather, white supremacy is part of the institutions of policing and the military themselves.

    Meanwhile, the language of terrorism has become a rhetorical device that justifies brutal acts — from using facial recognition software to drone strikes on civilians — under the guise of “protecting America.”

    “There’s a real fear in the word ‘terrorism’ as instrumentalized by our political leaders,” shared Sijal Nasralla of MPower Change during the panel. “It’s a term that has been used to harm us. And then I think that it has been used to profile, to harm us, [and] to wage wars on majority Muslim countries … to vindicate that kind of violence.”

    The uprisings that took place across the country after the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor added a new layer of concern about local and federal law enforcement surveillance and targeting of Black activists and others committed to racial justice.

    The Trump administration labeled racial justice and opposition to white supremacy as threats. As white supremacists are classified as “racially motivated violent extremists,” activists question whether the same classification will be used to target those working for racial justice. The terms may have changed but concerns continue as to how Black and other communities of color are being characterized, tracked and targeted in pursuit of so-called safety and security.

    Dissent by people of color is often labeled anti-American and prioritized for targeting by police and carceral systems while white nationalism is often ignored (or even endorsed) by the authorities even when it is publicly recognized as a threat. Having a system built on white supremacy allows for government agencies to conflate the righteous rage of oppressed people with white entitlement and anger.

    This is also seen in the renewed focus on anti-protest bills in multiple state houses across the country. “There have been over 50 anti-protest bills introduced since the insurrection in what seems to be an effort by legislators to capitalize on the chaos and advance proposals that increase penalties and create new criminal sanctions for protesters,” Nora Benavidez told Truthout. As the director of U.S. Free Expression Programs for Pen America, Benavidez has studied the increasing criminalization of dissent studying response to racial justice over the past several years.

    Benavidez says state legislatures fail to address the growing threat of white supremacy and white nationalist violence, instead opting for false equivalencies between the Capitol attack and racial justice protests. The same misleading narrative is seen in the continued use of racially motivated extremism as a single category to regulate without any discernment in the difference between groups. “This narrative is misleading,” continued Benavidez, saying it “conflates an extremist power grab with a BIPOC-led protest movement for social change.

    Some say sunlight is the best disinfectant, yet when government abuses carried out under the guise of surveillance and security are exposed, they’re often characterized as isolated occurrences. However, across jurisdictions, mass surveillance continues to disproportionately impact marginalized communities and those advancing justice and equity.

    Efforts to address safety and security must address white supremacy and systemic racism ingrained in law enforcement institutions at all levels of government. The problem of combatting white supremacist violence cannot be solved through the existing law enforcement apparatus, and require exploring partnerships with grassroots movement-based organizations like the BREATHE Act. Simply acting to implement “anti-terrorism” laws without considering the prevalence of harm caused to Black and other people of color by surveillance programs will only continue to exacerbate the problem.

    “If the government is truly interested in addressing white nationalist violence, then they must develop measures of accountability that don’t result in the targeting and scapegoating of BIPOC communities,” said Hilal.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • NGOs, MPs warn ‘draconian’ draft bill will turn Fiji into police state

    By Christine Rovoi, RNZ Pacific journalist

    A proposed draft Police Bill in Fiji has come under intense scrutiny from civil society groups and opposition parties.

    The draft legislation will give police greater surveillance powers if passed in Parliament.

    The proposal is now open to public submissions and the government says it will replace the Police Act 1965.

    The draft Bill gives police the powers to secretly or forcefully enter any premises to place tracking devices.

    Police can secretly monitor and record communications of people they suspect are about to commit a crime or have committed one, the Bill states.

    The draft law also allows police to recruit an informer or anyone else who can provide information in relation to a police matter.

    The government has not stated why it is necessary for police to search a crime scene and seize potential evidence without a warrant as stated in the Bill.

    Police powers need ‘updating’
    But the Minister for Police, Inia Seruiratu, said the Police Act 1965 needed to be updated because officers were now tasked with enforcing laws aligned to new and emerging challenges such as the global govid-19 pandemic, terrorism, transnational organised crime and other crimes evident around the globe.

    Seruiratu said the Bill was a preliminary draft of submissions received by police during three days of consultations with the force’s key stakeholders in May 2019.

    “Policing has developed beyond the traditional roles it is known for and the Fiji Police Force needs an enabling foundation that not only assists them in the work they are constitutionally mandated to do but will greatly enhance our national efforts to effectively respond to the rapidly evolving criminal landscape.”

    However, the opposition parties have condemned the draft legislation and warned it encroaches on the civil liberties, democratic values and fundamental rights of Fijians.

    The leader of the Social Democratic Liberal Party, Viliame Gavoka, said they would do everything in their power to ensure the draft legislation did not reach the floor of Parliament.

    Gavoka said the “draconian” draft Bill would turn Fiji into a “police state”.

    “There’s lots of uproar in the community about police brutality as it has been ongoing for some time,” he said.

    “And then to introduce a Bill like this is truly frightening.

    People ‘fearful of the police’
    “The mentality of the country right now is fearful of the police. And here we have a Bill that gives them more powers to virtually do whatever they want to do with you.”

    The president of the National Federation Party, Pio Tikoduadua, said the government’s plan to introduce a law that could allow authorities to enter and search anyone’s property through force at any time was “frightening”.

    Tikoduadua said it was “inconceivable, ridiculous and insane”, adding a provision in the proposed Bill would make police force subject to military law in emergencies.

    “So, when police are subjected to military law, does it make them soldiers? This is unthinkable in a democracy. It is martial law and can be invoked at any time.”

    Former opposition leader Mick Beddoes said the proposed legislation would empower the police to suppress instead of protecting the people who had paid $US1.8 billion in wages to the security forces since 2017.

    Beddoes said the Bill would dilute people’s constitutional rights and impose on them some of the harshest penalties and fines.

    He said the proposed new law was ‘unwarranted and unjustified’.

    NGOs claim draft Bill violates rights
    The draft bill also forbade officers from joining a union and it would be unlawful for them to go on strike or to take any other type of industrial action.

    Human rights activist Shamima Ali said this violated the fundamental rights of police officers who risked their lives on the front-line to ensure Fijians were safe.

    Speaking at the International Women’s Day in Suva this week, Ali said i was time to push the barriers.

    “The Police Bill has the potential to further shrink us,” she said. “We might think, ‘oh it doesn’t concern us. We’re only concerned with bread and butter’. This concerns everyone.

    “We already have high rates of police brutality, pending cases and other criminal allegations. There are some hardworking, honest officers in the force but there are also the bad cops.”

    The Coalition on Human Rights said this was not the time to be giving police more powers when Fiji was facing a pandemic of police brutality cases where individuals had lost their lives at the hands of police.

    Its director, Nalini Singh, said this was unacceptable and a disgraceful reflection on the force which should be the bastion of lawfulness in this country.

    Raised human rights concerns
    “As the Coalition on Human Rights, we have repeatedly raised our concerns about the excessive force used by the Police during arrests on individuals, and the lack of transparency and urgency from the Police in investigation processes.

    “And yet our call for urgent action have been left unanswered. This proposed Police Bill 2020 is a sad reflection of Fiji’s priorities in its commitments towards upholding and respecting human rights of Fijians.

    According to data from the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, between May 2015 and April 2020, 400 police officers were charged with serious violent-related offences.

    The ODPP data showed the offences included 16 charges of rape, two charges of murder and nine charges of manslaughter.

    The largest women’s group in Fiji, Soqosoqo Vakamarama iTaukei, said police officers had the right to be part of a union.

    The group’s spokesperson, Adi Finau Tabakaucoro, said the Bill was supposed to help facilitate the work of the force.

    Meanwhile, the Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination Commission said it would, in its substantive submission, call for alignment of the Bill with the state’s human rights obligation under the domestic procedures and international conventions and treaties that Fiji had ratified.

    Submission after tabling
    Commissioner Ashwin Raj said his office would make its submission when the Bill was tabled in Parliament.

    Raj said any commentary on the draft bill, before it was tabled in Parliament, was “premature”.

    Meanwhile, police and the roads authority received an application for a protest permit march next week against the draft bill.

    Lautoka-based businessman Ben Padarath also lodged applications with the Suva City Council.

    The move has been supported by Opposition Whip Lynda Tabuya who said she would gather signatures for a petition to be presented to Parliament when it sits next month.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • NGOs, MPs warn ‘draconian’ draft bill will turn Fiji into police state

    By Christine Rovoi, RNZ Pacific journalist

    A proposed draft Police Bill in Fiji has come under intense scrutiny from civil society groups and opposition parties.

    The draft legislation will give police greater surveillance powers if passed in Parliament.

    The proposal is now open to public submissions and the government says it will replace the Police Act 1965.

    The draft Bill gives police the powers to secretly or forcefully enter any premises to place tracking devices.

    Police can secretly monitor and record communications of people they suspect are about to commit a crime or have committed one, the Bill states.

    The draft law also allows police to recruit an informer or anyone else who can provide information in relation to a police matter.

    The government has not stated why it is necessary for police to search a crime scene and seize potential evidence without a warrant as stated in the Bill.

    Police powers need ‘updating’
    But the Minister for Police, Inia Seruiratu, said the Police Act 1965 needed to be updated because officers were now tasked with enforcing laws aligned to new and emerging challenges such as the global govid-19 pandemic, terrorism, transnational organised crime and other crimes evident around the globe.

    Seruiratu said the Bill was a preliminary draft of submissions received by police during three days of consultations with the force’s key stakeholders in May 2019.

    “Policing has developed beyond the traditional roles it is known for and the Fiji Police Force needs an enabling foundation that not only assists them in the work they are constitutionally mandated to do but will greatly enhance our national efforts to effectively respond to the rapidly evolving criminal landscape.”

    However, the opposition parties have condemned the draft legislation and warned it encroaches on the civil liberties, democratic values and fundamental rights of Fijians.

    The leader of the Social Democratic Liberal Party, Viliame Gavoka, said they would do everything in their power to ensure the draft legislation did not reach the floor of Parliament.

    Gavoka said the “draconian” draft Bill would turn Fiji into a “police state”.

    “There’s lots of uproar in the community about police brutality as it has been ongoing for some time,” he said.

    “And then to introduce a Bill like this is truly frightening.

    People ‘fearful of the police’
    “The mentality of the country right now is fearful of the police. And here we have a Bill that gives them more powers to virtually do whatever they want to do with you.”

    The president of the National Federation Party, Pio Tikoduadua, said the government’s plan to introduce a law that could allow authorities to enter and search anyone’s property through force at any time was “frightening”.

    Tikoduadua said it was “inconceivable, ridiculous and insane”, adding a provision in the proposed Bill would make police force subject to military law in emergencies.

    “So, when police are subjected to military law, does it make them soldiers? This is unthinkable in a democracy. It is martial law and can be invoked at any time.”

    Former opposition leader Mick Beddoes said the proposed legislation would empower the police to suppress instead of protecting the people who had paid $US1.8 billion in wages to the security forces since 2017.

    Beddoes said the Bill would dilute people’s constitutional rights and impose on them some of the harshest penalties and fines.

    He said the proposed new law was ‘unwarranted and unjustified’.

    NGOs claim draft Bill violates rights
    The draft bill also forbade officers from joining a union and it would be unlawful for them to go on strike or to take any other type of industrial action.

    Human rights activist Shamima Ali said this violated the fundamental rights of police officers who risked their lives on the front-line to ensure Fijians were safe.

    Speaking at the International Women’s Day in Suva this week, Ali said i was time to push the barriers.

    “The Police Bill has the potential to further shrink us,” she said. “We might think, ‘oh it doesn’t concern us. We’re only concerned with bread and butter’. This concerns everyone.

    “We already have high rates of police brutality, pending cases and other criminal allegations. There are some hardworking, honest officers in the force but there are also the bad cops.”

    The Coalition on Human Rights said this was not the time to be giving police more powers when Fiji was facing a pandemic of police brutality cases where individuals had lost their lives at the hands of police.

    Its director, Nalini Singh, said this was unacceptable and a disgraceful reflection on the force which should be the bastion of lawfulness in this country.

    Raised human rights concerns
    “As the Coalition on Human Rights, we have repeatedly raised our concerns about the excessive force used by the Police during arrests on individuals, and the lack of transparency and urgency from the Police in investigation processes.

    “And yet our call for urgent action have been left unanswered. This proposed Police Bill 2020 is a sad reflection of Fiji’s priorities in its commitments towards upholding and respecting human rights of Fijians.

    According to data from the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, between May 2015 and April 2020, 400 police officers were charged with serious violent-related offences.

    The ODPP data showed the offences included 16 charges of rape, two charges of murder and nine charges of manslaughter.

    The largest women’s group in Fiji, Soqosoqo Vakamarama iTaukei, said police officers had the right to be part of a union.

    The group’s spokesperson, Adi Finau Tabakaucoro, said the Bill was supposed to help facilitate the work of the force.

    Meanwhile, the Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination Commission said it would, in its substantive submission, call for alignment of the Bill with the state’s human rights obligation under the domestic procedures and international conventions and treaties that Fiji had ratified.

    Submission after tabling
    Commissioner Ashwin Raj said his office would make its submission when the Bill was tabled in Parliament.

    Raj said any commentary on the draft bill, before it was tabled in Parliament, was “premature”.

    Meanwhile, police and the roads authority received an application for a protest permit march next week against the draft bill.

    Lautoka-based businessman Ben Padarath also lodged applications with the Suva City Council.

    The move has been supported by Opposition Whip Lynda Tabuya who said she would gather signatures for a petition to be presented to Parliament when it sits next month.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

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    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The New Normal (Phase 2)

    So, we’re almost a year into the “New Normal” (a/k/a “pathologized totalitarianism”) and things are still looking … well, pretty totalitarian.

    Most of Western Europe is still in “lockdown,” or “under curfew,” or in some other state of “health emergency.” Police are fining and arresting people for “being outdoors without a valid reason.” Protest is still banned. Dissent is still censored. The official propaganda is relentless. Governments are ruling by edict, subjecting people to an ever-changing series of increasingly absurd restrictions of the most fundamental aspects of everyday life.

    And now, the campaign to “vaccinate” the entirety of humanity against a virus that causes mild to moderate flu-like symptoms or, more commonly, no symptoms at all, in over 95% of those infected, and that over 99% of the infected survive (and that has no real effect on age-adjusted death rates, and the mortality profile of which is more or less identical to the normal mortality profile) is being waged with literally religious fervor.

    “Vaccine passports” (which are definitely creepy, but which bear no resemblance to Aryan Ancestry Certificates, or any other fascistic apartheid-type documents, so don’t even think about making such a comparison!) are in the pipeline in a number of countries. They have already been rolled out in Israel.

    In other words, as predicted by us “conspiracy theorists,” the “temporary emergency public health measures” implemented by GloboCap in March of 2020 are still very much in effect, and then some. That said, as you have probably noticed, the tenor of things is shifting a bit, which is unsurprising, as GloboCap is now making the transition from Phase 1 to Phase 2 of the “New Normal” roll-out.

    Phase 1 was pretty much classic “shock and awe.” An “apocalyptic virus” was “discovered.” A global “state of emergency” was declared. Constitutional rights were cancelled. Soldiers, police, surveillance cameras, military drones, and robot dogs were deployed to implement the worldwide police state. The masses were bombarded with official propaganda, photos of people dropping dead in the street, unconscious patients dying in agony, bodies being stuffed into makeshift morgue trucks, hospital ships, ICU horror stories, projections of hundreds of millions of deaths, terror-inducing Orwellian slogans, sentimental “war effort” billboards, and so on. The full force of the most formidable Goebbelsian propaganda machine in history was unleashed on the public all at once. (See, e.g., CNN, NPR, CNBC, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Forbes, and other “authoritative” sources like the IMF and the World Bank Group, the WEF, UN, WHO, CDC.)

    But the “shock and awe” phase can’t go on forever, nor is it ever intended to. Its purpose is (a) to terrorize the targeted masses into a state of submission, (b) to irreversibly destabilize their society, so that it can be radically “restructured,” and (c) to convincingly demonstrate an overwhelming superiority of force, so that resistance is rendered inconceivable. This shock and awe (or “rapid dominance”) tactic has been deployed by empires, and aspiring empires, throughout the course of military history. It has just been deployed by GloboCap against … well, against the entire world. And now, that phase is coming to an end.

    The shape of Phase 2 is not entirely clear yet, but one can make a few logical assumptions. Typically, this is the phase in which the conquering force (in this case, GloboCap) restores “normality” (i.e., a “new normality”) to the society it has just destabilized and terrorized. It installs a new occupation-friendly government, restarts the economy, and otherwise begins the gradual transition from martial law to something resembling “normal” everyday life. It hands out candy bars to kids, financial aid to businesses, power to generals and police, and “freedom” to the shell-shocked public.

    This appears to be where we are at the moment. As you’ve probably noticed, the corporate media, government leaders, and medical experts have been making noise about “the end of the pandemic,” or at least “the end of the emergency phase” of it. Suddenly, “some level of Covid is tolerable,” “Zero Covid is unlikely,” et cetera. This is happening pretty much right on cue.

    Now that the vaccination push is underway, they are trying to temper the mass paranoia and hatred that they have fomented for over a year with some hope and a vision of a post-crisis future. Governments are carefully relaxing restrictions, making sure we understand that if we don’t obey orders, wear our masks, get our vaccinations, and so, they will crack down on us again without mercy. They want to ease us into the pathologized-totalitarian future gently, so that it feels like we are being liberated, returning to some semblance of normal life, albeit in a new, more terrifying, perpetually-virus-and-extremist-threatened world.

    For example, here in Germany, the government has decided to “return some freedom and trust to the people,” but they are prepared to lock us down “hard” again if they suspect we haven’t “used their trust wisely.” According to the 5-Step Plan, bookshops and florists can reopen this week with a one-person-per-ten-square-meter limit, up to ten people can play non-contact sports, and five people from no more than two households can meet up (and, thus, also play non-contact sports), unless the “incidence rate” of positive PCR tests rises above 100 per thousand, in which case, back to “hard lockdown” we go. Two weeks after that, on March 22, if the “positive-test rate” stays below 50, outdoor restaurant dining can resume, and theaters, cinemas, and opera houses can open. However, if the “positive-test rate” is more than 50 but less than 100, outdoor dining will only be permitted on a strictly pre-booking basis. (One assumes there will be roving goon squads examining restaurants’ booking records and ordering patrons to show their papers.) There are further Kafkaesque conditions in the plan, but I think you get the general idea.

    Meanwhile, in the USA, although DC remains under occupation, the Capitol surrounded by razor-wire fences to protect democracy from an imaginary enemy straight out of George Orwell’s 1984, Texas, Mississippi, and a few other states are joining Florida in open rebellion, and allowing people to go out to eat, get together with their families and friends, walk around in public without medical-looking masks, and otherwise go about living their lives in a totally non-anus-clenched-paranoid fashion.

    Notwithstanding the outrage of the Covidian Cultists, this development is not of great concern to GloboCap, as the coastal power centers are full-blown “New Normal,” and the liberals who predominantly occupy them have been transformed into paranoid, hysterical zealots who now dedicate a considerable amount of time to hunting down alleged “Covid deniers,” “anti-maskers,” “vaccine refusers,” “white-supremacist extremists,” “conspiracy theorists,” “libertarians,” dead “racist cartoonists,” and anyone else who won’t conform to their pathologized-totalitarian ideology, and obsessively trolling them on social media, or reporting their thoughtcrimes to the Reality Police.

    This transformation of the relatively affluent, predominantly liberal, middle/upper classes, and the millions futilely aspiring thereto, into mindlessly-order-following “Good Germans” (or, rather, mindlessly-order-following “New Normals”) has also occurred here in Western Europe, and elsewhere throughout the global capitalist empire, and was one of GloboCap’s main objectives throughout Phase 1 of the “New Normal” roll out. This transformation has been in progress for quite some time, less dramatically and without a virus. It will continue once this virus is gone.

    The “New Normal” isn’t just about a virus. The “New Normal” was never just about a virus. You don’t need a new “normal” because of a virus. You need a new “normal” when your current “normal” has outlived its usefulness to those in power, which, in our case, are the global capitalist ruling classes.

    I’ve been writing about this for … well, most of my life, and publishing these columns for the last five years, so I’m not going to summarize all that here, but, basically, we’re living through one of those historic transformations of the structure of political power that we usually don’t recognize until after it has occurred … not just a “changing of the guard,” a transformation of the nature of power, how it is exercised, the beliefs it is based on, and the “reality” conjured into being by those beliefs.

    This transformation began with the end of the Cold War, when global capitalism became the first globally-hegemonic ideological system in history. The roll-out of the “New Normal” is part of that transformation, not the whole of it, but an essential stage. We are transitioning from an ideological “reality” to a post-ideological, pathologized “reality” … a “reality” in which any and all deviation from official ideology (i.e., “normality”) is no longer a political challenge or threat, but an “illness” or “psychiatric disorder.”

    I’m going to be obnoxious and quote myself, so that I don’t have to try to explain this again. Here’s a passage from a recent column:

    A globally-hegemonic system (e.g., global capitalism) has no external enemies, as there is no territory ‘outside’ the system. Its only enemies are within the system, and thus, by definition, are insurgents, also known as ‘terrorists’ and ‘extremists.’ These terms are utterly meaningless, obviously. They are purely strategic, deployed against anyone who deviates from GloboCap’s official ideology … which, in case you were wondering, is called ‘normality’ (or, in our case, currently, ‘New Normality’) … [t]he new breed of ‘terrorists’ do not just hate us for our freedom … they hate us because they hate ‘reality.’ They are no longer our political or ideological opponents … they are suffering from a psychiatric disorder. They no longer need to be argued with or listened to … they need to be ‘treated,’ ‘reeducated,’ and ‘deprogrammed,’ until they accept ‘Reality.’

    As we shift from Phase 1 to Phase 2 of the “New Normal,” the pathologization of political dissent will continue, and intensify, both overtly and subtlely. GloboCap and the corporate media will continue to warn of imminent “attacks on democracy” by imaginary “domestic terrorists,” as well as the old “non-domestic terrorists.” They will also continue to warn of imminent threats posed by exotic viruses, and “variants” of exotic viruses, and permanent “conditions” caused by viruses, and other threats to our bodily fluids. Above all, they will continue to warn of the danger of ingesting “misinformation,” “conspiracy theories,” or any other type of unverified, unauthorized, un-fact-checked content. They will thoroughly diagnose the sources of such content, and exhaustively explain the pathological conditions these sources will clearly be suffering from. They will explore a variety of treatments and cures, and recommend prophylactic measures against potential exposure to these sources.

    These multiplicitous “threats to democracy” (i.e., “terrorists,” “viruses,” “misinformation,” “racism,” “sexism,” “homophobia,” “transphobia,” “electoral-system scepticism,” “white-supremacist pancake syrup,” “premeditated pronoun abuse,” “oppositional-defiant-infant masklessness,” “vaccine hesitancy,” “religion,” et cetera) will fuse into a single Goldstein-like enemy which “New Normal” children will be conditioned to reflexively hate and fear, and want to silence, and quarantine off from “normal” society, or “cure” of their “illness” with government-mandated, “safe and effective” pharmaceutical therapies.

    But whatever … I wouldn’t worry about that. I’m probably just getting all worked up over nothing. After all, as a lot of my ex-friends will tell you (through their multiple masks and prophylactic face shields), I’m just a paranoid “conspiracy theorist” spreading “unverified misinformation.”

    • Photos: (1) Abir Sultan/EPE/EFE; (2) Ahnenpaß CC BY-SA 3.0;

    The post The New Normal (Phase 2) first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Home Invasions: All the Ways the Government Can Lay Siege to Your Property

    “How ‘secure’ do our homes remain if police, armed with no warrant, can pound on doors at will and … foricibly enter?”

    — Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the lone dissenter in Kentucky v. King

    Americans are not safe in their homes.

    Not anymore, at least.

    This present menace comes from the government and its army of bureaucratized, corporatized, militarized mercenaries who are waging war on the last stronghold left to us as a free people: the sanctity of our homes.

    The weapons of this particular war on our personal security and our freedoms include an abundance of laws that criminalize almost everything we do, a government that views our private property as its own, militarized police who have been brainwashed into believing that they operate above the law, courts that insulate police from charges of wrongdoing, legislatures that legitimize the government’s usurpations of our rights, and a populace that is so ignorant of their rights and distracted by partisan politics as to be utterly incapable of standing up to the government’s overreaches, incursions and power grabs.

    This is how far the mighty have fallen.

    Government agents—with or without a warrant, with or without probable cause that criminal activity is afoot, and with or without the consent of the homeowner—are now justified in mounting home invasions in order to pursue traffic violators, seize lawfully-owned weapons, carry out knock-and-talk “chats” with homeowners in the dead of night, “prevent” individuals from harming themselves, provide emergency aid, intervene in the face of imminent danger, serve as community caretakers, chase down individuals suspected of committing misdemeanor crimes, and anything else they can get away with.

    This doesn’t even begin to touch on the many ways the government and its corporate partners-in-crime may be using surveillance technology—with or without the blessing of the courts—to invade one’s home: with wiretaps, thermal imaging, surveillance cameras, and other monitoring devices.

    However, while the courts and legislatures have yet to fully address the implications of such virtual intrusions on our Fourth Amendment, there is no mistaking the physical intrusions by police into the privacy of one’s home: the toehold entry, the battering ram, the SWAT raid, the knock-and-talk conversation, etc.

    Whether such intrusions, warranted or otherwise, are unconstitutional continues to be litigated, legislated and debated.

    The spirit of the Constitution, drafted by men who chafed against the heavy-handed tyranny of an imperial ruler, would suggest that one’s home is a fortress, safe from almost every kind of intrusion. Unfortunately, a collective assault by the government’s cabal of legislators, litigators, judges and militarized police has all but succeeded in reducing that fortress—and the Fourth Amendment alongside it—to a crumbling pile of rubble.

    Two cases before the U.S. Supreme Court this term, Caniglia v. Strom and Lange v. California, are particularly noteworthy.

    In Caniglia v. Strom, police want to be able to carry out warrantless home invasions in order to seize lawfully-owned guns under the pretext of their so-called “community caretaking” duties. Under the “community caretaking” exception to the Fourth Amendment, police can conduct warrantless searches of vehicles relating to accident investigations and provide aid to “citizens who are ill or in distress.”

    At a time when red flag gun laws are gaining traction as a legislative means by which to allow police to remove guns from people suspected of being threats, it wouldn’t take much to expand the Fourth Amendment’s “community caretaking” exception to allow police to enter a home without a warrant and seize lawfully-possessed firearms based on concerns that the guns might pose a danger.

    What we do not need is yet another pretext by which government officials can violate the Fourth Amendment at will under the pretext of public health and safety.

    In Lange v. California, police want to be able to enter homes without warrants as long as they can claim to be in pursuit of someone they suspect may have committed a crime. Yet as Justice Neil Gorsuch points out, in an age in which everything has been criminalized, that leaves the door wide open for police to enter one’s home in pursuit of any and all misdemeanor crimes.

    At issue in Lange is whether police can justify entering homes without a warrant under the “hot pursuit” exception to the Fourth Amendment.

    The case arose after a California cop followed a driver, Arthur Lange, who was honking his horn while listening to music. The officer followed Lange, supposedly to cite him for violating a local noise ordinance, but didn’t actually activate the police cruiser’s emergency lights until Lange had already arrived home and entered his garage. Sticking his foot under the garage door just as it was about to close, the cop confronted Lange, smelled alcohol on his breath, ordered him to take a sobriety test, and then charged him with a DUI and a noise infraction.

    Lange is just chock full of troubling indicators of a greater tyranny at work.

    Over-criminalization: That you can now get pulled over and cited for honking your horn while driving and listening to music illustrates just how uptight and over-regulated life in the American police state has become.

    Make-work policing: At a time when crime remains at an all-time low, it’s telling that a police officer has nothing better to do than follow a driver seemingly guilty of nothing more than enjoying loud music.

    Warrantless entry: That foot in the door is a tactic that, while technically illegal, is used frequently by police attempting to finagle their way into a home and sidestep the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement.

    The definition of reasonable: Although the Fourth Amendment prohibits warrantless and unreasonable searches and seizures of “persons, houses, papers, and effects,” where we run into real trouble is when the government starts dancing around what constitutes a “reasonable” search. Of course, that all depends on who gets to decide what is reasonable. There’s even a balancing test that weighs the intrusion on a person’s right to privacy against the government’s interests, which include public safety.

    Too often, the scales weigh in the government’s favor.

    End runs around the law: The courts, seemingly more concerned with marching in lockstep with the police state than upholding the rights of the people, have provided police with a long list of exceptions that have gutted the Fourth Amendment’s once-robust privacy protections.

    Exceptions to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement allow the police to carry out warrantless searches: if someone agrees to the search; in order to ferret out weapons or evidence during the course of an arrest; if police think someone is acting suspiciously and may be armed; during a brief investigatory stop; if a cop sees something connected to a crime in plain view; if police are in hot pursuit of a suspect who flees into a building; if they believe a vehicle has contraband; in an emergency where there may not be time to procure a warrant; and at national borders and in airports.

    In other words, almost anything goes when it comes to all the ways in which the government can now invade your home and lay siege to your property.

    Thus we tumble down that slippery slope which might have started out with a genuine concern for public safety and the well-being of the citizenry only to end up as a self-serving expansion of the government’s powers that makes a mockery of the Fourth Amendment while utterly disregarding the rights of “we the people.”

    Frankly, it’s a wonder we have any property interests, let alone property rights, left to protect.

    Think about it.

    That house you live in, the car you drive, the small (or not so small) acreage of land that has been passed down through your family or that you scrimped and saved to acquire, whatever money you manage to keep in your bank account after the government and its cronies have taken their first and second and third cut…none of it is safe from the government’s greedy grasp.

    At no point do you ever have any real ownership in anything other than the clothes on your back.

    Everything else can be seized by the government under one pretext or another (civil asset forfeiture, unpaid taxes, eminent domain, public interest, etc.).

    The American Dream has been reduced to a lease arrangement in which we are granted the privilege of endlessly paying out the nose for assets that are only ours so long as it suits the government’s purposes.

    And when it doesn’t suit the government’s purposes? Watch out.

    This is not a government that respects the rights of its citizenry or the law. Rather, this is a government that sells its citizens to the highest bidder and speaks to them in a language of force.

    Under such a fascist regime, the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which declares that no person shall “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation,” has become yet another broken shield, incapable of rendering any protection against corporate greed while allowing the government to justify all manner of “takings” in the name of the public good.

    What we are grappling with is a government that has forfeited its purpose for existing.

    Philosophers dating back to John Locke have long asserted that the true purpose of government is to protect our rights, not just our collective rights as a people, but our individual rights, specifically our rights to life, liberty and property. As James Madison concluded in the Federalist Papers, “Government is instituted no less for the protection of the property than of the persons of individuals.”

    What we have been saddled with is a government that has not only lost sight of its primary reason for being—to protect the people’s rights—but has also re-written the script and cast itself as an imperial overlord with all of the neo-feudal authority such a position entails.

    Let me put it another way.

    If the government can tell you what you can and cannot do within the privacy of your home, whether it relates to what you eat, what you smoke or whom you love, you no longer have any rights whatsoever within your home.

    If government officials can fine and arrest you for growing vegetables in your front yard, gathering with friends to worship in your living room, installing solar panels on your roof, and raising chickens in your backyard, you’re no longer the owner of your property.

    If school officials can punish your children for what they do or say while at home or in your care, your children are not your own—they are the property of the state.

    If government agents can invade your home, break down your doors, kill your dog, damage your furnishings and terrorize your family, your property is no longer private and secure—it belongs to the government.

    If police can forcefully draw your blood, strip search you, probe you intimately, or force you to submit to vaccinations or lose your so-called “privileges” to move about and interact freely with your fellow citizens, your body is no longer your own—it is the government’s to do with as it deems best.

    Likewise, if the government can lockdown whole communities and by extension the nation, quarantine whole segments of the population, outlaw religious gatherings and assemblies of more than a few people, shut down entire industries and manipulate the economy, muzzle dissidents, and “stop and seize any plane, train or automobile to stymie the spread of contagious disease,” then you no longer have a property interest as master of your own life, either.

    This is what a world without the Fourth Amendment looks like, where the lines between private and public property have been so blurred that private property is reduced to little more than something the government can use to control, manipulate and harass you to suit its own purposes, and you the homeowner and citizen have been reduced to little more than a tenant or serf in bondage to an inflexible landlord.

    If we continue down this road, the analogy shifts from property owners to prisoners in a government-run prison with local and federal police acting as prison guards. In such an environment, you have no rights.

    So what can we do, short of scrapping this whole experiment in self-government and starting over?

    At a minimum, we need to rebuild the foundations of our freedoms.

    What this will mean is adopting an apolitical, nonpartisan, zero tolerance attitude towards the government when it oversteps its bounds and infringes on our rights.

    We need courts that prioritize the rights of the citizenry over the government’s insatiable hunger for power at all costs.

    We need people in the government—representatives, bureaucrats, etc.—who honor the public service oath to uphold and defend the Constitution.

    Most of all, we need to reclaim control over our runaway government and restore our freedoms.

    After all, we are the government. As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, “we the people” are supposed to be the ones calling the shots. As John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the United States, rightly observed: “No power on earth has a right to take our property from us without our consent.”

    The post Home Invasions: All the Ways the Government Can Lay Siege to Your Property first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • More power for Fiji’s police force – draft bill enables eavesdropping

    By Anish Chand in Suva

    Fiji police will have sweeping powers to monitor communications and forcefully enter premises to place tracking devices under the proposed Police Bill 2020.

    The draft legislation is now open for public submissions and will replace the Police Act 1965 once passed by Parliament.

    Police will have the powers to secretly or forcefully enter any premises to place tracking devices, states the draft law.

    They will need to obtain a warrant from a High Court judge and “specify the vehicle, craft, or conveyance of any kind or goods that may be tracked, specify the premises, vehicle, craft, or conveyance of any kind that may be entered pursuant to the warrant”, states the draft law.

    Police can also secretly monitor and record “communications” of persons about to commit a crime or have committed a crime if the draft law is passed in its current form.

    The law also allows police to recruit an “informer” who is described as “any person who, whether formally recruited by police or otherwise, provides information in relation to anything sought by police for any lawful purpose”.

    Police officers will not be allowed to join a union, states the draft law and it will be unlawful for them to go on strike or to take any industrial action.

    Fiji Village radio website reports that the draft bill proposes that a police officer or special constable would be able to search a crime scene and seize potential evidence without a warrant.

    The proposed law says a police officer or special constable may search any person, animal, vehicle or vessel at the crime scene or in the immediate vicinity of such crime scene.

    Any person who fails to comply with this could be sent to prison for up to five years.

    Anish Chand is a Fiji Times reporter. This report is republished with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Myanmar’s Bloody Sunday – security forces ‘live tracking’ media, protesters

    By Phil Thornton in Bangkok

    The Myanmar army, police and militia’s use of violence against peaceful protestors reached another level on Sunday, February 28.

    By 5pm, local media reported at least 19 confirmed killings and another 10 unconfirmed. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) spoke to journalists covering the nationwide protests.

    Toe Zaw Latt, a video journalist and production director with Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB), is not surprised by the brutality or the extreme force used by the security forces.

    “It’s their assignment,” he said. “This is what they’re trained to do. Arrest people for exercising their democratic rights. Shoot them, beat them with iron bars, use powerful slingshots to fire bolts, and metal spikes.

    “Use tear gas and fire live ammunition into crowds of unarmed people. They want to silence journalists, but we need to report.”

    Toe Zaw Latt was 17 in 1988 when he first faced the military’s violence. He prays the violence in 2021 does not reach the level experienced in 1988 when security forces fired live ammunition into crowds of peaceful protesters, killing thousands.

    “Thousands of us had to take refuge in neighbouring countries. Protest leaders and other activists were jailed for years, tortured and denied any human rights in prison,” he said

    Military blackouts
    DVB, an independent media company, has managed to keep broadcasting, despite the crisis and enforced country wide military blackouts.

    “They pulled the plug on us, but we now rely on our satellite being outside the country,”  said Toe Zaw Latt. “We’re managing to operate 24/7 and every two hours we have a 30-minute news bulletin plus our live social media platform.”

    In 2021, technology is changing how journalists and protesters record abuses, he says.

    “Everyone now has a smartphone and everyone can record the military’s crimes against humanity. But I fear for my staff’s security.

    “We are easily identified as journalists by our equipment and PRESS signage, but we are still targeted by security forces because they don’t want their brutality and crimes recorded.”

    Protesters and journalists are not the only ones using technology. Security forces are using surveillance tools to “live” track protesters’ locations, listen in on conversations and trawl through computers and phones.

    Justice for Myanmar, undercover advocates who campaign for justice and accountability in the country, released a number of reports implicating Western companies in the supply of surveillance technology now used by the military to track its pro-democracy opponents.

    Israeli surveillance technology
    The Ministry of Home Affairs budget files, obtained by Justice for Myanmar and reported in The New York Times, “indicate that dual-use surveillance technology made by Israeli, American and European companies made its way to Myanmar, despite many of their home governments banning such exports after the military’s brutal expulsion of Rohingya Muslims in 2017.”

    Justice for Myanmar spokesperson Yadanar Maung said:“The military are now using those very tools to brutally crack down on peaceful protesters risking their lives to resist the military junta and restore democracy, and to move against journalists who are exercising their right to report on protests.”

    Despite military surveillance, arrests and violence, Toe Zaw Latt says journalists seem determined to keep reporting.

    “It’s challenging for reporters working in these conditions. They [security forces] just start walking into residential streets and start shooting, they’re like mad dogs. Our professional equipment marks us as a target, but we’ll continue to do our job.”

    Aye Win, (not her real name) works for an international news agency in a major city, said it’s the unseen violence that worries her the most. “We fear most what we can’t see – snipers and the thought of what they will do to you when they take you to the barracks or jail,” she said.

    Gunshots, loud can be heard in the background as Aye Win describes an army truck outside delivering more troops to the area. “It’s now 5.30pm and it’s not safe to go out. My female colleagues are scared…not of the crackdown, but of the unseen brutality. I worry about my freelancers, they have no protection, media laws are weak. Police have no respect for journalists, if you get too close they grab and steal your equipment.”

    Evolving security tactics
    Ng Maung has been on the frontline since the coup started on February 1 and has noticed how the security forces tactics have evolved.

    “They have started to remove their identification badges. Our PRESS logo is now a target. Not knowing where snipers are is a huge fear, we now need protection from bullets.

    “If I can see them I’m not scared. It’s not safe to be on the streets at any time. Ten journalists have been arrested already.”

    Toe Zaw Latt explained even if journalists work for international agencies or for a small local media outlet or as a freelancer there is no guarantees for their safety or protection of their right to work without interference from security forces.

    “No one is safe under this military government. We’re all in immediate danger, but at the same time we have to report, we can’t stay silent.”

    The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners an independent organisation founded and run by former political prisoners reported as of March 1 that 1,213 people have been arrested and 913 remain in detention.

    AAP said security forces fired tear gas and rubber bullets at protestors and journalists and live ammunition was also fired at residential homes. Reports of security forces looting and robbing have been confirmed by video footage shared by credible sources on social media.

    Toe Zaw Latt said people have responded by trying to secure their neighbourhoods. “Residents are blocking the roads to stop the police and army from entering, the community are protecting student protestors.

    “There’s no rule of law in Myanmar, but people are helping activists and journalist with food, refuge and lifts. They treat people battling the effects of tear gas.

    “They have even given us masks to stop the risk of covid spread. People say the military is a bigger risk than covid – they’re far more dangerous to the people of Myanmar.”

    Phil Thornton is an adviser for IFJ in South East Asia.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Myanmar’s Bloody Sunday – security forces ‘live tracking’ media, protesters

    The Myanmar army, police and militia’s use of violence against peaceful protestors reached another level on Sunday, February 28.

    By 5pm, local media reported at least 19 confirmed killings and another 10 unconfirmed. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) spoke to journalists covering the nationwide protests.

    Toe Zaw Latt, a video journalist and production director with Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB), is not surprised by the brutality or the extreme force used by the security forces.

    “It’s their assignment,” he said. “This is what they’re trained to do. Arrest people for exercising their democratic rights. Shoot them, beat them with iron bars, use powerful slingshots to fire bolts, and metal spikes.

    “Use tear gas and fire live ammunition into crowds of unarmed people. They want to silence journalists, but we need to report.”

    Toe Zaw Latt was 17 in 1988 when he first faced the military’s violence. He prays the violence in 2021 does not reach the level experienced in 1988 when security forces fired live ammunition into crowds of peaceful protesters, killing thousands.

    “Thousands of us had to take refuge in neighbouring countries. Protest leaders and other activists were jailed for years, tortured and denied any human rights in prison,” he said

    Military blackouts
    DVB, an independent media company, has managed to keep broadcasting, despite the crisis and enforced country wide military blackouts.

    “They pulled the plug on us, but we now rely on our satellite being outside the country,”  said Toe Zaw Latt. “We’re managing to operate 24/7 and every two hours we have a 30-minute news bulletin plus our live social media platform.”

    In 2021, technology is changing how journalists and protesters record abuses, he says.

    “Everyone now has a smartphone and everyone can record the military’s crimes against humanity. But I fear for my staff’s security.

    “We are easily identified as journalists by our equipment and PRESS signage, but we are still targeted by security forces because they don’t want their brutality and crimes recorded.”

    Protesters and journalists are not the only ones using technology. Security forces are using surveillance tools to “live” track protesters’ locations, listen in on conversations and trawl through computers and phones.

    Justice for Myanmar, undercover advocates who campaign for justice and accountability in the country, released a number of reports implicating Western companies in the supply of surveillance technology now used by the military to track its pro-democracy opponents.

    Israeli surveillance technology
    The Ministry of Home Affairs budget files, obtained by Justice for Myanmar and reported in The New York Times, “indicate that dual-use surveillance technology made by Israeli, American and European companies made its way to Myanmar, despite many of their home governments banning such exports after the military’s brutal expulsion of Rohingya Muslims in 2017.”

    Justice for Myanmar spokesperson Yadanar Maung said:“The military are now using those very tools to brutally crack down on peaceful protesters risking their lives to resist the military junta and restore democracy, and to move against journalists who are exercising their right to report on protests.”

    Despite military surveillance, arrests and violence, Toe Zaw Latt says journalists seem determined to keep reporting.

    “It’s challenging for reporters working in these conditions. They [security forces] just start walking into residential streets and start shooting, they’re like mad dogs. Our professional equipment marks us as a target, but we’ll continue to do our job.”

    Aye Win, (not her real name) works for an international news agency in a major city, said it’s the unseen violence that worries her the most. “We fear most what we can’t see – snipers and the thought of what they will do to you when they take you to the barracks or jail,” she said.

    Gunshots, loud can be heard in the background as Aye Win describes an army truck outside delivering more troops to the area. “It’s now 5.30pm and it’s not safe to go out. My female colleagues are scared…not of the crackdown, but of the unseen brutality. I worry about my freelancers, they have no protection, media laws are weak. Police have no respect for journalists, if you get too close they grab and steal your equipment.”

    Evolving security tactics
    Ng Maung has been on the frontline since the coup started on February 1 and has noticed how the security forces tactics have evolved.

    “They have started to remove their identification badges. Our PRESS logo is now a target. Not knowing where snipers are is a huge fear, we now need protection from bullets.

    “If I can see them I’m not scared. It’s not safe to be on the streets at any time. Ten journalists have been arrested already.”

    Toe Zaw Latt explained even if journalists work for international agencies or for a small local media outlet or as a freelancer there is no guarantees for their safety or protection of their right to work without interference from security forces.

    “No one is safe under this military government. We’re all in immediate danger, but at the same time we have to report, we can’t stay silent.”

    The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners an independent organisation founded and run by former political prisoners reported as of March 1 that 1,213 people have been arrested and 913 remain in detention.

    AAP said security forces fired tear gas and rubber bullets at protestors and journalists and live ammunition was also fired at residential homes. Reports of security forces looting and robbing have been confirmed by video footage shared by credible sources on social media.

    Toe Zaw Latt said people have responded by trying to secure their neighbourhoods. “Residents are blocking the roads to stop the police and army from entering, the community are protecting student protestors.

    “There’s no rule of law in Myanmar, but people are helping activists and journalist with food, refuge and lifts. They treat people battling the effects of tear gas.

    “They have even given us masks to stop the risk of covid spread. People say the military is a bigger risk than covid – they’re far more dangerous to the people of Myanmar.”

    Phil Thornton is an adviser for IFJ in South East Asia.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Corporate Media Parrot FBI Talking Points as More Americans Turn to Encrypted Communication Online

     

    NextGov: FBI: ‘Dozens’ of Terror Suspects Have Used Encryption to Hide from Law Enforcement

    FBI Director James Comey (Nextgov, 10/8/15) told Congress that his agency lost track of “dozens” of terror suspects because of encryption. “We’re really not just mak­ing this up,” he assured senators.

    Before he became a household name as the accused spoiler of the 2016 election, James Comey, FBI director under President Barack Obama, was already well-known in tech circles as a crusader against strong encryption. Still smarting from Edward Snowden’s exposure of the US government’s massive and illegal domestic spying operations, Comey grabbed any microphone he could during the waning years of Obama’s tenure to warn Americans that encryption technology was putting us all at grave risk by causing law enforcement to “go dark.”

    Cryptography is the art of encoding text or other data such that only those who have the secret key can read it. This data can include anything from messages and records to digital currency—but these days encryption most commonly protects account passwords and other sensitive information as it traverses the internet.

    Encryption has been around for millennia and, in modern times, it is used on a daily basis by nearly every person living in a technologized society. But like any technology, it can frighten those in power when wielded by the relatively powerless. In the summer of 2015, Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee that encryption had suddenly inspired the FBI “to consider how criminals and terrorists might use advances in technology to their advantage.”

    Sensitive to the public’s lingering outrage at the Snowden revelations, Comey turned to the usual parade of horribles in his attempts to convince Congress that encryption isn’t all it’s cracked up to be: “Malicious actors can take advantage of the internet to covertly plot violent robberies, murders and kidnappings,” he warned. “Sex offenders can establish virtual communities to buy, sell and encourage the creation of new depictions of horrific sexual abuse of children.”

    Comey preferred to use “horrific sexual abuse of children” and the specter of terrorism to disparage encryption technology—recall the showdown between the FBI and Apple after the perpetrators of a late-2015 massacre in San Bernardino left behind an encrypted iPhone. But the ACLU (4/1/16) quickly exposed his fraud: Researchers uncovered 63 court orders for access to encrypted devices and reported, “To the extent we know about the underlying facts, these cases predominantly arise out of investigations into drug crimes”—rather than terrorists and pedophiles.

    In the wake of the January 6 mob attack on the US Capitol Building, this pattern is repeating itself again…only now corporate media are taking up the FBI’s mantle on their own behalf.

    NBC: Extremists move to secret online channels to plan for Inauguration Day in D.C.

    NBC (1/12/21) warned that “right-wing extremists are using channels on the encrypted communication app Telegram to call for violence against government officials on January 20.”

    Following the violence in DC, headlines across corporate media declared: “Far Right Turns to Encrypted Platforms to Stoke Further Unrest” (Financial Times, 1/14/21). This mass “relocation” online led corporate outlets to speculate that political extremists were planning something huge. NBC News (1/12/21) cherry-picked posts on the encrypted messaging app Telegram to foment fears of “a big turnout in Washington at Biden’s inauguration on January 20.” Politico (1/12/21) and the Washington Post (1/14/21) similarly linked the use of encryption to imminent violence. Despite weeks of breathless anticipation, that violence never materialized.

    Like Comey, corporate media have resorted to guilt by association to turn their readers against digital security. According to Vice (4/17/19), encrypted messaging apps and e-mail systems are chock-full of the worst people in the world, like “ISIS members,” “neo-Nazi extremist groups” and at least one “paramilitary organization.” Now we can add angry white men in furs to the list.

    More recently, Forbes (1/13/21) introduced its readers to the creators of Signal and Telegram (among the most popular encrypted messaging platforms) who belong to another infamous class: billionaires. Never mind that Forbes normally counts billionaires among the world’s most important people. To cement reader acrimony, they made sure to mention that Telegram’s founder is Russian.

    What preoccupied corporate media more than the possibility of violence in the near term, however, were the long-term implications for law enforcement. The Washington Post lamented, in multiple articles (1/17/21, 1/18/21), that the feds have “lost a valuable resource to monitor the growing threat.” Fortune (1/13/21) similarly complained that “encryption makes it difficult for law enforcement to monitor users.” The message is clear: Far-right extremists are coming to a town near you and, thanks to evil billionaire-funded technology, the police are helpless to do anything about it.

    Corporate media’s argument that encryption creates crime and that cops need exceptional access to stop it is as outmoded as it is simplistic. Their premise and conclusion are just as false now as they were when Comey staged his anti-encryption tour five years ago.

    In fact, news media’s resurgent obsession with encryption is just the latest episode in a decades-long effort to undermine user security in favor of domestic surveillance, with each iteration colored by the threat du jour. But instead of educating readers on the history of this conflict and the lessons learned, most corporate media seem to have forgotten all about it.

    Time: In the Fight Against Extremism, Don't Demonize Surveillance-Busting Tools like Signal and Bitcoin

    Alex Gladstein (Time, 1/26/21): “The main superspreaders of extremist content remain centralized corporate platforms like Facebook and YouTube, not open-source privacy platforms.”

    As Alex Gladstein recalled for Time (1/26/21), this debate originated in the 1990s with the dawn of internet communication and the US government’s original complaints about “going dark.” To solve that pseudo-problem, the National Security Agency developed the Clipper Chip, a piece of hardware that, when installed in consumer products, would give law enforcement exceptional access to otherwise unreadable data.

    The Clipper Chip met fierce resistance from consumer advocates and was panned by scholars, who concluded that this kind of technology would “require significant sacrifices in security and convenience, and substantially increased costs to all users of encryption,” that “the breathtaking scale and complexity” of such a system was “beyond the experience and current competency of the field,” and for these reasons “may well introduce ultimately unacceptable risks and costs.” After securing only one major adopter—its own Department of Justice—the US government abandoned the project.

    As Comey ramped up his crusade against encryption in 2015, the same scholars got together again to reassess these so-called “crypto wars.” They found that “today, the fundamental technical importance of strong cryptography and the difficulties inherent in limiting its use to meet law enforcement purposes remain the same.” And although Comey sought to convey the sense that a “going dark” phenomenon was just emerging, “the arguments are the same as two decades ago,” they concluded.

    Here we arrive at the present day, with corporate media peddling a new bogeyman in service of the same bogus arguments. Forbes (2/1/21) declared that “tech companies are going to have to decide whether they hate right-wing extremists more than they love privacy and freedom from government snooping.” “The problem is these apps are hamstrung by their absolutist posture,” Mark MacCarthy wrote, suggesting a middle-ground approach that wasn’t feasible in 1993 and is even less feasible today.

    While there are myriad problems with giving cops exceptional access to encrypted systems, the overarching issue is that technical vulnerabilities are morally agnostic—it doesn’t make any difference if the person taking advantage of the exploit is an FBI agent or a malevolent hacker.

    As the experts cited above wrote, “This is a trade-off space in which law enforcement cannot be guaranteed access without creating serious risk that criminal intruders will gain the same access.”  Not just messaging apps, but all internet-based activity is put at risk by creating backdoors to encryption.

    At the end of the day, Snowden demonstrated that there is no “going dark” phenomenon—we live in a golden age of surveillance, in which the US government and tech corporations have ready access to more data about their targets than at any point in history.

    Moreover, all of corporate media’s bellyaching about political extremists and encryption occurred after the riot was announced online, endorsed on nationwide radio, permitted by the National Park Service, and organized in plain sight on Facebook. Why, then, are corporate media again suggesting that we cripple the most important technology on the internet when law enforcement can’t even prevent violence planned out in the open?

    NYT: The Coup We Are Not Talking About

    Shoshana Zuboff (New York Times, 1/29/21): “The United States and many other liberal democracies chose surveillance over democracy as the guiding principle of social order.”

    The answer is that there is a facile tendency to blame technology (encryption) for social-political problems, while at the same time heralding technology (surveillance) as a silver bullet against those problems. And while the problematic technology is typically accessible to everyday people, the exceptional technology is only available to those with power.

    After the Snowden revelations, several NYU graduate students recognized this fixation on technology as part of a troubling depoliticization process. “The idea that solutions for societal problems can come from technical progress and sophistication in the private sector,” they wrote, “is the bread and butter of Silicon Valley corporations.” In other words, by focusing reader attention on encryption instead of the social and political conditions that give rise to right-wing extremism, corporate media are doing yeoman’s work for their benefactors.

    In an extraordinary op-ed for the New York Times (1/29/21), Shoshana Zuboff offered a different take on the January 6 riot—that such reactionary violence is an inevitable outcome of social surveillance, not digital privacy:

    Social media is not a public square but a private one governed by machine operations and their economic imperatives, incapable of, and uninterested in, distinguishing truth from lies or renewal from destruction.

    Time‘s Gladstein (1/26/21) thinks “the culture war over encrypted messaging might finally be ending,” but, so long as corporate media parrot FBI talking points and keep readers in the dark about their invalidity, the battle will continue with everyone’s online security as collateral damage.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Privacy, Immigrant Rights Groups Slam Biden’s ‘Smart Wall’

    A coalition of privacy and immigrant rights groups are pushing back on the Biden administration’s proposal to deploy a “smart” wall on the southern border.

    In a statement released Thursday, first obtained by The Hill, the 40 groups slam the legislation introduced in Congress last week as a “continuation of the Trump administration’s racist border policies, not a break from it.”

    The letter pans the proposed use of “smart technology” at the border as “Trump’s wall by another name.”

    The mammoth immigration bill, which is being spearheaded by Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) and Rep. Linda Sánchez (D-Calif.), authorizes the Department of Homeland Security to develop technology and surveillance infrastructure to “manage and secure the southern border.”

    The post Privacy, Immigrant Rights Groups Slam Biden’s ‘Smart Wall’ appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Demand The FBI Stop Lying And Stop Spying On Black Protesters

    Once again, Black activists and organizers are demanding our society transform itself and land on the right side of history. However, the state has chosen to greet this opportunity with increased violence and surveillance, doubling down on its commitment to undermine and disrupt Black-led movements for justice by criminalizing & attacking them. When the FBI was exposed for labeling participants of the Ferguson & nationwide uprisings “Black Identity Extremists,” we recognized the spirit of J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO was alive and well. Is this the legacy that the U. S. government wants to uphold? 60+year-old patterns of social change and state repression are yet again active.

    The post Demand The FBI Stop Lying And Stop Spying On Black Protesters appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Surveillance, Stress, And No Bathrooms

    The Amazonification of logistics has created a new group of highly exploited workers: delivery drivers. Amazon itself increasingly relies on an expanding network of subcontracted drivers and independent contractors to deliver packages to customers’ doors.

    The working conditions facing Amazon’s last-mile drivers are defined by a frantic pace, low wages, and relentless pressure to meet tight delivery deadlines. Workers of color and immigrants are overrepresented, as they are in all the lowest-paying segments of last-mile logistics.

    When an Amazon Prime member orders an item, the first step in the delivery process begins at an Amazon Fulfillment Center, where the item is picked by a worker and put into a box, and an address label is created.

    The post Surveillance, Stress, And No Bathrooms appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Vaccinations and Stimulus Packages Won’t Mend the Economy

    The social and economic destruction engulfing the U.S. and dozens of other countries remains out of everyone’s control and more chaos, instability, and insecurity now mark the global landscape.

    The ruling elite have repeatedly shown their inability to tackle any serious problems effectively. They are at a loss for how to deal with current problems and refuse to consider any alternative to their obsolete economic system. The best they can do is recycle old ideas to maintain their class power and privilege. Their efforts to block the New focus mainly on promoting disinformation about “new and better forms of capitalism,” including oxymorons like “inclusive capitalism,” “responsible capitalism,” and “ethical capitalism.”

    Since the outbreak of the “COVID Pandemic” in March 2020 every week has been a roller coaster for humanity. The economy and society keep lurching from one crisis to another while incoherence and stress keep amplifying. It is said that 1 in 6 Americans went into therapy for the first time in 2020.

    Unemployment, under-employment, inequality, mental depression, anxiety, suicide, environmental decay, inflation, debt, health care costs, education, and poverty are worsening everywhere. Thousands of businesses that have been around for years keep disappearing left and right.

    Top-down actions in response to the “COVID Pandemic” have made so many things worse for so many people. Many are wondering which is worse: the covid-19 virus or the top-down response to the pandemic. Governments everywhere have steadfastly refused to mobilize the people to solve the many problems that are worsening. The moral climate is low and more people are worried about the future.

    An atmosphere has been created whereby people are supposed to feel like the exhausting “COVID Pandemic” will last forever and we can all forget about getting back to any normal healthy non-digital relations, activities, and interactions. No society in history has worn face masks for an entire year. We are told over and over again that there is no returning to anything called “normal.” Moving everything online and repeatedly asserting that this is great, “cool,” and wonderful is proving to be unsatisfactory and unfulfilling. People want and need real, direct, non-digital connections and interactions with other human beings. Life behind a screen is not life.

    Even with all the restrictions and shutdowns the virus, according to the mainstream media, continues to wreak havoc at home and abroad. It is almost like none of the severe restrictions on people’s freedoms made any difference. People have had to endure this humiliation while also not being permitted any role in deciding the aim, operation, and direction of the economy or any of the affairs of society; they are left out of the equation every step of the way and not even asked for superficial “input” that always goes unheeded anyway. Existing governance arrangements are simply not working to empower people or affirm their rights. The people’s interests and will are blocked at every turn by an outdated political setup that advances only the narrow interests of the rich.

    Despite intense pressure to blindly rely on the rich and their political representatives to “figure things out,” this is not working. Nor does it help that the mainstream media approaches multiple crises and issues with endless double-talk, disconnected facts, catchy sound-bites, dramatic exaggerations, angry voices, political axe-grinding, and lots of confusion. Coherence and a human-centered outlook are avoided at all costs. People are constantly left disoriented. Jumping arbitrarily and rapidly from one thing to another in the most unconscious way is presented as useful analysis and information. This is why sorting out basic information has become a full-time job for everyone. People are understandably worn-out and overwhelmed. Disinformation overload degrades mental, emotional, and physical health.

    The world has become an uglier and gloomier place—all in the name of “improving health.” It is no surprise that a recent Gallup Poll shows that the majority of Americans are extremely dissatisfied with government, the economy, the culture, and the moral climate.

    In this hazardous unstable context, there are two ever-present key pieces of disinformation operating side by side. Both are designed to deprive working people of any say, initiative, outlook, or power.

    First there is the “once everyone is vaccinated things will be much better” disinformation. This ignores the fact that capitalist crises have endogenous causes not exogenous causes and that the economic crisis started well before the “COVID Pandemic.” More than 150 years of recessions, depressions, booms, busts, instability, chaos, and anarchy have not been caused by external phenomena like bacteria, germs, and viruses but by the internal logic and operation of capital itself. A so-called “free market” economy by its very nature and logic ensures “winners” and “losers,” “booms” and “busts.” It is called a “dog-eat-dog” fend-for-yourself competitive world for a reason. The modern idea that humans are born to society and have rights by virtue of their being is alien to “free market” ideology.

    Despite the fact that millions have been vaccinated at home and abroad, poverty, inequality, unemployment, debt, and other problems continue to worsen. Businesses continue to suffer and disappear. Hospitality, leisure, recreation, and other sectors have been decimated in many countries. Air travel is dramatically lower. So are car sales. It is not enough to say, “Yes, the next few months will be rough and lousy economically speaking but we will get there with more vaccinations. Just be patient, it will all eventually work out.” This is not what is actually unfolding. The all-sided crisis we find ourselves in started before the “COVID Pandemic” and continues unabated. Such a view also makes a mockery of economic science and the people’s desire to decide the affairs of society and establish much better arrangements that exclude narrow private interests and do not rely on police powers.

    In the coming months millions more will be vaccinated but economic decline and decay will continue. Both the rate and amount of profit have been falling for years. And owners of capital are not going to invest in anything when there is no profit to be had and when it is easier instead to balloon fictitious capital and pretend everything is a stock market video game. The lack of vaccinations did not cause the economic collapse the word is currently suffering through, nor will more vaccinations reverse economic decline and decay. The “COVID Pandemic” has largely made some people vastly richer and millions more much poorer. The “COVID Pandemic” has significantly increased inequality. Unfortunately, the so-called “Great Reset” agenda of the World Economic Forum and Pope Francis’s recent call for a “Copernican Revolution” in the economy will make things worse for millions more because they will perpetuate the existing moribund economic system. Such agendas are designed to fool the gullible, block working class consciousness and action, and keep the initiative in the hands of the global oligarchy.

    The same applies to so-called “stimulus packages.” Various versions of these top-down monetary and fiscal programs have been launched in different countries, and while they have assuaged some problems for people, they have not been adequate or fixed any underlying problems. They have not prevented poverty or mass unemployment. Economies remain mired in crisis. In most cases “stimulus packages” have made things worse by increasing the amount of debt that many generations will have to repay. This is in addition to the many other forms of debt Americans suffer from and rent payments that will one day have to be paid.

    Many are also wondering why trillions of dollars can be printed and instantly turned over to the banks and corporations with no discussion but the same cannot be done for social programs, public enterprises, and the people. Why, for example, can all not get free healthcare or have taxes eliminated? Why can’t various forms of personal debt be wiped out instantly? If the government can print money for “them” why can’t they print money for “us”? Who is government supposed to serve? Billionaires?

    Nether the CARES Act of 2020 nor the stimulus package passed in December 2020 nor the one President Biden is pushing for in March 2021 will be adequate or solve any major problems. Many felt that the $600 stimulus checks that went out in December 2020 were pathetic and insulting.

    The problem lies with a socialized productive economy run by everyone but owned and controlled by a tiny handful of competing private interests determined to maximize profit as fast as possible regardless of the damage to the social and natural environment. There is no way for the economy to benefit all individuals and serve the general interests of society so long as it is dominated by a handful of billionaires. The social wealth produced by workers cannot benefit workers and the society if workers themselves do not control the wealth they produce and have first claim to.

    The outlook, agenda, and reference points of the rich must be rejected and replaced by a human-centered aim, agenda, direction, and outlook. The current trajectory is untenable and unsustainable. The situation is dangerous in many ways, but perhaps one good thing to come out of the accelerated pace of chaos, anarchy, and instability are the contradictions that are presenting new opportunities for action with analysis that favors working people.

    The post Vaccinations and Stimulus Packages Won’t Mend the Economy first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • DWP uses excessive surveillance on suspected fraudsters, report finds

    Claimants are tailed, identified on CCTV and their social media monitored, Privacy International finds

    Suspected benefit fraudsters in the UK are being subjected to excessive surveillance techniques such as being tailed by government officers or identified in CCTV footage, according to a report.

    It also found that companies from bingo clubs to the BBC, estate agents and the NHS can be asked to provide information on people who may be under investigation.

    Related: One in three councils using algorithms to make welfare decisions

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Amazon Is Using AI-Equipped Cameras In Delivery Vans

    Amazon drivers at some U.S. facilities will soon have an extra set of eyes watching them when they hit the road to make their daily deliveries.

    The company recently began testing AI-equipped cameras in vehicles to monitor contracted delivery drivers while they’re on the job, with the aim of improving safety.

    Amazon has deployed the cameras in Amazon-branded cargo vans used by a handful of companies that are part of its delivery service partner program, which are largely responsible for last-mile deliveries. The cameras could be rolled out to additional DSPs over time, and Amazon has already distributed an instructional video to DSPs, informing them of how the cameras work.

    The post Amazon Is Using AI-Equipped Cameras In Delivery Vans appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Hipkins denies NZ’s MIQ standards slipping after covid cases, illicit rendevous

    By Katie Todd, RNZ News reporter

    A wine delivery, a note penned on the back of a facemask and a 20-minute bedroom “encounter” have spelled the end of a managed isolation staffer’s job in New Zealand.

    However, Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins refutes there are slipping standards at the border facilities, where authorities are also investigating the transmission of the coronavirus between Pullman Hotel guests.

    The illicit rendezvous with a returnee happened at the Grand Millennium in central Auckland on January 7, and came to light at today’s covid-19 briefing.

    Hipkins said the MIQ worker entered a guest’s room to deliver a bottle of wine after exchanging notes, and stayed for 20 minutes.

    “I didn’t enquire into specifically, the nature of the encounter, but there was a 20 minute encounter. That was enough for me to know it was unacceptable,” he said.

    While the encounter isn’t thought to have put others at risk, it’s been chided as “irresponsible” and “incredibly disappointing” by the head of managed isolation and quarantine Brigadier Jim Bliss, who said the security measures at the hotel meant the incident was detected quickly.

    A hotel manager realised the worker had not returned, and a hotel security manager located them in the room.

    Formal police warning
    Brigadier Bliss said they were immediately sent home and instructed to self-isolate and be tested, before being given a formal written warning by police.

    Both the worker and the returnee had returned negative test results both before and after the incident.

    “We’re not aware of any other reports of situations like this between staff and returnees,” Brigadier Bliss said.

    “There is absolutely no room for complacency for those inside our managed isolation and quarantine facilities.”

    Hipkins said the staffer had been sanctioned, and he also reassured it was a “one-off”.

    “We’re dealing with human beings. We ask everybody to the standards that we put in place. I cannot control the actions of that individual but we absolutely make clear what the rules are and when people breach the rules there are consequences,” he said.

    “Obviously I asked for that to be fully investigated and for appropriate action to be taken. I understand that appropriate action has been taken and that person is no longer working for managed isolation.”

    No new community cases
    There were no new community cases of covid-19 today, however, authorities have revealed there are two other people who they believe caught the virus in the Pullman Hotel – rather than overseas.

    They were staying on the same floor and have the South African variant strain of the virus.

    Hipkins admitted there was “something going on at the Pullman”.

    Director-general of health Ashley Bloomfield said stricter measures were in place until more was known.

    “No new arrivals are going in… a significant restriction on movement outside of rooms for everybody, and no movement outside of rooms once people have had that final test at day 12,” he said.

    In other new rules, those leaving the Pullman Hotel must isolate at home and have a follow up test five days later, while testing of staff is being ramped up and the ventilation systems are being upgraded.

    Pullman guests will only be able to exercise in limited numbers, with people who were on their flight.

    Curbs have also been put on smoking sessions – which are now capped at 10 minutes and a maximum of two people at a time, who are from the same flight.

    No wider restrictions
    Outside isolation, with no new community cases, today’s 1pm briefing granted the green light to thousands of holidaymakers, and concert-goers with Auckland anniversary weekend plans.

    After a frazzling week for organisers, Auckland International Buskers Festival, Chinese New Year Festival and Auckland Folk Festival will continue in the freedom of Alert Level 1.

    Next week, the first of more than 200 Auckland Pride events will kick off across the city.

    The recent cases of covid-19 in Auckland and Northland have been linked to Managed Isolation and Quarantine (MIQ). There is no evidence so far that suggests community transmission, the Ministry of Health said.

    • Call Healthline 0800 358 5453 for advice on when and where to get tested, and remain isolated until you have a negative test result.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Michael Field: Murky background to Vanuatu’s Chinese fishing boat arrests

    COMMENT: By Michael Field

    Docked and under some kind of arrest in Port Vila, Vanuatu, are two Chinese flagged fishing boats, allegedly caught in unauthorised waters.

    Of course it makes headlines, but the truth here is decidedly murky.

    The arrest of Donggongxing 13 and 16 is headline stuff; South Pacific nations seldom arrest Chinese boats. It causes too much trouble with Beijing.

    After all there are between 200 and 300 Chinese boats operating in Vanuatu’s 663,251 sq km exclusive economic zone. Few of them are ever seen in Vila or Luganville; they all operate out China’s biggest South Pacific fishing base – Suva, Fiji.

    All of them are either longliners or purse seiners, taking tuna.

    But not these arrested boats.

    Now this is odd – this is a case of the arrests being less significant than the class of boat.

    Known as ‘pot vessels’
    In the Western and Central Pacific Fishing Commission (WCPFC) register of 3450 fishing boats there are just three – all three are Chinese – known as “pot vessels”.

    The names of the exclusive three? Donggongxing 13, 16 and 17.

    Why are the region’s only pot vessels sitting off Hiu in the Torres Islands?

    The police map issued to the media shows they were arrested 32 km west of Hiu. That puts them inside Vanuatu’s territorial waters (not the EEZ) as defined by the Marine Zones Act 2018.

    Chinese fishing boats off Vanuatu
    Torres Island (right) with the dots showing Chinese fishing boats in January – all in the EEZ, none in territorial waters. Image: Global Fishing Watch/TPN

    As the Global Fishing Watch screen grab shows, there are plenty of Chinese boats (out of Suva) around Hiu – in the EEZ but not in territorial waters. Even the Chinese avoid going into territorial waters; getting caught is too easy (especially if the French send a jet aircraft).

    However, it should be noted that neither Donggongxing 13 nor 16 show up on Global Fishing Watch: they had their positioning systems switched off.

    A tuna boat probably has no real reason to go into territorial waters, but WCPFC data gives a possible clue. The vessels were authorised to catch grouper and sea cucumber.

    Chinese boats seized VDP
    Vanuatu Daily Post report of the arrest on 22 January 2021. Image: APR screenshot

    Both catches are lucrative
    Although beche de mer and grouper are ocean species, they are also easy to catch closer to shore, inside territorial waters. It is why the Vietnamese “blue boats” were reaching into the South Pacific. Both catches are lucrative.

    All three Donggongxing vessels are owned by Zhuhai Dong Gang Xing Long Distance Fishing Co. Beijing has given the relatively new company permission to fish in Mauritania in Africa, and Vanuatu.

    Their permissions were given under the Chinese government’s “One Belt, One Road” (the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)).

    Because China has given an international commitment to eventually cut back on building new fishing boats, Dong Gang Xing has been constructing them quickly. Ten are targeting for the Pacific.

    Registered pot vessels
    The WCPFC register of the only pot vessels in the Pacific. Image: Michael Field/TPN

    And this is where it gets odd; the company says they have permission under BRI to build a base in Vanuatu.

    Why they believe this is not clear. Vanuatu has not said anything but has instead arrested two boats.

    But were the two boats in territorial waters because they believed that under the deal between Vila and Beijing, Chinese boats can now enter territorial waters?

    And if so, is Vanuatu heading for a diplomatic row with China?

    Michael Field, who writes for Nikkei Asia, has provided this article for Asia Pacific Report.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Critical Lessons From Dr. Martin Luther King For These Times


    NOTE: Margaret Flowers and Askia Muhammad will co-host an inaugural special on Pacifica Radio on Wednesday, January 20 from 6:30 to 8:00 pm Eastern. It can be heard on WBAI and WPFW. The theme will be Dr. King’s triple evils and what Biden’s cabinet picks tell us about what we can expect from this administration. Guests include Dr. Greg Carr, Abby Martin and Danny Sjursen.

    Also, on Tuesday, January 26 at 8:00 pm Eastern, Popular Resistance will co-host a webinar, “COVID-19: How Weaponizing Disease and Vaccine Wars are Failing Us.” The webinar will be co-hosted by Margaret Flowers and Sara Flounders and it will feature Vijay Prashad, Max Blumethal, Margaret Kimberley and Lee Siu Hin. All are editors or contributors of the new book “Capitalism on a Ventilator.” Register at bit.ly/WeaponizingCOVID.

    This week we celebrate the life of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and witness the inauguration of our next president, Joe Biden. This inauguration will be unique, first, for being held during a pandemic and, second, for its heightened security in fear of another attack by Trump supporters. Downtown Washington, DC is normally secured during an inauguration and people must pass through checkpoints to get into the Mall and parade route, but this time is different.

    There are 25,000 members of the National Guard on duty in the city to protect the President and Members of Congress. But even this does not guarantee security. The FBI is screening every national guard member for ties to right wing militias and groups responsible for the January 6 assault on the Capitol. The ruling class experienced what it is like when those who are supposed to protect you don’t.

    This insecurity is another facet of a society in break down. As Dr. King warned us over 50 years ago:

    I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin to shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-centered’ society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. . . . A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

    Migrants march from Honduras to the United States with the hope of a better reception under a Biden administration (Luis Echeverria)

    The pandemic and recession have exposed more widely what many communities have known for a long time, that corporate profits are more important than their lives and that lawmakers serve the wealthy class. During the pandemic, the rich have gotten richer, the Pentagon budget has ballooned with bi-partisan support and the people have not received what they need to survive. Unemployment, loss of health insurance, hunger and poverty are growing while the stock market ended the year with record highs.

    Many are hopeful that a Democratic majority in Congress and a Democratic President will turn this around, and it is reasonable to expect there will be some positive changes. The Biden administration claims it will take immediate action to raise the federal minimum wage to $15/hour, extend the break on student loan payments, provide a one-time $1,400 payment and invest more in testing and vaccine administration, among other actions.

    These actions are welcome, but they are a far cry from what is necessary. A family with two parents working full time for minimum wage will still live in poverty, even at $15/hour. The majority of people in the United States, 65%, support giving $2,000/month to every adult during the pandemic. This is supported by 54% of Republicans polled and 78% of Democrats. People with student loans are calling for them to be cancelled, not delayed. And, as I wrote in Truthout, Biden’s priority for managing the pandemic is on reopening businesses and schools, not on taking the public health measures that are called for such as shutting down with guarantees of housing and economic support and nationalizing the healthcare system, as other countries have done.

    What is required is massive public investment in systemic changes that get to the roots of the crises we face. In addition to the triple evils that Dr. King spoke about, racism, capitalism and militarism, we can add the climate crisis. An eco-socialist Green New Deal such as that promoted by Howie Hawkins would get at the roots of each of these crises.

    Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute argues that the economy can handle a massive investment of public dollars without fear of negative consequences, such as inflation, because for too long the economy has been starving the public while funneling wealth to the top. It is time for redistribution of that wealth to serve the public good.

    In fact, Sam Pizzigati of Inequality.org writes that throughout history, governments have fallen when they fail to address wealth inequality and meet the people’s needs. This is the finding of a recent study called “Moral Collapse and State Failure: A View From the Past.” They write that the fall of pre-modern governments “can be traced to a principal leadership that inexplicably abandoned core principles of state-building that were foundational to these polities, while also ignoring their expected roles as effective leaders and moral exemplars.”

    From Socialist Alternative

    So far, it looks like what we can expect from the Biden Administration is a few tweaks to the system to placate people and relieve some suffering but not the system changes we require. Biden is actively opposed to national improved Medicare for All and a Green New Deal, two proposals that a majority of people, especially Democrats, support. Mark Dunlea explains why the Biden climate plan is inadequate for the dire situation we face.

    Biden’s cabinet picks and language make it clear that the United States’ aggressive foreign policy of regime change and wars for resources and domination will continue. Samantha Power, a war hawk, has been chosen to head the USAID, an institution that invests in creating chaos and regime change efforts in other countries. Victoria Nuland, who was a major leader of the US’ successful coup in Ukraine that brought neo-Nazis to power, has been picked for Deputy Secretary of State for Political Affairs. Biden’s choices for CIA Director, Mike Morell, and Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, are both torture proponents. Abby Martin of Empire Files exposes the dark backgrounds of several other nominees for Biden’s cabinet, including Antony Blinken as Secretary of State, Jake Sullivan as National Security Adviser, Linda Thomas-Greenfield for United Nations Ambassador and Michael Flourney to head the Pentagon.

    It also doesn’t appear that Democrats in Congress will show the necessary courage to fight for what the people need. Danny Haiphong of Black Agenda Report writes about the “Obama-fication” of “The Squad” and how they serve to protect the status quo and weaken the progressive movement. It is important to understand how they are the “more effective evil,” or as Gabriel Rockhill explains, they are the arm of liberal democracies that convince people to consent to the neo-liberal capitalism that is destroying our lives and the planet. This is how Western fascism rises within legislative bodies. Already, we are seeing champions of national improved Medicare for All, Bernie Sanders and Pramila Jayapal, back down to a position of lowering the age of Medicare eligibility, which would not solve our healthcare crisis, only delay that solution.

    Chris Hedges often warns us that we need to know what we are up against if we are to effectively challenge it. Dr. King warned us that our nation was heading toward spiritual death if we did not get to the roots of the crises, the triple evils. He demonstrated that social movements should not align themselves with capitalist political parties because then the movement becomes subservient to their interests and compromises its own interests. And he told us what we must do. Prior to King’s death, he was organizing an occupation of Washington, DC to demand an end to poverty.

    During the Biden administration, many of the progressive forces will work to weaken those of us who make demands for bold changes. They will try to placate us with a diverse cabinet of women and people of color who were chosen because they support capitalism, imperialism and systemic racism despite their identities. Chris Hedges describes this as a form of “colonialism.”

    Our tasks are to maintain political independence from the capitalist parties, struggle for systemic changes and embrace a bold agenda that inspires people to take action. Through strategic and intentional action, we can achieve the changes we need. We have a key ingredient for success – widespread support for the changes we need. Now, we only need to mobilize in ways that inspire people and that have an impact – strikes, boycotts, occupations and more that are focused on improving the lives of everyone.

    We can turn things around and reduce the suffering that is driving the polarization and trend towards violence in our country. It’s time to embrace our radical Dr. King.

    This article was posted on Tuesday, January 19th, 2021 at 12:03pm and is filed under Capitalism, Colonialism, Debt, Democrats, Joe Biden, Martin Luther King Jr., Militarism, National improved Medicare for all (NIMA), Racism, Republicans, Resistance, Ruling Elite, Social Movements, Student Loans, Surveillance, The Pentagon, Unemployment, US Congress, US Media, Wage.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Consent-Manufacturing For Patriot Act II Continues

    It’s been obvious for a long time that the best way to stop the rise of right-wing extremism in America that everyone’s so worried about today is not to pass a bunch of authoritarian laws, but to reverse the policies of soul-crushing neoliberalism and domestic austerity which led to Donald Trump. Instead of doing this, the next president is already pushing a Patriot Act sequel and reducing the stimulus checks he’d promised the public before he’s even been sworn in.

    President-elect Biden promised unambiguously that if voters gave the Democratic Party control of the Senate by electing Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in Georgia earlier this month, checks of $2,000 would “go out the door immediately”. Warnock blatantly campaigned on the promise of $2000 checks if elected, literally using pictures of checks with “$2000” written on them to do so. This was not an unclear promise by any stretch of the imagination, yet when Biden unveiled the “American Rescue Plan” on Thursday, the number 1400 was written where the number 2000 should have been.

    The argument being pushed out at the moment is that when Democrats were blatantly promising stimulus checks of $2000 what they really meant was that Americans would receive $1400 on top of the $600 checks they’d received earlier, and everyone should have just known this somehow (perhaps via some sort of psychic precognition or sorcery). Which of course makes as much sense as someone hiring you to do a job for a given amount of money and then paying you the amount promised minus the amount you’d made at your last job.

    It’s just so emblematic of US austerity policies, which are so normalized they don’t even use that word. Keep people stretched so thin that even a paltry $2000 after months and months of nothing can be spun as an excessively exorbitant indulgence which must be scaled back to keep it reasonable. In reality a grand total of $2600 in the richest nation on earth after all this time would still be a huge slap in the face, but generations of media spin have gone into keeping Americans from attaining that level of rightful entitlement.

    So as of this writing the internet is full of angry Americans actually typing the words “$1400 is not $2000”, which is totally bananas. People should not have to say that the number 1400 is not the same as the number 2000. It feels like if my Twitter feed was full of people saying “Cars are not birds”, or “Pogs are not iPhones”, or “Mimes are not salad”. People should not have to make such self-evident clarifications.

    But they apparently do need to make such clarifications, because scumbags like Adam Schiff are looking them right in the eye, sharing information that says “$1,400 checks” on it, and telling them that it says “$2000 relief checks”.

    2 + 2 = 5.

    Image

    So again, it’s pretty clear that America isn’t going to attempt to reverse the conditions which created Trump and all the extremist factions that everyone’s been freaking out about since the Capitol riot. Obama led to Trump, and the strategy going forward is to just keep tightening the neoliberal screws like both Obama and Trump did throughout their entire administrations. And, of course, to advance new “domestic terrorism” laws.

    As we discussed previously, Biden has often boasted of being the original author of the Patriot Act years before it was rapidly rolled out amid the fear and blind obsequiousness of the aftermath of 9/11. Now in the aftermath of the Capitol riot we are seeing a push to roll out new authoritarian laws around terrorism, this time taking aim at “domestic terror”, which were also in preparation prior to the event used to manufacture support for them.

    In a new article for Washington Monthly titled “It’s Time for a Domestic Terrorism Law“, Bill Scher argues against left-wing critics of the coming laws like Glenn Greenwald and Jacobin‘s Luke Savage saying such “knee-jerk reactions” against potential authoritarian abuses fail to address the growing problem. He opens with the acknowledgement that “Joe Biden’s transition team was already working on a domestic terrorism law before the insurrection,” and then he just keeps on writing as though that’s not weird or suspicious in any way.

    Scher lists among the growing threat of domestic terror not just white supremacists and right-wing extremists but “extremist left-wing domestic terrorism” as well. He approvingly cites Adam Schiff’s Confronting The Threat of Terrorism Act, which “creates a definition of domestic terrorism broadly encompassing plots that carry a ‘substantial risk of serious bodily injury’ along with an ‘intent to intimidate or coerce a civilian population’ or ‘influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion.’” The ACLU has unequivocally denounced Schiff’s bill, saying it “would unnecessarily expand law enforcement authorities to target and discriminate against the very communities Congress is seeking to protect.”

    Known CIA asset Ken Dilanian has also been trotted out to make the case that Americans have too many rights for their own good, co-authoring an NBC article titled “Worried about free speech, FBI never issued intelligence bulletin about possible Capitol violence“.

    “FBI intelligence analysts gathered information about possible violence involving the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6., but the FBI never distributed a formal intelligence bulletin, in part because of concerns that doing so might have run afoul of free speech protections, a current and two former senior FBI officials familiar with the matter told NBC News,” the article warns, making sure to inform readers that “experts say the lack of a domestic terrorism statute constrains the FBI from treating far-right and far-left groups the same as Americans who are radicalized to violence by Al Qaeda or ISIS ideology.”

    We can expect to see more such articles going forward.

    The only way to sincerely believe more Patriot Act-like laws will benefit Americans is to believe that the US will only have wise and beneficent leaders going forward, and the only way to sincerely believe the US will only have wise and beneficent leaders going forward is to be completely shit-eating stupid. The trajectory has already been chosen, and that trajectory is the one that has already given rise to Trump. Continuing along that same trajectory can only give rise to something far uglier, and that something far uglier will have whatever new authoritarian powers are added by Joe Biden.

    They’re not actually worried about “domestic terror”, they’re worried about any movement which threatens to topple the status quo. They want to make sure they can adequately spy, infiltrate, agitate and incarcerate into impotence any movement which provides a threat to America’s rulers and the system which funnels them wealth and power at the expense of everyone else. The movements which most threaten this are not rightists, who are generally more or less aligned with the interests of the oligarchic empire, but the left.

    This is who they’ll end up targeting going forward, and whatever Biden and Company wind up rolling out to fight “domestic terrorism” will help them do so.

    _____________________________

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • The US Capitol Building Riot and Its Blowback

    by Roger D. Harris / January 12th, 2021

    The right-wing demonstration turned violent riot at the US Capitol on January 6 was a spectacle, complete with Confederate flags and a QAnon shaman in red-white-and-blue face paint. The Venezuelan government stated: “With this unfortunate episode, the United States is experiencing what it has generated in other countries with its policies of aggression.”

    Some half of the active electorate voted for Trump, who believed the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent. The other half of the active electorate was abhorrent about what happened in Washington on January 6, speaking with semi-religious reverence about the desecration of sacred institutions. They believed, in contrast, that it was the 2016 presidential election that was stolen. The Russians were the culprits then and, for the last four years, they supported politicians ever vigilant against détente breaking out with the second most powerful nuclear state.

    The meme, “Due to travel restrictions this year, the US had to organize the coup at home,” went viral. Rather than a coup, as claimed by many in mainstream media, what happened in DC was a riot. “There is a huge difference,” observes Glenn Greenwald, “between, on the one hand, thousands of people shooting their way into the Capitol after a long-planned, coordinated plot with the goal of seizing permanent power, and, on the other, an impulsive and grievance-driven crowd more or less waltzing into the Capitol as the result of strength in numbers and then leaving a few hours later.”

    Whether Trump intended to stage a coup was secondary to whether he could do so. The institutions of state power were aligned against him, as indicated by the last ten secretaries of defense who admonished no go. Too much attention has been wasted obsessing about what was, at best, a delusion.

    The myriad maladies of the American body politic did not originate with Mr. Trump and will not terminate with his departure. He was unique, but not exceptional. His style was all his own, but the substance of the reign of 45 revealed a dreary continuity with his predecessors. And when Trump made feeble attempts to deviate, as with ending endless wars, the Democrats and the permanent state slapped him back into line.

    In fact, Trump may not go away. And for that he will have the liberals to thank. Just like some Trotskyists have made a career of exorcising the specter of Stalin, who died in 1953, liberals will be doing the same with Trump.

    Even if Trump wanted to gracefully bow out of public life – an unlikely outcome – liberals would keep on flogging his dead horse, for Trump has been their greatest asset. And well the liberals need to hold on to the ghost of Trump, as being “not-Trump” is their defining character now that liberalism is dead. Their agenda consists of simply carrying forward the same basic program of neoliberalism at home (but with diversity) and imperialism abroad (but with responsibility to protect) as Trump, only with more finesse.

    How unfathomable it is that a blowhard, paunchy, septuagenarian with a dyed hair combover could lead a right-wing cult movement. Far more bizarre is that person is also the president of the US, who in the 2020 election received more votes than any candidate in history except for his successful challenger. Arguably a white supremist, he garnered 58% of the white voters but also 18% of the black male voters and 36% of the Latino men. That 83% of those who felt the economy was a prime issue chose Trump is an insight into why someone so repugnant could attract so many votes.

    In short, the system has not been meeting the needs of its people, its naked dysfunctionality is bare for all to see, and the ruling circles are experiencing a crisis of legitimacy. The response of the rulers to mass discontent is not to address the root causes but to step up suppression as the trajectory of neoliberalism lurches toward fascism. The aftermath of the events of January 6 has precipitated blowbacks by the ruling elites, such as proposed anti-domestic terrorism measures, in anticipation of popular resistance to the intensifying contradictions of the US imperial project.

    The drama played out on January 6 reflected the distress generated by historical developments in late-stage capitalism: globalization and automation-induced job losses, accelerating wealth and income inequality, reduced access to educational opportunities and health care, food insecurity and hunger, and the threat of becoming homeless.

    The system’s unresolved contradictions are increasingly visible to its victims in both progressive (e.g., Black Lives Matter movement) and reactionary forms (e.g., the Trump phenomenon). Neither of these tendencies are likely to fade away because the conditions that precipitated them will only be exacerbated. Nativist and white-supremist elements – long an undercurrent in the American polity – have been given oxygen by Trump. The Democrats dismiss the right-wing insurgency as a “basket of deplorables.” The left needs to both resist the growing right-wing presence and neutralize them, if not win them over to understand the true source of their discontent.

    The Capitol building riot is being spun to distract from the failure of the neoliberal state to meet the needs of its citizens. Suddenly forgotten are urgently needed reforms like Medicare for All and a stimulus that benefits working people. Instead, the incoming administration of Joe Biden is pushing extensions of the authoritarian state under the guise of combatting domestic terrorism. But thanks to the Patriot Act, for which Biden takes credit as its prime writer, and other such repressive legislation already on the books, the state has already too much power over its citizens.

    These extensions of the coercive power of the state have been and will be used to suppress popular movements and need to be resisted. Beware, the mania for censoring so-called hate speech is a tool for silencing any dissent to the ruling powers. The price of cutting off Trump’s rants on Twitter and Facebook is the ascendence of monopoly corporations that are so powerful that they can even muzzle an elected president. Commonplace is the new normal of unchecked private corporations collecting data 24/7 on our most intimate activities.

    Because the ruling class cannot solve the maturing contradictions of global capitalism, their response to their crisis of legitimacy is to increasingly rely on repression. We cannot rely on the Democrats, who are now backed by the so-called moderate Republicans and underwritten by finance capital, because they are the ones cheerleading the descent into accelerating authoritarianism, as they champion censorship and the oppressive security state measures.

    Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad warn of three world existential crises: nuclear annihilation, climate catastrophe, and neoliberal destruction of the social contract. The ruling class is preparing for a real insurrection and, given the alternative, the people may not disappoint them.

    This article was posted on Tuesday, January 12th, 2021 at 3:42pm and is filed under Authoritarianism, Democrats, Donald Trump, Global Capitalism, Joe Biden, Neoliberalism, Opinion, Protests, Republicans, Surveillance, The “Left”, The “Right”, White Supremacy.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Raskolnikov’s Dream Come True

    Something is happening here,
    But you don’t know what it is,
    Do you, Mr. Jones?
    — Bob Dylan, Ballad of a Thin Man, 1965

    It’s hard.

    Life today seems like a dream, doesn’t it?  Surreal to the point where everything seems haunted and betwixt and between, or this against that, or that and this against us.

    Something.

    Or a Luis Buñuel film.  The logic of the irrational. Surrealistic.  A film made to draw us into an ongoing nightmare.  Hitchcock with no resolution. Total weirdness, as Hunter Thompson said was coming before he blew his brains out.  A life movie made to hypnotize in this darkening world where reality is created on screens, as Buñuel said of watching movies:

    This kind of cinematographic hypnosis is no doubt due to the darkness of the theatre and to the rapidly changing scenes, lights, and camera movements, which weaken the spectator’s critical intelligence and exercise over him a kind of fascination.

    — Louis Bunuel, My last sigh, Knopf, 1983

    Here we are in Weirdsville, USA where most people, whether of the left, right, or center, are hypnotized by the flickering screens.

    That’s what movies do.

    That’s what long planned psychological operations do.

    That’s what digital technology allows corrupt rulers and the national security state with its Silicon Valley partners in crime to do.

    We now live in a screen world where written words and logic are beside the point. Facts don’t matter. Personal physical experience doesn’t matter.  Clear thinking doesn’t matter. Hysterical reactions are what matter.  Manipulated emotions are what matter.  Saying “Fuck You” is now de rigueur, as if that were the answer to an argument.

    It’s all a movie now with the latest theatrical performance having been the January 6, 2021 stage show filmed at the U.S. Capital.  A performance so obvious that it isn’t obvious for those hypnotized by propaganda, even when the movie clearly shows that the producers arranged for the “domestic terrorists” to be ushered into the Capital.  They let the “Nazis” in on Dr. Goebbels orders.  Thank God Almighty they were beaten back before they seized power in their Halloween costumes.

    Now who could have given that order to the Capital and D.C. police, Secret Service, National Guard, and the vast array of militarized Homeland Security forces that knew well in advance of the January 6 demonstration?

    Who gave the stand-down orders on September 11, 2001, events that were clearly anticipated and afterwards were described by so many as if they were a movie?  Surreal. Dreamlike.

    As with the events of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent anthrax attacks, the recently staged show at the Capital that the mainstream media laughingly call an attempted coup d’état will result in a new “Patriot Act” aimed at the new terrorists – domestic ones – i.e. anyone who dissents from the authoritarian crackdown long planned and underway; anyone who questions the vast new censorship and the assault on the First Amendment; anyone who questions the official narrative of Covid-19 and the lockdowns; anyone who suggests that there are linkages between these events, etc.

    Who, after all, introduced the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act in 1995 that became the template for the Patriot Act in 2001 that was passed into law after September 11, 2001?  None other than former Senator Joseph Biden. Remember Joe?  He has a new plan.

    Of course, the massive Patriot Act had been written well before that fateful September day and was ready to be implemented by a Senate vote of 98-1, the sole holdout being Democratic Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin.  In the House of Representatives the vote was 357-66.

    For those familiar (or unfamiliar)  with history and fabricated false flags, they might want also to meditate on the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964 that gave Lyndon Johnson his seal of approval to escalate the war against Vietnam that killed so many millions. The vote for that fake crisis was 416-0 in the House and 88-2 in the Senate.

    In the words of Mark Twain:

    Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.

    — Mark Twain: A Biography, Albert Bigelow Paine,  Kolthoff Press, 2008

    Harry Houdini, the magical performer who was able to escape from any trap, any nightmarish enclosure, any lockdown, once said, “It’s still an open question, however, as to what extent exposure really hurts a performer.”

    The question has been answered.  It doesn’t hurt at all, for phony events still mesmerize millions who are eager to suspend their disbelief for the sake of a sad strand of hope that their chosen leaders – whether Biden or Trump – are levelling with them and are not playing them for fools. To accept that Trump and Biden are scripted actors in a highly sophisticated reality TV movie is a bit of “reality” too hard to bear.  Exposing them and their minions doesn’t hurt at all.  There’s no business but show business.

    Houdini knew well the tricks used to deceive a gullible audience hypnotized by theatrics. “A magician is only an actor,” he said, “an actor pretending to be a magician.”  This a perfect description of the charlatans who serve as presidents of the United States.

    Life today seems like a dream, doesn’t it?

    “Will wonders ever cease,” said Houdini, as he closed his shows.

    When I was a child I had a repetitive dream that I was trapped in a maze.  Trying to escape, all I could hear as I tried desperately to find an exit was a droning sound.  Droning without end.  The only way I could escape the maze was to wake up – literally.  But this dream would repeat for many years to the point where I realized my dreams were connected to my actual family and life in the U.S.A.

    Then, when I was later in the Marines and felt imprisoned and was attempting to get out as a conscientious objector, the dream changed to being trapped in the Marines, or the prison I was expecting if they didn’t let me go. Even when I got out of the Marines and was not in prison, the dreams that I was continued.

    It took me years to learn how to escape.

    I mention such dreams since they seem to encapsulate the feelings so many people have today. A sense of being trapped in a senseless social nightmare. Prisoners. Lost in a horror movie like Kafka’s novel The Castle in which the protagonist K futilely seeks to gain access to the rulers who control the world from their castle but can never reach his goal.

    But these are dreams and The Castle is fiction.

    On a conscious level, however, many people continue to rationalize their grasp of what is going on in the United States as if what they take to be reality is not fiction. Trump supporters –despite what are seen by them as his betrayals when he said on January 7 that “The demonstrators who infiltrated the Capitol have defiled the seat of American democracy….My focus now turns to ensuring a smooth, orderly and seamless transition of power. This moment calls for healing and reconciliation.” – still cling to the belief that he is the man they believe in and was going to “clean the swamp” but was sabotaged by the “deep state.” Biden supporters, driven by their obsessive hatred for Trump and the ongoing delusions that the Democratic Party, like the Republican, is not thoroughly corrupt, look forward to the Biden presidency and the new normal when he can “build back better.”  For both groups true faith never dies. It’s very touching.

    As I have written before, if the Democrats and the Republicans are at war as is often claimed, it is only over who gets the larger share of the spoils. Trump and Biden work for the same bosses, those I call the Umbrella People (those who own and run the country through their intelligence/military/media operatives), who produce and direct the movie that keeps so many Americans on the edge of their seats in the hope that their chosen good guy wins in the end.

    It might seem as if I am wrong and that because the Democrats and their accomplices have spent years attempting to oust Trump through Russia-gate, impeachment, etc. that what seems true is true and Trump is simply a crazy aberration who somehow slipped through the net of establishment control to rule for four years.  A Neo-Nazi billionaire who emerged from a TV screen and a golden tower high above the streets of New York.

    This seems self-evident to the Democrats and the supporters of Joseph Biden, and even to many Republicans.

    For Trump’s supporters, he seems to be a true Godsend, a real patriot who emerged out of political nowhere to restore America to its former greatness and deliver economic justice to the forgotten middle-Americans whose livelihoods have been devastated by neo-liberal economic policies and the outsourcing of jobs.

    Two diametrically opposed perspectives.

    But if that is so, why, despite Trump and Biden’s superficial differences – and Obama’s, Hillary Clinton’s and George W. Bush’s for that matter – have the super-rich gotten richer and richer over the decades and the war on terror continued as the military budget has increased each year and the armament industries and the Wall Street crooks continued to rake in the money at the expense of everyone else?  These are a few facts that can’t be disputed. There are many more. So what’s changed under Trump?  We are talking about nuances, small changes.  A clown with a big mouth versus traditional, “dignified” con men.

    Trump’s followers were betrayed the day he was sworn in, as Biden’s will be shortly unless they support a crackdown on civil rights, the squelching of the First Amendment, and laws against dissent under the aegis of a war against domestic terrorism.

    I’m afraid that is so.  Censorship of dissent that is happening now will increase dramatically under the Biden administration.

    Now we have the “insurrection,” also known as an attempted “coup d’état,” with barbarians breaching the gates of the sacred abode of the politicians of both parties who have supported bloody U.S. coups throughout the world for the past seventy plus years. Here is another example of history beginning as tragedy and ending as farce.

    But who is laughing?

    If you were writing this script as part of long-term planning, and average people were getting disgusted from decades of being screwed and were sick of politicians and their lying ways, wouldn’t you stop the reruns and create a new show?

    Come on, this is Hollywood where creative showmen can dazzle our minds with plots so twisted that when you leave the theater you keep wondering what it was all about and arguing with your friends about the ending. So create a throwback film where the good guy versus the bad guy was seemingly very clear, and while the system ground on, people would be at each other’s throats over the obvious differences, even while they were fabricated or were minor. This being the simple and successful age-old strategy of divide and conquer

    I realize that it is very hard for many to entertain the thought that Trump and Biden are not arch-enemies but are players in a spectacle created to confound at the deepest psychological levels.  I am not arguing that the Democrats didn’t want Hillary Clinton to win in 2016.  I am saying they knew Trump was a better opponent, not only because they could probably defeat him and garner more of the spoils, but because if he possibly won he was easily controlled because he was compromised.  By whom?  Not the Democrats, but the “Deep State” forces that control Hillary Clinton and all the presidents.  A compromised and corrupt lot.

    The Democrats and Republicans were not in charge in 2016 or in 2020.  Their bosses were.  The Umbrella people.  Biden will carry out their orders, and while everyone will conveniently forget what actually happened during Trump’s tenure, as I previously mentioned, they will only remember how the Democrats “tried” to oust this man in the black hat, while Biden will carry on Trump’s legacy with minor changes and a lot of PR. He will seem like a breath of fresh air as he continues and expands the toxic policies of all presidents.  So it goes.

    Throughout these recent days that the corporate mainstream media have devoted to this Trump/Biden saga, Julian Assange, a truth teller if ever there were one, remains tortured and locked up in an English high-security prison cell.  His plight has been a minor note at best for the corporate media that is focused on the American “coup d’état.” The spectacle rolls on as an innocent journalist who exposed the vast murderous crimes of the American government is left to slowly die in a horrible prison cell. A man who, if free, could report the truth of this current charade and expose the bloody underside of this magic show.

    Long ago in Russia, another dissident, Fyodor Dostoevsky, was also sentenced on trumped up charges to prison and exile in Siberia for being “freethinking” and a socialist enemy of the state. When he was finally released, he wrote a novel that was published in 1866.  It was Crime and Punishment, a masterpiece about a man named Rodian Romanovich Raskolnikov who, like Dostoevsky, is sentenced to exile and imprisonment in Siberia.  In Raskolnikov’s case, it was for killing an old woman pawnbroker to see if he was “above the common ruck.” The story explores Raskolnikov’s dual consciousness and the right to murder; prideful intellect versus compassion; rationalism versus spiritual values; freedom versus determinism; the individual versus the state.

    Like Nietzsche twenty years later, Dostoevsky sent out a warning long ago about the terrifying consequences that would follow in the wake of certain forms of thinking that would result in nihilism. To be “above the common ruck” and murder at will, to play with people as though they were what Raskolnikov calls the woman he murders – “louses,” to create divided minds in a game of social schizophrenia through antitheses that conceal the magician’s devious truths.

    At the end of Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov, while still in Siberian prison exile, feels that he, like Lazarus, has been raised from the dead.  He realizes that there is a solution to his split mind and that he has found it as he transitions “from one world into another…his initiation into a new, unknown life.”

    But such a resolution that I will not divulge is preceded by a very strange dream, one that rings a bell today when life seems like a dream with something happening here but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?

    When he [Raskolnikov] was better, he remembered the dreams he had had while he was feverish and delirious.  He dreamt that the whole world was condemned to a terrible strange new plague that had come to Europe from the depths of Asia.  Everyone was to be destroyed except a few chosen ones.  Some sort of new microbe was attacking people’s bodies, but these microbes were endowed with intelligence and will.  Men attacked by them became instantly furious and mad.  But never had men considered themselves so intellectual and so completely in possession of the truth as these sufferers, never had they considered their decisions, their scientific conclusions, their moral convictions so infallible.  Whole villages, whole towns and peoples were driven mad by the infection.  Everyone was excited and did not understand one another.  Each thought that he alone had the truth and was wretched looking at the others, beat himself on the breast, wept, and wrung his hands.  They did not know how to judge and could not agree what to consider evil and what good; they did not know who to blame, who to justify….The alarm bells kept ringing all day long in the towns; men rushed together, but why they were summoned and who was summoning them no one knew….The plague spread and moved further and further.  Only a few men could be saved in the whole world.  They were a pure chosen people, destined to found a new race and a new life, to renew and purify the earth, but no one had seen these men, no one had heard their words and their voices.

    Have you?

    The post Raskolnikov’s Dream Come True first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Reserve Bank investigates cyber attack – latest in NZ digital breaches

    The NZ Reserve Bank says it is investigating the breach, which may have exposed “commercially and personally sensitive information”. Image: Alexander Robertson/RNZ

    By RNZ News

    A cyber security expert says attacks like the latest on the Reserve Bank could be due to the type of data systems they are using.

    The Reserve Bank revealed yesterday a third party file sharing service it uses, which contains some sensitive information, had been hacked.

    It is the latest after a string of cyber attacks in the past year targeting several major organisations in New Zealand, including the NZ Stock Exchange – which had its servers knocked out of public view for nearly a week in August.

    Titanium Defence cyber security expert Tony Grasso, who was the cyber lead at the Department of Internal Affairs, told Morning Report file sharing systems could weaken security.

    Grasso said there were still lots of questions about the breach to be answered.

    “The question that will be on my mind, and I’m sure this will be what they’re looking at is, who got in, how did they get in, and more importantly, what information has been taken from this file share, but more interestingly than that, have they got from the file share onto the bank systems internally?”

    However, he said it would be hard to say who could be behind the breach at this stage.

    Foreign intelligence agency?
    “You have to always keep in mind it may be a foreign intelligence national agency whenever something as big as the Reserve Bank … any government department within reason, you always have to have that at the back of your mind,” he said.

    “It would be interesting to find out how they were caught. Our detection systems here are good, if it’s one of those systems that have come from another government agency, a more sensitive government agency, that may indicate it was a foreign actor, or these days criminal gangs are getting together and they’ve become an industry on their own and are really good at getting into organisations.

    “Imagine the ransom you could put on the Reserve Bank if you encrypted all their data, for example.”

    Grasso hoped for a more detailed report from the Reserve Bank on who it could be.

    “The Americans are very good at saying ‘it was definitely a foreign government’ and they normally name them as well. It would be good to know if it was that, if it was a criminal organisation or if was it a just a lone wolf – we have loads of these in our industry.”

    The Reserve Bank said sensitive information “may” have been breached.

    The type of information exposed would depend on who the third party was, Grass said.

    Third party may be IT provider
    “A third party could be just an IT provider and they’re just sharing architecture documents, that would be bad of course. But it could be information around covid for example.

    “If they were working with external agencies about the recovery of the company from covid … it could be papers around how we’re planning for our recovery, I mean who knows.

    “I would hope that sensitive stuff like that isn’t held in a third party file server, I’m fairly sure it wouldn’t be.”

    He said even if its own systems were very secure, having a third party who was insecure connecting to the systems could bring a threat.

    Yesterday, Reserve Bank Governor Adrian Orr said they were investigating the breach with experts and authorities.

    “The nature and extent of information that has been potentially accessed is still being determined, but it may include some commercially and personally sensitive information.

    “It will take time to understand the full implications of this breach, and we are working with system users whose information may have been accessed. Our core functions remain sound and operational.”

    The Reserve Bank declined a request for an interview with Morning Report.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

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    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Year Zero

    2020 was GloboCap Year Zero. The year when the global capitalist ruling classes did away with the illusion of democracy and reminded everyone who is actually in charge, and exactly what happens when anyone challenges them.

    In the relatively short span of the last ten months, societies throughout the world have been transformed beyond recognition. Constitutional rights have been suspended. Protest has been banned. Dissent is being censored. Government officials are issuing edicts restricting the most basic aspects of our lives … where we can go, when we can go there, how long we are allowed to spend there, how many friends we are allowed to meet there, whether and when we can spend time with our families, what we are allowed to say to each other, who we can have sex with, where we have to stand, how we are allowed to eat and drink, etc. The list goes on and on.

    The authorities have assumed control of the most intimate aspects of our daily lives. We are being managed like inmates in a prison, told when to eat, sleep, exercise, granted privileges for good behavior, punished for the slightest infractions of an ever-changing set of arbitrary rules, forced to wear identical, demeaning uniforms (albeit only on our faces), and otherwise relentlessly bullied, abused, and humiliated to keep us compliant.

    None of which is accidental, or has anything to do with any actual virus, or any other type of public health threat. Yes, before some of you go ballistic, I do believe there is an actual virus, which a number of people have actually died from, or which at least has contributed to their deaths … but there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever of any authentic public health threat that remotely justifies the totalitarian emergency measures we are being subjected to or the damage that is being done to society. Whatever you believe about the so-called “pandemic,” it really is as simple as that. Even if one accepts the official “science,” you do not transform the entire planet into a pathologized-totalitarian nightmare in response to a health threat of this nature.

    The notion is quite literally insane.

    GloboCap is not insane, however. They know exactly what they are doing … which is teaching us a lesson, a lesson about power. A lesson about who has it and who doesn’t. For students of history it’s a familiar lesson, a standard in the repertoire of empires, not to mention the repertoire of penal institutions.

    The name of the lesson is “Look What We Can Do to You Any Time We Fucking Want.” The point of the lesson is self-explanatory. The USA taught the world this lesson when it nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki. GloboCap (and the US military) taught it again when they invaded Iraq and destabilized the entire Greater Middle East. It is regularly taught in penitentiaries when the prisoners start to get a little too unruly and remember that they outnumber the guards. That’s where the “lockdown” concept originated. It isn’t medical terminology. It is penal institution terminology.

    As we have been experiencing throughout 2020, the global capitalist ruling classes have no qualms about teaching us this lesson. It’s just that they would rather not have to unless it’s absolutely necessary. They would prefer that we believe we are living in “democracies,” governed by the “rule of law,” where everyone is “free,” and so on. It’s much more efficient and much less dangerous than having to repeatedly remind us that they can take away our “democratic rights” in a heartbeat, unleash armed goon squads to enforce their edicts, and otherwise control us with sheer brute force.

    People who have spent time in prison, or who have lived in openly totalitarian societies, are familiar with being ruled by brute force. Most Westerners are not, so it has come as a shock. The majority of them still can’t process it. They cannot see what is staring them in the face. They cannot see it because they can’t afford to see it. If they did, it would completely short-circuit their brains. They would suffer massive psychotic breakdowns, and become entirely unable to function, so their psyches will not allow them to see it.

    Others, who see it, can’t quite accept the simplicity of it (i.e., the lesson being taught), so they are proposing assorted complicated theories about what it is and who is behind it … the Great Reset, China, the Illuminati, Transhumanism, Satanism, Communism, whatever. Some of these theories are at least partially accurate. Others are utter bull-goose lunacy.

    They all obscure the basic point of the lesson.

    The point of the lesson is that GloboCap — the entire global-capitalist system acting as a single global entity — can, virtually any time it wants, suspend the Simulation of Democracy, and crack down on us with despotic force. It can (a) declare a “global pandemic” or some other type of “global emergency,” (b) cancel our so-called “rights,” (c) have the corporate media bombard us with lies and propaganda for months, (d) have the Internet companies censor any and all forms of dissent and evidence challenging said propaganda, (e) implement all kinds of new intrusive “safety” and “security” measures, including but not limited to the physical violation of our bodies … and so on. I think you get the picture. (The violation of our bodies is important, which is why they love “cavity searches” in prison, and why the torture-happy troops at Abu Ghraib were obsessed with sexually violating their victims.)

    And the “pandemic” is only one part of the lesson. The other part is being forced to watch (or permitted to watch, depending on your perspective) as GloboCap makes an example of Trump, as they made examples of Corbyn and Sanders, as they made examples of Saddam and Gaddafi, and other “uncooperative” foreign leaders, as they will make an example of any political figurehead that challenges their power. It does not matter to GloboCap that such political figureheads pose no real threat. The people who rally around them do. Nor does it make the slightest difference whether these figureheads or the folks who support them identify as “left” or “right.” GloboCap could not possibly care less. The figureheads are just the teaching materials in the lesson that they are teaching us.

    And now, here we are, at the end of the lesson … not the end of the War on Populism, just the end of this critical Trumpian part of it. Once the usurper has been driven out of office, the War on Populism will be folded back into the War on Terror, or the War on Extremism, or whatever GloboCap decides to call it … the name hardly matters. It is all the same war.

    Whatever they decide to call it, this is GloboCap Year Zero. It is time for reeducation, my friends. It is time for cultural revolution. No, not communist cultural revolution … global capitalist cultural revolution. It is time to flush the aberration of the last four years down the memory hole, and implement global “New Normal” Gleichschaltung, to make sure that this never happens again.

    Oh, yes, things are about to get “normal.” Extremely “normal.” Suffocatingly “normal.” Unimaginably oppressively “normal.” And I’m not just talking about the “Coronavirus measures.” This has been in the works for the last four years.

    Remember, back in 2016, when everyone was so concerned about “normality,” and how Trump was “not normal,” and must never be “normalized?” Well, here we are. This is it. This is the part where GloboCap restores “normality,” a “new normality,” a pathologized-totalitarian “normality,” a “normality” which tolerates no dissent and demands complete ideological conformity.

    From now on, when the GloboCap Intelligence Community and their mouthpieces in the corporate media tell you something happened, that thing will have happened, exactly as they say it happened, regardless of whether it actually happened, and anyone who says it didn’t will be labeled an “extremist,” a “conspiracy theorist,” a “denier,” or some other meaningless epithet. Such un-persons will be dealt with ruthlessly. They will be censored, deplatformed, demonetized, decertified, rendered unemployable, banned from traveling, socially ostracized, hospitalized, imprisoned, or otherwise erased from “normal” society.

    You will do what you are told. You will not ask questions. You will believe whatever they tell you to believe. You will believe it, not because it makes any sense, but simply because you have been ordered to believe it. They aren’t trying to trick or deceive anybody. They know their lies don’t make any sense. And they know that you know they don’t make any sense. They want you to know it. That is the point. They want you to know they are lying to you, manipulating you, openly mocking you, and that they can say and do anything they want to you, and you will go along with it, no matter how insane.

    If they order you to take a fucking vaccine, you will not ask what is in the vaccine, or start whining about the “potential side effects.” You will shut up and take the fucking vaccine. If they tell you to put a mask on your kid, you will put a fucking mask on your fucking kid. You will not go digging up Danish studies proving the pointlessness of putting masks on kids. If they tell you the Russians rigged the election, then the Russians rigged the fucking election. And, if, four years later, they turn around and tell you that rigging an election is impossible, then rigging an election is fucking impossible. It isn’t an invitation to debate. It is a GloboCap-verified fact-checked fact. You will stand (or kneel) in your designated, color-coded, social-distancing box and repeat this verified fact-checked fact, over and over, like a fucking parrot, or they will discover some new mutant variant of virus and put you back in fucking “lockdown.” They will do this until you get your mind right, or you can live the rest of your life on Zoom, or tweeting content that no one but the Internet censors will ever see into the digital void in your fucking pajamas. The choice is yours … it’s is all up to you!

    Or … I don’t know, this is just a crazy idea, you could turn off the fucking corporate media, do a little fucking research on your own, grow a backbone and some fucking guts, and join the rest of us “dangerous extremists” who are trying to fight back against the New Normal. Yes, it will cost you, and we probably won’t win, but you won’t have to torture your kids on airplanes, and you don’t even have to “deny” the virus!

    That’s it … my last column of 2020. Happy totalitarian holidays!

    The post Year Zero first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • How Gulf States became Business Partners in Israel’s Occupation

    Since signing the Abraham Accords, the UAE and Bahrain have been actively colluding with Israel’s settler movement and military authorities

    The professed rationale for the recent Abraham Accords, so-called “peace deals” signed with Israel by the UAE and Bahrain, was to stymie Israeli efforts to annex swaths of the West Bank.

    The aim was supposedly to neutralise another “peace” plan – one issued early this year by US President Donald Trump’s administration – that approved Israel’s annexation of large areas of the West Bank dominated by illegal Jewish settlements.

    The two Gulf states trumpeted the fact that, in signing the accords in September, they had effectively scotched that move, thereby salvaging hopes of a future Palestinian state. Few observers entirely bought the official story – not least because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed that annexation had only been put on temporary hold.

    The real purpose of the Abraham Accords appeared less about saving Palestinians than allowing Gulf states to go public with, and expand, their existing ties to Israel. Regional intelligence could now be shared more easily, especially on Iran, and the Gulf would gain access to Israeli hi-tech and US military technology and weapons systems.

    Separately, Sudan was induced to sign the accords after promises it would be removed from Washington’s list of “terror-supporting” states, opening the door to debt relief and aid. And last week, Morocco became the fourth Arab state to initiate formal relations with Israel after the Trump administration agreed to recognise its occupation of Western Sahara.

    Twisting more arms

    Israel, in return, has been able to begin “normalising” with an important bloc of Arab states – all without offering any meaningful concessions on the Palestinian issue.

    Qatar and Saudi Arabia are also reported to have been considering doing their own deals with Israel. Jared Kushner, Trump’s Middle East adviser, visited the region this month in what was widely assumed to be a bid to twist arms.

    Riyadh’s hesitation, however, appears to have increased after Trump lost last month’s US presidential election to Joe Biden.

    Last week, during an online conference held in Bahrain and attended by Israeli Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi, a former senior Saudi government official, Turki al-Faisal al-Saud, launched a blistering verbal attack on Israel, saying it jailed Palestinians in “concentration camps” and had built an “apartheid wall”. It was unclear whether he was speaking in more than a personal capacity.

    While the covert purpose of the Abraham Accords was difficult to obscure, the stated aim – of aiding Palestinians by preventing Israel’s annexation of the West Bank – was still seen as a vital tool for the UAE and Bahrian to sell these agreements back home.

    But in practice, both have quickly jettisoned any pretence that Palestinians will benefit from these deals. Not only that, but already they barely bother to conceal the fact that they are actively and tangibly colluding with Israel to harm Palestinians – by bolstering Israel’s illegal settlements and subsidising its military regime of occupation.

    Trade with settlements

    Bahrain demonstrated this month how indifferent it is to the negative impacts on Palestinians. On a visit to Israel, the country’s trade minister, Zayed bin Rashid al-Zayani, said Bahrain was open to importing products from Israel wherever they were manufactured. “We have no issue with labelling or origin,” he said.

    The comment suggested that Manama was ready to become a gateway for Israel to export settlement products to the rest of the Arab world, helping to bolster the settlements’ legitimacy and economic viability. Bahrain’s trade policy with Israel would then be even laxer than that of the European Union, Israel’s top trade partner. The EU’s feeble guidelines recommend the labelling of settlement products.

    After wide reporting of Zayani’s comments, Bahrain’s state news agency issued a statement shortly afterwards saying he had been “misinterpreted”, and that there would be no import of settlement goods. But it is hard not to interpret the remarks as indicating that behind the scenes, Bahrain is only too willing to collude in Israel’s refusal to distinguish between products from Israel and those made in the settlements.

    That this is the trading basis of the Abraham Accords is further highlighted by reports that the UAE is already welcoming business with Israel’s illegal settlements. An Israeli winery, using grapes grown on the Golan Heights, a large plateau of Syrian territory seized by Israel in 1967 and illegally annexed in 1981, has reportedly started exporting to the UAE, which has liberalised its alcohol laws for non-citizens.

    This is a fruitful turn of events for Israel’s 500,000 settlers in the occupied West Bank. They have lost no time touting for business, with the first delegation arriving in Dubai last month hoping to tap new markets in the Arab world via the UAE. Last week a settler delegation reportedly returned to Dubai to sign an agreement with a UAE company to import settlement goods, including alcohol, honey, olive oil, and sesame paste.

    New low-point

    This marks a new low-point in the shift by Arab states away from their original position that Israel was a colonial implant in the region, sponsored by the West, and that there could be no “normalisation” – or normal relations – with it.

    In 2002, Saudi Arabia launched the Arab Peace Initiative, which offered Israel full diplomatic relations in return for ending the occupation. But Gulf states are now not only normalising with Israel when the occupation is actually intensifying; they are normalising with the occupation itself – as well as its bastard progeny, the settlements.

    Israel has built more than 250 settlements across a vast expanse of occupied Palestinian territory – 62 percent of the West Bank, referred to as Area C under the Oslo Accords. This area was supposed to be gradually transferred to the Palestinian Authority (PA), the government-in-waiting under Mahmoud Abbas, to become the territorial backbone of a Palestinian state.

    Instead, over the past quarter of a century, Israel has used its supposedly temporary control over Area C to rapidly expand the settlements, stealing vital land and resources. These colonies have been highly integrated into Israel, with settler roads criss-crossing the occupied West Bank and tightly limiting Palestinian movement.

    The peace deals with the UAE and Bahrain will help the settlements entrench further, assisting Israel’s longstanding policy of annexing the West Bank in all but name, through the creation of facts on the ground – the very outcome the Abraham Accords were ostensibly meant to prevent.

    Yossi Dagan, head of the West Bank regional council that visited Dubai last month, declared that there was “no contradiction between our demand to impose sovereignty [annex large parts of the West Bank] and the strengthening of commercial and industrial ties” with the Gulf.

    Al-Aqsa dividend

    In other words, settlers see the Abraham Accords as a business opportunity to expand their footprint in the occupied West Bank, not an obstacle. The likely gains for the settlers will include tourism, too, as visitors from the Gulf are expected to flock to al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem.

    The irony is that, because of Israel’s physical seizure of areas around the Islamic holy site and its control over access, Gulf Arabs will have far greater rights at al-Aqsa than the majority of Palestinians, who cannot reach it.

    Jordan, which has long been the custodian of al-Aqsa, justifiably fears that Saudi Arabia may use a future accord with Israel to muscle its way into taking charge of the Jerusalem holy site, adding it to its guardianship of Mecca and Medina.

    In occupied Jerusalem, Palestinians are deprived of the chance to develop their own housing, let alone infrastructure to cope with the business opportunities provided by the arrival of wealthy Gulf Arabs. That should leave Israel and its settler population – rather than Palestinians – well-placed to reap the dividends from any new tourism ventures.

    In a supreme irony, a member of the Abu Dhabi ruling family has bought a major stake in the Beitar Jerusalem football team, whose supporters are fiercely anti-Arab and back the takeover of East Jerusalem by settlers.

    Palestinian laboratories

    During his visit, Bahrain’s Zayani observed that, as his country geared up for flights to and from Israel next month: “We are fascinated by how integrated IT and the innovation sector in Israel has been embedded in every facet of life.”

    But Israel’s technology sector is “embedded in every facet of life” only because Israel treats the occupied Palestinian territories as a laboratory. Tests are conducted there on how best to surveil Palestinians, physically limit their movement and freedoms, and collect their biometric data.

    The hi-tech firms carrying out these experiments may be formally headquartered inside Israel, but they work and profit from their activities in the occupied territories. They are a vast complex of settlement businesses in their own right.

    This is why Nabil Shaath, an aide to Abbas, observed of the Gulf’s burgeoning ties with Israel that it was “painful to witness Arab cooperation with one of the worst manifestations of aggression against the Palestinian people, which is the Israeli settlements on our land”.

    Settler ally

    How enthusiastically the UAE and Bahrain are getting into the occupation business, and preparing to subsidise its worst features, is highlighted by the Abraham Fund, set up by the US in October. It is a vehicle for Gulf states and Israel to secure billions of dollars in private investment to underpin their new diplomatic relations.

    Again, the official story has glossed over the reality. According to statements from the main parties, the fund is intended to raise at least $3billion to bolster regional economic cooperation and development initiatives.

    The UAE’s minister of state, Ahmed Ali Al Sayegh, has said: “The initiative can be a source of economic and technological strength for the region, while simultaneously improving the lives of those who need the most support.”

    The fund is supposed to help Palestinians, as one of those groups most in need of support. But again, the main parties are not playing straight. Their deception is revealed by the Trump administration’s selection of who is to head the Abraham Fund, one of its last appointments before the handover to Biden.

    According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the fund will be overseen by Aryeh Lightstone, a fervently right-wing rabbi and ally of Israel’s settler community. Lightstone is a senior adviser to David Friedman, the US ambassador to Israel who has his own strong ties to the settlements. Friedman pushed aggressively for the US to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to occupied Jerusalem. Trump finally did so in May 2018, breaking an international consensus against locating diplomatic missions in Jerusalem.

    Checkpoint upgrade

    The political priorities of Lightstone are evident in one of the Abraham Fund’s first declared projects: to “modernise” Israeli checkpoints across the occupied West Bank.

    The checkpoint upgrade is being hailed by US officials as benefiting Palestinians. It will speed up their passage as they try to move around the occupied West Bank, and as those with permits enter Israel or the settlements to work. One senior Trump administration official promised checkpoint delays that currently keep Palestinians waiting for many hours could be dramatically cut: “If I can upgrade that, which doesn’t cost a lot of money, and have it take 30 seconds, I am blowing up [freeing up] 400,000 work hours a day.”

    There are many glaring problems with this approach – not least that under international law, belligerent military occupations such as Israel’s must be temporary in nature. Israel’s occupation has endured for more than five decades already.

    Efforts to make the occupation even more permanent – by improving and refining its infrastructure, such as through upgrades to create airport-style checkpoints – is in clear breach of international law. Now the Gulf will be intimately involved in subsidising these violations.

    Further, the idea that the Abraham Fund’s checkpoint upgrade is assisting Palestinians – “those who most need support” – or developing their economy is patently ridiculous. The fund is exclusively helping Israel, a robust first-world economy, which is supposed to shoulder the costs of its military rule over Palestinians.

    The economic costs of occupation are one of the few tangible pressures on Israel to withdraw from the territories and allow Palestinians sovereignty. If the oil-rich Gulf states help pick up the tab, they will incentivise Israel to stay put and steal yet more Palestinian land and resources.

    Indeed, the hours being freed up, even assuming that is what actually happens, are unlikely to help the Palestinian economy or bring financial benefits to the Palestinian labourers Israel has made dependent on its economy through the lengthy occupation. To develop their own economy, Palestinians need their land and resources stolen by Israel restored to them.

    Herding Palestinians

    Seen another way, the Abraham Fund’s planned checkpoint upgrade is actually a subsidy by the Gulf to the settlements. That is because the very purpose of the checkpoints is to enforce Israeli control over where and when Palestinians can travel in their homeland.

    Israel uses the checkpoints as a way to herd Palestinians into particular areas of the occupied West Bank, especially the third under nominal PA control, while blocking their entry to the rest. That includes a denial of access to the West Bank’s most fertile land and its best water sources. Those areas are exactly where Israel has been building and expanding the settlements.

    Palestinians are in a zero-sum battle against the settlers for control over land in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. Any help Israel receives in restricting their movement through checkpoints is a loss to Palestinians and a victory for the settlers. Modernised checkpoints will simply be far more efficient at herding Palestinians where Israel and the settlers want them to be.

    In partnering with Israel on upgrading checkpoints, the Gulf will be aiding Israel in making its technology of confinement and control of the Palestinian population even more sophisticated, benefiting once again the settlers.

    This is the real story of the Gulf’s Abraham Accords – not simply of turning a blind eye to Israel’s decades-long oppression of Palestinians, but of actively becoming partners with Israel and the settlers in carrying out that oppression.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

    This article was posted on Monday, December 14th, 2020 at 11:23pm and is filed under Annexation, Apartheid, Bahrain, Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump, EU, Human Rights, Hypocrisy, Iran, Israel/Palestine, Israeli Defence Force (IDF), Jordan, Land Theft, Morocco, Occupation, Palestinian Authority, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Surveillance, Technology, Tourism, Trade, United States, US Military, West Bank, Zionism.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.