Month: August 2011

The Cloud (and Silver Lining) of Internet Censorship

August 22, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

The uprisings in throughout the Middle East and Europe have demonstrated the power of the internet and social networking sites as tools for organizing against the state. It is because of their efficacy that these information sharing technologies have been suppressed by entrenched powers.

But does the cloud of internet censorship offer a silver lining?

Focusing on the CLOUD, G. Greenwald notes how the powers-that-be are making moves to seize control and snuff out the potential of these tools to disrupt the prevailing social order. The censorship for which the West has “long righteously  denounced China” and “vocally condemned Arab regimes” is steadily being adopted in the U.S. and Europe as a knee-jerk response to any challenge to and hint of social upheaval or mass action.

After the riots in London, for example, “the instant reaction of Prime Minister David Cameron was a scheme to force telecoms to allow his government the power to limit the use of Internet and social networking sites.” This, in conjunction with an campaign to lock people up for “inciting disorder” on facebook — these two guys were given four year sentences.

And more recently in San Fransisco, during a protest of yet another subway station killing at the hands of the out-of-control BART cops, “city officials shut down underground cell phone service entirely for hours“.

These episodes take place in an environment of aggressive prosecutions against all type of free-information activists such as Wikileaks, Bradley Manning, Anonymous, Aaron Swartz and others. At the same time, legislators are proposing bills to make it easier for the government to spy on the online activities of its citizens.  (See also this.)

But at least one target of this cloud of censorship likes to stress its SILVER LINING.  In an interview I posted about recently between the Wikileaks founder and philosopher Slavoj Zizek, Assange pointed out that although the sudden rise of such “McCarthyist hysteria” is worrying, nevertheless such official responses and attempts at censorship are in fact a “positive sign”:

Power that is completely unaccountable is silent. You know when you walk past a group of ants and you accidentally crush a few?  You do not turn to the others and say “stop complaining” or I’ll put a drone strike on your head — you completely ignore them.

And that is what happens to power that is in a very dominant position. It does not even bother to respond — it doesn’t flinch for an instant. And yet we saw all these figures in the United States coming out and speaking very aggressively…

We should always see censorship, actually, as a very positive sign. And the attempts toward censorship as a sign that the society is not yet completely sewn up, not yet completely fiscalised, but still has some political dimension to it, i.e. what people believe and think and feel and the words that they listen to actually matter. Because in some areas it doesn’t matter. And in the United States, actually, most of the time, it doesn’t matter what you say. We managed to speak and give information at such volume and at such intensity that people actually were forced to respond. It is rare that they are forced to respond. So I think this is one of the first positive symptoms I’ve seen from the United States in a while. That actually if you speak at this level, the cage can be rattled a bit, and people can be forced to respond.

In China, the censorship is much more aggressive, which to me is a very hopeful symptom of China, that it is still a political society even though it is fiscalizing, even though everything is being sewn up in contractual relationships and banking relationships as time has gone by. At the moment, the Chinese government and Public Security Bureau are actually scared of what people think.

Famine and War in the Horn of Africa

August 15, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

Famine in the Horn of Africa, again.

The U.N. is currently calling it the “worst humanitarian disaster in the world.”

Writing for al-Jazeera, economist Jeffrey Sachs reviewed the immediate causes of the crisis: Two years of failed rains, and colonial-era political boundaries that both divide and restrict the movements of traditionally pastoral communities.

Sachs reviews other contributing factors as well: the increasing instability of climate change, high fertility rates in the absence of contraception and family planning, widespread poverty and political instability.

The U.S. of course blames the political instability on — what else — Islamic “terrorist” groups like al-Shabaab, who are the target of and justification for black site torture prisons, drone strikes and proxy armed groups in Somalia.

Al-Shabbab, which has just lifted its ban on Western aid groups in the face of the severity of the famine,  has been the target of U.S. airstrikes and proxy attacks for years.  In a WGP post from May 2008, I tried to put a couple of these air strikes in context:

These bombings are directed at members of al-Shabaab, which is the military wing of the Islamic Courts Union who briefly controlled much of Somalia in 2006 — and who had brought relative peace and stability to the chaotic yet oil rich nation — before they were forced from power by U.S.-backed Ethiopian troops. (Christian Ethiopia is a historic enemy of Somalia, which is almost entirely Sunni Muslim.)

In that same three year old post, it was already clear how the U.S. proxy war against Somalia contributed to the threat of widespread famine:

The U.S.-backed Ethiopian invasion has contributed to a humanitarian crisis the International Committee of the Red Cross has described as “catastrophic”. Over a million people have been made internal refugees, and the U.N warned that 3.5. million Somalis — nearly half the country’s population — face famine. Moreover, Amnesty International has collected many accounts of atrocities by Ethiopian troops.

Here is a recent episode of al-Jazeera’s Inside Story that focuses on the rather facile question, “Are the problems in the Horn of Africa down to nature, or are people and politics to blame?”

Khadija O. Ali, a former member of the Somali Transitional National Parliament, laments the lack of women in Somali government as “women and children are the primary victims of ongoing conflict and deepening drought and famine.”

See here for a story about how U.S. universities are participating in an “African Land Grab”.

See here for the darker side of the World Food Program’s efforts in Somalia.

The image of the starving boy was originally published in the NYT, and was commented upon here and here.

Capitulations

August 8, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

With the recent capitulation in the face of small government, “free-market” ideologues, Obama continues in the grand tradition of corporate spokesliars like Ronald Reagan, who use popularly endearing personalities as cover for regressive transferals of wealth.

Nothing encapsulates the subservience of these U.S. Presidents to their corporate financiers like the moment, captured in a brilliant segment of M. Moore’s Capitalism, in which then-chairman of Merrill Lynch literally whispers directives into Reagan’s ear.

Reagan went on to preside over the “wholesale dismantling of our industrial infrastructure” for the “sake of short term profits.”

Reagan began with the evisceration of the labor unions, infamously firing every member of the air traffic controllers union after they had been on strike for two days. Moore identifies this moment as “The Day the Middle Class Died“.

But he lays ultimate responsibility for the calamity not on Reagan or his puppet-masters — they were just looking after their own interests after all  — but on the lack of solidarity among the other labor unions who refused to fight:

The biggest organization of unions in America told its members to cross the picket lines of the air traffic controllers and go to work. And that’s just what these union members did. Union pilots, flight attendants, delivery truck drivers, baggage handlers — they all crossed the line and helped to break the strike. And union members of all stripes crossed the picket lines and continued to fly.

Reagan and Wall Street could not believe their eyes! Hundreds of thousands of working people and union members endorsing the firing of fellow union members. It was Christmas in August for Corporate America.

And that was the beginning of the end. Reagan and the Republicans knew they could get away with anything — and they did.

(At MotherJones, btw, Kevin Drum looks at the numbers over the past decades to show why unions matter, not only for unionized employees but for non-unionized workers as well. The punchline: Sociological studies show that in the absence of strong labor unions, income inequality grows and the political clout of the middle class shrinks.)

Popular capitulation in the face of this rightward shift took a brief respite as a result of the outrageous excesses of the most recent Bush presidency — millions took to the streets in the run up to the invasion of Iraq, for example. And while Democratic Party leaders, fearful of not “supporting the troops”, colluded with the Bush regime at every dark step, there was at least the pretense that they stood in opposition to aggressive war, secret prisons, government surveillance and the like.  And when Bush tried to gut new deal social programs by privatizing them, the Unions, as weak as they had become relative to the decades preceding Reagan, blocked his plans.

“But since 2008 a Democratic president has neutralized all these constituencies,” laments A. Cockburn at Counterpunch.

Indeed, those to the left of pro-war free-market ideologues who run this country have no appetite for taking the current imperial spokesmodel to task. Why? Because he is “the first black president”, or because “he is doing the best he can”, or because they fear who might succeed him if he is defeated in the next election.

This reflexive support for Obama leads Cockburn to the ironic conclusion that “the best outcome for the left in 2008 would have been a victory for McCain, Obama’s Republican opponent”:

McCain! But, you wail, he would have plunged America into new wars, kept Guantanamo open, launched an onslaught on entitlements, surrendered to Wall Street and the banks…

McCain would have tried all these things, but maybe he would have quailed amid a storm of public protest.

The lesson, I think, is that what is essential is a principled, rather than partisan, opposition to Imperial theft and violence.  And this means an opposition that remains alive even when the office of the President is filled by a person whose surface qualities — their party affiliation, their skin tone, their oratory skill — one finds appealing.

Ultimately it is this popular capitulation of principle that allows officeholders to betray their constituencies. If they can take your vote for granted, there is no need to be concerned about your interests.

Winners

August 1, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

Congressional Leaders and the U.S. President have worked out the framework of a deal to lower the Federal deficit by slashing certain kinds of spending while doing nothing to increase revenue by taxing corporations or the rich.

Economist Paul Krugman calls the deal a “disaster” which “amounts to an abject surrender on the part of the president” to “raw extortion”, and wonders why Obama didn’t utilize any of the tools he had at his disposal to avoid this “catastrophe”.

The Young Turks Cenk Uygur, recently ushered from the insider’s club for his insufficiently partisan critical stance, remembers how President Clinton was able to avoid a debt ceiling challenge from Gingrich republicans in his day. Why didn’t Obama use this or any of the other available methods to avoid a similar challenge now?

Constitutional Lawyer cum Journalist G. Greenwald isn’t buying the myth of Obama’s weakness, and points to the president’s own pronouncements and actions to argue that brutal cuts to Social Security and Medicare is precisely what the corporatist Obama want.

The whole debt ceiling debate has been a political show — a display of tooth and nail fighting between parties that agree on fundamentals:

Ballooning war spending? Significant cuts are off the table.

Taxing corporations the rich? Don’t hold your breath.

In a DN interview, Economist Richard Wolf puts the debt agreement disaster in historical perspective:

In the ’50s and ’60s, the top bracket, the income tax rate that the richest people had to pay, for example the ’50s and ’60s, it was 91 percent. Every dollar over $100,000 that a rich person earned, he or she had to give 91 cents to Washington and kept nine. And the rationale for that was, we had come out of a Great Depression, we had come out of a great war, we had to rebuild our society, we were in a crisis, and the rich had the capacity to pay, and they ought to pay. Republicans voted for that. Democrats voted for that. What do we have today? Ninety-one percent? No. The top rate for rich people today, 35 percent. Again, nobody else in this society—not the middle, not the poor—have had anything like this consequence.

So, over the last 30, 40 years, a shift from corporate income tax to individual income tax, and among individuals, from the rich to everybody else. To deal with our budget problem without discussing that, putting that front and center, making that part of the story, that’s just a service to the rich and the corporations. There’s no polite way to say otherwise. And there’s something shameful about keeping all of that away and focusing on how we’re going to take out our budget problems by cutting back benefits to old people, to people who have medical needs. There’s something bizarre, and the world sees that, in a society that has done what it has done and now proposes to fix it on the backs of the majority.

Even worse this not-so-sleight-of-hand robbery comes at a time when globalizing corporations are achieving liberty from any merely national interests — expanding overseas and laying off domestic labor.

The Associated Press reports that “strong second-quarter earnings from McDonald’s, General Electric and Caterpillar on Friday are just the latest proof that booming profits have allowed Corporate America to leave the Great Recession far behind.”

Again Richard Wolf traces the historical trajectory:

You know, 30, 40 years ago, we spoke about corporations moving production jobs out of the United States. Ten or 15 years ago, we began to talk about outsourcing, moving white-collar jobs out. The most recent addition to that is the decision of corporations, as they look around the world, to say, you know, the growth of our market, the growth of demand, it’s in Asia, it’s in Latin America, it’s in parts of—it’s not here. The American people are exhausted. Their wages are going nowhere. We have high unemployment. And the fact is, no one is going to lend them much more money because they’re tapped out. So they’re not a growing market. So you see American corporations literally focused, for production and for consumption, elsewhere. That means they’re going to take care of themselves in the world.