I cite

A horrible list

1.   Climate change. I read the NYT magazine today. One of its reminders--that US gas mileage is pathetically worse than that in Japan and the EU. That the structure of our communities around driving is killing the environment. It may be that little nudge that pushes me to start a vegetable garden although I hate gardening. There are good reasons for this: I will be changing my practices, decreasing my carbon footprint, all that stuff. But I'm really doing it because I think that the society is so close to the abyss that I need some skills and some kind of provisions for the calamity to come.

2.    Economic collapse. With no Soviet Union to keep it in line, capitalism has accelerated and intensified unbearably. I can't get over the fact that 50 hedge fund managers (combined) made over 20 billion dollars this year. And that the numbers of workers making 20 dollars or more an hour has declined to levels below where they were in the seventies. The greed is mind-boggling. The 'oh well, there's nothing we can do' attitude is unbearable. There has been a massive counter-revolution in the US since the 70s, brought on by finance capital, its corporate allies, and conservatives in the wake of the unrest of the 60s (this was what makes Reagan so popular, the not quite human face of counter-revolution in the guise of greed is good and sex is bad). And the thing is, people have gone for it, swallowed what was screwing them whole. Cheap credit, tons of consumer goods, constant entertainment and socially acceptable prescription drugs. Who needs economic equality when we've got You Tube? We are all creative. We entertain each other and let the rich take more and the environment collapse.

3.   That the Bush administration will get away with torture (waging aggressive war, undertaking illegal surveillance). How could the NYT have ignored the White House torture story for more than a week and then only produce one editorial on it? The editorial was pathetic, saying things like we need more information and we won't get the information and using the Orwellian euphemisms for torture promulgated by the White House. Isn't it their job to dig up this information? Pelosi and the rest of the Democrats are pathetic, too weak and spineless (and I include both presidential candidates here) to call for resignations, press for indictments, and all the rest (maybe if folks had been giving each other blowjobs in the Oval we'd have a case...). The sickness will fester, continuing to kill the Constitution until it rots away completely (or is just the building blocks of children's toys Agamben evokes). Do we have anything to offer in its place?

Addition: Global food riots, shortages, and massive price increases, the flipside of American obesity (think corn syrup).

Palast on Spitzer, Wall Street, and Bush

A must-read from Greg Palast. An excerpt is below. Read the whole thing here:

This week, Bernanke’s Fed, for the first time in its history, loaned a selected coterie of banks one-fifth of a trillion dollars to guarantee these banks’ mortgage-backed junk bonds. The deluge of public loot was an eye-popping windfall to the very banking predators who have brought two million families to the brink of foreclosure.

Up until Wednesday, there was one single, lonely politician who stood in the way of this creepy little assignation at the bankers’ bordello: Eliot Spitzer.

Who are they kidding? Spitzer’s lynching and the bankers’ enriching are intimately tied.

How?  Follow the money.

The press has swallowed Wall Street’s line that millions of US families are about to lose their homes because they bought homes they couldn’t afford or took loans too big for their wallets. Ba-LON-ey. That’s blaming the victim.

Here’s what happened. Since the Bush regime came to power, a new species of loan became the norm, the ‘sub-prime’ mortgage and its variants including loans with teeny “introductory” interest rates. From out of nowhere, a company called ‘Countrywide’ became America’s top mortgage lender, accounting for one in five home loans, a large chunk of these ‘sub-prime.’

...

When the housing bubble burst and the paint flaked off, investors were left with the poop and the bankers were left with bonuses. Countrywide’s top man, Angelo Mozilo, will ‘earn’ a $77 million buy-out bonus this year on top of the $656 million - over half a billion dollars – he pulled in from 1998 through 2007.

But there were rumblings that the party would soon be over. Angry regulators, burned investors and the weight of millions of homes about to be boarded up were causing the sharks to sink. Countrywide’s stock was down 50%, and Citigroup was off 38%, not pleasing to the Gulf sheiks who now control its biggest share blocks.

Then, on Wednesday of this week, the unthinkable happened. Carlyle Capital went bankrupt. Who? That’s Carlyle as in Carlyle Group. James Baker, Senior Counsel. Notable partners, former and past: George Bush, the Bin Laden family and more dictators, potentates, pirates and presidents than you can count.

The Fed had to act. Bernanke opened the vault and dumped $200 billion on the poor little suffering bankers. They got the public treasure – and got to keep the Grinning’s house. There was no ‘quid’ of a foreclosure moratorium for the ‘pro quo’ of public bailout. Not one family was saved – but not one banker was left behind.

Facebook: the new office of information awareness

A student sent me this link. I guess it has been around a while, but it was news to me. The basic idea: just because the office of information awareness was killed doesn't mean it died. Or, why use spies and surveillance to get information from people when they will give it up for free? Is it just a coincidence that there is a non-profit organization that provides venture capital to technology companies that might be useful to the CIA or to governmental surveillance and data mining efforts?

Here's an article that repeats what's in the video: Facebook - the CIA conspiracy - 08 Aug 2007 - NZ Herald: Technology News from New Zealand and around the World.

Facebook's first round of venture capital funding ($US500,000) came from former Paypal CEO Peter Thiel. Author of anti-multicultural tome 'The Diversity Myth', he is also on the board of radical conservative group VanguardPAC.

The second round of funding into Facebook ($US12.7 million) came from venture capital firm Accel Partners. Its manager James Breyer was formerly chairman of the National Venture Capital Association, and served on the board with Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm established by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1999. One of the company's key areas of expertise are in "data mining technologies".

Breyer also served on the board of R&D firm BBN Technologies, which was one of those companies responsible for the rise of the internet.

Dr Anita Jones joined the firm, which included Gilman Louie. She had also served on the In-Q-Tel's board, and had been director of Defence Research and Engineering for the US Department of Defence.

She was also an adviser to the Secretary of Defence and overseeing the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is responsible for high-tech, high-end development.

It was when a journalist lifted the lid on the DARPA's Information Awareness Office that the public began to show concern at its information mining projects. ... The backlash from civil libertarians led to a Congressional investigation into DARPA's activity, [and] the Information Awareness Office lost its funding. ...

Parts of the IAO's technology round-up included 'human network analysis and behaviour model building engines', which Facebook's massive volume of neatly-targeted data gathering allows for.

Facebook's own Terms of use state: "by posting Member Content to any part of the Web site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license to use, copy, perform, display, reformat, translate, excerpt and distribute such information and content and to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such information and content, and to grant and authorise sublicenses of the foregoing.

And in its equally interesting privacy policy: "Facebook may also collect information about you from other sources, such as newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services, and other users of the Facebook service through the operation of the service (eg. photo tags) in order to provide you with more useful information and a more personalised experience. By using Facebook, you are consenting to have your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States."

I'm just glad that I blog rather than use Facebook. I have tons more privacy and security.

Rushkoff on 9/11 conspiracy theorists

Link: MAGPIE » RUSHKOFF on 9/11 conspiracy theorists - Arthur Magazine blogs for you....

Our government excels at doing its really bad stuff out in the open. They break laws in order to spy on citizens, and refuse to acknowledge objections from lawmakers or justice. They take taxpayers money and give it to the companies they run. They acknowledge the many billions of dollars that go missing, and offer not even a shrug. They put the people who formerly lobbied on behalf of industries in positions running the agencies that are supposed to be regulating them.

By looking under the rug for what isn’t even there, we neglect the horror show that is in plain view. In the process, we make it even easier for the criminals running our government to perpetuate their illegal, unethical and un-American activities.

In fact, the most logical conclusion I can draw from the existing evidence is that 9-11 theorists are themselves covert government operatives, dedicated to confusing the public, distracting activists from their tasks, equating all dissent with the lunatic fringe, and provoking the counterculture’s misplaced belief in the competency of its foes.
That’s the real conspiracy.

Richard Rogers: Do Search Engines Have Politics

Richard Rogers can fully document the removal of a site from Google. The removed site: 911truth.org. They were de-indexed, dropped from the top 3 sites coming up on a 9/11 query to below 1000. Google deliberately dropped them.

From 9/11 Truth.org:

Intrepid researchers that we are, we tried this for ourselves and, indeed, they're right! Go ahead...try it. Enter "911truth.org" in a Google search bar and you'll find, currently, the first entry in response is some unheard of site based in the country Nauru. (Nauru?, we asked ourselves, wondering how we could possibly have missed that in geography class. Wikipedia helped with that oversight. Ah, but, of course! It's that 8.1 square mile phosphate rock island in Micronesia, whose government "has resorted to unusual measures to obtain income." Briefly a tax haven and money laundering center, Nauru now houses a detention center for Australian asylum seekers.) Well, then--that explains it, eh?

So then, the site with the greatest number of hits which most closely matches the search string "911truth.org" is ... not ... 911truth.org? In fact, the main (index) page of 911truth.org isn't even in the list generated by a Google search for '911truth.org'! A page from our site linking to the Chicago conference we hosted in June 2006 shows up. Meaning more viewers are looking at last year's conference announcement than the current front page of 911truth.org? Not so with other search engines, such as Ask, AltaVista and Yahoo... as one would expect, the first hit for this search is--surprise--911truth.org.

And, from another site, discussion of the conspiracy to keep some sites down.

 

FBI's 9/11 Saudi Flight Documents Released

Link: Matt Renner | FBI's 9/11 Saudi Flight Documents Released.

Newly released documents reveal the FBI suspected that a plane hired to transport members of the bin Laden family from the United States back to Saudi Arabia might have been chartered by Osama bin Laden himself. The documents raise new questions about the FBI investigation into the 9/11 attacks.

The fraying edges of the neoliberal economy in the US

The lack of services for the urban poor is well-documented. I have in mind not only the drastic reduction of social services over the past twenty years (and Clinton was the worst here), but also the problems that arise when the market decides what to provide and where to provide it. In the late 80s, there were few decent grocery stores above 125th Street on the West Side of NYC. The one I recall (a Dagostino's on Amsterdam) was smaller, dirtier, and with higher prices than downtown. The bodegas had smaller selections of worse quality fresh produce. Capital didn't see much opportunity for profit up there at the time--a likely result of the failure of the city, state, and federal government to maintain that part of the city.

Similar problems face very small cities in the rural areas of the edge of the rust belt. Likely for similar reasons: a population that doesn't have much money or much opportunity to spend what money they have for provisioning somewhere else. During junior high, I lived on the Mississippi coast. I went to the movies regularly. Geneva, New York is the only place I've ever lived where the movie projectors break repeatedly. One theater (we called it the rat house) closed this fall. The other one was remodeled, but still the projector broke. Tonight. At Pirates of the Caribbean 3. My daughter cried for a while. She cheered up as the high school kids began their cat calls.

But it isn't just the movie theater. Our local Wegmans grocery store (in the top 10 of the best places to work in the US, or at least the chain is, is declining rapidly. The salad in the bags seems rotten more often than it used to be. Some of the fruit seems like it was frozen and then thawed, badly. The managers can't seem to get the prepared chickens right: some nights, they are out of them by 6:00; other nights, the chickens aren't ready yet (that happened tonight; they told me twice that they would be ready in 10 minutes; when I asked the second time, they said that someone had forgotten to turn on the oven; this sort of thing happens a lot); weirdly, you would think that having a sense of how many to have ready and at what time would be pretty easy to measure, especially given how many ways that our purchases are tracked and measured.

Real existing capitalism: it rhetorically denies it dependence on state services and interventions; its mechanisms fail to deliver what they promise. And, because it's capitalism, nobody cares, nobody is responsible. It all just gets reconfigured as specific, individuated, lifestyle choices (attentive readers will guess that I've been reading Bauman today).

Monbiot.com » Bayoneting a Scarecrow

Thanks to John B. for drawing my attention to this: Monbiot.com » Bayoneting a Scarecrow.

To qualify as a true opponent of the Bush regime, you must also now believe that it is capable of magic. It could blast the Pentagon with a cruise missile, while persuading hundreds of onlookers that they saw a plane. It could wire every floor of the Twin Towers with explosives without attracting attention, and prime the charges (though planes had ploughed through the middle of the sequence) to drop each tower in a perfectly-timed collapse. It could make Flight 93 disappear into thin air, and somehow ensure that the relatives of the passengers collaborated with the deception. It could recruit tens of thousands of conspirators to participate in these great crimes, and induce them all to kept their mouths shut, for ever.

In other words, you must believe that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their pals are all-knowing, all-seeing and all-powerful, despite the fact that they were incapable of faking either weapons of mass destruction or any evidence at Ground Zero that Saddam Hussein was responsible. You must believe that the impression of cackhandedness and incompetence they have managed to project since taking office is a front. Otherwise you are a traitor and a spy.

 

Why do I bother with these morons? Because they are destroying the movements which some of us have spent a long time trying to build. Those of us who believe that the crucial global issues – climate change, the Iraq war, nuclear proliferation, inequality – are insufficiently debated in parliament or congress; that corporate power stands too heavily on democracy; that war criminals, cheats and liars are not being held to account, have invested our efforts in movements outside the mainstream political process. These, we are now discovering, are peculiarly susceptible to this epidemic of gibberish.

The obvious corollorary to the belief that the Bush administration is all-powerful is that the rest of us are completely powerless. In fact it seems to me that the purpose of the “9/11 truth movement” is to be powerless. The omnipotence of the Bush regime is the coward’s fantasy, an excuse for inaction used by those who don’t have the stomach to engage in real political fights.

Let me give you an example. The column I wrote about Loose Change two weeks ago The column I wrote about Loose Change two weeks ago generated 777 posts on Comment is Free, which is almost a record. Most of them were furious.. The response from a producer of the film, published last week, attracted 467(2). On the same day I published an article about a genuine, demonstrable conspiracy: a spy network feeding confidential information from an arms control campaign to Britain’s biggest weapons manufacturer, BAE. It drew 60 responses(3). The members of the 9/11 cult weren’t interested. If they were, they might have had to do something. The great virtue of a fake conspiracy is that it calls on you to do nothing.

The 9/11 conspiracy theories are a displacement activity. A displacement activity is something you do because you feel incapable of doing what you ought to do. A squirrel sees a larger squirrel stealing its hoard of nuts. Instead of attacking its rival, it sinks its teeth into a tree and starts ripping it to pieces. Faced with the mountainous challenge of the real issues we must confront, the chickens in the “truth” movement focus instead on a fairytale, knowing that nothing they do or say will count, knowing that because the perpetrators don’t exist, they can’t fight back. They demonstrate their courage by repeatedly bayoneting a scarecrow.

...

The 9/11 truthers remind me of nothing so much as the climate-change deniers, cherry-picking their evidence, seizing any excuse for ignoring the arguments of their opponents. Witness the respondents to my Loose Change column who maintain that the magazine Popular Mechanics, which has ripped the demolition theories apart, is a government front. They know this because one of its editors, Benjamin Chertoff, is the brother/nephew/first cousin of the US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. (They are, as far as Benjamin can discover, unrelated, but what does he know?(4)).

 

Like the millenarian fantasies which helped to destroy the Levellers as a political force in the mid-17th century, this crazy distraction presents a mortal danger to popular oppositional movements. If I were Bush or Blair, nothing would please me more than to see my opponents making idiots of themselves, while devoting their lives to chasing a phantom. But as a controlled asset of the New World Order, I would say that, wouldn’t I? It’s all part of the plot.

George Monbiot: Short Changing 9/11: Popular Documentary Takes Us Nowhere

Link: AlterNet: Short Changing 9/11: Popular Documentary Takes Us Nowhere.

There is a virus sweeping the world. It infects opponents of the Bush government, sucks their brains out through their eyes and turns them into gibbering idiots. The disease is called Loose Change. It is a film made by three young men which airs most of the standard conspiracy theories about the attacks of September. Unlike the other 9/11 conspiracy films, Loose Change is sharp and swift, with a thumping soundtrack, slick graphics and a calm and authoritative voiceover. Its makers claim that it has now been watched by 100 million people.

... Even if you have seen or read no other accounts of 9/11, and your brain has not yet been liquidized, a few problems must occur to you. The first is the complete absence of scientific advice. At one point the presenter asks "So what brought down the Twin Towers? Let's ask the experts." But they don't ask the experts. The film makers take some old quotes, edit them to remove any contradictions, then denounce all subsequent retractions as further evidence of conspiracy.

Alexander Cockburn: The 9/11 Conspiracists and the Decline of the Left

Link: Alexander Cockburn: The 9/11 Conspiracists and the Decline of the Left.

Five years after the attacks, 9/11 conspiracism has now penetrated deep into the American left. It is also widespread on the libertarian and populist right, but that is scarcely surprising, since the American populist right instinctively mistrusts government to a far greater degree than the left, and matches conspiracies to its demon of preference, whether the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Black Helicopters or the Jews.

These days a dwindling number of leftists learn their political economy from Marx via the small, mostly Trotskyist groupuscules. Into the theoretical and strategic void has crept a diffuse, peripatic conspiracist view of the world that tends to locate ruling class devilry not in the crises of capital accumulation, or the falling rate of profit, or inter-imperial competition, but in locale (the Bohemian Grove, Bilderberg, Ditchley, Davos) or supposedly "rogue" agencies, with the CIA still at the head of the list. The 9/11 "conspiracy", or "inside job", is the Summa of all this foolishness.