The conditions at Tesla’s production facility leading up to meeting its Model 3 production goal have been reported as nothing short of hellish as Elon Musk “barked” at employees working 12 hour shifts, bottlenecking other parts of the company’s production and reportedly causing concern by employees that the long hours and strenuous environment would cause even more workplace injuries and accidents.
Some Tesla analysts and bulls seemed surprised that the company’s stock fell on Monday, even after the company was able to report at the end of the weekend that it had not only reached its 5,000 Model 3 per week goal, but also that it had produced 7,000 vehicles overall. “I think we just became a real car company,” Musk wrote in an e-mail to his employees after meeting the goal for one week.
This led to a nearly 30 point swing in the price of Tesla stock during trading on Monday and further declines today. The stock opened and was quickly over $360 per share before it ultimately faded, gave up all of its gains and went on to finish the day red by several percent. Perhaps this quick loss of confidence was a result of investors finally reading behind the surface level headlines.
Sure, Tesla was able to produce 5,000 Model 3’s in a week, but at what cost? Skeptics and bears had asked what the point of meeting the 5,000 per work goal was if it must be done in an “all hands on deck“ fashion that is going to burn out employees and bottleneck other parts of the production line. For instance, it’s now being reported that the company’s Model S line is 800 cars behind schedule.
On Tuesday, Reuters reported that this is basically exactly what happened. In addition, they reported that a “short tempered“ Elon Musk personally oversaw production and “snapped“ at employees who were told that that weekend work days were mandatory and that 12 hour shifts should be expected.
The article stated:
A tense and short-tempered Chief Executive Elon Musk barked at engineers on the Fremont, California assembly line. Tesla Inc pulled workers from other departments to keep pumping out the Model 3 electric sedans, disrupting production of the Model S and X lines. And weekend shifts were mandatory.
…
Leading up to Sunday morning’s production milestone, Musk paced the Model 3 line, snapping at his engineers when the around-the-clock production slowed or stopped due to problems with robots, one worker said. Tesla built a new line in just two weeks in a huge tent outside the main factory, an unprecedented move in an industry that takes years to plan out its assembly lines, and said the tented production area accounted for 20 percent of the Model 3s produced last week.
“They were borrowing people from our line all day to cover their (Model 3) breaks so the line would continue to move,” said a Model S worker on Sunday.
Because of the focus on the Model 3, the S line is about 800 cars behind, the worker said.
“They’ve been throwing Model 3s ahead of the S to get painted to try to assure that they make their goal of 5,000,” the worker said. “The paint department can’t handle the volume.”
Employees were told that 12-hour days, 6-days-a-week would be expected. The company even re-wrote its attendance policy to make exceptions as to when they had to notify employees that they would be working weekends. We can’t help but wonder what impact this has had on morale:
Last week’s big push also brought a rewrite of the employee attendance policy. After mandatory weekend shifts were assigned, two workers said, Tesla rescinded a policy promising workers at least one week’s notice before weekend work.
“The manager and supervisor are verbally going around and saying: ‘If you don’t come in, you’ll be written up’,” one of the workers told Reuters last week.
Some employees are worried the frenetic pace plus long hours could burn out workers. One employee said they were told to keep working until they met their daily production mark, not when their shifts ended.
“They said starting tomorrow be prepared to work up to 12 hours,” said the Model S employee on Monday. “It’s gonna be basically 12 hours from now on and I’ve got a feeling it’s gonna be six days a week.”
Confirming an earlier Reuters report from late last week, Reuters again noted that the influx of new vehicles at a high rate bottlenecked the company’s paint shop, despite CEO Elon Musk responding to these allegations last week by Instagramming a relatively meaningless photograph of the company’s paint shop as if to say “hey, everything is fine.”
Reuters reported that this bottleneck could threaten the company’s annual total production goals:
Disruption of the Model S and X lines could threaten Tesla’s target of building 100,000 of those vehicles in 2018. Tesla built 49,489 of those cars in the first half of this year.
Asked about the potential S and X impact, Tesla said it also produced 1,913 of those vehicles during the last week of the quarter along with its Model 3s.
Tesla said it built a total of 28,578 Model 3s in the second quarter, and 40,989 since production began last July.
The hellish week of production seems to have taken its toll on employees, at least going by reports of what they told Reuters. The article notes that employees believe that the strenuous hours and the nonstop work will eventually burn out the staff, if it hasn’t already, and will lead to increased injuries and Musk “going through an awful lot of people”. In addition, with just one week’s run of 5,000 Model 3’s behind them, Tesla is now giving some of the line a break for the Fourth of July holiday:
In the morning of Sunday, July 1, about five hours after the self-imposed second-quarter deadline had passed, the number 5,000 flashed on a countdown screen viewed by Tesla’s Model 3 assembly-line workers. The Model 3 itself bore a “5,000” sign in its front window.
Tesla said on Monday that some of its Model 3 production would be on break as part of the July 4 holiday, with production to resume on Thursday. Tesla plans to build 6,000 Model 3s per week by August.
But the worker told to expect longer shifts warned that pushing assembly-line workers too hard could backfire.
“He (Musk) is gonna go through an awful lot of people because people are gonna start getting hurt left and right,” by the fast-moving assembly line, the worker said.
“There’s only so fast a person can move.”
Tesla had released a production update early Monday claiming that it had met its 5,000 car per week a goal by “factory gating“ 5000 Model 3s and 7000 total cars over the course of a week.
As one astute observer noticed on Twitter, however, the time from reserving your Model 3 to getting it delivered has shrunk. This seems to indicate that the pool of orders waiting to be filled on the Model 3 is also starting to shrink.
For now, the company technically has “hit its goal“ – but are we going to find out soon that the price that they paid for it in terms of not only overtime, but also production facility inefficiency and employee well-being, wasn’t worth it? The market already seems to think so.
Bad things happen to heads of Chinese conglomerates that have suffered a falling out with Beijing: one year ago, the head of Anbang, Wu Xiaohui, who at one point was the most voracious money launderer acquiror of companies around the globe (and was linked to Jared Kishner’s 666 Fifth Avenue building), mysteriously disappeared for an extended period of time after he was detained by Chinese authorities. Fast forward to today, when the chairman and co-founder of China’s other conglomerate, HNA Group, died in Provence, France, the company said on Wednesday.
Wang Jian, 57, was injured in a fall during a business trip, and died on Tuesday, according to a brief statement.
The company did not give the circumstances of Wang’s death or provide an exact location. A clerk at the Chinese embassy in Paris said she had no information on the case, according to SCMP. The company also published its website in monochrome as an apparent mark of respect.
Chinese business and finance magazine Caixin, cited “people close to Wang” as saying he fell from a high place near Avignon. He was taken to a local hospital for emergency treatment but fell into a coma.
The sources said that Wang woke up at one point and complained that “my feet hurt”.
According to a Reuters report, which cited local police, Wang died in the village of Bonnieux in Provence, after falling 10 metres off a wall while trying to take a photograph.
He tried to climb a low wall to see the view and take pictures,” the source said. After failing a first time, Wang took a run up. “He fell over the top and dropped 10 meters.”
In a separate statement written in English, the company’s board and management team, led by co-founder Chen Feng and chief executive Adam Tan, said: “HNA Group extends deepest condolences to Mr Wang’s family and many friends. Together, we mourn the loss of an exceptionally gifted leader and role model, whose vision and values will continue to be a beacon for all who had the good fortune to know him, as well as for the many others whose lives he touched through his work and philanthropy.”
Wang’s death comes just over a month after HNA Group denied rumors that Chen had died.
Wang was the driving forces behind the massive expansion of HNA Group. As co-founders, Wang and Chen transformed a regional airline based in China’s tropical island province of Hainan into a conglomerate with US$230 billion in assets.
Sources close to the company said Wang took a hands-on approach to running the company although Chen tended to be its public face.
Wang told employees earlier this year that the company’s difficulties were the result of a “major conspiracy” against the ruling Communist Party and President Xi Jinping by foreign and domestic “reactionary forces”, according to an internally-distributed email.
However, the embattled group appeared to have won a reprieve of sorts recently, when at a meeting held by China’s central bank, lenders were told to “support” HNA bonds, Bloomberg and the Financial Times reported last month.
Across the US, cities are independently passing measures to implement a $15 minimum wage – or mandating higher wages with an eye toward one day achieving that goal. But low-wage workers who are celebrating their fatter paychecks should enjoy the feeling while it lasts…because the more expensive workers become, the faster employers will work to replace those human workers with robots who can do the same job for a fraction of the cost.
Already, the first burger restaurant run entirely by a robot has opened in San Francisco. But progress in robotics hasn’t been confined to the food service industry. Last year, we introduced SAM (Semi-Automated Mason), a bricklaying robot that can do the work of 6 unionized masons every single day, without a break, benefits or a paycheck. And as it turns out, SAM already has some competition. Enter Fastbrick Robotics’ Hadrian X, a brick-laying robot that will soon be capable of constructing whole homes by itself. According to the company’s website, Hadrian is capable of constructing the walls of a home in a single day.
To be sure, the Hadrian is still being tested. FBR anticipates that the bricklaying robot will have constructed its first home, completely from scratch, by the end of 2018. But Hadrian’s home-building prowess is already on display in a video released by the company.
Unlike human workers, Hadrian can be mounted to a truck, crane or boat to make transportation easier. It also relies on stabilization technology that allows it to work through wind and other environmental factors that might stymie human workers. But perhaps most impressively, Hadrian can take a design from an engineer’s CAD software and build it – all without the help of human workers.
Indeed, Hadrian could start building homes quickly and cheaply in the very near future, replacing whole teams of human workers, since it’s designed to work alone. And unfortunately for the bricklayers that Hadrian could displace, there are no shoppers looking for assistance on a construction site, or other “customer-facing” construction site roles to which they can seamlessly transition.
In this article, we have attempted to identify the most censored stories of modern times in Britain. We have asked the opinions of one of the most famous and celebrated journalists and documentary film-makers of our time, a high-profile former Mi5 intelligence officer, an investigative journalist with one of the most well-known climate-change organisations, a veteran journalist of the Iraq war, an ex-army officer, along with the head of one of the worlds largest charities working against injustice.
One comment from our eclectic group of experts said; “the UK has the most legally protected and least accountable intelligence agencies in the western world so even in just that field competition is fierce, let alone all the other cover-ups.”
So true have we found this statement to be that we’ve had to split this article into two categories – military and non-military, with a view that we may well categorise surveillance and privacy on its own another time.
Without further ado – here are the most non-military censored stories in Britain since the 1980s, in no particular order. Do bear in mind that for those with inquisitive minds, some of these stories you will have read something about somewhere – but to the majority of citizens, these stories will read like conspiracy theories.
Consequences of American corporate influence over British welfare reforms
The demolition of the welfare state was first suggested in 1982 by the Conservative Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. Using neoliberal politics, every UK government since 1982 has covertly worked towards that goal. It is also the political thinking used as justification for the welfare reforms of the New Labour government, which introduced the use of the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) for all out-of-work disability benefit claimants. Neoliberal politics also justified additional austerity measures introduced by the Coalition government since 2010, and the Conservative government(s) since 2015, which were destined to cause preventable harm when disregarding the human consequences. Much of this is known and in the public domain.
However, what is less known is a story the government have tried very hard to gag. The American healthcare insurance system of disability denial was adopted, as was the involvement of a US healthcare company to distance the government from the preventable harm created by its use. The private sector was introduced on a wide scale in many areas of welfare and social policy as New Labour adopted American social and labour market policies – and the gravity of its effects cannot be understated.
The result? In one 11 month study 10,600 deaths were attributed to the government disability denial system of screening, with 2,200 people dying before the ESA assessment was even completed. Between May 2010 and February 2014, an astonishing total of 40,680 people died within 12 months of going through a government Work Capability Assessment. The government department responsible has since refused to publish updated mortality totals.
This political and social scandal has been censored, with the author of THIS truly damning report in trouble with the government for publishing it.
Climate Change, what a British oil giant knew all along
For decades, tobacco companies buried evidence that smoking was deadly, the same goes for the fossil fuel industry. As early as 1981, big oil company Shell was aware of the causes and catastrophic dangers of climate change. In the 1980s it was acknowledging with its own research that anthropogenic global warming was a fact. Then, as the scientific consensus became more and more clear, it started introducing doubt and giving weight to a “significant minority” of “alternative viewpoints” as the full implications for the company’s business model became clear.
By the mid-90s, the company started talking about “distinguished scientists” that cast aspersions of the seriousness of climate change. THIS REPORT provides proof of Shell’s documentation including emails of what they knew and what they were hiding from the public domain. One document in 1988 confirms that: “By the time the global warming becomes detectable it could be too late to take effective countermeasures to reduce the effects or even stabilise the situation.”
It was not until 2007 that scientific research eventually took a grip of the problem and proved what was known all along. However, as Shell did say – it’s probably too late to take effective countermeasures now anyway. There is still persistent quoting of climate science deniers by the fossil fuel industries.
Government Surveillance
In 2016, the UK was identified as the most extreme surveillance state in the Western world. However, legislation really only came about to legalise its use because of the Edward Snowden revelations in 2013. Prior to that, the British government had created a secret 360-degree mass surveillance architecture that no-one, including most members of parliament, knew anything about. And much of it has since been deemed illegal by the highest courts in both Britain and the European Union.
From operation Optic Nerve which took millions of sexually explicit images of an unknowing public through their devices to a hacking operation called Gemalto – where GCHQ stole the keys to a global encryption system with 700 million subscribers. The unaccountable spymasters of the UK have undertaken breathtaking operations of illegality with absolute impunity.
Some other programmes included; Three Smurfs – an operation to turn on any mobile device so it could listen to or activate the camera covertly on mobile phones. XKeyScore was basically a Google search engine for spies to find any data about anyone. Upstream and Tempora hacked into the worlds main cable highway, intercepting everything and anything globally with a leaked presentation slide from GCHQ on this programme expressly stating they were intent on “Mastering the Internet”. Royal Concierge identified diplomatic hotel reservations so GCHQ could organise a surveillance operation against dignitaries either domestic or foreign, in advance.
In truth, Britain is classed as an endemic surveillance state and right now, we only know what has been uncovered by whistleblowers. This is why people like Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and others are nothing less than political prisoners of Western governments. They don’t want you to know what they know about you. They also don’t want you to know about them, which is why the architecture is there in the first place. It is not for catching terrorists because if it was the courts would not deem these surveillance systems as illegal.
Evidence-Based Medical Studies
Over the last few years, medical professionals have come forward to share a truth that, for many people, proves difficult to swallow. One such authority is Dr. Richard Horton, the current editor-in-chief of the Lancet – considered to be one of the most well respected peer-reviewed medical journals in the world.
“The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.”
Across the pond, Dr Marcia Angell, a physician and longtime Editor-in-Chief of the New England Medical Journal (NEMJ), which is also considered another one of the most prestigious peer-reviewed medical journals in the world, makes her view of the subject quite plain:
“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine”.
Many newspapers in Britain take the opportunity to indulge in some shameless click baiting and report completely false stories simply to gain visitor numbers onto their website – as in this example by the Mail Online HERE or HERE.
The Skripal poisoning and Pablo Millar
D-notice’s (Defence and Security Media Advisory Notice) are used by the British state to censor the publication of potentially damaging news stories. They are issued to the mainstream media to withhold publication of damaging information. One such case was the widespread use of D-notices regarding the British ex-spy deeply involved in the Skripal/Novichok poisoning case in Salisbury.
Mainstream journalists, the press and broadcast media were issued with D-notices in respect of a former British intelligence officer called Pablo Miller. Miller was an associate of Christopher Steele, first in espionage operations in Russia and more recently in the activities of Steele’s private intelligence firm, Orbis Business Intelligence.
Steele was responsible for compiling the Trump–Russia dossier, comprising 17 memos written in 2016 alleging misconduct and conspiracy between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the Putin administration. The dossier paid for by the Democratic Party, claimed that Trump was compromised by evidence of his sexual proclivities (golden shower anyone?) in Russia’s possession. Steele was the subject of an earlier D-notice, which unsuccessfully attempted to keep his identity as the author of the dossier a secret.
Millar is reported to be Skripal’s handler in Salisbury and if Miller and by extension, Skripal himself were involved in Orbis’ work on the highly-suspect Steele-Trump dossier, which is thought to be the case (for all sorts of reasons – including these D-notices) alongside representatives of British and possibly US intelligence, then the motivations for the attempted assassination on the ex-Russian double agent was very wide at best. As it turned out, blame could not be pinned on Russia’s intelligence service, the FSB, no matter how hard the government tried. This particular part of the Skripal poisoning story remains buried by the mainstream media.
The City of London – A global crime scene
For over a hundred years the Labour party tried in vain to abolish the City of London and its accompanying financial corruption. In 1917, Labour’s new rising star Herbert Morrison, the grandfather of Peter Mandelson made a stand and failed, calling it the “devilry of modern finance.” And although attempt after attempt was made throughout the following decades, it was Margaret Thatcher who succeeded by abolishing its opponent, the Greater London Council in 1986.
Tony Blair went about it another way and offered to reform the City of London in what turned out to be a gift from God. He effectively gave the vote to corporations which swayed the balance of democratic power away from residents and workers. It was received by its opponents as the greatest retrograde step since the peace treaty of 1215, Magna Carta. The City won its rights through debt financing in 1067, when William the Conqueror acceded to it and ever since governments have allowed the continuation of its ancient rights above all others.
The consequence? It now stands as money launderer of the world, the capital of global crime scene with Britain referred to by the global criminal fraternity to be the most corrupt country in the world.
A ‘watchman’ sits at the high table of parliament and is its official lobbyist sitting in the seat of power right next to the Speaker of the House who is “charged with ensuring that its established rights are safeguarded.” The job is to seek out political dissent that might arise against the City.
The City of London has its own private funding and will ‘buy-off’ any attempt to erode its powers – any scrutiny of its financial affairs are put beyond external inspection or audit. It has it’s own police force – and laws. Its dark and shadowy client list includes; terrorists, drug barons, arms dealers, despots, dictators, shady politicians, corporations, millionaires and billionaires – most with something to hide. The shocking Panama Papers, Paradise Papers and Lux Leaks barely scratching the surface even with their almost unbelievable revelations of criminality.
Keith Bristow Director-General of the UK’s National Crime Agency said in June 2015 that the sheer scale of crime and its subsequent money laundering operations was “a serious strategic threat to Britain.” And whilst much of this activity is indeed published – the scale of it is not. It is now believed by many investigative journalists that the City of London is managing “trillions in ill-gotten gains” – not billions as we have all been told.
State propaganda – manipulating minds, controlling the internet
Reading this you would think this was the stuff of a conspiracy theory – sadly, it’s not. The government, through its spying agent GCHQ developed its own set of software tools to infiltrate the internet to shape what people see, hear and read, with the ability to rig online polls and psychologically manipulate people on social media. This was what Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept confirmed through the Snowden files in 2014. It was not about surveillance but about manipulating public opinion in ever more Orwellian ways.
These ‘tools’ now constitute some of the most startling methods of propaganda delivery systems and internet deception programmes known to mankind. What the Snowden files show are that the government can change the outcome of online polls (codenamed Underpass), send mass delivery of emails or SMS messages (Warpath) at will, disrupt video-based websites (Silverlord) and have tools to permanently disable PC accounts. They can amplify a given message to push a chosen narrative (GESTATOR), increase traffic to any given website” (GATEWAY) and have the ability to inflate page views on websites (SLIPSTREAM). They can crash any website (PREDATORS FACE), reduce page views and distort public responses, spoof any email account and telephone calls they like. Visitors to WikiLeaks are tracked and monitored as if an inquiring mind is now against the law.
Don’t forget, the government has asked no-one for permission to do any of this and none of this has been debated in parliament where representative democracy is supposed to be taking place. There is no protective legislation for the general public and no-one is talking about or debating these illegal programmes that taxpayers have been given no choice to fund – costing billions. This is government sponsored fake news and public manipulation programmes on a monumental scale.
Chris Huhne, a former cabinet minister and member of the national security council until 2012 said – “when it comes to the secret world of GCHQ, the depth of my ‘privileged information’ has been dwarfed by the information provided by Edward Snowden to The Guardian.”
The Guardian’s offices were then visited by MI5 and the Snowden files were ordered to be destroyedunder threats that if they didn’t, it would be closed down – a sign of British heavy-handedness reminiscent of the East-German Stasi.
Censorship – Spycatcher
‘Spycatcher’ was a truly candid autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer published in 1987. Written by Peter Wright, a former MI5 officer, it was published first in Australia after being banned by the British government in 1985. Its allegations proved too much for the authorities to allow it to be in the public domain.
In an interesting twist of irony, the UK government attempted to halt the book’s Australian publication. Malcolm Turnbull, current Prime Minister of Australia, was a lawyer at the time and represented the publisher that defeated the British government’s suppression orders against Spycatcher in Australia in September 1987, and again on appeal in June 1988. This is the same man that refuses to assist Julian Assange, an Australian citizen, from his hellhole existence in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
The book details plans of the MI6 plot to assassinate Egyptian President Nasser during the Suez Crisis; of joint MI5-CIA plotting against British Prime Minister Harold Wilson and of MI5’s eavesdropping on high-level Commonwealth conferences. Wright also highlights the methods and ethics of the spying business.
Newspapers printed in England, attempting proper reportage of Spycatcher’s principal allegations were served gag orders. If they continued, they were tried for contempt of court. However, the book proved so popular many copies were smuggled into England. In 1987, the Law Lords again barred reportage of Wright’s allegations or sale of books.
The ruling was then overturned, but Wright was barred from receiving royalties from the sale of the book in the United Kingdom. In November 1991, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the British government had breached the European Convention of Human Rights in gagging its own newspapers. The book has sold more than two million copies. In 1995, Wright died a millionaire from proceeds of his book.
Censorship – The Internet
To the inquisitive and knowledgeable, censorship of the internet by the British government is not news. In addition, there have been many reports, especially from independent outlets complaining about search engines and social media platforms censoring oppositional and dissenting voices.
Already described earlier in this article is the involvement of the authorities in strategies to manipulate public opinion and disseminate false narratives in their aims for control of the internet itself.
A few months ago, the government changed the law to block online content deemed as either pornographic or of an extremist nature to protect those under 16 years of age. It was anticipated that approximately 50 websites would be banned altogether. What subsequently happened was that thousands of websites disappeared from the internet with no court orders, injunctions, notices or justification. Even finding out which websites are on that list is a secret.
Over time, like many pieces of legislation that has been abused by the state, websites and online content that the government of the day does not like will have the perfect tool to simply press the ‘delete’ button, pretty much as they have already started doing.
Soon after the Second World War, some of America’s richest people began setting up a network of thinktanks to promote their interests. These purport to offer dispassionate opinions on public affairs. But they are more like corporate lobbyists, working on behalf of those who founded and fund them. These are the organisations now running much of the Trump administration. These same groups are now running much of Britain. Liam Fox and what was the Atlantic Bridge and the Adam Smith Institute are good examples.
They have control of the Conservative party and are largely responsible for years of work that steered Britain through the EU referendum that ended with Brexit. Tens of £millions have been spent, mostly undisclosed on making this dream to exploit Britain and its people a reality. In fact, almost everything in this article is about such organisations. Those hugely powerful individuals that own search engines and social media platforms along with the banking industry, the pharmaceutical and medical business, the fossil fuel and arms industries – they have reached a pinnacle of unprecedented corporate power.
Some of those fully censored stories pushed below the radar by these corporations include; how over 100,000 EU citizens die every year because of lobbying against workplace carcinogens, how corporate profits and taxes are hidden, the Tory-Trump plan to kill food safety with Brexit – to name but a few. And don’t forget the corporate media who are complicit. There are a handful of offshore billionaires that have the ability to decide what millions should read or see.
The Adam Smith Institute referred to earlier is a good example. It is a mouthpiece for right-wing extreme neoliberal capitalists. With a turnover of over £130 million and an operating profit of nearly £17 million, it has received millions of pounds in UK government funding. That is taxpayers money being used against taxpayers because the ASI does not believe in the likes of the NHS or civil society in general.
Talking of Dark Money – Brexit and the climate deniers
We recently reported about a transatlantic network of lobbyists pushing against action on climate change and (latterly) for Brexit? This group are all based out of one building around the corner from the Palace of Westminster.
The network is funded by shadowy elites in the UK and US and lobbies for rampant market deregulation while pushing the myth that climate change is a hoax.
What is much less known is that more recently, these groups have lobbied for a Hard Brexit, hoping the UK’s withdrawal from the EU will lead to a weakening of those environmental regulations that hinder future profits. These same groups are also behind the Tory-DUP pact, currently keeping Theresa May in her job while allowing hard-line Northern Irish social conservatives to dictate significant parts of the UK’s political agenda, themselves climate change deniers.
These are just some of Britain’s most censored stories. There are so many of them that we have had to categorise them, which says something about how democracy, free speech, civil liberty and human rights are performing in Britain right now.
After having observed Donald Trump’s historical references (the constitutional compromise of 1789, the examples of Andrew Jackson and Richard Nixon) and the way in which his partisans perceive his politics, Thierry Meyssan here analyses his anti-imperialist actions. The US President is not interested in taking a step back, but on the contrary, abandoning the interests of the transnational ruling class in order to develop the US national economy.
The problem
In 1916, during the First World War, Lenin analysed the reasons which led to the confrontation between the empires of his time. He wrote – Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. In this book, he clarified his analysis – « Imperialism is capitalism which has arrived at a stage of its development where domination by monopolies and financial capital has been confirmed, where the export of capital has acquired major importance, where the sharing of the world between international trusts has begun, and where the sharing of all the territories of the globe between the greatest capitalist countries has been achieved ».
The facts confirmed his logic of the concentration of capitalism that he described. In the space of one century, it substituted a new empire for the precedents – « America » (not to be confused with the American continent). By dint of fusions and acquisitions, a few multinational companies gave birth to a global ruling class which gathers every year to congratulate itself, as we watch, in Davos, Switzerland. These people do not serve the interests of the US population, and in fact are not necessarily United States citizens themselves, but use the means of the US Federal State to maximise their profits.
Donald Trump was elected as President of the United States on his promise to return to the earlier state of Capitalism, that of the « American dream, » by free market competition. We can of course claim a priori, as did Lenin, that such a reversal is impossible, but nonetheless, the new President has committed to this direction.
The heart of the imperial Capitalist system is expressed by the doctrine of the Pentagon, formulated by Admiral Arthur Cebrowski – the world is now split in two.
On one side, the developed, stable states…
…and on the other, those states which are not yet integrated into the imperial globalist system and are therefore doomed to instability. The US armed forces are tasked with destroying the state and social structures of the non-integrated regions. Since 2001, they have been patiently destroying the « Greater Middle East », and are now preparing to do the same in the « Caribbean Basin .»
We are obliged to note that the way in which the Pentagon looks at the world is based on the same concepts used by anti-imperialist thinkers like Immanuel Wallerstein, Giovanni Arrighi or Samir Amin.
The attempted solution
Donald Trump’s objective thus consists both of reinvesting the transnational capital in the US economy, and turning the Pentagon and the CIA away from their current imperialist functions with National Defense.
In order to do so, he has to withdraw from international commercial treaties and dissolve the inter-governmental structures which consolidate the old order.
French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe speaking to US President Donald Trump during the second day of the G7 meeting in Charlevoix, Canada, June 2018.
Undoing the international commercial treaties
From the very first days of his mandate, President Trump removed his country from the trans-Pacific partnership agreement, which had not yet been signed. This commercial treaty had been conceived strategically as a means of isolating China.
Since he was unable to cancel the signature of his country on those treaties which were already in force, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), he began to unravel them by imposing various customs duties which were contrary to the spirit, but not the letter, of the agreement.
Re-framing or dissolving the inter-governmental structures
As we have often written here, the United Nations Organisation is no longer a forum for peace, but an instrument of US imperialism within which a few states continue to resist. This was already the case during the Soviet policy of the empty chair (Korean War) and, since July 2012, it is once again true.President Trump has directly attacked the two main imperialist tools within the UNO – the peace-keeping operations (which have taken the place of the observation missions which were originally planned by the Charter), and the Human Rights Council (whose sole function is to justify the humanitarian wars waged by NATO). He has deprived the former of their budget, and withdrawn his country from the latter. However, he has just lost the election for Director of the International Organisation for Migration, leaving the road open, for the moment, for the world traffic in human beings. Of course, he has absolutely no wish to destroy the UNO, but only to refocus its activities and bring it back to its original function.
He has just torpedoed the G7. This meeting, initially intended as a moment for the exchange of points of view, had become, as from 1994, a tool for imperial domination. In 2014, it transformed itself into an instrument for anti-Russian activity – thus conforming to what had become the new strategy of the Anglo-Saxon nations, aimed at « cutting our losses », in other words, avoiding a World War by limiting the empire to the borders of Russia and thereby isolating it. President Trump took great care during the meeting in Charleroix to show his confused allies that he was no longer their overlord, and that they would have to make it on their own.
Finally, after having tried to use France to dynamite the European Union, he turned to Italy, where he sent Steve Bannon to create an anti-system government with the help of US banks. Rome has already concluded an alliance with five other capitals against Brussels.
Reinvesting in productive economy
Via diverse fiscal and customs measures, rarely voted by Congress and usually adopted by decree, President Trump encouraged the major companies of his country to repatriate their factories back to the USA. There immediately followed an economic recovery, which is about the only thing for which the Press will recognise him.
However, we are a long way from noting a financial decline. World finance is probably continuing to prosper outside of the USA, or in other words, continuing to suck up the wealth of the rest of the world.
Reorienting the Pentagon and the CIA
This is obviously the most difficult operation. During his election, President Trump could count on the the votes from his troops, but not those of the superior officers and generals
Donald Trump entered into politics on 11 September 2001. He immediately contested the official version of the events. Thereafter, he expressed his astonishment about the contradictions of the mainstream story – while Presidents Bush Jr. and Obama declared that they wanted to eliminate the jihadist movements, we observed on the contrary a drastic multiplication and globalisation of jihadism during their mandates which went as far as the creation of an independent state in Iraq and Syria.
This is why, as soon as he took office, President Trump surrounded himself with officers who enjoyed a recognised authority in the army. It was, for him, the only option, both to guard against a military coup d’etat and to ensure that he would be obeyed in the reforms that he wanted to implement. Then he gave carte blanche to all the military for everything concerning tactics on the ground. Finally, he never lost an opportunity to confirm his support for the armed forces and the Intelligence services.
After having confiscated their permanent chair at the National Security Council from the president of the chiefs of staff and the director of the CIA, he gave the order to cease support for the jihadists. Progressively, we saw Al-Qaeda and Daesh lose ground. This policy continues today with the withdrawal of US support for the jihadists in Southern Syria. From now on, they no longer form private armies, but only scattered groups which are used for occasional terrorist actions.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg (R) and US President Donald Trump take a seat during a working dinner meeting at the NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) headquarters in Brussels on May 25, 2017 during a NATO summit.
Similarly, he first of all pretended to give up dissolving NATO if it would agree to add an anti-terrorist function to its anti-Russian function. He is now beginning to show NATO that it does not enjoy eternal privileges, as we we saw with his refusal to deliver a special visa for an ex-General Secretary. Above all, he has begun to diminish its anti-Russian function. So he is now negotiating with Moscow the cancellation of Alliance manoeuvres in Eastern Europe. Besides this, he is now taking administrative actions which attest to the refusal of the allies to contribute to collective defence as far as they are able. In this way, he is preparing to dismantle NATO as soon as he sees fit.
This moment will only come when the destructuration of international relations occurs simultaneously at maturity in Asia (North Korea), the Greater Middle East (Palestine and Iran) and in Europe (UE).
Keep in mind
President Trump is absolutely not the « unpredictable » character so often described. Quite the contrary, he acts in a clearly thoughtful and logical manner.
Donald Trump is preparing a reorganisation of international relations. This change will operate through a complete and sudden upheaval directed against the interests of the transnational ruling class.
Over half of students who graduated from Harvard and Johns Hopkins universities this year did so with cum laude, magna cum laude or summa cum laude honors or their equivalents, reports the Wall Street Journal.
Just under that many students earned the once-meaningful designations at the University of Southern California, Lehigh, and Princeton. At Middlebury College, anyone with a GPA of at least 3.4 can add Latin honors to their brand new résumé, which was over half of students as of this spring.
“I’d say that it’s time to reconsider our eligibility criteria,” said Middlebury Interim Provost Jeff Cason.
According to a Wall Street Journal review of graduating seniors who earned designations at schools in the top 50 institutions ranked by the WSJ, honors designations “have become close to the norm at many top
The share increased to 44% from 32% in the past decade at USC, which requires a GPA of at least 3.5 for the lowest honor, cum laude, and to 44% from 39% at Lehigh, where students need at least a 3.4. –WSJ
“A 4.0 does signal something significant, that that student is good,” said Stuart Rojstaczer, a former professor at Duke University who studies grade inflation. “A 3.7, however, doesn’t. That’s just a run-of-the-mill student at any of these schools.”
What’s to blame? Academic researchers say grade inflation, not smarter students, according to the Journal. A University of Georgia researcher found that 47% of high-school students graduated with an A average in 2016, vs. 39% in 1998. Those students have been maintaining good grades in college.
At Wellesley College, 41% of this year’s graduating class completed their degrees with Latin honors, which means a GPA of at least 3.6 at the Massachusetts school. That share has risen in the past two years, after being roughly one-third for much of the past decade. A spokeswoman said the school hasn’t pinpointed the cause of the increase. –WSJ
Nearly 59% of spring graudates from Johns Hopkins did so with “general honors,” by achieving a GPA of at least 3.5. Ten years ago, that was around 46%.
One Johns Hopkins graduate, Rushabh Doshi, learned that he’d made his way onto a list of honor students – only to notice that the list was four pages long.
Mr. Doshi, who majored in public health and is heading to Oxford University to study medical anthropology in the fall, said he was proud of his academic accomplishment. But, he said, “It’s not something that holds too much weight.” –WSJ
Most top tier schools cap the percentage of the graduating class that can receive honors – however that number varies widely; from 25% at Columbia University to 60% at Harvard. After Harvard’s number hit 91% in 2001, they revised their selection process.
Northwestern University bumped its percentage of eligible seniors from 16% to 25% in 2010 – citing concerns over students losing out on graduate-school admissions because they were competing with peersfrom colleges with more lax honors requirements.
And now they’re meaningless…
The dean of Stanford University’s Knight-Hennesey Scholars graduate program, Derrick Bolton, says that application readers “may glance” at honors designations, but don’t give them much weight. Bolton says that the program – which received 3,601 applications for just 50 spots – “looks for more candidates who challenge themselves academically,” even if that means they earned a dreaded “B” along the way.
“The Latin honors are sending you a signal, but there’s noise,” said Bolton.
“Moving the whole bar upward creates a problem where people learn they can do very little and get a grade-point average that looks very respectable,” said Richard Arum, dean of the University of California, Irvine School of Education. –WSJ
And at Georgetown University, honors are now distributed by relative performance of all the students, rather than a fixed 3.5 GPA. Now, roughly 25% of graduates is handed one of the three Latin honors as opposed to over half the students receiving designations.
Georgetown made the change “in order to ensure that Latin honors represent a mark of distinction.”
In Part 1 of our investigative series on Surveillance Capitalism, MPN spoke to author Yasha Levine and Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster about the rise of the Amazon.com empire and its fusion with the U.S. state apparatus.
In our next installments, we will continue exploring the rise of Surveillance Capitalism and the implications of Amazon-fueled spying technology, both in the workplace and in U.S. city streets.
“Capitalism is a system that seeks to transgress all boundaries in its production and sale of commodities, commodifying everything in existence, which today, in the age of monopoly-finance capital and surveillance capitalism, means intruding into every aspect of existence,” John Bellamy Foster told MPN.
This year may go down in history as a turning-point when the world finally woke up to the dark side of the ubiquitous presence of popular Silicon Valley companies in our daily lives. One can only hope so, at least.
From Amazon to Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft and PayPal – among others – revelations poured out confirming the ongoing abuse of user data by monopolistic corporations, as well as their growing role as vendors of surveillance technology to the U.S. police state, military, and migrant detention agencies.
In March, the lid was blown off of the violation of user data on Facebook, with Cambridge Analytica mining user information for the purpose of providing millions of detailed “psychological profiles” to the Trump campaign, among others. Scarcely two weeks later, the Google campus was in an uproar over the development of its “Project Maven,” which was building an AI-fueled platform to vastly upgrade the automatic targeting abilities of the U.S. military’s global drone fleet. Faced with public outrage and internal dissent, the company pulled out of bidding to renew its Pentagon contract, which ends next year.
Now, employees and shareholders of Amazon.com – the world’s largest online marketer and cloud-computing provider – are demanding that chief executive Jeff Bezos halt the sale of its facial recognition or Amazon Web Services (AWS) Rekognition service to law enforcement agencies across the U.S., including to the Department of Homeland Security – Immigration and Customs Enforcement (DHS-ICE).
“As ethically concerned Amazonians, we demand a choice in what we build, and a say in how it is used,” the letter said. “We learn from history, and we understand how IBM’s systems were employed in the 1940s to help Hitler.
“IBM did not take responsibility then, and by the time their role was understood, it was too late,” it continued, referring to collusion with the operation of Nazi extermination camps during the Second World War. “We will not let that happen again. The time to act is now.”
Unveiled in November 2016 as a part of the AWS cloud suite, Rekognition analyzes images and video footage to recognize objects while providing analytics to users. It also lets clients “identify people of interest against a collection of millions of faces in near real-time, enabling use cases such as timely and accurate crime prevention,” according to promotional material. Law enforcement agencies like the Washington County Sheriff’s Department pay as little as $6 to $12 a month for access to the platform, giving deputies the ability to scan its mugshot database against real-time footage.
Amazon employees cited a report from the ACLU that notes that AWS Rekognition “raises profound civil liberties and civil rights concerns” owing to its “capacity for abuse.” Its uses could include monitoring protest activity, as well as the possibility that ICE could employ the technology to continuously track immigrants and advance its “zero tolerance” policy of detaining migrant families and children at the U.S.-Mexico border.
In the letter distributed on email list “we-won’t-build-it,” Amazon employees lay out their opposition to their employer’s collusion with the police and the DHS-ICE migrant-capture and mass-incarceration regime:
We don’t have to wait to find out how these technologies will be used. We already know that in the midst of historic militarization of police, renewed targeting of Black activists, and the growth of a federal deportation force currently engaged in human rights abuses — this will be another powerful tool for the surveillance state, and ultimately serve to harm the most marginalized.”
The furor surrounding AWS Rekognition is hardly a revelation to journalist Yasha Levine. Instead, as is the case with Google and other flagship firms’ work for Washington, it’s just another chapter in Silicon Valley’s long-time integration into the repressive state apparatus.
“This isn’t so much a big step to some ‘Surveillance Apocalypse,’ it’s just an indication of where we’ve been for a long time,” Levine told MintPress News.
Yet the Amazon workers’ outrage was likely provoked by recent headlines highlighting the Trump administration’s separation of Central American migrant families at the concentration camps along the Southern border – along with the key role Amazon plays for ICE’s data “ecosystem,” crucial to the operation of ICE’s immigrant enforcement, mass incarceration, and removal regime.
In their letter, Amazon’s employees decried the role the company plays in the platform Palantir provides for ICE:
We also know that Palantir runs on AWS. And we know that ICE relies on Palantir to power its detention and deportation programs. Along with much of the world we watched in horror recently as U.S. authorities tore children away from their parents. Since April 19, 2018 the Department of Homeland Security has sent nearly 2,000 children to mass detention centers…
In the face of this immoral U.S. policy, and the U.S.’s increasingly inhumane treatment of refugees and immigrants beyond this specific policy, we are deeply concerned that Amazon is implicated, providing infrastructure and services that enable ICE and DHS.“
In 2014, ICE gave Palantir a $41 million contract for the Investigative Case Management (ICM) system, which expanded its capacity for data-sharing between the bureau and other agency databases including those of the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, among others. The contract allowed ICE to significantly boost its ability to capture and incarcerate unauthorized migrants based on the disparate data Palantir collated and hosted on Amazon Web Services’ servers.
Watch | Palantir 101
“What Amazon has simply done is allow everyone to lease that [Rekognition] capability the way that you would lease its web space, or have a pay-as-you-go plan with Amazon,” Levine commented.
In his new book, Surveillance Valley: The Hidden History of the Internet, Levine details the romance enjoyed between Big Data and the U.S. repressive state. In the introduction to his book, he notes :
From Amazon to eBay to Facebook — most of the Internet companies we use every day have also grown into powerful corporations that track and profile their users while pursuing partnerships and business relationships with major U.S. military and intelligence agencies. Some parts of these companies are so thoroughly intertwined with America’s security services that it is hard to tell where they end and the U.S. government begins.”
Having conquered retail and the internet, Amazon looks to the state and says “Forward”
President Barack Obama shakes hands with workers after speaking at the Amazon fulfillment center in Chattanooga, Tenn., July 30, 2013. Susan Walsh | AP
Conceived by founder Jeff Bezos as an “everything store” selling products from books to DVDs and music, Amazon has long been a scourge to the traditional brick-and-mortar marketplace, spending the late 1990s and the 2000s sweeping big and small booksellers alike into the ash-heap of retail history.
“Amazon has now become the de facto store for everything in America – it’s shocking to think about how much we buy from it and how much money we give away to it,” Levine said, adding that the company’s power as a business “is kind of depressing.”
The company has also become the world’s premier internet hosting firm through its Amazon Web Services cloud computing platform. From 2006 on, AWS played a similar role to Amazon.com’s retail platform in regard to small-fry-displacing traditional corporate data centers and information technology (IT) professionals, providing a previously unimaginable level of centralization in terms of data storage and IT functionality at a low cost. For some time even Dropbox found shelter under the AWS cloud.
Watch | Amazon.com and Jeff Bezos In 1999
The company’s success as the world’s biggest retailer and cloud computing service was closely related to Amazon’s surveillance efforts directed not only toward consumers, but against its huge and heavily-exploited employee workforce. As Levine detailed in his book:
[Amazon] recorded people’s shopping habits, their movie preferences, the books they were interested in, how fast they read books on their Kindles, and the highlights and margin notes they made. It also monitored its warehouse workers, tracking their movements and timing their performance.
Amazon requires incredible processing power to run such a massive data business, a need that spawned a lucrative side business of renting out space on its massive servers to other companies.”
In the 2012 U.S. presidential election, AWS software provided nearly all aspects of then-incumbent President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign software and big-data analysis, ranging from web management to mailing-list management, data modeling, volunteer dispatching, voter-information database maintenance and “massive transaction processing” for donations.
Watch | Obama for America on AWS
By early 2013, a secretive deal awarded Amazon a 10-year, $600-million contract to provide cloud services to the Central Intelligence Agency and the 17 agencies comprising the intelligence community.
Langley’s contract with such a commercially-oriented company as Amazon, rather than rival bidder IBM, sent shockwaves through the tech industry, but the company boasted that it reflected the “superior technology platform” it could provide to the CIA along with its ability to deliver “the confidence and security assurance needed for mission-critical systems.”
Amazon’s platform will soon be the venue for a major intelligence project by the CIA dubbed “Mesa Verde,” which will see the agency’s AWS-built C2S cloud software deployed in multiple experiments meant to parse thousands of terabytes of data, including public web data, using natural language processing tools, sentiment analysis, and data visualization.
According to a Bloomberg Government report in May, AWS is the only private cloud platform granted clearance to store agency information marked “Secret.”
Amazon’s CIA partnership: Surveillance Capitalism in action
Rev. Paul Benz, center, and Shankar Narayan, legislative director of the ACLU of Washington, right, stand with others as they wait to deliver petitions at Amazon headquarters, June 18, 2018, in Seattle. Representatives of community-based organizations urged Amazon at a news conference to stop selling its face surveillance system, Rekognition, to the government. They later delivered the petitions to Amazon. Elaine Thompson | AP
Amazon’s partnership with Langley is just another case of surveillance capitalism in action, according to sociology professor and author John Bellamy Foster, the editor of the venerable independent socialist journal Monthly Review.
Speaking to MintPress News, Foster explained:
Amazon now seems to be landing one contract after another with the military and intelligence sectors in the United States…
[The CIA cloud] is built on the premises of a private corporation, a kind of ‘walled castle’ for intelligence [spy] agency communication separate from the rest of the Internet, but principally operated by a for-profit corporation. Amazon also has a $1 billion contract with the Security and Exchange Commission, works with NASA, the Food and Drug Administration and other government agencies.”
In a 2014 essay for Monthly Review, Foster and Robert W. McChesney introduced the term surveillance capitalism in reference to the process of finance capital monetizing data extracted through surveillance operations performed in collusion with the state apparatus. The two trace the political-economic roots of the the data-driven Information Age from the early stages of the military-industrial complex to the 1950s fusion of consumer capitalism – corporations, ad agencies, and media – with the permanent warfare state, eventually leading to the birth of satellite technology, the internet, and the domination of a handful of monopolist tech firms during the present era of neoliberal globalization.
From the tech sector’s role in police-state operations to the expansion of “Smart” technology like Amazon’s Alexa into our homes, the use of drones and AI for keeping tabs on the entire population, and the manipulation of Facebook user data by the Trump campaign’s partnership with Cambridge Analytica, Foster is unequivocal in his judgment of surveillance capitalism’s metastasizing growth and its omniscient role in our daily lives:
The implications for the future are staggering.”
Not everyone shares Foster’s pessimistic perspective. To former CIA cybersecurity researcher John Pirc, the agency contract with Amazon represented the removal of a “clouded judgment”-based stigma over cloud computing security. Speaking to The Atlantic, Pirc commented:
You hear so many people on the fence about cloud, and then to see the CIA gobble it up and do something so highly disruptive, it’s kind of cool.”
Holy Disruption and the “Gale Force of Creative Destruction”
Creation, epiphany, genesis, prophecy, rapture, sacrifice, wrath; such sacred words pepper the Old and New Testaments and still carry divine significance for the faithful. Beloved by clergy and revered by the flock, such consecrated terms hardly apply to Apple’s bitten-fruit logo or Alexa’s profanely secular robotic voice.
But in today’s cult of high technology and the internet — where entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg have been elevated to the level of prophets or pharaohs, and start-ups are evangelized at TED Talks as the panacea to problems ranging from physical fitness to refugee crises — a new ecclesiastical lexicon is used. Central to this pseudo-religion of Big Data is the phrase disruption, an oft-invoked term signifying the replacement of old markets and business models by new technological innovations.
As Silicon Valley pioneer, computer scientist, and critic Jaron Lanier noted in his 2013 book Who Owns the Future?:
The terminology of ‘disruption’ has been granted an almost sacred status in tech business circles…
To disrupt is the most celebrated achievement. In Silicon Valley, one is always hearing that this or that industry is ripe for disruption. We kid ourselves, pretending that disruption requires creativity. It doesn’t. It’s always the same story.”
For Lanier – a fervent defender of capitalism — the D-word is misused to convey the liberating potential of new technology, when in fact the reign of big tech firms has led to a shrunken market dominated by “a small number of spying operations in omniscient positions.” Thus the digital landscape has become the fiefdom of monopoly firms who exercise an iron grip on competitors and Big Data’s primary commodities – internet users and their data.
To Foster, this process is little more than neoliberalism – the prevailing capitalist ideology dictating the unimpeded control over all aspects of public life by finance capital and the market. Foster notes that neoliberal orthodoxy is rooted in the concept of creative destruction, the concept from which the “disruption” buzzword is derived.
Creative destruction was introduced in 1942 by Austrian-American economist Joseph Schumpeter to describe a process of constant change under capitalism, whereby emerging entrepreneurs act as “innovation powerhouses” through a “perennial gale of creative destruction” that disorganizes and displaces competition, reshapes global markets, and paves the way to an emergence of new monopolies such as, for example, Silicon Valley’s leading firms.
Watch | Greenspan on Schumpeter’s “Creative Destruction”
“One of the key components of neoliberal ideology has been the opening up of the system to the unrestricted growth of monopolistic corporations and monopoly power,” Foster said to MintPress News, adding:
The neoliberal age has thus seen one of the greatest periods of growth of monopoly power, particularly in the cyber or digital realm, in all of history. If you take Google, Amazon, and Facebook, none of them even existed 25 years ago, and Facebook didn’t exist 15 years ago. Amazon had a 51 percent increase in market capitalization between 2016 and 2017 alone. These are giant monopolistic enterprises.”
Continuing, Foster explained:
In general, capitalism is a system that seeks to transgress all boundaries in its production and sale of commodities, commodifying everything in existence — which today, in the age of monopoly-finance capital and surveillance capitalism, means intruding into every aspect of existence as a means of manipulating not only the physical world, but also the minds and lives of everyone within it. It is this that constitutes the heart of surveillance capitalism.
But this same system of monopoly-finance capital has as its counterpart a growing centralization of power and wealth, increasing monopoly control, expanding militarism and imperialism, and an expansion of police power. It is what the political theorist Sheldon Wolin called ‘inverted totalitarianism,’ the growth of totalizing control of the population, and the destruction of human freedom under the mask of an ideology of individualism.”
As Amazon now approaches its 25-year anniversary, Foster notes, it’s become “a vast cultural (or anti-cultural) commodity empire” – and its ownership of The Washington Post has made clear the monopoly firm’s fusion with the state apparatus of U.S. imperialism.
Amazon clutches the “Newspaper of Record,” or “Democracy Dies in Darkness”
The front page of the Washington Post is displayed outside the Newseum in Washington, , 2013, a day after it was announced that Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for $250 million. Evan Vucci | AP
Since Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million, the leading newspaper of the U.S. capital has stood at the ramparts of Fortress Amazon.Beyond any elite squadron of lobbyists or contracts with the Homeland Security or National Security State, the newspaper’s influential role shaping public and policymaker opinion gives Jeff Bezos and his fellow Amazon executives unparalleled access to the halls of imperial power.
“Of course it’s a problem when a powerful, monopolistic business like this with a very controlling owner is in the media business as well,” Yasha Levine commented, adding:
Let’s be honest, Amazon is a major CIA contractor now, and now this major contractor owns one of the most important newspapers in the country – which also happens to report on the CIA and national security issues.”
Since President Donald Trump came to power last January, “Amazon Washington Post” has been the target of the former reality-TV star’s ire as a top example of “fake news media.” While many of Trump’s attacks on the Post have been his standard Twitter outbursts against legitimate journalistic scrutiny, the newspaper once celebrated for publishing the groundbreaking 1971 Pentagon Papers is now both a bully pulpit for the president’s detractors in the Beltway liberal “resistance” and a mouthpiece of an aggressively neoliberal wing of the U.S. establishment.
“The Washington Post was always a liberal-capitalist paper, an arbiter of capitalist ideology and a defender of U.S. empire, [but] it has now become, as part of the Bezos empire, something worse,” Foster observed.
Scarcely a day passes without the Post publishing a torrent of stories seeking to expose “Russian interference” favoring Trump through social media or “fake news.” Citing the “experts” in “nonpartisan” media criticism group PropOrNot, the Post has smeared MintPress News and publications likeBlack Agenda Report,CounterPunch, andTruthout as propaganda platforms tied to the Kremlin without citing so much as a shred of evidence. Through its de facto blacklist, the group has also attempted to tie disparate independent media organizations to hard-right and white-supremacist outlets like Alex Jones’Infowars and neo-Nazi websiteThe Daily Stormer.
Watch | WaPo refuses to add disclosure about $600M CIA contract
The Washington Post has generally waged what amounts to an ideological war on basic progressive causes, Foster explained:
It recently ran an article describing the ‘far left’ as those who believed in single-payer health insurance or protecting national parks, as if even these traditional left-liberal causes were now far outside the range of acceptable political discourse — a stance clearly designed to ratchet the political discourse further to the right. Bezos and Amazon are simply symbols of this social retrogression, as is the current autocrat in the White House.”
To Levine, the trend – like the ownership of muckraking news website The Intercept by billionaire Silicon Valley entrepreneur and eBay co-founder Pierre Omidyar — goes beyond the Post alone. Levine commented:
It’s a larger issue of Silicon Valley coming into its own, and businesses built on top of the internet dominating business; and if you dominate business, you dominate society and news media coverage – that’s just the way things work.”
Foster agrees, and minces no words depicting the danger Amazon’s growing power in U.S. society represents:
Democracy can be judged in various ways, but no definition of democracy – no matter how specious – is consistent with a society in which such vast class and monopoly power exist, and where the infrastructure of genuine democracy (education, communications, science, culture, public discourse, means of public protest) is demolished.
For this and other reasons, U.S. society and much of the capitalist world is shifting from neo-liberalism to something better described as neo-fascism.”
In our next installments, we will continue exploring the rise of Surveillance Capitalism and the implications of Amazon-fueled spying technology, both in the workplace and in U.S. city streets.
Last weekend’s violence in Portland between Antifa and Trump supporters produced a viral video of a “resistance” member being knocked out cold.
The man, wearing a black and yellow Fred Perry polo shirt, which has become the now-famous uniform of the Proud Boys, forced his attacker to the ground with one punch. After being knocked out, the Antifa supporter had to be carried away by a group of his fellow protesters.
Big League Politics reached out to Gavin McInnes, who founded the Proud Boys, whose only comment was “F#&k around and find out,” stating that Antifa “found out.” –Big League Politics
The skirmish in Portland has many talking about the prospect of a second Civil War in the United States. As we reported last week, a shocking 31% of voters say it’s likely that the United States will experience a second civil war over the next five years, according to a new Rasmussen poll.
As such, conservatives have taken to twitter to mock the violent left with a new hashtag which has quickly gone viral: #SecondCivilWarLetters – which envisions the “soy-boys” on the left writing letters during a second Civil War.
SECRET//NOTRUMP
To Antifa Command:
Half the regiment walked home after we ran out of selfie sticks and wifi for instagram. Granola stores are dry. Our undercover op failed when the Red Caps started doing pushups and using improper pronouns
We had no idea wearing all black in summer would lead to this many casualties. They warned us in Basic about living outdoors but we didn’t believe them.
Reports of Special Forces Q Brigades in the hills nearby.
#secondcivilwarletters
My Darling Clara,
I write to you today along the Twittermattox timeline where the infirmary tents continue to fill without cessation, the woods ringing with the barking despairs hollowed-eyed souls driven to madness by butthurt and sick burns.
Amy;
I am safely in Vancouver.
It is lovely. Everyone rides bicycles.
Their prime minister seems delightful.
I will attempt to send Coffee Crisp and Ketchup flavoured Lays to you and your battalion in the morn.
– James#secondcivilwarletters
My dearest Madison;
Whilst engaging hostiles in Santa Clarita, we found ourselves pinned down between Starbucks, Peets, Seattle’s Best and an Einstein’s bagels. We are running low of seasonal blends and jalapeño cheddar.
Send rations.
– Regards, Corey #secondcivilwarletters
You may have heard Paul Joseph Watson was captured by our company yesterday. He kept telling us to imagine his shock, until Fatima shoved her hijab in his mouth. He is being well treated, despite his protests at the soy milk. War is hell, eh? #secondcivilwarletters
— Mike Stuchbery 💀🍷 (@MikeStuchbery_) July 3, 2018
Dearest Xer,
Conditions on the front are grim. Our soy rations are down to two lattes a day. Wifi is only one bar. We have but the writings of Senator Ta-Nehisi to comfort us during the frog barrages. Intel reports General McInnes’ forces are on the move
Given the spate of violence directed towards Trump supporters which began during the 2016 election which has most recently manifested itself in the form of stalking, public shaming and threatening Trump officials, it’s easy to see how nearly 1/3 of voters think civil war is on the horizon. There are also scores of leftist hate groups roaming around looking for a fight, as well documented by Far Left Watch.
Remember these charming incidents? (there are hundreds)
While monetary tightening remains the main risk for global stock markets, the threat of a trade war continues to dominate the headlines…
THE DONALD’S DEALMAKING
The question raised by Donald Trump’s trade agenda with China remains, in essence, extremely simple. It is whether The Donald is engaged in a typical ‘Art of the Deal’ negotiation, where he can suddenly turn on a dime and declare a ‘win’, or whether he is really seriously trying to stop Chinaupgrading its economy by targeting ‘Made in China 2025’.
Such a stance would amount to an act of economic warfare. On this point, it should be understood that some of those in Washington pushing this policy view of China as some kind of strategic rival for global leadership. For such people this is about far more than just tariffs.
The markets had been assuming that the American president would not take this too far. But, as discussed here before, concerns have grown as it has increasingly looked like Trump is supporting Robert Lighthizer’s (US Trade Representative) and Peter Navarro’s (White House Economic Adviser) agenda.
HOW LIKELY IS ECONOMIC WARFARE?
On July 6, first the US and then Chinese 25% tariffs on US$34 billion worth of goods are due to go into effect. If bilateral negotiations do not resume before that date, then the chances of the US and China entering a so-called trade war grow significantly.
If the above is the state of play, market action has now become critical. The more that the US stock market freaks out about these policies in terms of declining share prices, the more likely becomes The Donald to perform a U-turn. This is because Trump is a market-focused guy even if it is also the case that much of his electoral base are not invested in stocks because they do not have the requisite savings.
There has already been more than a hint of this market dynamic at work last week when the S&P500 recovered some of its losses ‘intraday’ on Monday after Navarro was presumably ordered to issue a less combative statement. His comments came after news reports over the weekend that the US could block companies with at least 25% Chinese ownership from buying companies involved in so-called “industrially significant technology”.
S&P500
Source: Bloomberg
Similarly, on Wednesday last week, the S&P500 reversed a pre-market opening decline when Trump made some more conciliatory comments on the nature of the coming investment restrictions. Trump said he will now use a strengthened existing agency and national security review process to scrutinize Chinese acquisitions of American technologies. He said: “Congress has made significant progress toward passing legislation that will modernize our tools for protecting the nation’s critical technologies from harmful foreign acquisitions”.
Meanwhile, if the American president does remain committed to the combative agenda as regards China, Congressional review could prove more destructive of the bilateral relationship over the longer term than tariff hikes. It is also the case that Congress involvement will be via the so-called Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) whose authority will be enhanced, as Trump referred to above, by new legislation in Congress called the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act (FIRRMA).
The Congressional involvement will probably make the process harder to unwind once the restrictions are imposed. It is certainly the case that Congress has its own share of enthusiastic China bashers, as is clear from those in Congress who have been seeking to reverse Trump’s decision to overturn the ban on ZTE buying American goods. The US Senate voted last week by 85-10 to reinstate the ZTE sales ban.
US IMPORTS FROM CHINA AND CHINA IMPORTS FROM THE US
Source: US Census Bureau, China General Administration of Customs
Now it is true, technically, that the pending investment restrictions will not just be aimed at China. The Treasury Secretary has stated that the restrictions will apply “to all countries that are trying to steal our technology”. But the political reality is that all this activity in Washington has a China focus. So, the danger is that once these sorts of actions are announced, they will turn out to have a life of their own.
EVENTS IN NORTH KOREA ARE PLEASING TO CHINA
Meanwhile, amidst all this focus on deteriorating Sino-US relations, there is one potential positive that should not be completely ignored.
That is that events are unfolding in the Korean peninsula in a manner which should please China and a lot of this, intentionally or not, seems to be due to the American president.
China would certainly welcome a North Korean economy that is pursuing a more China-style reform-oriented course in terms of the management of its economy, though the first priority may not be Trump-style beachfront condos.
Second, Beijing will also want to maintain North Korea as an independent state, and Trump does not appear to be pushing for unification.
Third, China will welcome Trump’s proposal, made at the Singapore summit on June 12, to end American “war games” on the Korean peninsula.
The hope from the above must be that there has been some constructive ‘behind the scenes’ dialogue between Washington and Beijing on North Korea which would infer that the relationship is not as antagonistic as current headlines on the trade issue would suggest.
It has now been 3 years and 4 months since #Chicago last logged a day w/ out a shooting and/or a homicide. Since 2/28/15: 2,214 killed, 10,144 wounded.
In a statement released by the police department last June following President Trump’s tweet, police Superintendent Eddie Johnson said,
“If you have a magic bullet to stop the violence anywhere, not just in Chicago but in America, then please, share it with us…”
“More than just a new strategy or tactic, we are foundationally changing the way we fight crime in Chicago. This new strike force will significantly help our police officers stem the flow of illegal guns and create a culture of accountability for the small subset of individuals and gangs who disproportionately drive violence in our city.”
The numbers have only got worse since then.
Courtesy of HeyJackass.com, here are Chicago’s deadliest ‘hoods…
See all the stunning details of Chicago’s ongoing collapse at HeyJackass.com
