On today’s episode of Breaking The Set, Abby Martin discusses several vital topics that would be career-killers for so-called journalists on other news channels. This video is 27 minutes of truth you won’t see anywhere on establishment media.
Abby crushes warmongering lies by McCain and Netanyahu, exposes how Hillary Clinton is owned by corporate tyrants, she interviews Mike Papantonio on Big Pharma misconduct and CIA torture whistleblower John Kiriakou. Great show!
A New York court has fined the Palestine Liberation Organisation $218mn after it held the group liable for attacks in Israel 10 years ago, in which Americans were amongst the victims. The jury ruled in favour of 10 American families who sought damages relating to the 6 attacks, which killed 33.
This extraordinarily perverse judgement ignores the 10,000 Palestinians killed by the IDF from 1987 to date which includes hundreds of children under the age of 16, women under the age of 69 and persons over the age of 60.
The published statistics from the B’Tselem Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories,* are as follows:
Palestinians killed by the IDF from 1987-2000 = 1376
Palestinians killed by the IDF from 2000-2008 = 4790
Palestinians killed by the IDF from 2008-2009 = 1398
Palestinians killed by the IDF from 2009-2015 = 609
Palestinians killed by the IDF in August 2014 = 1767
(inc. 431 children, 200 women and 85 over sixty)
_____________________TOTAL killed by the IDF = 9940
2. Palestinians in Israeli custody as at 31.12.14 = 5528
3. There are now an estimated 515,000 illegal settlers in the Occupied Territories who must be repatriated to Israel in accordance with the will of the United Nations and the International Court of Justice before there can be peace in the Holy Land.
However, for so long as the Israel lobby in the United States exerts such undue influence over the judicial system and over the House of Representatives, the outlook for peace is virtually non-existent – but the likelihood of further war, funded and supplied by a misinformed and lobby-controlled US Congress, is almost inevitable.
Meanwhile the international community should condemn this perverse court ruling that offends justice, reason and democracy.
| EDITOR’S CHOICE | 24.02.2015 | 21:46 |
 A senior Ukrainian official is urging the West to risk a nuclear conflagration in support of a “full-scale war” with Russia that he says authorities in Kiev are now seeking, another sign of the extremism that pervades the year-old, U.S.-backed regime in Kiev.
In a recent interview with Canada’s CBC Radio, Ukraine’s Deputy Foreign Minister Vadym Prystaiko said, “Everybody is afraid of fighting with a nuclear state. We are not anymore, in Ukraine — we’ve lost so many people of ours, we’ve lost so much of our territory.” Prystaiko added, “However dangerous it sounds, we have to stop [Russian President Vladimir Putin] somehow. For the sake of the Russian nation as well, not just for the Ukrainians and Europe.” The deputy foreign minister announced that Kiev is preparing for “full-scale war” against Russia and wants the West to supply lethal weapons and training so the fight can be taken to Russia. “What we expect from the world is that the world will stiffen up in the spine a little,” Prystaiko said. Yet, what is perhaps most remarkable about Prystaiko’s “Dr. Strangelove” moment is that it produced almost no reaction in the West. You have a senior Ukrainian official saying that the world should risk nuclear war over a civil conflict in Ukraine between its west, which favors closer ties to Europe, and its east, which wants to maintain its historic relationship with Russia. Why should such a pedestrian dispute justify the possibility of vaporizing millions of human beings and conceivably ending life on the planet? Yet, instead of working out a plan for a federalized structure in Ukraine or even allowing people in the east to vote on whether they want to remain under the control of the Kiev regime, the world is supposed to risk nuclear annihilation. But therein lies one of the under-reported stories of the Ukraine crisis: There is a madness to the Kiev regime that the West doesn’t want to recognize because to do so would upend the dominant narrative of “our” good guys vs. Russia’s bad guys. If we begin to notice that the right-wing regime in Kiev is crazy and brutal, we might also start questioning the “Russian aggression” mantra. According to the Western “group think,” the post-coup Ukrainian government “shares our values” by favoring democracy and modernity, while the rebellious ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine are “Moscow’s minions” representing dark forces of backwardness and violence, personified by Russia’s “irrational” President Putin. In this view, the conflict is a clash between the forces of good and evil where there is no space for compromise. Yet, there is a craziness to this “group think” that is highlighted by Prystaiko’s comments. Not only does the Kiev regime display a cavalier attitude about dragging the world into a nuclear catastrophe but it also has deployed armed neo-Nazis and other right-wing extremists to wage a dirty war in the east that has involved torture and death-squad activities. Not Since Adolf Hitler No European government, since Adolf Hitler’s Germany, has seen fit to dispatch Nazi storm troopers to wage war on a domestic population, but the Kiev regime has and has done so knowingly. Yet, across the West’s media/political spectrum, there has been a studious effort to cover up this reality, even to the point of ignoring facts that have been well established. The New York Times and the Washington Post have spearheaded this journalistic malfeasance by putting on blinders so as not to see Ukraine’s neo-Nazis, such as when describing the key role played by the Azov battalion in the war against ethnic Russians in the east. On Feb. 20, in a report from Mariupol, the Post cited the Azov battalion’s importance in defending the port city against a possible rebel offensive. Correspondent Karoun Demirjian wrote: “Petro Guk, the commander of the Azov battalion’s reinforcement operations in Mariupol, said in an interview that the battalion is ‘getting ready for’ street-to-street combat in the city. The Azov battalion, now a regiment in the Ukrainian army, is known as one of the fiercest fighting forces in the pro-Kiev operation. “But … it has pulled away from the front lines on a scheduled rest-and-retraining rotation, Guk said, leaving the Ukrainian army — a less capable force, in his opinion — in its place. His advice to residents of Mariupol is to get ready for the worst. “‘If it is your home, you should be ready to fight for it, and accept that if the fight is for your home, you must defend it,’ he said, when asked whether residents should prepare to leave. Some are ready to heed that call, as a matter of patriotic duty.” The Post’s stirring words fit with the Western media’s insistent narrative and its refusal to include meaningful background about the Azov battalion, which is known for marching under Nazi banners, displaying the Swastika and painting SS symbols on its helmets. The New York Times filed a similarly disingenuous article from Mariupol on Feb. 11, depicting the ethnic Russian rebels as barbarians at the gate with the Azov battalion defending civilization. Though providing much color and detail – and quoting an Azov leader prominently – the Times left out the salient and well-known fact that the Azov battalion is composed of neo-Nazis. But this inconvenient truth – that neo-Nazis have been central to Kiev’s “self-defense forces” from last February’s coup to the present – would disrupt the desired propaganda message to American readers. So the New York Times just ignores the Nazism and refers to Azov as a “volunteer unit.” Yet, this glaring omission is prima facie proof of journalistic bias. There’s no way that the editors of the Post and Times don’t know that the presence of neo-Nazis is newsworthy. Indeed, there’s a powerful irony in this portrayal of Nazis as the bulwark of Western civilization against the Russian hordes from the East. It was, after all, the Russians who broke the back of Nazism in World War II as Hitler sought to subjugate Europe and destroy Western civilization as we know it. That the Nazis are now being depicted as defenders of Western ideals has to be the ultimate man-bites-dog story. But it goes essentially unreported in the New York Times and Washington Post as does the inconvenient presence of other Nazis holding prominent positions in the post-coup regime, including Andriy Parubiy, who was the military commander of the Maidan protests and served as the first national security chief of the Kiev regime. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Ukraine, Through the US Looking Glass.”] The Nazi Reality Regarding the Azov battalion, the Post and Times have sought to bury the Nazi reality, but both have also acknowledged it in passing. For instance, on Aug. 10, 2014, a Times’ article mentioned the neo-Nazi nature of the Azov battalion in the last three paragraphs of a lengthy story on another topic. “The fighting for Donetsk has taken on a lethal pattern: The regular army bombards separatist positions from afar, followed by chaotic, violent assaults by some of the half-dozen or so paramilitary groups surrounding Donetsk who are willing to plunge into urban combat,” the Times reported. “Officials in Kiev say the militias and the army coordinate their actions, but the militias, which count about 7,000 fighters, are angry and, at times, uncontrollable. One known as Azov, which took over the village of Marinka, flies a neo-Nazi symbol resembling a Swastika as its flag.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “NYT Whites Out Ukraine’s Brownshirts.”] Similarly, the Post published a lead story last Sept. 12 describing the Azov battalion in flattering terms, saving for the last three paragraphs the problematic reality that the fighters are fond of displaying the Swastika: “In one room, a recruit had emblazoned a swastika above his bed. But Kirt [a platoon leader] … dismissed questions of ideology, saying that the volunteers — many of them still teenagers — embrace symbols and espouse extremist notions as part of some kind of ‘romantic’ idea.” Other news organizations have been more forthright about this Nazi reality. For instance, the conservative London Telegraph published an article by correspondent Tom Parfitt, who wrote: “Kiev’s use of volunteer paramilitaries to stamp out the Russian-backed Donetsk and Luhansk ‘people’s republics’… should send a shiver down Europe’s spine. “Recently formed battalions such as Donbas, Dnipro and Azov, with several thousand men under their command, are officially under the control of the interior ministry but their financing is murky, their training inadequate and their ideology often alarming. The Azov men use the neo-Nazi Wolfsangel (Wolf’s Hook) symbol on their banner and members of the battalion are openly white supremacists, or anti-Semites.” Based on interviews with militia members, the Telegraph reported that some of the fighters doubted the Holocaust, expressed admiration for Hitler and acknowledged that they are indeed Nazis. Andriy Biletsky, the Azov commander, “is also head of an extremist Ukrainian group called the Social National Assembly,” according to the Telegraph article which quoted a commentary by Biletsky as declaring: “The historic mission of our nation in this critical moment is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival. A crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen.” The Telegraph questioned Ukrainian authorities in Kiev who acknowledged that they were aware of the extremist ideologies of some militias but insisted that the higher priority was having troops who were strongly motivated to fight. Azov fighters even emblazon the Swastika and the SS insignia on their helmets. NBC News reported: “Germans were confronted with images of their country’s dark past … when German public broadcaster ZDF showed video of Ukrainian soldiers with Nazi symbols on their helmets in its evening newscast.”
But it’s now clear that far-right extremism is not limited to the militias sent to kill ethnic Russians in the east or to the presence of a few neo-Nazi officials who were rewarded for their roles in last February’s coup. The fanaticism is present at the center of the Kiev regime, including its deputy foreign minister who speaks casually about a “full-scale war” with nuclear-armed Russia. An Orwellian World In a “normal world,” U.S. and European journalists would explain to their readers how insane all this is; how a dispute over the pace for implementing a European association agreement while also maintaining some economic ties with Russia could have been worked out within the Ukrainian political system, that it was not grounds for a U.S.-backed “regime change” last February, let alone a civil war, and surely not nuclear war. But these are clearly not normal times. To a degree that I have not seen in my 37 years covering Washington, there is a totalitarian quality to the West’s current “group think” about Ukraine with virtually no one who “matters” deviating from the black-and-white depiction of good guys in Kiev vs. bad guys in Donetsk and Moscow. And, if you want to see how the “objective” New York Times dealt with demonstrations in Moscow and other Russian cities protesting last year’s coup against Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, read Sunday’s dispatch by the Times’ neocon national security correspondent Michael R. Gordon, best known as the lead writer with Judith Miller on the infamous “aluminum tube” story in 2002, helping to set the stage for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Here’s how Gordon explained the weekend’s anti-coup protests: “The official narrative as reported by state-run television in Russia, and thus accepted by most Russians, is that the uprising in Ukraine last year was an American-engineered coup, aided by Ukrainian Nazis, and fomented to overthrow Mr. Yanukovych, a pro-Russian president.” In other words, the Russians are being brainwashed while the readers of the New York Times are getting their information from an independent news source that would never be caught uncritically distributing government propaganda, another example of the upside-down Orwellian world that Americans now live in. [See, for example, “NYT Retracts Russian Photo Scoop.”] In our land of the free, there is no “official narrative” and the U.S. government would never stoop to propaganda. Everyone just happily marches in lockstep behind the conventional wisdom of a faultless Kiev regime that “shares our values” and can do no wrong — while ignoring the brutality and madness of coup leaders who deploy Nazis and invite a nuclear holocaust for the world. consortiumnews.com |
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden continues to loom large in the world’s daily news. Revelations from the trove of data he disclosed to journalists roll out on a near-weekly basis, followed by denials and excuses from politicians and bureaucrats he exposes as responsible for rights violations around the world. Citizenfour, a documentary covering his heroic actions on behalf of the public, just grabbed the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
It’s easy to get lost in the minutiae of Snowden’s individual disclosures. And that’s OK. Each disclosure tells us something important about those who rule us. But there’s more to it than the details. There’s a bigger picture.
In a February 23 “Ask Me Anything” discussion on Reddit, Snowden encapsulated that bigger picture. “[W]e the people,” he wrote, “will implement systems that provide for a means of not just enforcing our rights, but removing from governments the ability to interfere with those rights” (emphasis Snowden’s).
That’s the whole ballgame right there, folks. The purpose of political government has never been, as the US Declaration of Independence claims, “to secure these rights [life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness] … deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The purpose of political government has always been to monopolize violations of rights and to use those violations to redistribute power, control and wealth from you to the political class.
Many — perhaps most — of us don’t get it. Sometimes Snowden himself doesn’t seem quite sure of it. But the politicians know it deep down in their guts.
When the world’s panicked potentates and powermongers squeal that people like Snowden make it more difficult for them to “protect” us, what they really mean is that people like Snowden unlock and open the doors of the cages we’re kept in.
The politicians aren’t afraid of bad actors getting in. They’re afraid of us getting out. Worse, they’re afraid that while we’re out, we’ll realize we never needed them. They fear that the final shred of the emperor’s clothes — the notion that the state is a “necessary evil” — will fall away, revealing them to us in all their nakedness as the unnecessaryevil they’ve always been. And that fear is fully justified.
Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden (among others; Barrett Brown and Ross Ulbricht also come immediately to mind) have earned their places as central figures in the pantheon of human liberty. They will one day be revered (indeed, they already are among many) as modern-day Thomas Paines.
Paine’s work brought down the British Empire in one small corner of Earth; it also inspired and informed the revolution in France. The effects reverberate across more than two centuries of human history down to this very day. Snowden and those others are in the process of completing Paine’s mission by bringing down the global political class’s preferred governance model of the last 400 years, the Westphalian nation-state.
Snowden’s Great Removal is in progress and unstoppable. It deserves our enthusiastic embrace.
Robert Kirchner | February 24th, 2015
We’ll get to the book in a bit, but first I have to say a few things about the phenomenon of Russell Brand himself. Frankly, I’m a bit worried for Russell Brand. He has shown tremendous personal courage in recent years, transforming himself from a bad-boy British comedian/celebrity, whose comedy revolved around his own dionysian excesses of sex, drugs and odd fashion sense, into a prominent voice for radical change, a razor-sharp critic of the media Spectacle [1] he is part of, and of the ruling class interests that this Spectacle serves. He is in recovery from his addictions, one day at a time, and he speaks with personal authority against the uselessly punitive War on Drugs in the UK and US. He has been able to use his celebrity status to penetrate territory where radicals have long been denied entry: popular TV talk shows in Britain and the US, not only putting forth radical leftist political perspectives, reaching millions of viewers, but also exposing the prevailing vapid discourse of these forums and of the other glitterati personalities who inhabit them.
In 2013, he was interviewed by Jeremy Paxman, an attack-dog pundit of the BBC: Brand not only called for massive redistribution of wealth, and cheerfully admitted that he doesn’t vote; he rebuked Paxman and the political class for pretending that voting makes a difference. The initially sneering Paxman was reduced to whimpering lame protestations. Brand went on to start “The Trews” (a portmanteau of “true news”), a regular on-going Youtube series in which he interviews radical thinkers on a range of current political and social issues. And now he has written a book, Revolution.[2]
Well, the Spectacle, and its ruling class owners, do not suffer such public challenges gladly. The Observer’s Nick Cohen, for example, dismissed Revolution as “atrocious: long-winded, confused and smug; filled with references to books Brand has half read and thinkers he has half understood.” Their knives are now out for Russell Brand, waiting for a misstep. Given Brand’s volatile personality (he has been diagnosed with attention deficit and bipolar disorders), it is a testimony to the strength of his addiction recovery work (or, as he would probably say, to the help of his Higher Power) that he hasn’t, under this kind of pressure, self-destructed already. Meanwhile, we anarchists find ourselves in a rather awkward position: we’ve been offering serious critiques of capitalism and state violence since forever, but the first person in decades to reach a mass audience with such critiques, including many young people, is this charismatic bad-boy celebrity, Russell Brand. We don’t do charisma.
Moreover, Brand is not a systematic ideologue. His political theory remains somewhat inchoate. There are clearly some things he is against (gross political and financial inequality, consumerism, immigrant-bashing), and some things he is for (real democracy, non-violence, sane environmental policy). But readers of Revolution expecting to find therein a comprehensive blueprint for a new society, with step-by-step instructions on how to get there, will, like Nick Cohen, be disappointed. (Though anarchists should not be ruffled by this: on the contrary, we have long eschewed top-down political programs in favour of bottom-up emergence of democratic solutions.) But what will Brand call for next, and will we be able to agree with him, on either substance or strategy? Many are urging him to stand for Parliament or Mayor of London, some out of sincere admiration, others in the hope that he’ll get buried in the quagmire of electoral politics, and that will put an end to his whinging about social problems. Given his (self-acknowledged) predilection for attention-getting behaviour, this may be a difficult temptation for Brand to resist.
This brings us now to what may be the central question for followers of the C4SS website: is Brand, in fact, an anarchist? What he says is,
I don’t know much about anarchism, I only know about anarchy from graffiti, the Sex Pistols, and as a kind of slur or reprimand from my mum: “Is that what you want? It’d be anarchy!” (pp. 74-75)
But this occurs as the lead-in to an interview with the noted anarchist anthropologist David Graeber, whom Brand approvingly cites for his ideas on debt cancellation.
Well, according to David Graeber, there’s more to anarchy than not tidying your bedroom, spitting, and having a Mohican. In fact, it isn’t defiantly disorderly at all; it is society that has no centralized power…. David as an anarchist is opposed to centralized power in any form. He believes that people should be entrusted and empowered, that given the opportunity, released from the chains of authority and the spell of a corrupting media, we will form fair and functioning systems; they may not be perfect, but remember, we’re not competing with perfection, we’re competing with corruption, inequality, and destruction…. I asked him what he envisaged … “My dream [said Graeber] is to create a thousand autonomous institutions that can gradually take over the business of organizing everyday life, pretty much ignoring the authorities, until gradually the whole apparatus of state comes to seem silly, unnecessary, a bunch of buffoons useful for entertainment perhaps, but no one we have to take seriously.” I like the idea of creating autonomous organizations to perform necessary social functions that are not motivated by profit. This along with the principles of equality, nonviolence, and ecological responsibility are necessary pillars of Revolution. (pp. 75-81)
I think this passage, combined with his public anti-voting stance, is sufficient to identify Brand as, at the very least, anarchist-friendly. And he refers back to Graeber’s anarchism, repeatedly and with approbation, through the rest of the book. Moreover, later in the book (ch. 27, 30), he quotes Noam Chomsky at length, another anarchist public intellectual, regarding US foreign policy. He also seems to recognise that M.K. Gandhi was essentially anarchist, in his tactics if not his nationalist goals. But most tellingly, Brand is aware of the anarchist organizational principles [3] underlying Alcoholics Anonymous and its various 12-step fellowship offspring, to which he (presumably) owes his own recovery from addiction.[4] In ch. 32, he characterizes Alcoholics Anonymous as “a successful, worldwide, leaderless, anarchist collective with millions of members” (emphasis mine).
This does not keep Brand from calling, intermittently, for statist solutions to social problems. He’s in favour of tighter laws against greenhouse gas emissions and other forms of environmental degradation; a better financed National Health Service (NHS) and other health and welfare benefits for vulnerable members of society; getting corporate money out of politics; more rigorous tax enforcement against big corporations; and many other things that statist leftists typically call for. But so have many avowed anarchists, from Proudhon to Chomsky, as interim measures to deal with particularly egregious forms of suffering and injustice, without abandoning the ultimate goal of a stateless society. (Personally, I don’t believe that working for statist policy reform is a fruitful strategy, even in the interim, but other anarchists may disagree.) Even within C4SS.org, the point has repeatedly been made that, in the face of massive upward redistributions of wealth through state-enforced monopolies and rents, anarchists should hardly be focussing their ire on NHS and the few remaining “welfare-state” institutions and policies which redistribute small amounts of wealth in the opposite direction.
In Brand’s case, though, I suspect that this mixture of anarchist and statist positions is merely due to a failure to think it through and recognise their incompatibility. Brand writes with passion, often based on personal experience, in a style that is sometimes funny (as one would expect from a professional comedian), and sometimes movingly poetic, particularly in his descriptions of the underclass society he grew up in. Which is to say that Brand is clearly more of a poet than a philosopher: to paraphrase Emerson, Brand’s mind is not hobgoblinned by ideological consistency, foolish or otherwise. But on the whole, the various solutions Brand proposes through the course of the book are overwhelmingly anarchist in spirit, including relocalization of the food system, abolition of personal titles (Dr., Lord, Mr. President, etc.), nonviolence (on this point he is consistent)[5], promotion of worker cooperative businesses, and a general disposition to engage with people in democratic discussion and see what emerges.
So, the book is called Revolution. What kind of revolution, then, does Brand have in mind? Robert Colville of The Daily Telegraph sneered that Brand “has not even the faintest fragment of an inkling of how his Revolution will come about” and “[a]s for how things would work afterwards, don’t ask.” I think though, that the mystification is Colville’s, not Brand’s; it stems from Colville’s obvious (professionally obligatory) ideological hostility to Brand, and, more interestingly, from his rather outdated (though still widely shared) conventional understanding of what a revolution is – i.e. simply a popularly supported coup d’état: the old regime falls (peacefully or violently) and a new regime assumes power, enacting some program of change. But this has never been the anarchist understanding of revolution, and it is not Brand’s either. For anarchists, revolution is not a single cataclysmic political event, but an ongoing social process of “building the new society in the shell of the old”, or as Gandhi put it more succinctly, “be[ing] the change you want to see in the world”.
Brand takes this a step farther — and here he may part company from some “ni-Dieu-ni-maîtres” anarchists, not to mention completely befuddling establishment critics like Colville. For Brand insists that we cannot “be the change” without undergoing a personal spiritual awakening that puts us in relationship with a loving Higher Power. As Brand says, “I know society can change, because look at how I’ve changed,” from fame-besotted heroin addict to activist. And that change, according to the 12-step program in all its incarnations, requires “a decision to turn one’s life and one’s will over to to the care of God as we understood God” (Step 3). What distinguishes this position from Evangelical Christianity (or various other forms of fundamentalist religion) is the eschewal of dogmatism: as millions of recovered alcoholics and other addicts have found, it is sufficient to trust in a “Power greater than oneself” — however that is conceived. That won’t win over militant atheists like Richard Dawkins, (whom Brand pokes fun at throughout Revolution), but it should reassure the rest of us that Brand does not aspire to become a new Jerry Falwell.
Indeed, Brand is nothing if not eclectic in his spirituality: he describes a number of religious experiences in Revolution, from Kundalini Yoga and Transcendental Meditation to an altar call in an Eritrean church. He shows an almost indiscriminate openness towards unconventional forms of spirituality, just as he sometimes seems to fall for any sort of anti-establishment political argument. But auto-didacts like Brand come by their intellectual quirkiness honestly; and “quirkiness” is, of course, a purely subjective judgement. So, the reader may be inspired or put off by Brand’s exploration of religion. But it should be understood that, for Brand, this spiritual openness to change is precisely how the Revolution starts.
Notes:
[1] I’m using “Spectacle” in the sense of Guy Debord and the Situationists, i.e. capitalism’s tendency to replace authentic social relations with objects, such as consumer products and celebrities. Brand, by the way, devotes chapter 15 of Revolution to Situationism, so he’s well aware of this phenomenon.
[2] This is not Brand’s first book. He has written two autobiographical books, called My Booky-Wook, and Booky-Wook 2.
[3] For discussion of the classic anarcho-communist Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin’s influence on Bill W., the co-founder of AA, see http://www.scribd.com/doc/38398959/Benign-Anarchy-Voluntary-association-mutual-aid-and-Alcoholics-Anonymous.
[4] Brand has to be slightly cagey on this point, due to Tradition 11, which says, inter alia, “we need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio and films”. That is, one doesn’t “out” oneself or one another as members, not merely out of respect for confidentiality, but also so that the fellowship doesn’t come to be publically associated with particular high-profile personalities. Brand merely says that he’s part of an “abstinence-based recovery” program and fellowship; he doesn’t identify it as Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, or any 12-step group. I should add that my inference that it is a 12-step fellowship is merely an assumption on my part, based on no personal acquaintance with Brand.
[5] As I never tire of pointing out to my fellow Quakers, the logical conclusion of nonviolence is anarchism; one can’t have a state without violence.
Via Mark Sletten comes this thread from yesterday’s Ask Me Anything session at Reddit that featured Edward Snowden, Oscar-winning documentarian Laura Poitras, and journalist Glenn Greenwald.
The question posed to Snowden:
What’s the best way to make NSA spying an issue in the 2016 Presidential Election? It seems like while it was a big deal in 2013, ISIS and other events have put it on the back burner for now in the media and general public. What are your ideas for how to bring it back to the forefront?
His answer is well worth reading in full (I’ve posted it after the jump), but its essence is a full-throated defense of classical liberal and libertarian theorizing not just about the consent of the governed but the right to work around the government when it focuses on social order over legitimacy. And, as important, a recognition that this is what we at Reason and others call “the Libertarian Moment,” or a technologically empowered drive toward greater and greater control over more and more aspects of our lives. While the Libertarian Moment is enabled by technological innovations and generally increasing levels of wealth and education, it’s ultimately proceeds from a mind-set as much as anything else: We have the right to live peacefully any way we choose as long as we are not infringing on other people’s rights to do the same. Our politics and our laws should reflect this emphasis on pluralism, tolerance, and persuasion (as opposed to coercion) across social, economic, and intellectual spheres of activity.
As Snowden emphasizes, it’s not simply that governments (thankfully) fail at attempts for perfect surveillance and law enforcement. It’s that technologically empowered people are actively worked to route around government attempts to fence us in. “We the people will implement systems that provide for a means of not just enforcing our rights, but removing from governments the ability to interfere with those rights,” he writes (emphasis in original). “we can find ways to reduce or remove their powers on a new—and permanent—basis.”
Reading throught the Reddit exchange, it’s easy to see why Snowden recently brought the 1,000-plus attendees of the International Students for Liberty Conference to their feet multiple times. He isn’s some kind of pie-eyed nihilist, hell-bent on destroying the red, white, and blue for personal fame or out of ideological fervor. At31 years old, he is an exceptionally well-spoken, thoughtful critic of the abuse of power that has become endemic to modern American governance. At the ISFLC, he said his one regret is that he didn’t expose systemic infringement on citizens’ constitutional rights sooner than he did.
If people lose their willingness to recognize that there are times in our history when legality becomes distinct from morality, we aren’t just ceding control of our rights to government, but our agency in determing thour futures.
How does this relate to politics? Well, I suspect that governments today are more concerned with the loss of their ability to control and regulate the behavior of their citizens than they are with their citizens’ discontent.
How do we make that work for us? We can devise means, through the application and sophistication of science, to remind governments that if they will not be responsible stewards of our rights, we the people will implement systems that provide for a means of not just enforcing our rights, but removing from governments the ability to interfere with those rights.
You can see the beginnings of this dynamic today in the statements of government officials complaining about the adoption of encryption by major technology providers. The idea here isn’t to fling ourselves into anarchy and do away with government, but to remind the government that there must always be a balance of power between the governing and the governed, and that as the progress of science increasingly empowers communities and individuals, there will be more and more areas of our lives where—if government insists on behaving poorly and with a callous disregard for the citizen—we can find ways to reduce or remove their powers on a new—and permanent—basis.
Our rights are not granted by governments. They are inherent to our nature. But it’s entirely the opposite for governments: their privileges are precisely equal to only those which we suffer them to enjoy.
Emphasis in original.
Snowden ends by noting that “when [the law] becomes contrary to our morals, we have both the right and the responsibility to rebalance it toward just ends.”
Here’s his full answer:
This is a good question, and there are some good traditional answers here. Organizing is important. Activism is important.
At the same time, we should remember that governments don’t often reform themselves. One of the arguments in a book I read recently (Bruce Schneier, “Data and Goliath”), is that perfect enforcement of the law sounds like a good thing, but that may not always be the case. The end of crime sounds pretty compelling, right, so how can that be?
Well, when we look back on history, the progress of Western civilization and human rights is actually founded on the violation of law. America was of course born out of a violent revolution that was an outrageous treason against the crown and established order of the day. History shows that the righting of historical wrongs is often born from acts of unrepentant criminality. Slavery. The protection of persecuted Jews.
But even on less extremist topics, we can find similar examples. How about the prohibition of alcohol? Gay marriage? Marijuana?
Where would we be today if the government, enjoying powers of perfect surveillance and enforcement, had — entirely within the law — rounded up, imprisoned, and shamed all of these lawbreakers?
Ultimately, if people lose their willingness to recognize that there are times in our history when legality becomes distinct from morality, we aren’t just ceding control of our rights to government, but our agency in determing thour futures.
How does this relate to politics? Well, I suspect that governments today are more concerned with the loss of their ability to control and regulate the behavior of their citizens than they are with their citizens’ discontent.
How do we make that work for us? We can devise means, through the application and sophistication of science, to remind governments that if they will not be responsible stewards of our rights, we the people will implement systems that provide for a means of not just enforcing our rights, but removing from governments the ability to interfere with those rights.
You can see the beginnings of this dynamic today in the statements of government officials complaining about the adoption of encryption by major technology providers. The idea here isn’t to fling ourselves into anarchy and do away with government, but to remind the government that there must always be a balance of power between the governing and the governed, and that as the progress of science increasingly empowers communities and individuals, there will be more and more areas of our lives where — if government insists on behaving poorly and with a callous disregard for the citizen — we can find ways to reduce or remove their powers on a new — and permanent — basis.
Our rights are not granted by governments. They are inherent to our nature. But it’s entirely the opposite for governments: their privileges are precisely equal to only those which we suffer them to enjoy.
We haven’t had to think about that much in the last few decades because quality of life has been increasing across almost all measures in a significant way, and that has led to a comfortable complacency. But here and there throughout history, we’ll occasionally come across these periods where governments think more about what they “can” do rather than what they “should” do, and what is lawful will become increasingly distinct from what is moral.
In such times, we’d do well to remember that at the end of the day, the law doesn’t defend us; we defend the law. And when it becomes contrary to our morals, we have both the right and the responsibility to rebalance it toward just ends.
Barbara H. Peterson
I want food that Grandma ate. How hard is that to understand? I don’t want it chemically lobotomized and coated with poison. I don’t want it genetically spliced to become something between a salamander and a tomato. I don’t want it radiated and mutated. I don’t want a virus inserted in its DNA. I don’t want its RNA tampered with to change its traits. I just want good, old fashioned food. The kind you grow in your garden and use to feed your family and critters. The kind the bees like to collect pollen from and not go belly up the minute they enter the hive. The kind that you can pick with your bare hands and eat right from the plant. The kind that won’t turn your stomach into a pesticide factory and your guts into mush.
I actually have the gall to want food that is edible and good for me, not just something a chemical company threw together sporting a pretty label and packaging that says it is. Is that really too much to ask?
Well, according to Monsanto et al, it is. And the agribusiness giants have taken over the universities.
These corporate GMO and chemical farming pushers are brainwashing whole generations of young adults and senior adults that GMOs are safe, have been around for thousands of years, and are a perfectly natural alternative to Grandma’s garden, made by Monsanto. The chemical/life sciences company. You know the one. The one that appears to poison the very ground that it sits on along with the people around it.
Just how were Nitro citizens exposed to dioxin? Monsanto was producing the toxic herbicide Agent Orange in Nitro, and dioxin is a chemical byproduct of the substance. It is known to cause serious health conditions. The factory which produced Agent Orange was opened in Nitro in 1948 and remained in operation until 2004, even though usage of this herbicide in the past (in Vietnam and other Asian countries) was fatal to millions of citizens and the war veterans who were exposed to it.
Is this what we want for our children? Our planet? Our dinner plates?
Monsanto laughed all the way to the bank while covering up the toxicity of its industrial shenanigans as Anniston, Alabama’s children played in and ate dirt soaked with PCBs at yet another toxic superfund site created by Monsanto.
On the west side of Anniston, the poor side of Anniston, the people ate dirt. They called it “Alabama clay” and cooked it for extra flavor. They also grew berries in their gardens, raised hogs in their back yards, caught bass in the murky streams where their children swam and played and were baptized. They didn’t know their dirt and yards and bass and kids — along with the acrid air they breathed — were all contaminated with chemicals. They didn’t know they lived in one of the most polluted patches of America.
That is what Monsanto is about. Greed and avarice. Not feeding a starving world as the PR would have you believe.
And this is the company my friends, that is hell bent on owning the foundation of the world’s food supply, including that snack you are munching on, organic or not. And we are supposed to trust its good intentions? I’ll just bet those kids who played on that toxic soil in Anniston are feeling the love about now, as they inhale their last breaths through a respirator in the cancer wing of the local hospital.
Want to know why supposed “scientists” from such as UC Davis can get by with purporting to be “not receiving funds” from the biotech industry while spouting universities Monsanto propaganda? Because the money they receive is laundered through the universities they work for. They don’t receive it directly from Monsanto, they simply receive their paycheck from the university that does. Or the foundation that does. Or whatever biotech sinkhole that will accept money for services rendered.
http://documents.foodandwaterwatch.org/doc/PublicResearchPrivateGain.pdf
Land grant universities’ dependence on industry money has corrupted the independence of public science, as academics align their research projects with the ambitions of the private sector. Industry funding also diverts academic resources and attention away from projects that benefit the public, including research that challenges corporate control of food systems.
Donors can and do influence the outcomes of research to meet their business needs. More than 15 percent of university scientists acknowledge having “changed the design, methodology or results of a study in response to pressure from a funding source.”
Individual examples of pro-industry research abound… [A] study found that around half of authors of peer-reviewed journal articles about the safety of genetically engineered (GE) foods had an identifiable affiliation with industry. All of these produced favorable results to industry sponsors, while very few acknowledged having received industry funding.
http://documents.foodandwaterwatch.org/doc/PublicResearchPrivateGain.pdf
The future of a major research deal between UC Davis and the Monsanto corporation brings the role of the university into bold relief. How far can a university go in collaborating with private industry before its mission of contributing to basic knowledge becomes distorted? How will we know when it’s gone too far?
Here is a link to a letter confirming only one of Monsanto’s many contributions to UC Davis:
http://www.cheeseslave.com/wp-cont…/…/2012/10/grfx_c3_31.pdf
The following is a portion of a Sacramento Bee article that has been removed from the newspaper’s site:
A “who’s who” of international biotechnology companies fund work at UC Davis. They include Monsanto, Syngenta, DuPont and Bayer. Some grants pay for specific research, but many arrive with no official strings attached. Whatever the form, the companies get something in return – access to the university’s talent pool and, often, first crack at its scientific breakthroughs.
“The public is having a hard time figuring out where the corporate door ends and where the university door begins,” said Bill Liebhardt, former director of the UC system’s sustainable farming program, which promotes nonindustrial farming methods.
Small farmers — the very people agricultural colleges like UC Davis were established to help — feel neglected. “The university is being led by industry,” said Judith Redmond, co-owner of Full Belly Farm, an organic vegetable farm in Yolo County. (Source: Sacramento Bee)
But don’t worry, Monsanto and its cohorts are feeding the world. What’s left of it when they get through is anyone’s guess.
This type of behavior is unacceptable by any standards. The Universities are essentially bought off by corporate biotech interests such as Monsanto’s and tasked with unleashing a technology with relatively unknown consequences on the general public under the guise of a love for humanity; a PR campaign designed to sell as much of the stuff as possible. This type of behavior is not only unethical, but criminal. Yet, that is exactly what Monsanto has a sordid history of doing and getting away with. With the government’s blessing and complicity. Money talks, reason walks. Along with common sense, compassion, and any spark of humanity left in the souls of those wretched creatures who are pulling the trigger on humanity one gene-spliced concoction at a time.
@2015 Barbara H. Peterson
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