Words of Power
Just look at the individual words which we have recently co-opted from the US military.
When we westerners find that ‘our’ enemies — al-Qaeda, for example, or the Taliban — have set off more bombs and staged more attacks than usual, we call it ‘a spike in violence’. Ah yes, a ‘spike’!
A ‘spike’ in violence, ladies and gentlemen is a word first used, according to my files, by a brigadier general in the Baghdad Green Zone in 2004. Yet now we use that phrase, we extemporise on it, we relay it on the air as our phrase. We are using, quite literally, an expression created for us by the Pentagon. A spike, of course, goes sharply up, then sharply downwards. A ‘spike’ therefore avoids the ominous use of the words ‘increase in violence’ — for an increase, ladies and gentlemen, might not go down again afterwards.
(via Robert Fisk)
SCotUS: Corporations are People Too
Just in time for November’s congressional elections, the Supreme Court today handed down a 5-4 ruling (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission [PDF]) that decrees that the Government may not restrict corporations from spending as much money as they want to influence political campaigns, particularly with the production and airing of ads. The decision reversed about two decades of restrictions on what unions and corporations could spend on elections.
The case was originally argued to determine whether an anti-Hillary Clinton feature film — produced by conservative group Citizens United — constituted political advertising. But the grounds of the case were eventually expanded to a number of campaign finance precedents. Said Justice John Paul Stevens in his sharp minority opinion, “Essentially, five justices were unhappy with the limited nature of the case before us, so they changed the case to give themselves an opportunity to change the law.”
Most telling to us, Cleta Mitchell, a conservative election lawyer, said the justices had “ripped the duct tape off the mouths of the American people, to allow them to exercise their First Amendment rights to support and oppose candidates, to criticize elected officials and candidates at any time, without the need to ask the government.”
But last time we checked, corporations are not people, and unlimited money is not free speech. Perhaps she meant that corporations are just organizations of people? But the Constitution was not designed to entitle corporations to First Amendment protections. (And though Citizens United is a nonprofit corporation, they received direct corporate funding for the movie they produced.)
Security Theater
The more we undermine our own laws, the more we convert our buildings into fortresses, the more we reduce the freedoms and liberties at the foundation of our societies, the more we’re doing the terrorists’ job for them.
(via Bruce Schneier)
New International Flight Follies
Innocent passengers have nothing to hide.
Ever the reactionaries, the fine people at the Transportation Security Administration (as directed by the US Department of Homeland Security) have hatched some wide-ranging measures in order to alleviate the rest of us from the twin burdens of humanity and freedom. But the fun part is in how they’ve implemented these restrictions.
Of course the only true prevention for criminal acts on passenger planes is to ban travelers from planes entirely. Failing that, you might consider behaving in as arbitrary and random a way as possible, in order to… well, to confuse the terrorism out of your patrons. You might also increase the number of pat-downs (definitely), perform more physical inspection of approved carry-on luggage (probably), and institute even more draconian rules for the final hour of flight (maybe).
Airline officials have also decreed that, during the final hour of flight, it is now up to individual captains to decide whether passengers can move from their seats, can use pillows or blankets, or can hold anything on their laps, including laptop computers. Some flights found travelers being instructed to keep their hands visible.
TSA spokeswoman Sterling Payne said the agency would “continually review and update these measures to ensure the highest level of security.”
Or not. Maybe. Sometimes.
Loud Noises!
Further evidence that many Americans are emotional, intellectual infants.
Transportation Security Administration officials said passengers aboard U.S. Airways Flight 192 from Orlando, Fla., on Saturday night reported that two men, described as Middle Eastern, were acting strangely and talking loudly to each other in a foreign language.
A nearby passenger also observed one of men watching what appeared to be footage of a suicide bombing, but was actually a scene from the 2007 movie “The Kingdom.” The man also got up from his seat while the seat belt warning sign was still lit, FBI spokesman Manuel Johnson said.
“The totality of those three occurrences led this passenger to believe this was suspicious,” he said.
(via The Associated Press)
Dinner’s on Monsanto
“It’s food! Really.”
There’s a lot of money to be made if you own both the lock and the key that opens it. Chemicals are Monsanto’s game, so if I told you that they owned both the poison and the antidote you might call it pragmatism. But Monsanto’s real coup was licensing its genetically-modified seeds to the world’s farmers based primarily on the promise that Monsanto’s GM seeds produce higher yields. Cleverly, Monsanto has engineered these seeds to be resistant to their “broad-spectrum” herbicide called Roundup, which is the second half of the bargain.
This alone puts Monsanto in a profitable position, but there’s even more money to be made. Being that farmers can’t own Monsanto’s patented seeds, they must instead license a new batch after each harvest. This turns the ancient practice of seed-saving into a crime, and in response Monsanto has dispatched undercover crop police to root out (ahem) the criminal farmers, and try them for violation of intellectual property rights, patent infringement, and seed piracy.
Still, you can see why farmers would be tempted by Monsanto’s siren song. If you don’t believe that biotechnology has real environmental and health benefits, just ask Monsanto — they have an army of scientists ready with the findings. But the plants that grow from Monsanto’s seed stock don’t keep to themselves. Just as Monsanto’s representatives have infiltrated the upper echelons of our government, Monsanto’s plants produce their own seeds and pollens, and it’s not long before surrounding crops are bombarded by foreign DNA, leading to contamination of the natural surrounding ecosystem, bizarre mutations, and new vulnerability to disease. (This doesn’t just apply to Monsanto, of course. In 2002 a corn engineered by Prodigene to produce pharmaceutical medicines contaminated corn and soybean fields in Iowa and Nebraska.)
Still, farmers remain upbeat about the promise of Monsanto’s products.
[Monsanto’s] seeds represent “probably the most revolutionary event in grain crops over the last 30 years,” said Geno Lowe, a Salisbury, Md., soybean farmer.
(via washingtonpost.com)
The dinosaurs might have said the same thing about that meteor.
Shame Stamps
Idiot.
The federal government may think it’s doing people a favor by providing them with access to food, but it’s doing them a disservice if it also robs them of the motivation necessary to break free from dependency.
(via National Review Online)
What are you going to do with the poor! First they single-handedly crash the economy, then they immediately start asking for bailouts. Says Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, “Food stamps is quasi money.” They is indeed. Not to mention the fact that every penny leeched by the needy takes away from another executive’s bonus money, meaning that this country may soon be at risk of suffering an executive incentive deficit.
(via NYT)
Discussion of Blackwater’s Secret War in Pakistan
Jeremy Scahill on GritTV
Beginning almost immediately after September 11th, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld essential segregated JSOC (about JSOC) from the rest of the military. And the idea there was that they were going to create a sort of stand-alone military force that would reply directly to the administration rather than the military chain of command. So essentially JSOC has an open classified mandate where they can take people — snatch then, they can carry out targeted assassination, and they also run their own bombing campaign inside of Pakistan, I’m told, that runs parallel to the CIA’s. And one of the reasons why this is significant is that all of the actions of the CIA have to be briefed to the so-called “Gang of Eight” — in the intelligence committee, Dianne Feinstein and others — and these operations, I’m told, are not being briefed to the Congress.
In other words, while the United States States trumpets the rule of law, it is by and large a country that routinely circumvents any pesky law that stands in the way of profit, subjugation, or imperialism. (The scary thing is that, where Blackwater are concerned, the US military may actually agree with my sentiments.)
Jeremy Scahill has his own blog, and is an active twitterer.
(via YouTube)
Murdoch-Microsoft deal in the works
The Financial Times is saying that Microsoft is ready to pay Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. to remove its news content from Google (no one tell Fox about robots.txt, please). The fact that this is a user-hostile strategy — users don’t keep track of which companies may be listed in which search engine — is right up Microsoft’s alley. Still, this doesn’t bode well for users who just want to find stuff.
(via Boing Boing)
The “Fascist-Pass,” Part II
I wrote two years ago about the carrot of convenience the corporations will dangle over the heads of the consumer nation to coerce them into forfeiting their own freedoms.
New “fast-pass” traffic lanes between California and Mexico promise to speed processing of the 55,000 vehicles that enter the U.S., provided they’re willing to be tagged with background check information encoded into their SENTRI PortPass, which features Automatic Vehicle Identification (AVI) transponder technology.
This sprint toward fascism is met by the popular press without criticism. On the “morning news” this week (which is easily the happiest TV news there is) they were hyping the new $99.95 “Clear Card” which allows travelers to jump to the head of the security line in participating airports. It doesn’t actually get you through security, it just pops you to the top. And all you have to do is submit your bio stats, along with a retinal scan, and this data is encoded into the card for easy scanning!
The angle they played up was the convenience. The angle they didn’t play up was that this data was stored by a government contractor: “Clear® is a subsidiary of Verified Identity Pass, Inc.” A contractor, mind you — which means that they take your data for profit. A corporation storing your data. That’s… um… I think they have a word for that.
It’s not even the clear card itself, but the press’ attitude toward these things that really got me. Where’s the outcry? (Well, it’s online, but that’s not surprising.) This is how the fascists win: by making it “convenient” to give up your freedoms, and by framing “privacy” as difficult or, even worse, as suspicious.
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- RT @jeremyscahill: WATCH Video: Rick Rowley of @BigNoiseFilms on #Maddow destroys White House line on #wikileaks docs http://bit.ly/bowrw0
- Reusable grocery bags = bacteria farms? The American Chemistry Council says so… but why do they want you to think that? http://bit.ly/c1GuDM
- Haitian Farmers Fight Back Against Monsanto http://tinyurl.com/2cugn45
- RE: Justices Back Monsanto on Biotech Seed Planting: http://tinyurl.com/2brzfxb // Monsanto’s “victory” here may be nothing more than spin.
- Justices Back Monsanto on Biotech Seed Planting: http://tinyurl.com/2am8fbg // Fucking hell, SCotUS fail. Only Stevens dissented.