January 10, 2016

New Year, Same Crisis: Prepare for Imperialism's Terror and Carnage in 2016

New Year, Same Crisis: Prepare for Imperialism's Terror and Carnage in 2016

Saturday, 09 January 2016 00:00
By Danny Haiphong, Black Agenda Report | Op-Ed


Every January 1st, a significant number of the population in the US formulates resolutions for the New Year. Some promise to exercise more, eat healthier, or save more money. Imperialism, the system that rules a large portion of the planet, has only one resolution. That resolution is to spread carnage and terror on oppressed people all over the world. Achievement of the resolution is measured by how rich in profits the ruling class becomes at the expense of the oppressed masses. The imperialist system transitions into the New Year in a state of crisis. This crisis must be understood if the forces of progress around the world hope to unite toward the goal of social transformation and revolution.

The Crisis

Imperialism enters 2016 in a general crisis that began in the 1970's and exploded in 2008. This crisis is characterized by a gradual decline in the rate of profit. The rate of profit has declined in concert with the expansion of global capital and technology. Technological advances have permanently replaced a large sector of the working class and made the system expensive to maintain. Imperialism's economic infrastructure, capitalism, has developed the technological basis for both higher productivity and labor efficiency. Cycles of overproduction inherent in the capitalist order are no longer resolved by the rehiring of labor to bolster profits.

One could say the imperialist system is trapped in its own contradictions. On the one hand, imperialism needs labor to accumulate profits. On the other, the introduction of technology has permanently replaced jobs and reduced capitalism's only source of profit: labor. Fewer workers are producing more and working longer hours, yet all workers have seen their conditions fall immensely over the last forty years precisely because imperialist entrepreneurs must extract profit from a shrinking workforce. As the system has grown more costly to maintain, the exploitation and repression of workers and oppressed peoples has intensified with no end in sight.

The Carnage and Terror

The intensification of exploitation has come in many forms, all of which stem from the root and branch of the imperialist system. Since the economic crisis of 2008, the imperialists have waged wars of destabilization abroad to fend off the rise of Russia and China. Internally, a massive campaign of repression and surveillance has been instituted to dampen the rebellion of the workers in the imperialist countries. This campaign of repression has largely affected the historic victims of white supremacy. The Mass Black Incarceration state, which ensures that one of every eight prisoners in the world is a Black American, provides the quintessential example of the terror imperialism brings to those whose labor is no longer necessary for production. .........(more)

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/34317-new-year-same-crisis-prepare-for-imperialism-s-terror-and-carnage-in-2016

January 10, 2016

Fearful Food Industry Jeopardizing Public's Right to Information

Fearful Food Industry Jeopardizing Public's Right to Information

Saturday, 09 January 2016 00:00
By Carey Gillam, US Right to Know | Op-Ed


I just don't get it.

Over the more than 20 years I have worked as a business journalist, I've always been motivated by a simple premise: Knowledge is power, and that power belongs with the public. The spread of information that people can use to make decisions - what to buy, what to eat, where to invest, etc. - helps support and promote the principles of freedom and democracy, I believe.

That's why the fear and loathing emanating from the food industry over the public's right to information about the food they consume is so hard for me to grasp.

As we kick off 2016 the leaders of many of the nation's largest and most powerful food companies are doubling down on their commitment to block mandatory labeling of foods made with genetically engineered crops, and they are seeking Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack's help to do so. The issue has become urgent for the industry as what would be the nation's first mandatory labeling measure is set to go into effect July 1 in Vermont. The industry has thus far failed to convince a federal court to block the law's implementation, though the fight could go to trial this spring.

Citizens in many other states continue to try to pass similar mandatory labeling measures. A GMO label would allow a consumer to know at a glance information that many consider important. Given that knowledge, some people might shy away from GMO-labeled foods; others may not care. Some may seek out GMO-labeled foods if they feel they provide special value or are helping "feed the world," as GMO seed developers such as Monsanto Co. claim. But the public's right to that knowledge - to that decision-making ability - terrifies many in an industry that generates sales of roughly $2.1 trillion annually. The fear is so strong that they have enlisted teams of legal and public relations professionals to help try to convince regulators and federal lawmakers to override Vermont's law and prohibit any future laws like it. ..................(more)

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/34300-fearful-food-industry-jeopardizing-public-s-right-to-information

January 9, 2016

How Debt Conquered America

How Debt Conquered America
January 8, 2016

Special Report: America presents itself to the world as “the land of the free” but – for the vast majority – it is a place of enslaving indebtedness, a reality for much of “the 99%” that has deep historical roots hidden or “lost” from our history, as Jada Thacker explains.

By Jada Thacker


Since its center-stage debut during the Occupy Wall Street movement, “the 99%” – a term emblematic of extreme economic inequality confronting the vast majority – has become common place. The term was coined by sociology professor David Graeber, an Occupy leader and author of the encyclopedic Debt: The First 5,000 Years, published just as the Occupy movement captured headlines.

What Graeber’s monumental work did not emphasize specifically, and what most Americans still do not appreciate, is how debt was wielded as the weapon of choice to subjugate the 99% in the centuries before the Occupy protesters popularized the term. Like so many aspects of our Lost History, the legacy of debt has been airbrushed from our history texts, but not from our lives.

The original 99% in America did not occupy Wall Street in protest. They occupied the entire Western Hemisphere as original inhabitants of North and South America. After 20,000 years of Occupy Hemisphere, an Italian entrepreneur appeared, having pitched an investment opportunity to his financial backers in Spain.

Soon after Columbus launched his business enterprise on the pristine beaches of the New World, each native discovered there above the age of puberty was required to remit a “hawk’s bell’s worth” of gold dust to the Spaniards every two weeks. The hands of all those failing to do so were cut off and strung about their necks – so that they bled to death, thus motivating the compliance of others.

Bartolome de las Casas, a contemporary slave-owning priest-turned-reformer, reported three million natives were exterminated by Spanish entrepreneurship in only 15 years. His population figures were guesstimates, but modern researchers confirm that 80 to 90% of the Taino people in the Hispaniola-Cuba region died within 30 years of Spanish contact, the majority from disease. .................(more)

https://consortiumnews.com/2016/01/08/how-debt-conquered-america/

January 9, 2016

Asking Silicon Valley to 'disrupt' terrorists is tech talk for 'surveillance'

(Guardian UK) The White House and its national security team are set to meet Friday with the country’s largest tech companies, like Facebook and Google, to discuss how they can help “disrupt” Isis’s online activities (that cringe-worthy phrase is theirs, not mine). On the agenda: censorship and invasive anti-privacy and security measures that could affect not just Isis supporters, but everyone who uses the internet.

You can hate Isis while still being disturbed about the lengths the government is going to pressure these tech companies. There are so many shady things going on with this meeting it’s hard to know where to start.

First, tech companies were reportedly lured into the meeting with the promise that it was going to be about how to prevent Isis from using social media to amplify its message (we’ll get to that later on), but then, as the Guardian’s Danny Yadron reported, US officials pulled a “bait and switch” on the tech companies and cornered them into discussing encryption as well. FBI director Jim Comey’s “participation in the meeting was on the condition of encryption being on the agenda,” according to the Washington Post.

Despite the huge security benefits to encryption and the fact that it has not played a significant role in any of the recent terrorist attacks, the FBI has been on a warpath to get tech companies to stop using end-to-end encryption in some of their communications tools, essentially asking tech giants to give the government a “back door” to make sure there is not any communication platform that they cannot spy on.

This is a dangerously short-sighted move that will not only weaken internet security for everyone and put everyone’s privacy at further risk, but will also give Russia, China and other authoritarian countries the green light to demand the exact same thing to crush dissent. .....................(more)

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/08/white-house-silicon-valley-meeting-terrorism-social-media-facebook-twitter-microsoft-youtube-apple

January 9, 2016

How Debt Conquered America

How Debt Conquered America
January 8, 2016

Special Report: America presents itself to the world as “the land of the free” but – for the vast majority – it is a place of enslaving indebtedness, a reality for much of “the 99%” that has deep historical roots hidden or “lost” from our history, as Jada Thacker explains.

By Jada Thacker


Since its center-stage debut during the Occupy Wall Street movement, “the 99%” – a term emblematic of extreme economic inequality confronting the vast majority – has become common place. The term was coined by sociology professor David Graeber, an Occupy leader and author of the encyclopedic Debt: The First 5,000 Years, published just as the Occupy movement captured headlines.

What Graeber’s monumental work did not emphasize specifically, and what most Americans still do not appreciate, is how debt was wielded as the weapon of choice to subjugate the 99% in the centuries before the Occupy protesters popularized the term. Like so many aspects of our Lost History, the legacy of debt has been airbrushed from our history texts, but not from our lives.

The original 99% in America did not occupy Wall Street in protest. They occupied the entire Western Hemisphere as original inhabitants of North and South America. After 20,000 years of Occupy Hemisphere, an Italian entrepreneur appeared, having pitched an investment opportunity to his financial backers in Spain.

Soon after Columbus launched his business enterprise on the pristine beaches of the New World, each native discovered there above the age of puberty was required to remit a “hawk’s bell’s worth” of gold dust to the Spaniards every two weeks. The hands of all those failing to do so were cut off and strung about their necks – so that they bled to death, thus motivating the compliance of others.

Bartolome de las Casas, a contemporary slave-owning priest-turned-reformer, reported three million natives were exterminated by Spanish entrepreneurship in only 15 years. His population figures were guesstimates, but modern researchers confirm that 80 to 90% of the Taino people in the Hispaniola-Cuba region died within 30 years of Spanish contact, the majority from disease. .................(more)

https://consortiumnews.com/2016/01/08/how-debt-conquered-america/

January 9, 2016

A US Media Lost in Propaganda

from Consortium News:


A US Media Lost in Propaganda
January 9, 2016

There was once a time – perhaps just a brief moment in time – when American journalists were cynical and responsible enough to resist being jerked around by U.S. government propaganda, but that time has long since passed if it ever existed, a reality that William Blum describes.

By William Blum


Vulgar, crude, racist and ultra-sexist though he is, Donald Trump can still see how awful the American mainstream media is.

I think one of the main reasons for Donald Trump’s popularity is that he says what’s on his mind and he means what he says, something rather rare amongst American politicians, or politicians perhaps anywhere in the world. The American public is sick and tired of the phony, hypocritical answers given by office-holders of all kinds.

When I read that Trump had said that Sen. John McCain was not a hero because McCain had been captured in Vietnam, I had to pause for reflection. Wow! Next the man will be saying that not every American soldier who was in the military in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq was a shining hero worthy of constant media honor and adulation.

When Trump was interviewed by ABC-TV host George Stephanopoulos, former aide to President Bill Clinton, he was asked: “When you were pressed about (Russian president Vladimir Putin’s) killing of journalists, you said, ‘I think our country does plenty of killing too.’ What were you thinking about there? What killing sanctioned by the U.S. government is like killing journalists?”

Trump responded: “In all fairness to Putin, you’re saying he killed people. I haven’t seen that. I don’t know that he has. Have you been able to prove that? Do you know the names of the reporters that he’s killed? Because I’ve been – you know, you’ve been hearing this, but I haven’t seen the name. Now, I think it would be despicable if that took place, but I haven’t seen any evidence that he killed anybody in terms of reporters.” ...............(more)

https://consortiumnews.com/2016/01/09/a-us-media-lost-in-propaganda/

January 9, 2016

A Great Fall: The Origins and Crisis of Neoliberalism

from Dollars & Sense:


A Great Fall: The Origins and Crisis of Neoliberalism
The First Part of a Two-Part Article

BY DAVID M. KOTZ | NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015


In the fall of 2008, a massive financial and economic crisis struck the United States and much of the world. The biggest American banks were suddenly insolvent and survived only thanks to government bailouts. A deep recession spread around the globe. The unemployment rate in the United States jumped up to 10%. Over the following five years, more than four million U.S. homeowners were tossed out of their homes due to foreclosure, as home values plummeted below the mortgage debt owed and unemployment cut household incomes. The economies of the United States, Europe, and much of the rest of the world have been stuck in stagnation or worse since 2008.

This condition is not something new in the history of capitalism. Capitalist economic systems—in which a small percentage of the population owns the enterprises, hires wage workers, and sells the products aiming for a profit—have brought economic growth but also periodic severe economic crises. To understand these recurring crises, we need to take account of the quite different forms of capitalism over time. While always having the key features noted above, capitalism has nevertheless not looked the same at all times. For several decades following World War II, the United States had a “regulated capitalism” in which government, trade unions, and other non-market institutions played major roles in regulating the economy. Since 1980, we have lived under “neoliberal capitalism,” in which the government retreated from regulation of business and markets, and trade unions were marginalized (see sidebar). In the past, each form of capitalism has worked well on its own terms—fostering investment and economic growth—for a few decades, after which snowballing problems gave rise to severe economic crises such as today’s.

The crisis of neoliberal capitalism has made it vulnerable to replacement by something else. Every past economic crisis of this severity has been followed by major changes in economic and political institutions. Earlier so-called “free-market” forms of capitalism have produced economic crises before in U.S. history—in the 1890s and the end of the 1920s. In each case, the crisis was followed by the construction of some kind of regulated capitalism, in response to the forces that had brought on the crisis. After 1900, Progressive Era reforms together with the rise of powerful Wall Street banks led to a corporate-dominated form of regulated capitalism. This lasted until the end of World War I, when another shift brought a decade of relatively unhindered pursuit of profit—the Roaring Twenties—that culminated in the 1929 crash. Eventually, a more thoroughly regulated capitalism, this time based on capital-labor compromise, emerged in the late 1940s. While history does not always repeat itself, there is good reason to expect that, if U.S. capitalism is to surmount the stagnation that has followed the crash of 2008, it will do so through another version of regulated capitalism, which can potentially address the problems that led to the current crisis.

Several big questions cry out for answers. Why did the last sea change, from regulated to neoliberal capitalism, take place—not just in the United States but in much of the world—around 1980? Why did a radically different form of capitalism emerge after decades of active state regulation and strong trade unions? Why did the post-1980 “neoliberal capitalism” eventually produce such a big economic crisis after 25 years of seemingly stable, if lackluster and unequally distributed, economic growth? And most immediately, what kind(s) of economic change are possible and likely today? The relative strength and determination of key economic classes has decided the direction of economic change in past crisis periods, and the current one is not likely to be an exception. ...................(more)

http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2015/1115kotz.html

January 9, 2016

Chipotle's food safety crisis, explained in 4 minutes

After hearing a trickle of reports about food poisoning over recent months, millions of lunch-seeking Americans are probably wondering: Is it safe to eat at Chipotle?

The bad news is that public health investigators haven't identified the source of the E. coli that sickened almost 60 Chipotle customers in 11 states. By the time they started testing the restaurants and the employees, they couldn't find a trace of the bacteria.

But that may be a blessing in disguise, because without a specific ingredient or supplier to blame, Chipotle has to inspect everything. .................(more)

http://www.vox.com/2016/1/6/10719578/is-chipotle-safe

January 9, 2016

Have we lost the deeply democratic vision that animated the early internet?

from Dissent magazine:


Phantom Public
Astra Taylor ▪ Winter 2016


[font size="1"](Rosa Menkman / Flickr)[/font]


In 1964 the enigmatic Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan famously declared “the medium is the message.” At the same time he called media “extensions of man.” Fifty years ago these assertions were provocative enough to turn McLuhan into a countercultural celebrity. Today, it all seems somewhat unremarkable: who doesn’t feel their smartphone, for both better and worse, to be a part of them? The idea that media extend us—making us more connected and sociable, informed and empowered—is not just pervasive; it is essential to the promotion of the digital economy, or what theorist Jodi Dean has dubbed “communicative capitalism.”

Though McLuhan’s work fell out of fashion for a few decades, there has been renewed interest in his theories since the advent of the internet, which some say McLuhan—never afraid to make sweeping pronouncements or predications—anticipated. McLuhan imagined a vast electronic web encircling the globe, with cinema, television, radio, telephones, and the printing press enabling individuals to communicate with one another in a “global village.” “Today computers hold out the promise of a means of instant translation of any code or language into any other code or language,” wrote McLuhan in a particularly optimistic—today, we might say “techno-utopian”—passage in his groundbreaking 1964 book Understanding Media. “The computer, in short, promises by technology a Pentecostal condition of universal understanding and unity,” which would lead to the unfolding of a “general cosmic consciousness.”

Today you don’t have to be a card-carrying McLuhanite to believe that forms of media have their own inherent politics. Many academics and pundits have built their reputations arguing that the rise of the internet leads to the decentralization and democratization of communication, and of social life more broadly. While some contemporary critics have challenged this sort of “technological determinism,” the proposition that new media is irrelevant to understanding politics is equally problematic. We need more historically informed analyses of the way power operates in an era of digital networks and electronic media, and more pointed critiques of the ways the powerful purposefully obscure their influence over and through these channels.

The work of Stanford historian Fred Turner is a good place to start. As he explains in his fascinating and illuminating 2013 book The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties, McLuhan’s apparently pioneering thinking on media owes a large and largely forgotten debt to an earlier group of anti-fascist campaigners and well-meaning Cold Warriors. They were the first to articulate a vision of a media-driven democracy that, though never perfectly implemented, has suffused much of today’s popular thinking about the internet and social media. .............(more)

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/phantom-public-marshall-mcluhan-steward-brand-techno-utopians

January 9, 2016

Thom Hartmann: The Crash of 2016

Published on Dec 5, 2013
Looking at American history, Hartmann, host of The Big Picture, sees that roughly every four generations, catastrophe strikes. To avert the next economic and social disaster, he urges us to reject the destabilizing profit motives of corporations, and embrace the ideals of democratic civil values that once defined the nation.