[Peace-discuss] NfN/AOTA notes

Fri Dec 7 08:06:32 UTC 2018

War: The weapons the US uses

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGMyMSU8psA -- "On Contact with Chris 
Hedges" on tear gas -- a chemical weapon.

War: Drone policy and its effects on drone pilots

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkaHgamB_5s -- an interesting interview 
with a former drone pilot talking about who he's killed and the effects on 
the drone pilots.

War: Yemen -- 85,000 children under age 5 dead from "extreme hunger and 
disease" according to Save the Children using UNICEF data.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/12/06/yemen-85000-dead-kids/ -- Charles 
Pierson on "Yemen: 85,000. Dead. Kids."

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/12/06/seeing-yemen-from-jeju/ -- Kathy 
Kelly on "Saving Yemen from Jeju".

Media: Corporate media's coverage of George H. W. Bush's death tries to 
make his legacy look better than he deserves.

Paul Street on "A Killer Dies, a Teacher Lives: George H.W. Bush v. Noam 
Chomsky" gives a far more reasonable view.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/12/03/a-killer-dies-a-teacher-lives-george-h-w-bush-v-noam-chomsky/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Py3lldXINc -- Scottie Nell Hughes gave a 
glowing review of G.H.W. Bush (hereafter "Bush") typical of corporate media 
(so it was particularly noticed on her RT show; who benefits from echoing 
what is so common elsewhere?). We're supposed to believe her when she says 
Bush "sought peace" because he "saw war" (meaning his front-line fighting 
experience somehow made him "seek peace"). She also chastised post-Bush 
presidents on this line:

> What is new is having leadership in the United States for 4 [holds up 4
> fingers] administrations who have never seen the hell of battle up
> close. I wonder if they had would we be in the position today where the
> threat of war would not be so callously thrown around? We are so quick
> to mark a place in history for those who create war. But in President
> George H. W. Bush's case we should give him just as much credit for
> seeking peace.

She never mentioned any of Bush's wars (keeping the Iran-Iraq war going, 
funding the contras and the South African apartheid regime, Central 
America, and more).

She spent her segment trying to convince us that because he was a "nice" 
man, a man who remained "calm" as the Soviet Union went toward state 
capitalism (with no mention of how that shift worked out for the least 
well-off), that we should think kindly about him.

Fortunately there are dissenters: Jeremy Scahill and Arun Gupta in 
https://theintercept.com/2018/12/05/george-h-w-bush-1924-2018-american-war-criminal/ 
do a better job of listing "Bush's militarism, war, coups, regime change, 
and the lies of American exceptionalism" as the Intercept put it.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/all-us-presidents-living-and-dead-are-war-criminals 
and 
https://www.blackagendareport.com/if-theres-hell-below-thats-where-hell-go-bar-obituary-george-hw-bush 
each do a better job of putting Bush into context as just another US 
President war criminal (like all the others).

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/12/05/the-amazing-gwhb-hagiography/ is 
Ted Rall's essay on "The Amazing GWHB Hagiography".

Media: What's the harm of RT's news coverage?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8DWMXOOVCc -- Mike Papantonio's response 
to Suzanne Spaulding's complaint that RT and "America's Lawyer with Mike 
Papantonio" tell the truth(!) about corporate power and abuse. He talks 
about Spaulding's group which is funded by the corporations Papantonio 
talks about on his show and other RT shows cover.

But things are changing at RT. Larry King's "Politicking" show is joined by 
Scottie Nell Hughes' "News Views Hughes" show in corporate friendliness. RT 
has some ways to go before it's more like corporate media.

Irony of the week: CNBC publishes an article with title "Goldman Sachs asks 
in biotech research report: 'Is curing patients a sustainable business model?'"

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patients-a-sustainable-business-model.html

> Goldman Sachs analysts attempted to address a touchy subject for biotech
> companies, especially those involved in the pioneering "gene therapy"
> treatment: cures could be bad for business in the long run.
> 
> "Is curing patients a sustainable business model?" analysts ask in an
> April 10 report entitled "The Genome Revolution."
> 
> "The potential to deliver 'one shot cures' is one of the most attractive
> aspects of gene therapy, genetically-engineered cell therapy and gene
> editing. However, such treatments offer a very different outlook with
> regard to recurring revenue versus chronic therapies," analyst Salveen
> Richter wrote in the note to clients Tuesday. "While this proposition
> carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a
> challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash
> flow."

There's the more apparent answer to the article's question (answer: no, 
it's not meant to be a sustainable business model) and then there are the 
questions about who pays for handling what happens after we genetically 
edit more people.

It's an interesting win-win for the banksters:

Win #1: convince a bunch of people that "one shot cures" are not 
sufficiently profitable to be worth funding while never pushing the reader 
to consider eliminating private funding and doing all medicinal research 
and development with government funds (as opposed to government funds 
providing funding and then allowing privateers to market and own the 
results via patents).

Win #2: gene editing is very new and (as a previous story highlighted) 
remarkably untested with substantial consequences (genetic alterations are 
passed onto future generations). Whatever profit is to be had will be borne 
by the banksters and whatever costs there are to pay will almost certainly 
be borne by the public.

Ralph Nader's Destroying the Myths of Market Fundamentalism conference talks

Introduction
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5687cmbf9L4

Antitrust and How Kleptocracy Corrupts What Markets Are Supposed To Do Well
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJ_h4JybIUQ

How Fraud Corrodes Weak Market Regulations Governed by Market Fundamentalism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzGELSq4alE

The Virtues and Limits of Markets
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whoGbxnt8es

Corporate Tax-Break Subsidies: Boosting Monopolies, Fueling Inequality
Length: 17m28s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrhzNCwaJFM

Systematized Tax Evasion: Cheating Competition
Length: 12m35s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3572anqSanE

Systemic Corporate Crime: Business as Usual, Making Markets Irrelevant
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYNKaWqESgk

How Market Fundamentalism Corrupts the Political System
Length: 19m17s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OK2bTk1uVM

Endemic Market Failure and Inequality
Length: 22m21s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Aa2Kpr0UGg

The Assault on Regulation (And the Case for It)
Length: 48m00s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rP66rSP5TGw

The SEC and the Inadequacies of Financial Regulation
Length: 27m41s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmc_br9UBkw

Public Goods: When Markets Fail
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXcvzHYqqRs

Health: The politics of addiction

Two highly recommended Johann Hari talks:

https://theintercept.com/2018/12/02/watch-addiction-depression-the-opioid-epidemic-what-are-they-telling-us-a-discussion-with-johann-hari/ 
-- Glenn Greenwald interviews Johann Hari on the political implications of 
addiction.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/1omEKIBwod8 -- Johann Hari's lecture to TED 
about addiction myths and how addiction really works. Addressing the 
underlying reasons why people seek escape from their lives is far more 
likely to get them to rid themselves of addictions than addressing the 
addiction as if it is the root of the problem because people 
"self-medicate" (as the current term says) in order to escape the harm from 
something else (such as the direct effects of: neoliberal economics, 
neverending war, poverty, homelessness, etc.).

and his books: "Chasing the Scream" and "Lost Connections".

And virtually any Gabor Maté talk is also highly recommended:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66cYcSak6nE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARyq_BtCVMo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpHiFqXCYKc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvQYwOlx0HY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLki68uLfjw

and his book "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts".

Censorship: Google behaves in a way one expects an international spy to act 
but somehow this strikes the uninitiated as surprising.

https://theintercept.com/2018/12/01/google-china-censorship-human-rights/ 
-- Author Jack Poulson says "I Quit Google Over Its Censored Chinese Search 
Engine. The Company Needs to Clarify Its Position on Human Rights." but 
Google's position has been quite clear and made absolutely crystal clear 
when we learned (thanks to Edward Snowden) that Google joined the NSA's 
PRISM program on January 14, 2009 (see 
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/Prism_slide_5.jpg for 
the "Dates When PRISM Collection Began For Each Provider" including many 
PRISM "providers" whose names you know: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, 
YouTube, Skype before they were purchased by Microsoft, AOL, and Apple).

Poulson's article in The Intercept is mainly about Google's "Project 
Dragonfly". Details on this project are difficult to come by but we believe 
the general goal of Project Dragonfly is to provide a censored search 
engine in China where, presumably, the Chinese government gets to determine 
which search results are excluded, which results are included, and how 
search results are ranked.

One look at Google's other activities show a multitude of privacy violations:

- Google Home is like Amazon's Echo -- a spy device listening in on 
everything within mic range, under the control of proprietary software 
(software the user does not control).

- Google's email service (GMail) exists to make it easier to spy on users 
en masse via their email. There might also be additional spying via the 
Javascript code most users use when using their GMail account. The 
continued existence of GMail and adoption of GMail by large organizations 
tells us email is still very widely used and thus an important source of 
information for spies. One should prefer other email services and use email 
encryption and remailers to put off the day when one's emails are read.

- Google's search engine can and does track user searches and results; this 
too helps Google maintain profiles on users.

These activities account for a great deal of what Google's users use and 
have apparently been valuable enough to Google and the NSA that Google's 
participation in PRISM is no accident and in no way surprising. Google's 
main line of business is spying. Anyone who claims the spying is done 
merely to provide targeted advertising is both underselling what's really 
going on, and speaking beyond their knowledge. We can't say what value 
Google's spying provides partially because the fruits of mass surveillance 
are multiply useful and they could grow more useful with time. A spying 
organization develops profiles on people by indiscriminately spying on them 
over time. Those profiles could take years to develop, during which time 
it's easy to get sycophantic corporate media (as is the norm for the tech 
press) to make claims like spying is to help Google's advertisers focus 
their ads on people willing to buy products.

Censorship/Russiagate: Google doesn't like Pres. Trump

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_cpfHM3llA -- typing in "Trump" shows 
"Trump is bad", "Trump the worst", "Trump impeach", and "Trump is Russian" 
among the supplied autofill search hints.

Censorship/Israel: CNN fires commentator for expressing pro-Palestinian view

https://theintercept.com/2018/11/29/cnn-submits-to-right-wing-outrage-mob-fires-marc-lamont-due-to-his-offensive-defense-of-palestinians-at-the-un/ 
-- Glenn Greenwald article
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPM11hHkw0s -- Cornel West on the firing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Sqsi9olF94 -- CNN fires Marc Lamont Hill 
for expressing pro-Palestinian view; Israeli activists chide him as though 
it's anti-Jewish to want to not kill Palestinians.

Russiagate/Economic: Putting things in perspective

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmA5Zs22VN4  -- Williamson: Poverty is a 
greater threat than Russia. A sensible view.

Assange: The recently-reported deal is not new and Joe Lauria tells us 
"he's not going anywhere".

https://therealnews.com/stories/ecuadorian-ex-diplomat-report-claiming-assange-met-manafort-is-false

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HimlwWHPRco -- As Assange faces secret (and 
still unknown) charges from the US, Ben Norton of The Real News tells us 
that an Ecuadorian Ex-diplomat tells us the report that Manafort met 
Assange is false. This was totally predicted (given the complete absence of 
backing in the recent Guardian article) but it's good to see more sources 
echoing what is most likely the case. Norton also provides a good concise 
summary of the situation thus far:

> BEN NORTON: The United States government has secretly filed criminal
> charges against Julian Assange, the founder and editor of the
> whistleblowing journalism organization WikiLeaks. This has huge
> implications for journalism around the world, and could be an enormous
> blow to the freedom of the press here in the U.S., because Assange is
> not a U.S. citizen, and he has not done journalistic work inside the
> U.S. So the U.S. government is trying to criminally prosecute a
> journalist who is not even a citizen for publishing confidential
> government documents, which all major newspapers do, including the New
> York Times and the Washington Post.
> 
> Assange has never been charged with a crime, but he’s been trapped in 
> the embassy of Ecuador inside London since 2012. He has feared that the 
> British government would extradite him to the U.S. for prosecution, 
> where he is afraid he could face the death penalty. In 2016, a United 
> Nations human rights panel determined that Assange is being arbitrarily 
> detained under international law, and that he must be freed and is due 
> compensation. But still, in the past two years since that U.N. ruling, 
> Assange has remained stuck in the Ecuadorian embassy.
> 
> And now corporate media outlets are spreading stories about Assange
> that WikiLeaks maintains are totally false. On November 27, the British 
> newspaper the Guardian published a story claiming that Donald Trump’s 
> former campaign manager Paul Manafort met Assange inside the Ecuadorian 
> embassy three times for secret talks in 2013, 2015, and in mid-2016.
> The Guardian report implied that this was related to WikiLeaks’
> publication of leaked Democratic Party documents and emails. Wikileaks
> actually says this story is completely false, and has pledged to sue the
> Guardian for it. WikiLeaks is currently raising money for a lawsuit.
> Assange and Manafort both say that the story is fake, and even the
> Washington Post has actually cast doubt on the Guardian report.
> 
> Well, now a former diplomat in the Ecuadorian embassy in London is also 
> speaking out. Fidel Narvaez told the British news website the Canary 
> that the story is false

Norton interviewed Narvaez on TRNN and one interesting point came out -- 
who wrote the Guardian article?

> BEN NORTON: And can you talk more about the previous reports, along with
> this report? The Guardian, what’s interesting, is that in the digital
> version of this report it disguised the fact that this story had three
> coauthors. The digital version only shows Luke Harding and Dan Collins.
> However, in the print version of the story, it actually showed that
> there were three coauthors. The third was Villavicencio, who is this
> Ecuadoran activist who was previously strongly opposed to the government
> of Rafael Correa, which was now replaced by the current president Lenin
> Moreno. And as I mentioned previously, Ecuadoran public news have
> accused Villavicencio of publishing doctored information. So if this has
> happened in the past, why would the Guardian continue using this person
> as a critical source? And a photo on Twitter shows Luke Harding and Dan
> Collins, in fact, meeting with the CEO in Quito, Ecuador. So it’s very
> clear that he is one of the main sources.
> 
> FIDEL NARVAEZ: Yeah. Yeah, most probably he’s one of the main sources.
> And the sources of that source, I assume, is the a security company that
> used to be in charge of the security of the embassy, who was contacted
> by the intelligence services in Ecuador. They have been pretty hostile
> to Julian Assange during those years, producing very misrepresentations
> in reports about the day to day in the embassy, trying to misrepresent
> Julian’s stay in the embassy. And these latest fabrications, they have
> clearly a political aim. It is a clear attempt to link Assange,
> WikiLeaks, to Russian collusion and Trump administration, which I don’t
> think, I don’t think there are grounds for that at all.

The points Glenn Greenwald raised in his Intercept piece are still very 
valid and have yet to be addressed by the Guardian.

In regards to the most recent story -- that the UK promises to guarantee 
Assange's safety from the death penalty.

Such as:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s14TtQNGaNw -- RT interview with Joe Lauria.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ig_BVkqsUPM -- RT news item mentioning the 
alleged "new" and written deal between Ecuador and the UK.

> FIDEL NARVAEZ: Well, what Lenin Moreno is claiming is not something new.
> And there’s a key point on this that we need to understand. Political
> asylum is not equivalent to protecting you from the electrical chair.
> From the death penalty. Political asylum is protecting your rights
> integrally. So if there is a risk of Julian Assange being sentenced to a
> life sentence, to spend his life in prison, that’s absolutely
> unacceptable. If there is a risk of Julian Assange being sentenced to
> 30, 40 years in the security prison, as Chelsea Manning was condemned,
> that’s absolutely unacceptable. That’s why Julian Assange has political
> asylum from Ecuador; to protect his rights.
> 
> So the UK has claimed that from the very beginning, in the year 2012,
> saying that in the case of the risk of death penalty, they won’t
> extradite a person to a country where the death penalty is in place. So
> that’s not, that’s nothing new. But this does unacceptable if now Lenin
> Moreno wants to ask Assange to leave the embassy because supposedly he
> had reached an agreement with the UK. There’s no agreement. That’s
> something that was always there. We always knew, and that’s
> unacceptable.

Joe Lauria's interview explains why US elites want Assange:

- Assange revealed "Vault 7" a collection of CIA tools for doing a lot of 
things electronically including misleading investigators by planting false 
clues to divert investigators, spying on people via their "smart" home 
devices (for example, so-called "smart" TVs)

- Assange released the DNC emails. These emails are among the long list of 
reasons why Hillary Clinton believes she did not become US President in 
2016. She's utterly wrong about that but she needs a scapegoat to explain 
why she lost a rigged election to a duly elected Donald Trump.

- Assange has revealed war crimes (such as the footage showing US military 
shooting down civilians, children, and journalists with higher-up approval).

The list of reasons the elites hate WikiLeaks goes on and on. This is also 
the same list of reasons why WikiLeaks and Assange are heroes.

Economy: Wall St. frowns on Huawei CFO arresting Huawei Chief Financial 
Officer Meng Wanzhou (孟晚舟), daughter of company founder Ren Zhengfei.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qE-CHkpc7-w
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0DeVVnGB_Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ll1GR_iXo24

Huawei Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou might be used by the US as a 
means of getting China to do what the US wants in any future trade negotiation.

Background: The US had Canada arrest Chinese citizen and Huawei 
([hoo-AH-WAY]) Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou for unknown charges. 
The running speculation is that the US arrested her because Huawei violated 
US sanctions against Iran.

This arrest seems to be driving tensions against China up and making 
investors nervous.

Reports warning Americans, in particular, not to use Huawei products 
because they could pose a risk to one's security (the US military has been 
warned Huawei goods pose a national security risk) are completely without 
basis in fact. The cellphone (proper name "tracker" since that's what these 
devices spend most of their time doing) market is filled with devices that 
run proprietary software and constantly track the user's location, and 
allow the cell carrier to replace any software on the device with any other 
software at any time. This is a potent combination for turning a 
general-purpose computer into a spy tool. Since people make these devices 
their primary phones and primary computers, they're a high-value target for 
mass surveillance. Hence it's not a question of whether the device is a 
security risk, it's a question of who benefits from the proprietary control 
-- Google with Android phones running Google's software, Apple with iPhones 
running Apple's software, and any app that runs across either of these OSes 
can spy on the user as well. We already know that Google and Apple have 
been NSA "partners" for years (courtesy of Ed Snowden's revelations). 
Huawei rightly says their products pose "no greater cybersecurity risk" 
than any other vendors' products. I think they're right in this -- they're 
all untrustworthy. There's no reasonable belief that one isn't being spied 
upon if one uses a tracker.

Economy: The next recession is coming and it will be worse than what we 
experienced in 2008.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qE-CHkpc7-w
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrBUgOyNf5M -- latest edition of the Keiser 
Report

Protests: Yellow Vests get Macron government to abandon the fuel tax hike

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrBUgOyNf5M -- latest edition of the Keiser 
Report
https://consortiumnews.com/2018/12/05/yellow-vests-rise-against-neo-liberal-king-macron/ 
-- Diana Johnstone on this protest.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCcKmdURMpg -- news of scrapping the tax hike.

In what appears to be a populist protest, the latest is that French 
President Macron is now not suspending but abandoning its planned fuel tax 
hike. Lives lost and millions of euros of damage over the past 3 weeks of 
violent protest.

The Saturday (2018-12-08) protest will continue as the protestors say 
scrapping the tax hike is 'too little, too late' and one of the police 
unions' front staff will join the yellow vests (Les gilets Jaunes) in this 
on Saturday.

Exploitation: Stopping corporate exploitation in prisons

https://therealnews.com/series/rattling-the-bars-stopping-corporate-exploitation-in-prisons

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJn050UGNQU -- part 1 of 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kuYPVA1_QM -- part 2 of 2

> Eddie Conway talks with Bianca Tylek, founder of the Corrections
> Accountability Corporation about thousands of corporations funding
> private prisons and immigration detention centers and what citizens can
> do about it.
A very interesting topic and Bianca Tylek's work has identified over 3,000 
companies that profit from mass incarceration. She talks about her work in 
this 2-part interview.

-J