[Peace-discuss] anti-neoliberalism notes

[J.B. Nicholson]

Here are some notes to spur discussion on News from Neptune. Have a good 
show guys.







Candidates: Sen. Mike Gravel is running for POTUS too
https://twitter.com/MikeGravel/status/1113213097513295872 -- Sen. Gravel's 
announcement, read by many courtesy of a pointer on WikiLeaks' Twitter 
feed. His official launch date is April 8.





https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjHs-E2e2V4 -- 27m03s -- Abby Martin 
interviews NSA whistleblower and former NSA Technical Director, Bill Binney.

The interview is good and gets into many issues including war and how the 
NSA's invasiveness doesn't keep us safe, doesn't protect our civil 
liberties, and costs us lots of money:

- how the NSA takes in more data but couldn't properly analyze what they 
had. Binney's software ("ThinThread") did a better job of managing this and 
this gave him a keen understanding of what the NSA is really after. This 
means that the NSA has information on where future attacks come from (for 
example) but without proper analysis we're not more safe despite giving up 
so much privacy.

- how much data they take in daily -- 90 billion emails/day, 12 billion 
phone calls/day (3 billion/day of which are in the US alone) and the phone 
calls are automatically transcribed. The new Utah data center is very 
useful for retaining copies of recordings of calls, emails, and whatever 
else they wish to retain.

- that when the NSA claims they don't use the data they collect against 
American citizens that's a lie. Binney: "They're speaking for analysts and 
NSA. That's the only people they're speaking for. But they don't tell you 
that they left taps in the CIA and FBI and DEA, the Drug Enforcement 
Agency, and they also didn't tell anybody that the 5 eyes (GCHQ in Britain, 
Canadians, Australians, and New Zealands) also had direct access to that 
database.". So all the data they spy on is available to many more parties, 
"without any oversight whatsoever" (as Binney points out).

- Russiagate: the Vault 7 WikiLeaks release includes program documentation 
on how the CIA has software to disguise the true source of an attack to 
make it appear to come from other actors in other countries (including Russia).

- Russiagate: explaining how the DNC emails were leaked (released from 
within the DNC) not "hacked" (obtained from outside the DNC). And how the 
connections to Russia weren't anywhere near fast enough to convey the DNC 
email data to Russia (we're talking about being off by more than half).

- and more including some internal and political motivations within the NSA.

- Bill Binney:
> They [the NSA] traded the security of the people of the United States
> and the free world for money. I mean, they still have the same problem,
> they haven't changed a thing. So what it means to everybody in the world
> is that people keep buying from these attacks that they could stop. I
> mean look at every attack that's happened: every one is basically done
> by people who are already known to be bad. Well, I mean the issue is why
> aren't you focusing on them to reduce your problem and get rid of
> [eliminate from suspicion] all the other people in the world?

and more about falsehoods spread just after the 9/11 attacks.

The only part of the interview I disagree with is at the end where Binney 
recommends people make their own encryption to preserve their privacy 
amongst their peers in small groups. Encryption is difficult to do well; it 
is very challenging to devise an encryption scheme that genuinely keeps 
attackers from decrypting the correct underlying message. Not letting the 
NSA have a copy of the source code will not necessarily prevent them from 
breaking encrypted messages. The only exception I know of to this is what's 
called a one-time pad but they require a secure channel to share a copy of 
the key, so they're not practically useful online where strangers talk to 
each other. Also, if one uses a proprietary operating system (such as those 
in common desktop use and virtually all phones/trackers) the message can be 
spied on in other ways bypassing the encryption entirely. So not only is 
encryption difficult, it's also difficult to get a setup that ordinary 
people can use with commonly used hardware and operating systems.







Humanitarian crisis: Honduras -- brought on by the US

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWyS4BY-TfA -- Greyzone Project interview 
on the 2009 Honduran coup against Manuel Zelaya.  This, unlike Venezuela, 
is a real humanitarian crisis. This coup happened under Pres. Obama which 
might help to explain why it doesn't get much press today (today's 
so-called "resistance" tries to make G.W. Bush and Obama look good).





Multinational/US-driven patent law pushes disasters around the world, 
suicides, monocrops, and more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1282XZ_8ofw is 27m39s -- Prof. Vandana 
Shiva talking about how patent power, organized power (World Bank, US 
government, and multinational corporations) working against the public 
interest in growing food helps big agricultural companies railroad major 
world countries (including the US and India) into monocultures, starvation, 
slavery, and farmers who lose so much control over their work that they 
commit suicide (Chris Hedges mentions that over 250,000 Indian farmers have 
committed suicide often by drinking the very pesticides that wrecked their 
farm).

Bill & Melinda Gates foundation is a major problem here too: Shiva says the 
organizations and products they give money to are strategically chosen to 
help sustain or solidify monopolistic control in software and genetics 
(such as CRISPR, the gene-editing tool) which poses long-term threats 
against people being able to control their lives.

In a way, there's far too much here to be covered in such a short program. 
We need more people to engage in 'seed saving' -- keeping seeds companies 
don't own so we can keep growing those crops and doing as farmers 
traditionally did (collecting the seeds from those crops for planting 
later). As a result of the corporate/governmental so-called "green 
revolution" which empowered corporate interests to push monocultures, seed 
diversity decreased and made our crops more vulnerable both to bugs (which 
had evolved resistance to the pesticides) and to losing control over what 
is grown where and how much will be charged when a crop is sold.

I don't agree with Shiva's reference to Facebook meddling in the US 
elections because it's not clear precisely what was done and what effect 
sending Facebook user data to Cambridge Analytica had on elections. There 
are other economic and war-based explanations for the US 2016 election and 
Brexit support that don't require Facebook at all. Also, it's not clear to 
me that Facebook's choice violated Facebook's terms of service or if this 
was merely distasteful to Facebook users.






(referencing Barbie's "Math is hard!") -- Censorship is hard! Twitter 
relents on its censorship against French government ads when faced with 
politicians outcry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sLrtHLWd0k -- France has a law to battle 
fake news and Twitter says it tried to comply by "banning all targeted 
advertising in France, including campaigns calling on people to vote". But 
this censorship had to be reconsidered when faced with outcries from 
politicians and user demands for republishing posts. It's not clear that 
there is a winning argument on either side here -- the French law aiming to 
stamp out misinformation is directly against free speech, and Twitter's 
bans are also not in keeping with free speech. And it's hard to clearly 
identify what speech some users want censored.

Charlotte Dubenskij [pronounced "doo-BIN-skee"] reports for RT:
> Ahead of EU elections, the French Government Information Service (GIS)
> launched a campaign aimed at boosting voter registration. But Twitter
> found that the "Oui, j'ai vote" campaign is in violation of France's own
> anti-fake news law and ta-da through an accident. Twitter posted,
> "Following the 'information manipulation' law, we have decided to ban
> all targeted advertising in France, including campaigns calling on
> people to vote.". The GIS responded, "Twitter does not know how to do
> this at this time, and has therefore decided to have a completely
> extreme policy, cutting any supposedly political campaign.". [...] After
> a lot of pressure, Twitter quickly relented posting, "After a lot of
> discussions, we have decided to allow ads encouraging electoral
> participation.".
It seems that Twitter bans accounts and posts discussing many things it's 
administrators don't care for, from talking about the recent movie 
"Unplanned" to ending users said to post conspiracies (but not 
corporate-friendly conspiracy theories like Russiagate, which always get a 
pass). Twitter's censorship is so widespread and impossible to predict that 
users are leaving Twitter. According to Dubenskij:

> So enraged are users that many are leaving the platform altogether. The
> problem's become so embarrassing for Twitter that it's now going to stop
> announcing how many users it keeps losing.





Venezuela: Coups are hard! The US-led Venezuelan coup is not going so well 
for the US but the US is planning for the day when the neocons successfully 
topple the Maduro government.

Fk-KwLfTG1E -- RT reports "The US is developing a rescue plan for 
Venezuela's economy designed to pump cash into the country through banks, 
smartphones, and apps. But even though the Trump administration isn't 
rushing to reveal the details the plan has one key condition"

Larry Kudlow, Director US National Economic Council:
> The timeline is to get rid of Maduro. I have no idea when that's gonna
> be. [...] It's a question of getting hold of, what I call, the machinery
> of government.
Stateside, the New York Times runs an anti-Maduro video starring 
Venezuelan-American comedian and writer Joanna Hausmann which fails to 
mention that her father is Ricardo Hausmann, a Harvard economics professor 
and self-proclaimed Venezuelan president Juan Guaido's representative to 
Inter-American Development Bank, the biggest lender in Latin America. This 
is a clear violation of the New York Times' stated ethics policy (yes, they 
have one!). So even while the Times notes:

> It should be noted that her [Joanna Hausmann's] father has a lot to gain
> politically and professionally should regime change happen.
They don't mention her father's relationship to Guaido or that there is a 
clear violation of the Times' supposed policy which states:

> Staff members must be sensitive that perfectly proper political activity
> by their spouses, family or companions may nevertheless create conflicts
> of interest or the appearance of conflict.
But they didn't care and presented Ms. Hausmann as just another independent 
voice:

Adam Ellick, Executive Producer of Opinion Video for the Times:
> We were aware of her father's biography before publication, but Ms.
> Hausmann is an independent adult woman who has built a popular following
> on her own, by producing a portfolio of argued videos about Venezuela
> via her own YouTube channel.
Buzzfeed, CNN, and the Four Freedoms Forum all committed the same 
lying-by-omission when they too carried Joanna Hausmann's views. It's 
reminiscent of the recent Bernie Sanders CNN "Town Hall" meeting which 
featured questions from Democratic Party elites (hardly representative of 
ordinary Democratic Party voters), or the run-up to the first Gulf War 
under Pres. George H.W. Bush where "Niyirah" (who cried while reeling off a 
sad story about babies being dumped out of incubators and leaving babies 
"on the cold floor" in 1990). She was never revealed to be Niyirah 
al-Sabah, daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador, and her tale was pure fiction 
never confirmed to be true. She had arranged to give testimony without 
taking an oath making it legal for her to lie.










Elections: More evidence of anti-neoliberalism around the world -- comic 
Volodymyr Zelensky beat the US-backed Petro Poroshenko for president of 
Ukraine in the first round of elections

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoVLpvO3q90 -- "CrossTalk" on this topic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpV6tfZ_y7k -- "Going Underground" on this 
topic. This show also alleges CIA involvement in these elections.









Russiagate: Russiagator Rachel Maddow sees ratings fall after Mueller 
report summary from Barr was published.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/maddow-other-msnbc-hosts-see-ratings-drop-fox-up/2019/03/27/eb59e6fe-50da-11e9-bdb7-44f948cc0605_story.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3jRe0kAbLA -- Maddow spent 30 seconds 
reporting on the result of the Mueller Trump-Russia collusion investigation 
which Bill Barr published in his 4-page summary. Maddow fell from #1 to #6 
on the Monday after the Barr summary was published, a drop of almost 
500,000 viewers from the previous Monday.

Associated Press' David Bauder:
> Rachel Maddow isn’t backing away from her coverage of President Donald
> Trump and any connection to Russia’s involvement in trying to influence
> the 2016 presidential campaign. The question is how much her fans want
> to listen.
> 
> Maddow’s audience has dipped on her two days back on the air since
> Attorney General William Barr reported that special counsel Robert
> Mueller had found no collusion between Trump and Russia’s efforts. Her
> audience of 2.5 million on Monday was 19 percent below her average this
> year, and it went down further to 2.3 million on Tuesday, the Nielsen
> company said.
> 
> Meanwhile, her head-to-head competitor on Fox News Channel, Sean
> Hannity, saw his audience soar on Monday to 4 million viewers, a 32
> percent increase from his average. It slipped to 3.57 million on
> Tuesday. One of Trump’s most prominent media fans, Hannity was to
> interview the president on Wednesday’s show.

Fellow Russiagator, CNN's Brian Stelter, host of "Reliable Sources", told 
former "Nightline" host Ted Koppel at a panel discussion that CNN didn't 
care if CNN's ratings went down 40%. Everyone in the room, including many 
TV newsreaders, laughed at Stelter's claim.






Russiagate: When do Russiagators lose their Facebook & Twitter accounts for 
pushing a fraudulent conspiracy theory?

It's not in keeping with a principled view of free speech, but that was 
never the view social media outlets used to determine what to publish on 
behalf of their users. Given how some people and organizations have been 
censored (such as Alex Jones who seems to have been kicked off of Facebook, 
Twitter, and YouTube in a coordinated effort) when can we expect 
Russiagators to lose their accounts? Jimmy Dore asks pertinent questions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5ZQYNScqh8 -- Should MSNBC lose their 
Facebook page for pushing Russiagate?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNyfzQ3FdbU -- How about Think Progress?







Economy: UBI -- Universal Basic Income -- is getting more press from Andrew 
Yang

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S43Aluf1sz8 -- 2020 Democratic Party 
presidential candidate Andrew Yang on Jimmy Dore's show.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZJiZC89HBc -- Keiser Report on UBI which 
also brings up the Andrew Yang piece below from realclearpolitics.com.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/03/13/andrew_yang_universal_basic_income_is_not_socialism_is_good_for_markets.html 
-- Alaskan oil wealth is shared in part with Alaskans. UBI is quite old, 
UBI is not socialism, UBI is "good for markets":

Andrew Yang appeared on CBS' "Red and Blue" and said:
> A universal basic income is a policy where every citizen in a country
> gets a certain amount of money free and clear to do whatever they want.
> So my plan, the Freedom Dividend, would give every American adult $1,000
> per month, $12,000 per year, starting at age 18. This would create
> millions of jobs around the country and allow families and individuals
> to help manage this historic transition that we're in, in terms of
> technology transforming the labor force.
> 
> This idea is new to many Americans, but it is actually as old as the
> country itself. Thomas Paine was for it at the founding of the country,
> he called it the "Citizens' Dividend."
> 
> Martin Luther King was for it in the 1960s. Milton Freidman and 1,000
> economists signed a study saying this would be great for our society,
> and one state has had a dividend for 37 years, where everyone in the
> state of Alaska gets between $1-2,000 per year, no questions asked.
> 
> And what they're doing in Alaska with oil money, we can do for the rest
> of the country with technology money...
[...]
> I'm a CEO and businessperson, and I'll tell you, putting money into
> peoples' hands is good for business, it is good for the economy, it is
> good for markets. This is not socialism, this is capitalism where income
> doesn't start at zero. If you think about where Americans are going to
> spend this money, they're going to spend it at their local businesses,
> their main street economy. And this is a great way to help supercharge
> those businesses for the next number of years.[...]
> You have to look at what has happened to our economic system over the
> last number of years. Where all the relationships that we've taken for
> granted with capitalism, where if your company grew rich and successful
> you'd have to hire lots of people, you'd have to treat them well and pay
> them well, you'd have to pay them at least as well so they can afford to
> buy your services, the way Henry Ford said, how do my workers buy my
> cars?
> 
> In today's economy, you can create a very rich and successful business
> that doesn't employ lots of people, if it does employ people it can
> employ them as a gig or temporary or contract workers, and it doesn't
> need to pay them well enough to buy the goods and services because you
> can sell globally. And so, all of the things we've taken for granted
> about capitalism are now changing, and we have to evolve with the times.






Economy: Charles Hugh Smith on "Politics Has Failed, Now Central Banks Are 
Failing"

> Are we in a pre-revolutionary era? Here's clue #1: politics has failed.
> When the political process can no longer fix what's broken, politics has
> failed. When entire classes of citizenry no longer feel represented,
> politics has failed. When the system delivers a steadily declining
> standard of living to the bottom 80% of households, politics has
> failed.
> 
> Clue #2: having failed, the political machinery passed the baton to the
> central bank, which attempted to fix what's broken by creating money out
> of thin air."Free" money and low-cost credit has always been viewed as
> the go-to fix for whatever's broken, because it's, well, free to the
> issuing central state and politically popular (everybody loves free
> money, free bread and free circuses).
> 
> This political expediency works for a time--hence it's popularity
> throughout history-- but eventually the asymmetries, perverse incentives
> and unintended consequences pile up and the entire financial system
> capsizes.
> 
> Clue #3: America's monetary substitute for political process has failed.
> The failure isn't visible to those paid not to look at centralized
> failure, but it's visible to objective observers. Glance at the chart
> below: the Federal Reserve has announced it will end reducing its
> "emergency response to save the world" balance sheet in September 2019,
> leaving it roughly $3 trillion larger than it was a decade ago in the
> pre-crisis definition of "normal."





Economy: Wall St. Journal admits Marx was right, says Oakland Socialist blog

https://oaklandsocialist.com/2019/04/03/wall-st-journal-admits-marx-was-right/

> It was clear from the headline alone: The Wall St. Journal was admitting
> that Karl Marx was right. They wrote: "Investors Brace for Hit to Profits
> as Costs Rise" -- "Increasing wage and energy costs threaten to hurt
> companies’ margins just as the U.S. economy slows"
> 
> Their article continued: “Investors are concerned that rising wages and
> energy costs will eat into corporate profits, threatening the decade
> long bull market in stocks. Economists expect to see a strong month of
> wage growth when the Labor Department releases the March jobs report
> Friday. Wages grew at their fastest pace in nearly a decade in February,
> after starting to pick up speed just over a year ago…. These costs
> threaten to push down corporate profitability, some investors say…”
> 
> In his piece, Value, Price and Profit, Karl Marx argued that an increase
> in wages does not cause price increases. Rather, it causes a cut in
> profits. The piece is a debate with a man named Weston, who argued that
> it makes no sense for workers to fight for higher wages, since that will
> only result in higher prices.
> 
> If that were true, Marx answered, then a cut in wages would mean a cut
> in prices. He asked why wages are necessarily fixed as a set percentage
> of the cost of production. If that percentage cannot increase, then it
> can’t decrease either. So it makes no sense for the capitalist to push
> for a cut in wages either. But that is exactly what they do!
> 
> Marx explained that if wages in general rise, there would be an increase
> in demand for the kinds of goods workers typically buy, allowing for
> increased prices for those products. Meanwhile, there would have been no
> increase in demand for the goods that the capitalists buy, meaning that
> those prices could not increase. That means greater profits for the
> producers of goods that workers buy than the profits for those that the
> capitalists buy. The result would be that capital would tend to flow
> into the more profitable sector – consumer goods for workers. That would
> increase the competition in that sector, forcing the prices back down
> again.
> 
> The ultimate result is that the percentage of the total cost of
> production that goes to wages increases. Where does this increase come
> from? It must be taken out of the profits!



Economy: "Social Security provides most of the income for about half of 
households age 65 and older" -- US Government Accountability Office

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/almost-half-older-americans-zero-210656147.html 
-- Half of Older Americans Have Nothing in Retirement Savings

> (Bloomberg) -- The bad news is that almost half of Americans
> approaching retirement have nothing saved in a 401(k) or other
> individual account. The good news is that the new estimate, from the
> U.S. Government Accountability Office, is slightly better than a few
> years earlier.
> 
> Of those 55 and older, 48 percent had nothing put away in a
> 401(k)-style defined contribution plan or an individual retirement
> account, according to a GAO estimate for 2016 that was released Tuesday.
> That’s an improvement from the 52 percent without retirement money in
> 2013.
> 
> Two in five of such households did have access to a traditional
> pension, also known as a defined benefit plan. However, 29 percent of
> older Americans had neither a pension nor any assets in a 401(k) or IRA 
> account.
> 
> The estimate from the GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, is a
> brief update to a more comprehensive 2015 report on retirement savings
> in the U.S. Both are based on the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer 
> Finances.
> 
> The previous report found the median household of those age 65 to 74
> had about $148,000 saved, the equivalent of an inflation-protected
> annuity of $649 a month.
> 
> “Social Security provides most of the income for about half of 
> households age 65 and older,” the GAO said.
> 
> The Employee Benefit Research Institute estimated earlier this month 
> that 41 percent of U.S. households headed by someone age 35 to 64 are 
> likely to run out of money in retirement. That’s down 1.7 percentage 
> points since 2014.
-J