Tuesday Open Thread 05-05-15

Good morning 99percenters!

“It’s pure authoritarianism”: Glenn Greenwald exposes the link between Baltimore’s uprising and the NSA
Award-winning journalist tells Salon why the erosion of civil liberties at home and abroad is interconnected

It got lost in all the hubbub of the uprising in Baltimore, as well as the addition of a few more candidates to the 2016 presidential election, but according to reports from multiple sources last week, it’s looking more probable than ever that the so-called Patriot Act will not be reauthorized until after it’s undergone some privacy-protecting revisions. The distance between vague promises in a report and an actual change to the bill’s infamously broad language is considerable, of course. But absent the waves of outrage inspired by leaks from former CIA contractor Edward Snowden — whose collaboration with Salon alum and Intercept founding editor Glenn Greenwald recently led to an Academy Award — it’s hard to imagine reformers ever getting even this close.

Recently, Salon spoke over the phone with Greenwald, whose book on his experience with Snowden, “No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State,” was recently released in paperback. We touched on the reception to the book, the events in Baltimore, Hillary Clinton’s sincerity and the importance of the controversy involving this year’s PEN Awards and Charlie Hebdo. Our conversation is below and has been edited for clarity and length.

Why The Powers That Be Are Pushing A Cashless Society
We Can’t Rein In the Banks If We Can’t Pull Our Money Out of Them

Martin Armstrong summarizes the headway being made to ban cash,  and argues that the goal of those pushing a cashless society is to prevent bank runs … and increase their control:

The central banks are … planning drastic restrictions on cash itself. They see moving to electronic money will first eliminate the underground economy, but secondly, they believe it will even prevent a banking crisis. This idea of eliminating cash was first floated as the normal trial balloon to see how the people take it. It was first launched by Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard University and Willem Buiter, the chief economist at Citigroup. Their claims have been widely hailed and their papers are now the foundation for the new age of Economic Totalitarianism that confronts us. Rogoff and Buiter have laid the ground work for the end of much of our freedom and will one day will be considered the new Marx with hindsight. They sit in their lofty offices but do not have real world practical experience beyond theory. Considerations of their arguments have shown how governments can seize all economic power are destroy cash in the process eliminating all rights. Physical paper money provides the check against negative interest rates for if they become too great, people will simply withdraw their funds and hoard cash. Furthermore, paper currency allows for bank runs. Eliminate paper currency and what you end up with is the elimination of the ability to demand to withdraw funds from a bank.

In many nations, specific measures have already been taken demonstrating that the Rogoff-Buiter world of Economic Totalitarianism is indeed upon us. This is the death of Capitalism. Of course the socialists hate Capitalism and see other people’s money should be theirs. What they cannot see is that Capitalism is freedom from government totalitarianism. The freedom to pursue the field you desire without filling the state needs that supersede your own.

There have been test runs of this Rogoff-Buiter Economic Totalitarianism to see if the idea works. I reported on June 21, 2014 that Britain was doing a test run. A shopping street in Manchester banned cash as part of an experiment to see if Brits would accept a cashless society. London buses ended accepting cash payments from July 2014. Meanwhile, Currency Exchange dealers began offering debt cards instead of cash that they market as being safer to travel with. The Chorlton, South Manchester experiment was touted to test customers and business reaction to the idea for physical currency will disappear inside 20 years.

What’s Washington Doin’ in Central Asia Now?
Since the time the CIA financed and trained more than one hundred Mujahideen Islamic Jihadists, including a fanatical Saudi named Osama bin Laden, to wage a decade-long proxy war against forces of the Soviet Army in Afghanistan, Washington has been obsessed with the idea of penetrating deep into Central Asia in order to drive a wedge between China and Russia.

Early attempts in the wake of the post-2001 US forces’ presence in Afghanistan met with mixed success. Now it appears that Washington is frantically trying a repeat, even calling the ageing US Ambassador Richard M. Miles out of retirement to head a new try at a Color Revolution.

There seems to be a sense of urgency to Washington’s new focus on Central Asia. Russia is hardly buckling under from US and EU financial sanctions; rather she is looking more vibrant than ever, making strategic economic and military deals seemingly everywhere. And Russia’s Eurasian neighbor, The Peoples’ Republic of China, is laying plans to build energy pipelines and high speed rail links with Russia across Eurasia.

Washington appears now to be responding.

The problem with the Washington neoconservatives is that they aren’t very creative, in fact, in terms of understanding the larger consequences of their specific actions, they are rather stupid. And their shenanigens have become very well-known, not only in Moscow, but also in Uzbekistan, Kyrgystan and other Central Asian republics formerly part of the Soviet Union.

‘Father of internet’ speaks out against govt demand for back doors in encryption

Internet pioneer Vint Cerf said Monday that creating defects in encryption systems for law enforcement, often known as “back doors,” was “super, super risky” and not the “right answer.”

Cerf, recognized as a “father of the internet,” currently working at Google, told an audience at the National Press Club that he understood law enforcement’s desire to avoid being locked away from evidence that could be used to prevent crimes. He went on to say, however, that providing such access raises constitutional and legal questions.

The Congress is forced now to struggle with that, and they’re going to have to listen to these various arguments about protection and safety on the one hand and preservation and privacy and confidentiality on the other,” Cerf said, as
reported by The Hill.

The Obama administration has been trying to force companies like Google and Apple to create defects in encryption so the FBI and other government agencies can gain access to people’s information; this despite mounting criticism over the plan – a criticism that’s shared by Cerf.

Aretha Franklin - Respect

Aretha Franklin - Think

Aretha Franklin - Chain Of Fools

Aretha Franklin - Mockingbird

Aretha Franklin - Spanish Harlem

Open thread, talk the talk!

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mimi's picture

I can't right now read your linked articles, because I listen to Amy Goodman's show and I wanted to add here the link, because the issues she is covering I think is very important.
Today in detail about "All the President's Psychologists" I urge you all to get into the whole report released and the interviews she has with Steven Reisner and Nathianal Raymond. It's quite detailed and complicated to summarize. But I hope it's covered and pushed to give it more eyes.

And thank you for your links. I am just overwhelmed with all of the importance revealed.

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it's warm, gloomy and raining this morning, a good time to catch up on some links, thanks.

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Pluto's Republic's picture

As the world continues to string the US along on its doomed trade agreements:

UN calls for suspension of TTIP talks over fears of human rights abuses

UN lawyer says tactics used by multinationals in courts outside of public jurisdiction would undermine democracy and law

A senior UN official has called for controversial trade talks between the European Union and the US to be suspended over fears that a mooted system of secret courts used by major corporations would undermine human rights.

Alfred de Zayas, a UN human rights campaigner, said there should be a moratorium on negotiations over the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which are on course to turn the EU and US blocs into the largest free-trade area in the world.

The Cuban-born US lawyer warned that the lesson from other trade agreements around the world was that major corporations had succeeded in blocking government policies with the support of secret arbitration tribunals that operated outside the jurisdiction of domestic courts.

De Zayas said: “We don’t want a dystopian future in which corporations and not democratically elected governments call the shots. We don’t want an international order akin to post-democracy or post-law.”

:

Disputes have already cost governments hundreds of millions of pounds in compensation. The Swedish nuclear energy group Vattenfall is suing the German government for its decision to phase out nuclear energy following the Fukushima disaster, while the French waste and energy group Veolia sued the Egyptian government when it raised the minimum wage.

“There have been more than 600 such cases and most of them have been decided in favour of the corporations,” he said. “Why? Because the arbitrators are highly paid corporate lawyers, today working for the corporation, tomorrow as advocates, day after tomorrow as lobbyist, the day after that as arbitrators.

“These are classical situations of conflict of interest and lack of independence.”

Heh: "We don’t want an international order akin to post-democracy or post-law." That horse left the barn a long time ago, Mr. De Zayas. But still, the UN gets an "E" for effort.

Meanwhile, Occupied Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, was in DC prancing through congress in his official role as a US Poodle lobbying for the TPP. Salon's Patrick Smith not only nailed this fiasco, but cracked me up in the process:

The real story behind Shinzo Abe’s visit: China, TPP and what the media won’t tell you about this state visit

We witness reordination of a relationship between the U.S. and Japan that should have died a bad death decades ago

The grande fête Washington has laid on all week for Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, is very unusual on the face of it. When a head of state spends this much time in another nation’s capital, you know significant doings are afoot.

And they are. In agreements reached as soon as they met Monday, Abe and President Obama have taken defense ties to an intimacy unprecedented in history. As it stands now, this breaches Article 9 of the Japanese constitution, the “no-war” clause barring Japan from military activities other than those in direct defense of its shores.

On the White House steps Tuesday, Abe confirmed his conscription as a commissioned officer in Washington’s campaign to get its ambitious trade pact, the corporate-drafted Trans-Pacific Partnership, signed this year. “We will continue to cooperate to lead the TPP talks through their last phase,” Abe said in one of those side-by-side tableaux commonly staged for the press and the television cameras.

Less practically but more momentously, we have Abe’s Wednesday address to a joint session of Congress, wherein 535 American legislators implicitly certified Abe and the rightist factions in his Liberal Democratic Party in their efforts to get past questions of guilt and responsibility in the Pacific War (as Asians call World War II and the decade of aggression that preceded it) without honestly addressing them.

Pretty extensive agenda. These people have been walking and chewing gum all over Washington since Abe’s arrival. But there is a remarkable coherence to all Abe and the Obama administration are getting done. The next paragraph is a fulsome description of what I think this week is all about.

China.

You will hear 55 times over the next little while that, no, the escalation of defense ties has nothing to do with containing the mainland. And no, the TPP may happen to exclude China but is not intended to exclude China.

Take none of these protests seriously. The extension of NATO eastward has nothing to do with Russia, either. Sanctions imposed since the Ukraine crisis erupted last year have nothing to do with disrupting the economic interdependence that has developed between the European Union and post-Soviet Russia, either.

Zing!

Very entertaining week, starring the folks who invented kabuki.

Worth the read.

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____________________

The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato
Big Al's picture

Don't let them take our cash. Of course they'll paint the picture so the lemmings agree, just like they agreed to 401K's and
credit cards. Fucking credit cards. I haven't used one of those in over 15 years now. Gave them up long ago. Haven't had a loan of
any kind since then too. Debt free except the house I really will never truly own.

Real moral of the story - we need to abolish the private central banks. Not change them or reform them, abolish them and start
over. The BIS, IMF, Fed Reserve, all of it has to go. Most people simply don't realize what power these banks and their banksters hold
over us thru private central banking.

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Big Al's picture

The World Domination Tour continues. Unless we stop it, who knows what will come. Maybe a war with Russia.
Maybe a world economic collapse. Maybe worse.

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Some of this is because of the end of a strike at the docks, but mostly its about the economy of the rest of the world
slowing down.

TB.jpg

TB2.jpg

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Pluto's Republic's picture

US exports are too expensive for the world these days. That's the entire point of the world working in concert to devalue their currencies against the dollar. In effect, it is a global economic sanction against the United States.

For every loser, there are winners (nations with a trade surplus)

Is QE4 next?

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____________________

The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato

trust us

More than 50 Isis fighters have been killed by coalition air strikes in Syria, the US Army claims, although monitors claim only civilians were hit.
Major Curtis Kellogg, a spokesperson for Central Command , said there were no civilians near the village of Birmehli when fighter jets struck overnight on Thursday.
At least 50 Isis fighters were among the casualties, he said, but Centcom had “no indication that any civilians were killed”.
"We work extremely hard to be precise in the application of our air strikes and take all allegations of civilian casualties very seriously.”

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights maintained that not one Isis fighter had been killed in what it branded a “massacre”.
In its own count based on evidence from activists on the ground, it listed the death of 64 civilians 64 civilians including 31 children under the age of 16 and 19 women.

If we refuse to admit we killed civilians then we didn't kill civilians. It's simple math.

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shaharazade's picture

for the big dose of Aretha! A great way to start my work day, I'll be glad to have the soulful tunes of Aretha running around my brain. Think I'll put her on my ipod. Be back later to catch up on all the news and talk that's fit to read. Have a good day everyone.

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shaz, it's definitely ear worm inducing. See ya' later!

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JayRaye's picture

Fantastic way to start the day!!!

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Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth.-Lucy Parsons

she is the queen.

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joe shikspack's picture

while most of us probably don't care if others know that we purchased bacon, eggs and a couple of batteries at the store on saturday, there is a certain anonymity that the use of cash offers that is inextricable from our privacy. the fact of being unable to not leave a trail of transactions for future data-mining by the government really sucks.

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Big Al's picture

also. More difficult to work under the table, sell drugs, purchase off grid goods, farmers markets, etc.,
so it's a big step toward total control as well. We'd end up having to create underground currencies and other
means to get around the Orwell system.
This one has to be fought to the death.

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how gleeful the banks will be when they can do their negative interest rate gig on your deposits and charge you for storing your digital pixel accounts on their bank computers.

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mimi's picture

the system down.

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just got back from seeing my dad. I did some major improvements yesterday on some of our features. If you want a really easy way to monitor the site now, check out the changes to the "Content Stream" in the left sidebar. I bookmarked that page and I can bounce in here at any time and with a quick glance can see any new posts or comments, it shows you the new comments and the total number of comments, and essays with any new comments goes to the top of the list so you don't have to scroll much to view it. Try it, it's handy and would probably work well for those that use a handheld. I also improved the "Comment Stream", and in your user account (My Account) i improved the "My Content" and "My Comments" features, check them out. I fashioned all four of those features the way DKos does it so you'll find them more familiar to use now.

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"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon