Despite the current mess the Republican Party finds itself in, both
major parties are committed to a two party system. And in supporting
and working for this two party system, they also attempt to control
the party loyalists from their central committees.
I just received my primary ballot. In Washington, we vote by mail. I
do have the option, which I use, to go to my county courthouse and
vote by an accessible machine, which reads to me as I mark my paper
ballot. But on my ballot, according to my wife, there are only two
columns, Democrat and Republican. While I am not either, I will mark
my ballot for Bernie Sanders.
Carl Jarvis
On May 6, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>
> Nichols writes: "What Sanders is proposing is a necessary quest - and a
> realistic one. Already, he is better positioned than any recent insurgent
> challenger to engage in rules and platform debates, as well as in dialogues
> about everything from the vice-presidential nomination to the character of
> the fall campaign."
>
> Senator Bernie Sanders. (photo: Scott Olson/Getty)
>
>
> A Contested Convention Is Exactly What the Democratic Party Needs
> By John Nichols, Moyers & Company
> 05 May 16
>
> Bernie Sanders will go to Philadelphia with more pledged delegates than any
> insurgent in modern history. Here's what he could do with them.
> Joe Biden understands something about the Democratic Party and its future
> that his fellow partisans would do well to consider. "I don't think any
> Democrat's ever won saying, 'We can't think that big - we ought to really
> downsize here because it's not realistic,'" the vice president told The New
> York Times in April. "C'mon man, this is the Democratic Party! I'm not part
> of the party that says, 'Well, we can't do it.'" Mocking Hillary Clinton's
> criticism of Bernie Sanders for proposing bold reforms, Biden dismissed the
> politics of lowered expectations. "I like the idea of saying, 'We can do
> much more,' because we can," he declared, leading the Times to observe
> that,
> while Biden wasn't making an endorsement, "He'll take Mr. Sanders's
> aspirational approach over Mrs. Clinton's caution any day."
> Unwittingly or not, Biden made an even better case than Sanders has for
> taking his insurgent campaign all the way to the Democratic convention in
> Philadelphia. If the party is going to run in 2016 on a "do much more"
> agenda - as opposed to triangulating around the center - the Vermont
> senator's supporters and like-minded Democrats, including Clinton's
> progressive backers, will have to force the issue. Taking the Sanders
> insurgency to the convention is the paramount vehicle for placing demands
> that are ideological and, as Biden's comments suggest, also strategic.
> That's one reason why Sanders promised in a statement on April 26 to go to
> the convention with "as many delegates as possible to fight for a
> progressive party platform" - despite the fact that Clinton's delegate
> advantage now all but guarantees that she will win the nomination.
> What Sanders is proposing is a necessary quest - and a realistic one.
> Already, he is better positioned than any recent insurgent challenger to
> engage in rules and platform debates, as well as in dialogues about
> everything from the vice-presidential nomination to the character of the
> fall campaign. As veteran political analyst Rhodes Cook noted in a survey
> prepared for The Atlantic, by mid-April, Sanders had exceeded the overall
> vote totals and percentages of Howard Dean in 2004, Jesse Jackson in 1988,
> Gary Hart in 1984 and Ted Kennedy in 1980, among others. (While Barack
> Obama's 2008 challenge to Clinton began as something of an insurgency, he
> eventually ran with the solid support of key party leaders like Kennedy.)
> By
> the time the District of Columbia votes on June 14, Sanders will have more
> pledged delegates than any challenger seeking to influence a national
> convention and its nominee since the party began to democratize its
> nominating process following the disastrous, boss-dominated convention of
> 1968.
> This new reality has Clinton supporters fretting about the prospect of a
> chaotic convention that could expose divisions within the party when it
> should be uniting for what increasing looks like a fall fight against
> Donald
> Trump. But a muscular appearance by Sanders and his delegates at the
> convention doesn't have to lead to bitterness. Historically, contested
> conventions - not carefully choreographed coronations - have led parties
> and
> their nominees to take more audacious positions and to excite broader
> electoral coalitions.
> "Conventions are where we come together, but you don't really come together
> if you avoid differences," says the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who has protested,
> attended or spoken at nearly a dozen Democratic national conventions (and
> who has not endorsed a candidate in the primary race this year). "You start
> by understanding that it takes two wings to fly. If you have two strong
> wings - a wing that has won and a wing that has lost - you don't deny the
> differences; you recognize them. You debate, find common ground, find ways
> to start working together for immediate goals - the next election - and for
> long-term goals that can mean as much to the nation as to the party."
> Recent conventions have been so tightly scripted that it's easy to forget
> that both parties have long histories of contested gatherings - sometimes
> with open combat over the party's standard-bearer (as may erupt at this
> year's Republican convention), but often with spirited competition over
> rules, platforms and the very nature of the party itself. Contested
> conventions can open policy debates and clear the way for "significant
> political and social progress," argues Fitchburg State University professor
> Benjamin Railton, who has analyzed the history of conventions. With 18
> state
> wins so far and more than 1,350 delegates, Sanders is uniquely poised to
> push for such progress. Since Clinton will likely arrive at the convention
> with a majority of the pledged delegates and a lead in the popular vote,
> she'll have every right to argue, as she did in April, that "I am winning.
> And I'm winning because of what I stand for and what I've done."
> Front-runners rarely invite input from insurgent challengers, and if
> Clinton
> chooses to wall Sanders off, she'll have the upper hand in Philadelphia. In
> January, Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz
> appointed a pair of Clinton allies, Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy and
> former Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin, to head the platform committee. And
> an ardent Clinton supporter and noted Sanders antagonist, former
> congressman
> Barney Frank, will cochair the rules committee.
> But Clinton's decision to adopt what was initially Sanders's position on a
> host of issues, from wages to climate change to trade policy, shows that
> her
> campaign recognizes that a substantial portion of the party's base - as
> well
> as its potential base - is attracted to Sanders's more aspirational
> message.
> And the pressure to make that recognition a part of the Democratic platform
> will grow as the committees expand before the convention and Sanders aides
> urge the DNC to deliver on the promise made by spokesman Luis Miranda: that
> the party is "committed to an open, inclusive and representative process"
> for drawing up the platform, and that "both of our campaigns will be
> represented on the drafting committee."
> If Sanders advocates gain sufficient representation to provoke debates,
> what
> are the likely pressure points? Like Jackson and his supporters, who forced
> rules reforms and the diversification of the DNC in 1988, the Sanders camp
> could champion a more open and representative Democratic Party. There could
> be calls for reducing or eliminating the role of superdelegates, for a
> better approach to scheduling debates and for consistent primary rules to
> avoid dramatic variations in turnout based on whether the primary is open
> or
> closed. Even though Sanders ran well in caucuses, his backers could gain
> credibility by also arguing that caucuses are too incoherently organized
> and
> difficult to participate in to be justified. On all of these issues,
> Sanders
> supporters would have to establish alliances with Clinton backers who
> recognize that it is time to "democratize the Democratic Party."
> The prospect of aligning with Clinton supporters, especially progressive
> members of Congress and labor activists who will attend the convention as
> superdelegates, creates even greater openings for platform fights.
> Prospective nominees tend to favor weaker platforms; Harry Truman would
> have
> preferred milder civil-rights commitments than were made in his party's
> 1948
> platform, and it took steady pressure from unions, liberals and Ted Kennedy
> to get Jimmy Carter to finally embrace spending on jobs programs. It will
> take similar pressure to get Clinton and her inner circle to accept a
> Democratic platform that Sanders says must include "a $15-an-hour minimum
> wage, an end to our disastrous trade policies, a Medicare-for-all
> health-care system, breaking up Wall Street financial institutions, ending
> fracking in our country, making public colleges and universities
> tuition-free, and passing a carbon tax so we can effectively address the
> planetary crisis of climate change." Clinton stalwarts may want to keep
> things vague, but look for the Sanders team to demand specifics, such as an
> explicit endorsement of a national $15 minimum wage instead of the $12
> proposal that Clinton initially offered, and an unequivocal rejection of
> the
> Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal that President Obama supports and that
> Clinton once championed but now criticizes.
> As it happens, many of Clinton's most passionate allies have been outspoken
> supporters of the fight for $15, fair-trade policies and proposals to break
> up the big banks. One of them, Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, a potential
> vice-presidential pick, has argued publicly that Clinton "should work with
> [Sanders] on the platform" in order to strengthen the party's appeal. Other
> Clinton backers like Connecticut Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and
> nonaligned House members like Wisconsin's Mark Pocan could play a critical
> role in steering the party toward unequivocal opposition to the TPP. There
> could also be room for cooperation on addressing mass incarceration,
> passing
> constitutional amendments to get big money out of politics and guaranteeing
> voting rights for all.
> Sanders backers want to win these platforms fights - not to make a point
> about their campaign, but to make a deeper point about what the Democratic
> Party must stand for in order to win the 2016 election and the future. "The
> convention can amplify what this campaign made visible - that there are
> millions of Americans who are hurting - and say that the Democratic Party
> has to respond to that pain with bigger and bolder policies," says Working
> Families Party national director Dan Cantor, a veteran of the 1988 Jackson
> campaign who is now a Sanders backer. "Democrats who want to win a big
> majority in November, to take back the Congress and to move forward in the
> states, know that the party has to stand for something that excites young
> people, that excites working people. No matter who the nominee is, the
> party
> has to take a big-vision stand."
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not
> valid.
>
> Senator Bernie Sanders. (photo: Scott Olson/Getty)
> http://billmoyers.com/story/a-contested-convention-is-exactly-what-the-democ
> ratic-party-needs/http://billmoyers.com/story/a-contested-convention-is-exac
> tly-what-the-democratic-party-needs/
> A Contested Convention Is Exactly What the Democratic Party Needs
> By John Nichols, Moyers & Company
> 05 May 16
> Bernie Sanders will go to Philadelphia with more pledged delegates than any
> insurgent in modern history. Here's what he could do with them.
> oe Biden understands something about the Democratic Party and its future
> that his fellow partisans would do well to consider. "I don't think any
> Democrat's ever won saying, 'We can't think that big - we ought to really
> downsize here because it's not realistic,'" the vice president told The New
> York Times in April. "C'mon man, this is the Democratic Party! I'm not part
> of the party that says, 'Well, we can't do it.'" Mocking Hillary Clinton's
> criticism of Bernie Sanders for proposing bold reforms, Biden dismissed the
> politics of lowered expectations. "I like the idea of saying, 'We can do
> much more,' because we can," he declared, leading the Times to observe
> that,
> while Biden wasn't making an endorsement, "He'll take Mr. Sanders's
> aspirational approach over Mrs. Clinton's caution any day."
> Unwittingly or not, Biden made an even better case than Sanders has for
> taking his insurgent campaign all the way to the Democratic convention in
> Philadelphia. If the party is going to run in 2016 on a "do much more"
> agenda - as opposed to triangulating around the center - the Vermont
> senator's supporters and like-minded Democrats, including Clinton's
> progressive backers, will have to force the issue. Taking the Sanders
> insurgency to the convention is the paramount vehicle for placing demands
> that are ideological and, as Biden's comments suggest, also strategic.
> That's one reason why Sanders promised in a statement on April 26 to go to
> the convention with "as many delegates as possible to fight for a
> progressive party platform" - despite the fact that Clinton's delegate
> advantage now all but guarantees that she will win the nomination.
> What Sanders is proposing is a necessary quest - and a realistic one.
> Already, he is better positioned than any recent insurgent challenger to
> engage in rules and platform debates, as well as in dialogues about
> everything from the vice-presidential nomination to the character of the
> fall campaign. As veteran political analyst Rhodes Cook noted in a survey
> prepared for The Atlantic, by mid-April, Sanders had exceeded the overall
> vote totals and percentages of Howard Dean in 2004, Jesse Jackson in 1988,
> Gary Hart in 1984 and Ted Kennedy in 1980, among others. (While Barack
> Obama's 2008 challenge to Clinton began as something of an insurgency, he
> eventually ran with the solid support of key party leaders like Kennedy.)
> By
> the time the District of Columbia votes on June 14, Sanders will have more
> pledged delegates than any challenger seeking to influence a national
> convention and its nominee since the party began to democratize its
> nominating process following the disastrous, boss-dominated convention of
> 1968.
> This new reality has Clinton supporters fretting about the prospect of a
> chaotic convention that could expose divisions within the party when it
> should be uniting for what increasing looks like a fall fight against
> Donald
> Trump. But a muscular appearance by Sanders and his delegates at the
> convention doesn't have to lead to bitterness. Historically, contested
> conventions - not carefully choreographed coronations - have led parties
> and
> their nominees to take more audacious positions and to excite broader
> electoral coalitions.
> "Conventions are where we come together, but you don't really come together
> if you avoid differences," says the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who has protested,
> attended or spoken at nearly a dozen Democratic national conventions (and
> who has not endorsed a candidate in the primary race this year). "You start
> by understanding that it takes two wings to fly. If you have two strong
> wings - a wing that has won and a wing that has lost - you don't deny the
> differences; you recognize them. You debate, find common ground, find ways
> to start working together for immediate goals - the next election - and for
> long-term goals that can mean as much to the nation as to the party."
> Recent conventions have been so tightly scripted that it's easy to forget
> that both parties have long histories of contested gatherings - sometimes
> with open combat over the party's standard-bearer (as may erupt at this
> year's Republican convention), but often with spirited competition over
> rules, platforms and the very nature of the party itself. Contested
> conventions can open policy debates and clear the way for "significant
> political and social progress," argues Fitchburg State University professor
> Benjamin Railton, who has analyzed the history of conventions. With 18
> state
> wins so far and more than 1,350 delegates, Sanders is uniquely poised to
> push for such progress. Since Clinton will likely arrive at the convention
> with a majority of the pledged delegates and a lead in the popular vote,
> she'll have every right to argue, as she did in April, that "I am winning.
> And I'm winning because of what I stand for and what I've done."
> Front-runners rarely invite input from insurgent challengers, and if
> Clinton
> chooses to wall Sanders off, she'll have the upper hand in Philadelphia. In
> January, Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz
> appointed a pair of Clinton allies, Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy and
> former Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin, to head the platform committee. And
> an ardent Clinton supporter and noted Sanders antagonist, former
> congressman
> Barney Frank, will cochair the rules committee.
> But Clinton's decision to adopt what was initially Sanders's position on a
> host of issues, from wages to climate change to trade policy, shows that
> her
> campaign recognizes that a substantial portion of the party's base - as
> well
> as its potential base - is attracted to Sanders's more aspirational
> message.
> And the pressure to make that recognition a part of the Democratic platform
> will grow as the committees expand before the convention and Sanders aides
> urge the DNC to deliver on the promise made by spokesman Luis Miranda: that
> the party is "committed to an open, inclusive and representative process"
> for drawing up the platform, and that "both of our campaigns will be
> represented on the drafting committee."
> If Sanders advocates gain sufficient representation to provoke debates,
> what
> are the likely pressure points? Like Jackson and his supporters, who forced
> rules reforms and the diversification of the DNC in 1988, the Sanders camp
> could champion a more open and representative Democratic Party. There could
> be calls for reducing or eliminating the role of superdelegates, for a
> better approach to scheduling debates and for consistent primary rules to
> avoid dramatic variations in turnout based on whether the primary is open
> or
> closed. Even though Sanders ran well in caucuses, his backers could gain
> credibility by also arguing that caucuses are too incoherently organized
> and
> difficult to participate in to be justified. On all of these issues,
> Sanders
> supporters would have to establish alliances with Clinton backers who
> recognize that it is time to "democratize the Democratic Party."
> The prospect of aligning with Clinton supporters, especially progressive
> members of Congress and labor activists who will attend the convention as
> superdelegates, creates even greater openings for platform fights.
> Prospective nominees tend to favor weaker platforms; Harry Truman would
> have
> preferred milder civil-rights commitments than were made in his party's
> 1948
> platform, and it took steady pressure from unions, liberals and Ted Kennedy
> to get Jimmy Carter to finally embrace spending on jobs programs. It will
> take similar pressure to get Clinton and her inner circle to accept a
> Democratic platform that Sanders says must include "a $15-an-hour minimum
> wage, an end to our disastrous trade policies, a Medicare-for-all
> health-care system, breaking up Wall Street financial institutions, ending
> fracking in our country, making public colleges and universities
> tuition-free, and passing a carbon tax so we can effectively address the
> planetary crisis of climate change." Clinton stalwarts may want to keep
> things vague, but look for the Sanders team to demand specifics, such as an
> explicit endorsement of a national $15 minimum wage instead of the $12
> proposal that Clinton initially offered, and an unequivocal rejection of
> the
> Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal that President Obama supports and that
> Clinton once championed but now criticizes.
> As it happens, many of Clinton's most passionate allies have been outspoken
> supporters of the fight for $15, fair-trade policies and proposals to break
> up the big banks. One of them, Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, a potential
> vice-presidential pick, has argued publicly that Clinton "should work with
> [Sanders] on the platform" in order to strengthen the party's appeal. Other
> Clinton backers like Connecticut Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and
> nonaligned House members like Wisconsin's Mark Pocan could play a critical
> role in steering the party toward unequivocal opposition to the TPP. There
> could also be room for cooperation on addressing mass incarceration,
> passing
> constitutional amendments to get big money out of politics and guaranteeing
> voting rights for all.
> Sanders backers want to win these platforms fights - not to make a point
> about their campaign, but to make a deeper point about what the Democratic
> Party must stand for in order to win the 2016 election and the future. "The
> convention can amplify what this campaign made visible - that there are
> millions of Americans who are hurting - and say that the Democratic Party
> has to respond to that pain with bigger and bolder policies," says Working
> Families Party national director Dan Cantor, a veteran of the 1988 Jackson
> campaign who is now a Sanders backer. "Democrats who want to win a big
> majority in November, to take back the Congress and to move forward in the
> states, know that the party has to stand for something that excites young
> people, that excites working people. No matter who the nominee is, the
> party
> has to take a big-vision stand."
> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
>
>
>
Friday, May 6, 2016
Fwd: [blind-democracy] In Cowboy Capitalism, High Technology Worsens Economic Inequities
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Carl Jarvis <carjar82@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 6 May 2016 07:45:29 -0700
Subject: Re: [blind-democracy] In Cowboy Capitalism, High Technology
Worsens Economic Inequities
To: blind-democracy@freelists.org
"In Cowboy Capitalism, High Technology Worsens Economic Inequities."
As it is currently being exploited, high technology certainly is
widening the economic gap between the 1% and the 99%. But it is not
the high technology that is at the root of the problem. It is
Capitalism. Especially our mutant international corporate capitalism.
Like a raging cancer, capitalism must devour all that is around it, in
order to expand and survive. And, like a raging cancer, Capitalism
has no ability to know when all its sustenance is gone. We have no
ability to signal a cancer that it must stop growing. Our only hope
of stopping its determination to conquer our body is to either kill it
or cut it out.
We cannot "reform" cancer. Nor can we "reform" Capitalism.
The bottom goal of Capitalism is to gather in all existing resources.
It is a single minded goal, no matter how it is dressed up and sold to
us, the 99%. Like a growing cancer, Capitalism has no thought of what
comes after all around it has been consumed and destroyed. Until that
point Capitalism will believe its conquest will go on forever. By the
time it realizes that there are limits, it will be too late. OF
course there are great differences between cancer and capitalism. For
example, a tumor does not attempt to deceive us as to its purpose.
It grows, crowding out our life in the process. Capitalism however,
has the ability to confuse us and sweet talk us into believing that we
are benefiting, becoming healthier and prospering from its relentless
growth.
Ending Capitalism is essential for our survival as a species. To do
this we need a combination of medicines; information; education; inter
cooperation; solidarity.
It will take strong determination and a brand new understanding of
what makes a healthy society in order for Capitalism to be relegated
to the backroom of Human History.
Once we have learned what we need to do to live full, comfortable,
productive, meaningful lives, we will then be able to use technology
as a positive force, rather than a threat to our existence.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/5/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> In Cowboy Capitalism, High Technology Worsens Economic Inequities
> Thursday, 05 May 2016 00:00 By Robert McChesney and John Nichols, Nation
> Books | Book Excerpt
> (Photo: Ars Electronica / RYBN)
> What will happen when technology replaces people in the service,
> manufacturing and professional industries of an already struggling economy?
> In their new book, Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols explore the
> possibility of reclaiming the future for the people, before it's too late.
> Noam Chomsky calls People Get Ready "lucid and informed" while Thom
> Hartmann
> says it's an "essential book." Get your copy by making a donation to
> Truthout today!
> The following is an excerpt from People Get Ready: The Fight Against a
> Jobless Economy and a Citizens Democracy:
> The growth in the economy's capacity to produce since the 1930s, or even
> the
> 1960s, has been extraordinary, much as these economists anticipated. If the
> experts we used as counsel for this chapter are anywhere near accurate, the
> next four or five decades could make the twentieth century look like the
> twelfth century.
> In popular economic theory, such revolutionary increases in productive
> capacity are supposed to translate into higher living standards, much
> shorter workweeks, richer public infrastructure, and a greater overall
> social security. Society should have the resources to tackle vexing
> environmental problems with the least amount of pain possible. In fact,
> however, nothing on the horizon suggests that this is in the offing. As
> automation and computerization take productive capacity to undreamed-of
> heights, jobs grow more scarce and are de-skilled, many people are poorer,
> and all the talk is of austerity and seemingly endless cutbacks in social
> services. There is growing wealth for the few combined with greater
> insecurity for the many. Washington, we've got a problem.
> (Image: Nation Books)The false assumptions, of course, are that the
> benefits of the technology accrue to more than the owners of the firms
> deploying the technologies. And also that capitalists have incentive to
> produce far more than they do to satisfy the needs of people worldwide. In
> fact, Veblen had it right: capitalists produce as much as they do only as
> long as it remains profitable to do so. Producing more than that lowers
> prices and lessens profits. In short, to follow Keynes's logic to a place
> he
> did not go, capitalism would seem to have little or no reason to exist if
> the "economic problem" is solved, so it is imperative that the economic
> problem remain. For business and wealthy investors to continue to win,
> everyone else has to lose.
> In our view, the evidence points in one direction: the economy needs to be
> fundamentally reformed, if not replaced. Capitalism as we know it is the
> wrong economic system for the material world that is emerging. This is a
> radical conclusion, but it is not made merely by radicals. The number of
> true believers who think leaving firms and wealthy investors alone to do as
> they wish will ultimately solve the employment problem and give us a great
> economy that can be the foundation for a vibrant democracy is shrinking,
> primarily because it is a faith-based position. There are also some who
> have
> a similar faith that technology is innately progressive and all-powerful,
> so
> it can and will solve capitalism's problems for us. They tell us that all
> we
> have to do is get out of the way, make some fresh popcorn, and grab a
> front-row seat as the future unfolds.
> But researching this book, what has been striking to us is that many,
> perhaps most, of the people who have studied these matters -- from across
> the political spectrum -- recognize that if the system is left alone, it
> will not right itself. Instead, structural changes are needed, and
> government will have to play the central role in determining and
> instituting
> these changes. Even those who believe that the existing capitalist system
> provides benefits that make it worth saving realize that significant
> reforms
> and government policy interventions are necessary to prevent intolerable
> outcomes. "It's time to start discussing what kind of society we should
> construct around a labor-light economy," Brynjolfsson and McAfee conclude.
> "How should the abundance of such an economy be shared? How can the
> tendency
> of modern capitalism to produce high levels of inequality be muted while
> preserving its ability to allocate resources efficiently and reward
> initiative and effort? What do fulfilling lives look like when they no
> longer center on industrial-era conceptions of work? How should education,
> the social safety net, taxation, and other important elements of civic
> society be rethought?"
> Where markets and business and private investment figure into the new
> economy is a matter to be studied, debated, and resolved; we only know that
> it cannot be the same as what we have had for generations. The solutions to
> the employment and economic crises in the United States are political. The
> great debate is over what types of reforms there should be, and what type
> of
> system we should end up with. A core responsibility of the democratic state
> is to provide the ground rules and basis for an economy that will best
> serve
> the democratically determined needs of the people. An unavoidable part of
> this debate is to take up the issues last taken seriously in the 1960s: How
> should technology best be deployed to serve human needs? Never has the need
> for such a democratic debate and policymaking been greater than it is
> today.
> Copyright (2016) by Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols. Not to be
> reprinted without permission of the publisher, Nation Books.
> JOHN NICHOLS
> John Nichols, a pioneering political blogger, has written The Nation's
> Online Beat since 1999, is their Washington DC correspondent, and
> contributing writer for The Progressive and In These Times. He is also the
> associate editor of the Capital Times, the daily newspaper in Madison,
> Wisconsin. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Chicago
> Tribune
> and dozens of other newspapers, and he is a frequent guest on radio and
> television programs as a commentator on politics and media issues. Nichols
> lives in Madison, Wisconsin and Washington, DC.
> ROBERT MCCHESNEY
> Robert W. McChesney is the Gutgsell Endowed Professor in the Department of
> Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the
> author or editor of 23 books. His work has been translated into 30
> languages. He is the cofounder of Free Press, a national media reform
> organization. In 2008, the Utne Reader listed McChesney among their "50
> visionaries who are changing the world."
> RELATED STORIES
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> Much in Age of Plutocratic Rule
> By Mark Karlin, Truthout | Interview
> Robert McChesney: We Need to Advocate Radical Solutions to Systemic
> Problems
> By Mark Karlin, Truthout | Interview
> John Nichols on Bernie Sanders' Surge and the Rising Power of Movements
> By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! | Video Interview
> ________________________________________
> Show Comments
> Hide Comments
> <a href="http://truthout.disqus.com/?url=ref">View the discussion
> thread.</a>
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
> In Cowboy Capitalism, High Technology Worsens Economic Inequities
> Thursday, 05 May 2016 00:00 By Robert McChesney and John Nichols, Nation
> Books | Book Excerpt
> . font size Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink
> reference not valid.Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink
> reference not valid.
> . (Photo: Ars Electronica / RYBN)
> . What will happen when technology replaces people in the service,
> manufacturing and professional industries of an already struggling economy?
> In their new book, Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols explore the
> possibility of reclaiming the future for the people, before it's too late.
> Noam Chomsky calls People Get Ready "lucid and informed" while Thom
> Hartmann
> says it's an "essential book." Get your copy by making a donation to
> Truthout today!
> The following is an excerpt from People Get Ready: The Fight Against a
> Jobless Economy and a Citizens Democracy:
> The growth in the economy's capacity to produce since the 1930s, or even
> the
> 1960s, has been extraordinary, much as these economists anticipated. If the
> experts we used as counsel for this chapter are anywhere near accurate, the
> next four or five decades could make the twentieth century look like the
> twelfth century.
> In popular economic theory, such revolutionary increases in productive
> capacity are supposed to translate into higher living standards, much
> shorter workweeks, richer public infrastructure, and a greater overall
> social security. Society should have the resources to tackle vexing
> environmental problems with the least amount of pain possible. In fact,
> however, nothing on the horizon suggests that this is in the offing. As
> automation and computerization take productive capacity to undreamed-of
> heights, jobs grow more scarce and are de-skilled, many people are poorer,
> and all the talk is of austerity and seemingly endless cutbacks in social
> services. There is growing wealth for the few combined with greater
> insecurity for the many. Washington, we've got a problem.
> (Image: Nation Books)The false assumptions, of course, are that the
> benefits of the technology accrue to more than the owners of the firms
> deploying the technologies. And also that capitalists have incentive to
> produce far more than they do to satisfy the needs of people worldwide. In
> fact, Veblen had it right: capitalists produce as much as they do only as
> long as it remains profitable to do so. Producing more than that lowers
> prices and lessens profits. In short, to follow Keynes's logic to a place
> he
> did not go, capitalism would seem to have little or no reason to exist if
> the "economic problem" is solved, so it is imperative that the economic
> problem remain. For business and wealthy investors to continue to win,
> everyone else has to lose.
> In our view, the evidence points in one direction: the economy needs to be
> fundamentally reformed, if not replaced. Capitalism as we know it is the
> wrong economic system for the material world that is emerging. This is a
> radical conclusion, but it is not made merely by radicals. The number of
> true believers who think leaving firms and wealthy investors alone to do as
> they wish will ultimately solve the employment problem and give us a great
> economy that can be the foundation for a vibrant democracy is shrinking,
> primarily because it is a faith-based position. There are also some who
> have
> a similar faith that technology is innately progressive and all-powerful,
> so
> it can and will solve capitalism's problems for us. They tell us that all
> we
> have to do is get out of the way, make some fresh popcorn, and grab a
> front-row seat as the future unfolds.
> But researching this book, what has been striking to us is that many,
> perhaps most, of the people who have studied these matters -- from across
> the political spectrum -- recognize that if the system is left alone, it
> will not right itself. Instead, structural changes are needed, and
> government will have to play the central role in determining and
> instituting
> these changes. Even those who believe that the existing capitalist system
> provides benefits that make it worth saving realize that significant
> reforms
> and government policy interventions are necessary to prevent intolerable
> outcomes. "It's time to start discussing what kind of society we should
> construct around a labor-light economy," Brynjolfsson and McAfee conclude.
> "How should the abundance of such an economy be shared? How can the
> tendency
> of modern capitalism to produce high levels of inequality be muted while
> preserving its ability to allocate resources efficiently and reward
> initiative and effort? What do fulfilling lives look like when they no
> longer center on industrial-era conceptions of work? How should education,
> the social safety net, taxation, and other important elements of civic
> society be rethought?"
> Where markets and business and private investment figure into the new
> economy is a matter to be studied, debated, and resolved; we only know that
> it cannot be the same as what we have had for generations. The solutions to
> the employment and economic crises in the United States are political. The
> great debate is over what types of reforms there should be, and what type
> of
> system we should end up with. A core responsibility of the democratic state
> is to provide the ground rules and basis for an economy that will best
> serve
> the democratically determined needs of the people. An unavoidable part of
> this debate is to take up the issues last taken seriously in the 1960s: How
> should technology best be deployed to serve human needs? Never has the need
> for such a democratic debate and policymaking been greater than it is
> today.
> Copyright (2016) by Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols. Not to be
> reprinted without permission of the publisher, Nation Books.
> John Nichols
> John Nichols, a pioneering political blogger, has written The Nation's
> Online Beat since 1999, is their Washington DC correspondent, and
> contributing writer for The Progressive and In These Times. He is also the
> associate editor of the Capital Times, the daily newspaper in Madison,
> Wisconsin. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Chicago
> Tribune
> and dozens of other newspapers, and he is a frequent guest on radio and
> television programs as a commentator on politics and media issues. Nichols
> lives in Madison, Wisconsin and Washington, DC.
> Robert McChesney
> Robert W. McChesney is the Gutgsell Endowed Professor in the Department of
> Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the
> author or editor of 23 books. His work has been translated into 30
> languages. He is the cofounder of Free Press, a national media reform
> organization. In 2008, the Utne Reader listed McChesney among their "50
> visionaries who are changing the world."
> Related Stories
> John Nichols and Robert McChesney: Progressives Ask for Too Little, Not Too
> Much in Age of Plutocratic Rule
> By Mark Karlin, Truthout | InterviewRobert McChesney: We Need to Advocate
> Radical Solutions to Systemic Problems
> By Mark Karlin, Truthout | InterviewJohn Nichols on Bernie Sanders' Surge
> and the Rising Power of Movements
> By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! | Video Interview
>
> Show Comments
>
>
>
From: Carl Jarvis <carjar82@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 6 May 2016 07:45:29 -0700
Subject: Re: [blind-democracy] In Cowboy Capitalism, High Technology
Worsens Economic Inequities
To: blind-democracy@freelists.org
"In Cowboy Capitalism, High Technology Worsens Economic Inequities."
As it is currently being exploited, high technology certainly is
widening the economic gap between the 1% and the 99%. But it is not
the high technology that is at the root of the problem. It is
Capitalism. Especially our mutant international corporate capitalism.
Like a raging cancer, capitalism must devour all that is around it, in
order to expand and survive. And, like a raging cancer, Capitalism
has no ability to know when all its sustenance is gone. We have no
ability to signal a cancer that it must stop growing. Our only hope
of stopping its determination to conquer our body is to either kill it
or cut it out.
We cannot "reform" cancer. Nor can we "reform" Capitalism.
The bottom goal of Capitalism is to gather in all existing resources.
It is a single minded goal, no matter how it is dressed up and sold to
us, the 99%. Like a growing cancer, Capitalism has no thought of what
comes after all around it has been consumed and destroyed. Until that
point Capitalism will believe its conquest will go on forever. By the
time it realizes that there are limits, it will be too late. OF
course there are great differences between cancer and capitalism. For
example, a tumor does not attempt to deceive us as to its purpose.
It grows, crowding out our life in the process. Capitalism however,
has the ability to confuse us and sweet talk us into believing that we
are benefiting, becoming healthier and prospering from its relentless
growth.
Ending Capitalism is essential for our survival as a species. To do
this we need a combination of medicines; information; education; inter
cooperation; solidarity.
It will take strong determination and a brand new understanding of
what makes a healthy society in order for Capitalism to be relegated
to the backroom of Human History.
Once we have learned what we need to do to live full, comfortable,
productive, meaningful lives, we will then be able to use technology
as a positive force, rather than a threat to our existence.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/5/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> In Cowboy Capitalism, High Technology Worsens Economic Inequities
> Thursday, 05 May 2016 00:00 By Robert McChesney and John Nichols, Nation
> Books | Book Excerpt
> (Photo: Ars Electronica / RYBN)
> What will happen when technology replaces people in the service,
> manufacturing and professional industries of an already struggling economy?
> In their new book, Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols explore the
> possibility of reclaiming the future for the people, before it's too late.
> Noam Chomsky calls People Get Ready "lucid and informed" while Thom
> Hartmann
> says it's an "essential book." Get your copy by making a donation to
> Truthout today!
> The following is an excerpt from People Get Ready: The Fight Against a
> Jobless Economy and a Citizens Democracy:
> The growth in the economy's capacity to produce since the 1930s, or even
> the
> 1960s, has been extraordinary, much as these economists anticipated. If the
> experts we used as counsel for this chapter are anywhere near accurate, the
> next four or five decades could make the twentieth century look like the
> twelfth century.
> In popular economic theory, such revolutionary increases in productive
> capacity are supposed to translate into higher living standards, much
> shorter workweeks, richer public infrastructure, and a greater overall
> social security. Society should have the resources to tackle vexing
> environmental problems with the least amount of pain possible. In fact,
> however, nothing on the horizon suggests that this is in the offing. As
> automation and computerization take productive capacity to undreamed-of
> heights, jobs grow more scarce and are de-skilled, many people are poorer,
> and all the talk is of austerity and seemingly endless cutbacks in social
> services. There is growing wealth for the few combined with greater
> insecurity for the many. Washington, we've got a problem.
> (Image: Nation Books)The false assumptions, of course, are that the
> benefits of the technology accrue to more than the owners of the firms
> deploying the technologies. And also that capitalists have incentive to
> produce far more than they do to satisfy the needs of people worldwide. In
> fact, Veblen had it right: capitalists produce as much as they do only as
> long as it remains profitable to do so. Producing more than that lowers
> prices and lessens profits. In short, to follow Keynes's logic to a place
> he
> did not go, capitalism would seem to have little or no reason to exist if
> the "economic problem" is solved, so it is imperative that the economic
> problem remain. For business and wealthy investors to continue to win,
> everyone else has to lose.
> In our view, the evidence points in one direction: the economy needs to be
> fundamentally reformed, if not replaced. Capitalism as we know it is the
> wrong economic system for the material world that is emerging. This is a
> radical conclusion, but it is not made merely by radicals. The number of
> true believers who think leaving firms and wealthy investors alone to do as
> they wish will ultimately solve the employment problem and give us a great
> economy that can be the foundation for a vibrant democracy is shrinking,
> primarily because it is a faith-based position. There are also some who
> have
> a similar faith that technology is innately progressive and all-powerful,
> so
> it can and will solve capitalism's problems for us. They tell us that all
> we
> have to do is get out of the way, make some fresh popcorn, and grab a
> front-row seat as the future unfolds.
> But researching this book, what has been striking to us is that many,
> perhaps most, of the people who have studied these matters -- from across
> the political spectrum -- recognize that if the system is left alone, it
> will not right itself. Instead, structural changes are needed, and
> government will have to play the central role in determining and
> instituting
> these changes. Even those who believe that the existing capitalist system
> provides benefits that make it worth saving realize that significant
> reforms
> and government policy interventions are necessary to prevent intolerable
> outcomes. "It's time to start discussing what kind of society we should
> construct around a labor-light economy," Brynjolfsson and McAfee conclude.
> "How should the abundance of such an economy be shared? How can the
> tendency
> of modern capitalism to produce high levels of inequality be muted while
> preserving its ability to allocate resources efficiently and reward
> initiative and effort? What do fulfilling lives look like when they no
> longer center on industrial-era conceptions of work? How should education,
> the social safety net, taxation, and other important elements of civic
> society be rethought?"
> Where markets and business and private investment figure into the new
> economy is a matter to be studied, debated, and resolved; we only know that
> it cannot be the same as what we have had for generations. The solutions to
> the employment and economic crises in the United States are political. The
> great debate is over what types of reforms there should be, and what type
> of
> system we should end up with. A core responsibility of the democratic state
> is to provide the ground rules and basis for an economy that will best
> serve
> the democratically determined needs of the people. An unavoidable part of
> this debate is to take up the issues last taken seriously in the 1960s: How
> should technology best be deployed to serve human needs? Never has the need
> for such a democratic debate and policymaking been greater than it is
> today.
> Copyright (2016) by Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols. Not to be
> reprinted without permission of the publisher, Nation Books.
> JOHN NICHOLS
> John Nichols, a pioneering political blogger, has written The Nation's
> Online Beat since 1999, is their Washington DC correspondent, and
> contributing writer for The Progressive and In These Times. He is also the
> associate editor of the Capital Times, the daily newspaper in Madison,
> Wisconsin. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Chicago
> Tribune
> and dozens of other newspapers, and he is a frequent guest on radio and
> television programs as a commentator on politics and media issues. Nichols
> lives in Madison, Wisconsin and Washington, DC.
> ROBERT MCCHESNEY
> Robert W. McChesney is the Gutgsell Endowed Professor in the Department of
> Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the
> author or editor of 23 books. His work has been translated into 30
> languages. He is the cofounder of Free Press, a national media reform
> organization. In 2008, the Utne Reader listed McChesney among their "50
> visionaries who are changing the world."
> RELATED STORIES
> John Nichols and Robert McChesney: Progressives Ask for Too Little, Not Too
> Much in Age of Plutocratic Rule
> By Mark Karlin, Truthout | Interview
> Robert McChesney: We Need to Advocate Radical Solutions to Systemic
> Problems
> By Mark Karlin, Truthout | Interview
> John Nichols on Bernie Sanders' Surge and the Rising Power of Movements
> By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! | Video Interview
> ________________________________________
> Show Comments
> Hide Comments
> <a href="http://truthout.disqus.com/?url=ref">View the discussion
> thread.</a>
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
> In Cowboy Capitalism, High Technology Worsens Economic Inequities
> Thursday, 05 May 2016 00:00 By Robert McChesney and John Nichols, Nation
> Books | Book Excerpt
> . font size Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink
> reference not valid.Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink
> reference not valid.
> . (Photo: Ars Electronica / RYBN)
> . What will happen when technology replaces people in the service,
> manufacturing and professional industries of an already struggling economy?
> In their new book, Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols explore the
> possibility of reclaiming the future for the people, before it's too late.
> Noam Chomsky calls People Get Ready "lucid and informed" while Thom
> Hartmann
> says it's an "essential book." Get your copy by making a donation to
> Truthout today!
> The following is an excerpt from People Get Ready: The Fight Against a
> Jobless Economy and a Citizens Democracy:
> The growth in the economy's capacity to produce since the 1930s, or even
> the
> 1960s, has been extraordinary, much as these economists anticipated. If the
> experts we used as counsel for this chapter are anywhere near accurate, the
> next four or five decades could make the twentieth century look like the
> twelfth century.
> In popular economic theory, such revolutionary increases in productive
> capacity are supposed to translate into higher living standards, much
> shorter workweeks, richer public infrastructure, and a greater overall
> social security. Society should have the resources to tackle vexing
> environmental problems with the least amount of pain possible. In fact,
> however, nothing on the horizon suggests that this is in the offing. As
> automation and computerization take productive capacity to undreamed-of
> heights, jobs grow more scarce and are de-skilled, many people are poorer,
> and all the talk is of austerity and seemingly endless cutbacks in social
> services. There is growing wealth for the few combined with greater
> insecurity for the many. Washington, we've got a problem.
> (Image: Nation Books)The false assumptions, of course, are that the
> benefits of the technology accrue to more than the owners of the firms
> deploying the technologies. And also that capitalists have incentive to
> produce far more than they do to satisfy the needs of people worldwide. In
> fact, Veblen had it right: capitalists produce as much as they do only as
> long as it remains profitable to do so. Producing more than that lowers
> prices and lessens profits. In short, to follow Keynes's logic to a place
> he
> did not go, capitalism would seem to have little or no reason to exist if
> the "economic problem" is solved, so it is imperative that the economic
> problem remain. For business and wealthy investors to continue to win,
> everyone else has to lose.
> In our view, the evidence points in one direction: the economy needs to be
> fundamentally reformed, if not replaced. Capitalism as we know it is the
> wrong economic system for the material world that is emerging. This is a
> radical conclusion, but it is not made merely by radicals. The number of
> true believers who think leaving firms and wealthy investors alone to do as
> they wish will ultimately solve the employment problem and give us a great
> economy that can be the foundation for a vibrant democracy is shrinking,
> primarily because it is a faith-based position. There are also some who
> have
> a similar faith that technology is innately progressive and all-powerful,
> so
> it can and will solve capitalism's problems for us. They tell us that all
> we
> have to do is get out of the way, make some fresh popcorn, and grab a
> front-row seat as the future unfolds.
> But researching this book, what has been striking to us is that many,
> perhaps most, of the people who have studied these matters -- from across
> the political spectrum -- recognize that if the system is left alone, it
> will not right itself. Instead, structural changes are needed, and
> government will have to play the central role in determining and
> instituting
> these changes. Even those who believe that the existing capitalist system
> provides benefits that make it worth saving realize that significant
> reforms
> and government policy interventions are necessary to prevent intolerable
> outcomes. "It's time to start discussing what kind of society we should
> construct around a labor-light economy," Brynjolfsson and McAfee conclude.
> "How should the abundance of such an economy be shared? How can the
> tendency
> of modern capitalism to produce high levels of inequality be muted while
> preserving its ability to allocate resources efficiently and reward
> initiative and effort? What do fulfilling lives look like when they no
> longer center on industrial-era conceptions of work? How should education,
> the social safety net, taxation, and other important elements of civic
> society be rethought?"
> Where markets and business and private investment figure into the new
> economy is a matter to be studied, debated, and resolved; we only know that
> it cannot be the same as what we have had for generations. The solutions to
> the employment and economic crises in the United States are political. The
> great debate is over what types of reforms there should be, and what type
> of
> system we should end up with. A core responsibility of the democratic state
> is to provide the ground rules and basis for an economy that will best
> serve
> the democratically determined needs of the people. An unavoidable part of
> this debate is to take up the issues last taken seriously in the 1960s: How
> should technology best be deployed to serve human needs? Never has the need
> for such a democratic debate and policymaking been greater than it is
> today.
> Copyright (2016) by Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols. Not to be
> reprinted without permission of the publisher, Nation Books.
> John Nichols
> John Nichols, a pioneering political blogger, has written The Nation's
> Online Beat since 1999, is their Washington DC correspondent, and
> contributing writer for The Progressive and In These Times. He is also the
> associate editor of the Capital Times, the daily newspaper in Madison,
> Wisconsin. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Chicago
> Tribune
> and dozens of other newspapers, and he is a frequent guest on radio and
> television programs as a commentator on politics and media issues. Nichols
> lives in Madison, Wisconsin and Washington, DC.
> Robert McChesney
> Robert W. McChesney is the Gutgsell Endowed Professor in the Department of
> Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the
> author or editor of 23 books. His work has been translated into 30
> languages. He is the cofounder of Free Press, a national media reform
> organization. In 2008, the Utne Reader listed McChesney among their "50
> visionaries who are changing the world."
> Related Stories
> John Nichols and Robert McChesney: Progressives Ask for Too Little, Not Too
> Much in Age of Plutocratic Rule
> By Mark Karlin, Truthout | InterviewRobert McChesney: We Need to Advocate
> Radical Solutions to Systemic Problems
> By Mark Karlin, Truthout | InterviewJohn Nichols on Bernie Sanders' Surge
> and the Rising Power of Movements
> By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! | Video Interview
>
> Show Comments
>
>
>
Thursday, May 5, 2016
Re: [blind-democracy] Tomgram: Nick Turse, It Can't Happen Here, Can It?
"It Can't Happen Here, Can It?"
That subject line started me to remembering how totally indoctrinated
I had been as a child. America, insulated from most of the rest of
the world by broad oceans, and dominating those neighbors unfortunate
enough to be within our hemisphere.
"It could never happen here!" they cried. "Our democracy is too
strong, thanks to the great foresight of our Founding Fathers, that we
can never fall to some tyrant, as has so often happened around the
world." And I bought this, hook line and sinker, despite the fact
that we had almost split into two nations back in the 1860's.
Still, FDR had wooed the South, and the Dixicrats found a place within
the protection of the Federal government where they could lick their
wounds, and plot to keep Racism alive. The Great Depression and then,
the "Good War" fought, "Over There", kept us bonded, through the
Korean Conflict(War) and only began to unravel during the late 50's
and 60's as the Civil Rights Movement gathered momentum and our
intervention in Vietnam and Cambodia took our attention away from the
simmering unrest within our own borders.
But tensions grew and anger that had been kept somewhat under control,
was fanned by Right Wing Opportunists, led by that Republican Hero,
Ronald Reagan, as he gathered the former Dixicrats to his bosom and
told them bedtime stories about Government being the enemy, and shouts
of, "The South Shall Rise Again!" was merely a tribute to the long
Southern Tradition.
But now we have no longer any control over the boiling cauldron, with
the likes of Donald Trump fanning the flames of hatred, one group over
the next...over the next...
And the Shock Jocks from the Far, Crazed Right have inundated the
airwaves, boldly spewing suspicion and fear and hatred.
Can it happen here? The question should be, Can we keep it from
happening here?
Carl Jarvis
On 5/4/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>
> Tomgram: Nick Turse, It Can't Happen Here, Can It?
> By Nick Turse
> Posted on May 3, 2016, Printed on May 4, 2016
> http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176135/
> Every now and then, I teach a class to young would-be journalists and one
> of
> the first things I talk about is why I consider writing an act of
> generosity. As they are usually just beginning to stretch their writerly
> wings, their task, as I see it, is to enter the world we're already in
> (it's
> generally the only place they can afford to go) and somehow decode it for
> us, make us see it in a new way. And who can deny that doing so is indeed
> an
> act of generosity? But for the foreign correspondent, especially in war
> zones, the generosity lies in the very act of entering a world filled with
> dangers, a world that the rest of us might not be capable of entering, or
> for that matter brave enough to enter, and somehow bringing us along with
> them.
> I thought about this recently when I had in my hands the first copy of Nick
> Turse's new Dispatch Book, Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead: War
> and
> Survival in South Sudan, and flipped it open to its memorable initial
> paragraph, one I already new well, and began to read it all over again:
> "Their voices, sharp and angry, shook me from my slumber. I didn't know the
> language but I instantly knew the translation. So I groped for the opening
> in the mosquito net, shuffled from my downy white bed to the window, threw
> back the stained tan curtain, and squinted into the light of a new day
> breaking in South Sudan. Below, in front of my guest house, one man was
> getting his ass kicked by another. A flurry of blows connected with his
> face
> and suddenly he was on the ground. Three or four men were watching."
> Nick, TomDispatch's managing editor and a superb historian as well as
> reporter, spent years in a war-crimes zone of the past to produce his
> award-winning book, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in
> Vietnam. It was a harrowing historical journey for which he traveled to
> small villages on the back roads of Vietnam to talk to those who had
> experienced horrific crimes decades earlier. In 2015, however, on his
> second
> trip to South Sudan, a country the U.S. helped bring into existence, he
> found himself in an almost unimaginable place where the same kinds of war
> crimes were being committed right then and there in a commonplace way,
> where
> violence was the coin of the realm, and horrors of various sorts were
> almost
> guaranteed to be around the next corner. In his new book, he brings us with
> him into such a world in a way that is deeply memorable. Ann Jones, author
> of They Were Soldiers, calls him "the wandering scribe of war crimes." And
> she adds, "Reading Turse will turn your view of war upside down... There's
> no glory here in Turse's pages, but the clear voices of people caught up in
> this fruitless cruelty, speaking for themselves."
> Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead is, I think, the definition of an
> act of generosity. Nick has just returned from his latest trip to South
> Sudan and today's post gives you a sense of the ongoing brutalities and
> incongruities of life there (and here as well). Tom
> Donald Trump in South Sudan
> What Trumps the Horrors of a Hellscape? The Donald!
> By Nick Turse
> LEER, South Sudan -- I'm sitting in the dark, sweating. The blinding white
> sun has long since set, but it's still in the high 90s, which is a relief
> since it was above 110 earlier. Slumped in a blue plastic chair, I'm
> thinking back on the day, trying to process everything I saw, the people I
> spoke with: the woman whose home was burned down, the woman whose teenage
> daughter was shot and killed, the woman with 10 mouths to feed and no
> money,
> the glassy-eyed soldier with the AK-47.
> Then there were the scorched ruins: the wrecked houses, the traditional
> wattle-and-daub tukuls without roofs, the spectral footprints of homes set
> aflame by armed raiders who swept through in successive waves, the remnants
> of a town that has ceased to exist.
> And, of course, there were the human remains: a field of scattered skulls
> and femurs and ribs and pelvises and spinal columns.
> And I'm sitting here -- spent, sweaty, stinking -- trying to make sense of
> it all about 10 feet from a sandbagged bunker I'm supposed to jump into if
> the shooting starts again. "It's one of the worse places in the world,"
> someone had assured me before I left South Sudan's capital, Juba, for this
> hellscape of burnt-out buildings and unburied bones that goes by the name
> of
> Leer.
> A lantern on a nearby table casts a dim glow on an approaching aid worker,
> an African with a deep knowledge of this place. He's come to fetch his
> dinner. I'm hoping to corral him and pick his brain about the men who
> torched this town, burned people alive, beat and murdered civilians,
> abducted, raped, and enslaved women and children, looted and pillaged and
> stole.
> Before I can say a word, he beats me to the punch with his own set of
> rapid-fire questions: "This man called Trump -- what's going on with him?
> Who's voting for him? Are you voting for him?" He then proceeds to tell
> me
> everything he's heard about the Republican frontrunner -- how Trump is
> tarnishing America's global image, how he can't believe the things Trump
> says about women and immigrants.
> Here, where catastrophic food insecurity may tip into starvation at any
> time, where armed men still arrive in the night to steal and rape. ("They
> could come any night. You might even hear them tonight. You'll hear the
> women screaming," another aid worker told me earlier in the day.) Here,
> where horrors abound, this man wants -- seemingly needs -- to know if
> Donald
> Trump could actually be elected president of the United States. "I'm
> really
> afraid," he says of the prospect without a hint of irony.
> Of Midwifery and Militias
> After decades of effort, the United States "helped midwife the birth" of
> the
> Republic of South Sudan, according to then-Senator, now Secretary of State
> John Kerry. In reality, for the South Sudanese to win their independence
> it
> took two brutal conflicts with Sudan, the first of which raged from 1955 to
> 1972, and the second from 1983 to 2005, leaving millions dead and
> displaced.
> Still, it is true that for more than 20 years, a bipartisan coalition in
> Washington and beyond championed the southern rebels, and that, as the new
> nation broke away from Sudan, the U.S. poured in billions of dollars in
> aid,
> including hundreds of millions of dollars of military and security
> assistance.
> The world's youngest nation, South Sudan gained its independence in 2011
> and
> just two and a half years later plunged into civil war. Since then, an
> estimated 50,000 to 300,000 people have been killed in a conflict pitting
> President Salva Kiir, a member of the country's largest tribe, the Dinka,
> against Riek Machar, an ethnic Nuer and the vice president he sacked in
> July
> 2013. That December, a fight between Dinka and Nuer troops set off the
> current crisis, which then turned into a slaughter of Nuers by Kiir's
> forces
> in Juba. Reprisals followed as Machar's men took their revenge on Dinkas
> and other non-Nuers in towns like Bor and Bentiu. The conflict soon
> spread,
> splintering into local wars within the larger war and birthing other
> violence that even a peace deal signed last August and Machar's recent
> return to the government has been unable to halt.
> The signature feature of this civil war has been its preferred target:
> civilians. It has been marked by massacres, mass rape, sexual slavery,
> assaults of every sort, extrajudicial killings, forced displacement of
> local
> populations, disappearances, abductions, torture, mutilations, the
> wholesale
> destruction of villages, pillaging, looting, and a host of other crimes.
> Again and again, armed men have fallen upon towns and villages filled with
> noncombatants. That's exactly what happened to Leer in 2015. Militias
> allied with the government, in coordination with Kiir's troops -- the Sudan
> People's Liberation Army, or SPLA -- attacked the town and nearby villages
> again and again. Rebel forces fled in the face of the government
> onslaught.
> Fearing execution, many men fled as well. Women stayed behind, caring for
> children, the sick, and the elderly. There was an assumption that they
> would be spared. They weren't. Old men were killed in their homes that
> were then set ablaze. Women were gang raped. Others were taken away as
> sex
> slaves. Whole villages were razed. Survivors were chased into the nearby
> swamps, tracked down, and executed. Children drowned in the chaos.
> Those who lived through it spent months in those waterlogged swamps, eating
> water lily bulbs. When they returned home, they were confronted yet again
> by pitiless armed men who, at gunpoint, took what meager belongings they
> had
> left, sometimes the very clothes off children's backs.
> This is a story that ought to be told and told and retold. And yet here in
> Leer, like everywhere I went in South Sudan, I couldn't get away from
> Donald
> Trump. So many -- South Sudanese, Americans, Canadians, Europeans --
> seemed
> to want to talk about him. Even in this ruined shell of a town, Trump was
> big news.
> The "Endorsement" Heard Round the World
> Back in Juba, I settle down in the shade of my hotel's bar on a Saturday
> morning to read the Daily Vision. In that newspaper, there's a story about
> the dire economic straits the country finds itself in and the violence it's
> breeding, as well as one about violations of the 2015 peace pact. And then
> there's this gem of a headline: "Nobody Likes Donald Trump. Not Even White
> Men."
> A fair number of South Sudanese men I ran into, however, did like him. "He
> mixes it up," one told me, lauding Trump's business acumen. "At least he
> speaks his mind. He's not afraid to say things that people do not want to
> hear," said another. I heard such comments in Juba and beyond. It leaves
> you with the impression that if his campaign hits rough shoals in the U.S.,
> Trump might still have a political future in South Sudan. After all, this
> is a country currently led by a brash, cowboy-hat-wearing former guerrilla
> who mixes it up and is certainly not afraid to speak his mind even when it
> comes to threatening members of the press with death.
> Compared to Kiir, who stands accused by the United Nations of war crimes,
> Trump looks tame indeed. The Republican candidate has only threatened to
> weaken First Amendment protections in order to make it easier to sue, not
> kill, reporters. Still, the two leaders do seem like-minded on a number of
> issues. Kiir's government, for example, is implicated in all manner of
> atrocities, including torture, which Trump has shown an eagerness to employ
> as a punishment in Washington's war on terror. Trump has also expressed a
> willingness to target not only those deemed terrorists, but also their
> families. Kiir's forces have done just that, attacking noncombatants
> suspected of sympathizing with the rebels, as they did during the sack of
> Leer.
> So it didn't come as a surprise when, in March, the Sudan Tribune -- a
> popular Paris-based website covering South Sudan and Sudan -- reported that
> Salva Kiir had endorsed Trump. It even provided readers with the official
> statement issued by Kiir's office after his phone call with the U.S.
> presidential candidate: "Donald Trump is a true, hard-working, no-nonsense
> American who, when he becomes president, will support South Sudan in its
> democratic path and stability. South Sudan, the world newest nations [sic],
> is also looking forward to Donald Trump's support and investment in almost
> all the sectors." Trump, said the Tribune, "expressed his thanks for the
> endorsement and said he will send his top aides to the country to discuss
> further the investment opportunities."
> It turned out, however, that the Tribune had been taken in by a local
> satirical news site, Saakam -- the Onion of South Sudan -- whose tagline is
> "Breaking news like it never happened." That the Tribune was fooled by the
> story is not as strange as it might first seem. As journalist Jason
> Patinkin observed in Quartz, "Kiir's reputation is such that many Africa
> watchers and journalists found the story plausible."
> I, for one, hadn't even bothered to read the Tribune article. The title
> told me all I needed to know. It sounded like classic Kiir. I almost
> wondered what had taken him so long to reach out. But South Sudan's
> foreign
> ministry assured Patinkin, "There is no truth to [the story] whatsoever."
> For now, at least.
> Will He Win?
> There's a fever-dream, schizophrenic quality to the war in South Sudan.
> The
> conflict began in an orgy of violence, then ebbed, only to flare again and
> again. As the war has ground on, new groups have emerged, and alliances
> have formed while others broke down. Commanders switch sides, militias
> change allegiances. In 2014, for example, Brigadier General Lul Ruai
> Koang,
> the rebel army's spokesman, called out the SPLA for "committing crimes
> against humanity." Kiir, he said, had lost control of his forces and had
> become little more than a puppet of his Ugandan backers. Last year, Lul
> split from Machar to form the "South Sudan Resistance Movement/Army" -- an
> organization that attracted few followers. This year, he found a new job,
> as the spokesman for the military he once cast as criminal. "I promise to
> defend SPLA in Media Warfare until the last drop of blood," he wrote in a
> Facebook post after being tapped by Kiir. Of course, Machar himself has
> just recently returned to Juba to serve as first vice-president to Kiir.
> In a country like this, enmeshed in a war like this, it's hardly surprising
> that ceasefires have meant little and violence has ground on even after a
> peace deal was signed last August. Leer was just one of the spots where
> atrocities continued despite the pact that "ended" the conflict.
> More recently, the war -- or rather the various sub-conflicts it's spawned,
> along with other armed violence -- has spread to previously peaceful areas
> of the country. Cattle-raiding, a long-standing cultural practice, now
> supercharged by modern weaponry and military-style tactics, has proven
> increasingly lethal to communities nationwide, and has recently even bled
> across the border into Ethiopia. A South Sudanese raid into that country's
> Gambela region last month killed 208 Ethiopians, and the attackers abducted
> 108 women and children while stealing more than 2,000 head of cattle.
> While in Leer, I do end up talking at length with the Trump-intrigued aid
> worker about local cattle-raiding, as well as the killings, the rapes, and
> the widespread looting. I was always, however, aware that, like many other
> foreign aid workers and locals I meet, what he really wanted was an
> American
> take on the man presently dominating U.S. politics, an explanation of the
> larger-than-life and stranger-than-life figure who, even in South Sudan,
> has
> the ability to suck the air out of any room.
> "This Trump. He's a crazy man!" he tells me as we sit together beneath an
> obsidian sky now thick with stars. He reminds me that he's not authorized
> by his employer to speak on the record. I nod. Then he adds
> incredulously,
> "He says some things and you wonder: Are you going to be president?
> Really?!"
> A couple of other people are around us now, eating dinner after a long,
> sweltering day. They, too, join in the conversation, looking to me for
> answers. I find myself at a loss. Here, in this place of acute hunger
> ever-teetering on the brink of famine, here, a short walk from homes that
> are little more than hovels, where children go naked, women wear dresses
> that are essentially rags, and a mother's dream is to lay her hands on a
> sheet of plastic to provide protection from the coming rains, I do my best
> to explain seething white male anger in America over "economic
> disenfranchisement," "losing out," and being "left behind," over Donald
> Trump's channeling of "America's economic rage." I'm disgusted even
> articulating these sentiments after spending the day speaking to people
> whose suffering is as unfathomable in America as America's wealth is
> unimaginable here.
> Some of Leer's women fled with their children into the nearby swamps when
> armed men swept in. Imagine running blind, in the black of night, into
> such
> a swamp. Imagine tripping, falling, losing your grip on a small child's
> hand as shots ring out. Imagine that child stumbling into water too deep
> for her to stand. Imagine slapping frantically at that water, disoriented,
> spinning in the darkness, desperate to find a child who can't swim, who's
> slipped beneath the surface, who is suddenly gone.
> And now imagine me trying to talk about the worries of Trump supporters
> "that their kids won't have a chance to get ahead."
> I really don't want to say any more. I don't want to try to make sense of
> it or try to explain why so many Americans are so enraged at their lot and
> so enthralled with Donald Trump.
> The aid worker lets me off the hook with another assessment of the
> Republican candidate. "Things he says, they are very awkward. When he
> says
> those things, you think: He's crazy. How can he be a presidential
> candidate?"
> How to respond? I'm at a loss.
> "If he wins the election, America will not have the influence it's had," he
> says.
> Maybe that's not such a bad thing, I counter. Maybe not having such
> influence would be good for the world.
> It's the truth. It also completely misses the point. Even here, even as
> I'm revolted by talking about America's "problems" amid the horrors of
> Leer,
> I'm still looking at things from a distinctly American vantage point. I'm
> talking about theoretically diminished U.S. power and what that might mean
> for the planet, but come 2017 he's going to be out in the thick of it, in
> this or some other desperate place, and he's obviously worried about what
> the foreign policy of Donald Trump's America is going to mean for him, for
> Africa, for the world.
> I go silent. He goes silent. Another aid worker has been listening in,
> piping up intermittently between mouthfuls of rice and goat meat. "So is
> he
> going to win?" he asks me.
> I look over at him and half-shrug. Everyone, I say, thought Trump was
> going
> to flame out long ago. And I stop there. I'm too spent to talk Trump
> anymore. I don't have any answers.
> My companion looks back at me and breaks his silence. "It can't happen,
> can
> it?"
> Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch and a fellow at the Nation
> Institute. An award-winning investigative journalist, he has written for
> the
> New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Nation, and is a
> contributing
> writer for the Intercept. His latest book is Next Time They'll Come to
> Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan. His website is
> NickTurse.com. Reporting for this story was made possible through the
> generous support of Lannan Foundation.
> Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
> Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
> Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
> Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
> Single-Superpower World.
> Copyright 2016 Nick Turse
> C 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
> View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176135
>
> Tomgram: Nick Turse, It Can't Happen Here, Can It?
> By Nick Turse
> Posted on May 3, 2016, Printed on May 4, 2016
> http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176135/
> [Note for TomDispatch Readers: The newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's
> riveting reportorial trip into a war-crimes zone, Next Time They'll Come to
> Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan, is now officially out. I
> can't tell you how proud I am that we're publishing such a personal and
> unsettling work. It's powerful and -- believe me -- unforgettable. Noam
> Chomsky writes of it: "A vivid, gripping account of inhuman cruelty, laced
> with rays of hope and courage and dignity amidst the horrors." Adam
> Hochschild calls it "searing reporting." I simply call it moving and
> horrifying. As always, with Nick's books, for a contribution of $100 or
> more
> ($125 if you live outside the U.S.), you can get a signed, personalized
> copy
> and in the process help ensure that more Dispatch Books appear in the
> world.
> Check our donation page for the details. Above all, I urge every
> TomDispatch
> reader to buy a copy, if not for yourself, then for someone else (maybe
> that
> college student you know who might someday be the next great investigative
> reporter). Help make the latest Dispatch Book a genuine success.
> With that in mind, I've asked Haymarket Books, the fantastic publisher of
> our imprint, to offer TD readers a discount on it. Here's all you have to
> do: click on this link, which will take you to the Haymarket website. Then
> click "add to cart," select the number of books you want, and click on
> "checkout." After you've filled out your shipping and billing information,
> you will be asked to enter a "coupon code." To purchase one book, enter
> TURSE25 and you'll get 25% off the cover price; for five or more books,
> enter TURSE40 and you'll get 40% off. Tom]
> Every now and then, I teach a class to young would-be journalists and one
> of
> the first things I talk about is why I consider writing an act of
> generosity. As they are usually just beginning to stretch their writerly
> wings, their task, as I see it, is to enter the world we're already in
> (it's
> generally the only place they can afford to go) and somehow decode it for
> us, make us see it in a new way. And who can deny that doing so is indeed
> an
> act of generosity? But for the foreign correspondent, especially in war
> zones, the generosity lies in the very act of entering a world filled with
> dangers, a world that the rest of us might not be capable of entering, or
> for that matter brave enough to enter, and somehow bringing us along with
> them.
> I thought about this recently when I had in my hands the first copy of Nick
> Turse's new Dispatch Book, Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead: War
> and
> Survival in South Sudan, and flipped it open to its memorable initial
> paragraph, one I already new well, and began to read it all over again:
> "Their voices, sharp and angry, shook me from my slumber. I didn't know the
> language but I instantly knew the translation. So I groped for the opening
> in the mosquito net, shuffled from my downy white bed to the window, threw
> back the stained tan curtain, and squinted into the light of a new day
> breaking in South Sudan. Below, in front of my guest house, one man was
> getting his ass kicked by another. A flurry of blows connected with his
> face
> and suddenly he was on the ground. Three or four men were watching."
> Nick, TomDispatch's managing editor and a superb historian as well as
> reporter, spent years in a war-crimes zone of the past to produce his
> award-winning book, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in
> Vietnam. It was a harrowing historical journey for which he traveled to
> small villages on the back roads of Vietnam to talk to those who had
> experienced horrific crimes decades earlier. In 2015, however, on his
> second
> trip to South Sudan, a country the U.S. helped bring into existence, he
> found himself in an almost unimaginable place where the same kinds of war
> crimes were being committed right then and there in a commonplace way,
> where
> violence was the coin of the realm, and horrors of various sorts were
> almost
> guaranteed to be around the next corner. In his new book, he brings us with
> him into such a world in a way that is deeply memorable. Ann Jones, author
> of They Were Soldiers, calls him "the wandering scribe of war crimes." And
> she adds, "Reading Turse will turn your view of war upside down... There's
> no glory here in Turse's pages, but the clear voices of people caught up in
> this fruitless cruelty, speaking for themselves."
> Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead is, I think, the definition of an
> act of generosity. Nick has just returned from his latest trip to South
> Sudan and today's post gives you a sense of the ongoing brutalities and
> incongruities of life there (and here as well). Tom
> Donald Trump in South Sudan
> What Trumps the Horrors of a Hellscape? The Donald!
> By Nick Turse
> LEER, South Sudan -- I'm sitting in the dark, sweating. The blinding white
> sun has long since set, but it's still in the high 90s, which is a relief
> since it was above 110 earlier. Slumped in a blue plastic chair, I'm
> thinking back on the day, trying to process everything I saw, the people I
> spoke with: the woman whose home was burned down, the woman whose teenage
> daughter was shot and killed, the woman with 10 mouths to feed and no
> money,
> the glassy-eyed soldier with the AK-47.
> Then there were the scorched ruins: the wrecked houses, the traditional
> wattle-and-daub tukuls without roofs, the spectral footprints of homes set
> aflame by armed raiders who swept through in successive waves, the remnants
> of a town that has ceased to exist.
> And, of course, there were the human remains: a field of scattered skulls
> and femurs and ribs and pelvises and spinal columns.
> And I'm sitting here -- spent, sweaty, stinking -- trying to make sense of
> it all about 10 feet from a sandbagged bunker I'm supposed to jump into if
> the shooting starts again. "It's one of the worse places in the world,"
> someone had assured me before I left South Sudan's capital, Juba, for this
> hellscape of burnt-out buildings and unburied bones that goes by the name
> of
> Leer.
> A lantern on a nearby table casts a dim glow on an approaching aid worker,
> an African with a deep knowledge of this place. He's come to fetch his
> dinner. I'm hoping to corral him and pick his brain about the men who
> torched this town, burned people alive, beat and murdered civilians,
> abducted, raped, and enslaved women and children, looted and pillaged and
> stole.
> Before I can say a word, he beats me to the punch with his own set of
> rapid-fire questions: "This man called Trump -- what's going on with him?
> Who's voting for him? Are you voting for him?" He then proceeds to tell me
> everything he's heard about the Republican frontrunner -- how Trump is
> tarnishing America's global image, how he can't believe the things Trump
> says about women and immigrants.
> Here, where catastrophic food insecurity may tip into starvation at any
> time, where armed men still arrive in the night to steal and rape. ("They
> could come any night. You might even hear them tonight. You'll hear the
> women screaming," another aid worker told me earlier in the day.) Here,
> where horrors abound, this man wants -- seemingly needs -- to know if
> Donald
> Trump could actually be elected president of the United States. "I'm really
> afraid," he says of the prospect without a hint of irony.
> Of Midwifery and Militias
> After decades of effort, the United States "helped midwife the birth" of
> the
> Republic of South Sudan, according to then-Senator, now Secretary of State
> John Kerry. In reality, for the South Sudanese to win their independence it
> took two brutal conflicts with Sudan, the first of which raged from 1955 to
> 1972, and the second from 1983 to 2005, leaving millions dead and
> displaced.
> Still, it is true that for more than 20 years, a bipartisan coalition in
> Washington and beyond championed the southern rebels, and that, as the new
> nation broke away from Sudan, the U.S. poured in billions of dollars in
> aid,
> including hundreds of millions of dollars of military and security
> assistance.
> The world's youngest nation, South Sudan gained its independence in 2011
> and
> just two and a half years later plunged into civil war. Since then, an
> estimated 50,000 to 300,000 people have been killed in a conflict pitting
> President Salva Kiir, a member of the country's largest tribe, the Dinka,
> against Riek Machar, an ethnic Nuer and the vice president he sacked in
> July
> 2013. That December, a fight between Dinka and Nuer troops set off the
> current crisis, which then turned into a slaughter of Nuers by Kiir's
> forces
> in Juba. Reprisals followed as Machar's men took their revenge on Dinkas
> and
> other non-Nuers in towns like Bor and Bentiu. The conflict soon spread,
> splintering into local wars within the larger war and birthing other
> violence that even a peace deal signed last August and Machar's recent
> return to the government has been unable to halt.
> The signature feature of this civil war has been its preferred target:
> civilians. It has been marked by massacres, mass rape, sexual slavery,
> assaults of every sort, extrajudicial killings, forced displacement of
> local
> populations, disappearances, abductions, torture, mutilations, the
> wholesale
> destruction of villages, pillaging, looting, and a host of other crimes.
> Again and again, armed men have fallen upon towns and villages filled with
> noncombatants. That's exactly what happened to Leer in 2015. Militias
> allied
> with the government, in coordination with Kiir's troops -- the Sudan
> People's Liberation Army, or SPLA -- attacked the town and nearby villages
> again and again. Rebel forces fled in the face of the government onslaught.
> Fearing execution, many men fled as well. Women stayed behind, caring for
> children, the sick, and the elderly. There was an assumption that they
> would
> be spared. They weren't. Old men were killed in their homes that were then
> set ablaze. Women were gang raped. Others were taken away as sex slaves.
> Whole villages were razed. Survivors were chased into the nearby swamps,
> tracked down, and executed. Children drowned in the chaos.
> Those who lived through it spent months in those waterlogged swamps, eating
> water lily bulbs. When they returned home, they were confronted yet again
> by
> pitiless armed men who, at gunpoint, took what meager belongings they had
> left, sometimes the very clothes off children's backs.
> This is a story that ought to be told and told and retold. And yet here in
> Leer, like everywhere I went in South Sudan, I couldn't get away from
> Donald
> Trump. So many -- South Sudanese, Americans, Canadians, Europeans -- seemed
> to want to talk about him. Even in this ruined shell of a town, Trump was
> big news.
> The "Endorsement" Heard Round the World
> Back in Juba, I settle down in the shade of my hotel's bar on a Saturday
> morning to read the Daily Vision. In that newspaper, there's a story about
> the dire economic straits the country finds itself in and the violence it's
> breeding, as well as one about violations of the 2015 peace pact. And then
> there's this gem of a headline: "Nobody Likes Donald Trump. Not Even White
> Men."
> http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608466485/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
> http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608466485/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20A fair
> number of South Sudanese men I ran into, however, did like him. "He mixes
> it
> up," one told me, lauding Trump's business acumen. "At least he speaks his
> mind. He's not afraid to say things that people do not want to hear," said
> another. I heard such comments in Juba and beyond. It leaves you with the
> impression that if his campaign hits rough shoals in the U.S., Trump might
> still have a political future in South Sudan. After all, this is a country
> currently led by a brash, cowboy-hat-wearing former guerrilla who mixes it
> up and is certainly not afraid to speak his mind even when it comes to
> threatening members of the press with death.
> Compared to Kiir, who stands accused by the United Nations of war crimes,
> Trump looks tame indeed. The Republican candidate has only threatened to
> weaken First Amendment protections in order to make it easier to sue, not
> kill, reporters. Still, the two leaders do seem like-minded on a number of
> issues. Kiir's government, for example, is implicated in all manner of
> atrocities, including torture, which Trump has shown an eagerness to employ
> as a punishment in Washington's war on terror. Trump has also expressed a
> willingness to target not only those deemed terrorists, but also their
> families. Kiir's forces have done just that, attacking noncombatants
> suspected of sympathizing with the rebels, as they did during the sack of
> Leer.
> So it didn't come as a surprise when, in March, the Sudan Tribune -- a
> popular Paris-based website covering South Sudan and Sudan -- reported that
> Salva Kiir had endorsed Trump. It even provided readers with the official
> statement issued by Kiir's office after his phone call with the U.S.
> presidential candidate: "Donald Trump is a true, hard-working, no-nonsense
> American who, when he becomes president, will support South Sudan in its
> democratic path and stability. South Sudan, the world newest nations [sic],
> is also looking forward to Donald Trump's support and investment in almost
> all the sectors." Trump, said the Tribune, "expressed his thanks for the
> endorsement and said he will send his top aides to the country to discuss
> further the investment opportunities."
> It turned out, however, that the Tribune had been taken in by a local
> satirical news site, Saakam -- the Onion of South Sudan -- whose tagline is
> "Breaking news like it never happened." That the Tribune was fooled by the
> story is not as strange as it might first seem. As journalist Jason
> Patinkin
> observed in Quartz, "Kiir's reputation is such that many Africa watchers
> and
> journalists found the story plausible."
> I, for one, hadn't even bothered to read the Tribune article. The title
> told
> me all I needed to know. It sounded like classic Kiir. I almost wondered
> what had taken him so long to reach out. But South Sudan's foreign ministry
> assured Patinkin, "There is no truth to [the story] whatsoever."
> For now, at least.
> Will He Win?
> There's a fever-dream, schizophrenic quality to the war in South Sudan. The
> conflict began in an orgy of violence, then ebbed, only to flare again and
> again. As the war has ground on, new groups have emerged, and alliances
> have
> formed while others broke down. Commanders switch sides, militias change
> allegiances. In 2014, for example, Brigadier General Lul Ruai Koang, the
> rebel army's spokesman, called out the SPLA for "committing crimes against
> humanity." Kiir, he said, had lost control of his forces and had become
> little more than a puppet of his Ugandan backers. Last year, Lul split from
> Machar to form the "South Sudan Resistance Movement/Army" -- an
> organization
> that attracted few followers. This year, he found a new job, as the
> spokesman for the military he once cast as criminal. "I promise to defend
> SPLA in Media Warfare until the last drop of blood," he wrote in a Facebook
> post after being tapped by Kiir. Of course, Machar himself has just
> recently
> returned to Juba to serve as first vice-president to Kiir.
> In a country like this, enmeshed in a war like this, it's hardly surprising
> that ceasefires have meant little and violence has ground on even after a
> peace deal was signed last August. Leer was just one of the spots where
> atrocities continued despite the pact that "ended" the conflict.
> More recently, the war -- or rather the various sub-conflicts it's spawned,
> along with other armed violence -- has spread to previously peaceful areas
> of the country. Cattle-raiding, a long-standing cultural practice, now
> supercharged by modern weaponry and military-style tactics, has proven
> increasingly lethal to communities nationwide, and has recently even bled
> across the border into Ethiopia. A South Sudanese raid into that country's
> Gambela region last month killed 208 Ethiopians, and the attackers abducted
> 108 women and children while stealing more than 2,000 head of cattle.
> While in Leer, I do end up talking at length with the Trump-intrigued aid
> worker about local cattle-raiding, as well as the killings, the rapes, and
> the widespread looting. I was always, however, aware that, like many other
> foreign aid workers and locals I meet, what he really wanted was an
> American
> take on the man presently dominating U.S. politics, an explanation of the
> larger-than-life and stranger-than-life figure who, even in South Sudan,
> has
> the ability to suck the air out of any room.
> "This Trump. He's a crazy man!" he tells me as we sit together beneath an
> obsidian sky now thick with stars. He reminds me that he's not authorized
> by
> his employer to speak on the record. I nod. Then he adds incredulously, "He
> says some things and you wonder: Are you going to be president? Really?!"
> A couple of other people are around us now, eating dinner after a long,
> sweltering day. They, too, join in the conversation, looking to me for
> answers. I find myself at a loss. Here, in this place of acute hunger
> ever-teetering on the brink of famine, here, a short walk from homes that
> are little more than hovels, where children go naked, women wear dresses
> that are essentially rags, and a mother's dream is to lay her hands on a
> sheet of plastic to provide protection from the coming rains, I do my best
> to explain seething white male anger in America over "economic
> disenfranchisement," "losing out," and being "left behind," over Donald
> Trump's channeling of "America's economic rage." I'm disgusted even
> articulating these sentiments after spending the day speaking to people
> whose suffering is as unfathomable in America as America's wealth is
> unimaginable here.
> Some of Leer's women fled with their children into the nearby swamps when
> armed men swept in. Imagine running blind, in the black of night, into such
> a swamp. Imagine tripping, falling, losing your grip on a small child's
> hand
> as shots ring out. Imagine that child stumbling into water too deep for her
> to stand. Imagine slapping frantically at that water, disoriented, spinning
> in the darkness, desperate to find a child who can't swim, who's slipped
> beneath the surface, who is suddenly gone.
> And now imagine me trying to talk about the worries of Trump supporters
> "that their kids won't have a chance to get ahead."
> I really don't want to say any more. I don't want to try to make sense of
> it
> or try to explain why so many Americans are so enraged at their lot and so
> enthralled with Donald Trump.
> The aid worker lets me off the hook with another assessment of the
> Republican candidate. "Things he says, they are very awkward. When he says
> those things, you think: He's crazy. How can he be a presidential
> candidate?"
> How to respond? I'm at a loss.
> "If he wins the election, America will not have the influence it's had," he
> says.
> Maybe that's not such a bad thing, I counter. Maybe not having such
> influence would be good for the world.
> It's the truth. It also completely misses the point. Even here, even as I'm
> revolted by talking about America's "problems" amid the horrors of Leer,
> I'm
> still looking at things from a distinctly American vantage point. I'm
> talking about theoretically diminished U.S. power and what that might mean
> for the planet, but come 2017 he's going to be out in the thick of it, in
> this or some other desperate place, and he's obviously worried about what
> the foreign policy of Donald Trump's America is going to mean for him, for
> Africa, for the world.
> I go silent. He goes silent. Another aid worker has been listening in,
> piping up intermittently between mouthfuls of rice and goat meat. "So is he
> going to win?" he asks me.
> I look over at him and half-shrug. Everyone, I say, thought Trump was going
> to flame out long ago. And I stop there. I'm too spent to talk Trump
> anymore. I don't have any answers.
> My companion looks back at me and breaks his silence. "It can't happen, can
> it?"
> Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch and a fellow at the Nation
> Institute. An award-winning investigative journalist, he has written for
> the
> New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Nation, and is a
> contributing
> writer for the Intercept. His latest book is Next Time They'll Come to
> Count
> the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan. His website is NickTurse.com.
> Reporting for this story was made possible through the generous support of
> Lannan Foundation.
> Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
> Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
> Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
> Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
> Single-Superpower World.
> Copyright 2016 Nick Turse
> C 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
> View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176135
>
>
>
>
>
>
"It Can't Happen Here, Can It?"
That subject line started me to remembering how totally indoctrinated
I had been as a child. America, insulated from most of the rest of
the world by broad oceans, and dominating those neighbors unfortunate
enough to be within our hemisphere.
"It could never happen here!" they cried. "Our democracy is too
strong, thanks to the great foresight of our Founding Fathers, that we
can never fall to some tyrant, as has so often happened around the
world." And I bought this, hook line and sinker, despite the fact
that we had almost split into two nations back in the 1860's.
Still, FDR had wooed the South, and the Dixicrats found a place within
the protection of the Federal government where they could lick their
wounds, and plot to keep Racism alive. The Great Depression and then,
the "Good War" fought, "Over There", kept us bonded, through the
Korean Conflict(War) and only began to unravel during the late 50's
and 60's as the Civil Rights Movement gathered momentum and our
intervention in Vietnam and Cambodia took our attention away from the
simmering unrest within our own borders.
But tensions grew and anger that had been kept somewhat under control,
was fanned by Right Wing Opportunists, led by that Republican Hero,
Ronald Reagan, as he gathered the former Dixicrats to his bosom and
told them bedtime stories about Government being the enemy, and shouts
of, "The South Shall Rise Again!" was merely a tribute to the long
Southern Tradition.
But now we have no longer any control over the boiling cauldron, with
the likes of Donald Trump fanning the flames of hatred, one group over
the next...over the next...
And the Shock Jocks from the Far, Crazed Right have inundated the
airwaves, boldly spewing suspicion and fear and hatred.
Can it happen here? The question should be, Can we keep it from
happening here?
Carl Jarvis
On 5/4/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>
> Tomgram: Nick Turse, It Can't Happen Here, Can It?
> By Nick Turse
> Posted on May 3, 2016, Printed on May 4, 2016
> http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176135/
> Every now and then, I teach a class to young would-be journalists and one
> of
> the first things I talk about is why I consider writing an act of
> generosity. As they are usually just beginning to stretch their writerly
> wings, their task, as I see it, is to enter the world we're already in
> (it's
> generally the only place they can afford to go) and somehow decode it for
> us, make us see it in a new way. And who can deny that doing so is indeed
> an
> act of generosity? But for the foreign correspondent, especially in war
> zones, the generosity lies in the very act of entering a world filled with
> dangers, a world that the rest of us might not be capable of entering, or
> for that matter brave enough to enter, and somehow bringing us along with
> them.
> I thought about this recently when I had in my hands the first copy of Nick
> Turse's new Dispatch Book, Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead: War
> and
> Survival in South Sudan, and flipped it open to its memorable initial
> paragraph, one I already new well, and began to read it all over again:
> "Their voices, sharp and angry, shook me from my slumber. I didn't know the
> language but I instantly knew the translation. So I groped for the opening
> in the mosquito net, shuffled from my downy white bed to the window, threw
> back the stained tan curtain, and squinted into the light of a new day
> breaking in South Sudan. Below, in front of my guest house, one man was
> getting his ass kicked by another. A flurry of blows connected with his
> face
> and suddenly he was on the ground. Three or four men were watching."
> Nick, TomDispatch's managing editor and a superb historian as well as
> reporter, spent years in a war-crimes zone of the past to produce his
> award-winning book, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in
> Vietnam. It was a harrowing historical journey for which he traveled to
> small villages on the back roads of Vietnam to talk to those who had
> experienced horrific crimes decades earlier. In 2015, however, on his
> second
> trip to South Sudan, a country the U.S. helped bring into existence, he
> found himself in an almost unimaginable place where the same kinds of war
> crimes were being committed right then and there in a commonplace way,
> where
> violence was the coin of the realm, and horrors of various sorts were
> almost
> guaranteed to be around the next corner. In his new book, he brings us with
> him into such a world in a way that is deeply memorable. Ann Jones, author
> of They Were Soldiers, calls him "the wandering scribe of war crimes." And
> she adds, "Reading Turse will turn your view of war upside down... There's
> no glory here in Turse's pages, but the clear voices of people caught up in
> this fruitless cruelty, speaking for themselves."
> Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead is, I think, the definition of an
> act of generosity. Nick has just returned from his latest trip to South
> Sudan and today's post gives you a sense of the ongoing brutalities and
> incongruities of life there (and here as well). Tom
> Donald Trump in South Sudan
> What Trumps the Horrors of a Hellscape? The Donald!
> By Nick Turse
> LEER, South Sudan -- I'm sitting in the dark, sweating. The blinding white
> sun has long since set, but it's still in the high 90s, which is a relief
> since it was above 110 earlier. Slumped in a blue plastic chair, I'm
> thinking back on the day, trying to process everything I saw, the people I
> spoke with: the woman whose home was burned down, the woman whose teenage
> daughter was shot and killed, the woman with 10 mouths to feed and no
> money,
> the glassy-eyed soldier with the AK-47.
> Then there were the scorched ruins: the wrecked houses, the traditional
> wattle-and-daub tukuls without roofs, the spectral footprints of homes set
> aflame by armed raiders who swept through in successive waves, the remnants
> of a town that has ceased to exist.
> And, of course, there were the human remains: a field of scattered skulls
> and femurs and ribs and pelvises and spinal columns.
> And I'm sitting here -- spent, sweaty, stinking -- trying to make sense of
> it all about 10 feet from a sandbagged bunker I'm supposed to jump into if
> the shooting starts again. "It's one of the worse places in the world,"
> someone had assured me before I left South Sudan's capital, Juba, for this
> hellscape of burnt-out buildings and unburied bones that goes by the name
> of
> Leer.
> A lantern on a nearby table casts a dim glow on an approaching aid worker,
> an African with a deep knowledge of this place. He's come to fetch his
> dinner. I'm hoping to corral him and pick his brain about the men who
> torched this town, burned people alive, beat and murdered civilians,
> abducted, raped, and enslaved women and children, looted and pillaged and
> stole.
> Before I can say a word, he beats me to the punch with his own set of
> rapid-fire questions: "This man called Trump -- what's going on with him?
> Who's voting for him? Are you voting for him?" He then proceeds to tell
> me
> everything he's heard about the Republican frontrunner -- how Trump is
> tarnishing America's global image, how he can't believe the things Trump
> says about women and immigrants.
> Here, where catastrophic food insecurity may tip into starvation at any
> time, where armed men still arrive in the night to steal and rape. ("They
> could come any night. You might even hear them tonight. You'll hear the
> women screaming," another aid worker told me earlier in the day.) Here,
> where horrors abound, this man wants -- seemingly needs -- to know if
> Donald
> Trump could actually be elected president of the United States. "I'm
> really
> afraid," he says of the prospect without a hint of irony.
> Of Midwifery and Militias
> After decades of effort, the United States "helped midwife the birth" of
> the
> Republic of South Sudan, according to then-Senator, now Secretary of State
> John Kerry. In reality, for the South Sudanese to win their independence
> it
> took two brutal conflicts with Sudan, the first of which raged from 1955 to
> 1972, and the second from 1983 to 2005, leaving millions dead and
> displaced.
> Still, it is true that for more than 20 years, a bipartisan coalition in
> Washington and beyond championed the southern rebels, and that, as the new
> nation broke away from Sudan, the U.S. poured in billions of dollars in
> aid,
> including hundreds of millions of dollars of military and security
> assistance.
> The world's youngest nation, South Sudan gained its independence in 2011
> and
> just two and a half years later plunged into civil war. Since then, an
> estimated 50,000 to 300,000 people have been killed in a conflict pitting
> President Salva Kiir, a member of the country's largest tribe, the Dinka,
> against Riek Machar, an ethnic Nuer and the vice president he sacked in
> July
> 2013. That December, a fight between Dinka and Nuer troops set off the
> current crisis, which then turned into a slaughter of Nuers by Kiir's
> forces
> in Juba. Reprisals followed as Machar's men took their revenge on Dinkas
> and other non-Nuers in towns like Bor and Bentiu. The conflict soon
> spread,
> splintering into local wars within the larger war and birthing other
> violence that even a peace deal signed last August and Machar's recent
> return to the government has been unable to halt.
> The signature feature of this civil war has been its preferred target:
> civilians. It has been marked by massacres, mass rape, sexual slavery,
> assaults of every sort, extrajudicial killings, forced displacement of
> local
> populations, disappearances, abductions, torture, mutilations, the
> wholesale
> destruction of villages, pillaging, looting, and a host of other crimes.
> Again and again, armed men have fallen upon towns and villages filled with
> noncombatants. That's exactly what happened to Leer in 2015. Militias
> allied with the government, in coordination with Kiir's troops -- the Sudan
> People's Liberation Army, or SPLA -- attacked the town and nearby villages
> again and again. Rebel forces fled in the face of the government
> onslaught.
> Fearing execution, many men fled as well. Women stayed behind, caring for
> children, the sick, and the elderly. There was an assumption that they
> would be spared. They weren't. Old men were killed in their homes that
> were then set ablaze. Women were gang raped. Others were taken away as
> sex
> slaves. Whole villages were razed. Survivors were chased into the nearby
> swamps, tracked down, and executed. Children drowned in the chaos.
> Those who lived through it spent months in those waterlogged swamps, eating
> water lily bulbs. When they returned home, they were confronted yet again
> by pitiless armed men who, at gunpoint, took what meager belongings they
> had
> left, sometimes the very clothes off children's backs.
> This is a story that ought to be told and told and retold. And yet here in
> Leer, like everywhere I went in South Sudan, I couldn't get away from
> Donald
> Trump. So many -- South Sudanese, Americans, Canadians, Europeans --
> seemed
> to want to talk about him. Even in this ruined shell of a town, Trump was
> big news.
> The "Endorsement" Heard Round the World
> Back in Juba, I settle down in the shade of my hotel's bar on a Saturday
> morning to read the Daily Vision. In that newspaper, there's a story about
> the dire economic straits the country finds itself in and the violence it's
> breeding, as well as one about violations of the 2015 peace pact. And then
> there's this gem of a headline: "Nobody Likes Donald Trump. Not Even White
> Men."
> A fair number of South Sudanese men I ran into, however, did like him. "He
> mixes it up," one told me, lauding Trump's business acumen. "At least he
> speaks his mind. He's not afraid to say things that people do not want to
> hear," said another. I heard such comments in Juba and beyond. It leaves
> you with the impression that if his campaign hits rough shoals in the U.S.,
> Trump might still have a political future in South Sudan. After all, this
> is a country currently led by a brash, cowboy-hat-wearing former guerrilla
> who mixes it up and is certainly not afraid to speak his mind even when it
> comes to threatening members of the press with death.
> Compared to Kiir, who stands accused by the United Nations of war crimes,
> Trump looks tame indeed. The Republican candidate has only threatened to
> weaken First Amendment protections in order to make it easier to sue, not
> kill, reporters. Still, the two leaders do seem like-minded on a number of
> issues. Kiir's government, for example, is implicated in all manner of
> atrocities, including torture, which Trump has shown an eagerness to employ
> as a punishment in Washington's war on terror. Trump has also expressed a
> willingness to target not only those deemed terrorists, but also their
> families. Kiir's forces have done just that, attacking noncombatants
> suspected of sympathizing with the rebels, as they did during the sack of
> Leer.
> So it didn't come as a surprise when, in March, the Sudan Tribune -- a
> popular Paris-based website covering South Sudan and Sudan -- reported that
> Salva Kiir had endorsed Trump. It even provided readers with the official
> statement issued by Kiir's office after his phone call with the U.S.
> presidential candidate: "Donald Trump is a true, hard-working, no-nonsense
> American who, when he becomes president, will support South Sudan in its
> democratic path and stability. South Sudan, the world newest nations [sic],
> is also looking forward to Donald Trump's support and investment in almost
> all the sectors." Trump, said the Tribune, "expressed his thanks for the
> endorsement and said he will send his top aides to the country to discuss
> further the investment opportunities."
> It turned out, however, that the Tribune had been taken in by a local
> satirical news site, Saakam -- the Onion of South Sudan -- whose tagline is
> "Breaking news like it never happened." That the Tribune was fooled by the
> story is not as strange as it might first seem. As journalist Jason
> Patinkin observed in Quartz, "Kiir's reputation is such that many Africa
> watchers and journalists found the story plausible."
> I, for one, hadn't even bothered to read the Tribune article. The title
> told me all I needed to know. It sounded like classic Kiir. I almost
> wondered what had taken him so long to reach out. But South Sudan's
> foreign
> ministry assured Patinkin, "There is no truth to [the story] whatsoever."
> For now, at least.
> Will He Win?
> There's a fever-dream, schizophrenic quality to the war in South Sudan.
> The
> conflict began in an orgy of violence, then ebbed, only to flare again and
> again. As the war has ground on, new groups have emerged, and alliances
> have formed while others broke down. Commanders switch sides, militias
> change allegiances. In 2014, for example, Brigadier General Lul Ruai
> Koang,
> the rebel army's spokesman, called out the SPLA for "committing crimes
> against humanity." Kiir, he said, had lost control of his forces and had
> become little more than a puppet of his Ugandan backers. Last year, Lul
> split from Machar to form the "South Sudan Resistance Movement/Army" -- an
> organization that attracted few followers. This year, he found a new job,
> as the spokesman for the military he once cast as criminal. "I promise to
> defend SPLA in Media Warfare until the last drop of blood," he wrote in a
> Facebook post after being tapped by Kiir. Of course, Machar himself has
> just recently returned to Juba to serve as first vice-president to Kiir.
> In a country like this, enmeshed in a war like this, it's hardly surprising
> that ceasefires have meant little and violence has ground on even after a
> peace deal was signed last August. Leer was just one of the spots where
> atrocities continued despite the pact that "ended" the conflict.
> More recently, the war -- or rather the various sub-conflicts it's spawned,
> along with other armed violence -- has spread to previously peaceful areas
> of the country. Cattle-raiding, a long-standing cultural practice, now
> supercharged by modern weaponry and military-style tactics, has proven
> increasingly lethal to communities nationwide, and has recently even bled
> across the border into Ethiopia. A South Sudanese raid into that country's
> Gambela region last month killed 208 Ethiopians, and the attackers abducted
> 108 women and children while stealing more than 2,000 head of cattle.
> While in Leer, I do end up talking at length with the Trump-intrigued aid
> worker about local cattle-raiding, as well as the killings, the rapes, and
> the widespread looting. I was always, however, aware that, like many other
> foreign aid workers and locals I meet, what he really wanted was an
> American
> take on the man presently dominating U.S. politics, an explanation of the
> larger-than-life and stranger-than-life figure who, even in South Sudan,
> has
> the ability to suck the air out of any room.
> "This Trump. He's a crazy man!" he tells me as we sit together beneath an
> obsidian sky now thick with stars. He reminds me that he's not authorized
> by his employer to speak on the record. I nod. Then he adds
> incredulously,
> "He says some things and you wonder: Are you going to be president?
> Really?!"
> A couple of other people are around us now, eating dinner after a long,
> sweltering day. They, too, join in the conversation, looking to me for
> answers. I find myself at a loss. Here, in this place of acute hunger
> ever-teetering on the brink of famine, here, a short walk from homes that
> are little more than hovels, where children go naked, women wear dresses
> that are essentially rags, and a mother's dream is to lay her hands on a
> sheet of plastic to provide protection from the coming rains, I do my best
> to explain seething white male anger in America over "economic
> disenfranchisement," "losing out," and being "left behind," over Donald
> Trump's channeling of "America's economic rage." I'm disgusted even
> articulating these sentiments after spending the day speaking to people
> whose suffering is as unfathomable in America as America's wealth is
> unimaginable here.
> Some of Leer's women fled with their children into the nearby swamps when
> armed men swept in. Imagine running blind, in the black of night, into
> such
> a swamp. Imagine tripping, falling, losing your grip on a small child's
> hand as shots ring out. Imagine that child stumbling into water too deep
> for her to stand. Imagine slapping frantically at that water, disoriented,
> spinning in the darkness, desperate to find a child who can't swim, who's
> slipped beneath the surface, who is suddenly gone.
> And now imagine me trying to talk about the worries of Trump supporters
> "that their kids won't have a chance to get ahead."
> I really don't want to say any more. I don't want to try to make sense of
> it or try to explain why so many Americans are so enraged at their lot and
> so enthralled with Donald Trump.
> The aid worker lets me off the hook with another assessment of the
> Republican candidate. "Things he says, they are very awkward. When he
> says
> those things, you think: He's crazy. How can he be a presidential
> candidate?"
> How to respond? I'm at a loss.
> "If he wins the election, America will not have the influence it's had," he
> says.
> Maybe that's not such a bad thing, I counter. Maybe not having such
> influence would be good for the world.
> It's the truth. It also completely misses the point. Even here, even as
> I'm revolted by talking about America's "problems" amid the horrors of
> Leer,
> I'm still looking at things from a distinctly American vantage point. I'm
> talking about theoretically diminished U.S. power and what that might mean
> for the planet, but come 2017 he's going to be out in the thick of it, in
> this or some other desperate place, and he's obviously worried about what
> the foreign policy of Donald Trump's America is going to mean for him, for
> Africa, for the world.
> I go silent. He goes silent. Another aid worker has been listening in,
> piping up intermittently between mouthfuls of rice and goat meat. "So is
> he
> going to win?" he asks me.
> I look over at him and half-shrug. Everyone, I say, thought Trump was
> going
> to flame out long ago. And I stop there. I'm too spent to talk Trump
> anymore. I don't have any answers.
> My companion looks back at me and breaks his silence. "It can't happen,
> can
> it?"
> Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch and a fellow at the Nation
> Institute. An award-winning investigative journalist, he has written for
> the
> New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Nation, and is a
> contributing
> writer for the Intercept. His latest book is Next Time They'll Come to
> Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan. His website is
> NickTurse.com. Reporting for this story was made possible through the
> generous support of Lannan Foundation.
> Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
> Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
> Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
> Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
> Single-Superpower World.
> Copyright 2016 Nick Turse
> C 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
> View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176135
>
> Tomgram: Nick Turse, It Can't Happen Here, Can It?
> By Nick Turse
> Posted on May 3, 2016, Printed on May 4, 2016
> http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176135/
> [Note for TomDispatch Readers: The newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's
> riveting reportorial trip into a war-crimes zone, Next Time They'll Come to
> Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan, is now officially out. I
> can't tell you how proud I am that we're publishing such a personal and
> unsettling work. It's powerful and -- believe me -- unforgettable. Noam
> Chomsky writes of it: "A vivid, gripping account of inhuman cruelty, laced
> with rays of hope and courage and dignity amidst the horrors." Adam
> Hochschild calls it "searing reporting." I simply call it moving and
> horrifying. As always, with Nick's books, for a contribution of $100 or
> more
> ($125 if you live outside the U.S.), you can get a signed, personalized
> copy
> and in the process help ensure that more Dispatch Books appear in the
> world.
> Check our donation page for the details. Above all, I urge every
> TomDispatch
> reader to buy a copy, if not for yourself, then for someone else (maybe
> that
> college student you know who might someday be the next great investigative
> reporter). Help make the latest Dispatch Book a genuine success.
> With that in mind, I've asked Haymarket Books, the fantastic publisher of
> our imprint, to offer TD readers a discount on it. Here's all you have to
> do: click on this link, which will take you to the Haymarket website. Then
> click "add to cart," select the number of books you want, and click on
> "checkout." After you've filled out your shipping and billing information,
> you will be asked to enter a "coupon code." To purchase one book, enter
> TURSE25 and you'll get 25% off the cover price; for five or more books,
> enter TURSE40 and you'll get 40% off. Tom]
> Every now and then, I teach a class to young would-be journalists and one
> of
> the first things I talk about is why I consider writing an act of
> generosity. As they are usually just beginning to stretch their writerly
> wings, their task, as I see it, is to enter the world we're already in
> (it's
> generally the only place they can afford to go) and somehow decode it for
> us, make us see it in a new way. And who can deny that doing so is indeed
> an
> act of generosity? But for the foreign correspondent, especially in war
> zones, the generosity lies in the very act of entering a world filled with
> dangers, a world that the rest of us might not be capable of entering, or
> for that matter brave enough to enter, and somehow bringing us along with
> them.
> I thought about this recently when I had in my hands the first copy of Nick
> Turse's new Dispatch Book, Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead: War
> and
> Survival in South Sudan, and flipped it open to its memorable initial
> paragraph, one I already new well, and began to read it all over again:
> "Their voices, sharp and angry, shook me from my slumber. I didn't know the
> language but I instantly knew the translation. So I groped for the opening
> in the mosquito net, shuffled from my downy white bed to the window, threw
> back the stained tan curtain, and squinted into the light of a new day
> breaking in South Sudan. Below, in front of my guest house, one man was
> getting his ass kicked by another. A flurry of blows connected with his
> face
> and suddenly he was on the ground. Three or four men were watching."
> Nick, TomDispatch's managing editor and a superb historian as well as
> reporter, spent years in a war-crimes zone of the past to produce his
> award-winning book, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in
> Vietnam. It was a harrowing historical journey for which he traveled to
> small villages on the back roads of Vietnam to talk to those who had
> experienced horrific crimes decades earlier. In 2015, however, on his
> second
> trip to South Sudan, a country the U.S. helped bring into existence, he
> found himself in an almost unimaginable place where the same kinds of war
> crimes were being committed right then and there in a commonplace way,
> where
> violence was the coin of the realm, and horrors of various sorts were
> almost
> guaranteed to be around the next corner. In his new book, he brings us with
> him into such a world in a way that is deeply memorable. Ann Jones, author
> of They Were Soldiers, calls him "the wandering scribe of war crimes." And
> she adds, "Reading Turse will turn your view of war upside down... There's
> no glory here in Turse's pages, but the clear voices of people caught up in
> this fruitless cruelty, speaking for themselves."
> Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead is, I think, the definition of an
> act of generosity. Nick has just returned from his latest trip to South
> Sudan and today's post gives you a sense of the ongoing brutalities and
> incongruities of life there (and here as well). Tom
> Donald Trump in South Sudan
> What Trumps the Horrors of a Hellscape? The Donald!
> By Nick Turse
> LEER, South Sudan -- I'm sitting in the dark, sweating. The blinding white
> sun has long since set, but it's still in the high 90s, which is a relief
> since it was above 110 earlier. Slumped in a blue plastic chair, I'm
> thinking back on the day, trying to process everything I saw, the people I
> spoke with: the woman whose home was burned down, the woman whose teenage
> daughter was shot and killed, the woman with 10 mouths to feed and no
> money,
> the glassy-eyed soldier with the AK-47.
> Then there were the scorched ruins: the wrecked houses, the traditional
> wattle-and-daub tukuls without roofs, the spectral footprints of homes set
> aflame by armed raiders who swept through in successive waves, the remnants
> of a town that has ceased to exist.
> And, of course, there were the human remains: a field of scattered skulls
> and femurs and ribs and pelvises and spinal columns.
> And I'm sitting here -- spent, sweaty, stinking -- trying to make sense of
> it all about 10 feet from a sandbagged bunker I'm supposed to jump into if
> the shooting starts again. "It's one of the worse places in the world,"
> someone had assured me before I left South Sudan's capital, Juba, for this
> hellscape of burnt-out buildings and unburied bones that goes by the name
> of
> Leer.
> A lantern on a nearby table casts a dim glow on an approaching aid worker,
> an African with a deep knowledge of this place. He's come to fetch his
> dinner. I'm hoping to corral him and pick his brain about the men who
> torched this town, burned people alive, beat and murdered civilians,
> abducted, raped, and enslaved women and children, looted and pillaged and
> stole.
> Before I can say a word, he beats me to the punch with his own set of
> rapid-fire questions: "This man called Trump -- what's going on with him?
> Who's voting for him? Are you voting for him?" He then proceeds to tell me
> everything he's heard about the Republican frontrunner -- how Trump is
> tarnishing America's global image, how he can't believe the things Trump
> says about women and immigrants.
> Here, where catastrophic food insecurity may tip into starvation at any
> time, where armed men still arrive in the night to steal and rape. ("They
> could come any night. You might even hear them tonight. You'll hear the
> women screaming," another aid worker told me earlier in the day.) Here,
> where horrors abound, this man wants -- seemingly needs -- to know if
> Donald
> Trump could actually be elected president of the United States. "I'm really
> afraid," he says of the prospect without a hint of irony.
> Of Midwifery and Militias
> After decades of effort, the United States "helped midwife the birth" of
> the
> Republic of South Sudan, according to then-Senator, now Secretary of State
> John Kerry. In reality, for the South Sudanese to win their independence it
> took two brutal conflicts with Sudan, the first of which raged from 1955 to
> 1972, and the second from 1983 to 2005, leaving millions dead and
> displaced.
> Still, it is true that for more than 20 years, a bipartisan coalition in
> Washington and beyond championed the southern rebels, and that, as the new
> nation broke away from Sudan, the U.S. poured in billions of dollars in
> aid,
> including hundreds of millions of dollars of military and security
> assistance.
> The world's youngest nation, South Sudan gained its independence in 2011
> and
> just two and a half years later plunged into civil war. Since then, an
> estimated 50,000 to 300,000 people have been killed in a conflict pitting
> President Salva Kiir, a member of the country's largest tribe, the Dinka,
> against Riek Machar, an ethnic Nuer and the vice president he sacked in
> July
> 2013. That December, a fight between Dinka and Nuer troops set off the
> current crisis, which then turned into a slaughter of Nuers by Kiir's
> forces
> in Juba. Reprisals followed as Machar's men took their revenge on Dinkas
> and
> other non-Nuers in towns like Bor and Bentiu. The conflict soon spread,
> splintering into local wars within the larger war and birthing other
> violence that even a peace deal signed last August and Machar's recent
> return to the government has been unable to halt.
> The signature feature of this civil war has been its preferred target:
> civilians. It has been marked by massacres, mass rape, sexual slavery,
> assaults of every sort, extrajudicial killings, forced displacement of
> local
> populations, disappearances, abductions, torture, mutilations, the
> wholesale
> destruction of villages, pillaging, looting, and a host of other crimes.
> Again and again, armed men have fallen upon towns and villages filled with
> noncombatants. That's exactly what happened to Leer in 2015. Militias
> allied
> with the government, in coordination with Kiir's troops -- the Sudan
> People's Liberation Army, or SPLA -- attacked the town and nearby villages
> again and again. Rebel forces fled in the face of the government onslaught.
> Fearing execution, many men fled as well. Women stayed behind, caring for
> children, the sick, and the elderly. There was an assumption that they
> would
> be spared. They weren't. Old men were killed in their homes that were then
> set ablaze. Women were gang raped. Others were taken away as sex slaves.
> Whole villages were razed. Survivors were chased into the nearby swamps,
> tracked down, and executed. Children drowned in the chaos.
> Those who lived through it spent months in those waterlogged swamps, eating
> water lily bulbs. When they returned home, they were confronted yet again
> by
> pitiless armed men who, at gunpoint, took what meager belongings they had
> left, sometimes the very clothes off children's backs.
> This is a story that ought to be told and told and retold. And yet here in
> Leer, like everywhere I went in South Sudan, I couldn't get away from
> Donald
> Trump. So many -- South Sudanese, Americans, Canadians, Europeans -- seemed
> to want to talk about him. Even in this ruined shell of a town, Trump was
> big news.
> The "Endorsement" Heard Round the World
> Back in Juba, I settle down in the shade of my hotel's bar on a Saturday
> morning to read the Daily Vision. In that newspaper, there's a story about
> the dire economic straits the country finds itself in and the violence it's
> breeding, as well as one about violations of the 2015 peace pact. And then
> there's this gem of a headline: "Nobody Likes Donald Trump. Not Even White
> Men."
> http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608466485/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
> http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608466485/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20A fair
> number of South Sudanese men I ran into, however, did like him. "He mixes
> it
> up," one told me, lauding Trump's business acumen. "At least he speaks his
> mind. He's not afraid to say things that people do not want to hear," said
> another. I heard such comments in Juba and beyond. It leaves you with the
> impression that if his campaign hits rough shoals in the U.S., Trump might
> still have a political future in South Sudan. After all, this is a country
> currently led by a brash, cowboy-hat-wearing former guerrilla who mixes it
> up and is certainly not afraid to speak his mind even when it comes to
> threatening members of the press with death.
> Compared to Kiir, who stands accused by the United Nations of war crimes,
> Trump looks tame indeed. The Republican candidate has only threatened to
> weaken First Amendment protections in order to make it easier to sue, not
> kill, reporters. Still, the two leaders do seem like-minded on a number of
> issues. Kiir's government, for example, is implicated in all manner of
> atrocities, including torture, which Trump has shown an eagerness to employ
> as a punishment in Washington's war on terror. Trump has also expressed a
> willingness to target not only those deemed terrorists, but also their
> families. Kiir's forces have done just that, attacking noncombatants
> suspected of sympathizing with the rebels, as they did during the sack of
> Leer.
> So it didn't come as a surprise when, in March, the Sudan Tribune -- a
> popular Paris-based website covering South Sudan and Sudan -- reported that
> Salva Kiir had endorsed Trump. It even provided readers with the official
> statement issued by Kiir's office after his phone call with the U.S.
> presidential candidate: "Donald Trump is a true, hard-working, no-nonsense
> American who, when he becomes president, will support South Sudan in its
> democratic path and stability. South Sudan, the world newest nations [sic],
> is also looking forward to Donald Trump's support and investment in almost
> all the sectors." Trump, said the Tribune, "expressed his thanks for the
> endorsement and said he will send his top aides to the country to discuss
> further the investment opportunities."
> It turned out, however, that the Tribune had been taken in by a local
> satirical news site, Saakam -- the Onion of South Sudan -- whose tagline is
> "Breaking news like it never happened." That the Tribune was fooled by the
> story is not as strange as it might first seem. As journalist Jason
> Patinkin
> observed in Quartz, "Kiir's reputation is such that many Africa watchers
> and
> journalists found the story plausible."
> I, for one, hadn't even bothered to read the Tribune article. The title
> told
> me all I needed to know. It sounded like classic Kiir. I almost wondered
> what had taken him so long to reach out. But South Sudan's foreign ministry
> assured Patinkin, "There is no truth to [the story] whatsoever."
> For now, at least.
> Will He Win?
> There's a fever-dream, schizophrenic quality to the war in South Sudan. The
> conflict began in an orgy of violence, then ebbed, only to flare again and
> again. As the war has ground on, new groups have emerged, and alliances
> have
> formed while others broke down. Commanders switch sides, militias change
> allegiances. In 2014, for example, Brigadier General Lul Ruai Koang, the
> rebel army's spokesman, called out the SPLA for "committing crimes against
> humanity." Kiir, he said, had lost control of his forces and had become
> little more than a puppet of his Ugandan backers. Last year, Lul split from
> Machar to form the "South Sudan Resistance Movement/Army" -- an
> organization
> that attracted few followers. This year, he found a new job, as the
> spokesman for the military he once cast as criminal. "I promise to defend
> SPLA in Media Warfare until the last drop of blood," he wrote in a Facebook
> post after being tapped by Kiir. Of course, Machar himself has just
> recently
> returned to Juba to serve as first vice-president to Kiir.
> In a country like this, enmeshed in a war like this, it's hardly surprising
> that ceasefires have meant little and violence has ground on even after a
> peace deal was signed last August. Leer was just one of the spots where
> atrocities continued despite the pact that "ended" the conflict.
> More recently, the war -- or rather the various sub-conflicts it's spawned,
> along with other armed violence -- has spread to previously peaceful areas
> of the country. Cattle-raiding, a long-standing cultural practice, now
> supercharged by modern weaponry and military-style tactics, has proven
> increasingly lethal to communities nationwide, and has recently even bled
> across the border into Ethiopia. A South Sudanese raid into that country's
> Gambela region last month killed 208 Ethiopians, and the attackers abducted
> 108 women and children while stealing more than 2,000 head of cattle.
> While in Leer, I do end up talking at length with the Trump-intrigued aid
> worker about local cattle-raiding, as well as the killings, the rapes, and
> the widespread looting. I was always, however, aware that, like many other
> foreign aid workers and locals I meet, what he really wanted was an
> American
> take on the man presently dominating U.S. politics, an explanation of the
> larger-than-life and stranger-than-life figure who, even in South Sudan,
> has
> the ability to suck the air out of any room.
> "This Trump. He's a crazy man!" he tells me as we sit together beneath an
> obsidian sky now thick with stars. He reminds me that he's not authorized
> by
> his employer to speak on the record. I nod. Then he adds incredulously, "He
> says some things and you wonder: Are you going to be president? Really?!"
> A couple of other people are around us now, eating dinner after a long,
> sweltering day. They, too, join in the conversation, looking to me for
> answers. I find myself at a loss. Here, in this place of acute hunger
> ever-teetering on the brink of famine, here, a short walk from homes that
> are little more than hovels, where children go naked, women wear dresses
> that are essentially rags, and a mother's dream is to lay her hands on a
> sheet of plastic to provide protection from the coming rains, I do my best
> to explain seething white male anger in America over "economic
> disenfranchisement," "losing out," and being "left behind," over Donald
> Trump's channeling of "America's economic rage." I'm disgusted even
> articulating these sentiments after spending the day speaking to people
> whose suffering is as unfathomable in America as America's wealth is
> unimaginable here.
> Some of Leer's women fled with their children into the nearby swamps when
> armed men swept in. Imagine running blind, in the black of night, into such
> a swamp. Imagine tripping, falling, losing your grip on a small child's
> hand
> as shots ring out. Imagine that child stumbling into water too deep for her
> to stand. Imagine slapping frantically at that water, disoriented, spinning
> in the darkness, desperate to find a child who can't swim, who's slipped
> beneath the surface, who is suddenly gone.
> And now imagine me trying to talk about the worries of Trump supporters
> "that their kids won't have a chance to get ahead."
> I really don't want to say any more. I don't want to try to make sense of
> it
> or try to explain why so many Americans are so enraged at their lot and so
> enthralled with Donald Trump.
> The aid worker lets me off the hook with another assessment of the
> Republican candidate. "Things he says, they are very awkward. When he says
> those things, you think: He's crazy. How can he be a presidential
> candidate?"
> How to respond? I'm at a loss.
> "If he wins the election, America will not have the influence it's had," he
> says.
> Maybe that's not such a bad thing, I counter. Maybe not having such
> influence would be good for the world.
> It's the truth. It also completely misses the point. Even here, even as I'm
> revolted by talking about America's "problems" amid the horrors of Leer,
> I'm
> still looking at things from a distinctly American vantage point. I'm
> talking about theoretically diminished U.S. power and what that might mean
> for the planet, but come 2017 he's going to be out in the thick of it, in
> this or some other desperate place, and he's obviously worried about what
> the foreign policy of Donald Trump's America is going to mean for him, for
> Africa, for the world.
> I go silent. He goes silent. Another aid worker has been listening in,
> piping up intermittently between mouthfuls of rice and goat meat. "So is he
> going to win?" he asks me.
> I look over at him and half-shrug. Everyone, I say, thought Trump was going
> to flame out long ago. And I stop there. I'm too spent to talk Trump
> anymore. I don't have any answers.
> My companion looks back at me and breaks his silence. "It can't happen, can
> it?"
> Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch and a fellow at the Nation
> Institute. An award-winning investigative journalist, he has written for
> the
> New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Nation, and is a
> contributing
> writer for the Intercept. His latest book is Next Time They'll Come to
> Count
> the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan. His website is NickTurse.com.
> Reporting for this story was made possible through the generous support of
> Lannan Foundation.
> Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
> Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
> Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
> Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
> Single-Superpower World.
> Copyright 2016 Nick Turse
> C 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
> View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176135
>
>
>
>
>
>
"It Can't Happen Here, Can It?"
Monday, May 2, 2016
New Study Shows Mass Surveillance Breeds Meekness, Fear and Self-Censorship
From: Carl Jarvis <carjar82@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 2 May 2016 08:16:01 -0700
Subject: Re: [blind-democracy] New Study Shows Mass Surveillance
Breeds Meekness, Fear and Self-Censorship
To: blind-democracy@freelists.org
Gosh and Golly Gee! Does it really take an empirical study to confirm
something we already know? I remember one of my Social Psych classes
talked about Empirical Findings that proved marriage is more apt to
occur among people living in close proximity to one another.
Do you think?
I suppose that empirical studies are one way of causing people to
pause and think about those forces that control our lives. Maybe we
Americans are too busy these days, running madly on the Treadmill of
Life, just trying to stay even, to find time to pause and question
some of the weird pressures that mold our society.
Intimidation is the cornerstone in a government's program of
population control. That is true because intimidation is used across
our Land as a basic tool. Parents intimidate their young with threats
of corporal punishment if they behave outside their family's norms.
The boss intimidates us by holding the power to fire us if we fail to
follow his business policies. God will punish us if we fail to
worship him. And of course, every denomination has the inside word on
just how that worship must be conducted. To do otherwise will bring
eternal Fire and Brimstone.
My elder sister learned at a very early age that she could control her
little brother and sister by threatening to tattle about some misdeed
or other that we'd done.
An even better example was the reaction of the employees, once my
friends and co-workers, when I was actively attempting to organize the
factory where I worked. The word went out that anyone thinking that
they were going to have a union in their future, would be pounding the
pavement looking for another job. Out of about 120 employees, only
five of us had the nerve to stand against the intimidation by the
boss.
When I told my Pastor that I was not only leaving my wife of ten
years, but that I was also leaving religion, because I no longer
feared the wrath of a God whom I no longer believed existed, my pastor
wept shamelessly. He begged me to reconsider, because he did not want
to see me burn in Hell. But I told him that Hell was a place I no
longer believed existed. This Man of God honestly believed Satan had
taken control of my life. But in fact, from where I saw things, it
was he, my pastor, who was controlled by intimidation. But because he
did not dare to challenge the belief that had been pounded into his
brain, he would never see how thoroughly his life was controlled by
fear and intimidation.
For sure, in the years that followed my dismissal of God, I have found
myself confronted by intimidation. Each time I felt that pressure, I
had to weigh the pros and cons, and decide if I could stand against
it, or if I was in a better place by accepting it.
But in "going along", I vowed to never violate one of my basic values.
But of course I could not know if I was violating my basic values, or
not, if I had not slowed down and thought about them.
We are encouraged by our fast paced society, to focus our attention
outward, rather than looking within. But unless we question every
action or belief, we can never be sure, never really know what is
driving us.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/2/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>
> Greenwald writes: "A newly published study from Oxford's Jon Penney
> provides
> empirical evidence for a key argument long made by privacy advocates: that
> the mere existence of a surveillance state breeds fear and conformity and
> stifles free expression."
>
> A Man uses a cell phone. (photo: Francisco Seco/AP)
>
>
> New Study Shows Mass Surveillance Breeds Meekness, Fear and Self-Censorship
> By Glenn Greenwald, the Intercept
> 01 May 16
>
> A newly published study from Oxford's Jon Penney provides empirical
> evidence
> for a kiy argument long made by privacy advocates: that the mere existence
> of a surveillance state breeds fear and conformity and stifles free
> expression. Reporting on the study, the Washington Post this morning
> described this phenomenon: "If we think that authorities are watching our
> online actions, we might stop visiting certain websites or not say certain
> things just to avoid seeming suspicious."
> The new study documents how, in the wake of the 2013 Snowden revelations
> (of
> which 87% of Americans were aware), there was "a 20 percent decline in page
> views on Wikipedia articles related to terrorism, including those that
> mentioned 'al-Qaeda,' "car bomb' or 'Taliban.'" People were afraid to read
> articles about those topics because of fear that doing so would bring them
> under a cloud of suspicion. The dangers of that dynamic were expressed well
> by Penney: "If people are spooked or deterred from learning about important
> policy matters like terrorism and national security, this is a real threat
> to proper democratic debate."
> As the Post explains, several other studies have also demonstrated how mass
> surveillance crushes free expression and free thought. A 2015 study
> examined
> Google search data and demonstrated that, post-Snowden, "users were less
> likely to search using search terms that they believed might get them in
> trouble with the US government" and that these "results suggest that there
> is a chilling effect on search behavior from government surveillance on the
> Internet."
> The fear that causes self-censorship is well beyond the realm of theory.
> Ample evidence demonstrates that it's real - and rational. A study from PEN
> America writers found that 1 in 6 writers had curbed their content out of
> fear of surveillance and showed that writers are "not only overwhelmingly
> worried about government surveillance, but are engaging in self-censorship
> as a result." Scholars in Europe have been accused of being terrorist
> supporters by virtue of possessing research materials on extremist groups,
> while British libraries refuse to house any material on the Taliban for
> fear
> of being prosecuted for material support for terrorism.
> There are also numerous psychological studies demonstrating that people who
> believe they are being watched engage in behavior far more compliant,
> conformist and submissive than those who believe they are acting without
> monitoring. That same realization served centuries ago as the foundation of
> Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon: that behaviors of large groups of people can
> be
> effectively controlled through architectural structures that make it
> possible for them to be watched at any given movement even though they can
> never know if they are, in fact, being monitored, thus forcing them to act
> as if they always are being watched. This same self-censorsing, chilling
> effect of the potential of being surveilled was also the crux of the
> tyranny
> about which Orwell warned in 1984:
> There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any
> given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in
> on
> any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they
> watched
> everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire
> whenever they wanted to. You have to live - did live, from habit that
> became
> instinct - in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and,
> except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
> This is a critical though elusive point which, as the Post notes, I've been
> arguing for years, including in the 2014 TED talk I gave about the harms of
> privacy erosions. But one of my first visceral encounters with this harmful
> dynamic arose years before I worked on NSA disclosures: it occurred in
> 2010,
> the first time I ever wrote about WikiLeaks. This was before any of the
> group's most famous publications.
> What prompted my writing about WikiLeaks back then was a secret 2008
> Pentagon Report that declared the then-little-known group a threat to
> national security and plotted how to destroy it: a report which, ironically
> enough, was leaked to WikiLeaks, which then published it online. (Shortly
> thereafter, WikiLeaks published a 2008 CIA report describing (presciently,
> it turns out) how the best hope for maintaining popular European support
> for
> the war in Afghanistan would be the election of Barack Obama as President:
> since he would put a pretty, popular, progressive face on war policies.)
> As a result of that 2008 report, I researched WikiLeaks and interviewed its
> founder, Julian Assange, and found that they had been engaging in vital
> transparency projects around the world: from exposing illegal corporate
> waste-dumping in East Africa to political corruption and official lies in
> Australia. But they had one significant problem: funding and human resource
> shortfalls were preventing them from processing and publishing numerous
> leaks. So I wrote an article describing their work, and recommended that my
> readers support that work either by donating or volunteering. And I
> included
> links for how they could do so.
> In response, a large number of American readers expressed - in emails, in
> the comment section, at public events - the fear to me that, while they
> support WikiLeaks' work, they were petrified that supporting them would
> cause them to end up on a government list somewhere or, worse, charged with
> crimes if WikiLeaks ended up being formally charged as a national security
> threat. In other words, these were Americans who were voluntarily
> relinquishing core civil liberties - the right to support journalism they
> believe in and to politically organize - because of fear that their online
> donations and work would be monitored and surveilled. Subsequent
> revelations
> showing persecution and surveillance against WikiLeaks and its supporters,
> including an effort to prosecute them for their journalism, proved that
> these fears were quite rational.
> There is a reason governments, corporations, and multiple other entities of
> authority crave surveillance. It's precisely because the possibility of
> being monitored radically changes individual and collective behavior.
> Specifically, that possibility breeds fear and fosters collective
> conformity. That's always been intuitively clear. Now, there is mounting
> empirical evidence proving it.
>
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not
> valid.
>
> A Man uses a cell phone. (photo: Francisco Seco/AP)
> https://theintercept.com/2016/04/28/new-study-shows-mass-surveillance-breeds
> -meekness-fear-and-self-censorship/https://theintercept.com/2016/04/28/new-s
> tudy-shows-mass-surveillance-breeds-meekness-fear-and-self-censorship/
> New Study Shows Mass Surveillance Breeds Meekness, Fear and Self-Censorship
> By Glenn Greenwald, the Intercept
> 01 May 16
> newly published study from Oxford's Jon Penney provides empirical evidence
> for a key argument long made by privacy advocates: that the mere existence
> of a surveillance state breeds fear and conformity and stifles free
> expression. Reporting on the study, the Washington Post this morning
> described this phenomenon: "If we think that authorities are watching our
> online actions, we might stop visiting certain websites or not say certain
> things just to avoid seeming suspicious."
> The new study documents how, in the wake of the 2013 Snowden revelations
> (of
> which 87% of Americans were aware), there was "a 20 percent decline in page
> views on Wikipedia articles related to terrorism, including those that
> mentioned 'al-Qaeda,' "car bomb' or 'Taliban.'" People were afraid to read
> articles about those topics because of fear that doing so would bring them
> under a cloud of suspicion. The dangers of that dynamic were expressed well
> by Penney: "If people are spooked or deterred from learning about important
> policy matters like terrorism and national security, this is a real threat
> to proper democratic debate."
> As the Post explains, several other studies have also demonstrated how mass
> surveillance crushes free expression and free thought. A 2015 study
> examined
> Google search data and demonstrated that, post-Snowden, "users were less
> likely to search using search terms that they believed might get them in
> trouble with the US government" and that these "results suggest that there
> is a chilling effect on search behavior from government surveillance on the
> Internet."
> The fear that causes self-censorship is well beyond the realm of theory.
> Ample evidence demonstrates that it's real - and rational. A study from PEN
> America writers found that 1 in 6 writers had curbed their content out of
> fear of surveillance and showed that writers are "not only overwhelmingly
> worried about government surveillance, but are engaging in self-censorship
> as a result." Scholars in Europe have been accused of being terrorist
> supporters by virtue of possessing research materials on extremist groups,
> while British libraries refuse to house any material on the Taliban for
> fear
> of being prosecuted for material support for terrorism.
> There are also numerous psychological studies demonstrating that people who
> believe they are being watched engage in behavior far more compliant,
> conformist and submissive than those who believe they are acting without
> monitoring. That same realization served centuries ago as the foundation of
> Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon: that behaviors of large groups of people can
> be
> effectively controlled through architectural structures that make it
> possible for them to be watched at any given movement even though they can
> never know if they are, in fact, being monitored, thus forcing them to act
> as if they always are being watched. This same self-censorsing, chilling
> effect of the potential of being surveilled was also the crux of the
> tyranny
> about which Orwell warned in 1984:
> There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any
> given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in
> on
> any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they
> watched
> everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire
> whenever they wanted to. You have to live - did live, from habit that
> became
> instinct - in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and,
> except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
> This is a critical though elusive point which, as the Post notes, I've been
> arguing for years, including in the 2014 TED talk I gave about the harms of
> privacy erosions. But one of my first visceral encounters with this harmful
> dynamic arose years before I worked on NSA disclosures: it occurred in
> 2010,
> the first time I ever wrote about WikiLeaks. This was before any of the
> group's most famous publications.
> What prompted my writing about WikiLeaks back then was a secret 2008
> Pentagon Report that declared the then-little-known group a threat to
> national security and plotted how to destroy it: a report which, ironically
> enough, was leaked to WikiLeaks, which then published it online. (Shortly
> thereafter, WikiLeaks published a 2008 CIA report describing (presciently,
> it turns out) how the best hope for maintaining popular European support
> for
> the war in Afghanistan would be the election of Barack Obama as President:
> since he would put a pretty, popular, progressive face on war policies.)
> As a result of that 2008 report, I researched WikiLeaks and interviewed its
> founder, Julian Assange, and found that they had been engaging in vital
> transparency projects around the world: from exposing illegal corporate
> waste-dumping in East Africa to political corruption and official lies in
> Australia. But they had one significant problem: funding and human resource
> shortfalls were preventing them from processing and publishing numerous
> leaks. So I wrote an article describing their work, and recommended that my
> readers support that work either by donating or volunteering. And I
> included
> links for how they could do so.
> In response, a large number of American readers expressed - in emails, in
> the comment section, at public events - the fear to me that, while they
> support WikiLeaks' work, they were petrified that supporting them would
> cause them to end up on a government list somewhere or, worse, charged with
> crimes if WikiLeaks ended up being formally charged as a national security
> threat. In other words, these were Americans who were voluntarily
> relinquishing core civil liberties - the right to support journalism they
> believe in and to politically organize - because of fear that their online
> donations and work would be monitored and surveilled. Subsequent
> revelations
> showing persecution and surveillance against WikiLeaks and its supporters,
> including an effort to prosecute them for their journalism, proved that
> these fears were quite rational.
> There is a reason governments, corporations, and multiple other entities of
> authority crave surveillance. It's precisely because the possibility of
> being monitored radically changes individual and collective behavior.
> Specifically, that possibility breeds fear and fosters collective
> conformity. That's always been intuitively clear. Now, there is mounting
> empirical evidence proving it.
> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
>
>
>
Date: Mon, 2 May 2016 08:16:01 -0700
Subject: Re: [blind-democracy] New Study Shows Mass Surveillance
Breeds Meekness, Fear and Self-Censorship
To: blind-democracy@freelists.org
Gosh and Golly Gee! Does it really take an empirical study to confirm
something we already know? I remember one of my Social Psych classes
talked about Empirical Findings that proved marriage is more apt to
occur among people living in close proximity to one another.
Do you think?
I suppose that empirical studies are one way of causing people to
pause and think about those forces that control our lives. Maybe we
Americans are too busy these days, running madly on the Treadmill of
Life, just trying to stay even, to find time to pause and question
some of the weird pressures that mold our society.
Intimidation is the cornerstone in a government's program of
population control. That is true because intimidation is used across
our Land as a basic tool. Parents intimidate their young with threats
of corporal punishment if they behave outside their family's norms.
The boss intimidates us by holding the power to fire us if we fail to
follow his business policies. God will punish us if we fail to
worship him. And of course, every denomination has the inside word on
just how that worship must be conducted. To do otherwise will bring
eternal Fire and Brimstone.
My elder sister learned at a very early age that she could control her
little brother and sister by threatening to tattle about some misdeed
or other that we'd done.
An even better example was the reaction of the employees, once my
friends and co-workers, when I was actively attempting to organize the
factory where I worked. The word went out that anyone thinking that
they were going to have a union in their future, would be pounding the
pavement looking for another job. Out of about 120 employees, only
five of us had the nerve to stand against the intimidation by the
boss.
When I told my Pastor that I was not only leaving my wife of ten
years, but that I was also leaving religion, because I no longer
feared the wrath of a God whom I no longer believed existed, my pastor
wept shamelessly. He begged me to reconsider, because he did not want
to see me burn in Hell. But I told him that Hell was a place I no
longer believed existed. This Man of God honestly believed Satan had
taken control of my life. But in fact, from where I saw things, it
was he, my pastor, who was controlled by intimidation. But because he
did not dare to challenge the belief that had been pounded into his
brain, he would never see how thoroughly his life was controlled by
fear and intimidation.
For sure, in the years that followed my dismissal of God, I have found
myself confronted by intimidation. Each time I felt that pressure, I
had to weigh the pros and cons, and decide if I could stand against
it, or if I was in a better place by accepting it.
But in "going along", I vowed to never violate one of my basic values.
But of course I could not know if I was violating my basic values, or
not, if I had not slowed down and thought about them.
We are encouraged by our fast paced society, to focus our attention
outward, rather than looking within. But unless we question every
action or belief, we can never be sure, never really know what is
driving us.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/2/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>
> Greenwald writes: "A newly published study from Oxford's Jon Penney
> provides
> empirical evidence for a key argument long made by privacy advocates: that
> the mere existence of a surveillance state breeds fear and conformity and
> stifles free expression."
>
> A Man uses a cell phone. (photo: Francisco Seco/AP)
>
>
> New Study Shows Mass Surveillance Breeds Meekness, Fear and Self-Censorship
> By Glenn Greenwald, the Intercept
> 01 May 16
>
> A newly published study from Oxford's Jon Penney provides empirical
> evidence
> for a kiy argument long made by privacy advocates: that the mere existence
> of a surveillance state breeds fear and conformity and stifles free
> expression. Reporting on the study, the Washington Post this morning
> described this phenomenon: "If we think that authorities are watching our
> online actions, we might stop visiting certain websites or not say certain
> things just to avoid seeming suspicious."
> The new study documents how, in the wake of the 2013 Snowden revelations
> (of
> which 87% of Americans were aware), there was "a 20 percent decline in page
> views on Wikipedia articles related to terrorism, including those that
> mentioned 'al-Qaeda,' "car bomb' or 'Taliban.'" People were afraid to read
> articles about those topics because of fear that doing so would bring them
> under a cloud of suspicion. The dangers of that dynamic were expressed well
> by Penney: "If people are spooked or deterred from learning about important
> policy matters like terrorism and national security, this is a real threat
> to proper democratic debate."
> As the Post explains, several other studies have also demonstrated how mass
> surveillance crushes free expression and free thought. A 2015 study
> examined
> Google search data and demonstrated that, post-Snowden, "users were less
> likely to search using search terms that they believed might get them in
> trouble with the US government" and that these "results suggest that there
> is a chilling effect on search behavior from government surveillance on the
> Internet."
> The fear that causes self-censorship is well beyond the realm of theory.
> Ample evidence demonstrates that it's real - and rational. A study from PEN
> America writers found that 1 in 6 writers had curbed their content out of
> fear of surveillance and showed that writers are "not only overwhelmingly
> worried about government surveillance, but are engaging in self-censorship
> as a result." Scholars in Europe have been accused of being terrorist
> supporters by virtue of possessing research materials on extremist groups,
> while British libraries refuse to house any material on the Taliban for
> fear
> of being prosecuted for material support for terrorism.
> There are also numerous psychological studies demonstrating that people who
> believe they are being watched engage in behavior far more compliant,
> conformist and submissive than those who believe they are acting without
> monitoring. That same realization served centuries ago as the foundation of
> Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon: that behaviors of large groups of people can
> be
> effectively controlled through architectural structures that make it
> possible for them to be watched at any given movement even though they can
> never know if they are, in fact, being monitored, thus forcing them to act
> as if they always are being watched. This same self-censorsing, chilling
> effect of the potential of being surveilled was also the crux of the
> tyranny
> about which Orwell warned in 1984:
> There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any
> given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in
> on
> any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they
> watched
> everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire
> whenever they wanted to. You have to live - did live, from habit that
> became
> instinct - in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and,
> except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
> This is a critical though elusive point which, as the Post notes, I've been
> arguing for years, including in the 2014 TED talk I gave about the harms of
> privacy erosions. But one of my first visceral encounters with this harmful
> dynamic arose years before I worked on NSA disclosures: it occurred in
> 2010,
> the first time I ever wrote about WikiLeaks. This was before any of the
> group's most famous publications.
> What prompted my writing about WikiLeaks back then was a secret 2008
> Pentagon Report that declared the then-little-known group a threat to
> national security and plotted how to destroy it: a report which, ironically
> enough, was leaked to WikiLeaks, which then published it online. (Shortly
> thereafter, WikiLeaks published a 2008 CIA report describing (presciently,
> it turns out) how the best hope for maintaining popular European support
> for
> the war in Afghanistan would be the election of Barack Obama as President:
> since he would put a pretty, popular, progressive face on war policies.)
> As a result of that 2008 report, I researched WikiLeaks and interviewed its
> founder, Julian Assange, and found that they had been engaging in vital
> transparency projects around the world: from exposing illegal corporate
> waste-dumping in East Africa to political corruption and official lies in
> Australia. But they had one significant problem: funding and human resource
> shortfalls were preventing them from processing and publishing numerous
> leaks. So I wrote an article describing their work, and recommended that my
> readers support that work either by donating or volunteering. And I
> included
> links for how they could do so.
> In response, a large number of American readers expressed - in emails, in
> the comment section, at public events - the fear to me that, while they
> support WikiLeaks' work, they were petrified that supporting them would
> cause them to end up on a government list somewhere or, worse, charged with
> crimes if WikiLeaks ended up being formally charged as a national security
> threat. In other words, these were Americans who were voluntarily
> relinquishing core civil liberties - the right to support journalism they
> believe in and to politically organize - because of fear that their online
> donations and work would be monitored and surveilled. Subsequent
> revelations
> showing persecution and surveillance against WikiLeaks and its supporters,
> including an effort to prosecute them for their journalism, proved that
> these fears were quite rational.
> There is a reason governments, corporations, and multiple other entities of
> authority crave surveillance. It's precisely because the possibility of
> being monitored radically changes individual and collective behavior.
> Specifically, that possibility breeds fear and fosters collective
> conformity. That's always been intuitively clear. Now, there is mounting
> empirical evidence proving it.
>
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not
> valid.
>
> A Man uses a cell phone. (photo: Francisco Seco/AP)
> https://theintercept.com/2016/04/28/new-study-shows-mass-surveillance-breeds
> -meekness-fear-and-self-censorship/https://theintercept.com/2016/04/28/new-s
> tudy-shows-mass-surveillance-breeds-meekness-fear-and-self-censorship/
> New Study Shows Mass Surveillance Breeds Meekness, Fear and Self-Censorship
> By Glenn Greenwald, the Intercept
> 01 May 16
> newly published study from Oxford's Jon Penney provides empirical evidence
> for a key argument long made by privacy advocates: that the mere existence
> of a surveillance state breeds fear and conformity and stifles free
> expression. Reporting on the study, the Washington Post this morning
> described this phenomenon: "If we think that authorities are watching our
> online actions, we might stop visiting certain websites or not say certain
> things just to avoid seeming suspicious."
> The new study documents how, in the wake of the 2013 Snowden revelations
> (of
> which 87% of Americans were aware), there was "a 20 percent decline in page
> views on Wikipedia articles related to terrorism, including those that
> mentioned 'al-Qaeda,' "car bomb' or 'Taliban.'" People were afraid to read
> articles about those topics because of fear that doing so would bring them
> under a cloud of suspicion. The dangers of that dynamic were expressed well
> by Penney: "If people are spooked or deterred from learning about important
> policy matters like terrorism and national security, this is a real threat
> to proper democratic debate."
> As the Post explains, several other studies have also demonstrated how mass
> surveillance crushes free expression and free thought. A 2015 study
> examined
> Google search data and demonstrated that, post-Snowden, "users were less
> likely to search using search terms that they believed might get them in
> trouble with the US government" and that these "results suggest that there
> is a chilling effect on search behavior from government surveillance on the
> Internet."
> The fear that causes self-censorship is well beyond the realm of theory.
> Ample evidence demonstrates that it's real - and rational. A study from PEN
> America writers found that 1 in 6 writers had curbed their content out of
> fear of surveillance and showed that writers are "not only overwhelmingly
> worried about government surveillance, but are engaging in self-censorship
> as a result." Scholars in Europe have been accused of being terrorist
> supporters by virtue of possessing research materials on extremist groups,
> while British libraries refuse to house any material on the Taliban for
> fear
> of being prosecuted for material support for terrorism.
> There are also numerous psychological studies demonstrating that people who
> believe they are being watched engage in behavior far more compliant,
> conformist and submissive than those who believe they are acting without
> monitoring. That same realization served centuries ago as the foundation of
> Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon: that behaviors of large groups of people can
> be
> effectively controlled through architectural structures that make it
> possible for them to be watched at any given movement even though they can
> never know if they are, in fact, being monitored, thus forcing them to act
> as if they always are being watched. This same self-censorsing, chilling
> effect of the potential of being surveilled was also the crux of the
> tyranny
> about which Orwell warned in 1984:
> There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any
> given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in
> on
> any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they
> watched
> everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire
> whenever they wanted to. You have to live - did live, from habit that
> became
> instinct - in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and,
> except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
> This is a critical though elusive point which, as the Post notes, I've been
> arguing for years, including in the 2014 TED talk I gave about the harms of
> privacy erosions. But one of my first visceral encounters with this harmful
> dynamic arose years before I worked on NSA disclosures: it occurred in
> 2010,
> the first time I ever wrote about WikiLeaks. This was before any of the
> group's most famous publications.
> What prompted my writing about WikiLeaks back then was a secret 2008
> Pentagon Report that declared the then-little-known group a threat to
> national security and plotted how to destroy it: a report which, ironically
> enough, was leaked to WikiLeaks, which then published it online. (Shortly
> thereafter, WikiLeaks published a 2008 CIA report describing (presciently,
> it turns out) how the best hope for maintaining popular European support
> for
> the war in Afghanistan would be the election of Barack Obama as President:
> since he would put a pretty, popular, progressive face on war policies.)
> As a result of that 2008 report, I researched WikiLeaks and interviewed its
> founder, Julian Assange, and found that they had been engaging in vital
> transparency projects around the world: from exposing illegal corporate
> waste-dumping in East Africa to political corruption and official lies in
> Australia. But they had one significant problem: funding and human resource
> shortfalls were preventing them from processing and publishing numerous
> leaks. So I wrote an article describing their work, and recommended that my
> readers support that work either by donating or volunteering. And I
> included
> links for how they could do so.
> In response, a large number of American readers expressed - in emails, in
> the comment section, at public events - the fear to me that, while they
> support WikiLeaks' work, they were petrified that supporting them would
> cause them to end up on a government list somewhere or, worse, charged with
> crimes if WikiLeaks ended up being formally charged as a national security
> threat. In other words, these were Americans who were voluntarily
> relinquishing core civil liberties - the right to support journalism they
> believe in and to politically organize - because of fear that their online
> donations and work would be monitored and surveilled. Subsequent
> revelations
> showing persecution and surveillance against WikiLeaks and its supporters,
> including an effort to prosecute them for their journalism, proved that
> these fears were quite rational.
> There is a reason governments, corporations, and multiple other entities of
> authority crave surveillance. It's precisely because the possibility of
> being monitored radically changes individual and collective behavior.
> Specifically, that possibility breeds fear and fosters collective
> conformity. That's always been intuitively clear. Now, there is mounting
> empirical evidence proving it.
> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
>
>
>
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