The ideology of capitalism and free markets reject the need for thought, knowledge, information, and any notion of public life

rob urie in counterpunch...

Occupy is Alive; So is History

Political leadership in the West has calcified atop a set of existing facts and trajectory that assure rebellion in one form or another until they are reconciled. In addition to the economic divides between wealth and poverty, employment and unemployment, opportunity and the lack of opportunity, there is a generational divide that has left youth around the world on the outside of economic life.

[...]

These conditions were not created by the young or by the multitudes that are likewise on the outside of economic and mainstream political life. They result from decades of ideologically driven policies that assumed that the secular deity of markets removed the need for thought, knowledge, information, and any notion of public life. This ideology supports a predatory economic order that has had disastrous consequences for vast majorities in the West. And yet it still drives economic and political decisions today.


[...]


[T]here are entirely practical reasons why rebellion is here to stay until these problems are resolved. What this rebellion will look like will be a function of material conditions as they develop and the systemic response to them. To date this response has been discouraging and events unfolding in Egypt add new degrees of pessimism. This written, rebellion is both necessary and life affirming.

we'll see, i guess...

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Chris Hedges: The fight in Quebec is our fight. Their enemy is our enemy. And their victory is our victory.

i'm encouraged by what's happening in quebec... they are clearly protesting for the same reasons that gave rise to the arab spring, the occupy movement, the student protests in chile and the indignados in spain: the brutal hand of the global corporate state...

chris hedges in truthdig...

The Quebec government, which like the United States’ security and surveillance state is deaf to the pleas for justice and fearful of widespread unrest, has reacted by trying to stamp out the rebellion. It has arrested hundreds of protesters. The government passed Law 78, which makes demonstrations inside or near a college or university campus illegal and outlaws spontaneous demonstrations in the province. It forces those who protest to seek permission from the police and imposes fines of up to $125,000 for organizations that defy the new regulations. This, as with the international Occupy movement, has become a test of wills between a disaffected citizenry and the corporate state. The fight in Quebec is our fight. Their enemy is our enemy. And their victory is our victory
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This sustained resistance is far more effective than a May Day strike. If Canadians can continue to boycott university classrooms, continue to get crowds into the streets and continue to keep the mainstream behind the movement, the government will become weak and isolated. It is worth attempting in the United States.


[...]


The importance of the Occupy movement, and the reason I suspect its encampments were so brutally dismantled by the Obama administration, is that the corporate state understood and feared its potential to spark a popular rebellion. I do not think the state has won. All the injustices and grievances that drove people into the Occupy encampments and onto the streets have been ignored by the state and are getting worse. And we will see eruptions of discontent in the weeks and months ahead.


If these mass protests fail, opposition will inevitably take a frightening turn. The longer we endure political paralysis, the longer the formal mechanisms of power fail to respond, the more the extremists on the left and the right—those who venerate violence and are intolerant of ideological deviations—will be empowered. Under the steady breakdown of globalization, the political environment has become a mound of tinder waiting for a light.

hedges goes on to express his concern that the longer the fundamental issues go unaddressed and the more that protests are suppressed, the greater the likelihood of violence...

The left in times of turmoil always coughs up its own version of the goons on the far right. Black Bloc anarchists within the Occupy movement in the United States, although they remain marginal, replicate the hyper-masculinity, lust for violence and quest for ideological purity of the right while using the language of the left. And they, or a similar configuration, will grow if the center disintegrates.

and that is something i most fervently pray does not happen...

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Glenn: creating a climate of fear so that you know we can do whatever we want to you and no one can stop us

glenn posts this morning on the uc davis atrocity and offers his views on why such barbarity is being employed...

Implanting fear of authorities in the heart of the citizenry is a far more effective means of tyranny than overtly denying rights. That’s exactly what incidents like this [UC Davis] are intended to achieve.

[...]

[T]hey are all about deterring meaningful challenges to those in power through the exercise of basic rights. Rights are so much more effectively destroyed by bullying a citizenry out of wanting to exercise them than any other means.

glenn then includes this video clip of his talk at claremont-mckenna college on 4 november in which he cites the repressive tactics used on bradley manning as a clear example of why such extreme measures are not only being used but widely advertised... the second clip from that talk makes the same point about how effective the demonization of wikileaks has been in stoking fear in the citizenry...





i have to confess that, in the limited exposure i've had while protesting with the occupy movement, i've been acutely aware that, were i to be arrested, it would probably bring to a screeching halt any opportunity i have of gaining fresh contract work in my chosen field of international development... besides making it potentially difficult to pass any background checks, the possibility also exists that i could be placed on various watch lists that could turn entering and leaving the country into a endless nightmare... while i'd like to be able to dismiss such concerns, i cannot help but consider the consequences of having my last few years of earning a living snuffed out by my government...

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For 30 years, your nation financed & supported me, politely overlooking corruption and repression all the while

tom tomorrow strikes again...


Click image for larger version

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Narus, Israeli-founded and now Boeing-owned, rears its ugly head in Egypt

aha... and why are we not surprised...?

timothy karr via the huffpost on narus...

Telecom Egypt, the nation's dominant phone and Internet service provider, is a state-run enterprise, which made it easy on Friday morning for authorities to pull the plug and plunge much of the nation into digital darkness.

Moreover, Egypt also has the ability to spy on Internet and cell phone users, by opening their communication packets and reading their contents. Iran used similar methods during the 2009 unrest to track, imprison and in some cases, "disappear" truckloads of cyber-dissidents.

The companies that profit from sales of this technology need to be held to a higher standard. One in particular is an American firm, Narus of Sunnyvale, Calif., which has sold Telecom Egypt "real-time traffic intelligence" equipment.

Narus, now owned by Boeing, was founded in 1997 by Israeli security experts to create and sell mass surveillance systems for governments and large corporate clients.

The company is best known for creating NarusInsight, a supercomputer system which is allegedly used by the National Security Agency and other entities to perform mass surveillance and monitoring of public and corporate Internet communications in real time.

Narus provides Egypt Telecom with Deep Packet Inspection equipment (DPI), a content-filtering technology that allows network managers to inspect, track and target content from users of the Internet and mobile phones, as it passes through routers on the information superhighway.

Other Narus global customers include the national telecommunications authorities in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia -- two countries that regularly register alongside Egypt near the bottom of Human Rights Watch's world report.

i started posting on narus in 2007 (see my posts here)... it's one of the companies to be most feared in domestic surveillance and, now that it's owned by boeing, means that its power has increased exponentially...

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The Iraq police state testbed... (Be sure to note the choice of words...!)

testbed...

A testbed is a platform for experimentation for large development projects. Testbeds allow for rigorous, transparent and replicable testing of scientific theories, computational tools, and other new technologies.

iraq testbed...

[T]he Bush administration is transforming Iraq into a test tube for modern techniques of repression, which already include use of night-vision optics on drone aircraft, heat resonance imaging, and firepower that is both deadly and precise.

three choices... will it be door number one, door number two, or door number three...?

A war fighter needs to know one of three things: Do I let him go? Keep him? Or shoot him on the spot?

ya gotta love "door number three..."

Though [Pentagon weapons designer Anh] Duong is best known for designing high-explosives used to destroy hardened targets, she also supervised the Joint Expeditionary Forensics Facilities project, known as a “lab in a box” for analyzing biometric data, such as iris scans and fingerprints, that have been collected on more than one million Iraqis.

The labs – collapsible, 20-by-20-foot units each with a generator and a satellite link to a biometric data base in West Virginia – will let U.S. forces cross-check data in the field against information collected previously that can be used to identify insurgents. These labs are expected to be deployed across Iraq in early 2008.

Duong said the next step will be to shrink the lab to the size of a “backpack” so soldiers who encounter a suspect “could find out within minutes” if he’s on a terrorist watch list and should be killed.

Duong justified this biometric-data program as a humanitarian way of singling out “bad guys” for elimination while sparing innocent civilians.

so, howrya likin' it so far...? does it give you that warm, fuzzy feeling, knowing that our government is busy figuring out how to "eliminate" the bad guys...?

oops...! bad reading... sayonara, baby...!

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