Chris Hedges's Blog, page 439

Snooping Through Silicon Valley

“Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley”
Purchase in the Truthdig Bazaar

“Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley”

A book by Corey Pein

Reviewed by Louise Rubacky

In the introduction of the timely and amusingly titled “Live Work Work Work Die,” author Corey Pein notes that his book is “not straightforward journalism, but truthful.” Pein’s “Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley” (the subtitle) conveys empathy for and savviness about his sources, and his self-deprecating tone buoys his claim of honesty. However, he obtained much of his information without telling his interviewees that they were being interviewed for his book, and he assumed everything said to him was on the record. These are unsettling facts to consider when assessing the results of his snoop through the tech sector, which he shows to be more worrying than wonderful.

Pein is a wry and sharp chronicler with a gift for phrasing that strings lights around the absurdities of the gig economy and the belief in Everyman entrepreneurial capacity. But the main title’s promise—or at least, its implication—doesn’t deliver, despite the accompanying, trending emoji graphics. (Though these emojis could illustrate Elon Musk’s trajectory of tech aggression.) There’s no soul stripping, existential reckoning about what lies beneath and beyond so many gauntlets to venture capitalist altars. Rather, the depressing, similar tales of wealth-seeking youth (and their failures to achieve it) in the book’s first two-thirds suddenly give way to a focus on a broader story—the shadowy beginnings and dark underpinnings of powerful tech companies and some of their key people.

It seems counterintuitive as a book structure, but personal journeys attract multigenerational eyes and ears these days, so his being a centerpiece of the narrative may have been Pein’s selling strategy. The reader trails along with him from one free drink dispensary and shared housing disappointment to another, where temporary tenants, pumped on passion for tech success, rarely stop working. Almost everyone we meet has an idea, and seeks investors or well-paid, plentifully perked employment. Arrogance and incompetence seep from the pages, as from the higher math whiz baffled by a simple rice cooker, even though he mostly subsisted on rice. Pein quotes an unnamed Twitterer: “Tech culture is focused on solving one problem: What is my mother no longer doing for me?” Genius does what it must. …

Click here to read long excerpts from “Live Work Work Work Die” at Google Books.

Before getting to that last section on tech’s dungeons and dragons, Pein details his own paces through the pitching-for-dollars process and experience, enlightening readers about subjection to high-roller humiliation. Despite learning, bizarrely, that one doesn’t actually need a Big Idea to find an investor, he develops a doozy called Laborize. His satirical startup would help its customer companies by organizing restive workers of rival companies:

“If Uber could use stealthy labor-organizing-style tactics in its campaign to poach drivers from Lyft, why shouldn’t Lyft retaliate by covertly funding an actual employee union drive at Uber? Come to think of it, why shouldn’t any company that wanted to gain an edge over a competitor do this?”

Illegal and highly unlikely, he takes the idea for several spins around the pitch pit, gets a few laughs, a serious warning, zero dollars, and then joins the other mostly male starters, those who never get far enough to be counted, as part of the 95 percent who fail.

After his fast failure, Pein rents his last and least dismal digs, a backyard tent, and begins ripping back curtains on some of the wizards of Silicon Oz. The quackery is as surreal as the money, and the fact that these stories are not as famous as the many legends about Steve Jobs says much about the levels of risk, reason and sanity in this branch of unbridled capitalism.

Though repellent, I found the stories of structural corruption more forceful than those of individual valley disciples anxious to make their first cool billion. Of course, many go to Silicon Valley for the billions, and the stories are braided. But the broader picture is more pertinent as a warning about tech’s sinister, pernicious capabilities. As recent headline stories have indicated, much of the wrongdoing by its leadership was done knowingly for growth, “sincere” regrets notwithstanding.

Pein lays foretelling groundwork about the missing morals of some of Big Tech winners, starting with little-touted details of Stanford’s ignoble beginnings. Namesake Leland Stanford’s history includes abusing immigrant railway workers. Founding president David Starr Jordan promoted white supremacy in a eugenics pamphlet he authored, and is quoted as having said to the class of 1907, “An aristocracy of brains is the final purpose of democracy.” (There are more Stanford men who favored the non-science of eugenics, which influenced the German Nazi Party.) Pein draws a long line from Stanford’s ugly past to internet platforms featuring today’s burgeoning hate groups.

There are tidbits about early lawbreaking escapades—and the passes they were given—of Google, Apple, Facebook and others. (Pein interviewed no major company founders or CEOs.) For anyone who watches the HBO show “Silicon Valley,” the revelations will not be surprising. If tech titans are updated iterations of personified greed resting on the old idea that one is extraordinary if extraordinarily rich, so what? It’s not as if we all haven’t been warned about money lust before, in many cautionary tales.

What’s different is that our latter-day tech savants also sell themselves as change agent visionaries dusted with heroic magic. Magic properties have long been used in marketing consumer goods, but in the tech world, the seer/founders are marketed, too. Changing the world was their vague promise that became the Kool-Aid cliche, and many enthusiasts swallowed it. (“Change” often sells in politics, too; never mind that it is a term implying no value.) Worse, few “visionaries” were smart enough or wise enough to imagine the potential for diabolical social shifts that were lurking in their designs.

The further I got into the book, the more similarities I found between the web and the Bible, in terms of power—both spread globally, both have been mightily misused to sway and soothe minds, and each arena’s originators couldn’t imagine the destructive potential that might come of obsessive, zealous devotion. That the viral spread of neofascist/neo-reactionary and white supremacist alt-rightism could link to the rise of authoritarian regimes did not occur to some of the most famous top-tier brainiacs, or that exponential damage would parallel customer growth.

Worship of dubious ideas proves as keen as worship of money and wealthy gods. The part of the book covering the Foresight Institute, The Singularity and those connected to it—Ray Kurzweil, Peter Thiel and others—is especially disturbing. Thiel is one of those Valley gods with a flat demeanor and dismissive disdain for diversity, government and nonprofit organizations, contending that the absence of profit as a goal indicates an unwillingness to work hard. (Huh?) Palantir, one of Thiel’s latest endeavors, is a powerful, opaque surveillance data management company whose funds came partially from the CIA’s venture capital front In-Q-Tel. Too bad government is so useless. The inconsistencies and hypocrisies in Thiel’s beliefs and proclamations over the years are striking, but his alliance with the current president makes perfect, if tragic, sense.

A last note about the book: The publisher’s marketing material sells the author as an undercover operative who assumed an entrepreneur identity in order to learn what it’s like in the tech trenches. But it is clear from the beginning of the book that Corey Pein began the project in search of success and wealth for himself. He had tried twice before without hitting it big, but never in Silicon Valley, the biggest tech casino of all. Once there, he awakened to its ruses quickly, and delivers a vital portrait of the culture as well as a significant, if partial, history. So, why the misleading PR? Does it matter? Isn’t all PR misleading? As with Pein’s slippery approach to journalism, answers to these questions are of a piece with his warnings about Big Tech’s seductive invasions and effects.

Saudi State Media Confirms Khashoggi Is Dead

ISTANBUL — Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi died in a “fistfight” in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, the kingdom claimed early Saturday, finally admitting that the writer had been slain at its diplomatic post. Authorities said 18 Saudi suspects were in custody and intelligence officials had been fired.

The overnight announcements in Saudi state media came more than two weeks after Khashoggi, 59, entered the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul for paperwork required to marry his Turkish fiancée, and never came out. They also contradicted assertions in Turkish media leaks that Khashoggi was tortured, killed and dismembered inside the consulate, claims the kingdom had rejected as “baseless.”

But growing international pressure and comments by U.S. officials up to President Donald Trump forced the kingdom to acknowledge Khashoggi’s death.

While it fired officials close to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia stopped short of implicating the heir-apparent of the world’s largest oil exporter. King Salman, his father, appointed him to lead a committee that will restructure the kingdom’s intelligence services after Khashoggi’s slaying. No major decisions in Saudi Arabia are made outside of the ultraconservative kingdom’s ruling Al Saud family.

The kingdom also offered a far different version of events than those given by Turkish officials, who have said an “assassination squad” from the kingdom including an official from Prince Mohammed’s entourage and an “autopsy expert” flew in ahead of time and laid in wait for Khashoggi at the consulate. Beyond its statements attributed to anonymous officials, Saudi Arabia offered no evidence to support its claims.

Khashoggi, a prominent journalist and royal court insider for decades in Saudi Arabia, had written columns for The Washington Post critical of Prince Mohammed and the kingdom’s direction while living in self-imposed exile in the U.S.

“God have mercy on you my love Jamal, and may you rest in Paradise,” Khashoggi’s fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, tweeted following the Saudi announcements.

In a statement Friday night, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the U.S. will closely follow international investigations into Khashoggi’s death and will advocate for justice that is “timely, transparent and in accordance with all due process.”

Trump meanwhile called the Saudi announcement a “good first step,” but said what happened to Khashoggi was “unacceptable.”

The announcements came in a flurry of statements carried by the state-run Saudi Press Agency early Saturday morning.

“Preliminary investigations conducted by the Public Prosecution showed that the suspects had traveled to Istanbul to meet with the citizen Jamal Khashoggi as there were indications of the possibility of his returning back to the country,” the statement read. “Discussions took place with the citizen Jamal Khashoggi during his presence in the consulate of the kingdom in Istanbul by the suspects (that) did not go as required and developed in a negative way, leading to a fistfight. The brawl led to his death and their attempt to conceal and hide what happened.”

There’s been no indication Khashoggi had any immediate plans to return to the kingdom.

The Saudi statements did not identify the 18 Saudis being held by authorities and did not explain how so many people could have been involved in a fistfight. The statement also did not shed any light on what happened to Khashoggi’s body after his death.

“The kingdom expresses its deep regret at the painful developments that have taken place and stresses the commitment of the authorities in the kingdom to bring the facts to the public opinion, to hold all those involved accountable and bring them to justice,” the statement said.

The kingdom at the same time announced the firing of four top intelligence officials, including Maj. Gen. Ahmed bin Hassan Assiri, a one-time spokesman for the Saudi military’s campaign in Yemen who later became a confidant of Prince Mohammed.

Saud Qahtani, a powerful adviser to Prince Mohammed, also was fired. Qahtani had led Saudi efforts to isolate Qatar amid a boycott of the country by the kingdom and three other Arab nations as part of a political dispute.

On Twitter, where Qahtani had launched vitriolic attacks against those he saw as the kingdom’s enemies, he thanked the Saudi government for the “great opportunity they gave me to serve my country all those years”

“I will remain a loyal servant to my country for all times,” he wrote.

Assiri had no immediate comment.

Earlier this week, the Turkish pro-government newspaper Yeni Safak, citing what it described as an audio recording of Khashoggi’s slaying, said a Saudi assassination squad seized the journalist after he entered the consulate, cutting off his fingers and later decapitating him. On Thursday, a leaked surveillance photo put Maher Abdulaziz Mutreb, a member of Prince Mohammed’s entourage on trips to the U.S., France and Spain this year, at the consulate just ahead of Khashoggi’s arrival.

Turkish crime scene investigators this week searched the Saudi Consulate building in Istanbul and the nearby residence of the Saudi consul general, and came out carrying bags and boxes. On Friday, investigators questioned staff and explored whether his remains could have been dumped outside Istanbul after his suspected killing, Turkish media and a security official said.

Trump has said that the consequences for the Saudis “will have to be very severe” if they are found to have killed Khashoggi, but has insisted that more facts must be known before making any judgements. He dispatched U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo earlier this week to both Saudi Arabia and Turkey to speak to officials on the case.

The president has made close ties to the kingdom a priority since taking office. Trump made his first overseas trip as president to Saudi Arabia and has touted his arms sales to the kingdom. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, responsible for a coming peace proposal for Israel and the Palestinians, also has forged a close relationship with Prince Mohammed.

Trump’s previous warnings over the case drew an angry response Sunday from Saudi Arabia and its state-linked media, including a suggestion that Riyadh could wield its oil production as a weapon. The U.S. president wants King Salman and OPEC to boost production to drive down high oil prices, caused in part by the coming re-imposition of oil sanctions on Iran in November.

It’s unclear whether the Saudi announcement will be enough to staunch the criticism the kingdom faces from lawmakers in the U.S., its most-crucial ally. California Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, called Saudi Arabia’s claim that Khashoggi was “killed while brawling with a team of more than a dozen dispatched from Saudi Arabia is not credible.”

He was “fighting for his life with people sent to capture or kill him,” Schiff said.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who earlier this week said in a televised interview that Prince Mohammed “has got to go,” added: “To say that I am skeptical of the new Saudi narrative about Mr. Khashoggi is an understatement.”

Human rights groups like Amnesty International separately have been calling for a United Nations investigation into Khashoggi’s killing.

“All along we were concerned about a whitewash, or an investigation by the entity suspected of involvement itself,” Amnesty’s Rawya Rageh said Saturday. “The impartiality of a Saudi investigation would remain in question.”

___

Fraser reported from Ankara, Turkey, and Gambrell reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Associated Press journalists Mehmet Guzel and Ayse Wieting in Istanbul, Zeke Miller in Washington and Munir Ahmed in Islamabad contributed to this report.

The Disastrous ‘War on Terror’ Has Come Home

French theorist Michel Foucault saw the writing on the wall. In his 1975 book, “Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison,” which drew on the work of the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, he introduced the social theory of “panopticism” to explain, at least in part, how surveillance functions as a system of power.

Today, we are very much living in a tech panopticon—one in which our purchasing habits, individual data and even physical movements can be tracked without our knowledge. What does this mean for the future of personal privacy? How has the “war on terror” radically altered the ways we fight crime, and in what ways might the state use the increasingly sophisticated tools at its disposal to abuse its authority?

For Jamie Garcia of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, the possibilities are terrifying and limitless. In the latest installment of “Scheer Intelligence,” she explores the dangers of predictive policing, specifically for people of color: “It takes us back to post-9/11 in which Congress wanted to set up a way to make domestic law enforcement the eyes and ears of the federal government.”

Not even the country’s most liberal states are immune to these kinds of civil rights violations. Take California, where Garcia notes the LAPD has ignored the will of the people at every turn to implement a controversial new drone program. “When you have your own city council not listening to the wishes of the community,” she laments, “you realize that there is no community control of these [initiatives].”

Despite this, Garcia refuses to abandon hope. “We [have to] talk about how the police is functioning,” she concludes. “We just assume, like a public utility, that they’re doing their job. That they’re providing us … safety. And I think that will open our eyes to how harmful policing is in our lives.”

Listen to Garcia’s full interview with Robert Scheer below, and beneath the audio player see a transcript of the interview.

Robert Scheer: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of “Scheer Intelligence,” where the intelligence comes from my guest. In this case it’s Jamie Garcia, who’s involved with a group called Stop LAPD Spying Coalition. And what it’s a reference to is something that has happened all over the country. The technologies launched by the CIA, by the NSA, by the Pentagon—to extensively spy on terrorists around the world and learn all these techniques of getting the terrorists in our midst and the terrorists who want to attack us—has now come to inform policing on the local community level.

Some of the estimates I’ve seen, it is highly secretive, of course, but about 50 different police departments in the United States are using the services of something called The LASER Program, which stands for, believe it or not, L.A. Strategic Extraction and Restoration. It’s basically data mining, trying to use artificial intelligence to figure out who are the bad guys are, how to do selective policing and there’s another program here in LA that’s also a national called PredPol which tries to do. … Both of these groups are basically aiming at something called predictive policing. The whole idea is to more effectively use police resources and using with data mining, the kind that use all the data we have on the Internet and to be more targeting.

The argument against it, and there’s a Dartmouth University study, many others, show that these are deeply biased studies. They involve racial profiling, they involve stigmatizing neighborhoods and they’re a self-fulfilling prophecy. That if you target people then you’ll have more arrest records, you’ll have more incidents, and that will affirm your description of these bad actors. So welcome, Jamie. Can you set us straight? How you got involved in this, what is your organization trying to do. I know you have weekly confrontations or meetings with the LAPD here in Los Angeles, so take it away.

Jamie Garcia: Yeah, thank you so much for giving us the time and to be able to inform Angelenos and talk to folks nationally about what is happening with predictive policing. So the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, we go back to 2011 when we were formed, but we were formed primarily around an initiative called the Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative, which is a national initiative that began in 2008. The coalition formed around that initiative, and when we think about predictive policing, I think it’s important that we see it not in a silo. We have to understand how it’s a part of the larger, national changing nature of policing, and you talk about how counter terrorism programs and counter insurgency programs are now becoming part of domestic law enforcement.

I think that’s a really important point because what we’re looking at is presumption of guilt, assigned criminality before anything happens. That concept really takes us back to post 9/11. Looking at the 9/11 Commission, where Congress really wanted to set up a way to make domestic law enforcement the eyes and ears of the federal government, So they can prevent something from happening. And I think that’s a really important concept for us to look at when we think about predictive policing because predictive policing is about data gathering. And it’s about data analysis, and it’s trying to find where that crime’s going to happen and who’s going to commit it before it actually occurs. But in some sense the Department of Justice, our federal government needed to set a landscape in order for that to occur, in order for people to buy into it. Then you mentioned this war on terror, and I think one of the guiding principles in the coalition is that there’s always an other.

That these types of policies, these type of tactics, are kind of pushed into our community because they’re looking for the terrorists, they’re looking for whatever new threat there is that we need to be fearful of. The two things I want to just kind of ground us in really quickly about the Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative is to how they define “suspicion.” They define it as observed behavior, reasonable indicative of pre-operational planning of criminal or terrorist behavior. Now when we think about reasonable indication, what exactly does that mean? You have probable cause, you have reasonable suspicion, now you have reasonable indication which the Office of Director of National Intelligence defined as an articulable concern.

When we bring in pre-operational planning, we think of the idea that someone is thinking about doing something. So that’s essentially the kind of legal framework that the suspicious activity reporting program set up. Now after the post-9/11 commission kind of came out with this desire to stop things before they happened they passed the Intelligence Reformed Terrorism Prevention Act which mandated the president to create what’s called the information sharing environment. That was essentially an environment where data can be shared through multiple agencies – local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies.

So again now there’s the concept of data sharing, and along with data analytics. So when we ground predictive policing and those things we see that predictive policing is part of a larger architecture of surveillance. It’s part of a larger information sharing environment. So LAPD has two programs that you mentioned, PredPol and Operation LASER, which stands for LA Strategic Extraction and Restoration.

RS: Let me just stop for a minute. I mean the irony here is this is the old thing that happened with the Roman Empire, you know. You go conquer the world and you end up conquering your own people. And really, what you’re talking about is something really bizarre. You’re talking about an activity that was supposed to be aimed at getting terrorists who first of all, 15 of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, they didn’t come from South Central LA. And you’ve got this specter of the foreign terrorists. And then you’re going to look for them in your own community. That gets conflated with gangs in LA. It gets conflated with common criminals and so forth. You end up getting all this federal money. These two programs by the way, the LASER program comes out of Palantir. People don’t know, you know, the CIA funded that organization.

Now in community after community in this country, Palantir, a CIA-funded organization. CIA is not supposed to be involved in spying within this country. Nonetheless they can start through an operation they had called In-Q-Tel and the start this group and now they’re in almost every police department including here where we’re talking about it, in Los Angeles, very secretive operation. You can’t go and observe it or anything. What are they doing? They’re mining the data collected by the 17 national intelligence agencies, the NSA, the CIA, the FBI and everything conflating it with local police reports. And they can go stop people and what they’re doing is targeting our poorest communities, communities minority, black and brown. They’re using all of this stuff that was designed to get hijackers from Saudi Arabia’s own place and they’re using it against what? 16-year-old running around South Central.

JG: Yeah, and I think that’s the interesting thing and the historical context when we think about it because before Operation LASER there was Weed and Seed. And again, LASER stands for LA Strategic Extraction and Restoration. When they talk about the program they say that there are tumors in our community that must be extracted. And with laser-like precision, like a surgeon, that they’ll extract these people or places from the community and restore the community. Well that’s nothing new. LAPD has been doing that; that was Weed and Seed. Take out the weeds and seed something new. These things have always had an intent to cause harm in the community. The thing with the LASER program is not only it’s the targeting of people, but it’s also the targeting of their homes.

That’s one thing that LAPD doesn’t talk about is that the program specifically states find these people that they target, which are called “chronic offenders.” Stop them, harass them, violate them if you can and there’s always back up chronic offenders for LAPD to use if one comes into custody or one person is pushed out of the community. Now when it comes to targeting of homes, and again I talk about the intent to cause harm is that the LASER zones that they set up through this program, within them there’s things that are called anchor points. Where they find homes that they want to target and they want to evict or work with the citywide nuisance abatement program to actually slap at state injunction and get properties turned over from owners so that the state is controlling it. Installing surveillance equipment, evicting certain individuals.

RS: If I could just stop you for a minute, I mean I just want to … There’s something so weirdly Orwellian about this and the use of language and what have you. It masks the absurdity of it. Because as far as I know there’s no evidence of gang kids or gang people in Los Angeles being hijackers of airplanes that blow up the World Trade Center. This is technology that was developed in Iraq and Afghanistan. To get ISIS, to get terrorists of, and so forth. Then somehow it’s made available to local police departments free of charge, taxpayers pay for it. Federal money goes into it and then some companies get really super wealthy. People become billionaires as a result and why are you looking at gangs in LA if you’re trying to get international terrorists? What is the connection between the Bloods the Crips and ISIS? There is no connection. What there is is a connection of the military industrial complex. You can make a lot of money saying, “Hey, we’re going to use this new technology and go after these people.”

JG: That point is really important because when Jeff Brantingham, co-creator of PredPol, when started to bring this information to create PredPol, there’s a picture that he has in a slide where he’s talking about predictive analytics. He shows a picture of Afghani men and a picture of Latino youth, side by side, one being the international terrorist, and one being what you would call a domestic terrorist. Now when we think about how we’re being policed, there was … LASER program we always say that it’s a tactic that’s old. When we think about gang injunctions and gang databases, LASER uses LASER zones and chronic offender bulletins. So very similar, but the nature of the language is changing, and I think that’s the point that’s really important because there’s been a lot of strides where people have said gang databases are harmful to people. There’s one year olds on the Cal Gang Database that have been self-proclaimed gang members that aren’t even able to speak in deciding that they’re gang members. So very flawed policing tactics.

In a way to legitimize themselves, to keep targeting the same communities that have always been targeted, black, brown, and poor communities, they have to change the language. That’s one thing that we’re really starting to uplift. For example now in schools, there’s a program called preventing violent extremism, where they’re trying to predict who will be the next possible shooter in a school. But instead of speaking in languages of like, this is a gang member, or this is going to be a problem child, they use violent extremists, which is kind of coming from that same terminology when we think about terrorists, when we think about terrorism, we think about these extremists.

So a lot of policing is changing the way that it describes itself, to sterilize itself, to make it seem like it’s race neutral, to make it seem like it’s unbiased, and data has a big role in that because most people think that data is neutral. Most people think that if it’s scientific, then it has to be right, but we have to kind of go back and look at what’s actually being criminalized, who’s actually being criminalized, and who’s collecting this data, for what purpose are they collecting this data? How is this data being used? Can these questions of community safety actually be answered through an algorithm?

I think that’s some of the bigger questions we have to ask ourselves as well, because so much technology and so much is moving with algorithms that we think it can solve every problem, but when we think about the problem of community safety, instead of the conditions that people are living under as being the problem, it’s the person and it’s the place that becomes the risk. It’s the person and the place that becomes the target. It’s the person and the place that gets extracted. Not poverty, not racism, not lack of schools, not lack of green spaces, not lack of grocery stores, none of those things become identified as the problem according to LAPD. I think those things are really important because again, it’s driving while black was predictive policing. We look at predictive policing now, and data is a proxy for race.

RS: I see it more as a racket. Now, a racket can have terrible social consequences, a lot of people end up in jail, they get racially profiled, they get killed, not going to deny that. But I see this as an extension of the military industrial complex. 9/11 opened the floodgates. The Cold War was over, we didn’t have a big enemy in the world, we were going to actually have a peace dividend, we were going to spend money on rebuilding our schools and making life better, and so forth. Then suddenly we had terrorism, and then we could get a lot of money to go fight terrorism. Then in order to spread it around, let’s get the local police departments get in. What do they do?

The money comes pouring into city after city and this becomes policing, so we don’t talk any longer about community policing, or reaching out to the community, or job training program, or inspiring youth. We don’t talk about any of that. We talk about using this high tech world of [inaudible 00:14:33] predicting who’s going to be a criminal or who’s going to be a terrorist. In a way, it’s terrorizing the community. I don’t want to dignify it by assuming this makes sense logically as a way of stopping crime. I see this as a boondoggle to spend a lot of money, and it’s a way of using that keyword that you used, “the other.” I got to take a quick break and we’ll back. I’m talking to Jamie Garcia who’s with a group called Stop LAPD Spying Coalition.

—

RS: We’re back with my guest, Jamie Garcia, [inaudible 00:15:10] “Scheer Intelligence.” So tell us more about predictive policing and what are you able to do about it. You’ve been able to get some documents, you’ve been able to file some lawsuits.

JG: Well we’re really about community building, we’re really about base building, we’re really about community empowerment. This is definitely something that can’t be resolved by an ordinance that says we want community control over surveillance. We want these programs abolished. We don’t see this doing anything productive in our community. This is a long-term fight, we definitely want predictive policing, PredPol, and LASER dismantled, but that’s on the long road towards abolition. That’s definitely a longer conversation, but what we did in May of 2017, the community came together and basically asked each other, what do we want to know about this program? We had one or two articles that let us know that LASER existed, that told us a little bit about it. So we literally all sat together, our headquarters is at Los Angeles Community Action Network, we’re based in Skid Row, so community members from Skid Row, from different areas in Los Angeles came together and wrote a public records request.

We have, it’s similar to a Freedom of Information Act, but it’s in California, so we drafted a public records request and asked for information about the LASER program. Went as far as saying we want every single chronic offender bulletin released, and that’s the secret list that LAPD has on people that they’re monitoring, tracking, and tracing through the community.

Basically LAPD responded with a couple emails saying, “Oh, give us a little time. We’re looking through documents.” Then they just went silent and decided to completely ignore us, completely ignore the community’s demand to know information. So, about eight months later we filed lawsuit in February 2018. Within two weeks of filing that lawsuit, they went around our lawyer and actually gave us documents. So at that point our conversations back and forth with the city attorney began, where they really tried to deny that at that time it was called the Smart Policing Initiative, which was the group within LAPD that was starting to operationalize the LASER program throughout the city of LA. They tried to deny that the group even existed. So we had to send them documentation from their reports that said the group existed.

We have pretty much, after about three conversations with them, have almost satiated what we wanted from the public records request. The last thing we have is the release of the chronic offender bulletins. We feel that the community has a right to know if they’re on this list, we believe this list should be released. They are not budging, so we have a court date that’s set for August of 2019, which is kind of ridiculous, but it gives us opportunities to get into the community, to actually have people in courtrooms basically saying they want this list released.

RS: Have you gotten any reaction from elected officials, be they county supervisors, be they local city people, the police board, the police commission?

JG: Well the mayor’s very much in support of this program. In fact, in his state of the city address he mentions the Community Safety Operations Centers, he mentions how predictive policing will protect people’s property. So he’s very aware. But what was-

RS: Wait a minute, let me just get this straight now. So Mayor [Eric] Garcetti, he thinks it’s great that you do predictive policing, right? Does that include doing it against people who are peace activists or civil rights activists? Members of the ACLU? Is that predictive policing? What information can we have? Where are they even situated? Where is the data being gathered?

JG: Well that’s the interesting thing, is that these Community Safety Operation Centers where they do the data analysis, and they create the lists, and they create the hot spots, they create the LASER zones, those, they’re not advertising it. They’re not telling us this is where the headquarters at, where we’re doing this data analytics. We know where LAPD’s headquarters at, but they’re definitely not advertising where the Community Safety Operation Centers are. Through the public records requests though, we are starting to receive information about where possible locations of these CSOCs are. Garcetti wants one per bureau by the end of 2019.

RS: This is a spying operation on your citizens. This is intimidating, okay? How is this list compiled? We know they have access to CIA data, to NSA data, to FBI. They are funded, I have to mention over and over again here, this LASER operation was started as a CIA operation, In-Q-Tel funded it, then Palantir grew out of that. For the first three years Palantir had only one customer, the CIA. So now here in Los Angeles, there’s this organization, Palantir, and they’re figuring out which one of us citizens here, or non-citizens, residents, are the tumor that they have to get rid of. Are they relying on NSA data or are they relying on CIA? They’re relying on police work. You have, in fact, a national police presence deciding who are the suspect citizens. What do they base it on?

We don’t know what’s in their algorithm. Is it that maybe you give a speech, or you hand out a leaflet, or you try to organize. I think this is an incredibly intimidating exercise, and what I’m asking you as a community activist, when you go see the city council members, when you go see the mayor, when you ask them, “What are you doing? Are you spying on people in this community in the name of protecting them?” What is their answer?

JG: Well, one example I can give is that the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition also had an active campaign against the drones. We collected 3,000 signatures throughout the city of LA that said no to the drones, we kept them grounded for three years, they came back. LAPD did its own community surveys out of their results, 99% of the community they surveyed said no. The Los Angeles Police Commission said, “Well, we know the community doesn’t trust the police, but we do. We’re passing this program through.” When it came up for vote in city council, when they had to finally approve the moneys for the drones, we went, we told them, “We don’t want them, here’s all the proof that the community doesn’t want them.” Again, they themselves said, “We trust the police. We are going to give them the drones.” That happened in a public safety committee, that happened in front of full city council.

That’s the reason why when we think about these kind of policies and ordinances that are starting to be pushed nationwide, saying if there’s only community control of surveillance then we’d be more protected, we would know what’s going on. But when you have your own city council not listening to the wishes of the community, you have your own police commission who’s supposed to be overseeing and in charge of the police not listening and completely going against the will of the community. You realize that there is no community control of these things. The Los Angeles Police Department will do what it wants. So I think that’s really important when we think about how we’re organizing against surveillance, and how we’re organizing against these policies and practices because I don’t think it’s something that our own city government wants to protect us from. And in fact the police commission was not even aware of the terminology of data driven evidence based policing and how it’s taken off. How the DOJ is providing grants through the Bureau of Justice Assistance to police departments like LAPD to create programs like LASER. Palantir is facilitating this process. And in fact we have spoken to other media outlets that have interviewed Palantir and they themselves say, “Well, it’s not us that’s doing this. We are just a provider of a service. It’s LAPD that’s doing this.”

And I didn’t get this information firsthand, but when I was told that this is how they are perceiving their role in this type of policing, in this type of harm that’s happening to our communities. I was completely not surprised, but realizing how people like you’re saying are just concerned about the money they’re making, not concerned about how they’re facilitating a program that’s harming the community, that has intent to come harm. I mean LASER is extracting people from the community, incarcerating them or evicting families and making it absolutely impossible for them to rent or buy a home or end up homeless. And I think people really need to realize that if they’re talking about the health and wellness of our communities, is making people homeless, especially in this time right now, the solution that we’re looking for?

RS: So we’re talking about the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us about. This is money coming from the federal government that basically redefines what local policing is all about. And Palantir [inaudible 00:23:59] responsibility because they are the ones that figure out what to look for, what data to mine, how do you mine it? How do you isolate a criminal? How do you get a judge to put a stiffer sentence on someone? How do you make someone homeless? How do you get them evicted? How do you get local police to stop people on the street?

So we are talking about the national security city, but the people designing that data mining or figuring out what’s the tumor. And we know that the FBI at one point thought Martin Luther King was the tumor and had to be eliminated. Right? So we are basically talking about a national surveillance state that now reaches down into the local community and has unlimited funding evidently and can combine all these enormous databases, federal, international, local, and target people based on a criteria they put in. Whether it’s skin color, whether it’s politics, whether it’s income or what have you. They can target them. Right?

But the real issue is we’ve accepted, and I get back to the example of the Roman Empire. They said, “Oh no, the Roman legions, they’re only going to do it outside somewhere. They’re going to do it in Iraq. They’ll do it in Afghanistan and so forth.” Now we find these weapons are developed for Afghanistan and Iraq, no, it’s now here it’s targeting. It’s profiling. It’s not going after bankers who ripped us off, they are not targeted, right? No fancy swindlers who almost destroyed the whole economy. No, it’s saying this kid or this guy, he was a member of a gang and he knew that one, but then we don’t even know what they’re doing. Maybe they’re picking up because people are politically objectionable to them because after all these local databases are merged with the CIA, NSA and everyone else’s database. Is that not the case?

JG: And that’s why I mentioned the greater architecture of surveillance. LAPD has the intelligence gathering guidelines based on one tip. LAPD can infiltrate any organization that wants to, to collect information on what’s going on there. So we’re talking about COINTELPRO tactics. I mean that are legitimized, that are practiced. I mean they can go on Facebook and create false personas and become your friend and find out information about you, gather information. There’s a long history of that kind of infiltration and that kind of disruption of movement building and I think we can even see what happened today in city hall where they passed a motion that basically any type of protest, any kind of disruption that they decide is too disruptive, you will be banned from returning to city hall. And if you do it again, you’ll be banned for three days. If you do it again, you’ll be banned for six days. So essentially it’s the criminalization of protest. So we are no longer even able to use our voices to protest these laws that are harming our communities.

RS: But you know, the irony is we’ve been there before, before high tech, before the incident, and you mentioned COINTELPRO. We know the LAPD had a red squad that went after any trade unionists, any protests, any peace person. There’s a long history of that sort of thing. However, now it’s made more ominous because you have high tech, you can get every single phone call, you can get all this data, right? That’s what this new Orwellian society is all about. This LASER program which regards some of our people living here, maybe many of them as tumors to be eradicated, that’s a nationally funded program by an organization, the CIA, that’s not supposed to be involved in our domestic lives. That’s against the law. Okay.

And yet you have these wonderful liberal folks on our city council down here in LA and our state government and everything saying, “Oh yeah, let’s do it, prevent the policing. That’s great.” No, that’s spying, that’s gathering all the information you can on the people that live here and then you single out the ones you don’t like for whatever reason. And you go after them. I’ll give you the last words, but I mean this is kind of a backwards way to do it I didn’t give you a proper introduction, but I am so inspired by this work that you’re doing. I want to know more about your story. So how’d you get into this? Let’s end on that. What motivated you? Why are you doing this? Who are you?

JG: Well, I’m a full time registered nurse. I work in the community of Boyle Heights. I started in the coalition and late 2011 towards the end of 2011 and I was actually active in The Occupy movement. I was helping to run the medical tent. The coalition did a teaching right next to the medical tent and I sat down and I started to listen in on what suspicious activity reporting is and I realized that not only was I a target, but it started to be very clear to me. And I think this is what the work of the coalition does, is it breaks down what does a police state look like. Let’s get into the specifics. Let’s talk about what they’re really doing and I think that’s what we don’t do in our communities is we don’t talk about really how is the police functioning. We just assume like a public utility that they’re doing their job, they’re providing us water or food or safety. And I think that is what will help open our eyes to how harmful policing isn’t our lives.

One thing I want to leave communities with, because I think when we hear this stuff, it becomes very overwhelming we feel kind of like how do we fight back. And one thing that we’ve been really talking about and how we fight back is the preservation of our narrative, the preservation of our story, the preservation of our lives, who we are and its entirety. And the thing that’s very misleading about data, it’s really the decontextualization of who we are by breaking us up into these little data points. There’s this assumption that neutrality, objectivity will occur. But once you break us up into data points, all the nuances that make us who we are, why we are where we’re at in our lives, where we’ve come from, where we want to be, get completely extracted or completely erased. But when in the hands of LAPD, that data gets reconstructive through the lens of criminalization.

So I leave communities with just remembering that it’s our stories that we have to preserve. It’s our stories that we have to tell. It’s our voices that have to tell those stories because that’s how we will fight back because, yes, it’s about surveillance. It’s about spying, but it’s really about trying to find a way to criminalize us. Find a way to make our lifestyles criminal, whether it’s racism, sexism, ableism, it’s how can we criminalize those things that are different? How do we take that story away and reconstruct it through a lens of criminalization? And that’s essentially what LAPD is doing.

RS: That’s it for this edition of “Scheer Intelligence.” Our producers are Joshua, Scheer and Isabel Carreon. Our engineers are Kat Yore and Mario Diaz at KCRW and here at the Annenberg School of communication and journalism it’s Sebastian Grubaugh. See you next week with another edition of “Scheer Intelligence.”

Caravan Migrants Break Guatemala Border Fence, Rush Mexico

TECUN UMAN, Guatemala — Migrants traveling in a mass caravan burst through a Guatemalan border fence and streamed by the thousands toward Mexican territory on Friday, defying Mexican authorities’ entreaties for an orderly crossing and U.S. President Donald Trump’s threats of retaliation.

On the Mexican side of a border bridge, they were met by a phalanx of police with riot shields. About 50 managed to push their way through before officers unleashed pepper spray and the rest retreated.

The gates were closed again, and police used a loudspeaker to address the masses, saying, “We need you to stop the aggression.”

Mexican federal police chief Manelich Castilla, speaking from the border town of Ciudad Hidalgo, told Foro TV that his forces achieved their main objective of preventing a violent breach by the 3,000-plus migrants. In a separate interview with Milenio television, he accused people not part of the caravan of attacking police with firecrackers and rocks.

“It will be under the conditions that have been said since the start,” Castilla said. “Orderly, with established procedures, never through violence or force as a group of people attempted.”

The chaos calmed somewhat as migrants formed lines in a mass of humanity stretching across the bridge. Some returned to the Guatemalan side to buy water and food.

But others, tired of waiting, jumped off the bridge into the Suchiate River. Migrants organized a rope brigade to ford its muddy waters, and some floated across on rafts operated by local residents who charged a dollar or two to make the crossing.

Cristian, a 34-year-old cell phone repairman from San Pedro Sula, said he left Honduras because gang members had demanded protection payments of $83 a month, a fifth of his income. It was already hard enough to support his four daughters on the $450 he makes, so he closed his small business instead.

Cristian, declined to give his last name because the gangsters had threatened him. He estimated that about 30 percent of the migrants want to apply for refugee status in Mexico, while the rest want to reach the United States.

“I want to get to the States to contribute to that country,” Cristian said, “to do any kind of work, picking up garbage.”

Two buses arrived to transport women, children and the elderly to be processed by Mexican immigration authorities. But the migrants refused to board, fearing they would simply be deported.

“Walk! Walk!” they chanted, insisting they be allowed to continue on foot.

Earlier in the day, thousands of migrants, some waving Honduran flags and carrying umbrellas to protect against the sun, arrived at the Guatemalan side of the river, noisily demanding they be allowed to cross.

“One way or another, we will pass,” they chanted, climbing atop U.S.-donated military jeeps parked at the scene. Young men tugged on the fence, finally tearing it down, prompting the huge crowd of men, women and children to rush past and over the bridge.

Edwin Santos of San Pedro Sula was one of the first to race by, clutching the hands of his father and wife.

“We are going to the United States!” he shouted. “Nobody is going to stop us!”

Acner Adolfo Rodriguez, 30, one of the last through, said he hoped to find work and a better life far from the widespread poverty and gang violence in Honduras, one of the world’s deadliest countries.

“May Trump’s heart be touched so he lets us through,” Rodriguez said.

The U.S. president has made it clear to Mexico that he is monitoring its response. On Thursday he threatened to close the U.S. border if Mexico didn’t stop the caravan. Later that day he tweeted a video of Mexican federal police deploying at the Guatemalan border and wrote: “Thank you Mexico, we look forward to working with you!”

Mexican officials said those with passports and valid visas — only a tiny minority of those trying to cross — would be let in immediately.

Migrants who want to apply for refuge in Mexico were welcome to do so, they said, but any who decide to cross illegally and are caught will be detained and deported.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met Friday with President Enrique Pena Nieto and Foreign Relations Secretary Luis Videgaray in Mexico City, with the caravan high on the agenda.

At a news conference with Videgaray, Pompeo called illegal migration a “crisis” and emphasized “the importance of stopping this flow before it reaches the U.S. border,” while also acknowledging Mexico’s right to handle the crisis in a sovereign fashion.

“Mexico will make its decision,” Pompeo said. “Its leaders and its people will decide the best way to achieve what I believe are our shared objectives.”

At Mexico City’s airport before leaving, Pompeo said four Mexican federal police officers had been injured in the border standoff and expressed his sympathy.

On Thursday, Videgaray asked the U.N. for help processing what Mexico expects to be a large number of asylum requests.

But Jose Porfirio Orellana, a 47-year-old farmer from Yoro province in Honduras, said he has his sights set on the United States due to woeful economic conditions in his country.

“There is nothing there,” Orellana said.

Migrants have banded together to travel en masse regularly in recent years, but this caravan was unusual for its huge size, said Victor Clark-Alfaro, a Latin American studies professor at San Diego State University. By comparison, a caravan in April that also attracted Trump’s ire numbered about 1,000.

“It grabs one’s attention that the number of people in these kinds of caravans is on the rise,” Clark-Alfaro said. “It is migration of a different dimension.”

Speaking on the Televisa network, Videgaray did not seem concerned about Trump’s threat to close the U.S.-Mexico border, saying it had to be viewed in light of the hotly contested U.S. midterm elections, in which Trump has made border security a major campaign issue.

Videgaray noted that 1 million people transit the border legally every day, and about $1 million in commerce crosses every minute.

“Before taking decisions of that kind,” Videgaray said, “there would be many people in the United States … who would consider the consequences.”

___

Associated Press writer Peter Orsi in Mexico City contributed to this report.

Russian Woman Charged With U.S. Election Interference

WASHINGTON — A Russian woman was accused Friday of a sweeping effort to sway American public opinion through social media in the first federal case alleging foreign interference in the 2018 midterm election.

The Justice Department unsealed the criminal complaint on the same day that U.S. intelligence agencies, in a rare public statement, asserted that Russia, China, Iran and other countries were engaged in continuous efforts to influence American policy and voters in the upcoming elections and beyond.

The U.S. is concerned about the foreign campaigns “to undermine confidence in democratic institutions and influence public sentiment and government policies,” the national security officials said. “These activities also may seek to influence voter perceptions and decision-making in the 2018 and 2020 U.S. elections.”

The Justice Department prosecution targets Elena Alekseevna Khusyaynova, a St. Petersburg woman who prosecutors say helped manage the finances of a hidden but powerful Russian social media effort aimed at spreading distrust for American political candidates and causing divisions on hot-button social issues like immigration and gun control.

Prosecutors say Khusyaynova worked for the same social media troll farm that was indicted earlier this year by special counsel Robert Mueller as part of his investigation into potential coordination between Russia and the 2016 Trump presidential campaign. The social media effort outlined by prosecutors Friday largely mirrors Mueller’s criminal case against three Russian companies, including the Internet Research Agency, and 13 Russians.

Since at least 2015, the group created thousands of false social media profiles and email accounts that appeared to be from people inside the U.S. and were aimed to “create and amplify divisive social and political content,” including on significant current events, such as deadly shootings in South Carolina and Las Vegas, prosecutors said in court papers.

One fake persona, registered to “Bertha Malone,” made over 400 Facebook posts containing inflammatory content. Another fake Facebook account, in the name of “Rachell Edison,” made more than 700 posts focused on gun control and the Second Amendment.

The Russian organizers of the conspiracy advised that the posts should reflect various viewpoints, and it gave specific instructions to only share articles from certain news websites to correspond to specific political views, prosecutors said.

After one news article appeared online with the headline, “McCain Says Thinking a Wall Will Stop Illegal Immigration is ‘Crazy,'” members of the group were told to brand the Republican senator as “an old geezer who has lost it and who long ago belonged in a home for the elderly.” They were also told to say that McCain had a “pathological hatred toward Donald Trump and toward all his initiatives.”

After another article appeared about Mueller last year, members of the troll farm were told to share the article and say that Mueller was a “puppet of the establishment” who had connections to the Democratic Party and “who says things that should either remove him from his position or disband the entire investigation commission.”

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said recently that Russia has no intention to interfere in the midterm elections in the U.S. or meddle elsewhere.

Friday’s separate statement about foreign influence in U.S. elections was issued just weeks before the Nov. 6 elections by the Office of the Department of National Intelligence, the Justice Department, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.

Given the breadth of alleged interference by Russia, which includes the hacking of Democratic email accounts ahead of the 2016 presidential election, it was notable that the intelligence community identified two other nations in the same statement that did not provide specific examples of foreign meddling.

President Trump has often cast doubt on U.S. intelligence findings that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, as Mueller investigates whether Trump’s campaign was connected. More recently, Trump has conceded a Russian role but has likened it to efforts of China and other nations.

Meanwhile, Vice President Mike Pence blasted China in a speech saying Russia’s influence efforts in America pale in comparison with the covert and overt activities of the Chinese to interfere in the midterms and counter Trump’s tough trade policies against Beijing.

But top administration officials have provided little evidence that China’s activities are comparable to Russia’s massive covert measures that were spelled out in previous indictments obtained by Mueller.

The officials have cited largely public steps taken by China, such as aiming tariffs at politically important states and pressuring U.S. businesses to speak out against the Trump administration.

Other countries are using social media to amplify divisive issues in American society and sponsor content in English-language media, such as Russia’s RT and Sputnik news outlets, the security agencies’ statement said. They also distribute propaganda and plant disinformation against political candidates, the departments said.

The agencies said they currently do not have any evidence that voting systems have been disrupted or compromised in ways that could result in changing vote counts or hampering the ability to tally votes in the midterms, which are fewer than 20 days away.

“Some state and local governments have reported attempts to access their networks, which often include online voter registration databases, using tactics that are available to state and nonstate cyber actors,” they said.

But so far, they said, state and local officials have been able to prevent access or quickly mitigate these attempts.

___

Associated Press writers Michael Balsamo and Colleen Long contributed to this report.

3 Easy Fixes to Social Security and Medicare Republicans Won’t Acknowledge

Republicans would love to get rid of Social Security and Medicare. But they can’t, because Social Security and Medicare are among the most popular of all federal programs. Besides, most Americans have been paying into them their whole working lives, and depend on them.

So how will Republicans attempt to end these programs? By doing nothing to save Medicare and Social Security.

The trustees for Medicare and Social Security – of which I used to be one – say Medicare will run out of money by 2026, three years sooner than last projected, and Social Security will run out in 2034.

But this doesn’t have to be the case.

Here are three easy fixes to Social Security and Medicare that Republicans don’t want you to know about.

First: Raise the cap on income subject to Social Security payroll taxes.

This year, that cap is $128,400, meaning that every dollar earned above $128,400 isn’t subject to Social Security taxes.

So the typical CEO of a big company, who makes over $15 million, pays Social Security taxes on just $128,400 of his or her income, a tiny fraction. While the typical nurse practitioner, who takes home around $100,000, pays Social Security taxes on every dollar of his or her income.

In this era of raging inequality, that’s not fair. And it’s not even logical. Raise the cap.

Second: To help rein in Medicare costs, allow the government to use its huge bargaining power to negotiate lower drug prices. 

Big Pharma has gotten legislation barring the government from negotiating lower drug prices. That legislation should be repealed.

Big Pharma says this would mean less research on new drugs, but that’s baloney. Pharma already spends more on advertising, marketing, and lobbying than it does on research.

Third: To deal with a basic reason why Social Security and Medicare are running out of money, allow more young immigrants into the U.S.

The basic reason why Social Security and Medicare are running out of money is the American population continues to age and live longer – leaving a relatively smaller working population to pay into Social Security and Medicare.

What to do? Allow in more young immigrants. Immigrants and their children are the fastest growing segment of the working population, already contributing billions in payroll taxes every year. Instead of shutting immigrants out, allowing more immigrants into the country will help secure the future of Social Security and Medicare.

This isn’t rocket science, folks. Raise the cap, negotiate drug prices, and allow in more immigrants. Do these three things and you won’t have to worry about Social Security and Medicare not being there when you need it.

Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro Accused of Widespread Electoral Fraud

An investigative story published by the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo today proves that companies are paying for WhatsApp bulk messaging services to spread fake news and attack ads against the Workers’ Party (PT). According to the article, companies are planning a big operation for the week before the runoff election in Brazil, which will be held on Oct. 28.

The companies are supporting the far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro and using lists of mobile contacts sold by digital strategy agencies and also the presidential hopeful’s own database. The law, however, only allows candidates to use their own lists of contacts provided voluntarily by individuals.

To send hundreds of millions of messages, contracts are worth as high as R$12 million (more than US$3.2 million). One of the companies hiring these services is Havan, owned by Luciano Hang, who has reportedly been forcing his employees to vote for Jair Bolsonaro. Hiring this kind of services can be considered illegal campaign contributions from corporations if they are proven to have links with the Social Liberal Party candidate.

João Meira, who holds a master’s degree in Political Law, explains that the elections could be annulled due to illegal campaign practices and abuse of economic power.

Meira argues that, with a fierce WhatsApp campaign and the “industry of lies” established around it, it is virtually impossible to control what kind of content is shared and, if the accusations are proven true, “the fraud completely taints the election process.” “If Bolsonaro and his campaign are proven to be associated with the actions of those groups of people who committed unlawful acts, even if he is elected, he can be impeached and be ineligible to run for eight years,” the expert says.

While some of the agencies reported to be sending mass WhatsApp messages include Quickmobile, Yacows, Croc Services, and SMS Market, Bolsonaro’s financial disclosures only include the company AM4 Brasil Inteligência Digital, which was paid R$115,000 (nearly US$31,000) to provide digital media services.

According to Folha, the services are between R$0.08 and R$0.12 (US$0.02-0.03) per message sent to contact numbers from the candidate’s own list and R$0.30 to R$0.40 (US$0.08-0.11) per message when the list of contacts is provided by the agency. The agencies also offer segmentation by region and even income.

Strategies

Folha reported that one of the strategies used by Bolsonaro’s campaign is automatically generating foreign phone numbers through websites such as TextNow. The article also mentions that the contact databases are often provided illegally by debt collection companies or employees who work at phone companies.

Using international calling codes, the administrators can dodge spam filters and restrictions imposed by WhatsApp, such as the limit of 256 members in a group or automatically sharing a message to no more than 20 people or groups.

The Workers’ Party candidate, Fernando Haddad, has been the primary target of fake news shared through WhatsApp in the 2018 elections. The presidential hopeful said he will file complaints against the accused companies, arguing the episode shows, once again, that Bolsonaro does not respect democracy.

“We are going to ask the electoral court and the Federal Police to immediately arrest these corrupt businesspeople in order to stop [them from sending] these WhatsApp messages. They have names of owners, names of companies, contracts, the amount of slush funds – which is an election offense. He [Bolsonaro] is dodging [the presidential] debates, but he cannot dodge justice,” Haddad said.

The Workers’ Party released a statement calling the Federal Police to investigate “Bolsonaro’s criminal activities.”

“It’s a consorted action to influence the electoral process that the electoral courts cannot overlook or leave unpunished. We are taking all legal measures so that he is held accountable for his crimes, including using slush funds, because the millions spent on the industry of lies are not included in his financial disclosures,” the statement reads.

“Congressman Jair Bolsonaro’s criminal methods cannot be tolerated in a democracy. The Brazilian authorities have a duty to make sure the election process runs smoothly. Social media companies cannot just passively watch their services being used to spread lies and offenses and become accomplices in the manipulation of millions of users,” the party wrote.

Havan did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Nadia Murad and Amal Clooney Take the Yazidis’ Cause to the U.N. (Video)

It’s hard to imagine what would cause a commotion on the floor of the United Nations, where international heads of state routinely drop by to offer brief breaks from the daily grind of institutionalized diplomacy.

But when Yazidi refugee Nadia Murad showed up on Sept. 22, 2016, to officially as the first goodwill ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking of the United Nations, it didn’t seem like business as usual, judging by this clip from filmmaker Alexandria Bombach’s new documentary, “On Her Shoulders.”

The gravity of the crisis Murad is there to address, as well as her air of quiet determination, is offset by the swirl of activity around her, as members of her extended support team usher her in and do some on-the-fly stage directing before she begins her speech. Causing no small amount of chic pandemonium is a different sort of celebrity humanitarian in Murad’s midst—Amal Clooney, who is there in the capacity of her lawyer.

“On Her Shoulders,” which tracks part of Murad’s multistop speaking tour to draw worldwide attention to the genocide by Islamic State of Yazidi communities in Iraq and Syria, opens Friday in the U.S. Click here to read Truthdig’s interview with Bombach.

https://www.truthdig.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/OHS_clip5-1.mp4

 

Watch the trailer for “On Her Shoulders” below (film clips courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories):

 

https://www.truthdig.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/OHS-trailer-2.mp4

Thom Hartmann: Billionaire-Funded Fascism Is Rising in America

The billionaire fascists are coming for your Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. And they’re openly bragging about it.

Right after Trump’s election, back in December of 2016, Newt Gingrich openly bragged at the Heritage Foundation that the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress were going to “break out of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt model.” That “model,” of course, created what we today refer to as “the middle class.”

This week Mitch McConnell confirmed Gingrich’s prophecy, using the huge deficits created by Trump’s billionaire tax cuts as an excuse to destroy “entitlement” programs.

“I think it would be safe to say that the single biggest disappointment of my time in Congress has been our failure to address the entitlement issue, and it’s a shame, because now the Democrats are promising Medicare for All,” McConnell told Bloomberg. He added, “[W]e’re talking about Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid.”

These programs, along with free public education and progressive taxation, are the core drivers and maintainers of the American middle class. History shows that without a strong middle class, democracy itself collapses, and fascism is the next step down a long and terrible road.

Ever since the election of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have been working overtime to kneecap institutions that support the American middle class. And, as any working-class family can tell you, the GOP has had some substantial successes, particularly in shifting both income and political power away from voters and toward billionaires and transnational corporations.

In July of 2015, discussing SCOTUS’s 5 to 4 conservative vote on Citizens United, President Jimmy Carter told me: “It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery…” He added: “[W]e’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors…”

As Princeton researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page demonstrated in an exhaustive analysis of the difference between what most Americans want their politicians to do legislatively, versus what American politicians actually do, it’s pretty clear that President Carter was right.

They found that while the legislative priorities of the top 10 percent of Americans are consistently made into law, things the bottom 90 percent want are ignored. In other words, today in America, democracy only “works” for the top 10 percent of Americans.

For thousands of years, economists and economic observers from Aristotle to Adam Smith to Thomas Piketty have told us that a “middle class” is not a normal byproduct of raw, unregulated capitalism—what right-wing ideologues call “the free market.”

Instead, unregulated markets—particularly markets not regulated by significant taxation on predatory incomes—invariably lead to the opposite of a healthy middle class: they produce extremes of inequality, which are as dangerous to democracy as cancer is to a living being.

With so-called “unregulated free markets,” the rich become super-rich, while grinding poverty spreads among working people like a heroin epidemic. This further polarizes the nation, both economically and politically, which, perversely, further cements the power of the oligarchs.

While there’s a clear moral dimension to this—pointed out by Adam Smith in his classic Theory of Moral Sentiments—there’s also a vital political dimension.

Smith noted, in 1759, that, “All constitutions of government are valued only in proportion as they tend to promote the happiness of those who live under them. This is their sole use and end.”

Smith added a cautionary note, however: “[The] disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition… is the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.”

Jefferson was acutely aware of this: the Declaration of Independence was the first founding document of any nation in the history of the world that explicitly declared “happiness” as a “right” that should be protected and promoted by government against predations by the very wealthy.

That was not at all, however, a consideration for the architects of supply-side Reaganomics, although they appropriated JFK’s “rising tide lifts all boats” metaphor to sell their hustle to (boatless) working people.

Far more troubling (and well-known to both Smith and virtually all of our nation’s founders), however, was Aristotle’s observation that when a nation pursues economic/political activities that destroy its middle class, it will inevitably devolve either into mob rule or oligarchy. As he noted in Politics:

“Now in all states there are three elements: one class is very rich, another very poor, and a third in a mean. … But a [government] ought to be composed, as far as possible, of equals and similars; and these are generally the middle classes. …

“Thus it is manifest that the best political community is formed by citizens of the middle class, and that those states are likely to be well-administered in which the middle class is large, and stronger if possible than both the other classes, or at any rate than either singly; for the addition of the middle class turns the scale, and prevents either of the extremes from being dominant.”

This is how America was for the Boomer generation until about two decades ago: a 30-year-old in the 1970s had a 90 percent chance of having or attaining a higher standard of living than his or her parents. But, since the 1980s introduction of Reaganomics, there’s been more than a 70 percent drop in “social mobility”—the ability to move from one economic station of life into a better one.

So, if our democratic republic is to return to democracy and what’s left of our middle class is to survive (or even grow), how do we do that?

History shows that the two primary regulators within a capitalist system that provide for the emergence of a middle class are progressive taxation and a healthy social safety net.

As Jefferson noted in a 1785 letter to Madison, “Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise.”

Similarly, Thomas Paine, proposing in Agrarian Justice (1797) what we today call Social Security, said that a democracy can only survive when its people “[S]ee before them the certainty of escaping the miseries that under other governments accompany old age…” Such a strong social safety net, Paine argued, “will have an advocate and an ally in the heart of all nations.”

Tragically, Republicans are today planning to destroy both our nation’s progressive taxation system and our social safety net, in obsequious service to their billionaire paymasters.

Flipping Jefferson and FDR on their heads, Republicans last year passed a multi-trillion-dollar tax break for the rich, with a few-hundred-dollars bone tossed in for working people.

Meanwhile, Republicans are already hard at work dismantling the last remnants of the New Deal and the Great Society.

As Ian Milhiser notes, “Republicans in the House hope to cut Social Security benefits by 20–50 percent. Speaker Paul Ryan’s plan to voucherize Medicare would drive up out-of-pocket costs for seniors by about 40 percent. Then he’d cut Medicaid by between a third and a half.”

This is not, of course, the first time Republicans have tried this. They’ve been trying to dismantle Social Security since 1936, and Reagan himself even recorded a 33 RPM LP calling LBJ’s Great Society proposal for a program called “Medicare” as “socialism,” saying that if it passed then one day we’d all look back “remembering the time when men were free.”

And it’s always been in service to the same agenda—handing political and economic power over the morbidly rich and the corporations that got them there.

In earlier times, we had a word for this takeover of democracy by the morbidly rich and the corporations: fascism.

As I’ve written before, in early 1944, the New York Times asked Vice President Henry Wallace to, as Wallace noted, “write a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?”

Vice President Wallace’s answer to those questions was published in the New York Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis powers of Germany and Japan.

“The really dangerous American fascists,” Wallace wrote, “are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. … The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information.

“With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public,” Wallace continued, “but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.”

In this, Wallace was using the classic definition of the word “fascist”—the definition Mussolini had in mind when he claimed to have invented the word.

As the 1983 American Heritage Dictionary noted, fascism is: “A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism.”

Vice President Wallace bluntly laid out in his 1944 Times article his concern about the same happening here in America: “American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, [and] the deliberate poisoners of public information…”

He could have been describing Fox, right-wing hate radio, and the billionaires who keep today’s GOP in power.

Noting that, “Fascism is a worldwide disease,” Wallace further suggested that fascism’s “greatest threat to the United States will come after the war” and will manifest “within the United States itself.”

Watching the Republicans of his day work from the same anti-worker playbook they are today, Wallace added:

“Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion.”

As Wallace wrote, some in big business “are willing to jeopardize the structure of American liberty to gain some temporary advantage.”

In a comment prescient of Donald Trump’s trashing of “Mexican rapists” and “gangs” in Chicago, Wallace wrote:

“The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and adapted to immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power.

“It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the growth of prejudice.”

And that prejudice would be exploited to win elections so that the fascists could rob the people and enhance their own power and wealthy.

But even at this, Wallace noted, American fascists would still have to lie to the people in order to gain power. And if the day ever came when a billionaire opened a “news” network just to promote fascist thinking, they could promote their lies with ease.

“The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact,” Wallace wrote. “Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy.”

In his strongest indictment of the tide of fascism the vice president of the United States saw rising in America, he added:

“They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective, toward which all their deceit is directed, is to capture political power so that using the power of the State and the power of the market simultaneously they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.”

In the election of 2018, we stand at a crossroad that Roosevelt and Wallace only imagined.

Billionaire-funded fascism is rising in America, calling itself “conservativism” and “Trumpism.”

The Republican candidates’ and their billionaire donors’ behavior today eerily parallels that day in 1936 when Roosevelt said, “In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for.” President Roosevelt and Vice President Wallace’s warnings are more urgent now than ever before.

If Trump and the billionaire fascists who bankroll the Republicans succeed in destroying the last supports for America’s enfeebled middle class, including Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—and succeed in blocking any possibility of Medicare for All or free college and trade school—not only will the bottom 90 percent of Americans suffer, but what little democracy we have left in this republic will evaporate. History, from Greek and Roman times through Europe in the first half of the 20th century, suggests it will probably be replaced by a violent, kleptocratic oligarchy that no longer shrinks from words like “fascist.”

The warning signs are already here, and, in the face of nationwide election fraud based in Republican voter purges, we must turn out massive numbers if we’re to preserve the American Dream and finally make it available to all.

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.

StarKist to Plead Guilty to Price Fixing, Faces Fine of Up to $100 Million

SAN FRANCISCO — StarKist Co. agreed to plead guilty to a felony price fixing charge as part of a broad collusion investigation of the canned tuna industry, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Thursday.

The DOJ said StarKist faces up to a $100 million fine when it is sentenced. Prosecutors allege that the industry’s top three companies conspired between 2010 and 2013 to keep prices artificially high.

“We have cooperated with the DOJ during the course of its investigation and accept responsibility,” said StarKist chief executive Andrew Choe. “We will continue to conduct our business with the utmost transparency and integrity.”

StarKist is owned by South Korean company Dongwon Industries, one of the largest tuna catching companies in the world. The parent company’s website carries pledges to abide by ethical standards and good corporate citizenship.

The scheme came to light when Thai Union Group’s Chicken of the Sea attempt to buy San Diego-based Bumble Bee failed in 2015, according to court records. Chicken of the Sea executives then alerted federal investigators, who agreed to shield the company from criminal prosecution in exchange for cooperation.

Bumble Bee Foods last year pleaded guilty to the same charge and paid a $25 million fine, $111 million lower than prosecutors said it should have been. Prosecutors said they feared putting the financially struggling Bumble Bee out of business with a high fine and agreed to let the company make interest-free payments for five years.

Two former executives of Bumble Bee and one from StarKist have also each pleaded guilty to price-fixing charges. None of them have been sentenced.

Former Bumble Bee chief executive Christopher Lischewski has pleaded not guilty to a price fixing charge.

“The conspiracy to fix prices on these household staples had direct effects on the pocketbooks of American consumers,” said Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim.

In addition, the three companies face myriad lawsuits from wholesalers, food service companies and retailers such as Walmart, Target and Kroger.