Everyone's Blog Posts - The Activist Motivator2024-03-19T03:07:08Zhttp://activism101.ning.com/profiles/blog/feed?xn_auth=noNature and the Lawtag:activism101.ning.com,2016-12-23:3143100:BlogPost:372222016-12-23T05:08:32.000ZCromaghttp://activism101.ning.com/profile/Cromag
<h1><span style="color: #008080;">Nature and the Law</span></h1>
<p><span class="font-size-3">A new movement is working to protect our environment through the recognition of its fundamental rights. It’s an idea whose time has come.</span></p>
<address>By <a href="http://democracyjournal.org/author/mari-margil/">Mari Margil</a> from December 20, 2016, 4:39 pm – 8 MIN READ…</address>
<h1><span style="color: #008080;">Nature and the Law</span></h1>
<p><span class="font-size-3">A new movement is working to protect our environment through the recognition of its fundamental rights. It’s an idea whose time has come.</span></p>
<address>By <a href="http://democracyjournal.org/author/mari-margil/">Mari Margil</a> from December 20, 2016, 4:39 pm – 8 MIN READ<a href="http://3yaxqw1hoybz1qcak31ysc9f.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/WV-mining-704x396.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://3yaxqw1hoybz1qcak31ysc9f.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/WV-mining-704x396.jpg?width=300" class="align-right" width="300"/></a></address>
<p><span class="font-size-1">Photo by <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/poweredbylycoming/12736071905/">Delta Whiskey</a> via <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/legalcode">CC 2.0</a></span></p>
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<p><span class="font-size-2">The election of Donald Trump as the forty-fifth President of the United States sent a shiver down the spines of millions of Americans who care about the environment.</span></p>
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<p><span class="font-size-2">Trump has called global warming “bullshit” and a “hoax,” while saying very little, if anything, on the environment itself. Of course, climate change <em>is</em> occurring and accelerating at a rate far faster than scientific models predicted, with temperatures in the Arctic 20 degrees Celsius above normal and sea ice at a record low. Further, species are going extinct 1,000 to 10,000 times faster than natural background rates, and ecosystems, such as coral reefs, are collapsing.</span></p>
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<p><span class="font-size-2">All of this is happening <em>pre-President Trump</em>.</span></p>
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<p><span class="font-size-2">With his cabinet picks including climate change denier Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, nominated to head up the Environmental Protection Agency, and climate change skeptic, former Texas Governor Rick Perry, to head up the Energy Department, there is little reason to believe a <em>President</em> Trump will take action to slow the course of global warming or protect nature.</span></p>
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<p><span class="font-size-2">Indeed, Trump promised to roll back President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which requires power plants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. He also promised to revive coal mining. However, the existential threat posed to the environment would necessarily continue regardless of who occupies the White House, unless a fundamental change in humankind’s relationship with the natural world takes place.</span></p>
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<p><span class="font-size-2">So, the question remains, what’s to be done?</span></p>
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<p><span class="font-size-2">Unfortunately, today, legal systems in the United States and around the world are simply not designed to protect nature. Rather, laws and governments are largely focused on how to <em>use</em> nature as fast as possible.</span></p>
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<p><span class="font-size-2">Things are no better at the international level, where trade agreements empower corporations to sue governments in order to overturn or restrict the reach of environmental laws. Meanwhile, international agreements to protect the climate—such as the recent Paris Agreement—remain largely non-binding and unenforceable.</span></p>
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<p><span class="font-size-2">To realize the change we need will require a massive mobilization of people. And this has been, at no point, truer than it is right now. But, as past people’s movements have demonstrated, this kind of fundamental social change is only possible when a broad spectrum of people come together to demand it.</span></p>
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<p><span class="font-size-2">Fortunately, a new people-powered movement is indeed building to advance that change and to establish the highest protection for nature through the recognition of its fundamental rights. From Ecuador to the United States, to Nepal, the United Kingdom, Bolivia, to tribal nations and political parties, to activists, communities, indigenous peoples, and governments, initiatives on the rights of nature are being advanced around the world.</span></p>
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<h5>Recognizing the Rights of Nature</h5>
<p><span class="font-size-2">In 2008, Ecuador became the first country in the world to recognize the rights of nature in its national constitution. Courts there have issued decisions in a number of cases upholding and affirming the constitutional rights of nature, and prohibiting and stopping activities that violate those rights. This includes the first successful constitutional case, brought on behalf of the Vilcabamba River. The Provincial Court of Loja found that the rights of the river were being infringed by road construction that was impacting the river’s flow. In a case in the Galapagos, Judge Pineda Cordero cited the rights of nature constitutional provisions in ruling that road construction must stop until a government review was conducted that guaranteed the protection of iguana and other species’ habitats.</span></p>
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<p><span class="font-size-2">Efforts are now underway in other countries as well—including India, Australia, and the United Kingdom, among others—to advance rights of nature laws at the local and national level. This includes, for example, the adoption of a national policy platform on the rights of nature by the Green Party of England and Wales in February 2016.</span></p>
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<p><span class="font-size-2">In the United States, more than three dozen communities have now passed local laws which transform nature from <em>property</em> to <em>rights-bearing</em> ecosystems and natural communities. These laws are the first in the nation to recognize legally enforceable <em>rights of nature</em>, and there are now efforts to advance rights-based laws at the state level as well. Unsurprisingly, industry is stepping in to try to block these efforts.</span></p>
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<p><span class="font-size-2">In September 2016, the General Council of the Ho-Chunk Nation, based in Wisconsin, advanced an amendment to their tribal constitution to recognize the rights of nature. If passed by a vote of the full membership in 2017, the Ho-Chunk would become the first tribal nation to enshrine the rights of nature in its constitution.</span></p>
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<p><span class="font-size-2">As in Ecuador, cases are now being litigated in the United States, with ecosystems seeking to defend their right to exist and flourish. This includes a case in Highland Township, Pennsylvania, which first passed a local law recognizing the rights of nature in 2013. The law prohibited frack wastewater injection wells, recognizing that the wells would violate the rights of people and ecosystems. Under pressure from Seneca Resources, an oil and gas corporation which sued the community to overturn its ordinance, the Township Supervisors repealed the ordinance in 2016. Community members voted in November 2016 to reinstate the prohibition on injection wells, as well as to re-codify the rights of nature into law, through the approval of a Home Rule Charter for the Township. Within weeks, the corporation sued Highland Township a second time. As of this writing, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals is considering an appeal from the Crystal Spring watershed in Highland, to intervene in the initial case to defend its rights against the corporation’s “rights” to inject frack waste.</span></p>
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<p><span class="font-size-2">Rights of nature laws differ significantly from conventional environmental laws. First, they recognize nature as possessing legally enforceable rights. This includes rights to exist, flourish, and regenerate, as well as to be restored. Through such laws, nature is empowered to defend and enforce its own rights, and people and governments are authorized to do the same. If the rights of an ecosystem are found to be violated, damages are to be awarded in the amount it would take to fully restore the ecosystem, and such funds are to be used solely for that restoration.</span></p>
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<p><span class="font-size-2">Today, traditional environmental laws are designed to authorize activities (fracking, mining, drilling, etc.) which intentionally harm the environment, while placing certain conditions on how those activities are conducted. Permits are issued by governments to corporations to carry out these activities, such that corporations are issued legal permits to dump frack waste, for example.</span></p>
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<p><span class="font-size-2">Under rights of nature laws, proposed activities such as frack wastewater injection wells must be evaluated as to whether their operation would violate the rights of natural systems. Essentially, an injection well would need to be considered in light of whether it would infringe on the right of ecosystems to health and well-being. In so doing, such laws are intended to stop harm <em>before</em> it happens. Under oil and gas laws, on the other hand, harm is legally authorized and damage that occurs is considered <em>after</em> the fact.</span></p>
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<p><span class="font-size-2">For environmental laws that do provide for citizens to bring suit against a corporation for environmental harm, the courts require citizens to demonstrate they have “standing” to bring such a suit. Thus, a person needs to show that they’ve suffered “injury in fact” by the company’s action. That is, they need to show some personal injury from that which was inflicted upon the environment. Harm to an ecosystem is considered secondarily.</span></p>
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<p><span class="font-size-2">Rights of nature laws, on the other hand, provide what some have called “automatic standing” for a person to bring a case to defend and enforce these rights. Thus, a person does not have to demonstrate that <em>they</em> experienced harm as a result of harm to an ecosystem. The concern is the ecosystem itself. Further, the laws are written such that not only does a person have the authority to bring a case to defend and enforce nature’s rights, but the ecosystem “as the real party in interest” has the authority to bring suit on its own behalf. These laws would finally move us away from the human-centric premise that willfully disregards actual harm to the environment.</span></p>
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<p><span class="font-size-2">Although these laws may be relatively new, the ideas behind them are not. More than a century ago environmentalist John Muir wrote that we must respect “the rights of all the rest of creation.” In 1972, Professor Christopher D. Stone explained, in his seminal law review article “Should Trees Have Standing?<em>”</em>, “Throughout legal history, each successive extension of rights to some new entity has been, theretofore, a bit unthinkable. We are inclined to suppose the rightlessness of rightless “things” to be a decree of Nature, not a legal convention acting in support of the status quo.” More recently, in 2015, Pope Francis, in calling for a new era of environmental protection, declared, in a speech before the United Nations, that “[a] true ‘right of the environment’ does exist…”</span></p>
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<p><span class="font-size-2">As past movements have demonstrated, recognizing rights of the rightless is difficult, generations-long work. In making the fundamental shift that is necessary to protect nature, we must confront not only the law, but ourselves.</span></p>
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<p><span class="font-size-2">The rights of nature movement is building, with both cultural shifts and legal shifts now taking shape. And with the very fabric of life at stake, now more than ever, it is an idea and a movement whose time has come.</span></p>
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<p><a href="http://democracyjournal.org/author/mari-margil/">Mari Margil</a> <span class="author-inner-bio">is the Associate Director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund. She leads the organization’s International Center for the Rights of Nature.</span></p>
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<p></p>State Plastic and Paper Bag Legislation: Justice or Manipulation?tag:activism101.ning.com,2016-12-04:3143100:BlogPost:370222016-12-04T21:00:00.000ZCromaghttp://activism101.ning.com/profile/Cromag
<p><a href="http://img.deseretnews.com/images/article/hires/1662618/1662618.jpg" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="http://img.deseretnews.com/images/article/hires/1662618/1662618.jpg?width=400" width="400"></img></a> The plastic and paper bag law is ostensibly environmental legislation in hopes that a small fee will diminish the environmental impact of single-use merchant bags. It was possible to have the fee go into an environmental fund to help with diminishing the impact, but that was voted down by CA Prop 65. The resulting declining of Prop 65 is essentially saying that we cannot force the…</p>
<p><a href="http://img.deseretnews.com/images/article/hires/1662618/1662618.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://img.deseretnews.com/images/article/hires/1662618/1662618.jpg?width=400" class="align-right" width="400"/></a>The plastic and paper bag law is ostensibly environmental legislation in hopes that a small fee will diminish the environmental impact of single-use merchant bags. It was possible to have the fee go into an environmental fund to help with diminishing the impact, but that was voted down by CA Prop 65. The resulting declining of Prop 65 is essentially saying that we cannot force the merchant to send this newly mandated money the merchant is receiving for their goods, but which they didn't receive for their goods before the law, to go towards something the merchant does not approve. But since it is a law it is essentially a tax and traditionally the government decides where to spend tax. But this is a special law that forces the user to pay for something that was traditionally an expense the merchant footed to support its patrons. It would be difficult to start charging for it after the custom has been established by merchants. Therefore instead of taxing the user or the merchant for what was traditionally the merchant's expense, it has become a subsidy for the merchant. It is a law that tells the grocer they must charge for their goods and they must charge at least 0.10 cents per bag in hopes that this will help the environment. This is ostensibly what individual citizen voters decided was necessary to codify into law. </p>
<p><strong>How has the new law changed your habits and impact on the environment?</strong></p>
<p>Please let us know in the comments below.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.ncsl.org/research/environment-and-natural-resources/plastic-bag-legislation.aspx">http://www.ncsl.org/research/environment-and-natural-resources/plastic-bag-legislation.aspx</a></p>Unsafe at any Dose? Diagnosing Chemical Safety Failures, from DDT to BPAtag:activism101.ning.com,2016-05-22:3143100:BlogPost:366232016-05-22T16:55:31.000ZCromaghttp://activism101.ning.com/profile/Cromag
<p><a href="https://www.independentsciencenews.org/health/unsafe-at-any-dose-diagnosing-chemical-safety-failures-from-ddt-to-bpa/#comment-53791" target="_blank">via Independent Science News | by Jonathan Latham, PhD</a></p>
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<p><a href="https://independentsciencenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/isn-logo.png" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="https://independentsciencenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/isn-logo.png"></img></a> Piecemeal, and at long last, chemical manufacturers have begun removing the endocrine-disrupting plastic…</p>
<p><a href="https://www.independentsciencenews.org/health/unsafe-at-any-dose-diagnosing-chemical-safety-failures-from-ddt-to-bpa/#comment-53791" target="_blank">via Independent Science News | by Jonathan Latham, PhD</a></p>
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<p><a target="_blank" href="https://independentsciencenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/isn-logo.png"><img class="align-right" src="https://independentsciencenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/isn-logo.png"/></a>Piecemeal, and at long last, chemical manufacturers have begun removing the endocrine-disrupting plastic <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A#Pharmacokinetics">bisphenol-A</a> (BPA) from products they sell. <a href="https://www.thestreet.com/story/10471527/1/sunoco-restricts-sales-of-chemical-used-in-bottles.html">Sunoco no longer sells BPA</a> for products that might be used by children under three. France has a <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/france-bans-contested-chemical-bpa-food-packaging-article-1.1219611">national ban</a> on BPA food packaging. The <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-11843820">EU has banned BPA from baby bottles</a>. These bans and associated product withdrawals are the result of epic scientific research and some intensive environmental campaigning. But in truth these restrictions are not victories for human health. Nor are they even losses for the chemical industry.<span id="more-2086"></span></p>
<p>For one thing, the chemical industry now profits from selling premium-priced BPA-free products. These are usually made with the chemical substitute BPS, which current research suggests is even more of a health hazard than BPA. But since BPS is far less studied, it will likely take many years to build a sufficient case for a new ban.</p>
<p>But the true scandal of BPA is that such sagas have been repeated many times. Time and again, synthetic chemicals have been banned or withdrawn only to be replaced by others that are equally harmful, and sometimes are worse. Neonicotinoids, which the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) credits with creating a <a href="http://www.tfsp.info/">global ecological catastrophe</a>, are modern replacements for long-targeted organophosphate pesticides. Organophosphates had previously supplanted DDT and the other organochlorine pesticides from whose effects many bird species are only now recovering.</p>
<div id="attachment_2123" style="width: 310px;" class="wp-caption alignright"><img class="size-medium wp-image-2123" src="https://www.independentsciencenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/US-Chemical-Production-Woodruffe-300x225.jpg" alt="US Chemical Production" height="225" width="300"/><p class="wp-caption-text">US Chemical Production (Modified from Tracey Woodruffe)</p>
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<p>So the big and urgent question is this: if chemical bans are ineffective (or worse), what should anyone who wants to protect themselves and everyone else from flame retardants, pesticides, herbicides, endocrine disruptors, plastics and so on—but who doesn’t expect much help from their government or the polluters themselves—do?</p>
<p>What would an effective grassroots strategy for the protection of people and ecosystems from toxic exposures look like? Ought its overarching goal be a reduction in total population exposures and/or fewer chemical sales? Or should it aim for sweeping bans, such as of entire chemical classes? Or bans on specific usages (e.g. in all food or in all of agriculture)? Or on chemical use in particular geographic locations (e.g in/around all schools)? Or perhaps a better demand would be the dismantling (with or without replacement) of existing regulatory agencies, such as the culpable EPA? Or should chemical homicide be made a statutory crime? Or all of these together? And last, but not least, how can such goals be achieved given the finances and politics of our age?</p>
<p>The first task of chemical campaigning is to strip away the mythologies which currently surround the science of toxicology and the practice of chemical risk assessment. When we do this we find that chemical regulations don’t work. The chief reason, which is easy to demonstrate, is that the elementary experiments performed by toxicologists are incapable of generating predictions of safety that can usefully be applied to other species, or even to the same species when it exists in other environments or if it eats other diets. Numerous scientific experiments have shown this deficiency, and consequently that the most basic element of chemical risk assessment is scientifically invalid. For this reason, and many others too, the protection chemical risk assessments claim to offer is a pretense. As I will show, risk assessment is not a reality, it is a complex illusion.</p>
<p>This diagnosis may seem improbable and also depressing, but instead it reveals promising new political opportunities to end pollution and create a sustainable world. Because even in the world of chemical pollution, the truth can set you free.</p>
<p>The ensuing discussion, it should be noted, makes no significant effort to distinguish human health effects from effects on ecological systems. While these are often treated under separate regulatory jurisdictions, in practice, risks to people and ecosystems are difficult if not impossible to separate.</p>
<p>The story of the toxicological alarms surrounding BPA, which are diverse and scientifically extremely well substantiated, make an excellent starting point for this task.</p>
<h4>Ignoring the full toxicity of BPA</h4>
<p>According to the scientific literature, exposure to BPA in adulthood has numerous effects. It leads to stem cell and sperm cell defects (humans), prostate cancer (humans), risk of breast cancer (human and rats), blood pressure rises (humans), liver tumours and obesity (humans and mice) (<a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2718750/">Grun and Blumberg 2009</a>; <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960076014000314">Bhan et al., 2014</a>; <a href="http://press.endocrine.org/doi/abs/10.1210/en.2013-1955">Prins 2014</a>). However, foetuses exposed to BPA suffer from a significantly different spectrum of harms. These range from altered organ development (in monkeys) to food intolerance (in humans) (<a href="http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/169263/files/Perinatal%20Exposure%20to%20Bisphenol%20A,%20Ayyakkannu,%20Laribi.pdf">Ayyanan et al., 2011</a>; <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1240370/pdf/ehp0109-000675.pdf">Menard 2014</a>; <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0890623814000203">vom Saal et al., 2014</a>). Also in humans, early BPA exposures can lead to effects that are nevertheless delayed until much later in life, including psychiatric, social and behavioural abnormalities indicative of altered brain functions (<a href="http://www.researchgate.net/publication/51743683_Impact_of_early-life_bisphenol_A_exposure_on_behavior_and_executive_function_in_children/file/72e7e524ec8adb78d9.pdf">Braun et al., 2011</a>; <a href="http://europepmc.org/articles/PMC3440080">Perera et al., 2012</a>; <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0161813X14001715">Evans et al., 2014</a>).</p>
<p>The above examples are just a representative handful. They are drawn from a much larger body of at least 200 publications (some have estimated a thousand publications) finding harms from BPA. The sheer quantity of results, the diversity of species tested, of consequences found, and of scientific methodologies used, represent a massive accumulation of scientific evidence that BPA is harmful (reviewed in <a href="http://press.endocrine.org/doi/full/10.1210/er.2011-1050">Vandenberg et al., 2012</a>). The evidence against BPA being safe, in short, is as close to unimpeachable as science can manage.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, such a large evidence base indicates that anti-BPA campaigning has been only partially successful. All <a href="http://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/efsajournal/pub/3978.htm">the bans</a> and the commercial withdrawals still ignore the implications of some of the most alarming scientific findings of all. For example, bans on baby bottles will not prevent foetal exposure. Nor will they prevent harms that result even from very low doses of BPA.</p>
<h4>Ignoring the toxicity of BPS</h4>
<p>The chemical most frequently used to make BPA-free products is called BPS. As its name implies, BPS is very similar in chemical structure to BPA (see Fig. 1). However, BPS appears to be absorbed by the human body significantly more readily than BPA and is already detectable in 81% of Americans (Liao et al., 2012).</p>
<div id="attachment_1961" style="width: 310px;" class="wp-caption alignright"><img class="size-medium wp-image-1961" src="https://www.independentsciencenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/BPA-v.-BPS-300x41.gif" alt="The structures of BPA (left) and BPS" height="41" width="300"/><p class="wp-caption-text">Fig. 1 The structures of BPA (left) and BPS</p>
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<p>Research into the toxicology of BPS is still at an early stage, but BPS is now looking likely to be even more toxic than BPA (<a href="http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/1408989/">Rochester and Bolden 2015</a>). Like BPA, BPS has been found to interfere with mammalian hormonal activity. To a greater extent than BPA, BPS alters nerve cell creation in the zebrafish hypothalamus and causes behavioral hyperactivity in exposed zebrafish larvae (<a href="http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mariana_Fernandez2/publication/236956906_In_vitro_study_on_the_agonistic_and_antagonistic_activities_of_bisphenol-S_and_other_bisphenol-A_congeners_and_derivatives_via_nuclear_receptors/links/02e7e52bd54b448562000000.pdf">Molina-Molina et al., 2013</a>; <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/01/07/1417731112.short">Kinch et al., 2015</a>). These latter results were observed at the extremely low chemical concentrations of 0.0068uM. This is 1,000-fold lower than the official U.S. levels of acceptable human exposure. The dose was chosen by the researchers since it is the concentration of BPA in the river that passes their laboratory.</p>
<h4>Chemical substitutions are business as usual</h4>
<p>The substitution of one synthetic chemical for another, wherein the substitute later turns out to be hazardous, is not a new story. Indeed, a great many of the chemicals that environmental campaigners nowadays oppose (such as Monsanto’s best-selling herbicide <a href="http://t.co/DQKNuYTAEm">Roundup</a>) are still considered by many in their industries to be “newer” and “safer” substitutes for chemicals (such as 2,4,5-T) that are no longer widely used.</p>
<p>Thus, when the EU banned the herbicide atrazine, Syngenta replaced it with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terbuthylazine">terbuthylazine</a>. Terbuthylazine is chemically very similar and, <a href="http://www.treehugger.com/sustainable-agriculture/tyrone-hayes-misfortune-frogs-crooked-science-and-why-we-should-shun-gmos.html">according to University of California researcher Tyrone Hayes</a>, it appears to have similar ecological and health effects.</p>
<p>The chemical diacetyl was forced off the market for causing “<a href="https://thepumphandle.wordpress.com/popcorndiacetyl/">popcorn lung</a>“. However, it has been largely replaced by dimers and trimers of the same chemical. Unfortunately, the safety of these multimers is highly dubious since it is believed that, in use, they <a href="http://blogs.edf.org/health/2010/01/12/won%E2%80%99t-we-ever-stop-playing-whack-a-mole-with-%E2%80%9Cregrettable-chemical-substitutions%E2%80%9D/">break down into diacetyl</a>.</p>
<p>The Bt pesticides produced inside GMO crops are considered (by farmers and agribusiness) to be safer substitutes for organochlorine, carbamate, and organophosphate insecticides. These chemicals replaced DDT, which was banned in agriculture following Rachel Carson’s <em>Silent Spring.</em> DDT was itself the replacement for <a href="http://www.deq.state.va.us/Portals/0/DEQ/Land/RemediationPrograms/Brownfields/Weaver1-195-1-PB-8r.pdf">lead-arsenate</a>. Many other examples of what are sometimes called <a href="http://greensciencepolicy.org/hbcd-is-on-the-way-out-but-use-of-questionable-alternatives-will-persist/">regrettable substitutions</a> can be found.</p>
<p>Chemical bans (or often manufacturer withdrawals) that precede such substitutions are nevertheless normally celebrated as campaigning victories. But the chemical manufacturers know that substitution is an ordinary part of business. Because weeds and pests become resistant and patents run out, they are usually looking for substitutes irrespective of any environmental campaigning.</p>
<p>Manufacturers also know that, since approvals and permits initially rely primarily on data supplied by the applicant (<a href="https://www.independentsciencenews.org/news/many-european-pesticide-approvals-are-unlawful-says-eu-ombudsman/">and which is often anyway incomplete</a>), problems with safety typically manifest only later, as independent data and practical experience accumulate. Given this current system it is almost inevitable that older (or more widely used) chemicals typically have a dubious safety record while newer ones are considered “safer”.</p>
<h4>“Bad actors”: the rotten apple defence in toxicology</h4>
<p>In these cycles, of substituting one toxin for another, BPA is likely to become a classic.</p>
<p>Environmental health non-profits become active participants in this toxic treadmill when they implicitly treat certain chemicals as rotten apples. Some even explicitly refer to particular chemicals as “<a href="http://generationgreen.org/2010/03/the-toxies-an-award-show-for-bad-actor-chemicals/">bad actors</a>“. The chemical “bad actor” framing strongly implies that the methods and institutions of chemical regulation are not at fault.</p>
<p>But we can ask the question, in what chemical or biological sense can BPA be termed a bad actor? Is there, for example, a specific explanation for how it slipped through the safety net?</p>
<p>The very short answer to this question is to recall the results noted above: BPA impairs mammalian hormonal and reproductive systems; it disrupts brain function; it impacts stem cell development; it causes obesity and probably cancer; it causes erectile dysfunction. Many hundreds of research papers attest that BPA’s harmful effects are numerous, diverse, prolonged, reproducible and found in many species. In short, they are easy to detect (<a href="http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140227134843.htm">e.g. vom Saal et al., 2014</a>).</p>
<p>So while hundreds of scientists outside the regulatory loop have found problems, the formal chemical regulatory system has never flagged BPA, even though astonishingly, long before it was thought of as a plastic, BPA first came to the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A#History">attention of science</a> in specific searches for estrogen-mimicking (i.e. hormone-disrupting) compounds. And despite the overwhelming nature of the published evidence regulators <em>still</em> resist concluding that BPA is a health hazard. And so the clear answer to the “bad actor” question is that there is no special reason why BPA should have slipped through the regulatory process; instead, the case of BPA strongly suggests a dysfunctional regulatory system.</p>
<p>Framing the problem of pollution as being caused a few “bad actor” chemicals is equally inconsistent with the facts in other cases too. Chemical regulatory systems initially approved but have sometimes later banned or restricted (and always under public pressure): atrazine, endosulfan, Roundup (glyphosate), lindane, methyl bromide, methyl iodide, 2,4,5-T, chlorpyrifos, DDT and others. Many other chemicals are strongly implicated as harmful by extensive and compelling independent scientific evidence that has so far not been acted on. And of course, chemical regulators have graduated whole classes of “bad actors”: the organophosphate pesticides, PCBs, organochlorine pesticides, chlorofluorocarbons, neonicotinoids, phthalates, flame retardants, perfluorinated compounds, and so on.</p>
<p>How many bad actors ought it to take before we instead indict the whole show?</p>
<h4>Chemical regulation in theory and practice: the limits of toxicology</h4>
<p>An alternative approach to judging regulatory systems by their results, is to analyse them directly and assess their internal logic and rigour. Thus one can ask what is known about the <em>technical limitations of toxicology</em> and the overall <em>scientific rigour</em> of chemical risk assessment? And, secondly, one can direct attention to <em>the social and institutional practices of chemical regulation.</em> Are chemical risk assessments, for example, being applied by competent and well-intentioned institutions?</p>
<p>The technical limitations of chemical risk assessment are rarely discussed in detail (but see <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935114002473">Buonsante et al., 2014</a>). A full discussion would be lengthy, but some of the most important limitations are outlined in the paragraphs below.</p>
<p>The standard assays of toxicology involve the administration (usually oral feeding) of chemicals in short term tests of up to 90 days to defined strains of organisms (most often rats or mice). These test organisms are of a specified age and are fed standardised diets.</p>
<p>The results are then extrapolated to other doses, other age groups and other environments. Such experiments are used to create <em>estimates of harm</em>. Together with <em>estimates of exposure</em> they form the essence of chemical risk assessment. When specific chemicals are flagged as being worthy of further interest, other techniques may be brought to bear. These may include epidemiology, cell culture experiments, and biological modeling, but the basis of risk assessment is always the estimation of exposure and the estimation of harm. To say that both estimates are prone to error, however, is an understatement.</p>
<h4>Part I: limits to estimating chemical exposures</h4>
<p>Fifty years ago no one knew that many synthetic chemicals would evaporate at the equator and condense at the poles, from where they would enter polar ecosystems. Neither did scientists appreciate that all synthetic fat-soluble compounds that were sufficiently long-lived would bio-accumulate as they rose up the food chain and thus reach concentrations inside organisms sometimes many millions of times above background levels. Nor until recently was it understood that sea creatures such as fish and <a href="https://student.societyforscience.org/article/corals-dine-microplastics">corals would become major consumers of the plastic particles</a> flushed into rivers. These misunderstandings are all examples of historic errors in estimating real world exposures to toxic substances.</p>
<p>A general and broad limitation of these estimates is that real world exposures are very complex. For instance, commercial chemicals are often impure or not well defined. Thus PVC plastics are a complex mixture of polymers and may be further <a href="http://www.pvc.org/en/p/cadmium-stabilisers">mixed with Cadmium or Lead (in</a> <a href="http://www.pvc.org/en/p/cadmium-stabilisers">varied concentrations)</a>. One implication of this is that it is impossible for experiments contributing to risk assessment to be “realistic”. The reason is that actual exposures are always unique to individual organisms and vary enormously in their magnitude, duration, variability, and speed of onset, all of which influence the harm they cause. Whose specific reality would realism mimic?</p>
<p>Additionally, many regulatory decisions do not recognise that exposures to individual chemicals typically come from multiple sources. This failing is often revealed following major accidents or contamination events. Regulatory agencies will assert that actual accident-related doses do not exceed safe limits. However, such statements usually ignore that, because regulations function in effect as permits to pollute, many affected people may already be receiving significant exposures for that chemical prior to the accident.</p>
<p>Returning to the specific case of BPA, no one appreciated until 2013 that the main route of exposure to BPA in mammals is absorption through the mouth and not the gut. The mouth is an exposure route whose veinous blood supply <em>bypasses</em> the liver, and this allows BPA to circulate unmetabolised in the bloodstream (<a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3734497/">Gayrard et al. 2013</a>). Before this was known, many toxicologists explicitly denied the plausibility of measurements showing high BPA concentrations in human blood. They had assumed that BPA was absorbed via the gut and rapidly degraded in the liver.</p>
<h4>Part II: limits to estimating harms</h4>
<p>Similarly significant obstacles are faced in estimating harm. Many of these obstacles originate from the obvious fact that organisms and ecosystems are enormously biologically diverse.</p>
<p>The solution adopted by chemical risk assessment is to extrapolate. Extrapolation allows the results of one or a few experiments to “cover” other species and other environmental conditions.</p>
<p>Most of the assumptions required for such extrapolations, however, have never been scientifically validated. Lack of validation is most obvious for species not yet discovered or those that are endangered. But in other cases they are actively <a href="https://www.independentsciencenews.org/health/the-failing-animal-research-paradigm-for-human-disease/">known to be invalid</a> (e.g. <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3587220/">Seok et al., 2013</a>).</p>
<p>For example, in their responses to specific chemicals, rats often do <a href="https://www.independentsciencenews.org/news/the-experiment-is-on-us-animal-toxicology-testing-science/">not extrapolate</a> to humans. Indeed, they often do not extrapolate even to other rats. Thus individual strains of rats respond differently (which of course is why they get used); but also young and old rats give different responses. So do male and female rats (<a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0890623814000203">vom Saal et al., 2014</a>). So too do rats fed non-standard diets (<a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0041008X81901903">M</a><a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0041008X81901903">ainigi and Campbell, 1981</a>)</p>
<p>Even more extreme extrapolations are employed in ecological toxicology. For example, data on adult honey bees is typically extrapolated to every stage of the bee life cycle, to all other bee species, and sometimes to all pollinators, without the experimenters citing any supporting evidence. Such extrapolations may seem absurd but they are the primary basis of the claim that chemical risk assessment is comprehensive.</p>
<p>There are many other limits to estimating harm. Until it was too late, scientists were not aware that a human with an eighty-year lifespan could have a window of vulnerability to a specific chemical as short as <a href="http://toxsci.oxfordjournals.org/content/122/1/1.full">four days</a>. Neither was it known that the effects of chemicals could be <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0091674995700730">strongly influenced by the time of day they are ingested</a>.</p>
<p>Another crucially important limitation is that, for budgetary and practical reasons, toxicologists necessarily focus on a limited number of specific “endpoints”. An endpoint is whatever characteristic the experimenter chooses to measure. Typical endpoints are death (mortality), cancers, organism weight, and organ weights; but endpoints can even be more subtle measures like neurotoxicity. There is a whole politics associated with the choice of endpoints, which reflects their importance in toxicology, including allegations that endpoints are sometimes chosen for their insensitivity rather than their sensitivity; but the inescapable point is that no matter what endpoints are chosen, there is a much vaster universe of unmeasured endpoints. These typically include: learning defects, immune dysfunction, reproductive dysfunction, multigenerational effects, and so on. Ultimately, most potential harms don’t get measured by toxicologists and so are missing from risk assessments.</p>
<p>Another example of the difficulty of estimating real life harms is that organisms are exposed to mixtures of toxins (<a href="http://carcin.oxfordjournals.org/content/36/Suppl_1/S254.full.pdf+html">Goodson et al., 2015</a>). The question of toxin mixtures is extremely important (<a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1471489214000988">Kortenkamp, 2014</a>). All real life chemical exposures occur in combinations, either because of previous exposure to pollutants or because of the presence of natural toxins. Many commercial products moreover, such as pesticides, are only available as formulations (i.e. mixtures) whose principal purpose is to enhance the potency of the product. Risk assessments, however, just test the “active ingredient” alone (<a href="http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.276.7132&rep=rep1&type=pdf">Richard et al., 2005</a>).</p>
<p>Consider too that all estimates of harm depend fundamentally on the assumption of a linear (or at least simple) dose-response relationship for the effect of each chemical. This is necessary to estimate harms of doses that are higher, lower, or even in between tested doses. The assumption of a linear response is rarely tested, yet for numerous toxins (notably endocrine disrupting chemicals) a linear dose-response relationship has been disproven. Thus the question for any risk assessment is whether the assumption is reliable for the novel compound under review (reviewed in <a href="http://press.endocrine.org/doi/full/10.1210/er.2011-1050">Vandenberg et al., 2012</a>).</p>
<h4>Replacing doubts with false certainty</h4>
<p>To summarise, the process of chemical risk assessment relies on estimating real world exposures and their potential to cause harm by extrapolating from one or a few simple laboratory experiments. The resulting estimates come with enormous uncertainty. In many cases the results have been extensively critiqued and shown to be either dubious or actively improbable (<a href="http://www.altex.ch/resources/altex_2014_2_157_176_Charukeshi1.pdf">Chandrasekera and Pippin, 2013</a>). Yet extrapolation continues—even though we know that the various errors must multiply—because the alternative is to actually measure these different species, using different mixtures and under different circumstances. Given the challenges this would entail, the continued reliance on simplistic assumptions is understandable.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, one might have thought that such important limitations and assumptions would be frequently noted as caveats to risk assessments. They should be, but they are not. Following the UK’s traumatically disastrous outbreak of BSE (mad cow disease) in the 1980s, during which most of the UK population was exposed to infectious prions following highly questionable scientific advice, this exact recommendation was made in <a href="http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20090505194948/http://www.bseinquiry.gov.uk/report/volume1/toc.htm">the Phillips report</a>. Lord Phillips proposed that such caveats should be <em>specifically</em> explained to non-scientific recipients of scientific advice. In practice however, Phillips changed nothing.</p>
<p>When an unusual scientific document does discuss the limitations of chemical risk assessment (such as this description of <a href="http://www.cogem.net/index.cfm/en/publications/publicatie/can-interactions-between-bt-proteins-be-predicted">the failure of interactions between pesticides to extrapolate between closely related species</a>), it rapidly becomes obvious just how much the knowledge and understanding available to us are dwarfed by actual biological and system complexities. As any biologist ought to expect, the errors multiplied and the standard assumptions of risk assessment were overwhelmed even by ordinary life situations.</p>
<p>For good reason many scientific experts are therefore concerned about the number and quantity of man-made chemicals in our bodies. Recently, the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics linked chemical exposure to the emergence of new diseases and disorders. They specifically mentioned obesity, diabetes, hypospadias and reproductive dysfunction and noted: “The global health and economic burden related to toxic environmental chemicals is in excess of millions of deaths” (<a href="http://www.figo.org/sites/default/files/uploads/News/Final%20PDF_8462.pdf">Di Renzo et al., 2015</a>). The Federation acknowledged this to be an underestimate. Nor does it count disabilities.</p>
<h4>Conflicts of interest in chemical risk assessment</h4>
<p>In addition to the technical difficulties, there is also the problem that the scientists who produce scientific knowledge often have financial (and other) conflicts of interest. Conflicts, we know, lead to biases that impact on science well before it is incorporated into risk assessment (e.g. <a href="http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0040005">Lesser et al., 2007</a>).</p>
<p>A fascinating example of apparent unconscious bias comes from a recent survey of scientific publications on the non-target effects of pesticidal GMO (Bt) crops in outdoor experiments. It was commissioned by the Dutch government (<a href="http://www.cogem.net/index.cfm/en/publications/publicatie/research-report-ecological-and-experimental-constraints-for-field-trials-to-study-potential-effects-of-transgenic-bt-crops-on-non-target-insects-and-spiders">COGEM 2014</a>). The report observed that researchers who found negative consequences of GMO Bt crops were disregarding their own findings, even when these were statistically significant. Even more interesting to the Dutch authors, was that the rationales offered for doing so were oftentimes illogical. Typically, researchers were using experimental methods specialised for detecting ecotoxicological effects that were “transient or local”, but when such effects were found the researchers were dismissing the significance of their own results for being either transient or local. The COGEM report represented <em>prima facie</em> evidence that researchers within a whole academic discipline were avoiding conclusions that would throw doubt on the wisdom of using GMO Bt crops. Apparently the Bt researchers had a prior ideological commitment to finding no harm of the kind that scientists are supposed to not have.</p>
<h4>Corporate capture and institutional dysfunctionality</h4>
<p>Chemical regulation occurs primarily within a relatively small number of governmental or “independent” regulatory institutions.</p>
<p>Of these, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is the most prominent and widely imitated example. The EPA has a variety of institutional and procedural defects that prevent it being an effective regulator. Perhaps the best known of these is to allow self-interested chemical corporations to conduct the experiments and provide the data for risk assessment. This lets them summarise (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Bio-Test_Laboratories">or even lie about</a>) the results. As was once pointed out by Melvin Reuber, former EPA consultant, it is <a href="http://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyNET.exe/9100BAAX.txt?ZyActionD=ZyDocument&Client=EPA&Index=1976%20Thru%201980&Docs=&Query=&Time=&EndTime=&SearchMethod=1&TocRestrict=n&Toc=&TocEntry=&QField=&QFieldYear=&QFieldMonth=&QFieldDay=&UseQField=&IntQFieldOp=0&ExtQFieldOp=0&XmlQuery=&File=D%3A%5CZYFILES%5CINDEX%20DATA%5C76THRU80%5CTXT%5C00000012%5C9100BAAX.txt&User=ANONYMOUS&Password=anonymous&SortMethod=h%7C-&MaximumDocuments=1&FuzzyDegree=0&ImageQuality=r75g8/r75g8/x150y150g16/i425&Display=p%7Cf&DefSeekPage=x&SearchBack=ZyActionL&Back=ZyActionS&BackDesc=Results%20page&MaximumPages=1&ZyEntry=1&SeekPage=x">extraordinarily easy</a> for an independent commercial testing operation to bias or fix the result of a typical toxicology study for the benefit of a client.</p>
<p>How the EPA first allowed corporations to generate and submit their own regulatory data is a story well worth knowing.</p>
<p>In the 1980s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Bio-Test_Laboratories">Industrial Bio-Test Laboratories (IBT)</a> was the largest independent commercial testing laboratory in the United States. FDA scientist Adrian Gross discovered that IBT (and other testing companies) were <a href="http://www.webcitation.org/69A19G61r">deliberately, consistently, and illegally misleading both EPA and the FDA</a> about their results. Aided by practices such as the hiring of a chemist from Monsanto, who manufactured them, to test PCBs, IBT created an illusion of chemical safety for numerous pesticides and other chemicals. Many are still in use. They include Roundup, atrazine and 2,4-D, all commonly used in US agriculture. Between them, Canadian regulators drew up a list of 106 questionable chemical registrations and FDA identified 618 separate animal studies as being invalid due to “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Bio-Test_Laboratories">numerous discrepancies between the study conduct and data</a>.” Both regulators suppressed their findings.</p>
<p>Senior IBT managers were jailed, but what the scandal had revealed was that whenever results showed evidence of harm—which was often—, misleading regulators was standard practice.</p>
<p>More remarkable even than the scandal was EPA’s response. Instead of bringing testing in-house, which would seem the logical response to a system-wide failure of independent commercial testing, EPA instead created a Byzantine system of external reporting and corporate summarising. The resulting bureaucratic maze ensures that no EPA employee ever sets eyes on the original experiments or the primary data, and only a handful can access even the summarised results. This system has the consequence of excluding any formal possibility that whistleblowing on the part of Federal employees or FOIA requests (from outsiders) might reveal fraudulent or otherwise problematic tests. EPA calculatedly turned a blind eye to any potential future wrongdoing in the full knowledge that the chemical regulatory system it oversaw was systemically corrupt.</p>
<p>Probably more familiar to readers is what is called “<a href="http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/dalbo/Regulatory_Capture_Published.pdf">regulatory capture</a>.” This takes many forms, from the offering to public servants of favours and future jobs, to the encouragement of top-down political interference with regulatory agencies. The culminating effect is to ensure that political will within agencies to protect the public is diluted or lost.</p>
<p>Regulatory capture can become a permanent feature of an institution. For example, OECD member countries have an agreement called the Mutual Acceptance of Data (<a href="http://www.oecd.org/chemicalsafety/testing/oecdguidelinesforthetestingofchemicalsandrelateddocuments.htm">MAD</a>). MAD is appropriately named. It has the effect of explicitly excluding from regulatory consideration most of the peer-reviewed scientific literature (<a href="http://digibug.ugr.es/bitstream/10481/24821/1/ehp-117-309.pdf">Myers et al., 2009a</a>). The purported goal of MAD was to elevate experimental practices by requiring certification via <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_laboratory_practice">Good Laboratory Practice</a> (GLP) which was a procedure introduced after the IBT scandal (<a href="http://www.researchgate.net/publication/8331752_Equal_treatment_for_regulatory_science_extending_the_controls_governing_the_quality_of_public_research_to_private_research/file/3deec525c2f5d0c924.pdf">Wagner and Michaels, 2004</a>). GLP is a mix of management and reliability protocols that are standard in industrial laboratories but rare in universities and elsewhere. However, the consequence of accepting MAD has been to specifically exclude from regulatory consideration evidence and data not produced by industry.</p>
<p>The MAD agreement explains much of the regulatory inaction over BPA. Because of MAD, FDA (and also its European equivalent the European Food Safety Authority) have ignored the hundreds of peer-reviewed BPA studies—since they are not GLP— in favor of just two by industry. These two industry studies, whose credibility and conclusions have been publicly challenged by independent scientists, showed no ill effects of BPA (<a href="http://digibug.ugr.es/bitstream/10481/24821/1/ehp-117-309.pdf">Myers et al., 2009b</a>).</p>
<h4>Whistleblowing at the EPA</h4>
<p>Various EPA whistleblowers have described in detail the specifics of their former organisation’s capture by branches of the chemical industry.</p>
<p><a href="http://home.comcast.net/%7Ejurason/main/bio4.htm">Whistleblower William Sanjour</a> has described how regulatory failure was ensured by the organisational structure imposed on the EPA at its Nixon-era inception. The structure of EPA is inherently conflicted since it has the dual functions of both writing and <em>and</em> enforcing regulations. Unwillingness to enforce high standards led his superiors to order Sanjour <a href="https://www.independentsciencenews.org/health/designed-to-fail-why-regulatory-agencies-dont-work/">to write deliberate loopholes into those regulations.</a> More recently, the EU’s EFSA was similarly caught <a href="https://www.independentsciencenews.org/news/eu-safety-institutions-caught-plotting-an-industry-escape-route-around-looming-pesticide-ban/">proposing loopholes</a> for new regulations on endocrine disrupting chemicals. Inserting loopholes is standard practice in the writing of chemical safety regulations.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.independentsciencenews.org/health/designed-to-fail-why-regulatory-agencies-dont-work/">I</a><a href="https://www.independentsciencenews.org/health/designed-to-fail-why-regulatory-agencies-dont-work/">n the same article</a>, Sanjour also proposed that since corporate capture renders them useless, the public would be better off with no regulatory agencies. In a similar vein, former EPA pesticide scientist <a href="http://www.vallianatos.com/">Evaggelos Vallianatos</a> called his former employer, at book length, the “<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Poison-Spring-Secret-History-Pollution/dp/1608199142/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top/188-1966921-5851069">polluter’s protection agency</a>.” Another EPA whistleblower, <a href="http://www.whistleblowers.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=74">David Lewis</a>, this time at EPA’s Office of Water, has shown in court-obtained documents that EPA scientists buried evidence and even covered up deaths so as to formulate regulations that would permit land application of sewage sludge. This sludge was routinely contaminated with pathogens, heavy metals, industrial chemicals, pharmaceuticals, flame retardants, and other known hazardous substances. The corruption around sewage sludge regulations extended well beyond the EPA. It encompassed other federal agencies, several universities, the <a href="https://www.independentsciencenews.org/health/how-epa-faked-the-entire-science-of-sewage-sludge-safety-a-whistleblowers-story/">National Academy of Science</a>, and municipalities. David Lewis eventually obtained a legal judgement that the City of Augusta, Ga, had <a href="http://onlineathens.com/stories/072608/uganews_2008072600246.shtml#.VlhXAXt3bLY">“fudged”</a> the toxicity testing of its own sewage sludge in order to meet EPA guidelines. The city had done so at the request of EPA.</p>
<p>In another recent case, <a href="http://www.desmogblog.com/2015/03/02/internal-documents-reveal-extensive-industry-influence-over-epa-s-national-study-fracking">DeSmogBlog obtained</a>, through a Freedom of Information Act request (FOIA), internal documents showing how EPA offered access to its fracking study plans:</p>
<p><em>“[Y]ou guys are part of the team here,” one <span class="caps">EPA</span> representative <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1678647-greenpeace-foia-returns.html#document/p332/a205594" target="_blank">wrote</a> to Chesapeake Energy as they together edited study planning documents in October 2013, “please write things in as you see fit.”</em></p>
<p>Even more recently, EPA whistleblower and chemist Dr Cate Jenkins and the non-profit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (<a href="http://www.peer.org/">PEER</a>) successfully <a href="http://www.peer.org/news/news-releases/2015/04/21/egregious-epa-misconduct-delivers-whistleblower-win/">sued EPA</a> for suppressing information about toxic effects on 9/11 first responders. The case ended with a judgement showing that EPA had, among numerous egregious acts, created fake email accounts (including for EPA head Lisa Jackson) to evade accountability. According to Judge Chambers, EPA:</p>
<p><em>“Failed, and failed miserably, over an extended course of time in complying with its discovery obligations and…Court discovery orders”</em></p>
<p>Judge Chambers also found that EPA worked a “fraud on the Court” through numerous “false claims” and inaccurate claims of privilege which upon examination applied to “none of the documents provided”. The judge also found that EPA deliberately and illegally destroyed an unknown number of documents which should have been under a litigation hold.</p>
<p>The ultimate effect of these institutional defects is that chemical risk assessments in the US and the EU have a safety bar for approval that is so low that regulators virtually never decline to approve a chemical. In contrast, the exact same institutions use standards for taking any chemical <em>off</em> the market that are so high that such an event nearly never happens. Yet if both standards were based purely on science, as they claim to be, both bars would be the same height.</p>
<p>This double standard represents the overwhelming bias in the system. At every stage of chemical risk assessment—from the <a href="http://www.boulderweekly.com/article-12640-muzzled-by-monsanto.html">funding of research</a> to the ultimate decision to approve a chemical—the process is dominated by commercial concerns and not by science (as was <a href="http://inthesetimes.com/article/18504/epa_government_scientists_and_chemical_industry_links_influence_regulations">recently shown yet again</a>).</p>
<p>Beyond any conceivable doubt, inappropriate external influences swamp the scientific content and protective mission of chemical risk assessment.</p>
<h4>Chemical risk assessment: can the show be salvaged?</h4>
<p>It therefore seems clear that to frame individual chemicals as “bad actors” is incorrect. Chemical risk assessments themselves are the problem. Thus we can perfectly explain why approved chemicals accumulate red flags when exposed to the scientific process but also why those that replace them are no less harmful. Specific chemicals like BPA are thus the messengers and shooting them one by one is not only pointless, it is counterproductive. It distracts and detracts from the infinitely more important truth, that the institutions, the methods, and thus the entire oversight of chemical regulation is failing in what it claims to do, which is to protect from us from harm.</p>
<p>Importantly, chemical regulatory systems are not just broken, they are unfixable. Even with the best intentions, such as the full cooperation of all the institutions mentioned here and of the entire academic research community, remedying the technical problems would be a task that is beyond Herculean.</p>
<p>Consider just one of these–the testing of a chemical in combination with others. The testing of mixtures is an improvement often suggested by NGOs and thousands of scientific studies show that this is an important consideration. The pesticide Chlordecone, for example, increases the toxicity of an “otherwise inconsequential” dose of the common contaminant carbon tetrachloride by 67-fold in rats (<a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0041008X7990471X">Curtis et al., 1979</a>).</p>
<p>To test mixtures properly, however, would be astonishingly expensive and also enormously costly towards experimental animals. According to the US National Toxicology Program, standard 13 week studies of the interactions between just 25 chemicals would require 33 million experiments costing $3 trillion. This is because each chemical needs to be tested against all possible combinations of the others. To study mixtures of all 11,000 chlorinated chemicals in commerce would require 10<sup>3311</sup> experiments. This is more experiments than there are atoms in the universe. Our entire planet would have to devote itself to animal experimentation and the work would still not be done by the end of time itself (Yang 1994). Even then we would only know the toxicity of organochlorines towards a single test species. Would the results be extrapolable to any other species? Well, we could buy another planet and test it!</p>
<p>Imagine also that an adequate test for synthetic chemicals were devised and it was run by competent institutions. Would any chemical pass? The multiple harms of the single chemical BPA, plus the frequency with which chemical substitutes turn out later to be harmful, and plenty of other data, suggests it is possible that few chemicals would pass. This conclusion, of course, contradicts the presumption of innocence that underlies all chemical regulation. But we should be clear that the presumption is arbitrary and therefore may be wrong. What is so unbelievable, after all, about proposing that all man-made chemicals cause dysfunction at low doses in a significant subset of all the biological organisms on earth?</p>
<h4>Strategising for success</h4>
<p>Obviously, the implications of this knowldge are many, but the one of specific importance to environmental health campaigners, is that organising for a ban on a specific hazardous chemical, such as the herbicide atrazine, is likely to be a strategic error. If chemical risk assessment is ineffective then demanding a ban is pointless because achieving it will result only in the substitution of a chemical that is no better. But even worse, if chemical risk assessment is ineffective, such campaigns undermine the wider cause because they falsely imply that chemical regulations protect the public and limit pollution.</p>
<p>Messaging is extremely important. If the public learned that chemical regulations were effective only from the chemical industry they probably would disbelieve it. However, since they hear it from the entire environmental movement then chemical risk assessment acquires credibility. Why, they no doubt reason, would the environment movement pretend chemical testing was effective if it wasn’t? And indeed the environment movement traditionally reinforces this message still further whenever it calls for <em>more</em> testing.</p>
<p>In the light of this understanding, if they accept the accumulated scientific evidence, environmental and public health advocates who campaign for bans or restrictions on single chemicals have an opportunity to substantively rethink their strategies and reframe their activities. This doesn’t necessarily mean abandoning any discussion of individual chemicals, but at the very least it does mean explicitly framing those specific chemicals not as “bad actors” but as symptoms of a much bigger problem of incompetent and dysfunctional regulation, with all that implies.</p>
<p>This challenge is also a tremendous opportunity. Having facts that are more stark and analysis that is more scientific and more rigorous creates a superior and more powerful basis upon which to organise and strategise. Thus it brings more ambitious environmental health goals within reach. Advocates can choose from a broader range of possible approaches and engage a broadened segment of the population. They can place clear and obvious intellectual distance between their own realistic strategies for protecting the public and the planet and contradt them with the plainly inadequate views of the chemical industry. For example, it is surely easier to explain to a layperson the generic absurdities of chemical risk assessment (and thus gain their support) than it is to explain the toxicological niceties of glyphosate (Roundup) or 2,4-D, especially one chemical (of 80,000) at a time. They say the truth can set you free, but in the world of toxic campaigning it is a strategy that has hardly been tried yet. I am optimistic, therefore, that the tide can be turned.</p>
<p>In the late 1990s Greenpeace USA adopted the novel campaigning position that all chlorinated hydrocarbons should be banned, in part on the grounds that every one so far investigated had proven toxicologically problematic. In doing so they took chemical campaigning to a new level. Greenpeace was threatening thousands of products of the chemical industry with a strategic goal that had a realistic chance of significantly enhancing the quality of our environment. If they had succeeded <a href="https://www.independentsciencenews.org/news/new-research-links-neonicotinoid-pesticides-to-monarch-butterfly-declines/">neonicotinoids</a> would not now be ubiquitous in the environment, DDT would never have been allowed. Nor would 2,4-D, but it is unlikely that your material standard of living would be lower, it might even be higher.</p>
<p>Greenpeace was hit by a campaign of <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/29/AR2010112903764.html">corporate espionage</a>. Their offices were bugged and their computers were hacked, they were infiltrated by phony volunteers and more. The chemical industry was spooked. Greenpeace eventually backed off, but by raising the stakes and making their case with science, they had shown a way.</p>
<p>The book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pandoras-Poison-Chlorine-Environmental-Strategy/dp/0262700840">Pandora’s Poison</a> elaborates on the some of the ambitious ideas for eradicating pollution that Greenpeace tried but never in the end adequately road tested. It is time to learn the lessons of the past and move chemical safety campaigning outside of the comfort zone of the chemical industry, which is where it belongs.</p>
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In Yang RSH, ed: Toxicology of Chemical Mixtures. Academic Press 99-117.<br/> Yuan Z, S Courtenay, RC Chambers, I Wirgin (2006) <a href="http://infohouse.p2ric.org/ref/52/51806.pdf">Evidence of spatially extensive resistance to PCBs in an anadromous fish of the Hudson River</a>. Environmental Health Perspectives 114. 77-84.</p>Organic food’s dirty secret: What the “seductive” label fails to tell you [Updated Info]tag:activism101.ning.com,2015-03-15:3143100:BlogPost:359292015-03-15T19:30:00.000ZCromaghttp://activism101.ning.com/profile/Cromag
<p><strong>Just because food is labeled organic doesn't mean it's what you're expecting, journalist Peter Laufer tells Salon</strong></p>
<p>by Lindsay Abrams <a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1977360887?profile=original" target="_self"><img class="align-right" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1977360887?profile=RESIZE_320x320" width="310"></img></a></p>
<p>Published Saturday, Jul 19, 2014 11:00 AM PST…</p>
<p></p>
<p><strong>Just because food is labeled organic doesn't mean it's what you're expecting, journalist Peter Laufer tells Salon</strong></p>
<p>by Lindsay Abrams <a target="_self" href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1977360887?profile=original"><img width="310" class="align-right" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1977360887?profile=RESIZE_320x320" width="310"/></a></p>
<p>Published Saturday, Jul 19, 2014 11:00 AM PST</p>
<p><a href="http://www.salon.com/2014/07/19/organic_foods_dirty_secret_what_the_seductive_label_fails_to_tell_you/" target="_blank">http://www.salon.com/2014/07/19/organic_foods_dirty_secret_what_the_seductive_label_fails_to_tell_you/</a></p>
<p></p>
<div id="yui_3_18_1_15_1426435630735_49" class="articleContent"><p>Purchase produce emblazoned with the USDA’s official <a href="http://www.ams.usda.gov/AMSv1.0/ams.fetchTemplateData.do?&template=TemplateA&navID=NationalOrganicProgram&leftNav=NationalOrganicProgram&page=NOPOrganicSeal&description=The%20Organic%20Seal&acct=nopgeninfo">organic seal</a>, and you should be able to assume several things are true: Your food will have been grown without the benefit of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, sewage sludge or irradiation, and it won’t contain genetically modified organisms. Meat labeled organic will have been raised on such crops, and will be free of antibiotics and growth hormones; pre-slaughter, the cow or chicken or pig’s handlers were held to certain standards of animal health and welfare.</p>
<p>Whether or not you’re buying something that’s healthier than conventional food is still up for debate — the biggest analysis to date found <a href="http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=1355685">little evidence</a> for this being the case, although it did suggest that eating organic can reduce your risk of exposure to pesticide residues and antibiotic-resistant bacteria.</p>
<p>It is, of course, almost certainly going to cost more. The reasons why people decide to shell out for organic may vary depending on how well they understand the specifics, but at the very least, most recognize that buy choosing organic, they’re purchasing a product grown in ways that subvert the worst, environmental-damage-causing practices of conventional food production.</p>
<p>All that only works, however, if we can trust the integrity of the organic label. And according to journalist Peter Laufer, it’s seriously in need of reform. In his new book, “<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Organic-Journalists-Discover-behind-Labeling/dp/0762790717/saloncom08-20">Organic: A Journalist’s Quest to Discover the Truth Behind Food Labeling</a>,” Laufer attempts to trace the origins of two products: organic walnuts that he purchased at a Trader Joe’s, and black beans from a Whole Foods competitor, which arrived in California via, respectively, Kazakhstan and Bolivia. Getting clear answers about where, exactly, the food came from and how it was grown turns out to be a lot harder than he anticipated.</p>
<p>The organic label, Laufer tells Salon, has become “inappropriately seductive” to overly trusting consumers – a healthy degree of skepticism is needed about the food distribution system as a whole. Only by demanding our food be held to a higher level of scrutiny, he argues, can the organic label live up to its ideal.</p>
<hr/>Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows:<div style="opacity: 1;" class="toggle-group target hideOnInit"><p><strong>I’ve written about the problem with words like “natural,” which food companies love to put on their products, because they don’t actually mean anything. But “organic” is different, because we do have standards for what qualifies. Could you explain what has to happen for a food to merit that label?</strong></p>
<p>It’s somewhat complicated in terms of its history. The U.S. government got involved in the ’90s with the definition of organic and created the <a href="http://www.ams.usda.gov/AMSv1.0/ams.fetchTemplateData.do?template=TemplateN&navID=OrganicStandardsLinkNOPNationalList&rightNav1=OrganicStandardsLinkNOPNationalList&topNav=&leftNav=&page=NOPOrganicStandards&resultType=&acct=nopgeninfo">National Organic Program</a>. Some felt that those standards were watered down; for others, it limited what they could say about their own product. The standards have three levels, basically, the first one is 100 percent organic — that’s the highest and it means things like no herbicides, no pesticides, no sewage sludge, etc. Then there is the USDA organic which allows for 5 percent of the product to come from a list of about 200 approved substances that are not organic. This is extraordinarily controversial too, whether that should exist at all, and what is or is not on that list. And then there is “made with organic ingredients” which allows it to be dropped down to 70 percent, and you get a situation like the example in the book where you can have corn chips that are made with the organic corn but fried in conventional oil. There are those who ignore that label because they don’t want the USDA identity on their product, because they consider that their standards are higher. But those who want to call their stuff organic, and sell more than $5,000 worth of a product a year, must meet those standards or they’re violating the law.</p>
<p><strong>I suppose a better question to ask would be, what are the main issues you’ve found with the USDA’s label?</strong></p>
<p>I like that question better too, because I’m not all that concerned with these differentiations. What I’m concerned with most are the <span style="text-decoration: underline;">frailties of the certification process</span>. To be considered organic, a <span style="text-decoration: underline;">third-party certifier</span> certifies that the operation that’s creating the product is doing so according to the standards of the USDA and of the U.S. government. The <span style="text-decoration: underline;">rigor</span> of those inspections differs case by case — that’s one problem. Another problem is that certification is a business. And so the <span style="text-decoration: underline;">potential for conflict of interest</span> is huge, since the outfit being certified is paying for that certification in a competitive market. By definition, that puts the certifier in a position of being concerned about keeping the job. The third of three really big problems with the certification process is that so much food now is in the <span style="text-decoration: underline;">globalized food chain</span>, so from a U.S. point of view, food is coming in certified organic from all over the world, and these certifiers, that are U.S.-based, rarely do that certification on-site. They shop it out to <span style="text-decoration: underline;">local certifiers</span>. Definitions are different about what the regulations mean, and outside of the United States, unfortunately, the <span style="text-decoration: underline;">standards for honesty are not necessarily at the level that you and I may wish</span>.</p>
<p><strong>Are there any safeguards in place against that conflict of interest?</strong></p>
<p>Sure there are. You can go to Denmark where the government does the certifying. Or you can go to Austria, where the farmers get a subsidy if they’re growing organic, and then they are inspected by government inspectors and if it turns out that they are compromised, they have to pay back the cash subsidy. So there are various techniques that are in place around the world that could be employed in the U.S., rather than this privatized certification system.</p>
<p><strong>But what about in the USDA itself — are there any safeguards? Or else how do they justify doing it this way?</strong></p>
<p>Well, they justify it — and this is what they told me, I’m not speaking for them — by saying they require the certification companies to meet their standards and they spot-check them, and that they’re confident that they’re doing an appropriate job. What I found shocking during investigation was the <span style="text-decoration: underline;">lack of transparency</span> and the opaque manner in which the <span style="text-decoration: underline;">certification companies</span> operate. This was all documented in the book. But in order for me to learn what we’re talking about now, I had to find my own avenues to get the information, because the certification companies shut down. They will not talk.</p>
<p><strong>It seems like a lot of what you found really emphasizes the importance of knowing where your food comes from, and eating locally. Would you say that globalization of the food system and the principles we normally associate with organic food are at odds?</strong></p>
<p>Well, one could certainly make that argument. I know, because of my investigations in Bolivia for example, that you can get a fine organic black bean that’s sourced five thousand miles from my home in Oregon. That doesn’t make a whole heck of a lot of sense to me, just in terms of practicality and use of resources: it’s got to get shipped and it happens that that is a good quality product, but it just as easily could be a product from as far away that isn’t good. However, to say that just because it’s local, it’s better, is not necessarily the case. If something is sprayed to the hilt with a pesticide or an herbicide that you consider problematic, it doesn’t matter if it was grown by your neighbor, and <span style="text-decoration: underline;">we have crooks right here in this country</span>. I have a good example in the book from the same county I live in, in Oregon, where a guy was <span style="text-decoration: underline;">selling conventional corn as organic corn</span> and it compromised the food chain because he was selling this <span style="text-decoration: underline;">as feed to local organic dairies</span> in the Umpqua Valley of Oregon.</p>
<p><strong>How was he able to get away with something like that?</strong></p>
<p>Well, he ultimately didn’t get away with it, but one of the reasons he did goes back to the certification process. He used fraudulent certificates, <span style="text-decoration: underline;">counterfeit certificates</span> that he created from real ones, and it’s an example of how <span style="text-decoration: underline;">relatively easy</span> it is for a crook to take advantage of the system.</p>
<p><strong>So that’s something that happens often?</strong></p>
<p>We don’t know how often it happens, in part because <span style="text-decoration: underline;">the inspection system is understaffed</span> and we have something like <span style="text-decoration: underline;">$28 billion worth of organic food</span> being traded annually at this point in the U.S. and about <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong>28 employees</strong></span> in the National Organic Program to handle investigations of such certificates. So we know that it’s easy to make these, but we don’t know how many crooks are out there. We know that when there’s money involved, it does bring out the crooks or the <span style="text-decoration: underline;">compromisers</span>, somebody who may think that it really doesn’t matter that much if they don’t quite interpret the rules as strictly as you and I may wish them too, or as they were designed to be interpreted.</p>
<p><strong>A <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/business/organic-food-purists-worry-about-big-companies-influence.html?pagewanted=all">2012 New York Times article</a> caused a lot of controversy by claiming that Big Food had come in and drained all meaning from the organic label. Many <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2012/07/has-corprate-influence-turned-organic-fraud">responded</a> that while there are still a lot of problems with the label, local and organic is still a whole lot better than nothing. Where do you fall on the efficacy of the label as a whole? For example, for consumers walking through the store and looking for the best thing to buy?</strong></p>
<p>I fear that it is inappropriately seductive. This is one of the things I’ve learned from interviews with shoppers, and I can even feel it myself, and maybe you can too: it looks good, like that must be better. And the problem with it, from my perspective, after my investigations, is not that we shouldn’t be eating organic — we in my family strive for an organic pantry and fridge. It’s that what that label itself means is not well-understood by most consumers, in terms of the rigor of inspection and certification. And that’s what I set out to do, and I believe successfully did with the book, is show that <em><span style="text-decoration: underline;">just because that label is on there, it may be on there legally, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the product meets the shopper’s expectations</span></em>.</p>
<p><strong>Even Walmart is now starting to supply organic foods. Do you have a take on what that will mean for the label’s integrity?</strong></p>
<p>It’s not just Walmart. The greatest number of organic dollars are traded at Costco, and so Costco and Walmart are big into this, as are the traditional grocery store chains like Safeway, and they’re big into it because if you look at the curve of the last twenty years, the organic dollars spent have gone from a billion to that 28 billion. That’s just an extraordinary spike in twenty years, double digit increases every year recently, and so of course they’re embracing that. On the good side, you can say that means that more people are being introduced to what is arguably a healthier way to eat, and the prices are going down. However, if that means this volume continues to escalate and the bureaucracy that is supposed to keep check on the efficacy of the certification and inspection systems doesn’t grow exponentially, that doesn’t bode well. And then, at the same time, if what results from these kinds of draws, this kind of volume, is just factory farming becoming so-called organic, that has its own social consequences and issues that need to be thought through by the consumer, I believe.</p>
<p><strong>So at an institutional level, what needs to happen to keep up? Is it just a matter of dedicating more money and time and staff?</strong></p>
<p>Well, certainly the USDA or <span style="text-decoration: underline;">the government needs to spend more money staffing and funding the National Organic Program</span>, that’s one thing that has to happen. The next thing that has to happen is that we need to rethink, as a society, the globalization of the food chain, and think about what kinds of problems exist in transport: the potential for cross-pollination of conventional and organic; <span style="text-decoration: underline;">the opportunity for the bad guys to take a organic shipment and dilute with the less expensive conventional and still call it organic; the opportunity to launder the product and to make use of counterfeit certificates</span> — when we’re operating in a global environment, and we have affluent countries like the United States drawing food stuffs from impoverished countries that are suppliers, that <span style="text-decoration: underline;">creates a dynamic that opens the door to the kinds of corruption that we are seeing</span>. We also might want to take into consideration the social costs: Do you want to go to your local Whole Foods and buy something at an inflated price because of the way it’s packaged and offered and the environment of the Whole Foods, and have that product be something that came from a third-world environment where the workers involved in growing and processing it are making substandard wages? That’s a social cost to be considered that is exacerbated by the Costco/Walmart entrance into the organic sector.</p>
<p><strong>It took you so long to get any sort of answers from food retailers and certification companies, and the ones you got weren’t very satisfactory. And your impetus for writing this book at all was that first you had to be savvy enough to notice that the organic walnuts you bought at Trader Joe’s were made in Kazakhstan, and that had to make you suspicious. For the average consumer going to the store right now, what should they be looking out for? Is there anyway for them to protect against some of these abuses?</strong></p>
<p>I think there are a couple of things that you can do. One is, watch where that source country is. And that’s not to say that because something comes from some place like Kazakhstan it’s necessarily bad, but if you have a basic awareness of world current affairs, and you’re seeing the stuff come from a place that’s known for corruption like Kazakhstan, then you may be suspicious. Another really important clue is if there are multiple source countries listed. <span style="text-decoration: underline;">This apple juice is sourced in Argentina, China and California, so what the heck does that mean</span>? And how is it that you should have faith in the veracity of the label, I suggest, when it is by definition impossible to trace because it’s mixed? So those are two examples. The third example is if you’re buying from a company that you’ve had good experiences with historically, whether it’s the retailer like Whole Foods or whether it is the product provider, a brand or whatever it is that you may chose or that you’ve chosen for years, and you’ve had success with the product, then you might have some sense of confidence and then give them a call — most of them have 800 numbers — and say, “Where did this come from?” And if they’re open and happy to talk with you about it then I would suggest that should give you a certain feeling of confidence. And if they say “I’m sorry” — as so many of them say — “but this is proprietary information,” then that should throw up the red flag pretty high, because what have they got to hide?</p>
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<a id="yui_3_18_1_17_1426435630735_750" class="toggle-group toggleOnScroll trigger remember refreshAds gaTrackPageEvent on" href="http://www.salon.com/2014/07/19/organic_foods_dirty_secret_what_the_seductive_label_fails_to_tell_you/" name="yui_3_18_1_17_1426435630735_750"></a></div>
<p><a title="Lindsay Abrams" href="http://www.salon.com/writer/lindsay_abrams/"><img class="writerImage" id="writer-13390502" src="http://media.salon.com/2013/07/lindsay_abrams_square.jpg" title="Lindsay Abrams" alt="Lindsay Abrams" name="writer-13390502" height="65" width="70"/></a></p>
<p>Lindsay Abrams is a staff writer at Salon, reporting on all things sustainable. Follow her on Twitter @readingirl, email labrams@salon.com.</p>
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<p></p>
<p><span style="color: #ff0000;">More info below:</span></p>
<p></p>
<h2><span class="textColorblack">The global food and drink sector is fraught with significant challenges to ensure food safety, authenticity and global supply chain integrity.</span></h2>
<p align="justify">Defined as counterfeiting, mislabeling, adulteration, substitution, addition, dilution or grey market, food fraud is economically motivated. And although it has been around for centuries, as our global food supply chain continues to expand and become more complex, it is no longer deemed just a ‘quality’ issue but one of safety.</p>
<p align="justify">Brand erosion, lost revenues, supplier mistrust, bankruptcy, lawsuits, product quality and safety recalls, and even death, are all real concerns of food fraud. Any of these events could stem from just one supplier, one raw food ingredient, one mislabel, or one questionable food shipment.</p>
<p align="justify">And today’s fraudsters are more sophisticated than ever. Emboldened by lucrative profits, a history of poor detection and (so far) lenient penalties, these criminals are usually linked to organized crime and continue to infiltrate an often unprepared, global supply chain network.</p>
<p align="justify">Although the term ‘global supply chain’ or ‘network’ conjures up images of being well connected or ‘networked’, countries across the globe can vary significantly with regard to their food standards, customs, geopolitics or emergency preparedness which can negatively impact the chains’ links. As a result, stakeholders today need to be more aware of real, and potential, weaknesses in the supply chain and become more united in purpose and action to strengthen these weak links which, by default, will help weed out the fraudsters who are lying in wait.</p>
<p align="justify">The purpose of this eCongress is to highlight multi-disciplinary, leading-edge research as well as provide industry guidance on how to become more proactive in fighting and preventing food fraud. Each webinar within the series will share practical tips, strategies and case study highlights to spread awareness and help you fight intentional deception using food for economic gain, including:</p>
<ul>
<li><span class="textColorblack">Understanding what food fraud is and what you can do to prevent it;</span></li>
<li><span class="textColorblack">Points of vulnerability within the supply chain through the eyes of a criminologist;</span></li>
<li><span class="textColorblack">Strategies for tracking and countering food fraud through forensic accounting;</span></li>
<li><span class="textColorblack">New analytic screening technologies to promote authenticity and food integrity;</span></li>
<li><span class="textColorblack">New guidance for industry on how to mitigate ingredient risk through improving food safety management systems;</span></li>
<li><span class="textColorblack">Control plan preparation guidance to meet GFSI requirements coming into force in 2016; and</span></li>
<li><span class="textColorblack">The voice of the consumer in Europe: Lessons learned following the horsemeat scandal.</span></li>
</ul>
<p><strong><span class="textColorblack"><a href="http://xtalks.com/food-fraud.ashx" target="_blank">http://xtalks.com/food-fraud.ashx</a></span></strong></p>
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<p><strong>Record seizures of fake food and drink in INTERPOL-Europol operation</strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.interpol.int/News-and-media/News/2015/N2015-013" target="_blank">http://www.interpol.int/News-and-media/News/2015/N2015-013</a></p>
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<p><strong>Federal officials plan to track every fish and crustacean shipped to U.S. ports</strong></p>
<p>"Currently port officials are not required to collect that much information and much of what they do is not automatically shared by federal, state and local governments."</p>
<p><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/sea-hunt-officials-plan-to-track-seafood-bait-to-plate-to-end-fraud/2015/03/14/0ab191d8-c7fe-11e4-aa1a-86135599fb0f_story.html?postshare=9821426425805656" target="_blank">http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/sea-hunt-officials-plan-to-track-seafood-bait-to-plate-to-end-fraud/2015/03/14/0ab191d8-c7fe-11e4-aa1a-86135599fb0f_story.html?postshare=9821426425805656</a></p>
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<p><span class="textColorblack"><strong>The Truth About Organic Foods from China</strong> <br/></span></p>
<p><span class="textColorblack"><a href="http://ow.ly/KmnLR" target="_blank">http://ow.ly/KmnLR</a></span></p>
<h1><span class="font-size-3">Combatting Food Fraud with Science</span></h1>
<p><span class="textColorblack"><a href="http://sciex.com/solutions/food-and-beverage-testing/food-fraud-analysis" target="_blank">http://sciex.com/solutions/food-and-beverage-testing/food-fraud-analysis</a></span></p>
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<p><span class="textColorblack"><strong>Arsenic in apple juice: How much is too much? | Tampa Bay Times</strong></span></p>
<p><span class="textColorblack"><a href="http://ow.ly/Kmlhy" target="_blank">http://ow.ly/Kmlhy</a><br/></span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span class="textColorblack"><strong>Combating Food Fraud through Effective Collaboration - Food Industry Asia</strong></span></p>
<p><span class="textColorblack"><a href="http://ow.ly/Kmlor" target="_blank">http://ow.ly/Kmlor</a><br/></span></p>
<p></p>
<p><strong><span class="textColorblack">Food fraud expert professor Chris Elliott on what's changed since the horse meat scandal</span></strong></p>
<p><span class="textColorblack"><a href="http://ow.ly/KmlvI" target="_blank">http://ow.ly/KmlvI</a></span></p>
<p></p>
<p>Here's the Deal with the Organic Seal</p>
<p><a href="http://ow.ly/Kmoyj" target="_blank">http://ow.ly/Kmoyj</a></p>
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<p>Whole Foods 365 Organic: Made in China. An ABC Exposé. | elephant journal</p>
<p><a href="http://ow.ly/KmoIN" target="_blank">http://ow.ly/KmoIN</a></p>
<p></p>
<p>Whole Foods Market "Organic" Food is Uncertified China-Grown Food</p>
<p><a href="http://ow.ly/Kmp02" target="_blank">http://ow.ly/Kmp02</a></p>
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<p></p>If Nature Had Rightstag:activism101.ning.com,2014-10-23:3143100:BlogPost:351512014-10-23T21:51:43.000ZCromaghttp://activism101.ning.com/profile/Cromag
<p><span class="font-size-3">... "So what would a radically different law-driven consciousness look like?”<a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1977360902?profile=original" target="_self"><img class="align-right" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1977360902?profile=RESIZE_480x480" width="350"></img></a> The question was posed over three decades ago by a University of Southern California law professor as his lecture drew to a close. “One in which Nature had rights,” he continued. “Yes, rivers, lakes, trees. . . . How could such a posture in law affect a community’s view of…</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">... "So what would a radically different law-driven consciousness look like?”<a target="_self" href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1977360902?profile=original"><img width="350" class="align-right" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1977360902?profile=RESIZE_480x480" width="350"/></a> The question was posed over three decades ago by a University of Southern California law professor as his lecture drew to a close. “One in which Nature had rights,” he continued. “Yes, rivers, lakes, trees. . . . How could such a posture in law affect a community’s view of itself?” Professor Christopher Stone may as well have announced that he was an alien life form. Rivers and trees are objects, not subjects, in the eyes of the law and are by definition incapable of holding rights. His speculations created an uproar.</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">Stone stepped away from that lecture a little dazed by the response from the class but determined to back up his argument. He realized that for nature to have rights the law would have to be changed so that, first, a suit could be brought in the name of an aspect of nature, such as a river; second, a polluter could be held liable for harming a river; and third, judgments could be made that would benefit a river. Stone quickly identified a pending appeal to the United States Supreme Court against a decision of the Ninth Circuit that raised these issues. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had found that the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund was not “aggrieved” or “adversely affected” by the proposed development of the Mineral King Valley in the Sierra Nevada Mountains by Walt Disney Enterprises, Inc. This decision meant that the Sierra Club did not have “standing” so the court didn’t need to consider the merits of the matter. Clearly, if the Mineral King Valley itself had been recognized as having rights, it would have been an adversely affected party and would have had the necessary standing.</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">Fortuitously, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas was writing a preface to the next edition of the <i>Southern California Law Review</i>. Stone’s seminal “Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects” (“Trees”) was hurriedly squeezed into the journal and read by Justice Douglas before the Court issued its judgment. In “Trees,” Stone argued that courts should grant legal standing to guardians to represent the rights of nature, in much the same way as guardians are appointed to represent the rights of infants. In order to do so, the law would have to recognize that nature was not just a conglomeration of objects that could be owned, but was a subject that itself had legal rights and the standing to be represented in the courts to enforce those rights. The article eventually formed the basis for a famous dissenting judgment by Justice Douglas in the 1972 case of <i>Sierra Club v. Morton</i> in which he expressed the opinion that “contemporary public concern for protecting nature’s ecological equilibrium should lead to the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own preservation.”</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">Perhaps one of the most important things about “Trees” is that it ventured beyond the accepted boundaries of law as we know it and argued that the conceptual framework for law in the United States (and by analogy, elsewhere) required further evolution and expansion. Stone began by addressing the initial reaction that such ideas are outlandish. Throughout legal history, as he pointed out, each extension of legal rights had previously been unthinkable. The emancipation of slaves and the extension of civil rights to African Americans, women, and children were once rejected as absurd or dangerous by authorities. The Founding Fathers, after all, were hardly conscious of the hypocrisy inherent in proclaiming the inalienable rights of all men while simultaneously denying basic rights to children, women, and to African and Native Americans.</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">“Trees” has since become a classic for students of environmental law, but after three decades its impact on law in the United States has been limited. After it was written, the courts made it somewhat easier for citizens to litigate on behalf of other species and the environment by expanding the powers and responsibilities of authorities to act as trustees of areas used by the public (e.g., navigable waters, beaches, and parks). Unfortunately, these gains have been followed in more recent years by judicial attempts to restrict the legal standing of environmental groups. Damages for harm to the environment are now recoverable in some cases and are sometimes applied for the benefit of the environment. However, these changes fall far short of what Stone advocated for in “Trees.” The courts still have not recognized that nature has directly enforceable rights.</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">COMMUNITIES HAVE ALWAYS USED LAWS to express the ideals to which they aspire and to regulate how power is exercised. Law is also a social tool that is usually shaped and wielded most effectively by the powerful. Consequently, law tends to entrench a society’s fundamental idea of itself and of how the world works. So, for example, even when American society began to regard slavery as morally abhorrent, it was not able to peaceably end the practice because the fundamental concept that slaves were property had been hard-wired into the legal system. The abolition of slavery required not only that the enfranchised recognize that slaves were entitled to the same rights as other humans, but also a political effort to change the laws that denied those rights. It took both the Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment to outlaw slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment, in turn, played a role in changing American society’s idea of what was acceptable, thereby providing the bedrock for the subsequent civil rights movement.</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">In the eyes of American law today, most of the community of life on Earth remains mere property, natural “resources” to be exploited, bought, and sold just as slaves were. This means that environmentalists are seldom seen as activists fighting to uphold fundamental rights, but rather as criminals who infringe upon the property rights of others. It also means that actions that damage the ecosystems and the natural processes on which life depends, such as Earth’s climate, are poorly regulated. Climate change is an obvious and dramatic symptom of the failure of human government to regulate human behavior in a manner that takes account of the fact that human welfare is directly dependent on the health of our planet and cannot be achieved at its expense.</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">In the scientific world there has been more progress. It’s been almost forty years since James Lovelock first proposed the “Gaia hypothesis”: a theory that Earth regulates itself in a manner that keeps the composition of the atmosphere and average temperatures within a range conducive to life. Derided or dismissed by most people at the time, the Gaia hypothesis is now accepted by many as scientific theory. In 2001, more than a thousand scientists signed a declaration that begins “The Earth is a self-regulating system made up from all life, including humans, and from the oceans, the atmosphere and the surface rocks,” a statement that would have been unthinkable for most scientists when “Trees” was written.</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">The acceptance of Lovelock’s hypothesis can be understood as part of a drift in the scientific world away from a mechanistic understanding of the universe toward the realization that no aspect of nature can be understood without looking at it within the context of the systems of which it forms a part. Unfortunately, this insight has been slow to penetrate the world of law and politics.</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">But what if we were to imagine a society in which our purpose was to act as good citizens of the Earth as a whole?</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">What might a governance system look like if it were established to protect the rights of all members of a particular biological community, instead of only humans? Cicero pointed out that each of our rights and freedoms must be limited in order that others may be free. It is far past time that we should consider limiting the rights of humans so they cannot unjustifiably prevent nonhuman members of a community from playing their part. Any legal system designed to give effect to modern scientific understandings (or, indeed, to many cultures’ ancient understandings) of how the universe functions would have to prohibit humans from driving other species to extinction or deliberately destroying the functioning of major ecosystems. In the absence of such regulatory mechanisms, an oppressive and self-destructive regime will inevitably emerge. As indeed it has.</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">In particular, we should examine the fact that, in the eyes of the law, corporations are considered people and entitled to civil rights. We often forget that corporations are only a few centuries old and have been continually evolving since their inception. Imagine what could be done if we changed the fiduciary responsibilities of directors to include obligations not only to profitability but also to the whole natural world, and if we imposed collective personal liability on corporate managers and stockholders to restore any damage that they cause to natural communities. Imagine if landowners who abused and degraded land lost the right to use it. In an Earth-centered community, all institutions through which humans act collectively would be designed to require behavior that is socially responsible from the perspective of the whole community.A society whose concern is to maintain the integrity or wholeness of the Earth must also refine its ideas about what is “right” and “wrong.” We may find it more useful to condone or disapprove of human conduct by considering the extent to which an action increases or decreases the health of the whole community and the quality or intimacy of the relationships between its members. As Aldo Leopold’s famous land ethic states, “a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” From this perspective, individual and collective human rights must be contextualized within, and balanced against, the rights of the other members and communities of Earth.</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">ON SEPTEMBER 19, 2006, the Tamaqua Borough of Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, passed a sewage sludge ordinance that recognizes natural communities and ecosystems within the borough as legal persons for the purposes of enforcing civil rights. It also strips corporations that engage in the land application of sludge of their rights to be treated as “persons” and consequently of their civil rights. One of its effects is that the borough or any of its residents may file a lawsuit on behalf of an ecosystem to recover compensatory and punitive damages for any harm done by the land application of sewage sludge. Damages recovered in this way must be paid to the borough and used to restore those ecosystems and natural communities.</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">According to Thomas Linzey, the lawyer from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund who assisted Tamaqua Borough, this ordinance marks the first time in the history of municipalities in the United States that something like this has happened. Coming after more than 150 years of judicially sanctioned expansion of the legal powers of corporations in the U.S., this ordinance is more than extraordinary—it is revolutionary. In a world where the corporation is king and all forms of life other than humans are objects in the eyes of the law, this is a small community’s Boston tea party.</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">In Africa, nongovernmental organizations in eleven countries are also asserting local community rights in order to promote the conservation of biodiversity and sustainable development. Members of the African Biodiversity Network (ABN) have coined the term “cultural biodiversity” to emphasize that knowledge and practices that support biodiversity are embedded in cultural tradition. The ABN works with rural communities and schools to recover and spread traditional knowledge and practices.</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">This is part of a wider effort to build local communities, protect the environment by encouraging those communities to value, retain, and build on traditional African cosmologies, and to govern themselves as part of a wider Earth community.</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">These small examples, emerging shoots of what might be termed “Earth democracy,” are pressing upward despite the odds. It may well be that Earth-centered legal systems will have to grow organically out of human-scale communities, and communities of communities, that understand that they must function as integrated parts of wider natural communities. In the face of climate change and other enormous environmental challenges, our future as a species depends on those people who are creating the legal and political spaces within which our connection to the rest of our community here on Earth is recognized. The day will come when the failure of our laws to recognize the right of a river to flow, to prohibit acts that destabilize Earth’s climate, or to impose a duty to respect the intrinsic value and right to exist of all life will be as reprehensible as allowing people to be bought and sold. We will only flourish by changing these systems and claiming our identity, as well as assuming our responsibilities, as members of the Earth community.</span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">This is a portion of <strong><a href="http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/500" target="_blank">If Nature Had Rights</a></strong> by Cormac Cullinan cross posted from Orion Magazine February 2008 issue.</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">Check out their comment section too.</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3"><strong>Also a fairly weak counterpoint on <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2011/12/30/beware-the-rights-of-nature/" target="_blank">dailycaller</a> has an interesting conservative comment section.</strong></span></p>Glenn Greenwald: Why privacy matterstag:activism101.ning.com,2014-10-15:3143100:BlogPost:356512014-10-15T19:30:00.000ZCromaghttp://activism101.ning.com/profile/Cromag
<div class="col-lg-7 col-lg-offset-1"><div class="talk-article__body talk-transcript__body"><p class="talk-transcript__para"> (TEDGlobal 2014 transcript)</p>
<p class="talk-transcript__para"><span class="font-size-4"><strong>Why privacy matters</strong></span></p>
<p class="talk-transcript__para"><em>Glenn Greenwald was one of the first reporters to see — and write about — the Edward Snowden files, with their revelations about the United States' extensive surveillance of private citizens. In…</em></p>
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</div>
<div class="col-lg-7 col-lg-offset-1"><div class="talk-article__body talk-transcript__body"><p class="talk-transcript__para"> (TEDGlobal 2014 transcript)</p>
<p class="talk-transcript__para"><span class="font-size-4"><strong>Why privacy matters</strong></span></p>
<p class="talk-transcript__para"><em>Glenn Greenwald was one of the first reporters to see — and write about — the Edward Snowden files, with their revelations about the United States' extensive surveillance of private citizens. In this searing talk, Greenwald makes the case for why you need to care about privacy, even if you’re “not doing anything you need to hide."</em></p>
<p class="talk-transcript__para">Video link <a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1977360956?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="300" class="align-right" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1977360956?profile=RESIZE_320x320"/></a><a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/glenn_greenwald_why_privacy_matters" target="_blank">HERE</a></p>
<p class="talk-transcript__para">0:11 <span class="talk-transcript__para__text"><span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-855">There is an entire genre of YouTube videos</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-3798">devoted to an experience which</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-5811">I am certain that everyone in this room has had.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-8388">It entails an individual who,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-10401">thinking they're alone,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-11964">engages in some expressive behavior —</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-15170">wild singing, gyrating dancing,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-17677">some mild sexual activity —</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-20280">only to discover that, in fact, they are not alone,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-22878">that there is a person watching and lurking,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-25923">the discovery of which causes them</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-27678">to immediately cease what they were doing</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-29578">in horror.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-31468">The sense of shame and humiliation</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-33550">in their face is palpable.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-35833">It's the sense of,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-37565">"This is something I'm willing to do</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-39298">only if no one else is watching."</span></span></p>
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<p class="talk-transcript__para">0:53 <span class="talk-transcript__para__text"><span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-42898">This is the crux of the work</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-45316">on which I have been singularly focused</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-47363">for the last 16 months,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-49238">the question of why privacy matters,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-51300">a question that has arisen</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-53238">in the context of a global debate,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-56360">enabled by the revelations of Edward Snowden</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-58848">that the United States and its partners,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-61189">unbeknownst to the entire world,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-63211">has converted the Internet,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-65303">once heralded as an unprecedented tool</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-68104">of liberation and democratization,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-71420">into an unprecedented zone</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-73189">of mass, indiscriminate surveillance.</span></span></p>
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<p class="talk-transcript__para">1:28 <span class="talk-transcript__para__text"><span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-77283">There is a very common sentiment</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-79240">that arises in this debate,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-80726">even among people who are uncomfortable</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-82683">with mass surveillance, which says</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-84737">that there is no real harm</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-86660">that comes from this large-scale invasion</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-89405">because only people who are engaged in bad acts</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-92679">have a reason to want to hide</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-94748">and to care about their privacy.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-97459">This worldview is implicitly grounded</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-100240">in the proposition that there are two kinds of people in the world,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-102416">good people and bad people.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-104452">Bad people are those who plot terrorist attacks</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-107420">or who engage in violent criminality</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-108918">and therefore have reasons to want to hide what they're doing,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-112070">have reasons to care about their privacy.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-114127">But by contrast, good people</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-116950">are people who go to work,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-118603">come home, raise their children, watch television.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-121505">They use the Internet not to plot bombing attacks</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-124261">but to read the news or exchange recipes</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-126736">or to plan their kids' Little League games,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-129210">and those people are doing nothing wrong</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-131528">and therefore have nothing to hide</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-133575">and no reason to fear</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-135937">the government monitoring them.</span></span></p>
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<p class="talk-transcript__para">2:29 <span class="talk-transcript__para__text"><span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-138379">The people who are actually saying that</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-140189">are engaged in a very extreme act</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-142968">of self-deprecation.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-144524">What they're really saying is,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-146433">"I have agreed to make myself</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-148626">such a harmless and unthreatening</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-151472">and uninteresting person that I actually don't fear</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-154430">having the government know what it is that I'm doing."</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-157779">This mindset has found what I think</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-159583">is its purest expression</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-161652">in a 2009 interview with</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-163959">the longtime CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, who,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-166894">when asked about all the different ways his company</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-169436">is causing invasions of privacy</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-171608">for hundreds of millions of people around the world,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-174217">said this: He said,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-176208">"If you're doing something that you don't want</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-177884">other people to know,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-179898">maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."</span></span></p>
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<p class="talk-transcript__para">3:14 <span class="talk-transcript__para__text"><span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-183903">Now, there's all kinds of things to say about</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-185888">that mentality,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-188233">the first of which is that the people who say that,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-191473">who say that privacy isn't really important,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-193588">they don't actually believe it,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-196535">and the way you know that they don't actually believe it</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-198357">is that while they say with their words that privacy doesn't matter,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-201226">with their actions, they take all kinds of steps</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-204387">to safeguard their privacy.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-207154">They put passwords on their email</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-208972">and their social media accounts,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-210742">they put locks on their bedroom</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-212621">and bathroom doors,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-213970">all steps designed to prevent other people</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-216670">from entering what they consider their private realm</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-219572">and knowing what it is that they don't want other people to know.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-223273">The very same Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-226333">ordered his employees at Google</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-228942">to cease speaking with the online</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-230877">Internet magazine CNET</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-233150">after CNET published an article</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-235740">full of personal, private information</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-237773">about Eric Schmidt,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-239854">which it obtained exclusively through Google searches</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-242970">and using other Google products. (Laughter)</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-246311">This same division can be seen</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-248168">with the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-250630">who in an infamous interview in 2010</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-254160">pronounced that privacy is no longer</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-256559">a "social norm."</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-259584">Last year, Mark Zuckerberg and his new wife</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-262140">purchased not only their own house</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-264445">but also all four adjacent houses in Palo Alto</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-268320">for a total of 30 million dollars</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-269934">in order to ensure that they enjoyed a zone of privacy</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-273466">that prevented other people from monitoring</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-275592">what they do in their personal lives.</span></span></p>
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<p class="talk-transcript__para">4:50 <span class="talk-transcript__para__text"><span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-279191">Over the last 16 months, as I've debated this issue around the world,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-281944">every single time somebody has said to me,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-284360">"I don't really worry about invasions of privacy</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-285869">because I don't have anything to hide."</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-287478">I always say the same thing to them.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-289178">I get out a pen, I write down my email address.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-291471">I say, "Here's my email address.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-293113">What I want you to do when you get home</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-294812">is email me the passwords</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-296522">to all of your email accounts,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-298332">not just the nice, respectable work one in your name,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-300886">but all of them,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-302436">because I want to be able to just troll through</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-304497">what it is you're doing online,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-306176">read what I want to read and publish whatever I find interesting.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-308738">After all, if you're not a bad person,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-310538">if you're doing nothing wrong,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-312360">you should have nothing to hide."</span></span></p>
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<p class="talk-transcript__para">5:26 <span class="talk-transcript__para__text"><span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-315340">Not a single person has taken me up on that offer.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-318873">I check and — (Applause)</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-322878">I check that email account religiously all the time.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-326118">It's a very desolate place.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-329323">And there's a reason for that,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-331110">which is that we as human beings,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-333151">even those of us who in words</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-335105">disclaim the importance of our own privacy,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-337546">instinctively understand</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-339683">the profound importance of it.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-341877">It is true that as human beings, we're social animals,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-344704">which means we have a need for other people</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-346853">to know what we're doing and saying and thinking,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-349597">which is why we voluntarily publish information about ourselves online.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-353867">But equally essential to what it means</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-356713">to be a free and fulfilled human being</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-359294">is to have a place that we can go</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-361431">and be free of the judgmental eyes of other people.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-365459">There's a reason why we seek that out,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-367466">and our reason is that all of us —</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-370376">not just terrorists and criminals, all of us —</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-373704">have things to hide.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-375749">There are all sorts of things that we do and think</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-378496">that we're willing to tell our physician</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-381197">or our lawyer or our psychologist or our spouse</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-384952">or our best friend that we would be mortified</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-387290">for the rest of the world to learn.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-389250">We make judgments every single day</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-391452">about the kinds of things that we say and think and do</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-393910">that we're willing to have other people know,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-395631">and the kinds of things that we say and think and do</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-397621">that we don't want anyone else to know about.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-399950">People can very easily in words claim</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-403277">that they don't value their privacy,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-405439">but their actions negate the authenticity of that belief.</span></span></p>
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<p class="talk-transcript__para">7:01 <span class="talk-transcript__para__text"><span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-410416">Now, there's a reason why privacy is so craved</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-414146">universally and instinctively.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-415890">It isn't just a reflexive movement</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-417777">like breathing air or drinking water.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-420491">The reason is that when we're in a state</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-422931">where we can be monitored, where we can be watched,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-425588">our behavior changes dramatically.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-428264">The range of behavioral options that we consider</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-431297">when we think we're being watched</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-433105">severely reduce.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-435260">This is just a fact of human nature</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-437475">that has been recognized in social science</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-439763">and in literature and in religion</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-441670">and in virtually every field of discipline.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-443898">There are dozens of psychological studies</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-446680">that prove that when somebody knows</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-449231">that they might be watched,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-450800">the behavior they engage in</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-452492">is vastly more conformist and compliant.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-455974">Human shame is a very powerful motivator,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-459319">as is the desire to avoid it,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-462230">and that's the reason why people,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-463729">when they're in a state of being watched, make decisions</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-465968">not that are the byproduct of their own agency</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-469230">but that are about the expectations</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-471242">that others have of them</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-472694">or the mandates of societal orthodoxy.</span></span></p>
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<p class="talk-transcript__para">8:08 <span class="talk-transcript__para__text"><span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-477128">This realization was exploited most powerfully</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-479995">for pragmatic ends by the 18th- century philosopher Jeremy Bentham,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-484136">who set out to resolve an important problem</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-486487">ushered in by the industrial age,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-488289">where, for the first time, institutions had become</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-490647">so large and centralized</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-492644">that they were no longer able to monitor</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-494472">and therefore control each one of their individual members,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-497425">and the solution that he devised</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-499306">was an architectural design</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-501509">originally intended to be implemented in prisons</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-504225">that he called the panopticon,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-506544">the primary attribute of which was the construction</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-508904">of an enormous tower in the center of the institution</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-511975">where whoever controlled the institution</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-514123">could at any moment watch any of the inmates,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-516808">although they couldn't watch all of them at all times.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-520130">And crucial to this design</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-522185">was that the inmates could not actually</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-523980">see into the panopticon, into the tower,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-526856">and so they never knew</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-528528">if they were being watched or even when.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-530700">And what made him so excited about this discovery</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-534283">was that that would mean that the prisoners</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-536156">would have to assume that they were being watched</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-539184">at any given moment,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-540869">which would be the ultimate enforcer</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-542747">for obedience and compliance.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-546425">The 20th-century French philosopher Michel Foucault</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-549350">realized that that model could be used</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-551275">not just for prisons but for every institution</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-554390">that seeks to control human behavior:</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-556340">schools, hospitals, factories, workplaces.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-559215">And what he said was that this mindset,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-561413">this framework discovered by Bentham,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-563839">was the key means of societal control</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-567168">for modern, Western societies,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-569170">which no longer need</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-570944">the overt weapons of tyranny —</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-572851">punishing or imprisoning or killing dissidents,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-575247">or legally compelling loyalty to a particular party —</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-578561">because mass surveillance creates</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-580960">a prison in the mind</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-583515">that is a much more subtle</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-585358">though much more effective means</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-587247">of fostering compliance with social norms</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-590296">or with social orthodoxy,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-591758">much more effective</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-593320">than brute force could ever be.</span></span></p>
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<p class="talk-transcript__para">10:07 <span class="talk-transcript__para__text"><span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-596445">The most iconic work of literature about surveillance</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-599263">and privacy is the George Orwell novel "1984,"</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-602813">which we all learn in school, and therefore it's almost become a cliche.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-606280">In fact, whenever you bring it up in a debate about surveillance,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-608349">people instantaneously dismiss it</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-610598">as inapplicable, and what they say is,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-612900">"Oh, well in '1984,' there were monitors in people's homes,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-616183">they were being watched at every given moment,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-618348">and that has nothing to do with the surveillance state that we face."</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-622310">That is an actual fundamental misapprehension</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-625230">of the warnings that Orwell issued in "1984."</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-627931">The warning that he was issuing</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-629582">was about a surveillance state</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-631190">not that monitored everybody at all times,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-633354">but where people were aware that they could</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-635407">be monitored at any given moment.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-637036">Here is how Orwell's narrator, Winston Smith,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-640110">described the surveillance system</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-642150">that they faced:</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-643548">"There was, of course, no way of knowing</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-645975">whether you were being watched at any given moment."</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-648292">He went on to say,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-649743">"At any rate, they could plug in your wire</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-651454">whenever they wanted to.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-653163">You had to live, did live,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-655742">from habit that became instinct,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-657995">in the assumption that every sound you made</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-660490">was overheard and except in darkness</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-662680">every movement scrutinized."</span></span></p>
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<blockquote><p class="talk-transcript__para">11:16 <span class="talk-transcript__para__text"><span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-665419">The Abrahamic religions similarly posit</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-668765">that there's an invisible, all-knowing authority</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-671708">who, because of its omniscience,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-673451">always watches whatever you're doing,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-675347">which means you never have a private moment,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-678120">the ultimate enforcer</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-679804">for obedience to its dictates.</span></span></p>
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<p class="talk-transcript__para">11:33 <span class="talk-transcript__para__text"><span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-682794">What all of these seemingly disparate works</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-686198">recognize, the conclusion that they all reach,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-688984">is that a society in which people</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-691306">can be monitored at all times</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-693613">is a society that breeds conformity</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-696268">and obedience and submission,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-698510">which is why every tyrant,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-700021">the most overt to the most subtle,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-702103">craves that system.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-704366">Conversely, even more importantly,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-707020">it is a realm of privacy,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-709460">the ability to go somewhere where we can think</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-712470">and reason and interact and speak</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-715628">without the judgmental eyes of others being cast upon us,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-719282">in which creativity and exploration</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-722825">and dissent exclusively reside,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-725853">and that is the reason why,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-727674">when we allow a society to exist</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-730250">in which we're subject to constant monitoring,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-732413">we allow the essence of human freedom</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-735390">to be severely crippled.</span></span></p>
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<p class="talk-transcript__para">12:29 <span class="talk-transcript__para__text"><span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-738341">The last point I want to observe about this mindset,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-741463">the idea that only people who are doing something wrong</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-743388">have things to hide and therefore reasons to care about privacy,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-747270">is that it entrenches two very destructive messages,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-751276">two destructive lessons,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-753304">the first of which is that</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-755060">the only people who care about privacy,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-757180">the only people who will seek out privacy,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-759236">are by definition bad people.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-763311">This is a conclusion that we should have</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-765443">all kinds of reasons for avoiding,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-767971">the most important of which is that when you say,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-770723">"somebody who is doing bad things,"</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-773100">you probably mean things like plotting a terrorist attack</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-775937">or engaging in violent criminality,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-777978">a much narrower conception</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-780518">of what people who wield power mean</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-782970">when they say, "doing bad things."</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-785020">For them, "doing bad things" typically means</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-787327">doing something that poses meaningful challenges</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-790398">to the exercise of our own power.</span></span></p>
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<p class="talk-transcript__para">13:24 <span class="talk-transcript__para__text"><span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-793503">The other really destructive</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-795453">and, I think, even more insidious lesson</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-797361">that comes from accepting this mindset</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-800140">is there's an implicit bargain</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-802906">that people who accept this mindset have accepted,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-806250">and that bargain is this:</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-807705">If you're willing to render yourself</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-809677">sufficiently harmless,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-811779">sufficiently unthreatening</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-813949">to those who wield political power,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-815831">then and only then can you be free</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-818867">of the dangers of surveillance.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-820975">It's only those who are dissidents,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-823360">who challenge power,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-824841">who have something to worry about.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-826653">There are all kinds of reasons why we should want to avoid that lesson as well.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-830060">You may be a person who, right now,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-832298">doesn't want to engage in that behavior,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-834370">but at some point in the future you might.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-836825">Even if you're somebody who decides</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-838499">that you never want to,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-840264">the fact that there are other people</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-841898">who are willing to and able to resist</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-844102">and be adversarial to those in power —</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-846136">dissidents and journalists</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-847670">and activists and a whole range of others —</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-849758">is something that brings us all collective good</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-852252">that we should want to preserve.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-855230">Equally critical is that the measure</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-857324">of how free a society is</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-859587">is not how it treats its good,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-861737">obedient, compliant citizens,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-864200">but how it treats its dissidents</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-866040">and those who resist orthodoxy.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-869155">But the most important reason</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-870752">is that a system of mass surveillance</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-873153">suppresses our own freedom in all sorts of ways.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-875770">It renders off-limits</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-877571">all kinds of behavioral choices</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-879577">without our even knowing that it's happened.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-883130">The renowned socialist activist Rosa Luxemburg</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-885612">once said, "He who does not move</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-888105">does not notice his chains."</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-891461">We can try and render the chains</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-893150">of mass surveillance invisible or undetectable,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-896239">but the constraints that it imposes on us</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-898905">do not become any less potent.</span></span></p>
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<p class="talk-transcript__para">15:12 <span class="talk-transcript__para__text"><span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-901450">Thank you very much.</span></span></p>
<p class="talk-transcript__para">15:14 <span class="talk-transcript__para__text"><span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-903058">(Applause)</span></span></p>
<p class="talk-transcript__para">15:15 <span class="talk-transcript__para__text"><span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-904489">Thank you.</span></span></p>
<p class="talk-transcript__para">15:16 <span class="talk-transcript__para__text"><span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-905996">(Applause)</span></span></p>
<p class="talk-transcript__para">15:21 <span class="talk-transcript__para__text"><span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-910893">Thank you.</span></span></p>
<p class="talk-transcript__para">15:24 <span class="talk-transcript__para__text"><span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-913280">(Applause)</span></span></p>
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<p class="talk-transcript__para">15:30 <span class="talk-transcript__para__text"><span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-919320">Bruno Giussani: Glenn, thank you.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-921612">The case is rather convincing, I have to say,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-923901">but I want to bring you back</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-925466">to the last 16 months and to Edward Snowden</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-928817">for a few questions, if you don't mind.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-930882">The first one is personal to you.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-933370">We have all read about the arrest of your partner,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-936411">David Miranda in London, and other difficulties,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-939721">but I assume that</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-941805">in terms of personal engagement and risk,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-945161">that the pressure on you is not that easy</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-946965">to take on the biggest sovereign organizations in the world.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-949910">Tell us a little bit about that.</span></span></p>
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<p class="talk-transcript__para">16:03 <span class="talk-transcript__para__text"><span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-952345">Glenn Greenwald: You know, I think one of the things that happens</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-954000">is that people's courage in this regard</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-955932">gets contagious,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-957644">and so although I and the other journalists with whom I was working</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-961107">were certainly aware of the risk —</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-962643">the United States continues to be the most powerful country in the world</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-965365">and doesn't appreciate it when you</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-967363">disclose thousands of their secrets</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-969285">on the Internet at will —</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-971796">seeing somebody who is a 29-year-old</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-975265">ordinary person who grew up in</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-977284">a very ordinary environment</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-979597">exercise the degree of principled courage that Edward Snowden risked,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-983320">knowing that he was going to go to prison for the rest of his life</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-985540">or that his life would unravel,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-987322">inspired me and inspired other journalists</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-989297">and inspired, I think, people around the world,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-991120">including future whistleblowers,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-992808">to realize that they can engage in that kind of behavior as well.</span></span></p>
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<p class="talk-transcript__para">16:47 <span class="talk-transcript__para__text"><span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-996323">BG: I'm curious about your relationship with Ed Snowden,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-998809">because you have spoken with him a lot,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1001990">and you certainly continue doing so,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1003753">but in your book, you never call him Edward,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1006389">nor Ed, you say "Snowden." How come?</span></span></p>
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<p class="talk-transcript__para">17:00 <span class="talk-transcript__para__text"><span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1009849">GG: You know, I'm sure that's something</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1011493">for a team of psychologists to examine. (Laughter)</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1014824">I don't really know. The reason I think that,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1018413">one of the important objectives that he actually had,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1021967">one of his, I think, most important tactics,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1024303">was that he knew that one of the ways</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1026510">to distract attention from the substance of the revelations</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1029200">would be to try and personalize the focus on him,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1031850">and for that reason, he stayed out of the media.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1033917">He tried not to ever have his personal life</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1036426">subject to examination,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1038105">and so I think calling him Snowden</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1040819">is a way of just identifying him as this important historical actor</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1044393">rather than trying to personalize him in a way</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1046265">that might distract attention from the substance.</span></span></p>
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<p class="talk-transcript__para">17:40 <span class="talk-transcript__para__text"><span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1049145">Moderator: So his revelations, your analysis,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1050602">the work of other journalists,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1052378">have really developed the debate,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1055378">and many governments, for example, have reacted,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1057506">including in Brazil, with projects and programs</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1060110">to reshape a little bit the design of the Internet, etc.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1062964">There are a lot of things going on in that sense.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1065716">But I'm wondering, for you personally,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1067986">what is the endgame?</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1069637">At what point will you think,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1071270">well, actually, we've succeeded in moving the dial?</span></span></p>
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<p class="talk-transcript__para">18:05 <span class="talk-transcript__para__text"><span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1074462">GG: Well, I mean, the endgame for me as a journalist</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1076740">is very simple, which is to make sure</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1079183">that every single document that's newsworthy</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1081195">and that ought to be disclosed</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1082841">ends up being disclosed,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1084321">and that secrets that should never have been kept in the first place</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1086358">end up uncovered.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1087833">To me, that's the essence of journalism</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1089680">and that's what I'm committed to doing.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1091207">As somebody who finds mass surveillance odious</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1093681">for all the reasons I just talked about and a lot more,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1095868">I mean, I look at this as work that will never end</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1098394">until governments around the world</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1100571">are no longer able to subject entire populations</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1103190">to monitoring and surveillance</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1104676">unless they convince some court or some entity</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1107265">that the person they've targeted</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1108987">has actually done something wrong.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1111578">To me, that's the way that privacy can be rejuvenated.</span></span></p>
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<p class="talk-transcript__para">18:45 <span class="talk-transcript__para__text"><span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1114813">BG: So Snowden is very, as we've seen at TED,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1117159">is very articulate in presenting and portraying himself</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1119927">as a defender of democratic values</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1122207">and democratic principles.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1123920">But then, many people really find it difficult to believe</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1126948">that those are his only motivations.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1129350">They find it difficult to believe</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1130828">that there was no money involved,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1132449">that he didn't sell some of those secrets,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1134360">even to China and to Russia,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1136189">which are clearly not the best friends</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1138733">of the United States right now.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1140902">And I'm sure many people in the room</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1142608">are wondering the same question.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1144878">Do you consider it possible there is</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1146761">that part of Snowden we've not seen yet?</span></span></p>
<p class="talk-transcript__para"></p>
<p class="talk-transcript__para"></p>
<p class="talk-transcript__para">19:20 <span class="talk-transcript__para__text"><span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1149373">GG: No, I consider that absurd and idiotic.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1152554">(Laughter) If you wanted to,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1154968">and I know you're just playing devil's advocate,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1157430">but if you wanted to sell</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1160641">secrets to another country,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1162547">which he could have done and become</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1164264">extremely rich doing so,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1165910">the last thing you would do is take those secrets</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1167891">and give them to journalists and ask journalists to publish them,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1170635">because it makes those secrets worthless.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1172661">People who want to enrich themselves</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1174309">do it secretly by selling secrets to the government,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1176279">but I think there's one important point worth making,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1178100">which is, that accusation comes from</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1180338">people in the U.S. government,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1182170">from people in the media who are loyalists</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1184190">to these various governments,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1185788">and I think a lot of times when people make accusations like that about other people —</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1188936">"Oh, he can't really be doing this</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1190541">for principled reasons,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1192206">he must have some corrupt, nefarious reason" —</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1194448">they're saying a lot more about themselves</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1196555">than they are the target of their accusations,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1198381">because — (Applause) —</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1202766">those people, the ones who make that accusation,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1205286">they themselves never act</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1207190">for any reason other than corrupt reasons,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1209112">so they assume</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1210744">that everybody else is plagued by the same disease</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1213376">of soullessness as they are,</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1215378">and so that's the assumption.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1217249">(Applause)</span></span></p>
<p class="talk-transcript__para">20:29 <span class="talk-transcript__para__text"><span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1218876">BG: Glenn, thank you very much. GG: Thank you very much.</span></span></p>
<p class="talk-transcript__para">20:32 <span class="talk-transcript__para__text"><span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1221360">BG: Glenn Greenwald.</span> <span class="talk-transcript__fragment" id="t-1223692">(Applause)</span></span></p>
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</div>Suffering? Well, You Deserve Ittag:activism101.ning.com,2014-03-04:3143100:BlogPost:353242014-03-04T21:00:00.000ZCromaghttp://activism101.ning.com/profile/Cromag
<p><font face="georgia, times new roman, times, serif">By Chris Hedges</font> March 2nd, 2014<a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1977360868?profile=original" target="_self"><img class="align-right" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1977360868?profile=original" width="300"></img></a></p>
<p>OXFORD, England—The morning after my <a href="http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/edward_snowdens_moral_courage_20140223">Feb. 20 debate</a> at the Oxford Union, I walked from my hotel along Oxford’s narrow cobblestone streets, past its storied colleges with resplendent lawns and…</p>
<p><font face="georgia, times new roman, times, serif">By Chris Hedges</font> March 2nd, 2014<a target="_self" href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1977360868?profile=original"><img class="align-right" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1977360868?profile=original" width="300"/></a></p>
<p>OXFORD, England—The morning after my <a href="http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/edward_snowdens_moral_courage_20140223">Feb. 20 debate</a> at the Oxford Union, I walked from my hotel along Oxford’s narrow cobblestone streets, past its storied colleges with resplendent lawns and Gothic stone spires, to meet <a href="http://www.all-souls.ox.ac.uk/people.php?personid=46">Avner Offer</a>, an economic historian and Chichele Professor Emeritus of Economic History.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Offer, the author of “<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Challenge-Affluence-Self-Control-Well-Being-Britain/dp/0198208537/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1393801776&sr=1-1&keywords=the+challenge+of+affluence">The Challenge of Affluence:</a> Self-Control and Well-Being in the United States and Britain Since 1950", for 25 years has explored the cavernous gap between our economic and social reality and our ruling economic ideology. <strong>Neoclassical economics, he says, is a “just-world theory,” one that posits that not only do good people get what they deserve but those who suffer deserve to suffer.</strong> He says this model is “a warrant for inflicting pain.” If we continue down a path of mounting scarcities, along with economic stagnation or decline, this neoclassical model is ominous. It could be used to justify repression in an effort to sustain a vision that does not correspond to the real world.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Offer, who has studied the rationing systems set up in countries that took part in World War I, suggests we examine how past societies coped successfully with scarcity. In an age of scarcity it would be imperative to set up new, more egalitarian models of distribution, he says. Clinging to the old neoclassical model could, he argues, erode and perhaps destroy social cohesion and require the state to engage in greater forms of coercion.</p>
<p> </p>
<blockquote><p>“The basic conventions of public discourse are those of the <strong><a href="https://www.princeton.edu/%7Eachaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Age_of_Enlightenment.html">Enlightenment</a></strong>, in which the use of reason [enabled] us to achieve human objectives,” Offer said as we sat amid piles of books in his cluttered office. “Reason should be tempered by reality, by the facts. So underlining this is a notion of science that confronts reality and is revised by reference to reality. This is the model for how we talk. It is the model for the things we assume. But the reality that has emerged around us has not come out of this process. So our basic conventions only serve to justify existing relationships, structures and hierarchies. Plausible arguments are made for principles that are incompatible with each other.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p> </p>
<p>Offer cited a concept from social psychology called the <a href="http://www.scu.edu/ethics/publications/iie/v3n2/justworld.html">just-world theory</a>. “A just-world theory posits that the world is just. People get what they deserve. <strong>If you believe that the world is fair you explain or rationalize away injustice, usually by blaming the victim."</strong></p>
<p> </p>
<p>“Major ways of thinking about the world constitute just-world theories,” he said. “The Catholic Church is a just-world theory. If the Inquisition burned heretics, they only got what they deserved. Bolshevism was a just-world theory. If <a href="http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/324575/kulak">Kulaks</a> were starved and exiled, they got what they deserved. Fascism was a just-world theory. If Jews died in the concentration camps, they got what they deserved. The point is not that the good people get the good things, but the bad people get the bad things. Neoclassical economics, our principal source of policy norms, is a just-world theory.”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Offer quoted the economist <a href="http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Friedman.html">Milton Friedman</a>: “The ethical principle that would directly justify the distribution of income in a free market society is, ‘To each according to what he and the instruments he owns produces.’ ”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>“So,” Offer went on, “everyone gets what he or she deserves, either for his or her effort or for his or her property. No one asks how he or she got this property. And if they don’t have it, they probably don’t deserve it. The point about just-world theory is not that it dispenses justice, but that it provides a warrant for inflicting pain.”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>“Just-world theories are models of reality,” he said. “A rough and ready test is how well the model fits with experienced reality. When used to derive policy, an economic model not only describes the world but also aspires to change it. In policy, if the model is bad, then reality has to be forcibly aligned with it by means of coercion. How much coercion is actually used provides a rough measure of a model’s validity. That the Soviet Union had to use so much coercion undermined the credibility of communism as a model of reality. It is perhaps symptomatic that the USA, a society that elevates freedom to the highest position among its values, is also the one that has one of the very largest penal systems in the world relative to its population. It also inflicts violence all over the world. It tolerates a great deal of gun violence, and a health service that excludes large numbers of people.”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>“There are two core doctrines in economics,” Offer said. “One is individual self-interest. The other is the invisible hand, the idea that the pursuit of individual self-interest aggregates or builds up for the good of society as a whole. This is a logical proposition that has never been proven. If we take the centrality of self-interest in economics, then it is not clear on what basis economics should be promoting the public good. This is not a norm that is part of economics itself; in fact, economics tells us the opposite. <strong>Economics tells us that everything anyone says should be motivated by strategic self-interest. And when economists use the word ‘strategic’ they mean cheating.”</strong></p>
<p> </p>
<blockquote><p>Offer argued that “a silent revolution” took place in economics in the 1970s. “Economists,” he said of the 1970s, “discovered opportunism—a polite term for cheating. Before that, economics had been a just-world defense of the status quo. But when the status quo became the welfare state, suddenly economics became all about cheating. <a href="http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/game%20theory">Game theory</a> was about cheating. <a href="http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicChoice.html">Public-choice theory</a> was about cheating. <a href="http://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/asymmetricinformation.asp">Asymmetric information</a> was about cheating. The invisible-hand doctrine tells us there is only one outcome, and that outcome is the best. But once you enter a world of cheating there is no longer one outcome. It is what economists call <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=definition+of+multiple+equilibria&oq=definition+of+multiple+equ&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j0l5.6970j0j8&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=122&ie=UTF-8">multiple equilibria</a>, which means there is not a deterministic outcome. The outcome depends on how successful the cheating is. And one of the consequences of this is that economists are not in a strong position to tell society what to do.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>The problem, he said, is that the old norms of economics continue to inform our policy norms, as if the cheating norm had never been introduced.</strong></p>
<p> </p>
<p>“Let’s take the doctrine of optimal taxation,” he said. “If you assume a world of perfect competition, where every person gets their <a href="https://www.boundless.com/economics/definition/marginal-product/">marginal products</a>, then you can deduce a tax distribution where high progressive taxation is inefficient. This doctrine has been one of the drivers to reduce progressive taxation. But looking at the historical record this has not been accompanied by any great surge in productivity; rather, it has produced a great surge in inequality. So once again, there is a gap between what the model tells us should happen and what actually happens. In this case the model works, but only in the model, only if all the assumptions are satisfied. Reality is more complicated.”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>“The standard in modern society is that government allocates between 40 to 50 percent of output,” he said. “This anomaly is not explained by economic theory. If people are making democratic choices in their self-interest, why have these large government structures been built up?”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>“There is very little analytical argument in economics in support of government, but its benefits are so overwhelming it continues to hang on,” he said.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>“One of the issues here is when those in authority, whether political, academic or civic, are expounding their doctrines through Enlightenment idioms and we must ask, is this being done in good faith?” he said. “And here I think the genuine insight provided by the economics of opportunism is that we cannot assume it is being done in good faith.”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>“When I hear Republicans in the United States say that taking away people’s food stamps will do them good I ask, what do you know that allows you to say this? This rhetoric invokes the Enlightenment model. We all use it. It is improvement by means of reason. But Enlightenment discourse should not be taken at face value. We have to again ask whether it is being carried out in good faith.”</p>
<p> </p>
<blockquote><p>“Economics, political science and even philosophy, ever since rational choice swept through the American social sciences, have embraced the idea that an individual has no responsibility towards anyone except himself or herself,” he said. “A responsibility to anyone else is optional. The public discourse, for this reason, has become a hall of mirrors. Nothing anymore is what it seems to be.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p> </p>
<p>Our current economic model, he said, will be of little use to us in an age of ecological deterioration and growing scarcities. Energy shortages, global warming, population increases and increasing scarcity of water and food create an urgent need for new models of distribution. Our two options, he said, will be “hanging together or falling apart.” Offer argues that we cannot be certain that growth will continue. If standards of living stagnate or decline, he said, we must consider other models for the economy. Given the wealth and resources of industrialized nations, he said, a drop in living standards to what they were one or two generations ago would still permit a good quality of life.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Offer has studied closely the economies of World War I. Amid this catastrophe, he notes, civilian economies adapted. He holds up these war economies, with their heavy rationing, as a possible model for collective action in a contracting economy.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>“What you had was a very sudden transition to a serious scarcity economy that was underpinned by the necessity for sharing,” he said. “Ordinary people were required to sacrifice their lives. They needed some guarantee for those they left at home. These war economies were relatively egalitarian. These economics were based on the safety net principle. If continued growth in the medium run is not feasible, and that is a contingency we need to think about, then these rationing societies provide quite a successful model. On the Allied side, people did not starve, society held together.”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>However, if we cling to our current economic model—which Offer labels “every man for himself”—then, he said, “it will require serious repression.”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>“There is not a free market solution to a peaceful decline,” he said.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>“The state of current political economy in the West is similar to the state of communism in the Soviet Union around 1970,” he went on. “It is studied widely in the university. Everyone knows the formula. Everyone mouths it in discourse. But no one believes it.” The gap between the model and reality is now vast. <strong>Those in power seek “to bring reality into alignment with the model, and that usually involves coercion.”</strong></p>
<p> </p>
<p>“The amount of violence that is inflicted is an indicator of how well the model is aligned with reality,” he said. “That doesn’t mean imminent collapse. Incorrect models can endure for long periods of time. The Soviet model shows this.”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Violence, however, is ultimately an inefficient form of control. Consent, he said, is a more effective form of social control. He argued, citing <a href="http://www.johnkennethgalbraith.com/">John Kenneth Galbraith</a>, that in affluent societies the relative contentment of the majorities has permitted, through free market ideology, the abandonment, impoverishment and repression of minorities, especially African-Americans. As larger and larger segments of society are forced because of declining economies to become outsiders, the use of coercion, under our current model, will probably become more widespread.</p>
<p> </p>
<blockquote><p>“One of the unresolved issues in social science is how does the system hold together,” he said. “We have the economic model of the invisible hand, the miracle of the market, but we know it is not true, since government allocates up to 50 percent of output and income. We don’t actually rely on the ‘free’ market for our prosperity. Even the market sector is mostly dominated by entities with large market power.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p> </p>
<p>“We have this model that we are all selfish and somehow this generates the miracle of cooperation,” he said. “But equilibrium is only a truism for the well-off. There is money in the bank. The car is in the drive. The shops are full. The semesters follow each other. There is an overseas conference. The world seems to be OK. But if you look the other way, look at these other people, there is a world of hardship, misery and suffering. These suffering people are not always visible to invisible-hand advocates.”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>“Experimental economics has, in fact, demonstrated that when people are placed in experimental situations they do not behave as individualistic maximizers,” he went on. “Some of them do. Some of them do not.”</p>
<p> </p>
<blockquote><p>“<a href="http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Smith.html">Adam Smith</a>,” he noted, “wrote that what drives us is not, in the end, individual selfishness but reciprocal obligation. We care about other people’s good opinions. This generates a reciprocal cycle. Reciprocity is not altruistic. That part of the economic core doctrine is preserved. But if we depend on other people for our self-worth then we are not truly self-sufficient. We depend on the sympathy of others for our own well-being. Therefore, obligation to others means that we do not always seek to maximize economic advantage. Intrinsic motivations, such as obligation, compassion and public spirit, crowd out financial ones. This model can also motivate a different type of political and economic aspiration.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p> </p>
<p>“The free market norm assumes a frictionless exchange which maximizes everyone’s well-being,” he said. “The existence of ... coercive instruments, such as the prisons and the enormous military, makes you think that the theory is not all it is purported to be. There is a gap between what it pretends to be and what it is.”</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Offer said that universities, which should be incubators of new and radical ideas, are being stripped of their ability to independently critique the widening gap between reality and the false models of reality that are disseminated by the elites. </strong></p>
<p> </p>
<p>“The kind of willfulness with which I can talk to you now is not guaranteed for future scholars,” he said. “The academic system has discovered it is no longer necessary to provide tenure. This system is fraying. And this is deliberate. This independence is a source of trouble. When Stalin carried out his purges he purged the best and the brightest. These were an alternative source of power. And I think there is a sense in government and business that there is too much independence in academia. We need to be put in our place. T<strong>he spirit of free inquiry, free expression, and to some extent free teaching, and communality is alien to the corporate and political culture, which are repressive hierarchies.”</strong></p>
<p> </p>
<p>Those academics who deviate from the central core doctrines, including in economics, are finding themselves defunded. Oversight committees impose quotas on academics and insist that the work conform to what they call disciplinary norms.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>“The golden age of the university was in the postwar years, especially in the 1960s,” Offer said. “You saw great expansion. The university thrived under the auspices of the Cold War. But once the Cold War imperative disappears it is no longer as vital to maintain national capacity. Universities could be privatized.”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>“The idea of the autonomous scholar is disappearing,” he said. “I am not sure many people even remember it.”</p>
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<p>Originally posted on Truthdig.com <a href="http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/suffering_well_you_deserve_it_20140302/">http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/suffering_well_you_deserve_it_20140302/</a></p>Introducing the Global Power Project (Updated)tag:activism101.ning.com,2014-02-28:3143100:BlogPost:333762014-02-28T23:24:34.000ZCromaghttp://activism101.ning.com/profile/Cromag
<div id="article-info"><div id="date-and-author">Mon, 3/25/2013 - by Andrew Gavin Marshall</div>
</div>
<div id="sharethis"><div class="sharethis-wrapper">originally posted on Occupy.com</div>
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<p><a href="http://www.occupy.com/sites/default/files/styles/slide_narrow/public/field/image/corporate-article.jpg?itok=dCRg4WRZ" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="http://www.occupy.com/sites/default/files/styles/slide_narrow/public/field/image/corporate-article.jpg?itok=dCRg4WRZ&width=381" width="381"></img></a></p>
<div class="field-name-body"><p><span class="font-size-3">W</span>e live in an interdependent world, where nations are increasingly…</p>
</div>
<div id="article-info"><div id="date-and-author">Mon, 3/25/2013 - by Andrew Gavin Marshall</div>
</div>
<div id="sharethis"><div class="sharethis-wrapper">originally posted on Occupy.com</div>
</div>
<p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.occupy.com/sites/default/files/styles/slide_narrow/public/field/image/corporate-article.jpg?itok=dCRg4WRZ"><img class="align-right" src="http://www.occupy.com/sites/default/files/styles/slide_narrow/public/field/image/corporate-article.jpg?itok=dCRg4WRZ&width=381" width="381"/></a></p>
<div class="field-name-body"><p><span class="font-size-3">W</span>e live in an interdependent world, where nations are increasingly eclipsed in size and wealth by the major banks and transnational corporations which have come to dominate the global economy.</p>
<p>Royal Dutch Shell has more money than all but the top 22 countries on earth. Supra-national and international institutions like the European Central Bank and IMF punish the populations of Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland into poverty and conditions of exploitation. Banks and corporations make record profits while poverty soars, debts increase and hunger spreads. Half the world’s population lives on less than $3 per day, over 1 billion people live in slums, and a global land grab coupled with a six-year-long global food crisis is pushing populations off their land and into deeper poverty and extreme hunger.</p>
<p>Western governments impose “austerity” at home while waging wars and supporting dictatorships abroad. Across the Arab world populations have been in revolt, labor unrest in South Africa reveals the persistence of economic apartheid, and popular resistance has exploded across southern Europe, while student uprisings have shaken Britain, Chile, Quebec and Mexico.</p>
<p>Indigenous peoples in the western hemisphere are mobilizing and resisting the destruction of the natural world, from Ecuador, Brazil, Guatemala and Mexico to Canada. The Occupy Movement emerged as a reaction to the rapacious system of global power that has impoverished the world, devastated the environment, waged wars and, in the past few decades, emerged as a highly integrated global class of oligarchs.</p>
<p>It is within this context that Occupy.com is beginning a research project to examine the networks of global power and how they operate, providing a resource to activists and others who wish to engage in opposition to the global power structures as they currently exist. This initiative is the Global Power Project.</p>
<p>The aim of the Global Power Project is to map the connections between the world’s dominant institutions of power, by examining the relationships and points of cross-over among the individuals who direct these institutions. The institutions that will be examined include the major banks, central banks, oil companies, mining corporations, media conglomerates, major think tanks, foundations, university boards and other international organizations.</p>
<p>The aim is to expose not only the revolving door between government and private institutions, but to name names and directly call out the global elite based on their affiliations and networks of influence.</p>
<p>The first installment of the Global Power Project will examine six major American banks: JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup. Executives, board members and major advisers to these institutions will be studied, with information drawn from their official CVs, biographies, published interviews or financial publications, and collected into a detailed appendix outlining the individuals' past and present affiliations with other dominant institutions of power.</p>
<p>This includes examining the links between those who manage the big six banks and government agencies, universities, think tanks, foundations, international organizations, the media, multinational corporations and other organizations. From the data collected, we will be able to draw conclusions about the networks of influence and the shared leadership positions that enable these banks and bankers to wield significant influence over other institutions.</p>
<p>This is not a study of economic dependence or the investments made by banks. It is a study of the social organization, interaction and integration of national and global elites. Instead of viewing institutions as separate entities, and often in opposition to one another as it is commonly suggested, the Global Power Project will seek to document the increasingly globalized connections that bind the financial and political elite, and to expose this highly integrated network of individuals spread across an array of institutions both national and global.</p>
<p>The Global Power Project does not adhere to a particular ideological view, philosophy or dogma. Rather, it focuses on the facts: by examining the connections, affiliations and cross-memberships through which elites govern our dominant social, economic and political institutions. From this research we hope to offer a clearer understanding of the current networks and structures of global power, which can serve as an invaluable resource for those seeking to study, understand, expose or challenge those existing structures.</p>
<p>The initial, forthcoming installment in the Global Power Project will focus on the major Wall Street banks, studying their executive leadership, members of the boards of directors, international advisory boards and other key officials operating within those institutions.</p>
<p>Keep a lookout and spread the word. The mapping of networks of global power is about to begin.</p>
<br/>
<p><strong>Part 1: <a href="http://activism101.ning.com/profiles/blogs/global-power-project-part-1-exposing-the-transnational-capitalist?xg_source=activity" target="_self">Exposing the Transnational Capitalist Class</a></strong></p>
<p><strong>Part 2: <a href="http://activism101.ning.com/profiles/blogs/global-power-project-part-2-identifying-the-institutions-of?xg_source=activity" target="_self">Identifying the Institutions of Control</a></strong></p>
<p><strong>Part 3: <a href="http://activism101.ning.com/profiles/blogs/global-power-project-part-3-the-influence-of-individuals-and?xg_source=activity" target="_self">The Influence of Individuals and Family Dynasties</a></strong></p>
<p><strong>Part 4: <a href="http://activism101.ning.com/profiles/blogs/global-power-project-part-4-banking-on-influence-with-jpmorgan" target="_self">Banking on Influence with JPMorgan Chase</a></strong></p>
<p><strong>Part 5: <a href="http://andrewgavinmarshall.com/2013/07/10/global-power-project-part-5-banking-on-influence-with-goldman-sachs/" target="_blank">Banking on Influence With Goldman Sachs</a></strong></p>
<p><strong>Part 6: <a href="http://andrewgavinmarshall.com/2013/07/17/global-power-project-part-6-banking-on-influence-with-bank-of-america/" target="_blank">Banking on Influence With Bank of America</a></strong></p>
<p><strong>Part 7: <a href="http://andrewgavinmarshall.com/2013/07/24/global-power-project-part-7-banking-on-influence-with-citigroup/" target="_blank">Banking on Influence With Citigroup</a></strong></p>
<p><strong>Part 8: <a href="http://ow.ly/nyv4w" target="_blank">Banking on Influence With Wells Fargo</a></strong></p>
<p><strong>Part 9:</strong> <strong><a href="http://www.occupy.com/article/global-power-project-part-9-banking-influence-morgan-stanley" target="_blank">Banking on Influence With Morgan Stanley</a></strong></p>
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<div class="article-tags"><strong>Part 10: <a href="http://www.occupy.com/article/global-power-project-group-thirty-financial-crisis-kingpins" target="_blank">The Group of Thirty Series (G30 Members)</a></strong></div>
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<div class="article-tags"><a href="http://www.occupy.com/tags/global-power-project" target="_blank">Global Power Project</a> <a href="http://www.occupy.com/tags/andrew-gavin-marshall" target="_blank">Andrew Gavin Marshall</a></div>
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<p><span style="color: #ff0000;"><strong>July 16th 2013 Interview: The Global Power Oligarchy Knows Better Than You</strong></span></p>
<p><em>The following is a radio interview Andrew Gavin Marshall did with The Burt Cohen Show, originally <a href="http://burtcohen.com/Podcasts/tabid/79/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/322/The-Global-Power-Oligarchy-Knows-Better-Than-You.aspx">posted here</a>.</em></p>
<p><em><a href="http://burtcohen.com/Portals/0/RadioShows/AGMarshall_World.mp3" title="Listen to the podcast" target="_blank"><img class="PodcastIcon" src="http://burtcohen.com/Portals/0/Images/PodcastIcon%20%2832x32%29.png" alt="podcast icon" style="border: 0;"/> <span class="font-size-5"><strong>Listen to the podcast</strong></span></a></em></p>
<p>Are the world’s economic problems the result of an “excess of democracy?” Since the late 19th century, supra-national power elites have joined together to plan the world better than the unsophisticated masses ever could. Of course not everyone agrees with this set up. Today’s guest is Andrew Gavin Marshall head of the geopoplitics division of the Hampton Institute and research director for Occupy.com’s Global Power Project. It may not be government of, by, and for the people, but hey, it’s so much easier to just let these guys do it.</p>
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</div>Henry Giroux on Resisting the Neoliberal Revolutiontag:activism101.ning.com,2014-02-23:3143100:BlogPost:350192014-02-23T02:00:00.000ZCromaghttp://activism101.ning.com/profile/Cromag
<p class="rpu-sortable ui-state-disabled">Reactions to <a href="http://billmoyers.com/2014/02/21/anatomy-of-the-deep-state/" style="color: #009999;" target="_blank">Anatomy of a Deep State from the Bill Moyers Show</a></p>
<p class="rpu-sortable ui-state-disabled">February 2014 - Credit: Dale Robbins</p>
<p class="rpu-sortable ui-state-disabled autolink-10368589">The notion of the “Deep State” as outlined by…</p>
<p class="rpu-sortable ui-state-disabled">Reactions to <a style="color: #009999;" href="http://billmoyers.com/2014/02/21/anatomy-of-the-deep-state/" target="_blank">Anatomy of a Deep State from the Bill Moyers Show</a></p>
<p class="rpu-sortable ui-state-disabled">February 2014 - Credit: Dale Robbins</p>
<p class="rpu-sortable ui-state-disabled autolink-10368589">The notion of the “Deep State” as outlined by <a class="autolink" style="color: #009999;" title="Reactions to Mike Lofgren’s Essay on the Deep State (AutoLink by Repost.Us)" target="_blank" href="http://billmoyers.com/2014/02/21/reactions-to-mike-lofgrens-essay-on-the-deep-state/">Mike Lofgren</a> may be useful in pointing to a new configuration of power in the US in which corporate sovereignty replaces political sovereignty, but it is not enough to simply expose the hidden institutions and structures of power.</p>
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<p class="rpu-sortable ui-state-disabled autolink-10368589">What we have in the <a class="autolink" style="color: #009999;" title="Reactions to Mike Lofgren’s Essay on the Deep State (AutoLink by Repost.Us)" target="_blank" href="http://billmoyers.com/2014/02/21/reactions-to-mike-lofgrens-essay-on-the-deep-state/">US</a> today is fundamentally a new mode of politics, one wedded to a notion of “power unaccompanied by accountability of any kind,” and this poses a deep and dire threat to democracy itself, because such power is difficult to understand, analyze and counter.</p>
<p class="rpu-sortable ui-state-disabled"></p>
<p class="rpu-sortable ui-state-disabled">The biggest problem facing the US may not be its repressive institutions, modes of governance and the militarization of everyday life, but the interiority of neoliberal nihilism, the hatred of democratic relations and the embrace of a culture of cruelty.</p>
<p class="rpu-sortable ui-state-disabled autolink-10368589"></p>
<p class="rpu-sortable ui-state-disabled autolink-10368589">I would suggest that what needs to be addressed is some sense of how this unique authoritarian conjuncture of power and politics came into place. More specifically, there is no mention by <a class="autolink" style="color: #009999;" title="Reactions to Mike Lofgren’s Essay on the Deep State (AutoLink by Repost.Us)" target="_blank" href="http://billmoyers.com/2014/02/21/reactions-to-mike-lofgrens-essay-on-the-deep-state/">Lofgren</a> of the collapse of the social state that began in the 1970s with the rise of neoliberal capitalism, a far more dangerous form of market fundamentalism than we had seen in the first Gilded Age. Nor is there a sustained analysis of what is new about this ideology.</p>
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<p class="rpu-sortable ui-state-disabled">How, for instance, are the wars abroad related increasingly to the diverse forms of domestic terrorism that have emerged at home? What is new and distinctive about a society marked by militaristic violence, exemplified by its war on youth, women, gays, public values, public education and any viable exhibition of dissent? Why at this particular moment in history is an aggressive war being waged on not only whistle blowers, but also journalists, students, artists, intellectuals and the institutions that support them?</p>
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<p class="rpu-sortable ui-state-disabled">What’s missing in Lofgren’s essay is any reference to the rise of the punishing state with its massive racially inflected incarceration system, which amounts to a war on poor minorities, especially black youth. Nor is anything said about the culture of fear that now rules American life and how it functions to redefine the notion of security, diverting it away from social considerations to narrow matters of personal safety.</p>
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<p class="rpu-sortable ui-state-disabled">Moreover, Lofgren needs to say more about a growing culture of cruelty brought about by the death of concessions in politics — a politics now governed by the ultra-rich and mega corporations that has no allegiance to local politics and produces a culture infused with a self-righteous coldness that takes delight in the suffering of others. Power is now separated from politics and floats, unchecked and uncaring.</p>
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<p class="rpu-sortable ui-state-disabled">This is a revolution in which the welfare state is being liquidated, along with the collective provisions that supported it. It is a revolution in which economics drives politics.</p>
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<p class="rpu-sortable ui-state-disabled">Neoliberalism is a new form of hybrid global financial authoritarianism. It is connected to the Deep State and marked by its savage willingness in the name of accumulation, privatization, deregulation, dispossession and power to make disposable a wide range of groups extending from low income youth and poor minorities to elements of the middle class that have lost jobs, social protections and hope.</p>
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<p class="rpu-sortable ui-state-disabled">Then, there is the central question, how does the Deep State function to encourage particular types of individualistic, competitive, acquisitive and entrepreneurial behavior in its citizens?</p>
<p class="rpu-sortable ui-state-disabled"></p>
<p class="rpu-sortable ui-state-disabled">The biggest problem facing the US may not be its repressive institutions, modes of governance and the militarization of everyday life, but the interiority of neoliberal nihilism, the hatred of democratic relations and the embrace of a culture of cruelty. The role of culture as an educative force, a new and powerful force in politics is central here and is vastly underplayed in the essay (which of course cannot include everything). For instance, in what ways does the Deep State use the major cultural apparatuses to convince people that there is no alternative to existing relations of power, that consumerism is the ultimate mark of citizenship and that making money is the essence of individual and social responsibility?</p>
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<p class="rpu-sortable ui-state-disabled">In other words, there is no theory of cultural domination here, no understanding of how identities, subjectivities and values are shaped in the narrow and selfish image of commerce, how exchange values are the only values. In my estimation, the Deep State is symptomatic of something more ominous, the rise of a new form of authoritarianism, a counter-revolution in which society is being restructured and advanced under what might be called the neoliberal revolution. This is a revolution in which the welfare state is being liquidated, along with the collective provisions that supported it. It is a revolution in which economics drives politics.</p>
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<p class="rpu-sortable ui-state-disabled">Regarding the question of resistance, I think this is the weakest part of the essay. I don’t believe the system is broken. I think it works well, but in the interest of very privileged and powerful elite economic and political interests that are aggressively waging a war on democracy itself. If there is to be any challenge to this system, it cannot be made within the discourse of liberal reform, which has largely served to maintain the system. Occupy and many other social movements recognize this. These groups have refused to be defined by the dominant media, the dictates of the security state, the financialization of everyday life and forms of representations that are utterly corrupt.</p>
<p class="rpu-sortable ui-state-disabled"></p>
<p class="rpu-sortable ui-state-disabled">Hope and resistance will only come when the call for reform and working within the system gives way to imagining a very different understanding of what democracy means. The new authoritarianism with its diverse tentacles is the antithesis of democracy, and if we are going to change what Lofgren calls the Deep State, it is necessary to think in terms of an alternative that does not mimic its ideologies, institutions, governing structures and power relations.<br/> <br/>
<iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/80047135" frameborder="0" height="281" width="500"></iframe>
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<p><a href="http://vimeo.com/80047135">Henry Giroux on 'Zombie' Politics</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user9013478">BillMoyers.com</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.<br/> <br/>
<iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/80047085" frameborder="0" height="281" width="500"></iframe>
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<p><a href="http://vimeo.com/80047085">Politics in the Age of Casino Capitalism</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user9013478">BillMoyers.com</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.<br/> <br/>
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<p class="rpu-sortable ui-state-disabled">Two things are essential for challenging the new authoritarianism. First, there needs to be a change in collective consciousness about what democracy really means and what it might look like. This is a pedagogical task whose aim is to create the formative culture that produces the agents necessary for challenging neoliberal rule. Secondly, there is a need for a massive social movement with distinct strategies, organizations and the will to address the roots of the problem and imagine a very different kind of society, one that requires genuine democratic socialism as its aim. Democracy is on life support in the US and working within the system to change it is a dead end, except for gaining short-term reforms. The struggle for a substantive democracy needs more, and the American people expect more.</p>
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<div class="author-box clearfix"><div class="pic"><a target="_blank" href="http://billmoyers.com/author/henrygiroux/"><img class="align-left" src="http://cdn.billmoyers.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/20131112_2448_Henry-Giroux_guest-150x150.jpg?width=81" width="81"/></a></div>
<div class="dek"><strong>Henry A. Giroux</strong> holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is a distinguished visiting scholar at Ryerson University, both in Canada. He is the author of dozens of <a href="http://www.henryagiroux.com/books.htm">books</a> and his website is <a href="http://www.henryagiroux.com/">HenryGiroux.com</a>.</div>
</div>The Rights of Nature: Has Deep Ecology Gone Too Far?tag:activism101.ning.com,2014-01-27:3143100:BlogPost:350112014-01-27T16:00:00.000ZCromaghttp://activism101.ning.com/profile/Cromag
<div class="content"><div class="content-resize" style="min-height: 0px;"><p><span class="font-size-3">A specter is haunting the French humanist mind these days--a radical ecology movement that threatens to replace the idealization of humanity with an idealization of nature. Already we see "the passing of the humanist era," writes Luc Ferry, a philosopher at the Sorbonne and the University of Caen, in this prize-winning critique of that movement, a book all environmentalists ought to read. It…</span></p>
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<div class="content"><div style="min-height: 0px;" class="content-resize"><p><span class="font-size-3">A specter is haunting the French humanist mind these days--a radical ecology movement that threatens to replace the idealization of humanity with an idealization of nature. Already we see "the passing of the humanist era," writes Luc Ferry, a philosopher at the Sorbonne and the University of Caen, in this prize-winning critique of that movement, a book all environmentalists ought to read. It is by turn witty and sneering, brilliant and disturbing, wildly alarmist and, in the end, surprisingly conciliatory. Ferry recognizes that we need a new relationship with nature but hopes we can get there without sweeping changes in Western humanism and liberal society. Yet he exaggerates the danger radical environmentalists pose and resists the changes that are needed.</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">In 1587 the village of Saint-Julien brought suit against a colony of weevils attacking the vineyards. The villagers lost in court, the judge declaring that the insects, being creatures of God, possessed the same rights as people to live in the place. Ferry is amused that such a trial could ever have occurred, but he is not amused by today's animal liberationists, deep ecologists, greens of the left or right, or ecofeminists, all of whom seem to have too tender a regard for weevils, even to the point of preferring them over humans. Ferry calls this brigade the "ecologists," a term that refers not to the quantitative science of ecology, with its computer models of plant and animal dynamics, but to a moral philosophy that would give rights to the whole ecosphere, the entire natural environment.</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">The origins of this specter lie in "the Anglo-Saxon world," a quaintly out-of-date phrase used by French politicians as well as intellectuals to refer to England, Canada, and the United States (though mainly the latter, an irrational country prone to sudden strange enthusiasms), which together constantly challenge France's cultural hegemony, and in Germany, the old nemesis, the dark home of anti-modern romantics. Ferry acknowledges that these foreigners have their French counterparts in writers like Michel Serres; nonetheless, he fears that it is France itself, the great font of modern humanism, that is under attack by the eco-revolutionaries.</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">THE NEW HUMAN BEING</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">A major source of the global environmental crisis, say the radicals, is the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, which promoted a new vision of human beings as set apart from, and above, the rest of nature by their capacity for reason. Through reason, humanists sought to transcend the earth in two ways: an ethical triumph over brute egotism and a technological domination over nature that would make human life richer and more comfortable. Although these ideas sprang up all over Europe--and it was near Edinburgh that one of the most important figures of the age, Adam Smith, the founding ideologue of capitalism, appeared--France was certainly a world center of the Enlightenment. From its philosophe-inspired revolution of 1789 emerged a modern democratic society enshrining the rights of all humankind, or, as Americans like to say, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The utopianism in that revolutionary era was palpable. A new human being was expected momentarily to arrive. Freed from tradition, which Ferry describes as "second nature," akin to natural instinct and just as confining, that person would make up his own ethics, without divine guidance, becoming as it were his own god.</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">Ferry still believes in that noble dream. We humans have no nature, he argues, but are proudly "unnatural." We alone have a history. We alone pursue a future, constantly tearing down the old, moving on to the new. Unique among species, we create moral ideals and try to live up to them.</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">While no thoughtful person would disagree that humans are distinguished from the rest of nature by their moral consciousness, the history they have made over the past 200 years has not demonstrated much realization of Ferry's ideal. Ecologists have not been the first to make this point; it has been gathering force for a long time, through a succession of world wars, totalitarian regimes, and, most recently, weapons of annihilation. The hydrogen bomb, that dreadful and arrogant product of some of the most intelligent minds ever, has been particularly hard to square with humanism. Following hard on those events have come dying rivers, lakes, and forests, the wholesale extermination of species, and global warming. Unfortunately for nature, there are now six billion of us gods around, swallowing resources at a ferocious rate; our vaunted economic freedom has been won at the expense of all other living beings. Is it misanthropic to see and regret such destruction, or to question the Enlightenment project of environmental conquest, or to denounce that old notion of freedom when it is unchecked by compassion or responsibility? The religion (if such it has been) of humanism has shattered against the dark facts.</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">I SUFFER, THEREFORE I AM</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">The first section of Ferry's book deals with the crusade for animal liberation, which has little to do with ecology, aimed as it is at protecting individual animals rather than the integrity of the ecosphere. The Australian philosopher Peter Singer argues that because animals can suffer, or have their "interests" damaged, they should be given legal rights. Ferry disagrees, holding that animals cannot be liberated at all because true freedom involves rising above instinct. Animals can be let out of their cages, but they cannot become other than what they are. Yet he understands that they deserve better treatment than having their eyes poked out by callous experimenters or their pain made into sport. We need rules to stop unnecessary cruelty--protective rules for animals, rights for humans. It is a fine line, and the courts are likely to find it harder and harder to draw.</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">The animal rights advocates are merely illogical, Ferry believes, confusing distinct categories of being, but the radical or deep ecologists advocate a truly dangerous set of doctrines that threaten a new tyranny. They want to overturn modernity itself. They look on nature as sacred. They teach that humans are only one species among many, that the earth is greater than any single part. They have no tolerance for democratic procedures. Seizing on a few paragraphs in a handful of texts, however, Ferry fails to do justice to the movement, especially its more mature leaders.</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">Deep ecology's leading voice is Arne Naess, a Norwegian philosopher, who feels that environmental concerns should go beyond purely human matters such as public health or long-term economic viability to the preservation of all living organisms and ecosystems. "Present human interference with the nonhuman world is excessive," he writes, "and the situation is rapidly worsening." Curtailing that interference would require a drastic reversal of the growth in human population and consumption. Radical thoughts, yes, unlikely to gain wide acceptance anytime soon. Yet how could such a change of thinking, if it came, pose any danger to the human spirit or to freedom?</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">DICTATORSHIP BY ECOLOGICAL RIGHT?</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">It would, says Ferry, if ecologists started using force to get their way, requiring people, for example, to practice birth control or stop buying automobiles. If force means Soviet repression, Ferry is right to be worried, but if it means passing laws and regulations in the time-honored Western fashion, then he is overwrought. Naess, for one, does not advocate violent, authoritarian tactics, nor did Aldo Leopold, the American forerunner of the deep ecologists and author of the widely admired essay "The Land Ethic," which argues that, through education, humans might develop a sense of personal responsibility to preserve the beauty and integrity of the earth. Garrett Hardin, another American ecologist, went further, calling for "mutual coercion mutually agreed upon," but even that formula is perfectly compatible with liberal democracy. Deep ecology presents itself as a peaceful effort to achieve a radical moral vision: the subordination of individual and species self-interest to the welfare of the whole ecological community. Interestingly, that struggle toward altruism is precisely what Ferry means by human freedom. The only difference is that altruism now includes more than humankind.</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">Of course, antidemocratic tendencies can develop in almost any movement (including the Enlightenment; remember how the Paris revolutionaries treated their foes). Ferry shows how Walther Schoenichen, a member of the Nazi party in the 1930s and a German wildlife conservationist, is echoed in many of today's radical ecologists' love of wilderness, disgust for Western imperialism, and desire for roots. Other Nazis found in the hearty outdoor life a source of virility for the super-race and talked about getting back to the forest, where the German soul found its home. Although they may have passed laws to enforce conservation, it is hard to find any genuine respect for nature in the Third Reich, whether in Mein Kampf, the Nazis' deadly war machine, or their technological fantasies. Ferry's warning about these precedents is well taken, to be sure: a passion for nature neither guarantees respect for other people's lives or views nor stops all moral outrages. The obverse is also true: many good humanitarians have seen nothing wrong with destroying nature for trivial ends.</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">Ferry is not among them. Despite his professed hostility toward radicals of all sorts, he confesses that the time has come for reconsidering the place of nature in Western thinking. He offers a "democratic ecology" that would teach the duties of environmental protection and preservation without endangering the rights of man. Nature, he allows, possesses value, which is to say that value is not simply a human creation. Nature achieves a beauty and harmony that humans must not destroy. Natural ecosystems display an "intelligence" often superior to that of people and requiring respect. Ferry rejects the Cartesian idea that living things are mere machines, without feeling, which people may disassemble at will. He denies that endless consumption is the way to a liberated human consciousness. All these concessions are still novel ideas to many humanists, and acceptance of their full implications would bring profound changes to Western ethics. Nature, on the other hand, remains profane for Ferry, and also for most environmentalists, who are not deep ecologists. Even many radical ecologists acknowledge that there is much in nature that is against us, like the Ebola virus coming out of the African jungles. Nature in the modern, secular, scientific age is too complicated an idea to define, let alone carry a religious meaning, as it once did for American Indians, Buddhists, and Christians.</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">What really separates Ferry from the ethical radicals he despises? More than anything else, it is the radicals' project to overturn powerful modern institutions--not democracy so much as the institutions of industrial capitalism. Ferry supposes that capitalism, or "the market," can remain intact by greening up for a new generation of environmentally conscious consumers. Radical ecologists would tend to disagree, wondering how an economic institution founded on self-interest and greed can ever become compatible with an ecological conscience or, for that matter, how it could ever have coexisted with the moral side of humanism.</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">Ecology is, Ferry writes, a potentially revolutionary force, and why not? He insists that we had our revolution 200 years ago, the only one we will ever need. The ecologists reply that deteriorating environmental conditions have made a new revolution necessary, and they wonder why our age should not have the chance to invent new ethics and institutions. If it is human to try to escape tradition, to explore new moral frontiers, then the radical ecologists are, in spirit if not dogma, the rightful heirs of the Enlightenment.</span></p>
<h1 class="title"><span class="font-size-3"><a href="http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/51614/donald-worster/the-rights-of-nature-has-deep-ecology-gone-too-far" target="_blank">The Rights of Nature: Has Deep Ecology Gone Too Far?</a> by Donald Worster crossposted from ForeignAffairs December 1995 Issue<br/></span></h1>
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</div>George Lakoff to green marketers: use the F-wordtag:activism101.ning.com,2013-09-06:3143100:BlogPost:344152013-09-06T00:46:57.000ZCromaghttp://activism101.ning.com/profile/Cromag152
UC Berkeley researcher and cognitive linguist riffs on "freedom" and other hot-button words for sustainability communicators. Anna Clark - theguardian.com, Tuesday 27 August 2013 14.00 EDT<br />
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If you lean progressive, then you've probably heard of George Lakoff, professor of cognitive science and linguistics at UC Berkeley and author of The New York Times bestseller, Don't Think of an Elephant! Notwithstanding his unabashed political slant, Lakoff's research is applicable for commercial purposes,…
UC Berkeley researcher and cognitive linguist riffs on "freedom" and other hot-button words for sustainability communicators. Anna Clark - theguardian.com, Tuesday 27 August 2013 14.00 EDT<br />
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If you lean progressive, then you've probably heard of George Lakoff, professor of cognitive science and linguistics at UC Berkeley and author of The New York Times bestseller, Don't Think of an Elephant! Notwithstanding his unabashed political slant, Lakoff's research is applicable for commercial purposes, too. I recently spoke with him to get his insights into how Americans think and how green communicators can cut through the confusion over sustainability.<br />
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You're best known for writing about "framing the debate," so let's start with frames. What are they and how do they work?<br />
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Let's begin with reason and how it works. Going back to the 1600s with Descartes, Enlightenment thinking assumes that reason is conscious, logical and rational. This is outmoded. We've since learned that reason is actually 98% unconscious. So, frames are the unconscious neural circuits that define how we think and talk. They are conceptual structures made up of metaphors, narratives and emotions, and they are physically part of the brain. We cannot avoid framing. The only question is whose frames are being activated in the brains of the public.<br />
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What activates frames?<br />
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Words activate frames. That's why words are so important. A single word can activate not only the defining frame, but also the system its defining frame is in. The system of frames has, at the top, moral frames, so if you make any proposal that is social or political, the assumption is that you're doing it because it's "right". Anything below the hierarchy activates everything at the top of the frame. Since political ideologies are characterized by systems of frames, ideological language activates the ideological system.<br />
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We're taught that it is unwise to talk politics in business, but society is clearly polarized and marketers can't ignore this problem. What should sustainability communicators understand about how their audiences filter language?<br />
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In America, there are two models of morality at work, what we call the "strict father" and the "nurturant parent". Most people are actually moderates with both models present in different parts of their lives. But using the language of the "strict father" model, conservatives consistently invoke a system of frames, and when you activate a circuit, the synapses get stronger. Physically, more ion channels are opening up.<br />
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So, when you try to use reason to argue against the prevailing mindset, you actually strengthen the opposing position and weaken your own. You're not just activating the particular frame about a hot-button issue, you are going all the way up their moral frames.<br />
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What's an example of a word that triggers a "moral" response?<br />
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Consider the word "freedom". Using the morality frame, conservatives have patented "freedom" and now progressives act as if they are scared of that word. Here's a familiar policy example. Take the healthcare bill. The pollster that Obama used identified individual policies with 60%-80% popularity, and those became the conditions in the plan. However, even though each provision was very popular, only about 50% of the public actually supports it. How did the whole plan become unpopular when each provision was overwhelmingly popular? Any cognitive scientist will tell you that the policy parts don't determine how the whole is perceived.<br />
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This is how progressives shoot themselves in the foot. They focused on communicating the policies, the statistics. Conservatives understand that communication has to do with the moral basis. (They never said anything about provisions. Instead, they said this was about "freedom and life." They talked about a government takeover and death panels.<br />
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So, what should Obama have done? Not named it the "Affordable Care Act." He should have used the word "freedom" in it. Bottom line, progressives can't say, "They've already got that one." It's too important. We can't let them get that word. … We reclaim it by using it over and over. … What about freedom from weather disasters and pollutants? … You need to name the issues then use the word repeatedly.<br />
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What about "energy independence"?<br />
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Well, that's tricky. This is what we call a contested concept in linguistics. It could be a simple case that everybody agrees on but has complex properties and different values take that case and move it in different directions. Now, take that case and extend it further. That's how "energy independence" could logically mean renewable energy to one group and "drill baby drill" to another. My book, Whose Freedom, gives a detailed account of how central notion of freedom is in communication.<br />
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There are many tripwires to avoid in marketing green ideas and products. What's the secret to success?<br />
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You win by using your own frame. If you are asked, "Are you in favor of tax relief?" while being interviewed on Fox News, don't reinforce their frame in your response. You instead say, "I'm in favor of having the public jointly get together an provide public education and health."<br />
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So don't challenge the opposition in their language. Tell a new story instead.<br />
<br />
That's right. Whatever you do, don't try to dismantle common myths about such and such with a rational argument. It's worse than ineffective. It's shooting yourself in the foot because in stating their frame, you reinforce it.<br />
<br />
Do any sustainability campaigns stand out as being particularly effective to you?<br />
<br />
In terms of green marketing, most of it seems to be designed for liberals. Conservatives won't be interested if it's inconvenient for them or goes against some other tastes. Take all this stuff about getting rid of sugar. The problem is that it is being done stupidly. Campaigns that make fun of fat people are a complete disaster. A better approach would be to simply say, "Sugar is a poison. Here's how the poison works. Stop poisoning. Be good to yourself. This is your choice."<br />
<br />
What is perpetuating confusion over sustainability?<br />
<br />
Conservatives have set up an incredible infrastructure. It's a vast, unseen communication system and it's very effective. This has been pointed out over and over to progressives and few seem to recognize the danger. They think it's just propaganda and so they ignore it.<br />
<br />
Look at Alec (American Legislative Exchange Council). This is a co-ordinated communications effort planned over a decade to take over the national government through state legislatures. Then there's the Leadership Institute in Virginia. These people see themselves as moral crusaders. They are "right" and they are sticking to principle. They have list serves. They have been training people in conservative messaging for over 20 years.<br />
<br />
What else can we do to better communicate complex problems to the public without losing their attention?<br />
<br />
Understand that there are two kinds of causation: direct and systemic. Every language in the world has direct causation in its grammar; no language has systemic causation in its grammar. Climate scientists are the worst offenders because they understand and use systemic causation at work, but in communication they think that "causation" means direct causation. This has nothing to do with their talent or how articulate they are. They just don't know basic cognitive science.<br />
<br />
Here's a story. I'm at the Aspen Institute in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina. Gore and Kerry are there, but the smartest guy in the room is Ronald Reagan's chief strategist, who was partly progressive on environmental issues. Anyway, the scientist gets up there and gives an excellent science lecture. A reporter asks him, "Did global warming cause Hurricane Katrina?" A scientist cannot say that there was direct causation, but what he should have done was explain the chain of events and then string it together to show how Hurricane Katrina was systemically caused by global warming. You have to connect the dots for your audience.<br />
<br />
Any final advice for green communicators and marketers?<br />
<br />
Yes! This is not hopeless. There is a lot to know and a lot to do. The best place to start is with the brain. Before you worry about crafting one more message, learn about cognitive science.<br />
<br />
Anna Clark is the author of Green, American Style: Becoming Earth-Friendly and Reaping the Benefits and the president of EarthPeople Media, a communications firm and publisher of media related to sustainability and social innovation.The Leveraged Buyout of Americatag:activism101.ning.com,2013-08-28:3143100:BlogPost:341022013-08-28T00:50:07.000ZCromaghttp://activism101.ning.com/profile/Cromag
<p><i>Giant bank holding companies now own airports, toll roads, and ports; control power plants; and store and hoard vast quantities of commodities of all sorts. They are systematically buying up or gaining control of the essential lifelines of the economy. How have they pulled this off, and where have they gotten the money?</i></p>
<p><a href="http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/LetterToFedGoldmanUranium.pdf" rel="nofollow">In a letter</a> to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke dated June…</p>
<p><i>Giant bank holding companies now own airports, toll roads, and ports; control power plants; and store and hoard vast quantities of commodities of all sorts. They are systematically buying up or gaining control of the essential lifelines of the economy. How have they pulled this off, and where have they gotten the money?</i></p>
<p><a rel="nofollow" href="http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/LetterToFedGoldmanUranium.pdf">In a letter</a> to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke dated June 27, 2013, US Representative Alan Grayson and three co-signers expressed concern about the expansion of large banks into what have traditionally been non-financial commercial spheres. Specifically:</p>
<p>"[W]e are concerned about how large banks have recently expanded their businesses into such fields as electric power production, oil refining and distribution, owning and operating of public assets such as ports and airports, and even uranium mining."</p>
<p>After listing some disturbing examples, they observed:</p>
<p>"According to legal scholar Saule Omarova , over the past five years, there has been a "quiet transformation of U.S. financial holding companies." These financial services companies have become global merchants that seek to extract rent from any commercial or financial business activity within their reach. They have used legal authority in Graham-Leach-Bliley to subvert the "foundational principle of separation of banking from commerce" . . . .</p>
<p>"It seems like there is a significant macro-economic risk in having a massive entity like, say JP Morgan, both issuing credit cards and mortgages, managing municipal bond offerings, selling gasoline and electric power, running large oil tankers, trading derivatives, and owning and operating airports, in multiple countries."</p>
<p>A "macro" risk indeed -- not just to our economy but to our democracy and our individual and national sovereignty. Giant banks are buying up our country's infrastructure -- the power and supply chains that are vital to the economy. Aren't there rules against that? And where are the banks getting the money?</p>
<p align="center"><b>How Banks Launder Money Through the Repo Market</b></p>
<p>In an illuminating series of articles on <i>Seeking Alpha</i> titled "<a rel="nofollow" href="http://seekingalpha.com/article/1109701-repoed-how-the-fed-and-depositors-fund-banks-big-bets">Repoed!</a>", Colin Lokey argues that the investment arms of large Wall Street banks are using their "excess" deposits -- the excess of deposits over loans -- as collateral for borrowing in the repo market. Repos, or "repurchase agreements," are used to raise short-term capital. Securities are sold to investors overnight and repurchased the next day, usually day after day.</p>
<p>The deposit-to-loan gap for all US banks is now about $2 trillion, and nearly half of this gap is in Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and Wells Fargo alone. It seems that the largest banks are using the majority of their deposits (along with the Federal Reserve's quantitative easing dollars) not to back loans to individuals and businesses but to borrow for their own trading. Acquiring a company or a portion of a company mostly with borrowed money is called a "leveraged buyout." The banks are leveraging our money to buy up ports, airports, toll roads, power, and massive stores of commodities.</p>
<p>Using these excess deposits directly for their own speculative trading would be blatantly illegal, but the banks have been able to avoid the appearance of impropriety by borrowing from the repo market. (See my earlier article <a rel="nofollow" href="http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/2013/07/22/5835/">here</a>.) The banks' excess deposits are first used to purchase Treasury bonds, agency securities, and other highly liquid, "safe" securities. These liquid assets are then pledged as collateral in repo transactions, allowing the banks to get "clean" cash to invest as they please. They can channel this laundered money into risky assets such as derivatives, corporate bonds, and equities (stock).</p>
<p>That means they can buy up companies. Lokey writes, "It is common knowledge that prop [proprietary] trading desks at banks can and do invest in a variety of assets, including stocks." Prop trading desks invest for the banks' own accounts. This was something that depository banks were forbidden to do by the New Deal-era Glass-Steagall Act but that was allowed in 1999 by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed those portions of Glass-Steagall. </p>
<p>The result has been a massively risky $700-plus trillion speculative derivatives bubble. Lokey quotes from an article by Bill Frezza in the January 2013 <em>Huffington Post</em> titled " <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-frezza/toobigtofail-banks-gamble_b_2424156.html">Too-Big-To-Fail Banks Gamble With Bernanke Bucks</a> ":</p>
<p>"If you think [the cash cushion from excess deposits] makes the banks less vulnerable to shock, think again. Much of this balance sheet cash has been hypothecated in the repo market, laundered through the off-the-books shadow banking system. This allows the proprietary trading desks at these "banks" to use that cash as collateral to take out loans to gamble with. In a process called hyper-hypothecation this pledged collateral gets pyramided, creating a ticking time bomb ready to go kablooey when the next panic comes around." </p>
<p><b>That Explains the Mountain of Excess Reserves</b></p>
<p>Historically, banks have attempted to maintain a loan-to-deposit ratio of close to 100%, meaning they were "fully loaned up" and making money on their deposits. Today, however, that ratio is only 72% on average; and for the big derivative banks, it is lower yet. The unlent portion represents the "excess deposits" available to be tapped as collateral for the repo market.</p>
<p>The Fed's quantitative easing contributes to this collateral pool by converting less-liquid mortgage-backed securities into cash in the banks' reserve accounts. This cash is not something the banks can spend for their own proprietary trading, but they can invest it in "safe" securities -- Treasuries and similar securities that are also the sort of collateral acceptable in the repo market. Using this repo collateral, the banks can then acquire the laundered cash with which they can invest or speculate for their own accounts.</p>
<p>Lokey notes that US Treasuries are now being bought by banks in record quantities. These bonds stay on the banks' books for Fed supervision purposes, even as they are being pledged to other parties to get cash via repo. The fact that such pledging is going on can be determined from the banks' balance sheets, but it takes some detective work. Explaining the intricacies of this process, the evidence that it is being done, and how it is hidden in plain sight takes Lokey three articles, to which the reader is referred. Suffice it to say here that he makes a compelling case.</p>
<p align="center"><b>Can They Do That?</b></p>
<p>Countering the argument that "banks can't really do anything with their excess reserves" and that "there is no evidence that they are being rehypothecated," Lokey points to data coming to light in conjunction with JPMorgan's $6 billion "London Whale" fiasco. He calls it "clear-cut proof that banks trade stocks (and virtually everything else) with excess deposits." JPM's London-based Chief Investment Office [CIO] <a rel="nofollow" href="http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/ONE/2273239192x0x628656/4cb574a0-0bf5-4728-9582-625e4519b5ab/Task_Force_Report.pdf">reported</a>:</p>
<p>"JPMorgan's businesses take in more in deposits that they make in loans and, as a result, the Firm has excess cash that must be invested to meet future liquidity needs and provide a reasonable return. The primary reponsibility of CIO, working with JPMorgan's Treasury, is to manage this excess cash. CIO invests the bulk of JPMorgan's excess cash in high credit quality, fixed income securities, such as municipal bonds, whole loans, and asset-backed securities, mortgage backed securities, corporate securities, sovereign securities, and collateralized loan obligations."</p>
<p>Lokey comments:</p>
<p>"That passage is unequivocal -- it is as unambiguous as it could possibly be. <em>JPMorgan invests excess deposits in a variety of assets for its own account and as the above clearly indicates, there isn't much they won't invest those deposits in</em> . Sure, the first things mentioned are "high quality fixed income securities," but by the end of the list, deposits are being invested in corporate securities [stock] and CLOs [collateralized loan obligations]. . . . [T]he idea that deposits are invested only in Treasury bonds, agencies, or derivatives related to such "risk free" securities is patently false."</p>
<p>He adds:</p>
<p>"[I]t is no coincidence that stocks have rallied as the Fed has pumped money into the coffers of the primary dealers while ICI data shows retail investors have pulled nearly a half trillion from U.S. equity funds over the same period. It is the banks that are propping stocks."</p>
<p align="center"><b>Another Argument for Public Banking</b></p>
<p>All this helps explain why the largest Wall Street banks have radically scaled back their lending to the local economy. It appears that their loan-to-deposit ratios are low not because they cannot find creditworthy borrowers but because they can profit more from buying airports and commodities through their prop trading desks than from making loans to small local businesses.</p>
<p>Small and medium-sized businesses are responsible for creating most of the jobs in the economy, and they are struggling today to get the credit they need to operate. That is one of many reasons that we the people need to own some banks ourselves. Publicly-owned banks can direct credit where it is needed in the local economy; can protect public funds from <a rel="nofollow" href="http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/2013/04/29/bail-out-is-out-bail-in-is-in-another-argument-for-publicly-owned-banks/">confiscation through "bail-ins"</a> resulting from bad gambling in by big derivative banks; and can augment public coffers with banking revenues, allowing local governments to cut taxes, add services, and salvage public assets from fire-sale privatization. <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.amazon.com/Public-Bank-Solution-Austerity-Prosperity/dp/0983330867/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1371913558&sr=1-1&keywords=public+bank+solution">Publicly-owned banks have a long and successful history</a>, and recent studies have found them to be the safest in the world.</p>
<p>As Representative Grayson and co-signers observed in their letter to Chairman Bernanke, the banking system is now dominated by " global merchants that seek to extract rent from any commercial or financial business activity within their reach." They represent a return to a feudal landlord economy of unearned profits from rent-seeking. We need a banking system that focuses not on casino profiteering or feudal rent-seeking but on promoting economic and social well-being; and that is the mandate of the public banking sector globally.</p>
<p><b><font face="Verdana" size="2"><em>For a PublicBankingTV video on the bail-in threat, see</em> <em><a rel="nofollow" href="http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/2013/08/25/publicbankingtv-your-money-is-not-safe-in-the-big-banks/"><i>here</i></a></em><em>.</em></font></b></p>
<p><b><font face="Verdana" size="2">by Ellen Brown</font></b></p>
<p><b><font face="Verdana" size="2">Originally posted on <a href="http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Leveraged-Buyout-of-Am-by-Ellen-Brown-Bail-in_Banking-Fraud_Banking-Mergers-And-Acquistions_Derivatives-130827-8.htm" target="_blank">OpEdNews</a> August 27, 2013</font></b></p>
<p><b><font face="Verdana" size="2">Ellen Brown is an attorney, president of the Public Banking Institute, and author of 12 books, including WEB OF DEBT and its newly-released sequel, THE PUBLIC BANK SOLUTION. Her websites are <a href="http://WebofDebt.com">http://WebofDebt.com</a>, <a href="http://PublicBankSolution.com">http://PublicBankSolution.com</a>, and <a href="http://PublicBankingInstitute.org">http://PublicBankingInstitute.org</a>.</font></b></p>The Ecuadorian Library or, The Blast Shack After Three Yearstag:activism101.ning.com,2013-08-07:3143100:BlogPost:340272013-08-07T20:55:00.000ZCromaghttp://activism101.ning.com/profile/Cromag
<div class="post-field body notes-source"><p><a href="https://d233eq3e3p3cv0.cloudfront.net/max/700/0*eT5LwH4rOihgpThm.jpeg" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="https://d233eq3e3p3cv0.cloudfront.net/max/700/0*eT5LwH4rOihgpThm.jpeg?width=396" width="396"></img></a> Back in distant, halcyon 2010, I was asked to write something about Wikileaks and its Cablegate scandal. So, I wrote a rather melancholy essay about how things seemed to me to be going — dreadfully, painfully, like some leaden and ancient Greek tragedy.</p>
<p></p>
<p>In that 2010 essay, I surmised that things were going to get worse before…</p>
</div>
<div class="post-field body notes-source"><p><a target="_blank" href="https://d233eq3e3p3cv0.cloudfront.net/max/700/0*eT5LwH4rOihgpThm.jpeg"><img class="align-right" src="https://d233eq3e3p3cv0.cloudfront.net/max/700/0*eT5LwH4rOihgpThm.jpeg?width=396" width="396"/></a>Back in distant, halcyon 2010, I was asked to write something about Wikileaks and its Cablegate scandal. So, I wrote a rather melancholy essay about how things seemed to me to be going — dreadfully, painfully, like some leaden and ancient Greek tragedy.</p>
<p></p>
<p>In that 2010 essay, I surmised that things were going to get worse before they got any better. Sure enough, things now are lots, lots worse. Much worse than Cablegate ever was.</p>
<p></p>
<p>Cablegate merely kicked the kneecap of the archaic and semi-useless US State Department. But Edward Snowden just strolled out of the Moscow airport, with his Wikileaks personal escort, one month after ripping the pants off the National Security Agency.</p>
<p></p>
<p>You see, as it happens, a good half of my essay “<a href="https://medium.com/p/f745f5fbeb1c">The Blast Shack</a>” was about the basic problem of the NSA. Here was the takeaway from that essay back in 2010:</p>
<blockquote>One minute’s thought would reveal that a vast, opaque electronic spy outfit like the National Security Agency is exceedingly dangerous to democracy. Really, it is. The NSA clearly violates all kinds of elementary principles of constitutional design. The NSA is the very antithesis of transparency, and accountability, and free elections, and free expression, and separation of powers ― in other words, the NSA is a kind of giant, grown-up, anti-Wikileaks. And it always has been. And we’re used to that. We pay no mind.</blockquote>
<p>Well, dear readers, nowadays we do pay that some mind. Yes, that was then, while this is now.</p>
<p></p>
<p>So, I no longer feel that leaden discontent and those grave misgivings that I felt in 2010. The situation now is frankly exhilarating. It no longer has that look-and-feel of the Edgar Allen Poe House of Usher. This scene is straight outta Nikolai Gogol.</p>
<p></p>
<p>This is the kind of comedic situation that Russians find hilarious. I mean, sure it’s plenty bad and all that, PRISM, XKeyScore, show trials, surveillance, threats to what’s left of journalism, sure, I get all that, I’m properly concerned. None of that stops it from being hilarious.</p>
<p></p>
<p>Few geopolitical situations can ever give the Russians a full, free, rib-busting belly laugh. This one sure does.</p>
<p></p>
<p>If Snowden had gotten things his own way, he’d be writing earnest op-ed editorials in Hong Kong now, in English, while dining on Kung Pao Chicken. It’s some darkly modern act of crooked fate that has directed Edward Snowden to Moscow, arriving there as the NSA’s Solzhenitsyn, the up-tempo, digital version of a conscience-driven dissident defector.</p>
<p></p>
<p>But Snowden sure is a dissident defector, and boy is he ever. Americans don’t even know how to think about characters like Snowden — the American Great and the Good are blundering around on the public stage like blacked-out drunks, blithering self-contradictory rubbish. It’s all “gosh he’s such a liar” and “give us back our sinister felon,” all while trying to swat down the jets of South American presidents.</p>
<p></p>
<p>These thumb-fingered acts of totalitarian comedy are entirely familiar to anybody who has read Russian literature. The pigs in Orwell’s “Animal Farm” have more suavity than the US government is demonstrating now. Their credibility is below zero.</p>
<p></p>
<p>The Russians, by contrast, know all about dissidents like Snowden. The Russians have always had lots of Snowdens, heaps. They know that Snowden is one of these high-minded, conscience-stricken, act-on-principle characters who is a total pain in the ass.</p>
<p></p>
<p>Modern Russia is run entirely by spies. It’s class rule by the “siloviki,” it’s Putin’s “managed democracy.” That’s the end game for civil society when elections mean little or nothing, and intelligence services own the media, and also the oil. And that’s groovy, sure, it’s working out for them.</p>
<p></p>
<p>When you’re a professional spy hierarch, there are few things more annoying than these conscience-stricken Winston Smith characters, moodily scribbling in their notebooks, all about how there might be hope found in the proles somehow. They’re a drag.</p>
<p></p>
<p>See, dissidence is like Andrei Sakharov. Such a useful guy, modest, soft-spoken, brainy, built you a hydrogen bomb. This eerie device straight from hell even works, so it’s all good. Then all of a sudden he’s like: you know what? The noble science of physics shouldn’t harm mankind!</p>
<p></p>
<p>What kind of self-indulgent, fatuous gesture is that? Look here, Dr Labcoat: why was the public’s money given to you, if not to “harm mankind”? If physics was harmless, you wouldn’t have a damn salary!</p>
<p></p>
<p>That’s what life feels like for the NSA right now. That is the shoe Snowden laced on their foot. If you’re NSA, as so many thousands are, you’ve known from the get-go that the planet’s wires and cables are a weapon of mass surveillance. Because that is their inherent purpose! You can’t get all conflicted, and start whining that Internet users are citizens of some place or other! That is not the point at all!</p>
<p></p>
<p>Citizens and rights have nothing to do with elite, covert technologies! The targets of surveillance are oblivious dorks, they’re not even newbies! Even US Senators are decorative objects for the NSA. An American Senator knows as much about PRISM and XKeyScore as a troll-doll on the dashboard knows about internal combustion.</p>
<p></p>
<p>So, yes, the wry and mordant humor here has not escaped me. But let’s change perspective a bit. Yes, some time has passed, and the smoke of 2010 has lifted from the scene. The cypherpunk blast shack was blown to smithereens for good and all.</p>
<p></p>
<p>It’s now clear that the NSA has created its own dissidents. The closer they get to the actual living fully functional NSA, the bigger, and hairier, and more consequential these dissidents are.</p>
<p></p>
<p>First let’s consider Bradley Manning, who is not at all close to the NSA. Bradley was a bored and upset minor military technician who burned a zillion US documents onto a DVD, and labeled that “Lady Gaga.”</p>
<p></p>
<p>The authorities finally got around to convicting Bradley this week, of some randomized set of largely irrelevant charges. But the damage there is already done; some to Bradley himself, but mostly grave, lasting damage to the authorities. By maltreating Bradley as their Guantanamo voodoo creature, their mystic hacker terror beast from AlQaedaville, Oklahoma, they made Bradley Manning fifty feet high.</p>
<p></p>
<p>At least they didn’t manage to kill him. Bradley’s visibly still on his feet, and was not so maddened by the torment of his solitary confinement that he’s reduced to paste. So he’s going to jail as an anti-war martyr, but time will pass. Someday, some new entity, someone in power who’s not directly embarrassed by Cablegate, can pardon him.</p>
<p></p>
<p>Some future Administration can amnesty him, once they get around to admitting that Bradley’s War on Terror is history. The War on Terror has failed as conclusively as Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations failed. There’s terror all over the sands now, terror from Mali to Xinjiang, and a billion tender-hearted Bradleys couldn’t stop that bleeding, no matter how much they leak.</p>
<p></p>
<p>Thanks to the modern miracle of fracking, though, the mayhem in the oil patch means a lot less to K Street. Someday, Bradley Manning will be as forgotten to them as Monica Lewinsky is. Then they’ll yield to the hornet-like, persistent buzz of the leftie peaceniks, and let Bradley go. He’s not dangerous. Bradley Manning will never do anything of similar consequence again. He’s not a power player. He’s a prisoner of conscience.</p>
<p></p>
<p>However, unlike poor Monica Lewinsky, Bradley Manning will never lack for passionate adherents who admire him and love him. Before Bradley went into his ugly maelstrom, he didn’t have that. Nowadays, he does. Maybe it’s worth it.</p>
<p></p>
<p>Then there’s Julian Assange. Yeah, him, the silver-haired devil, the Mycroft Holmes of the Ecuadorian Embassy. Bradley Manning’s not at all NSA material, he’s just a leaky clerk with a thumb-drive. But Julian’s quite a lot closer to the NSA — because he’s a career cypherpunk.</p>
<p></p>
<p>If you’re a typical NSA geek, and you stare in all due horror at Julian, it’s impossible not to recognize him as one of your own breed. He’s got the math fixation, the stilted speech, the thousand-yard-stare, and even the private idiolect that somehow allows NSA guys to make up their own vocabulary whenever addressing Congress (who don’t matter) and haranguing black-hat hacker security conventions (who obviously do).</p>
<p></p>
<p>Julian has turned out to be a Tim Leary at the NSA’s psychiatric convention. He’s a lasting embarrassment who also spiked their Kool-Aid. Crushing Julian, cutting his funding, that stuff didn’t help one bit. He’s still got a roof and a keyboard. That’s all he ever seems to need.</p>
<p></p>
<p>There’s nothing quite like a besieged embassy from which to mock the empty machinations of the vengeful yet hapless State Department. House arrest has also helped Julian with this obscure struggle he has, not to fling himself headlong onto Swedish feminists. The ruthless confinement has calmed him; it’s helped him to focus. He’s grown and matured through ardent political struggle.</p>
<p></p>
<p>Julian Assange is still a cranky extremist with a wacky digital ideology, but he doesn’t have to talk raw craziness any more, because the authorities are busy doing that for him. They can’t begin to discuss PRISM and XKeyScore without admitting that their alleged democratic process is a neon façade from LaLaLand. Instead, they’re forced to wander into a dizzying area of discourse where Julian staked out all the high points ten years ago.</p>
<p></p>
<p>More astonishing yet: this guy Assange, and his tiny corps of hacker myrmidons, actually managed to keep Edward Snowden out of US custody. Not only did Assange find an effective bolthole for himself, he also faked one up on the fly for this younger guy.</p>
<p></p>
<p>Assange liberated Snowden, who really is NSA, or rather a civilian outsourced contractor for the NSA, like there’s any practical difference.</p>
<p></p>
<p>It’s incredible to me that, among the eight zillion civil society groups on the planet that hate and fear spooks and police spies, not one of them could offer Snowden one shred of practical help, except for Wikileaks. This valiant service came from Julian Assange, a dude who can’t even pack his own suitcase without having a fit.</p>
<p></p>
<p>I wouldn’t ever have picked Assange as a travel agent, but then just look at the fellow-travellers — the solemn signatories of the recent “International Principles on the Application of Human Rights to Communications Surveillance.” I’ll toss a few in as an ideological bloc here, just to memorialize their high-minded indignation.</p>
<p></p>
<h2>SIGNATORIES</h2>
<blockquote>7iber (Amman, Jordan), Access (International), Africa Platform for Social Protection – APSP (Africa), AGEIA Densi (Argentina), Agentura.ru (Russia), Aktion Freiheit statt Angst (Germany), All India Peoples Science Network (India), Alternatif Bilişim Derneği (Alternatif Bilişim) – Turkey (Turkey), Alternative Law Forum (India), Article 19 (International), ASL19 (Canada/Iran), Asociación Civil por la Igualdad y la Justicia – ACIJ (Argentina), Asociación de Internautas Spain (Spain), Asociación Paraguaya De Derecho Informático Y Tecnológico – APADIT (Paraguay), Asociación por los Derechos Civiles – ADC (Argentina), Aspiration (United States), Associação Brasileira de Centros de inclusão Digital – ABCID (Brasil), Associació Pangea Coordinadora Comunicació per a la Cooperació (Spain), Association for Progressive Communications – APC (International), Association for Technology and Internet – APTI (Romania), Association of Community Internet Center – APWKomitel (Indonesia), Australia Privacy Foundation – APF (Australia), Bahrain Center for Human Rights (Bahrain), Bangladesh NGOs Network for Radio and Communication – BNNRC (Bangladesh), Big Brother Watch (United Kingdom), Bits of Freedom (Netherlands), Bolo Bhi (Pakistan), Brasilian Institute for Consumer Defense – IDEC, (Brasil), British Columbia Civil Liberties Association – BCCLA (Canada) Bytes for All (Pakistan)…</blockquote>
<blockquote></blockquote>
<p>Just look at them all, and that’s just the A’s and B’s… Obviously, a planetary host of actively concerned and politically connected people. Among this buzzing horde of eager online activists from a swarm of nations, what did any of them actually do for Snowden? Nothing.</p>
<p></p>
<p>Before Snowden showed up from a red-eye flight from Hawaii, did they have the least idea what was actually going on with the hardware of their beloved Internet? Not a clue. They’ve been living in a pitiful dream world where their imaginary rule of law applies to an electronic frontier — a frontier being, by definition, a place that never had any laws.</p>
<p></p>
<p>The civil lib contingent here looks, if anything, even stupider than the US Senate Intelligence Oversight contingent — who have at least been paying lavishly to fund the NSA, and to invent a pet surveillance court for it, with secret laws. That silly Potemkin mechanism — it’s like a cardboard steering wheel in the cockpit of a Predator drone.</p>
<p></p>
<p>While Julian Assange, to do him credit, has the street smarts to behave as if he’s in a situation of feral realpolitik. Because he is. And how.</p>
<p></p>
<p>However, Assange now knows that. He’s a hardened veteran of it. And he’s gonna stay imperiled for the immediate future, because the upshot of this is pretty easy to see.</p>
<p></p>
<p>The inconvenient truth about the NSA is lying there on a table in the Ecuadorian Embassy, as stark as a poisoned crow. But it’ll join our planet’s many other inconvenient truths.</p>
<p></p>
<p>Snowden told the truth to the public — but then again, so did Solzhenitsyn, and even Al Gore lets on sometimes. The truth doesn’t do the trick for anybody, the truth is just a complicating factor. The present geopolitical situation is absolutely cluttered with amazing lies that didn’t work out for their owners.</p>
<p></p>
<p>The Iraqi weapons of mass destruction never existed. Climate change does exist, and could drown Wall Street any day now. The abject state of global finance is obvious, yet it makes no difference to the ongoing depredations. Drones are stark assassination machines, and they don’t stay classified. Anyone could go on.</p>
<p></p>
<p>And, yeah, by the way, Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, Google et al, they are all the blood brothers of Huawei in China — because they are intelligence assets posing as commercial operations. They are surveillance marketers. They give you free stuff in order to spy on you and pass that info along the value chain. Personal computers can have users, but social media has livestock.</p>
<p></p>
<p>Even the NSA is humiliated by the billowing clouds of ongoing pretense. Why pick on the NSA, anyway? They’re quiet professionals, well-trained, well-educated, they’re discreet. NSA guys don’t even know what the guy in the next NSA office is doing.</p>
<p></p>
<p>So, who made the NSA the scaly Godzilla, besides one loose civilian contractor who ran off to Hong Kong? What about the National Reconnaissance Office? The NRO never gets outed for their gorgon-stare cameras that can pick out the font on any license plate, anywhere from pole to pole.</p>
<p></p>
<p>What about all the other national cyberwar players, like the Chinese units, methodically spearphishing every Microsoft vuln on the planet? What about those truly ferocious coders who wrote Stuxnet, burned up Iranian atomic factories with raw malware, and who have never been glimpsed since? They’re a hundred times scarier than the kindly and gentlemanly NSA.</p>
<p></p>
<p>But can the NSA speak up for themselves, by leveling with the stakeholders about what really goes on, in the NSA’s actual, lived experience? Nope. Not even. Before Snowden, their mouths were duct-taped; after Snowden, it’ll be duct-tape, plus handcuffs and electronic ankle bracelets.</p>
<p></p>
<p>So, the truth is out there, but nobody’s gonna clean up all that falsehood. There is no visible way to make a clean break with the gigantic, ongoing institutional deceits. There’s no mechanism by which any such honesty could be imposed. It’s like reforming polygamy in the Ottoman Empire.</p>
<p></p>
<p>Even if the proles rise up in a wave, busily Twittering away, you’re gonna get an Arab Spring, followed by a regretful military coup once people figure out that networks just aren’t governments.</p>
<p></p>
<p>Even the electronic civil lib contingent is lying to themselves. They’re sore and indignant now, mostly because they weren’t consulted — but if the NSA released PRISM as a 99-cent Google Android app, they’d be all over it. Because they are electronic first, and civil as a very distant second.</p>
<p></p>
<p>They’d be utterly thrilled to have the NSA’s vast technical power at their own command. They’d never piously set that technical capacity aside, just because of some elderly declaration of universal human rights from 1947. If the NSA released their heaps of prying spycode as open-source code, Silicon Valley would be all over that, instantly. They’d put a kid-friendly graphic front-end on it. They’d port it right into the cloud.</p>
<p></p>
<p>Computers were invented as crypto-ware and spy-ware and control-ware. That’s what Alan Turing was all about. That’s where computing came from, that’s the scene’s original sin, and also its poisoned apple.</p>
<p></p>
<p>There’s not a coherent force on Earth that wants to cork up that bottle. They all just want another slug out of that bottle — and they’d rather like to paste their own personal, prestige label onto the bottle’s glass. You know, like your own attractive face, pasted on the humming planetary big iron of Facebook.</p>
<p></p>
<p>Digital, globalized societies — where capital and information moves, and where labor and human flesh doesn’t move — they behave like this. That is what we are witnessing and experiencing. It’s weird because we are weird. We’re half actual and half digital now. We’re like the squirming brood of a tiger mated to a shark.</p>
<p></p>
<p>You can tell that Manning, Assange and Snowden are all the same kind of irritant, because, somehow, amazingly, the planet’s response is to physically squish them. They’re all online big-time, and their digital shadow is huge, so the response is just to squeeze their mortal human bodies, literally, legally, extra-legally, by whatever means becomes available.</p>
<p></p>
<p>It’s a wrestling match of virtuality and actuality, an irruption of the physical into the digital. It’s all about Bradley shivering naked in his solitary cage, and Julian diligently typing in his book-lined closet at the embassy, and Ed bagging out behind the plastic seating of some airport, in a jetlag fit of black globalization that went on for a solid month.</p>
<p></p>
<p>And, those tiny, confined, somehow united spaces are the moral high ground. That’s where it is right now, that’s what it looks like these days.</p>
<p></p>
<p>You can see that in the recent epic photo of Richard Stallman — the Saint Francis of Free Software, the kind of raw crank who preaches to birds and wanders the planet shoeless – shoulder-to-shoulder with an unshaven Assange, sporting his manly work shirt. The two of them, jointly holding up a little propaganda pic of Edward Snowden.</p>
<p></p>
<p>They have the beatific look of righteousness rewarded. Che Guevara in his starred beret had more self-doubt than these guys. They are thrilled with themselves.</p>
<p></p>
<p>People, you couldn’t trust any of these three guys to go down to the corner grocery for a pack of cigarettes. Stallman would bring you tiny peat-pots of baby tobacco plants, then tell you to grow your own. Assange would buy the cigarettes, but smoke them all himself while coding up something unworkable. And Ed would set fire to himself, to prove to an innocent mankind that tobacco is a monstrous and cancerous evil that must be exposed at all costs.</p>
<p></p>
<p>And yet the three of them together, they look just amazing. They are fantastic figures, like the promise of otherworldly aid from a superhero comic. They are visibly stronger than they’ve ever been before. They have the initiative in a world afflicted with comprehensive helplessness.</p>
<p></p>
<p>And there’s more coming. Lots, lots more.</p>
<p></p>
<p>By Bruce Sterling</p>
<p>Originally posted August 2nd, 2013 at <a href="https://medium.com/geek-empire-1/a1ebd2b4a0e5" target="_blank">Medium.com</a></p>
<p>- 2010 Blast Shack <a href="https://medium.com/geek-empire-1/f745f5fbeb1c" target="_blank">HERE</a></p>
</div>Local Lawmaking: A Call for a Community Rights Movementtag:activism101.ning.com,2013-07-09:3143100:BlogPost:335262013-07-09T20:56:14.000ZCromaghttp://activism101.ning.com/profile/Cromag
<p>Mon, 7/1/2013 - by Thomas Linzey</p>
<p><a href="http://www.occupy.com/sites/default/files/styles/slide_narrow/public/field/image/picture-5.png?itok=PVYYAcy7" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="http://www.occupy.com/sites/default/files/styles/slide_narrow/public/field/image/picture-5.png?itok=PVYYAcy7&width=347" width="347"></img></a></p>
<p>A little over 10 years ago, a small, rural township in central Pennsylvania <a href="http://celdf.org/-1-49">banned corporate factory hog farms</a> from their community. A couple of years later, several New Hampshire and Maine towns banned Nestle and other corporations from extracting water for…</p>
<p>Mon, 7/1/2013 - by Thomas Linzey</p>
<p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.occupy.com/sites/default/files/styles/slide_narrow/public/field/image/picture-5.png?itok=PVYYAcy7"><img class="align-right" src="http://www.occupy.com/sites/default/files/styles/slide_narrow/public/field/image/picture-5.png?itok=PVYYAcy7&width=347" width="347"/></a></p>
<p>A little over 10 years ago, a small, rural township in central Pennsylvania <a href="http://celdf.org/-1-49">banned corporate factory hog farms</a> from their community. A couple of years later, several New Hampshire and Maine towns banned Nestle and other corporations from extracting water for bottling operations. In November 2010, the City of Pittsburgh <a href="http://celdf.org/-1-95">adopted a law</a> which prohibited fracking for shale gas within its boundaries. And just two months ago, at the start of May, Mora County, New Mexico, <a href="http://celdf.org/-1-91">banned all drilling</a> for oil and gas within the county.</p>
<p>While on their face these issues may appear to be different – ranging from corporate agribusiness to energy extraction – the communities on the receiving end of things all have at least one thing in common: they’ve given up hope that their state or federal government will act to protect them.</p>
<p>And so, they’ve stopped waiting – for new laws that will protect them, or for newly elected officials to act differently than ones who have been in office for decades. They’ve stopped waiting because they don’t believe that the state or federal government is their own anymore, or that those governments will ever act against the economic forces that put them there.</p>
<p>And there’s something else these communities have in common.</p>
<p>When they began to confront the corporations that were affecting them, both corporate and governmental officials told them that they couldn’t do anything – that they were helpless to protect their communities from being fracked, drilled, drained and destroyed.</p>
<p>Those officials informed them that only the state and federal government had the right to adopt laws governing those industries, and that, if a community did pass a law, that they would be sued for violating the corporation’s “constitutional rights.” Further, they explained that the community could then be held liable not just for the cost of the corporation’s lawyers, but also for potential future corporate profits lost as a result of the law’s adoption.</p>
<p>Historically, in the face of such financial threats, cities and towns across the country have simply thrown in the towel, abandoning any hope of elevating their own vision for their community’s future over the interests of those corporations. Thus, local laws are thrown into the shredder even before they emerge from governmental committees.</p>
<p>But in early 2000, something different began to happen. Communities began to stop backing down – perhaps because real change only occurs when there’s nothing left to lose. It was then that local elected officials and community leaders (mostly in Pennsylvania) began to grapple with the grim reality that our governments have not only failed to protect our rights, but now assist corporations to violate them.</p>
<p>Many have now concluded that our legislatures, environmental agencies and courts have all been privatized – and are now used by a corporate minority as just one more means to get oil and gas out of the ground, to run family farmers out of business, and to take everything of value that our communities have.</p>
<p><strong>Why Liberals and Progressives Have Run Out of Gas</strong></p>
<p>Cries about the corporatization of government, of course, are not new. Liberals and progressives have been screaming about it for years. They’ve never seemed, however, to invent a new kind of activism that isn’t completely dependent upon the very institutions and systems that have themselves been corporatized, to provide some kind of relief. Thus, liberal and progressive activism has been about asking regulators, politicians and judges to somehow rule against the very forces that live within those institutions.</p>
<p>Their tired activism remains one of pressure politics – that if you can mobilize enough people at the right time, those people can pressure the real decision makers to make different decisions.</p>
<p>But as communities have begun to move on their own, they’ve begun to ask some really tough questions of progressives, such as: if we really have government of, by, and for a small corporate minority, then does sending letters, filing lawsuits, or trying to elect the right people make any kind of difference at all?</p>
<p>It is here that these communities have departed from exhausted liberal beliefs – namely, the belief that we live in a democracy, and all we have to do is find a way to activate it so that it works in our favor. Instead, these communities – and the brave elected officials and community leaders who are now walking hand-in-hand with them – have seen this myth for what it is, and have begun to plow an entirely new path.</p>
<p>They’re seeking an activism that isn’t reliant upon the same institutions that created this mess. An activism which understands that the status quo powers will attempt to wield “the people’s” own institutions – all branches and agencies of government – to stop any movement that shows potential to replace the existing, unsustainable mechanisms of power with ones that are economically and environmentally sustainable.</p>
<p>In short, they’re seeking democracy, with the understanding that without the emergence of a movement which seizes authority to make decisions about food, water, and energy, we will continue to live in a place where those decisions are made by interests which benefit from continuing the destructive practices.</p>
<p><strong>Pioneering a New, Independent Activism from the Ground Up</strong></p>
<p>Envisioning what that “new” activism looks like has taken a lot of thinking, courage and planning. It has forced communities to examine how people who came before them – like Abolitionist Ted Weld and Suffragette Alice Paul – actually built movements of people in the face of a system of law that didn’t recognize those people as people.</p>
<p>And how they forced the system to enforce its own inherent contradictions in a way that made its downfall inevitable.</p>
<p>In our current corporate state, we must follow a similar path – implementing a form of political and organizing jujitsu that enables us to cut through the corporate culture in which we live, slicing our way through layers of law concocted for no other reason than to make us bystanders as our communities are slowly and inexorably flattened.</p>
<p>Over 150 communities in eight states have begun to make that road by walking it – applying the hard-earned lessons of the Abolitionists and the Suffragists and setting their sights not just on gaining a place at the table, but on building a new one.</p>
<p>This means changing the structure of how the system works, rather than just trying to get the system to act in their favor. It means supplanting corporate minorities with community majorities.</p>
<p>And although the threats these communities face may seem different on the surface, they are enacting local laws that are eerily similar. For in trying to stop these different threats, communities are running headfirst into the very same structure of law which says that they can’t.</p>
<p>Thus these laws not only prohibit fracking, drilling, corporate water extraction, sludging, or factory farms – they also establish local bills of rights – which recognize the rights of residents to clean air, clean water, a sustainable energy future, sustainable energy use, and sustainable agriculture. In banning fracking, drilling and other activities, these laws are necessarily prohibiting those activities which would violate the rights of residents.</p>
<p>From there, these laws openly and frontally challenge corporate and governmental powers that conflict with the authority of the community to recognize those rights and create those prohibitions – by refusing to recognize the validity of state and federal permits that would violate the local laws, and <a href="http://celdf.org/-1-86">openly eliminating</a> corporate “rights” that interfere with these laws.</p>
<p>In essence, these communities have come to recognize that environmental and economic sustainability cannot be attained without fundamental changes regarding who the structure of law recognizes as the legal authority to make the rules within those communities. Attaining that structural change means openly defying the laws that got us here in the first place.</p>
<p>These communities have recognized that their own visions of governance are meaningless until they first get their own governments, and the corporations that run them, off their backs.</p>
<p>They’ve even come up with a name for their brand of activism – collective, non-violent civil disobedience through municipal lawmaking. The shorthand is, they’re sitting down at the lunch counter together and they aren’t budging.</p>
<p>Of different political stripes and backgrounds, the people seizing their own municipalities to make these laws have one overriding belief – that they should be the ones that decide the future of their own communities. That they have a fundamental right to govern themselves. That they have a right to local self-government.</p>
<p><strong>The Right to Local Self-Government</strong></p>
<p>It is that right to local self-government – a right that we’re told that we already have, but which people discover is not there when they need it most – that serves as the guide-star of this slowly gathering movement.</p>
<p>To stop them, corporate and governmental officials will be forced to slay their own sacred cow – the “rule of law” – which they have used since time immemorial as their own version of “God said so.” Thus, governmental and corporate officials will be forced to bring the power of the system’s own courts, legislatures, and regulators crashing down on them, in the face of clear and overwhelming evidence that our food and water systems, our energy systems, and our global climate are themselves crashing as a result of policies created by those very same institutions.</p>
<p>In short, this organizing must reveal our governments and corporations for everything that they say that they aren’t. By building a sophisticated trap – that makes their power and actions their own undoing (much like the slaveowners of the 1840’s and anti-suffrage activists of the 1890’s) – we just might be able to pull ourselves out of this mess before we finally go over the cliff.</p>
<p>It is the communities that have gone first – like Wells Township in Pennsylvania, Barnstead in New Hampshire, and Mora County, New Mexico – who are now calling on other communities across the country to begin the long, hard road toward creating government that protects the rights of everyone, not just the few.</p>
<p>These communities’ new rule of law – made in the name of environmental and economic sanity – believes that people and nature have rights, not corporations; that new civil, political, and environmental rights must be recognized; and that we must stop (immediately) those corporate acts which harm us.</p>
<p>Now they are joining with other communities in Pennsylvania, Washington State, New Hampshire, New Mexico, and Ohio to form <a href="http://celdf.org/-1-89">Community Rights Networks</a> to begin to force statutory and constitutional changes that protect the right to local self-government. These burgeoning community networks are beginning to speak in a new, forceful language – one focused on doing whatever is necessary to protect rights and self-governance.</p>
<p>After all, similar language was driven over two hundred years ago into almost all of our state constitutions, like Pennsylvania’s, which declares:</p>
<blockquote><p>"All power is inherent in the people, and all free governments are founded on their authority and instituted for their peace, safety, and happiness. For the advancement of these ends they have at all times an inalienable and indefeasible right to alter, reform, or abolish their government in such manner as they may think proper."</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It is time to make these words real. It is time to join these pioneering communities to drive thousands of local laws that build a people’s movement with the capacity to drive a right to local self-government into our state and federal constitutions.</p>
<p>That’s the dream. And for those who for the past 10 years have said that the dream is impossible; that these communities ask for too much, too soon; and that we must play within the existing system of law and culture as a child within a sandlot – one simple refrain answers them all: If not us, who? If not now, when?</p>
<p><em>Thomas Linzey is Executive Director and Co-Founder of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), which provides free legal services to community-based conservation groups and municipal governments. The organization can be reached at <a href="mailto:info@celdf.org">info@celdf.org</a> or <a href="http://www.celdf.org">www.celdf.org</a>.</em></p>The Political Braintag:activism101.ning.com,2013-07-07:3143100:BlogPost:333772013-07-07T19:00:00.000ZCromaghttp://activism101.ning.com/profile/Cromag152
A recent brain-imaging study shows that our political predilections are a product of unconscious confirmation bias<br />
<br />
By Michael Shermer<br />
<br />
The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion ... draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises ... in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may…
A recent brain-imaging study shows that our political predilections are a product of unconscious confirmation bias<br />
<br />
By Michael Shermer<br />
<br />
The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion ... draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises ... in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate. --Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, 1620<br />
<br />
Pace Will Rogers, I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a libertarian. As a fiscal conservative and social liberal, I have found at least something to like about each Republican or Democrat I have met. I have close friends in both camps, in which I have observed the following: no matter the issue under discussion, both sides are equally convinced that the evidence overwhelmingly supports their position.<br />
<br />
This surety is called the confirmation bias, whereby we seek and find confirmatory evidence in support of already existing beliefs and ignore or reinterpret disconfirmatory evidence. Now a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study shows where in the brain the confirmation bias arises and how it is unconscious and driven by emotions. Psychologist Drew Westen led the study, conducted at Emory University, and the team presented the results at the 2006 annual conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.<br />
<br />
During the run-up to the 2004 presidential election, while undergoing an fMRI bran scan, 30 men--half self-described as "strong" Republicans and half as "strong" Democrats--were tasked with assessing statements by both George W. Bush and John Kerry in which the candidates clearly contradicted themselves. Not surprisingly, in their assessments Republican subjects were as critical of Kerry as Democratic subjects were of Bush, yet both let their own candidate off the hook.<br />
<br />
The neuroimaging results, however, revealed that the part of the brain most associated with reasoning--the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex--was quiescent. Most active were the orbital frontal cortex, which is involved in the processing of emotions; the anterior cingulate, which is associated with conflict resolution; the posterior cingulate, which is concerned with making judgments about moral accountability; and--once subjects had arrived at a conclusion that made them emotionally comfortable--the ventral striatum, which is related to reward and pleasure.<br />
<br />
Politicians need a peer-review system.<br />
"We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning," Westen is quoted as saying in an Emory University press release. "What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts." Interestingly, neural circuits engaged in rewarding selective behaviors were activated. "Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones," Westen said.<br />
<br />
The implications of the findings reach far beyond politics. A jury assessing evidence against a defendant, a CEO evaluating information about a company or a scientist weighing data in favor of a theory will undergo the same cognitive process. What can we do about it?<br />
<br />
In science we have built-in self-correcting machinery. Strict double-blind controls are required in experiments, in which neither the subjects nor the experimenters know the experimental conditions during the data-collection phase. Results are vetted at professional conferences and in peer-reviewed journals. Research must be replicated in other laboratories unaffiliated with the original researcher. Disconfirmatory evidence, as well as contradictory interpretations of the data, must be included in the paper. Colleagues are rewarded for being skeptical. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.<br />
<br />
We need similar controls for the confirmation bias in the arenas of law, business and politics. Judges and lawyers should call one another on the practice of mining data selectively to bolster an argument and warn juries about the confirmation bias. CEOs should assess critically the enthusiastic recommendations of their VPs and demand to see contradictory evidence and alternative evaluations of the same plan. Politicians need a stronger peer-review system that goes beyond the churlish opprobrium of the campaign trail, and I would love to see a political debate in which the candidates were required to make the opposite case.<br />
<br />
Skepticism is the antidote for the confirmation bias.<br />
<br />
First printed in Scientific American on June 26th,2006The Transnational Capitalist Class and the Discourse of Globalizationtag:activism101.ning.com,2013-07-05:3143100:BlogPost:333722013-07-05T21:30:00.000ZCromaghttp://activism101.ning.com/profile/Cromag
<h2><b>By Leslie Sklair</b></h2>
<div><b><i>Cambridge Review of International Affairs</i></b><br></br> <b>2000</b><br></br></div>
<p align="justify"><b>1. Introduction</b></p>
<p align="justify">Remarkably for a sub-discipline in the social sciences, theory and research on globalization appears to have reached a mature phase, in terms of volume of publications if not their quality, in a relatively short period of time. Most attempts to survey the field, despite their differences, agree that…</p>
<h2><b>By Leslie Sklair</b></h2>
<div><b><i>Cambridge Review of International Affairs</i></b><br/> <b>2000</b><br/></div>
<p align="justify"><b>1. Introduction</b></p>
<p align="justify">Remarkably for a sub-discipline in the social sciences, theory and research on globalization appears to have reached a mature phase, in terms of volume of publications if not their quality, in a relatively short period of time. Most attempts to survey the field, despite their differences, agree that globalization represents a serious challenge to the state-centrist assumptions of most previous social science. The apparently ‘natural' quality of societies bounded by their nation-states plus the difficulty of generating and working with data that cross national boundaries plus the lack of specificity in most theories of the global, all conspire to shore up the crumbling defences of state-centrist social theory against the onslaught of globalization in its several versions. Thus, just as the idea of globalization is becoming firmly established, the sceptics are announcing the limits and, in some extreme cases, the myth of globalization. Globalization, in the words of these scholars and populists alike, is nothing but globaloney.</p>
<p align="justify">I have a good deal of sympathy with the sceptics. What I label global system theory, paradoxically, is an attempt to limit drastically the theoretical scope of the concept of globalization and its concrete application in the sphere of empirical research. Globalization is, nevertheless, in my view, a world-historic phenomenon and one that has to be confronted in theory and research if we are to have any grasp of the contemporary world. This paper aims to outline global system theory and to illustrate its central themes through an examination of the discourse of globalization as expressed by the class that drives it, the transnational capitalist class.</p>
<p align="justify">It is important at the outset to <span style="text-decoration: underline;">distinguish between three distinct but often confused conceptions of globalization</span>. The first is the international or state-centrist conception of globalization where internationalization and globalization are used interchangeably. This usage signals the fact that the basic units of analysis are still nation-states and the pre-existing even if changing system of nation-states. This is the position of most of those who are in globalization denial. <strong>The second is the transnational conception of globalization, where the basic units of analysis are transnational practices, forces and institutions. In this conception, states (or, more accurately, state agents and agencies) are just one among several factors to be taken into account and, in some theories of globalization, no longer the most important</strong>. <span style="text-decoration: underline;">The third is the globalist conception of globalization, in which the state is actually said to be in the process of disappearing</span>. It is obviously important that all those who write about globalization are clear about the sense in which they use the term, but not all are, with resultant confusions. In order to make my own position clear, <span style="text-decoration: underline;">I should note that I use the terms 'transnational' and 'globalizing' interchangeably, in order to signal that the state' or rather, some state actors and agencies' do have a part to play in the globalization process, however diminished relative to their previous roles. This highlights the distinction between 'globalizing' and 'globalist' approaches</span>.</p>
<p align="justify"><span style="text-decoration: underline;">The concept of globalization propounded here rejects both state-centrism (realism) and globalism (the end of the state)</span>. The transnational conception of globalization postulates the existence of a global system. Its basic units of analysis are transnational practices (TNP), practices that cross-state boundaries but do not originate with state agencies or actors. Analytically, TNPs operate in three spheres, the economic, the political, and the cultural-ideological. The whole is the global system. While the global system is not synonymous with global capitalism, what <span style="text-decoration: underline;">the theory sets out to demonstrate is that the dominant forces of global capitalism are the dominant forces in the contemporary global system.</span> The building blocks of the theory are the transnational corporation, the characteristic institutional form of economic transnational practices, the transnational capitalist class in the political sphere and in the culture-ideology sphere, the culture-ideology of consumerism. The literatures on TNCs and consumerism are enormous. <span style="text-decoration: underline;">Here, the focus is on the transnational capitalist class and how it has constructed a discourse of globalization to further its interests.</span></p>
<p align="justify"><b>II. The Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC)</b></p>
<p align="justify">The transnational capitalist class can be analytically divided into four main fractions.</p>
<p align="justify">(i) owners and controllers of TNCs and their local affiliates;</p>
<p align="justify">(ii) globalizing bureaucrats and politicians;</p>
<p align="justify">(iii) globalizing professionals;</p>
<p align="justify">(iv) consumerist elites (merchants and media).</p>
<p align="justify">To some extent the exact disposition of these four fractions and the people and institutions from which they derive their power in the system can differ over time and locality. To study globalization and the state, for example, it makes most sense to couple globalizing bureaucrats and politicians, while for other issues other alliances may be more appropriate. It is also important to note, of course, that the TCC and each of its fractions are not always entirely united on every issue.</p>
<p align="justify">Nevertheless, together, leading personnel in these groups constitute a global power elite, dominant class or inner circle in the sense that these terms have been used to characterize the dominant class structures of specific countries. The transnational capitalist class is opposed not only by anti-capitalists who reject capitalism as a way of life and/or an economic system but also by capitalists who reject globalization. Some localized, domestically-oriented businesses can stand out against global corporations and prosper, but most cannot and perish. Influential business strategists and management theorists commonly argue that to survive, local business must globalize. Similarly, though most national and local politicians claim to represent the interests of the constituents on whose votes they depend, those who entirely reject globalization and espouse extreme nationalist ideologies are comparatively rare, despite the recent rash of civil wars in economically marginal parts of the world. And while there are anti-consumerist elements in most societies, there are few cases of a serious anti-consumerist party winning political power anywhere in the world.</p>
<p align="justify">The TCC is transnational (or globalizing) in the following respects.</p>
<p align="justify">(a) The economic interests of its members are increasingly globally linked rather than exclusively local and national in origin. As rentiers, their property and shares are becoming more globalized through the unprecedented mobility of capital that new technologies and new global political economy have created. As executives, their corporations are globalizing in terms of four criteria: foreign investment; world best practice and benchmarking; corporate citizenship; and global vision. The analysis of how the TCC has constructed a discourse of globalization below will focus on these criteria. As ideologues, their intellectual products serve the interests of globalizing rather than localizing capital, expressed in free market neo-liberal ideologies and the culture-ideology of consumerism. This follows directly from the shareholder-driven growth imperative that lies behind the globalization of the world economy and the increasing difficulty of enhancing shareholder value in purely domestic firms. While for many practical purposes the world is still organized in terms of discrete national economies, the TCC increasingly conceptualizes its interests in terms of markets, which may or may not coincide with a specific nation-state, and the global market, which clearly does not.</p>
<p align="justify">(b) The TCC seeks to exert economic control in the workplace, political control in domestic, international and global politics, and culture-ideology control in every-day life through specific forms of global competitive and consumerist rhetoric and practice. The focus of workplace control is the threat that jobs will be lost and, in the extreme, the economy will collapse unless workers are prepared to work longer and for less in order to meet foreign competition. A term first introduced around 1900 to describe how the capitalist class controls labour--the race to the bottom--has been rehabilitated by radical critics to characterize the effects of economic globalization. This is reflected in local electoral politics in most countries, where the major parties have few substantial strategic (even if many tactical) differences, and in the sphere of culture-ideology, where consumerism is rarely challenged within realistic politics. As we shall see below, this process is reinforced through the discourse of national and international competitiveness.</p>
<p align="justify">(c) Members of the TCC have outward-oriented global rather than inward-oriented local perspectives on most economic, political and culture-ideology issues. The growing TNC and international institutional emphasis on free trade and the shift from import substitution to export promotion strategies in most developing countries since the 1980s have been driven by members of the TCC working through government agencies, political parties, elite opinion organizations, and the media. Some credit for this apparent transformation in the way in which big business works around the world is attached to the tremendous growth in business education with a global focus, notably International MBAs, since the 1960s, particularly in the US and Europe, but increasingly all over the world.</p>
<p align="justify">(d) Members of the TCC tend to share similar life-styles, particularly patterns of higher education, and consumption of luxury goods and services. Integral to this process are exclusive clubs and restaurants, ultra-expensive resorts in all continents, private as opposed to mass forms of travel and entertainment and, ominously, increasing residential segregation of the very rich secured in gated communities by armed guards and electronic surveillance, from Los Angeles to Moscow, from Mexico City to Beijing, from Istanbul to Mumbai.</p>
<p align="justify">(e) Finally, members of the TCC seek to project images of themselves as citizens of the world as well as of their places and/or countries of birth. Leading exemplars of this phenomenon include Jacques Maisonrouge, born in France, who became in the 1960s the chief executive of IBM World Trade; Percy Barnevik, born in Sweden, who created the infrastructure and electronics conglomerate Asea Brown Boveri, often portrayed as spending most of his life in his corporate jet; Helmut Maucher, born in Germany, former CEO of Nestle's far-flung global empire; David Rockefeller, born in the USA, said to have been one of the most powerful men in the United States; the legendary Akio Morita, born in Japan, the founder of Sony and widely credited with having introduced global vision into Japan; and Rupert Murdoch, born in Australia, who took US nationality to pursue his global media interests.</p>
<p align="justify"><b>III. The Discourse of Capitalist Globalization: Competitiveness</b></p>
<p align="justify">One need not indulge in the fantasy of conspiracy theory to understand why politicians and professionals have been so engrossed with contentious ideas of the national interest and national competitiveness. Krugman's devastating critique, Competitiveness: a dangerous obsession' explains the latter (though not necessarily the former) with admirable clarity. The argument, briefly, is that only corporations and similar institutions can compete with one another and that the idea that nations can compete with one another is a 'dangerous obsession' that interferes with the economic efficiency of business. While Krugman's neo-liberal assumptions about the impossibility of industrial strategies can be challenged, the logic of his case on the incoherence of the idea of national competitiveness appears more convincing. This is central to the way in which politicians, bureaucrats and professionals in the service of the transnational capitalist class relate to the state.</p>
<p align="justify">A good illustration of these processes at work is provided by the political trajectories of five individuals who fit well into my category of globalizing politicians, what Jorge Dominguez terms 'technopols'. These five technopols are F.H. Cardoso, president of Brazil, A. Foxley in Chile, and D. Cavallo in Argentina (relative successes), P. Aspe in Mexico and Evelyn Matthei in Chile. They all take seriously ideas that are cosmopolitan and meet normal international professional standards, and they succeed by selling sound economic policy in their own countries. Technopols are technocrats with added characteristics: they are political leaders, they go beyond narrow specialisms, and they are active in the politics of remaking damaged social and political systems. Democratic technopols choose freer markets (in terms of global system theory this can be translated as 'support of globalizing business') over state intervention because it is what their professional training has taught them to do. Technopol support for free-markets also makes them more liable to favour democracy but this is the democracy of pluralist polyarchy and not any wider conception of representative democracy. In a statement redolent with meaning for those who would dare to oppose global capitalism, Dominguez argues: ‘only democratic political systems embody the compromises and commitments that may freely bind government and opposition to the same framework of a market economy'.</p>
<p align="justify">The careers of these five notables illustrate how technopols in Latin America and, I would argue, globalizing politicians all around the world, are made in five settings: elite schools, religious and secular faiths, policy-oriented teams, the world stage, and specific national contexts. The atin American five all studied either directly in the USA or were inspired by those who had (notably in the economics and political science departments at Chicago, MIT and Harvard). They made their moves when statist democrats (Alfonsin in Argentina, Sarney in Brazil, Allende in Chile, for example) failed, and when economic crisis facilitated acceptance of some version of the neo-liberal consensus. Technopols, thus, incorporate two transnational pools of ideas 'one favouring free markets, the other democracy. It is also important to note that technopols are not extreme neo-liberals out to kill off the state, but politicians who want to recraft the state from 'fat to fit', to encourage growth with a measure of equity. Above all, technopols understand that corporations and those who own and control them expect policy continuity to safeguard their investments. This means technopols need to develop a political and, increasingly, a globalizing agenda to establish a cosmopolitan vision to lock in their countries to free markets, international trade agreements and globalization, and to create political openings to bring all important social groups on side for 'national development in a competitive international marketplace'.</p>
<p align="justify">The significance of these examples, and they could be reinforced by many others from all over the world, is that they undermine the popular misconception that globalization is a Western imperialist plot. While there is no doubt that the global economy is still largely dominated by corporations domiciled in Western countries globalization has transformed the meaning of this fact. Crude dependency ideas of American corporations exploiting Latin America as instruments of the US state or British corporations exploiting Africa as instruments of the British state have given way to more nuanced theories of globalizing alliance capitalism and global shift to accommodate new technologies of production, financing and marketing.</p>
<p align="justify">Major corporations indulge these views for obvious reasons. Many major corporations interpret globalization in terms of being global locally. Corporations cope with the responsibilities of being local citizens globally by mobilizing national competitiveness on behalf of their mythical national interest in whatever part of the world the corporation happens to be doing business. The role of the globalizing politician is to ensure that all businesses, particularly the 'foreign' corporations who have traditionally felt themselves discriminated against (sometimes true, often the opposite of the truth), receive at least equal treatment and, where possible, privileges. These privileges, in the form of development grants, fiscal holidays, training subsidies, and other 'sweeteners', are routinely justified by the argument that attracting foreign investment will enhance the national interest. This can happen directly, with the addition of world class manufacturing facilities, and/or indirectly, with the introduction of new ideas, methods, and incentives for local supplier industries. The ability of corporations seeking such investment opportunities to show that they are world class and thus could enhance the industrial environment they seek to enter, is a political requirement for these privileges. Without this promise of increases in national prosperity, a corollary of global competitiveness, subsidies for 'foreign firms' would be much more difficult to sell to local populations who might see better uses for their taxes.</p>
<p align="justify">The insertion of the nation-state into the global capitalist system is facilitated by the transnational capitalist class through the discourse of national competitiveness. The TCC achieves this through facilitating alliances of globalizing politicians, globalizing professionals and the corporate sector. Globalizing politicians create the political conditions for diverting state support of various types (financial, fiscal, resources, infrastructure, ideological) towards the major corporations operating within state borders under the slogan of ‘national competitiveness'. Such support represents direct and indirect subsidies to the transnational capitalist class and, in the context of foreign direct investment, often involves state regulation in the interests of the major corporations. Politicians deliver these aids to industry and commerce through their campaigning and votes in support of capital-enhancing labour, trade and investment legislation. Parliamentary democracies based on geographical constituencies encourage this, resulting in 'pork-barrel politics' in the USA and its equivalents elsewhere. Globalizing politicians, therefore, need global benchmarks in a generic sense to demonstrate that they are internationally competitive. Their ‘national' corporations and, by extension, their 'nation', has to seek out world best practice in all aspects of business. Global capitalism succeeds by turning most spheres of social life into businesses, by making social institutions—such as schools, universities, prisons, hospitals, welfare systems' more business-like. Various forms of benchmarking are used in most large institutions to measure performance against actual competitors or an ultimate target, zero defects, for example. The term world best practice (WBP) is widely used as a convenient label for all measures of performance, achieved through various systems of benchmarking .</p>
<p align="justify">While globalizing politicians are responsible for creating the conditions under which WBP becomes the norm for evaluating the effectiveness of any social institution, they rarely become involved in its techniques. This is the responsibility of the globalizing professionals. The role of globalizing professionals is both technical and ideological. Their technical role is to create and operate benchmarking systems of various types; their ideological role is to sell these systems as the best way to measure competitiveness at all levels and, by implication, to sell competitiveness as the key to business (and national) success. It is, paradoxically, the way that national economic competitiveness has been raised to the pinnacle of public life that explains the empirical link between WBP, benchmarking and globalization.</p>
<p align="justify">WBP is bound to be a globalizing practice in the global capitalist system. It is quite conceivable that benchmarking could be restricted to small, localized communities of actors and institutions interested solely in providing a local service in terms of agreed criteria of efficiency. Examples of this can be found in the tourist industry, where several small competing firms offer almost identical services to unique, local attractions. They may systematically compare what they offer and upgrade (or possibly downgrade) their services to match the practices of more successful competitors. In a global economy, however, there are relentless pressures on small local businesses to become more global, either through predatory growth or, more typically, by allying themselves with major globalizing corporations. Therefore, to become world class it is not necessary to be big but it is necessary to compare yourself with what the big players in your business sector do, and to do what you do always better. Benchmarking is the measure through which all social institutions, including the state, can discover whether they are world class.</p>
<p align="justify">Benchmarking is normally defined as a system of continuous improvements derived from systematic comparisons with world best practice. The idea of continuous improvement was introduced by the New York University professor and soon-to-be management guru William Edwards Deming shortly after the end of the Second World War. This became the driving force behind the total quality management (TQM) movement which has had profound though uneven effects on big business all over the world. However, Japanese corporations working with state agencies first adopted these ideas, seeing in them the best way to rebuild their war-shattered economy. The Deming Prize for the best quality circles was established in Japan in 1951. These quality circles became a central mechanism for the spread and development of the new quality movement. By the 1990s their numbers exceeded 100,000 with about 10 million members throughout Japan. TQM, world best practice and benchmarking were given added impetus by the increase in global competition as protectionist walls have been breached all over the world and as rapidly-growing new companies, particularly in the high-tech sector, have threatened the market dominance of their older and, perhaps, less innovative rivals.</p>
<p align="justify">The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award was established in the USA in 1987, then the European Quality Award was introduced in 1991, followed by a veritable flood of quality initiatives covering almost all sectors of industry all over the world. These gave public recognition throughout business and beyond to the TQM movement that had swept through board rooms, office complexes and shop floors whenever an enterprise was faced with competition, particularly from 'foreign' companies, from the mid-1980s. An important aspect of these awards and quality standards and the movements they were part of was the centrality of the role of leadership, particularly the leadership of the most senior executives, in the quest for continuous improvement. Not since the robber barons in the 19th century had the leaders of big business been in the limelight to such an extent. And what the leaders of the major corporations were saying, almost unanimously, was that business success lay in putting the customer first and that customer satisfaction depended on quality.</p>
<p align="justify">WBP and benchmarking are logical strategies for globalizing corporations because when competition can, in principle, come from anywhere in the world, it is necessary for companies who wish to hold on to their market share, let alone increase it, to measure their performances against the very best in the world. 'The very best', of course, is a highly contentious idea. It can mean 'best returns on capital invested' or 'best stock market price increase' or 'best environmental performance' or 'best employer' or any number of other things. An additional and crucial factor is that most major corporations are in industries in which most of their products are quite similar to (sometimes virtually identical with) those of their competitors. Thus, it is vital to ensure that any competitive advantage that a product has, however small, is matched by competitive advantages in bringing it to market. That is why WBP, benchmarking and related performance-enhancing measures are so important. The TQM movement ensured that all aspects of company performance, from manufacturing widgets to answering telephones, from delivering and servicing the product to monitoring energy use in factories and offices, were liable to be benchmarked. The numerous criteria included for both the Deming Prize in Japan and the Baldrige National Quality Award in the USA were significant motivators in operationalizing the idea of total quality for customer-driven business. Many major corporations had their own versions of these quality packages.</p>
<p align="justify">The pioneers in global benchmarking were technology-intensive companies whose very survival depended on continuous innovation, like Motorola and Xerox. Also influential in the theory and practice of benchmarking were global management consultants, notably Anderson Consulting and McKinsey. There are literally hundreds of different quality measures, some firm specific, others product or industry specific, some specifically aspiring to zero defects. Some cover environmental standards, others citizenship standards. Some are regional in scope (the US, UK, European Union and Japan, for example, all have various types of quality standards) and some are virtually global (for example, the International Standards Organization ISO series).</p>
<p align="justify">The links between state agencies and corporations in the creation of bennchmarking and best practice systems can be briefly illustrated with the cases of Australia, Brazil and the USA. In Australia and Brazil, the globalizing fractions of the state and business were united in their belief that the protectionism of the past could no longer be maintained if they were to enter the global economy. The two governments embarked on two different paths to implement world best practice but with the same end in view, to make their companies internationally competitive. In Australia, best practice was seen largely as a problem of changing labour practices, and a Best Practice Demonstration Program was introduced in 1991 by the Department of Industrial Relations, working with the Australian Manufacturing Council. The rationale for the Program was clearly stated in the pamphlet 'What is Best Practice?' issued in 1994: 'As the Australian economy becomes increasingly integrated into the global market, Australian enterprises must become internationally competitive to succeed'. DuPont, ICI and BHP in Australia are cited as enthusiastic supporters of the Program. The official magazine of the Best Practice Program was entitled Benchmark and its pages in the 1990s exemplified the alliance between globalizing politicians, bureaucrats, professionals, big and small business, all striving for the quality improvements that would enhance national competitiveness.</p>
<p align="justify">In Brazil, the government agency responsible for quality standards was the National Institute for Standardization, Metrology and Industrial Quality (Inmetro). The President of Inmetro declared to an international meeting in Holland in 1998 that: 'The efforts made by Brazilian firms to improve the quality of their goods is linked to the beginning of competition in Brazil's economy. Up to 1990, when the economy was closed to imports, our companies did not bother about quality. After the opening of the economy in 1992, the need grew to show international standards of quality'. Inmetro worked closely with the Brazilian Program for Quality and Productivity and the Brazilian Foreign Trade Association, for enhanced quality in Brazil was necessary not only to compete against imports but, more importantly, to increase the potential for companies in Brazil to export.</p>
<p align="justify">In the USA, while quality standards and benchmarking have come largely from private industry initiatives, the Baldrige National Quality Award, perhaps the most prestigious mark of quality in the US, was established in 1987 as a joint venture between government and industry. Although modelled on the Japanese Deming Prize, the Baldrige process is transparent and provides an audit framework which companies could use for self-assessment. Cole has gone so far as to predict the death of the quality movement as quality improvement becomes part of normal management activity.</p>
<p align="justify">This is not the case outside the USA and a few major economies. While over 70 countries were reported as having agencies for accreditation and inspection of technical standards laboratories, it is commonly accepted that standards vary from place to place. An International Accreditation Forum (IAF) was established precisely to ensure comparability of standards and by 1998 had 18 member countries, with more applications, including Inmetro, in the pipeline. Accreditation by IAF meant recognition for technical standards in the US, Canadian, Chinese, Japanese and European Union markets, and a reasonable guarantee that the WTO technical rules were less likely to be used to block imports, often seen as a form of disguised protectionism. What the three cases of Australia, Brazil and the USA suggest is that globalizing state agents and professionals have joined forces with corporations to promote best practice in the service of national competitiveness. In this way the globalizing capitalist class uses the discourse of national and international competitiveness to impose more intensive discipline on the workforce and in some cases to impose unnecessarily high standards that drive smaller competitors out of the market. In addition, the imposition of World Best Practice and benchmarking beyond the narrow confines of manufacturing industries is another important step in the commodification of everything that is closely connected with the culture-ideology of consumerism.</p>
<p align="justify"><b>IV. The Corporate Capture of Sustainable Development</b></p>
<p align="justify">Similar processes can be observed in the corporate response to the environmental challenge. For decades, theorists of a singular ecological crisis have argued over the future prospects for life on the planet with those who conceive of the issue in terms of multiple, but manageable environmental problems. Major corporations always tried to keep these ideas apart but disasters like the Torrey Canyon (1967) and Santa Barbara (1969) oil spills, toxic contamination that provoked hundreds of anti-pollution suits in Japan in the 1970s, Bhopal in 1984 and Exxon Valdez in 1989, exacerbated the problems. The argument climaxed in the late 1980s and early 1990s under the pressures of globalization just as the discourse of sustainable development was emerging as the common language for those who were thinking about almost any environmental issue.</p>
<p align="justify">This view received dramatic confirmation in one of the key texts of the movement animated by the ecological crisis interpretation of the future of the planet, For the Common Good by Daly and Cobb. In the conclusion of their award-winning book they appealed to several groups of people for support:</p>
<p align="justify">There is still another group whose support we covet. This is that rather small group of persons who have a deep and knowledgeable concern for the Third World. We have in mind specifically the kind of people who co-operated in writing the Brundtland Report (Our Common Future), which calls attention to the idea of sustainable development ... As the concept of sustainable development is further defined, we believe it will begin to resemble our outline of an economics for community. (Daly and Cobb, p. 371)</p>
<p align="justify">Although this might sound a little disingenuous--sustainable development has become a major industry while Daly and Cobb's economics for community sank almost without trace--it clearly expressed a fundamental truth: sustainable development was seen as a prize that everyone involved in these arguments wanted to win. The winner, of course, gets to redefine the concept.</p>
<p align="justify">We can trace the first indication that some members of the corporate elite were beginning to take the ecological crisis seriously to the publication of Limits to Growth, sponsored by the Club of Rome. This gave a modicum of business respectability to the profoundly anti-capitalist thesis that growth had limits but, in general, those who spoke for global capitalism were able to shrug off the deeper lessons of the ‘limits to growth' school as alarmist and naí¯ve. However, the problem would not go away and the more forward-thinking members of the global business community knew that they were going to have to deal with it, eventually. By the late 1980s it became clear that the rhetoric of sustainable development provided a convenient solution and it was eagerly taken up by globalizing corporations as they tried to cope with the emerging force of the arguments around the singular ecological crisis.</p>
<p align="justify">The corporate response in the US and Europe to a spate of environmental catastrophes, notably Bhopal, evolved gradually throughout the 1980s. The chemical industry was clearly under pressure to be seen to be taking decisive action. An initiative of the Chemical Manufacturers Association (CMA) in 1988 in the USA resulted in the Responsible Care Program. This was adopted by more than 170 members of the CMA, including Union Carbide, and announced to the investing public and concerned citizens in full-page advertisements in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal on 11 April 1990. The British Chemical Industries Association had adopted its Responsible Care Programme in 1989.</p>
<p align="justify">Not only industries but international organizations of various types took it upon themselves to 'do something' about the environment. The European Community introduced a Community-wide environmental auditing scheme in 1993. The World Bank, for whom Daly had been a senior economist, had been discussing the environmental aspects of lending since the 1970s, with controversial results. Similarly, the Environmental Committee of the OECD has been discussing the issue since the early 1980s. Why has it proved so difficult to enact effective legislation to protect the environment? One factor was clearly the phenomenon of poacher turned gamekeeper in the leadership of some bodies charged with environmental protection. It is clear from the evidence of the 1980s that even anti-regulatory right-wing governments like those of Reagan and Thatcher, could no longer entirely ignore environmental violations. For example, while the Reagan Administration was pulling the teeth of the Environmental Protection Agency, at the same time it permitted the establishment of a powerful Environmental Crimes Unit in the Department of Justice.</p>
<p align="justify">The major corporations were not, of course, standing idly by while the struggle over the environment was accelerating. Globally, big business response was orchestrated by the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), which had been promoting an environmental agenda since the first UN environment conference in Stockholm in 1972. The ICC had members in more than 100 countries, though it was most active in Europe. It founded its own Commission on Environment in the 1970s, and its first World Conference of Environmental Management in 1984 attracted 500 leaders of industry, government and environmental groups from 72 countries. The ICC was chosen to give the official business community input to the Bergen Ministerial Conference that led to the report of the UN World Commission on Environment and Development where the concept of sustainable development was firmly established. In the frank words of an ICC analyst of this process: the Brundtland Report called on the cooperation of industry ... the business community is willing to play a leading role, and to take charge'. And take charge of sustainable development it did.</p>
<p align="justify">An immediate consequence of the work of ICC was the Global Environmental Management Initiative (GEMI) of 1990 formed to implement the Business Charter for Sustainable Development. Nineteen leading US transnational corporations announced their support for GEMI, including Union Carbide, desperate to rebuild its reputation after Bhopal. GEMI soon took on an institutional form in Washington D.C. The organization that eventually resulted from these efforts, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) was probably the most influential of the many green business networks that were established in the 1990s. For all their differences—local, national or global, general or industry-specific, well or less well resourced they all had one thing in common, their emphasis on self-assessment and voluntary codes where possible, but a decisive input into regulation where necessary. In this respect, the globalizing neo-liberal revolution associated with the Thatcher-Reagan attempt to mould state legislation to promote rather than to restrict the corporate interest, or 'free enterprise' as it was ideologically constructed, was very successful.</p>
<p align="justify">The roots of the distinctive global capitalist theory of sustainable development can be traced to the discussions around the Brundtland Report, Our Common Future, presented to the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1987. The uneasy compromise between conceptualizing the problem as a set of environmental challenges and as a much more serious singular indeed, planetary life-threatening ecological crisis suited big business very well. An insight into corporate thinking on the issue was given by Stephan Schmidheiny, a Swiss billionaire who was to play a crucial role for big business at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. In a series of high-profile articles, public pronouncements and consultations, Schmidheiny argued that environmental protection had been a defensive, negative, anti-progress concept, but environmentalists and industrialists were beginning see each other's points of view and to compromise. Thus, the idea of 'sustainable growth' had replaced the idea of 'conservation' and industry could get on with its job. Limits to growth were not, as originally thought, limits on supplies but rather limits on the disposal of resources used and transformed in the productive process. Accepting that industry has to operate within existing frameworks it can, nevertheless, act to use these frameworks for its own advantage by taking the offensive and shaping ecological legislation.</p>
<p align="justify">Thus, the negative environmentalism that had forced industries to respond to specific challenges on pollution and toxic hazards gave way to more general conceptions of 'sustainable growth' and 'sustainable development', entirely compatible concepts in the corporate analysis. Corporate environmentalism, therefore, both as a social movement and as a discourse, co-existed easily with this moderate conception of sustainability. From this powerful conceptual base big business successfully recruited much of the global environmental movement in the 1990s to the cause of sustainable global consumerist capitalism. This achievement is an object lesson in how dominant classes incorporate potential enemies into what Gramsci called new historical blocs.</p>
<p align="justify">Historical blocs are fluid amalgamations of forces that coagulate into social movements to deal with specific historical conjunctures, reflecting concrete problems that have to be confronted by different social groups. In the struggle for hegemony, historical blocs form and dissolve and reform. Big business mobilized a sustainable development historical bloc against what it saw as a threatening counter-culture organized around the powerful idea of the singular ecological crisis, the deep green or ecological movement.</p>
<p align="justify">The sustainable development historical bloc began in earnest in the period leading up to the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992. The close relationship between Maurice Strong, the virtual CEO of the Earth Summit, and Stephan Schmidheiny is a matter of public record. The environmental arm of the ICC, the Business Council for Sustainable Development, represented big business in Rio and was successful in keeping any potential criticism of the TNCs off the official agenda. There was, as a consequence, formidable corporate input into the formation of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD), the major institutional result of UNCED. The CSD has become a major transnational environmental organization in its own right. It evolved into a Division for Sustainable Development at the UN, and its major task was to monitor how member governments tested, developed and used over 100 indicators of sustainable development. The extent to which it redirects attention away from the singular ecological crisis that threatens the very existence of global capitalism onto the multiple environmental challenges that corporations can cope with and global capitalism can live with, will be a critical test for the success of the sustainable development historical bloc. The signs are not promising for deep ecologists. The basis on which the CSD approached its task of measuring consumption and production was as follows:</p>
<p align="justify">Sustainable consumption and production are essentially two sides of the same coin. Sustainable consumption addresses the demand side, examining how the goods and services required to meet peoples' needs and improve the quality of life, can be delivered in a way that reduces the burden on the Earth's carrying capacity. The emphasis of sustainable production is on the supply side, focussing on improving environmental performance in key economic sectors such as agriculture, energy, industry, tourism and transport.</p>
<p align="justify">From the ecological point of view this approach is based on a series of fallacies. The first is the anthropocentric approach itself, where sustainability for people and societies takes precedence over sustainability for the planet. The second fallacy is the idea that 'sustainable consumption' and 'sustainable production' are essentially two sides of the same coin, For ecologists, the real issue is not 'sustaining' production and consumption, but reducing them absolutely. In addition, ecologists argue that it is fallacious to assume that 'meeting needs', 'improving quality of life' and 'improving environmental performance' are parts of the solution to the ecological crisis. They are not. They are parts of the problem, particularly in terms of distinguishing real from artificial needs and establishing universal norms for an ecologically sound quality of life. It need hardly be said that those who hold these views—radical ecologists—are a small minority, even in the environmental movement, but the capture of the discourse of sustainable development from the environmental movement by the transnational capitalist class has made it even more difficult to mount a radical critique of capitalist consumerism than would otherwise have been the case.</p>
<p align="justify">The combination of the discourse of sustainable development with that of national and international competitiveness provides powerful weapons for the transnational capitalist class. Globalization is not a 'Western' but a globalizing capitalist ideology, whose discourse and practices are necessary to negate the growing class polarization and ecological crises characteristic of this latest stage in the long history of capitalism.</p>
<hr/><center><a href="https://www.globalpolicy.org/globaliz/define/index.htm">More Information on Globalization</a><br/> <a href="https://www.globalpolicy.org/globaliz/econ/index.htm">More Information on Globalization of the Economy</a> <br/> <a href="https://www.globalpolicy.org/globaliz/define/index.htm">More Information on Defining Globalization</a></center>Global Power Project, Part 4: Banking on Influence with JPMorgan Chasetag:activism101.ning.com,2013-07-04:3143100:BlogPost:332102013-07-04T20:00:00.000ZCromaghttp://activism101.ning.com/profile/Cromag
<div id="article-info"><div id="date-and-author">Wed, 7/3/2013 - by Andrew Gavin Marshall</div>
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<div id="sharethis"><div class="sharethis-wrapper">originally posted on occupy.com</div>
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<p><a href="http://www.occupy.com/sites/default/files/styles/slide_narrow/public/field/image/wall-street-bull_0.jpg?itok=uYg4HbvL" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="http://www.occupy.com/sites/default/files/styles/slide_narrow/public/field/image/wall-street-bull_0.jpg?itok=uYg4HbvL&width=361" width="361"></img></a></p>
<div class="field-name-body"><p>In May, JPMorgan Chase was listed as the …</p>
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<div id="article-info"><div id="date-and-author">Wed, 7/3/2013 - by Andrew Gavin Marshall</div>
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<div id="sharethis"><div class="sharethis-wrapper">originally posted on occupy.com</div>
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<div class="field-name-body"><p>In May, JPMorgan Chase was listed as the <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-13/it-s-official-sort-of-jpmorgan-is-world-s-biggest-bank.html">largest bank in the world</a> with assets at roughly $4 trillion -- some $1.53 trillion of it in derivatives. This was reported a month after the announcement that the bank had posted a record <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22126115">first-quarter profit</a> of $6.5 billion.</p>
<p>Jamie Dimon, the bank's CEO and Chairman, has faced a host of scandals in relation to his management of the megabank, including the loss of roughly $6 billion through the London branch of the bank -- losses that Dimon was accused of hiding. A <a href="http://www.news.com.au/world-news/ceo-jamie-dimon-hid-billions-in-losses/story-fndir2ev-12265986846120">300-page report</a> by the U.S. Senate, investigating the “creative accounting” of JPMorgan, noted that the bank “hid losses, did not share information with its regulators, and misled the public” in what one banking regulator <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/mar/14/jpmorgan-senate-investigation-london-whale">referred to as</a> “make believe voodoo magic.” Stated bluntly <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/business/jpmorgans-follies-for-all-to-see-in-a-senate-report.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0">in The New York Times</a>, JPMorgan Chase, the largest derivatives dealer in the world, “is too big to regulate."</p>
<p>In the midst of the scandal, the bank faced <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2013/05/07/the-revolt-against-jamie-dimon/">a potential “revolt</a>” of its shareholders in a bid to strip Dimon of his dual role as CEO and Chairman. In confidential government reports which were leaked to The New York Times, the bank was accused of “manipulative schemes” which transformed “money-losing power plants into powerful profit centers” while executives made “<a href="http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/05/02/jpmorgan-caught-in-swirl-of-regulatory-woes/">false and misleading statements</a>” under oath.</p>
<p>Yet even in the midst of scandal, Jamie Dimon was praised in a storm of support by billionaires, corporate kingpins and media barons. Calling JPMorgan Chase “as good a bank as there is,” New York City mayor and billionaire media baron Michael Bloomberg went on <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2012/05/31/mayor-bloomberg-likes-jamie-dimon-a-lot-more-than-big-sodas/">to call Dimon</a> “a very smart, honest, great executive.” News Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch <a href="http://blogs.marketwatch.com/thetell/2013/05/10/rupert-murdoch-defends-jamie-dimons-dual-role-at-j-p-morgan/">praised Dimon</a> as “one of the smartest, toughest guys around,” while Jack Welch, former chairman and CEO of General Electric, referred to him as a “great leader” and said he had <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2013/05/08/jamie-dimon-fan-club-welcomes-jack-welch/">earned</a> the “right to hold both Chairman and CEO titles.” To top it off, billionaire investor and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffet, <a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2011/07/warren_buffett_didnt_want_jami.html">dubbed Dimon</a> “a fabulous banker.”</p>
<p>And the adoration goes all the way to the top rung. In 2009, The New York Times <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/business/19dimon.html?pagewanted=all">referred to</a> Jamie Dimon as “President Obama’s favorite banker.” In 2010, Obama told Bloomberg BusinessWeek that he didn’t “begrudge” bank CEOs like Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs for their massive bonuses of $17 and $9 million, respectively. Obama explained: "I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free-market system.” <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aKGZkktzkAlA">The president added</a>, “I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen.”</p>
<p>In May of 2012, Obama rushed to Jamie Dimon’s defense in light of the financial scandals, <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/05/15/obama-has-up-to-1-million-in-jpmorgan-account/">stating that</a> Dimon was “one of the smartest bankers we got.” The Financial Times <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/d1890714-bd6f-11e2-890a-00144feab7de.html#axzz2UoVMGbl4">referred to Dimon</a> as “the last king of Wall Street.” And when finally faced with the decision to strip Dimon of his dual role as chairman and CEO, Obama’s "favorite banker" <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/51ce0cb2-c21b-11e2-ab66-00144feab7de.html#axzz2UoVMGbl4">ended up winning</a> “a decisive victory" by maintaining both his roles.</p>
<p>But this is just the surface of JPMorgan Chase’s financial manipulations. The bank, in fact, was at the forefront of creating Credit Default Swaps (CDS), a key aspect of the derivatives market that led to the inflation and subsequent blowout of the housing bubble. JPMorgan developed these “financial instruments” as a type of insurance policy in 1994, allowing the bank to trade its debt (in the form of loans to corporations and governments) to third parties, thus handing off the risk and removing the debts from its accounts, which allowed it to make further loans. JPMorgan opened up the first CDS desk in New York in 1997, “a division that would eventually earn the name <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2008/09/26/the-monster-that-ate-wall-street.html">the Morgan Mafia</a> for the number of former members who went on to senior positions at global banks and hedge funds.” Back in 2003, the same Warren Buffet who would later praise Dimon <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/2817995.stm">referred to</a> credit default swaps as “financial weapons of mass destruction.”</p>
<p>JPMorgan was also at the forefront in the United States pushing for financial deregulation, particularly the slow-motion dismantling of the Glass-Steagall Act that had been put in place in 1933 in response to the financial speculation which had helped spark the Great Depression. After hearing proposals from banks such as Citicorp, JP Morgan and Bankers Trust, which advocated the loosening of “restrictions” put in place by Glass-Steagall, the Federal Reserve Board in 1987 voted to ease many of the regulations. That same year, Alan Greenspan, who had previously been a director of JP Morgan, became the chairman of the Fed. In 1989, the Fed approved an application submitted by JP Morgan, Chase Manhattan, Citicorp and Bankers Trust to further reduce the regulations imposed by Glass-Steagall. In 1990, JP Morgan <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/wallstreet/weill/demise.html">became</a> “the first bank to receive permission from the Federal Reserve to underwrite securities.”</p>
<p>Financial deregulation accelerated under President Clinton, much to the delight of Wall Street banks, which were then permitted to merge into megabanks, with JPMorgan merging with Chase Manhattan to form JPMorgan Chase. As early as 2006 and 2007, multiple megabanks were beginning <a href="http://www.npr.org/2011/05/02/135846486/how-some-made-millions-betting-against-the-market">to bet against</a> the housing market through various hedge funds, allowing them to make profits on the housing collapse they created. JPMorgan continued to sell mortgages as it bet against the mortgage market, passing on the risk while it hedged its bets to profit from the failure and losses of others. In 2011, the bank paid a $153 million fine to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) <a href="http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/06/21/jpmorgan-pays-153-million-to-settle-mortgage-case/">to settle allegations</a> of “securities fraud.”</p>
<p>In the midst of the financial crisis in 2008, JPMorgan Chase became not only a major criminal, but also a prime beneficiary. In 2007, the global investment bank Bear Stearns was named <a href="http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/mostadmired/2007/industries/industry_52.html">by Fortune magazine</a> as the second “most admired” financial securities company in the United States, while Lehman Brothers was put in first place. As the financial crisis erupted, Bear Stearns executives “discovered” that they were “nearly out of cash” in March of 2008. The CEO of Bear Stearns, Alan Schwartz, made a phone call to Jamie Dimon -- JPMorgan Chase was the clearing agent for Bear Stearns -- asking for an overnight loan. Dimon, who also sat on the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, turned there instead of providing the loan through his own bank. The president of the New York Fed – who was elected by the banks that own the New York Fed – was Timothy Geithner. Geithner began discussions with Bear Stearns, and the following morning he held a meeting with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, where they agreed to an emergency loan for Bear Stearns, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124182740622102431.html">providing the funds</a> through JPMorgan Chase.</p>
<p>Over the following day, Geithner and Paulson informed Bear Stearns that it must sell the bank within days, and a deal was negotiated in which JPMorgan Chase would purchase Bear Stearns at $2 per share. Though Dimon had first refused to purchase the failed bank, he now engaged in negotiations with Geithner who <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aDNaFtVZV4ws">won over Dimon</a> by guaranteeing $30 billion for JPMorgan to purchase the sunken bank. Long story short: through the New York Fed, the U.S. government purchased billions of dollars in bad debts made by Bear Stearns, including $16 billion in credit default swaps that were downgraded to “junk” assets, while JPMorgan Chase acquired $360 billion <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-07-01/fed-s-maiden-lane-made-taxpayers-junk-bond-buyers-without-congress-knowing.html">in Bear Stearns assets</a> with little or no risk.</p>
<p>With the purchase of Bear Stearns facilitated by the New York Fed, and for the benefit of JPMorgan, Geithner continued in his role as willing servant to the banks who had elected him as president. Then, in September of 2008 when the insurance conglomerate American International Group (AIG) plunged into crisis and sought support from the government, the Fed and Treasury initially refused. AIG turned to JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, who went to the government to pressure for state support. The New York Fed, with Geithner at the helm, again organized a secret bailout of the institution, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/17/business/17insure.html?hp">valued at $85 billion</a>. In October, the government added an extra $38 billion to the AIG bailout, and the New York Fed provided a further $40 billion in November. Overall, U.S. taxpayers <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/11/business/economy/11aig.html">bailed out</a> the insurance giant with $150 billion.</p>
<p>Because many banks kept junk assets with AIG which didn’t affect its balance sheets, the insurance giant was allowed to continue making risky loans. Meanwhile, the New York Fed, noted Bloomberg journalist David Reilly, acted as “a black-ops outfit for the nation’s central bank,” and as a “quasi-governmental institution [which] isn’t subject to citizen intrusions such as freedom of information requests.” The AIG bailout, wrote Reilly, revealed what could be described as a “<a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-01-28/secret-banking-cabal-emerges-from-aig-shadows-david-reilly.html">secret banking cabal</a>.” Through AIG, bailout funds went to American, French, German, British, Swiss, Dutch and even Canadian banks. Goldman Sachs received over $12 billion, and billions <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/economicsunbound/archives/2009/03/german_and_fren.html">also went</a> to Merrill Lynch, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wachovia, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan Chase.</p>
<p>JPMorgan Chase was using bailout money from the government to purchase other banks and companies. As one executive at the bank<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/25/business/25nocera.html?_r=3&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin">commented</a> in regards to a $25 billion bailout from the government, “I think there are going to be some great opportunities for us to grow in this environment.” The banks repaid the bailout loans from other bailout funds they got from government, siphoning off taxpayer money<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/09/bank-tarp_n_1335006.html">back and forth</a> and rewarding them for their risky behavior. One university study noted that banks with political access – whether through lobbying efforts or board membership on the Fed – were more likely to get bailout funds, and in bigger numbers, than other banks. Notably among the <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/12/21/banks-study-idUSN2124009320091221">most politically connected</a> banks were Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley.</p>
<p>According to a 2012 study by the International Monetary Fund and Bloomberg magazine, JPMorgan Chase continues to receive government support far beyond the bailouts, as it is a major recipient of corporate welfare and state subsidies. In fact, according to the study, the biggest bank in the world gets roughly <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-18/dear-mr-dimon-is-your-bank-getting-corporate-welfare-.html">$14 billion per year</a> in state subsidies and welfare, largely helping “the bank pay big salaries and bonuses.”</p>
<p><strong>The Biggest and Most Connected Bank</strong></p>
<p>Not only is JPMorgan Chase the biggest bank in the world with over $4 trillion in assets, but its power and influence extends far beyond financial matters. It is a major political force in the world, highly integrated within the network of global elites who make up the plutocratic ruling class. As the subject of study for the Global Power Project, I examined 55 people at JPMorgan Chase, including all members of the executive committee, the board of directors and the international advisory council.</p>
<p>Of the 55 individuals examined at the bank, a total of 13 (or roughly 24%) of the individuals were either members or held leadership positions (previously or presently) with the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The CFR has been at the heart of the foreign-policy elite of the United States since it was created in 1921. Further, a total of eight JPMorgan officials held leadership positions in the World Economic Forum, the second most represented institutional affiliation of the bank. Holding yearly conferences that bring together thousands of participants from elite financial, corporate, political, cultural, media and other institutions, the WEF is one of the principal forums for the global elite, with JPMorgan operating right there at the center.</p>
<p>The next most represented institution is the Trilateral Commission, with 5 individuals at JPMorgan Chase holding membership in the international think tank – or “global policy group” – uniting elites from North America, Western Europe and Japan (and now also including China, India, and other Pacific-rim nations). The Trilateral Commission itself was founded in 1973 by the CEO of Chase Manhattan Bank – which later merged into JPMorgan Chase – David Rockefeller.</p>
<p>In descending order, the other most highly represented institutions having cross membership between leadership positions with JPMorgan Chase are: the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (4), the Business Council (4), Citigroup (4), Bilderberg (4), the Group of Thirty (4), Sara Lee Corporation (3), Harvard (3), American Express (3), American International Group (3), the Business Roundtable (3), Rolls Royce (3), the Center for Strategic and International Studies – CSIS (3), the European Round Table of Industrialists (3), the Peterson Institute for International Economics (2), the U.S.-China Business Council (2), and the National Petroleum Council (2).</p>
<p>Institutions which hold two individual cross leadership positions with JPMorgan Chase include: the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the University of Chicago, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., General Electric, Asia Business Council, the U.S. President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the Coca-Cola Company, National Bank of Kuwait Advisory Board, INSEAD, China-United States Exchange Foundation, Mitsubishi, the Carlyle Group, and the IMF.</p>
<p><strong>Meet the Elites at JPMorgan Chase</strong></p>
<p>It’s worth taking a look at some specific individuals who serve in a leadership and/or advisory capacity to JPMorgan Chase to get an idea of the composition of some of these global plutocrats.</p>
<p>Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, sits on the boards of directors of: the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Harvard Business School, and Catalyst. He is a Trustee of the New York University School of Medicine, a member of the Executive Committee of the Business Council, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the International Business Council of the World Economic Forum, a member of the Financial Services Forum, and a member of the International Advisory Panel of the Monetary Authority of Singapore.</p>
<p>Members of the board of JPMorgan Chase include James A. Bell, former President of Boeing and a current member of the board of Dow Chemical; Crandall C. Bowles, a director of Deere & Company and the Sara Lee Corporation, a former director of Wachovia, a Trustee of the Brookings Institution, on the Governing Board of the Wilderness Society, and a member of the Business Council and the Economic Club of New York. Other JPM board members include Stephen B. Burke, CEO of NBC Universal and Executive Vice President of Comcast Corporation; David M. Cote, the Chairman and CEO of Honeywell International who sits on President Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, on the advisory panel to Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR), and is a member of the Trilateral Commission; and Lee Raymond, director of the Business Council for International Understanding, who sits on the advisory panel to KKR, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and former Chairman of the National Petroleum Council as well as former Chairman and CEO of ExxonMobil, from which he retired in 2006 with <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/13/business/13exxon.html">a compensation package</a> of $398 million.</p>
<p>JPMorgan Chase has an International Council which provides advice to the bank’s leadership on economic, political and social trends across various regions and around the world. The International Council is chaired by Tony Blair, former Prime Minister of the UK, who also sits as an adviser to Zurich Financial. The Council includes Khalid A. Al-Falih, the President and CEO of Saudi Aramco (Saudi Arabian Oil Company), the world’s largest oil company, who also sits on the International Business Council of the World Economic Forum. Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan is also on JPMorgan’s International Council, and sits as Chairman of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), a partnership between the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. Annan is also on the boards of the United Nations Foundation, the World Economic Forum, and he is a member of the Global Board of Advisors of the Council on Foreign Relations.</p>
<p>The Council includes the third richest man in Mexico, Alberto Bailléres, as well as the Chairman and CEO of Telecom Italia, Franco Bernabé, who was the former CEO of Eni, one of the world’s largest oil companies (and Italy’s largest corporation), as well as the former Vice Chairman of Rothschild Europe. Bernabé sits on the board of PetroChina, China’s largest oil company. Bernabé is also a member of the European Round Table of Industrialists (a group of roughly 50 major European CEOs who directly advocate and work with EU political leaders in designing and implementing policy), he was a former Advisory Board member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the board of FIAT, and is actively a member of the Steering Committee of the Bilderberg Meetings.</p>
<p>Martin Feldstein, a prominent Economics professor at Harvard and the President Emeritus of the National Bureau of Economic Research, is another member of the International Council. Feldstein was the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to President Ronald Reagan and sat on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (an “independent” group that advises the president on intelligence matters) under President George W. Bush (from 2007-2009). President Obama appointed Feldstein to the Economic Recovery Advisory Board, and he also sits on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations, is a member of the Trilateral Commission, a participant in Bilderberg Meetings, and is a member of the International Advisory Board of the National Bank of Kuwait.</p>
<p>Gao Xi-Qing is the Vice Chairman, President and Chief Investment Officer of the China Investment Corporation (CIC), China’s sovereign investment fund. He was referred to <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/12/be-nice-to-the-countries-that-lend-you-money/307148/">by the Atlantic</a> as “the man who oversees $200 billion of China’s $2 trillion in dollar holdings.” Another notable Chinese member of the International Council is Tung Chee Hwa, the former Chief Executive and President of the Executive Council of Hong Kong, a core policy-making institution in the government of Hong Kong. Tung Chee Hwa is also the Vice Chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), a major political advisory group in the People’s Republic of China, once chaired by Mao Zedong. Tung Chee Hwa as well is the founder and Chairman of the China-United States Exchange Foundation, and a former member of the International Advisory Board of the Council on Foreign Relations.</p>
<p>Carla A. Hills is the only woman on the JPMorgan International Council, and is Chairman and CEO of Hills & Company International, a global consulting firm. She was the former United States Trade Representative in the George H.W. Bush administration, where she was the primary negotiator for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). She is also the Co-Chair of the Council on Foreign Relations, and sits on the International Boards of Rolls Royce and the Coca-Cola Company, as well as sitting on the board of directors of Gilead Sciences. Hills is a Counselor and Trustee of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a major American think tank where she also sits as Co-Chair of the Advisory Board (alongside Zbigniew Brzezinski, co-founder of the Trilateral Commission). In addition, Hills is a member of the Executive Committee of both the Trilateral Commission and the Peterson Institute for International Economics, as well as sitting on the boards of the International Crisis Group and the US-China Business Council, as Chair of the National Committee on US-China Relations, and Chair of the Inter-American Dialogue.</p>
<p>Henry Kissinger – former U.S. Secretary of State, National Security Adviser to President Richard Nixon, and Secretary of State to President Ford – also sits on the International Council of JPMorgan. Kissinger was a former adviser to Nelson Rockefeller, who recruited Kissinger as director of the Special Studies Project of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund in the 1950s. Kissinger was a director of the Council on Foreign Relations from 1977-1981, is a member of the Trilateral Commission, a former member of the Steering Committee and continuous participant in the Bilderberg Meetings, and is founder and chair of Kissinger Associates, an international consulting and advisory firm. Kissinger Chaired the National Bipartisan Commission on Central America during the Reagan administration, which provided justification for Reagan’s wars in Central America, and he was also a member of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from 1984-1990, advising both Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Alongside Zbigniew Brzezinski, Kissinger was a member of the Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy of the National Security Council and Defense Department, established in the late 1980s to develop a long-term strategy for the United States in the world. Kissinger has also been a member of the Defense Policy Board, providing “independent” advice to the Pentagon leadership on matters of foreign policy, from 2001 to the present, for both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations. Kissinger is also a Counselor and Trustee of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Honorary Governor of the Foreign Policy Association, an Honorary Member of the International Olympic Committee, an adviser to the board of directors of American Express, and is a Trustee Emeritus of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In addition, Kissinger is a director of the International Rescue Committee, the Atlantic Institute, and is on the advisory board of the RAND Center for Global Risk and Security, as well as Honorary Chairman of the China-United States Exchange Foundation.</p>
<p>Mustafa V. Koc is also a member of the International Council, and is Chairman of Koc Holding AS, Turkey’s largest multinational corporation. He also sits on the International Advisory Board of Rolls Royce, the Global Advisory Board of the Council on Foreign Relations, is a member of the Steering Committee of the Bilderberg Meetings, a former member of the International Advisory Board of the National Bank of Kuwait, and is Honorary Chairman of the Turkish Industrialists and Businessmen’s High Advisory Council.</p>
<p>Gérard Mestrallet is the Chairman and CEO of GDF Suez, one of the largest energy conglomerates in the world, and is on the board of Suez Environment (one of the major water privatization companies in the world), and also sits on the supervisory board of AXA, a major global French financial conglomerate. He is also an advisory board member of Siemens, and is a member of the European Round Table of Industrialists and the International Business Council of the World Economic Forum.</p>
<p>John S. Watson is the Chairman and CEO of Chevron Corporation. He is on the board of the American Petroleum Institute and is a member of the National Petroleum Council, the Business Roundtable, the Business Council, the American Society of Corporate Executives, and the Chancellor’s Board of Advisors of the University of California Davis. He is also a member of the International Business Council of the World Economic Forum.</p>
<p>The Chairman of JPMorgan Chase International, Jacob A. Frenkel, is Chairman and CEO of the Group of Thirty, and a member of the International Council. He is also a former Vice Chairman of American International Group (from 2004 to 2009, when it was rescued with the massive government bailout); the former Chairman of Merrill Lynch International (from 2000 to 2004), and the former Governor of the Bank of Israel (from 1991 to 2000). Frenkel was an Economic Counselor and Director of Research at the International Monetary Fund (from 1987 to 1991) and prior to that he was the David Rockefeller Professor of International Economics at the University of Chicago (from 1973 to 1987). In addition, Frenkel is the former Editor of the Journal of Political Economy, former Vice Chairman of the Board of Governors of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, former Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Inter-American Development Bank, and a former member of the International Advisory Board of the Council on Foreign Relations. Frenkel is currently a member of the board of directors of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a member of the Trilateral Commission, member of the International Advisory Council of the China Development Bank, member of the board of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, member of the Economic Advisory panel of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, member of the Council for the United States and Italy, member of the Investment Advisory Council of the Prime Minister of Turkey, and sits on the board of Loews Corporation.</p>
<p>To sum: it should be clear, from the evidence, that the leadership of JPMorgan Chase is not an isolated group of individuals involved in finance and exclusively relegated to the banking world, but a highly networked and influential group consisting of central figures in the global plutocracy – referred to as the "Transnational Capitalist Class" – with significant economic, social and political power. To refer to JPMorgan Chase simply as "a bank" is like referring to the United States as just "a country." A geopolitical force unto itself, and a conglomerate embedded within a transnational network of elite institutions and individuals, JPMorgan Chase goes beyond the financial indicators. Put simply, it is one of the most powerful banks in the world.</p>
<p><em>Andrew Gavin Marshall is an independent researcher and writer based in Montreal, Canada. He is Project Manager of The People's Book Project, head of the Geopolitics Division of the Hampton Institute, the research director of Occupy.com's Global Power Project, and has a weekly podcast with BoilingFrogsPost.</em></p>
</div>Global Power Project, Part 3: The Influence of Individuals and Family Dynastiestag:activism101.ning.com,2013-07-03:3143100:BlogPost:334572013-07-03T20:00:00.000ZCromaghttp://activism101.ning.com/profile/Cromag
<p></p>
<p>By: Andrew Gavin Marshall</p>
<p><a href="http://andrewgavinmarshall.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/slide_2.jpg" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="http://andrewgavinmarshall.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/slide_2.jpg?w=585&h=329&width=340" width="340"></img></a></p>
<div><p><em>The following is Part 3 of the Global Power Project, originally published at Occupy.com</em></p>
<p><em>The Global Power Project, an investigative series produced by Occupy.com, aims to identify and connect the worldwide institutions and individuals who comprise today’s global power oligarchy. In …</em></p>
</div>
<p></p>
<p>By: Andrew Gavin Marshall</p>
<p><a target="_blank" href="http://andrewgavinmarshall.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/slide_2.jpg"><img class="align-right" src="http://andrewgavinmarshall.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/slide_2.jpg?w=585&h=329&width=340" width="340"/></a></p>
<div><p><em>The following is Part 3 of the Global Power Project, originally published at Occupy.com</em></p>
<p><em>The Global Power Project, an investigative series produced by Occupy.com, aims to identify and connect the worldwide institutions and individuals who comprise today’s global power oligarchy. In <a href="http://activism101.ning.com/profiles/blogs/global-power-project-part-2-identifying-the-institutions-of?xg_source=activity" target="_self">Part 2</a>, which appeared last week, I discussed some of the dominant institutions that have facilitated and have in turn been supported by the development of this oligarchic class. In this third part, I examine the dynastic influence wielded by prominent corporate and financial families. This is not a study of wealth, but a study of power.</em></p>
<p>Dynastic power, embedded in the institution of “family,” has been with humanity for as long as empire: ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, China, the European empires and beyond. With the rise of capitalism, finance and corporations, formal political dynasties became less relevant to the expansion and maintenance of power and empire. Instead, dynastic power was and remains largely wielded in the corporate and financial sectors.</p>
<div><p>In Europe, the Rothschild banking dynasty was the unparalleled family power of the 19th century, and has continued as a major influence in Britain, France and elsewhere well into the 20th and 21st centuries. Baron Benjamin de Rothschild, considered to be the “world’s richest Rothschild today,” <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/magazine/family-values-1.323094" target="_blank">told the Israeli publication Ha’aretz</a> in 2010, “We have an obligation to continue the dynasty.” And indeed, the Rothschild banks and family are doing well. It <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/29f70354-7fca-11e1-92d3-00144feab49a.html#axzz2QClDRLJZ" target="_blank">recently decided</a> to bring together the French and British banking assets under one roof, and the dynasty has even been <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c046f570-79f8-11e2-b377-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2QClDRLJZ" target="_blank">expanding its influence</a> in merchant banking in London. The Rothschild bank was also seeking to <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e13ebee0-6e87-11df-ad16-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2QClDRLJZ" target="_blank">extend its presence</a> in the United States, “to take advantage of the growing demand for independent advice from companies globally.”</p>
<p>In the United States, the 19th century <a href="http://andrewgavinmarshall.com/2011/11/30/sneak-peak-at-my-book-the-rockefeller-world-council-on-foreign-relations-and-the-trilateral-commission/" target="_blank">saw the rise</a> of multiple corporate and financial dynasties, though the most lasting and still the most influential is the Rockefeller family. Initially through the Standard Oil empire, which was broken up into corporations we now know as ExxonMobil, Chevron and others, Rockefeller influence was prominent in universities (notably the University of Chicago and Harvard), in finance, with Chase Manhattan Bank (now JPMorgan Chase), in the creation and maintenance of major foundations (Rockefeller Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Rockefeller Family Fund) and in the establishment and leadership of major think tanks (Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg), all of which created access to political and social power that shaped institutions, ideologies and individuals on a vast scale.</p>
<div><p>James Wolfensohn, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, was formerly president of the World Bank, a long time member of the Steering Committee of the Bilderberg Group, and a trustee of the Brookings Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation. Wolfensohn’s father served as an advisor to the Rothschilds and <a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/the-man-who-inherited-the-rothschild-legend/story-e6frg6z6-1225945329773" target="_blank">taught the young Wolfensohn</a> how to “cultivate mentors, friends and contacts of influence.” Upon the event of David Rockefeller’s 90th birthday, celebrated at the Council on Foreign Relations in 2005, Wolfensohn described the Rockefeller patriarch as “the person who had perhaps the greatest influence on my life professionally,” <a href="http://www.cfr.org/world/council-foreign-relations-special-symposium-honor-david-rockefellers-90th-birthday/p8133" target="_blank">and added</a>: “In fact, it’s fair to say that there has been no other single family influence greater than the Rockefeller’s in the whole issue of globalization.”</p>
<p>In Canada, <a href="http://andrewgavinmarshall.com/2012/05/10/meet-canadas-ruling-oligarchy-parasites-a-plenty/" target="_blank">the Desmarais family</a>, which owns Power Corporation, exists as the country’s most influential dynasty with significant business and family ties to Canada’s political elite. Through their participation, organization and leadership in prominent think tanks and industry associations, the Desmarais have become a powerful influence in shaping not only Canada but the process of globalization itself in recent decades.</p>
<p>There are, of course, parallel corporate and financial dynasties in countries all over the world, such as the Agnellis in Italy, the Wallenbergs in Sweden, and the still-existing monarchs in Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium and beyond, who despite their “symbolic” political power wield significant financial and corporate influence. It should be no surprise that these powerful financial and corporate dynasties have substantial interaction and integration with one other. Bilderberg meetings act as a forum which very often represents dynastic influence from the Atlantic community, including the Rockefellers, Rothschilds, Desmarais, Wallenbergs, Agnellis and the Dutch, Belgian and Spanish monarchies, among others. It should also be no surprise that the two arguably most influential dynasties – Rothschild and Rockefeller – have been steadily increasing their connections, both formal and informal.</p>
<p>In fact, as the Financial Times reported in May of 2012, “Two of the best-known business dynasties in Europe and the US will come together after Lord Jacob Rothschild’s listed investment trust and Rockefeller Financial Services agreed to form a strategic partnership,” with the Rothschild-owned RIT Capital Partners purchasing a 37% stake in the Rockefeller family’s “wealth advisory and asset management group.” This “<a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/efe93494-a9a3-11e1-a6a7-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2QClDRLJZ" target="_blank">transatlantic union</a>,” noted the Financial Times, “brings together David Rockefeller, 96, and Lord Rothschild, 76 – two family patriarchs whose personal relationship spans five decades.”</p>
<p>To understand the kind of influence and power we’re talking about, it is helpful to briefly examine the biography — dare we refer to it as a CV — of one of the global patriarchs himself, David Rockefeller. Rockefeller was Chairman and CEO of Chase Manhattan Bank from 1969 to 1980, after which he remained Chairman of the International Advisory Committee of Chase Manhattan, from 1981 to 1999, and subsequently a member of the International Advisory Council (2000-2005) when the bank merged into JPMorgan Chase.</p>
<div><p>Rockefeller was a founding member of <a href="http://www.bilderbergmeetings.org/index.php" target="_blank">the Bilderberg Meetings</a> and he still holds an exclusive position on the Steering Committee’s Member Advisory Group. He was the Chairman of Rockefeller Group, Inc. from 1981 to 1995, and Chairman of Rockefeller Center Properties, Inc. Trust from 1996 to 2001. David Rockefeller was also a Chairman of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, where he remains as an advisory trustee; Chairman and Life Trustee of the Museum of Modern Art; and former Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, from 1970 to 1985, where he remains as Honorary Chairman.</p>
<p><a target="_blank" href="http://andrewgavinmarshall.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/bilderberg-group-meeting-rome-meeting-in-2012.jpg"><img class="align-right" src="http://andrewgavinmarshall.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/bilderberg-group-meeting-rome-meeting-in-2012.jpg?w=585&width=350" width="350"/></a></p>
<p>And it doesn’t stop there. The senior Rockefeller is founder of the David Rockefeller Fund; Chairman Emeritus of the Board of Trustees of the University of Chicago; former President of the Harvard College Board of Overseers; Honorary Chairman of the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy (CECP); and he was co-founder of the Global Philanthropists Circle. Rockefeller was also the founder and former North American Chairman of the Trilateral Commission, from 1973-1991, and remains Honorary Chairman. He was the founder of the Partnership for New York City, founder and Honorary Chairman of the Americas Society and the Council of the Americas, and he currently sits as Honorary Chairman and Life Trustee and Chairman Emeritus of the Rockefeller University Council. He is an honorary director of the <a href="http://www.iie.com/" target="_blank">Peterson Institute for International Economics</a>.</p>
<p>The past and present affiliations held by this one individual span the largest bank in the United States, the most prominent national think tank, highly influential transnational think tanks and policy boards, foundations and universities. This one individual has a network of influence that includes: JPMorgan Chase, the Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg Group, University of Chicago, Rockefeller University, Harvard, and many other prominent institutions. The fact that he has held – or currently holds – leadership positions in these institutions, and often for several decades, is an example of the significant networks of influence that go far beyond his identity as a “banker” or “former CEO of Chase Manhattan.”</p>
<p>When we place David Rockefeller in the context of his dynastic family’s broad array of institutional engagement, and the power that his past and present family members wield, the influence becomes much greater. Dynastic power again, like class power, should not be confused with “conspiracy theory,” as it does not function as a conspiracy but rather as a network of institutions, corporations, banks, think tanks and foundations with indirect political influence. They are more opportunistic than omnipotent, and are perhaps better thought of not as a few obscure families running the world but more akin to organized crime families – the Mafia – operating on a much larger scale.</p>
<p>Empire does not just happen, nor, for that matter, does “capitalism.” Society is made, constructed, shaped, directed, organized and engineered. Ideas are embedded in institutions, which establish ideologies, indoctrinate individuals and implement objectives. But they are not omnipotent; they must respond to changes in the population, in public opinion and will, in the cultural evolution of humanity, in resistance to war, tyranny, oppression and impoverishment. Institutions and ideologies must adapt to changing circumstances, to technological and cultural developments, or they will become obsolete.</p>
<div><p>The population, however, must also adapt to a changing environment, technological developments, cultural attitudes, economic and social disasters, and political engagement. The population – the people, both nationally and globally – must work to adapt their thinking, their perspective and their understanding of power, of ideas and institutions, of the way in which society functions and the ways in which it could function.</p>
<p>The purpose of the Global Power Project is to provide a lens through which to view and understand power more directly – not as abstract concepts of “democracy” or “capitalism,” liberal or conservative, Republican or Democratic, but as a complex relationship between power and people. This research seeks to identify the individuals and institutions that wield significant power over society, nationally and globally, to help us understand who specifically has shaped and is continuing to shape the world we all live in.</p>
<p>Starting next week, the Global Power Project will reveal extensive research on one or more institutions at a time, selecting them based upon known or perceived influence, and examining the individuals who serve in leadership, board membership and advisory roles at those institutions, answering the questions: what are their backgrounds, what other institutions have they worked for, what other boards do they sit on, what organizations are they members of? And importantly: how is their power connected?</p>
<p>Stay tuned next week, as we find out.</p>
<p><em><a href="http://www.andrewgavinmarshall.com/" target="_blank">Andrew Gavin Marshall</a> is an independent researcher and writer based in Montreal, Canada. He is Project Manager of The People’s Book Project, head of the Geopolitics Division of the Hampton Institute, Research Director for Occupy.com’s Global Power Project and hosts a weekly podcast show at <a href="http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/" target="_blank">BoilingFrogsPost</a>.</em></p>
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</div>Global Power Project, Part 2: Identifying the Institutions of Controltag:activism101.ning.com,2013-07-03:3143100:BlogPost:334562013-07-03T20:00:00.000ZCromaghttp://activism101.ning.com/profile/Cromag
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<div id="article-info"><div id="date-and-author">Wed, 6/19/2013 - by Andrew Gavin Marshall</div>
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<p><a href="http://www.occupy.com/sites/default/files/styles/slide_narrow/public/field/image/498285_flag_korporacii_ssha_2560x1600_%28www.GdeFon.ru%29.jpg?itok=kEvtKXKd" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="http://www.occupy.com/sites/default/files/styles/slide_narrow/public/field/image/498285_flag_korporacii_ssha_2560x1600_%28www.GdeFon.ru%29.jpg?itok=kEvtKXKd&width=413" width="413"></img></a></p>
<div class="field-name-body"><p><em>The Global Power Project, an investigative…</em></p>
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<div id="article-info"><div id="date-and-author">Wed, 6/19/2013 - by Andrew Gavin Marshall</div>
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<div class="field-name-body"><p><em>The Global Power Project, an investigative series produced by Occupy.com, aims to identify and connect the worldwide institutions and individuals who comprise today's global power oligarchy. In <a href="http://activism101.ning.com/profiles/blogs/global-power-project-part-1-exposing-the-transnational-capitalist?xg_source=activity" target="_self">Part 1</a>, which appeared last week, I provided an overview examining who and what constitute the global ruling elite – often referred to as the Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC). In this second part, I will attempt to identify some of the key, dominant institutions that have facilitated and have in turn been supported by the development of this oligarchic class. This is not a study of wealth, but a study of power.</em></p>
<p>In <a href="http://www.sagepub.com/dicken6/Sage%20articles/Chap%203/chap%203%20-%20Carroll.pdf">an article</a> for the journal International Sociology, William K. Carroll and Jean Philippe Sapinski examined the relationship between the corporate elite and the emergence of a “transnational policy-planning network,” beginning with its formation in the decades following World War II and speeding up in the 1970s with the creation of “global policy groups” and think tanks such as the World Economic Forum, in 1971, and the Trilateral Commission, in 1973, among many others.</p>
<p>The function of such institutions was to help mobilize and integrate the corporate elite beyond national borders, constructing a politically “organized minority.” These policy-planning organizations came to exist as “venues for discussion, strategic planning, discourse production and consensus formation on specific issues,” as well as “places where responses to crises of legitimacy are crafted,” such as managing economic, political, or environmental crises where elite interests might be threatened. These groups also often acted as “advocates for specific projects of integration, often on a regional basis.” Perhaps most importantly, the organizations “provide bridges connecting business elites to political actors (heads of states, politicians, high-ranking public servants) and elites and organic intellectuals in other fields (international organizations, military, media, academia).”</p>
<p>One important industry association, according to researchers Carroll and Carson in the journal Global Networks (Vol. 3, No. 1, 2003), is the International Chamber of Commerce. Launched by investment bankers in 1919, immediately following WWI, the Paris-based Chamber groups roughly 7,000 member corporations together across 130 countries, adhering to largely conservative, “free market” ideology. The “primary function” of the ICC, write Carroll and Carson, “is to institutionalize an international business perspective by providing a forum where capitalists and related professionals... can assemble and forge a common international policy framework.”</p>
<p>Another policy group with outsized global influence is the Bilderberg group, founded between 1952 and 1954, which provided “a context for more comprehensive international capitalist coordination and planning.” Bringing together roughly 130 elites from Western Europe and North America at annual closed meetings, “Bilderberg conferences have furnished a confidential platform for corporate, political, intellectual, military and even trade-union elites from the North Atlantic heartland to reach mutual understanding.”</p>
<p>As Valerie Aubourg examined in an article for the journal Intelligence and National Security (Vol. 18, No. 2, 2003), the Bilderberg meetings were organized largely at the initiative of a handful of European elites, with heavy financial backing from select American institutions including the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the CIA. The meetings incorporate leadership from the most prominent national think tanks, such as the Council on Foreign Relations, Brookings Institution, Carnegie Endowment and others from across the North Atlantic ‘community.’</p>
<p>Hugh Wilford, writing in the journal Diplomacy & Statecraft (Vol. 14, No. 3, 2003), identified major philanthropic foundations such as the Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie foundations as not only major sources of funding but also providers for much of the leadership of the Bilderberg meetings, which saw the participation of major industrial and financial firms in line with those foundations (David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan is a good example). Bilderberg was a major force in helping to create the political, economic and strategic consensus behind constructing a common European market.</p>
<p>With the support of these major foundations and their leadership, the Bilderberg meetings became a powerful global tool of the elites, not only in creating the European Union but in designing the process of globalization itself. Will Hutton, a former Bilderberg member, once referred to the group as “the high priests of globalization,” and a former Bilderberg steering committee member, Denis Healey,<a href="http://andrewgavinmarshall.com/2011/07/15/bilderberg-2011-the-rockefeller-world-order-and-the-high-priests-of-globalization/">once noted</a>: “To say we were striving for a one-world government is exaggerated, but not wholly unfair...we felt that a single community throughout the world would be a good thing.”</p>
<p>The large industrial foundations have played a truly profound – and largely overlooked – role in the shaping of modern society. The ‘Robber Baron’ industrial fortunes of the late 19th century – those of Morgan, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harriman, Vanderbilt, etc. – sought to shape a new order in which they would maintain a dominant influence throughout society. They founded major American universities (often named after themselves) such as Vanderbilt, or the University of Chicago which was founded by John D. Rockefeller.</p>
<p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.occupy.com/sites/default/files/media_crop/823/public/occupy-bilderberg-2012.jpg"><img class="align-right" src="http://www.occupy.com/sites/default/files/media_crop/823/public/occupy-bilderberg-2012.jpg?width=420" width="420"/></a></p>
<p>It was through their institutions that they sought to produce new elites to manage a new society, atop of which they sat. These universities became the harbingers of modern social sciences, seeking to "reform" society to fit the needs of those who dominated it; to engage in social engineering with the purpose of social control. It was in this context that the Carnegie Corporation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and later the Ford Foundation and others were founded: as engines of social engineering. One of their principal aims was to shape the development of the social sciences – and their exportation around the world to other industrial and imperial powers like Great Britain, and beyond. The social sciences were to facilitate the “scientific management” of society, and the foundations were the patrons of "<a href="http://andrewgavinmarshall.com/2012/04/08/the-purpose-of-education-social-uplift-or-social-control/">social control</a>."</p>
<p>The Rockefeller, Carnegie and Ford foundations were instrumental in providing funding, organization and personnel for the development of major American and international think tanks such as the Council on Foreign Relations, which became essential to the emergence of a dominant and entrenched U.S. business class linking academia, political, strategic, corporate and financial elites. The Rockefeller and Ford foundations in particular constructed the field of modern political science and "Area Studies" with a view to educating a <a href="http://andrewgavinmarshall.com/2011/10/18/an-education-for-empire-the-rockefeller-carnegie-and-ford-foundations-in-the-construction-of-knowledge/">class of people</a> who would be prepared to help manage a global empire.</p>
<p>They were also prominent in developing the educational system for black Americans designed to keep them relegated to labor and “vocational” training. They helped found many prominent universities in Africa, Asia and Latin America to train indigenous elites with a "Western" education in the social sciences, to <a href="http://andrewgavinmarshall.com/2011/10/21/education-or-domination-the-rockefeller-carnegie-and-ford-foundations-developing-knowledge-for-the-developing-world/">ensure continuity</a> between a domestic and international elite, between core and periphery, empire and protectorate.</p>
<p>Another major policy planning group is the Trilateral Commission, created out of the Bilderberg meetings as a separate transnational think tank and founded by Chase Manhattan CEO (and Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations) David Rockefeller along with academic-turned-policymaker Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1973. The Trilateral Commission linked the elites from Western Europe, North America and Japan (hence “trilateral”), and it now also includes members from China, India and a range of other Pacific-East Asian countries.</p>
<p>Consisting of a membership of roughly 350 individuals from finance, corporations, media, think tanks, foundations, academia and political circles, the Trilateral Commission (TC) has been immensely influential as a forum facilitating the development and integration of a "transnational elite." The aim of the TC was “to <a href="http://www.trilateral.org/go.cfm?do=Page.View&pid=5">foster closer cooperation</a> among these core industrialized areas of the world with shared leadership responsibilities in the wider international system.”</p>
<p>The most famous report issued by the Trilateral Commission in the mid-1970s suggested that due to the popular activism of the 1960s, there was a “crisis of democracy” that it defined as an “<a href="http://andrewgavinmarshall.com/2012/04/02/class-war-and-the-college-crisis-the-crisis-of-democracy-and-the-attack-on-education/">excess of democracy</a>,” which needed to be reduced in order for “democracy to function effectively.” According to the Trilateral Commission, what was needed was increased “apathy and noninvolvement on the part of some individuals and groups” to counter the “crisis” being caused by “a highly educated, mobilized, and participant society.”</p>
<p>Moving elsewhere, the World Economic Forum, founded in 1971, convenes annually in Davos, Switzerland and was originally designed “to secure the patronage of the Commission of European Communities, as well as the encouragement of Europe’s industry associations” and “to discuss European strategy in an international marketplace.” The WEF has since expanded its membership and mandate, as Carroll and Carson noted, “organized around a highly elite core of transnational capitalists (the 'Foundation Membership') – which it currently limits to '1000 of the foremost global enterprises’.” The meetings include prominent individuals from the scientific community, academics, the media, NGOs and many other policy groups.</p>
<p>Another major policy planning group emerged in the mid-1990s with an increased focus on environmental issues, called the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), which “instantly became the pre-eminent business voice on the environment” with a 1997 membership of 123 top corporate executives, tasked with bringing the “voice” of big business to the process of international efforts to address environmental concerns (and thus, to secure their own interests).</p>
<p>Among other prominent think tanks and policy-planning boards helping to facilitate and integrate a transnational network of elites are many nation-based organizations, particularly in the United States, such as with the Council on Foreign Relations, the Brookings Institution and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), among many others. The advisory boards to these organizations provide an important forum through which transnational elites may help to influence the policies of many separate nations, and most importantly, the world’s most powerful nation: the United States.</p>
<p>The Council on Foreign Relations, founded in 1921, refers to itself as “an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher,” with roughly 4,700 members. It is largely based in New York with affiliate offices in Washington D.C. and elsewhere. The CFR is, and has been, at the heart of the American foreign policy establishment, bringing together elites from academia, government, the media, intelligence, military, financial and corporate institutions.</p>
<p>The CFR worked in close cooperation with the U.S. government during World War II to design the post-War world over which America would reign supreme. The Council was active in establishing the “<a href="http://andrewgavinmarshall.com/2011/12/13/the-council-on-foreign-relations-and-the-grand-area-of-the-american-empire/">Grand Areas</a>” of the American Empire, and in <a href="http://andrewgavinmarshall.com/2011/11/30/sneak-peak-at-my-book-the-rockefeller-world-council-on-foreign-relations-and-the-trilateral-commission/">maintaining extensive influence</a> over the foreign policy of the United States.</p>
<p>As Carroll and Carson noted, there is a prominent relationship between those individuals who sit on multiple corporate boards and those who sit on the boards of prominent national and transnational policy-planning groups, “suggesting a highly centralized corporate-policy network.”</p>
<p>Studying 622 corporate directors and 302 organizations (five of which were the major policy-planning groups: ICC, Bilderberg, Trilateral Commission, World Economic Forum and World Business Council for Sustainable Development), Carroll and Carson assessed this network of transnational elites with data leading up to 1996, and concluded: “The international network is primarily a configuration of national corporate networks, integrated for the most part through the affiliations of a few dozen individuals who either hold transnational corporate directorships or serve on two or more policy boards.”</p>
<p>Out of the sample of 622 individuals, they found roughly 105 individuals (94 “transnational corporate linkers” and 11 others “whose corporate affiliations are not transnational but who sit on multiple global policy boards”) making up “the most immediate structural contributions to transnational class formation.” At the “core” of this network were 17 corporate directors, primarily European and North American, largely linked by the transnational policy groups, with the Trilateral Commission as “the most centrally positioned.” This network, they noted, “is highly centralized in terms of the individuals and organizations that participate in it.”</p>
<p>In undertaking a follow-up study of data between 1996 and 2006, published in the journal International Sociology (Vol. 25, No. 4, 2010), Carroll and Sapinski expanded the number of policy-planning groups from five to 11, including the original five (ICC, Bilderberg, TC, WEF, and WBCSD), but adding to them the Council on Foreign Relations (through its International Advisory Board), the UN Global Compact (through its advisory board), the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT), founded in 1983, the EU-Japan Business Round Table, the Transatlantic Business Dialogue, and the North American Competitiveness Council.</p>
<p>The results of their research found that among the corporate directors, “policy-board membership has shifted towards the transnationalists, who come to comprise a larger segment of the global corporate elite,” and that there was a growing group of elites “made up of individuals with one or more transnational policy-board affiliations.” As Carroll and Sapinski concluded:</p>
<p>"The corporate-policy network is highly centralized, at both the level of individuals and that of organizations. Its inner circle is a tightly interwoven ensemble of politically active business leaders; its organizational core includes the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Conference, the European Round Table of Industrialists and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, surrounded by other policy boards and by the directorates of leading industrial corporations and financial institutions based in capitalism’s core regions."</p>
<p>Organizations like the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT) are not think tanks, but rather, industry organizations (exclusively representing the interests and individuals of major corporations), wielding significant influence over political and social elites. As Bastiaan van Apeldoorn wrote in the journal New Political Economy (Vol. 5, No. 2, 2000), the ERT “developed into an elite platform for an emergent European transnational capitalist class from which it can formulate a common strategy and – on the basis of that strategy – seek to shape European socioeconomic governance through its privileged access to the European institutions.”</p>
<p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.occupy.com/sites/default/files/media_crop/824/public/bilderberg44687213.jpg"><img class="align-right" src="http://www.occupy.com/sites/default/files/media_crop/824/public/bilderberg44687213.jpg?width=400" width="400"/></a></p>
<p>In 1983, the ERT was formed as an organization of 17 major European industrialists (which has since expanded to several dozen members), with the proclaimed objective being “to revitalize European industry and make it competitive again, and to speed up the process of unification of the European common market.” Wisse Dekker, former Chairman of the ERT, once stated: “I would consider the Round Table to be more than a lobby group as it helps to shape policies. The Round Table’s relationship with Brussels [the EU] is one of strong co-operation. It is a dialogue which often begins at a very early stage in the development of policies and directives.”</p>
<p>The ERT was a central institution in the re-launching of European integration from the 1980s onward, and as former European Commissioner (and former ERT member) Peter Sutherland stated, “one can argue that the whole completion of the internal market project was initiated not by governments but by the Round Table, and by members of it... And I think it played a fairly consistent role subsequently in dialoguing with the Commission on practical steps to implement market liberalization.” Sutherland also explained that the ERT and its members “have to be at the highest levels of companies and virtually all of them have unimpeded access to government leaders because of the position of their companies... So, by definition, each member of the ERT has access at the highest level to government.”</p>
<p>Other notable industry associations include the <a href="http://andrewgavinmarshall.com/2012/04/24/canadas-economic-collapse-and-social-crisis-class-war-and-the-college-crisis-part-5/">Canadian Council of Chief Executives</a> (CCCE), formerly called the Business Council on National Issues (BCNI), a group comprised of Canada’s top 150 CEOs who were a major force for the promotion and implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The CCCE remains one of the most influential “interest groups” in Canada.</p>
<p>In the United States there are prominent industry associations like the Business Council, the Business Roundtable, and the Financial Services Forum. The Business Council describes itself as “a voluntary association of business leaders whose members meet several times a year for the free exchange of ideas both among themselves and with thought leaders from many sectors.”</p>
<p>Likewise, the <a href="http://businessroundtable.org/about-us/">Business Roundtable</a> describes itself as “an association of chief executive officers of leading U.S. companies with more than $7.3 trillion in annual revenues,” which believes that “businesses should play an active and effective role in the formation of public policy.”</p>
<p>Finally, the <a href="http://www.financialservicesforum.org/index.php/about-the-forum/forum-mission">Financial Services Forum</a> proclaims itself to be “a non-partisan financial and economic policy organization” which aims “to pursue policies that encourage savings and investment, promote an open and competitive global marketplace, and ensure the opportunity of people everywhere to participate fully and productively in the 21st-century global economy.”</p>
<p>These are among some of the many institutions which will be researched and examined in greater detail throughout the Global Power Project. In the next installment, I will be examining not only the societal and economic results of these dominant institutions of power, but the specific individuals — and in some cases family dynasties — that wield significant influence nationally and globally.</p>
<p><em><a href="http://www.andrewgavinmarshall.com/">Andrew Gavin Marshall</a> is an independent researcher and writer based in Montreal, Canada. He is Project Manager of The People’s Book Project, head of the Geopolitics Division of the Hampton Institute, Research Director for Occupy.com’s Global Power Project and host of a weekly podcast show at BoilingFrogsPost.</em></p>
<div><img alt="" class="media-image attr__media_crop_h__0 attr__media_crop_image_style__-1 attr__media_crop_instance__825 attr__media_crop_rotate__0 attr__media_crop_scale_h__480 attr__media_crop_scale_w__640 attr__media_crop_w__0 attr__media_crop_x__0 attr__media_crop_y__0" id="media_crop_8663944704458" src="http://www.occupy.com/sites/default/files/media_crop/825/public/corporate-states-of-am.jpg" name="media_crop_8663944704458" height="298" width="398"/></div>
</div>Global Power Project, Part 1: Exposing the Transnational Capitalist Classtag:activism101.ning.com,2013-07-03:3143100:BlogPost:334542013-07-03T04:00:00.000ZCromaghttp://activism101.ning.com/profile/Cromag
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<div id="article-info"><div id="date-and-author">Wed, 6/12/2013 - by Andrew Gavin Marshall</div>
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<p><a href="http://www.occupy.com/sites/default/files/styles/slide_narrow/public/field/image/slider_5.jpg?itok=sN0BRq_Q" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" height="243" src="http://www.occupy.com/sites/default/files/styles/slide_narrow/public/field/image/slider_5.jpg?itok=sN0BRq_Q" width="432"></img></a> <em><strong>The Global Power Project</strong>, an investigative series produced by Occupy.com, aims to identify and connect the…</em></p>
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<div id="article-info"><div id="date-and-author">Wed, 6/12/2013 - by Andrew Gavin Marshall</div>
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<p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.occupy.com/sites/default/files/styles/slide_narrow/public/field/image/slider_5.jpg?itok=sN0BRq_Q"><img class="align-right" src="http://www.occupy.com/sites/default/files/styles/slide_narrow/public/field/image/slider_5.jpg?itok=sN0BRq_Q" height="243" width="432"/></a><em><strong>The Global Power Project</strong>, an investigative series produced by Occupy.com, aims to identify and connect the worldwide institutions and individuals who comprise today's global power oligarchy. By studying the relationships and varying levels of leadership that govern our planet's most influential institutions — from banks, corporations and financial institutions to think tanks, foundations and universities — this project seeks to expose the complex, highly integrated network of influence wielded by relatively few individuals on a national and transnational basis. This is not a study of wealth, but a study of power.</em></p>
<div class="field-name-body"><p>Many now know the rhetoric of the 1% very well: the imagery of a small elite owning most of the wealth while the 99% take the table scraps. This rhetoric and imagery was made popular by the growth of the Occupy movement, so it seems appropriate that a project of Occupy.com should expand on this understanding and bring the activities of the global elite further to light.</p>
<p>In 2006, <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2006/dec/06/business.internationalnews">a UN report</a> revealed that the world’s richest 1% own 40% of the world’s wealth, with those in the financial and internet sectors comprising the “super rich.” More than a third of the world’s super-rich live in the U.S., with roughly 27% in Japan, 6% in the U.K., and 5% in France. The world’s richest 10% accounted for roughly 85% of the planet's total assets, while the bottom half of the population – more than 3 billion people – owned less than 1% of the world’s wealth.</p>
<p>Looking specifically at the United States, the top 1% own more than 36% of the national wealth and more than the combined wealth of the bottom 95%. Almost all of the wealth gains over the previous decade went to the top 1%. In the mid-1970s, the top 1% earned 8% of all national income; this number rose to 21% by 2010. At the highest sliver at the top, the 400 wealthiest individuals in America have more wealth than the bottom 150 million.</p>
<p><img alt="" class="media-image attr__media_crop_h__0 attr__media_crop_image_style__-1 attr__media_crop_instance__757 attr__media_crop_rotate__0 attr__media_crop_scale_h__0 attr__media_crop_scale_w__0 attr__media_crop_w__0 attr__media_crop_x__0 attr__media_crop_y__0" id="media_crop_4311109930276" style="border-width: 1px; border-style: solid;" src="http://www.occupy.com/sites/default/files/media_crop/757/public/plutonomy.png" name="media_crop_4311109930276" height="468" width="529"/></p>
<p><a href="http://pissedoffwoman.wordpress.com/2012/04/12/the-plutonomy-reports-download/">A 2005 report from Citigroup</a> coined the term “plutonomy” to describe countries “where economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few.” The report specifically identified the U.K., Canada, Australia and the United States as four plutonomies. Published three years before the onset of the financial crisis in 2008, the Citigroup report stated: “Asset booms, a rising profit share and favorable treatment by market-friendly governments have allowed the rich to prosper and become a greater share of the economy in the plutonomy countries.”</p>
<p>"The rich," said the report, "are in great shape, financially.”</p>
<p>In early 2013, Oxfam reported that the fortunes made by the world’s 100 richest people over the course of 2012 – roughly $240 billion – would be enough to lift the world’s poorest people out of poverty four times over. In <a href="http://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/cost-of-inequality-oxfam-mb180113.pdf">the Oxfam report</a>, "The Cost of Inequality: How Wealth and Income Extremes Hurt Us All," the international charity noted that in the past 20 years, the richest 1% had increased their incomes by 60%. Barbara Stocking, an Oxfam executive, noted that this type of extreme wealth is “economically inefficient, politically corrosive, socially divisive and environmentally destructive...We can no longer pretend that the creation of wealth for a few will inevitably benefit the many – too often the reverse is true.”</p>
<p>The report added: “In the UK, inequality is rapidly returning to levels not seen since the time of Charles Dickens. In China the top 10% now take home nearly 60% of the income. Chinese inequality levels are now similar to those in South Africa, which is now the most unequal country on Earth and significantly more unequal than at the end of apartheid.” In the United States, the share of national income going to the top 1% has doubled from 10 to 20% since 1980, and for the top 0.01% in the United States, “the share of national income is above levels last seen in the 1920s.”</p>
<p>Previously, in July of 2012, James Henry, a former chief economist at McKinsey, a major global consultancy, published a major report on tax havens for the Tax Justice Network which compiled data from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the IMF and other private sector entities to reveal that the world’s super-rich have hidden between $21 and $32 trillion offshore to avoid taxation.</p>
<p>Henry stated: “This offshore economy is large enough to have a major impact on estimates of inequality of wealth and income; on estimates of national income and debt ratios; and – most importantly – to have very significant negative impacts on the domestic tax bases of ‘source’ countries.” John Christensen of the Tax Justice Network <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jul/21/offshore-wealth-global-economy-tax-havens">further commented</a> that “Inequality is much, much worse than official statistics show, but politicians are still relying on trickle-down to transfer wealth to poorer people... This new data shows the exact opposite has happened: for three decades extraordinary wealth has been cascading into the offshore accounts of a tiny number of super-rich.”</p>
<p>With roughly half of the world’s offshore wealth, or some $10 trillion, belonging to 92,000 of the planet's richest individuals —representing not the top 1% but the top 0.001% — we see a far more extreme global disparity taking shape than the one invoked by the Occupy movement. Henry commented: “The very existence of the global offshore industry, and the tax-free status of the enormous sums invested by their wealthy clients, is predicated on secrecy.”</p>
<p>In <a href="http://www.salon.com/2008/03/14/superclass/">his 2008 book</a>, "Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making," David Rothkopf, a man firmly entrenched within the institutions of global power and the elites which run them, compiled a census of roughly 6,000 individuals whom he referred to as the “superclass.” They were defined not simply by their wealth, he said, but by the influence they exercised within the realms of business, finance, politics, military, culture, the arts and beyond.</p>
<p>Rothkopf noted: “Each member is set apart by his ability to regularly influence the lives of millions of people in multiple countries worldwide. Each actively exercises this power and often amplifies it through the development of relationships with other superclass members.”</p>
<p>The global elite are of course not defined by their wealth alone, but through the institutional, ideological and individual connections and networks in which they wield their influence. The most obvious example of these types of institutions are the multinational banks and corporations which dominate the global economy. In the first scientific study of its kind, Swiss researchers analyzed the relationship between 43,000 transnational corporations and “identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.”</p>
<p>In <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0025995">their report</a>, "The Network of Global Corporate Control, researchers noted that this network – which they defined as "ownership" by a person or firm over another firm, whether partially or entirely – “is much more unequally distributed than wealth” and that “the top ranked actors hold a control ten times bigger than what could be expected based on their wealth.” The “core” of this network – which consists of the world's top 737 corporations – control 80% of all transnational corporations (TNCs).</p>
<p>Even more extreme, the top 147 transnational corporations control roughly 40% of the entire economic value of the world’s TNCs, forming their own network known as the “super-entity.” The super-entity conglomerates all control each other, and thus control a significant portion of the rest of the world’s corporations with the “core” of the global corporate network consisting primarily of financial corporations and intermediaries.</p>
<p>In December of 2011, the former deputy secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton administration, Roger Altman, wrote an article for the Financial Times in which <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/890161ac-1b69-11e1-85f8-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2Vy2qWuKg">he described</a> financial markets as “a global supra-government” which can “oust entrenched regimes... force austerity, banking bail-outs and other major policy changes.” Altman said bluntly that the influence of this entity “dwarfs multilateral institutions such as the International Monetary Fund” as “they have become the most powerful force on earth.”</p>
<p>With the formation of this “super-entity” – a veritable global supra-government – made up of the world’s largest banks and corporations exerting immense influence over all other corporations, a new global class structure has evolved. It is this rarefied group of individuals and firms, and the relations they hold with one another, that we wish to further understand.</p>
<p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.occupy.com/sites/default/files/media_crop/758/public/cropped-eagle.jpg"><img class="align-left" src="http://www.occupy.com/sites/default/files/media_crop/758/public/cropped-eagle.jpg?width=401" height="206" width="344"/></a></p>
<p>According to <a href="http://www.globaltrends.com/knowledge-center/features/shapers-and-influencers/151-special-report-corporate-clout-distributed-the-influence-of-the-worlds-largest-100-economic-entities">the 2012 report</a>, "Corporate Clout Distributed: The Influence of the World’s Largest 100 Economic Entities," of the world’s 100 largest economic entities in 2010, 42% were corporations while the rest were governments. Among the largest 150 economic entities, 58% were corporations. Wal-Mart was the largest corporation in 2010 and the 25th largest economic entity on earth, with greater revenue than the GDPs of no less than 171 countries.</p>
<p>According to the <a href="http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2011/full_list/index.html">Fortune Global 500 list of corporations</a> for 2011, Royal Dutch Shell next became the largest conglomerate on earth, followed by Exxon, Wal-Mart, and BP. The Global 500 made record revenue in 2011 totaling some $29.5 trillion — more than a 13% increase from 2010.</p>
<p>With such massive wealth and power held by these institutions and "networks" of corporations, those individuals who sit on the boards, executive committees and advisory groups to the largest corporations and banks wield significant influence on their own. But their influence does not stand in isolation from other elites, nor do the institutions of banks and corporations function in isolation from other entities such as state, educational, cultural or media institutions.</p>
<p>Largely facilitated by the cross-membership that exists between boards of corporations, think tanks, foundations, educational institutions and advisory groups — not to mention the continual "revolving door" between the state and corporate sectors — these elites become a highly integrated, organized and evolved social group. This is as true for the formation of national elites as it is for transnational, or global, elites.</p>
<p>The rise of corporations and banks to a truly global scale – what is popularly referred to as the process of “globalization” – was facilitated by the growth of other transnational networks and institutions such as think tanks and foundations, which sought to facilitate these ideological and institutional structures of globalization. A wealth of research and analysis has been undertaken in academic literature over the past couple of decades to understand the development of this phenomenon, examining the emergence of what is often referred to as the "Transnational Capitalist Class" (TCC). In various political science and sociology journals, researchers and academics reject a conspiratorial thesis and instead advance a social analysis of what is viewed as a powerful social system and group.</p>
<p>As Val Burris and Clifford L. Staples argued in an article for the International Journal of Comparative Sociology (Vol. 53, No. 4, 2012), “as transnational corporations become increasingly global in their operations, the elites who own and control those corporations will also cease to be organized or divided along national lines.” They added: “We are witnessing the formation of a ‘transnational capitalist class’ (TCC) whose social networks, affiliations, and identities will no longer be embedded primarily in the roles they occupy as citizens of specific nations.” To properly understand this TCC, it is necessary to study what the authors call “interlocking directorates,” defined as “the structure of interpersonal or interorganizational relations that is created whenever a director of one corporation sits on the governing board of another corporation.”</p>
<p>The growth of “interlocking directorates” is primarily confined to European and North American conglomerates, whereas those in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East largely remain “isolated from the global interlock network.” Thus, the “transnationalization” of corporate directorates and, ultimately, of global class structures “is more a manifestation of the process of European integration – or, perhaps, of the emergence of a North Atlantic ruling class.”</p>
<p>The conclusion of these researchers was that the ruling class is not “global” as such, but rather “a supra-national capitalist class that has gone a considerable way toward transcending national divisions,” notably in the industrialized countries of Western Europe and North America; in their words, "the regional locus of transnational class formation is more accurately described as the North Atlantic region.” However, with the rise of the "East" – notably the economic might of Japan, China, India, and other East Asian nations – the interlocks and interconnections among elites are likely to expand as various other networks of institutions seek to integrate these regions.</p>
<p>The influence wielded by banks and corporations is not simply through their direct wealth or operations, but through the affiliations, interactions and integration by those who run the institutions with political and social elites, both nationally and globally. While we can identify a global elite as a wealth percentage (the top 1% or, more accurately, the top 0.001%), this does not account for the more indirect and institutionalized influence that corporate and financial leaders exert over politics and society as a whole.</p>
<p>To further understand this, we must identify and explore the dominant institutions which facilitate the integration of these elites from an array of corporations, banks, academia, the media, military, intelligence, political and cultural spheres. This will be the subject of the second installment in the series, appearing next week.</p>
<p><em>Andrew Gavin Marshall is an independent researcher and writer based in Montreal, Canada.</em></p>
<div><img alt="" class="media-image attr__media_crop_h__0 attr__media_crop_image_style__-1 attr__media_crop_instance__759 attr__media_crop_rotate__0 attr__media_crop_scale_h__391 attr__media_crop_scale_w__640 attr__media_crop_w__0 attr__media_crop_x__0 attr__media_crop_y__0" id="media_crop_4458023391198" src="http://www.occupy.com/sites/default/files/media_crop/759/public/plutonomytoffstoughsjimmysime.jpg" name="media_crop_4458023391198" height="288" width="470"/></div>
<div>Source: <a href="http://www.occupy.com/article/global-power-project-part-1-exposing-transnational-capitalist-class" target="_blank">Occupy.com</a></div>
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</div>Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Evertag:activism101.ning.com,2013-05-03:3143100:BlogPost:323972013-05-03T20:30:00.000ZCromaghttp://activism101.ning.com/profile/Cromag
<h2>The Illuminati were amateurs. The second huge financial scandal of the year reveals the real international conspiracy: There's no price the big banks can't fix<a href="http://assets.rollingstone.com/assets/images/story/everything-is-rigged-the-biggest-financial-scandal-yet-20130425/1000x600/20130423-national-affairs-600-1366749334.jpg" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="http://assets.rollingstone.com/assets/images/story/everything-is-rigged-the-biggest-financial-scandal-yet-20130425/1000x600/20130423-national-affairs-600-1366749334.jpg?width=300" width="300"></img></a></h2>
<h3 class="byline">by <strong>Matt Taibbi</strong></h3>
<div class="date">APRIL 25, 2013…</div>
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<h2>The Illuminati were amateurs. The second huge financial scandal of the year reveals the real international conspiracy: There's no price the big banks can't fix<a target="_blank" href="http://assets.rollingstone.com/assets/images/story/everything-is-rigged-the-biggest-financial-scandal-yet-20130425/1000x600/20130423-national-affairs-600-1366749334.jpg"><img class="align-right" src="http://assets.rollingstone.com/assets/images/story/everything-is-rigged-the-biggest-financial-scandal-yet-20130425/1000x600/20130423-national-affairs-600-1366749334.jpg?width=300" width="300"/></a></h2>
<h3 class="byline">by <strong>Matt Taibbi</strong></h3>
<div class="date">APRIL 25, 2013</div>
<div class="body"><p><span style="float: left; color: #000; font-size: 35pt; line-height: 0.7; margin: 0.13em 0.1em 0 0;">C</span>onspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world's largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.</p>
<p>You may have heard of the LIBOR scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that's trillion, with a "t") worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it "dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets."</p>
<p>That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world's largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess. Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world's largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.</p>
<p>Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It's about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.</p>
<p>It should surprise no one that among the players implicated in this scheme to fix the prices of interest-rate swaps are the same megabanks – including Barclays, UBS, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and the Royal Bank of Scotland – that serve on the Libor panel that sets global interest rates. In fact, in recent years many of these banks have already paid multimillion-dollar settlements for anti-competitive manipulation of one form or another (in addition to Libor, some were caught up in an anti-competitive scheme, <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-scam-wall-street-learned-from-the-mafia-20120620" target="_blank">detailed in <em>Rolling Stone</em> last year</a>, to rig municipal-debt service auctions). Though the jumble of financial acronyms sounds like gibberish to the layperson, the fact that there may now be price-fixing scandals involving both Libor and ISDAfix suggests a single, giant mushrooming conspiracy of collusion and price-fixing hovering under the ostensibly competitive veneer of Wall Street culture.</p>
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<p>Why? Because Libor already affects the prices of interest-rate swaps, making this a manipulation-on-manipulation situation. If the allegations prove to be right, that will mean that swap customers have been paying for two different layers of price-fixing corruption. If you can imagine paying 20 bucks for a crappy PB&J because some evil cabal of agribusiness companies colluded to fix the prices of both peanuts and peanut butter, you come close to grasping the lunacy of financial markets where both interest rates and interest-rate swaps are being manipulated at the same time, often by the same banks.</p>
<p>"It's a double conspiracy," says an amazed Michael Greenberger, a former director of the trading and markets division at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and now a professor at the University of Maryland. "It's the height of criminality."</p>
<p>The bad news didn't stop with swaps and interest rates. In March, it also came out that two regulators – the CFTC here in the U.S. and the Madrid-based International Organization of Securities Commissions – were spurred by the Libor revelations to investigate the possibility of collusive manipulation of gold and silver prices. "Given the clubby manipulation efforts we saw in Libor benchmarks, I assume other benchmarks – many other benchmarks – are legit areas of inquiry," CFTC Commissioner Bart Chilton said.</p>
<p>But the biggest shock came out of a federal courtroom at the end of March – though if you follow these matters closely, it may not have been so shocking at all – when a landmark class-action civil lawsuit against the banks for Libor-related offenses was dismissed. In that case, a federal judge accepted the banker-defendants' incredible argument: If cities and towns and other investors lost money because of Libor manipulation, that was their own fault for ever thinking the banks were competing in the first place.</p>
<p>"A farce," was one antitrust lawyer's response to the eyebrow-raising dismissal.</p>
<p>"Incredible," says Sylvia Sokol, an attorney for Constantine Cannon, a firm that specializes in antitrust cases.</p>
<p>All of these stories collectively pointed to the same thing: These banks, which already possess enormous power just by virtue of their financial holdings – in the United States, the top six banks, many of them the same names you see on the Libor and ISDAfix panels, own assets equivalent to 60 percent of the nation's GDP – are beginning to realize the awesome possibilities for increased profit and political might that would come with colluding instead of competing. Moreover, it's increasingly clear that both the criminal justice system and the civil courts may be impotent to stop them, even when they do get caught working together to game the system.</p>
<p>If true, that would leave us living in an era of undisguised, real-world conspiracy, in which the prices of currencies, commodities like gold and silver, even interest rates and the value of money itself, can be and may already have been dictated from above. And those who are doing it can get away with it. Forget the Illuminati – this is the real thing, and it's no secret. You can stare right at it, anytime you want.</p>
<p><span style="float: left; color: #000; font-size: 35pt; line-height: 0.7; margin: 0.13em 0.1em 0 0;">T</span>he banks found a loophole, a basic flaw in the machine. Across the financial system, there are places where prices or official indices are set based upon unverified data sent in by private banks and financial companies. In other words, we gave the players with incentives to game the system institutional roles in the economic infrastructure.</p>
<p>Libor, which measures the prices banks charge one another to borrow money, is a perfect example, not only of this basic flaw in the price-setting system but of the weakness in the regulatory framework supposedly policing it. Couple a voluntary reporting scheme with too-big-to-fail status and a revolving-door legal system, and what you get is unstoppable corruption.</p>
<p>Every morning, 18 of the world's biggest banks submit data to an office in London about how much they believe they would have to pay to borrow from other banks. The 18 banks together are called the "Libor panel," and when all of these data from all 18 panelist banks are collected, the numbers are averaged out. What emerges, every morning at 11:30 London time, are the daily Libor figures.</p>
<p>Banks submit numbers about borrowing in 10 different currencies across 15 different time periods, e.g., loans as short as one day and as long as one year. This mountain of bank-submitted data is used every day to create benchmark rates that affect the prices of everything from credit cards to mortgages to currencies to commercial loans (both short- and long-term) to swaps.</p>
<p><a class="inStoryLink" href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/gangster-bankers-too-big-to-jail-20130214" target="_blank">Gangster Bankers Broke Every Law in the Book</a></p>
<p>Dating back perhaps as far as the early Nineties, traders and others inside these banks were sometimes calling up the company geeks responsible for submitting the daily Libor numbers (the "Libor submitters") and asking them to fudge the numbers. Usually, the gimmick was the trader had made a bet on something – a swap, currencies, something – and he wanted the Libor submitter to make the numbers look lower (or, occasionally, higher) to help his bet pay off.</p>
<p>Famously, one Barclays trader monkeyed with Libor submissions in exchange for a bottle of Bollinger champagne, but in some cases, it was even lamer than that. This is from an exchange between a trader and a Libor submitter at the Royal Bank of Scotland:</p>
<blockquote><p>SWISS FRANC TRADER: can u put 6m swiss libor in low pls?... <br/>PRIMARY SUBMITTER: Whats it worth <br/>SWSISS FRANC TRADER: ive got some sushi rolls from yesterday?... <br/>PRIMARY SUBMITTER: ok low 6m, just for u <br/>SWISS FRANC TRADER: wooooooohooooooo. . . thatd be awesome</p>
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<p>Screwing around with world interest rates that affect billions of people in exchange for day-old sushi – it's hard to imagine an image that better captures the moral insanity of the modern financial-services sector.</p>
<p>Hundreds of similar exchanges were uncovered when regulators like Britain's Financial Services Authority and the U.S. Justice Department started burrowing into the befouled entrails of Libor. The documentary evidence of anti-competitive manipulation they found was so overwhelming that, to read it, one almost becomes embarrassed for the banks. "It's just amazing how Libor fixing can make you that much money," chirped one yen trader. "Pure manipulation going on," wrote another.</p>
<p>Yet despite so many instances of at least attempted manipulation, the banks mostly skated. Barclays got off with a relatively minor fine in the $450 million range, UBS was stuck with $1.5 billion in penalties, and RBS was forced to give up $615 million. Apart from a few low-level flunkies overseas, no individual involved in this scam that impacted nearly everyone in the industrialized world was even threatened with criminal prosecution.</p>
<p>Two of America's top law-enforcement officials, Attorney General Eric Holder and former Justice Department Criminal Division chief Lanny Breuer, confessed that it's dangerous to prosecute offending banks because they are simply too big. Making arrests, they say, might lead to "collateral consequences" in the economy.</p>
<p>The relatively small sums of money extracted in these settlements did not go toward reparations for the cities, towns and other victims who lost money due to Libor manipulation. Instead, it flowed mindlessly into government coffers. So it was left to towns and cities like Baltimore (which lost money due to fluctuations in their municipal investments caused by Libor movements), pensions like the New Britain, Connecticut, Firefighters' and Police Benefit Fund, and other foundations – and even individuals (billionaire real-estate developer Sheldon Solow, who filed his own suit in February, claims that his company lost $450 million because of Libor manipulation) – to sue the banks for damages.</p>
<p>One of the biggest Libor suits was proceeding on schedule when, early in March, an army of superstar lawyers working on behalf of the banks descended upon federal judge Naomi Buchwald in the Southern District of New York to argue an extraordinary motion to dismiss. The banks' legal dream team drew from heavyweight Beltway-connected firms like Boies Schiller (you remember David Boies represented Al Gore), Davis Polk (home of top ex-regulators like former SEC enforcement chief Linda Thomsen) and Covington & Burling, the onetime private-practice home of both Holder and Breuer.</p>
<p>The presence of Covington & Burling in the suit – representing, of all companies, Citigroup, the former employer of current Treasury Secretary Jack Lew – was particularly galling. Right as the Libor case was being dismissed, the firm had hired none other than Lanny Breuer, the same Lanny Breuer who, just a few months before, was the assistant attorney general who had balked at criminally prosecuting UBS over Libor because, he said, "Our goal here is not to destroy a major financial institution."</p>
<p>In any case, this all-star squad of white-shoe lawyers came before Buchwald and made the mother of all audacious arguments. Robert Wise of Davis Polk, representing Bank of America, told Buchwald that the banks could not possibly be guilty of anti- competitive collusion because nobody ever said that the creation of Libor was competitive. "It is essential to our argument that this is not a competitive process," he said. "The banks do not compete with one another in the submission of Libor."</p>
<p>If you squint incredibly hard and look at the issue through a mirror, maybe while standing on your head, you can sort of see what Wise is saying. In a very theoretical, technical sense, the actual process by which banks submit Libor data – 18 geeks sending numbers to the British Bankers' Association offices in London once every morning – is not competitive per se.</p>
<p>But these numbers are supposed to reflect interbank-loan prices derived in a real, competitive market. Saying the Libor submission process is not competitive is sort of like pointing out that bank robbers obeyed the speed limit on the way to the heist. It's the silliest kind of legal sophistry.</p>
<p>But Wise eventually outdid even that argument, essentially saying that while the banks may have lied to or cheated their customers, they weren't guilty of the particular crime of antitrust collusion. This is like the old joke about the lawyer who gets up in court and claims his client had to be innocent, because his client was committing a crime in a different state at the time of the offense.</p>
<p>"The plaintiffs, I believe, are confusing a claim of being perhaps deceived," he said, "with a claim for harm to competition."</p>
<p>Judge Buchwald swallowed this lunatic argument whole and dismissed most of the case. Libor, she said, was a "cooperative endeavor" that was "never intended to be competitive." Her decision "does not reflect the reality of this business, where all of these banks were acting as competitors throughout the process," said the antitrust lawyer Sokol. Buchwald made this ruling despite the fact that both the U.S. and British governments had already settled with three banks for billions of dollars for improper manipulation, manipulation that these companies admitted to in their settlements.</p>
<p>Michael Hausfeld of Hausfeld LLP, one of the lead lawyers for the plaintiffs in this Libor suit, declined to comment specifically on the dismissal. But he did talk about the significance of the Libor case and other manipulation cases now in the pipeline.</p>
<p>"It's now evident that there is a ubiquitous culture among the banks to collude and cheat their customers as many times as they can in as many forms as they can conceive," he said. "And that's not just surmising. This is just based upon what they've been caught at."</p>
<p>Greenberger says the lack of serious consequences for the Libor scandal has only made other kinds of manipulation more inevitable. "There's no therapy like sending those who are used to wearing Gucci shoes to jail," he says. "But when the attorney general says, 'I don't want to indict people,' it's the Wild West. There's no law."</p>
<p><span style="float: left; color: #000; font-size: 35pt; line-height: 0.7; margin: 0.13em 0.1em 0 0;">T</span>he problem is, a number of markets feature the same infrastructural weakness that failed in the Libor mess. In the case of interest-rate swaps and the ISDAfix benchmark, the system is very similar to Libor, although the investigation into these markets reportedly focuses on some different types of improprieties.</p>
<p>Though interest-rate swaps are not widely understood outside the finance world, the root concept actually isn't that hard. If you can imagine taking out a variable-rate mortgage and then paying a bank to make your loan payments fixed, you've got the basic idea of an interest-rate swap.</p>
<p>In practice, it might be a country like Greece or a regional government like Jefferson County, Alabama, that borrows money at a variable rate of interest, then later goes to a bank to "swap" that loan to a more predictable fixed rate. In its simplest form, the customer in a swap deal is usually paying a premium for the safety and security of fixed interest rates, while the firm selling the swap is usually betting that it knows more about future movements in interest rates than its customers.</p>
<p>Prices for interest-rate swaps are often based on ISDAfix, which, like Libor, is yet another of these privately calculated benchmarks. ISDAfix's U.S. dollar rates are published every day, at 11:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m., after a gang of the same usual-suspect megabanks (Bank of America, RBS, Deutsche, JPMorgan Chase, Barclays, etc.) submits information about bids and offers for swaps.</p>
<p>And here's what we know so far: The CFTC has sent subpoenas to ICAP and to as many as 15 of those member banks, and plans to interview about a dozen ICAP employees from the company's office in Jersey City, New Jersey. Moreover, the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, or ISDA, which works together with ICAP (for U.S. dollar transactions) and Thomson Reuters to compute the ISDAfix benchmark, has hired the consulting firm Oliver Wyman to review the process by which ISDAfix is calculated. Oliver Wyman is the same company that the British Bankers' Association hired to review the Libor submission process after that scandal broke last year. The upshot of all of this is that it looks very much like ISDAfix could be Libor all over again.</p>
<p>"It's obviously reminiscent of the Libor manipulation issue," Darrell Duffie, a finance professor at Stanford University, told reporters. "People may have been naive that simply reporting these rates was enough to avoid manipulation."</p>
<p>And just like in Libor, the potential losers in an interest-rate-swap manipulation scandal would be the same sad-sack collection of cities, towns, companies and other nonbank entities that have no way of knowing if they're paying the real price for swaps or a price being manipulated by bank insiders for profit. Moreover, ISDAfix is not only used to calculate prices for interest-rate swaps, it's also used to set values for about $550 billion worth of bonds tied to commercial real estate, and also affects the payouts on some state-pension annuities.</p>
<p>So although it's not quite as widespread as Libor, ISDAfix is sufficiently power-jammed into the world financial infrastructure that any manipulation of the rate would be catastrophic – and a huge class of victims that could include everyone from state pensioners to big cities to wealthy investors in structured notes would have no idea they were being robbed.</p>
<p>"How is some municipality in Cleveland or wherever going to know if it's getting ripped off?" asks Michael Masters of Masters Capital Management, a fund manager who has long been an advocate of greater transparency in the derivatives world. "The answer is, they won't know."</p>
<p>Worse still, the CFTC investigation apparently isn't limited to possible manipulation of swap prices by monkeying around with ISDAfix. According to reports, the commission is also looking at whether or not employees at ICAP may have intentionally delayed publication of swap prices, which in theory could give someone (bankers, <em>cough, cough</em>) a chance to trade ahead of the information.</p>
<p>Swap prices are published when ICAP employees manually enter the data on a computer screen called "19901." Some 6,000 customers subscribe to a service that allows them to access the data appearing on the 19901 screen.</p>
<p>The key here is that unlike a more transparent, regulated market like the New York Stock Exchange, where the results of stock trades are computed more or less instantly and everyone in theory can immediately see the impact of trading on the prices of stocks, in the swap market the whole world is dependent upon a handful of brokers quickly and honestly entering data about trades by hand into a computer terminal.</p>
<p>Any delay in entering price data would provide the banks involved in the transactions with a rare opportunity to trade ahead of the information. One way to imagine it would be to picture a racetrack where a giant curtain is pulled over the track as the horses come down the stretch – and the gallery is only told two minutes later which horse actually won. Anyone on the right side of the curtain could make a lot of smart bets before the audience saw the results of the race.</p>
<p>At ICAP, the interest-rate swap desk, and the 19901 screen, were reportedly controlled by a small group of 20 or so brokers, some of whom were making millions of dollars. These brokers made so much money for themselves the unit was nicknamed "Treasure Island."</p>
<p>Already, there are some reports that brokers of Treasure Island did create such intentional delays. Bloomberg interviewed a former broker who claims that he watched ICAP brokers delay the reporting of swap prices. "That allows dealers to tell the brokers to delay putting trades into the system instead of in real time," Bloomberg wrote, noting the former broker had "witnessed such activity firsthand." An ICAP spokesman has no comment on the story, though the company has released a statement saying that it is "cooperating" with the CFTC's inquiry and that it "maintains policies that prohibit" the improper behavior alleged in news reports.</p>
<p>The idea that prices in a $379 trillion market could be dependent on a desk of about 20 guys in New Jersey should tell you a lot about the absurdity of our financial infrastructure. The whole thing, in fact, has a darkly comic element to it. "It's almost hilarious in the irony," says David Frenk, director of research for Better Markets, a financial-reform advocacy group, "that they called it ISDA<em>fix</em>."</p>
<p><span style="float: left; color: #000; font-size: 35pt; line-height: 0.7; margin: 0.13em 0.1em 0 0;">A</span>fter scandals involving libor and, perhaps, ISDAfix, the question that should have everyone freaked out is this: What other markets out there carry the same potential for manipulation? The answer to that question is far from reassuring, because the potential is almost everywhere. From gold to gas to swaps to interest rates, prices all over the world are dependent upon little private cabals of cigar-chomping insiders we're forced to trust.</p>
<p>"In all the over-the-counter markets, you don't really have pricing except by a bunch of guys getting together," Masters notes glumly.</p>
<p>That includes the markets for gold (where prices are set by five banks in a Libor-ish teleconferencing process that, ironically, was created in part by N M Rothschild & Sons) and silver (whose price is set by just three banks), as well as benchmark rates in numerous other commodities – jet fuel, diesel, electric power, coal, you name it. The problem in each of these markets is the same: We all have to rely upon the honesty of companies like Barclays (already caught and fined $453 million for rigging Libor) or JPMorgan Chase (paid a $228 million settlement for rigging municipal-bond auctions) or UBS (fined a collective $1.66 billion for both muni-bond rigging and Libor manipulation) to faithfully report the real prices of things like interest rates, swaps, currencies and commodities.</p>
<p>All of these benchmarks based on voluntary reporting are now being looked at by regulators around the world, and God knows what they'll find. The European Federation of Financial Services Users wrote in an official EU survey last summer that all of these systems are ripe targets for manipulation. "In general," it wrote, "those markets which are based on non-attested, voluntary submission of data from agents whose benefits depend on such benchmarks are especially vulnerable of market abuse and distortion."</p>
<p>Translation: When prices are set by companies that can profit by manipulating them, we're fucked.</p>
<p>"You name it," says Frenk. "Any of these benchmarks is a possibility for corruption."</p>
<p>The only reason this problem has not received the attention it deserves is because the scale of it is so enormous that ordinary people simply cannot see it. It's not just stealing by reaching a hand into your pocket and taking out money, but stealing in which banks can hit a few keystrokes and magically make whatever's in your pocket worth less. This is corruption at the molecular level of the economy, Space Age stealing – and it's only just coming into view.</p>
<p><em>This story is from the May 9th, 2013 issue of Rolling Stone.<br/></em></p>
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<p><span class="url"><a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/everything-is-rigged-the-biggest-financial-scandal-yet-20130425">http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/everything-is-rigged-the-biggest-financial-scandal-yet-20130425</a></span></p>Why People Believe in Conspiracy Theories AND Where They Originatetag:activism101.ning.com,2013-05-02:3143100:BlogPost:323932013-05-02T20:00:00.000ZCromaghttp://activism101.ning.com/profile/Cromag
<h2>An expert explains the psychology of conspiratorial thinking</h2>
<p><span class="byline">Published April 24th, 2013 in <a href="http://www.salon.com/2013/04/24/why_people_believe_in_conspiracy_theories/" target="_blank">Salon Media</a> By <a class="gaTrackLinkEvent" href="http://www.salon.com/writer/alex_seitz_wald/" rel="author">Alex Seitz-Wald…</a></span></p>
<p><span class="byline"><a href="http://media.salon.com/2013/04/xfiles-620x412.jpg" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="http://media.salon.com/2013/04/xfiles-620x412.jpg?width=300" width="300"></img></a></span></p>
<h2>An expert explains the psychology of conspiratorial thinking</h2>
<p><span class="byline">Published April 24th, 2013 in <a href="http://www.salon.com/2013/04/24/why_people_believe_in_conspiracy_theories/" target="_blank">Salon Media</a> By <a href="http://www.salon.com/writer/alex_seitz_wald/" rel="author" class="gaTrackLinkEvent">Alex Seitz-Wald</a></span></p>
<p><span class="byline"><a target="_blank" href="http://media.salon.com/2013/04/xfiles-620x412.jpg"><img class="align-right" src="http://media.salon.com/2013/04/xfiles-620x412.jpg?width=300" width="300"/></a></span></p>
<div class="articleContent"><p>We’ve written before about the <a href="http://www.salon.com/2013/01/16/newtown_truthers_where_conspiracy_theories_come_from/">historical and social aspects of conspiracy theories</a>, but wanted to learn more about the psychology of people who believe, for instance, that the Boston Marathon bombing was a government “false flag” operation. Psychological forces like <a href="http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection/2011/05/05/what-is-motivated-reasoning-how-does-it-work-dan-kahan-answers/">motivated reasoning</a> have long been associated with conspiracy thinking, but scientists are learning more every year. For instance, a British study published last year found that people who believe one conspiracy theory are prone to believe many, <a href="http://www.academia.edu/1207098/Dead_and_alive_Beliefs_in_contradictory_conspiracy_theories">even ones that are completely contradictory</a>.</p>
<p>Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, a cognitive scientist at the University of Western Australia, published a paper late last month in the journal Psychological Science that has received <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/04/conspiracy-theory-climate-change-science-psychology.html">widespread praise</a> for looking at the thinking behind conspiracy theories about science and climate change. We asked him to explain the psychology of conspiracy theories. This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.</p>
<p><strong>First of all, why do people believe conspiracy theories?</strong></p>
<p>There are number of factors, but probably one of the most important ones in this instance is that, paradoxically, it gives people a sense of control. People hate randomness, they dread the sort of random occurrences that can destroy their lives, so as a mechanism against that dread, it turns out that it’s much easier to believe in a conspiracy. Then you have someone to blame, it’s not just randomness.</p>
<p><strong>What are the psychological forces at play in conspiracy thinking?</strong></p>
<p>Basically what’s happening in any conspiracy theory is that people have a need or a motivation to believe in this theory, and it’s psychologically different from evidence-based thinking. A conspiracy theory is immune to evidence, and that can pretty well serve as the definition of one. If you reject evidence, or reinterpret the evidence to be confirmation of your theory, or you ignore mountains of evidence to focus on just one thing, you’re probably a conspiracy theorist. We call that a self-sealing nature of reasoning.</p>
<div style="opacity: 1;" class="toggle-group target hideOnInit"><p>Another common trait is the need to constantly expand the conspiracy as new evidence comes to light. For instance, with the so-called Climategate scandal, there were something like nine different investigations, all of which have exonerated the scientists involved. But the response from the people who held this notion was to say that all of those investigations were a whitewash. So it started with the scientists being corrupt and now not only is it them, but it’s also all the major scientific organizations of the world that investigated them and the governments of the U.S. and the U.K., etc., etc. And that’s typical — instead of accepting the evidence, you actually turn it around and say that it’s actually evidence to support the conspiracy because it just means it’s even broader than it was originally thought to be.</p>
<p><strong>Are there certain types of people who are more prone to believing in conspiracy theories than others? Does it match any kind of political lines?</strong></p>
<p>I don’t think there is a systematic association between political views and the propensity to believe in conspiracy theories. There are some studies that suggest people on the political left are inclined to it, and there are some that suggest people on the right are. But it’s always a weak association. There are some theories that appeal to only one side, however. For example, the idea that 9/11 was an inside job was fairly common among Democrats in the early part of the 2000s, and very few Republicans believed it at the time. But conversely, the idea that the U.N. is trying to create a world government is predominantly held by people on the right, but not at all by people on the political left. So it really doesn’t depend on politics.</p>
<p><strong>Everyone is prone to some degree of bias and motivated reasoning — where do you draw the line, if there is one?</strong></p>
<p>The crucial difference between having a preconceived notion — we all do that, of course — and conspiratorial thinking is when you get into that self-sealing reasoning and ignore every piece of evidence that is pointing the other way, when you’re starting to broaden the circle of conspirators, and when your skepticism gets to be nihilistic — when you believe absolutely nothing that the government or the media is saying — that’s when you’ve crossed the line.</p>
<p><strong>I hear a lot of stories from people who email or from friends who have a brother, or cousin, or friend who they say is normal and smart, but then they’re horrified to find conspiratorial stuff on their Facebook page or whatnot. One was even a medical student at a very prestigious school. How do otherwise smart and reasonable people end up believing this stuff?</strong></p>
<p>Well, there is no relationship to intelligence, in my experience. Many of these people are actually quite smart, though not all, so it’s not that. It’s the need to explain and control, as I said, but it can be other things also: A general sense of disgruntlement, feeling excluded from society. Feeling discriminated against. Even insecurity in one’s job.</p>
<p>And it’s often with good reason. For instance, the conspiracy theory that AIDS was created by the U.S. government is held disproportionately by African-Americans. In a sense, there is good reason to have that suspicion, since it wasn’t that long ago that, in the 1950s or even later, that the U.S. government was <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States#Compulsory_sterilization">sterilizing African-Americans</a> and doing all sorts of horrible things to them without their consent. So some conspiracy theories have a grain of historical truth in them — that’s not to say the theories are true, but the conditions that give rise to them are.</p>
<p><strong>How should we think of conspiracy theorists? They’re often dismissed as fringey nuts, but an awful lot of Americans <a href="http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2013/04/conspiracy-theory-poll-results-.html">believe in one conspiracy or another</a>.<br/></strong> <br/> First of all, <em>any</em> extraordinary event will be followed by conspiracy theorizing. I can tell you that right now. Whatever happens tomorrow, there will be a conspiracy theory about it. Number two, I think it’s important that we understand that it satisfies a need. It isn’t that these people are necessarily disordered or marginal members of society. After all, not that long ago, half of Republican primary voters <a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0211/49554.html">thought</a> President Obama was born outside the U.S. So, if half of one segment of a population believes in a conspiracy theory then you can’t talk about marginal elements and you have to accept that it’s a real part of society and serves a need. And I think we have to understand that need and find ways for society to find other ways in which that need can be satisfied.</p>
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<a id="yui_3_8_0_11_1367439535509_1539" class="toggle-group toggleOnScroll trigger remember refreshAds gaTrackPageEvent on" href="http://www.salon.com/2013/04/24/why_people_believe_in_conspiracy_theories/" name="yui_3_8_0_11_1367439535509_1539"></a></div>
<p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.salon.com/writer/alex_seitz_wald/"><img class="align-left" src="http://media.salon.com/2012/03/AlexSeitzWaldBio.png?width=70" width="70"/></a> Alex Seitz-Wald is Salon's political reporter. Email him at aseitz-wald@salon.com, and follow him on Twitter <a href="http://www.twitter.com/aseitzwald">@aseitzwald</a>.</p>
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<p><span style="color: #000000;"><strong>- Also in Salon Jan 16th, 2013</strong></span></p>
<h1><strong><span style="color: #ff0000;" class="font-size-5"><a href="http://www.salon.com/2013/01/16/newtown_truthers_where_conspiracy_theories_come_from/" class="gaTrackLinkEvent"><span style="color: #ff0000;">Newtown truthers: Where conspiracy theories come from</span></a></span></strong></h1>
<h2>The Sandy Hook deniers are delusional -- but their paranoid beliefs date back to the founding of America</h2>
<p><span class="byline">By <a href="http://www.salon.com/writer/alex_seitz_wald/" rel="author" class="gaTrackLinkEvent">Alex Seitz-Wald</a></span></p>
<p>While it’s difficult to fathom why anyone would deny the deaths of 26 children and teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary last month, <a href="http://www.salon.com/2013/01/09/the_worst_sandy_hook_conspiracy_theory_yet/">the conspiracy theories surrounding the massacre</a> actually follow a fairly common pattern, experts who study them say, and may be more understandable than they first appear.</p>
<p>“This whole thing is bringing a variety of conspiracy theories from American history together,” explained Robert Goldberg, a historian at the University of Utah who has <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Enemies-Within-Culture-Conspiracy-America/dp/0300090005">written a book</a> and <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQmYhVopjz8">lectured extensively</a> about American conspiracy theories.</p>
<p>While there are many flavors of conspiracy theories surrounding the shooting, one thread that unites many of them is the notion that this was a government hoax aimed at taking away people’s guns. “Whether it’s the Oklahoma City bombing, or the Waco incident, or Ruby Ridge, or 9/11, or Sandy Hook, the idea is that these are modern <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_fire">Reichstags</a> (the event that occurred in Germany in 1933), which is an excuse that the government is going to use to declare an emergency to take the guns away from the patriots, and then confine the patriots,” Goldberg said.</p>
<p>Indeed, similar theories were floated after the shooting in Aurora, Colo., and even Gun Owners of American head Larry Pratt <a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/08/17/crazies_obama_staged_aurora/">flirted with the notion</a>. But the theories quickly sputtered away when Aurora didn’t lead to any meaningful action on gun control. Sandy Hook is different. The Obama administration seems likely to force some action, perhaps even by executive order, as Obama <a href="http://www.salon.com/2013/01/15/proposals_expected_from_obama_to_curb_gun_violence/">announced today</a>.</p>
<p>Conspiracy theories are not unique to America — Hitler built an entire genocidal regime by convincing his people to believe anti-Jewish conspiracy theories — but the prevalence and potency of anti-government paranoia is particular to the U.S., and it’s a product of our history.</p>
<p><strong>America’s paranoid style</strong></p>
<p>In fact, you could argue that the United States was founded on a conspiracy theory. “The conviction that the English colonial policies of the 1760s and 1770s constituted a conspiracy to enslave America played a major role in the outbreak of the American Revolution,” scholar Peter Knight writes in his comprehensive <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=qMIDrggs8TsC&pg=PA476&lpg=PA476&dq=conspiracy+theory+colonial+era&source=bl&ots=tffjPRxjA5&sig=KcL-O0ISKjc74A6n5mht_zg6fGc&hl=en&sa=X&ei=HxD2UKvRHsTx0gHSg4CwDA&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=colonial&f=false">encyclopedia of American conspiracy theories</a>. In the Declaration of Independence, the Founders wrote that King George was executing a secret plot with the “direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.”</p>
<p>And after the Revolution, we established a centralized government while Europe’s capitals remained hamstrung by a series of quarreling gentry and competing religious authorities. Soon Washington replaced London as the object of concern for conspiracists on the fringes of both the right and left. This dynamic helped created a culture where fearing the government is not only accepted, but patriotic. Richard Hofstadter famously explored this in his <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paranoid_Style_in_American_Politics">seminal 1964 essay</a> on the “paranoid style in American politics.” “You heard it with Barry Goldwater, you heard it with Ronald Reagan, and you hear it today, particularly in regards to the gun rights people,” Goldberg said.</p>
<p>Add to that the American sense of mission and exceptionalism, and people begin to fear that outsiders are trying to destroy our specialness. (“They hate us for our freedoms,” as was often said of terrorists in the past decade.) And when that’s combined with the country’s diversity, some people now fear the enemy is <em>already inside</em> the gates. This helps explain the <a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/12/05/michele_bachmann_wins_how_the_anti_muslim_fringe_hacked_the_media/">paranoia about Shariah law</a>, or even the Birther movement, which essentially assumes that President Obama is a Manchurian candidate planted to destroy America. When that perceived enemy takes the reins of the already suspicious federal government, as Obama did, you have a volatile conspiracy brew.</p>
<p>But anti-government paranoia alone doesn’t get you to thinking the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax. For that, we need to take a look at the psychology at play here.</p>
<p>Many different psychologies are at play here, from hardcore anti-government paranoids who are likely to see a false-flag operation in everything from Waco to Sandy Hook, to others who are trying to make sense of a nonsensical tragedy. Conspiracy theories often seem entirely irrational or even insane; they may actually be far more logical than they appear. At their core, conspiracy theories are like folk tales, a search for an explanation for the unexplainable, a way of making sense of a world. There’s no logic or meaning to what happened at Sandy Hook — a mentally unbalanced lone gunman targeted defenseless children for no particular reason — and that is deeply disturbing. So some people would rather invent an explanation to apply some kind of (even if twisted) logic to the event and to add meaning to the death of innocent children or deny their death entirely and thus absolve the emotional trauma a bit.</p>
<p>“This narrative is just one way people make sense of disturbing events, though they are making sense of it in a way that’s central to their own worldview,” explained Ilan Shrira, social psychologist at Loyola University in Chicago who has <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-narcissus-in-all-us/200809/paranoia-and-the-roots-conspiracy-theories">written about 9/11 conspiracy theories</a> for Psychology Today. So if your worldview is anti-government, then you make sense of it by blaming the government.</p>
<p>That’s why there’s such an obsession with trying to find multiple gunmen at Sandy Hook. This is perhaps the chief objective of amateur investigators online, and what <a href="http://www.salon.com/2013/01/14/is_it_okay_for_reporters_to_question_the_official_narrative_of_sandy_hook/">Ohio TV reporter Ben Swann drilled in on</a> while “asking questions” about this and other shootings. Finding other shooters is critical: “Without more than one shooter, you don’t have a conspiracy,” Goldberg said. By definition, you need co-conspirators. The same was true, of course, with the assassination of President Kennedy, perhaps the most theorized about event in American history. “If it’s just one nut, the purpose and meaning in the tragedy is gone, it’s stripped away. There’s no meaning, there’s no purpose to the deaths of these kids,” Goldberg added.</p>
<p><strong>Conspiracy theories are everywhere</strong></p>
<p>Shrira also pointed to the psychological importance of narrative when it comes to conspiracy theories: “Another reason for their potency is that they are alluring narratives; they garner widespread attention, even from an audience who may not fully accept them.”</p>
<p>Indeed, all you have to do is watch the Jason Bourne movies to understand the allure of a conspiracy theory. You don’t need to accept any of the truthers’ arguments as anything other than delusional fantasy to fall for the intellectual thrill of fitting together a great puzzle. We’re almost conditioned to think in conspiracy theories.</p>
<p>“From the first blockbuster ‘Birth of a Nation’ all the way the ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy, what Hollywood sells is conspiracy theories,” said Goldberg. Just look at “Homeland,” the smart person’s favorite TV show, which depicts a series of intertwined conspiracies. Or the “X-Files,” or Tom Clancy and Dan Brown novels, or pretty much any movie about spies, not to mention the pseudo-documentaries on the History Channel about Roswell or the moon landing. “We are fed a steady diet of conspiracy theories and the possibility of conspiracy and told it can be real,” Goldberg added.</p>
<p>Once the seed of belief is planted, it’s very hard to change people’s minds, thanks to a few powerful and related psychological forces: cognitive dissonance, motivated reasoning and confirmation bias. Put simply, these forces — present in everyone but critical to conspiracists’ worldview — make believers disregard any evidence that contradicts their preexisting belief, and seek out only evidence that confirms it. Anything else is explained away — or the source is discredited as bought off or part of the conspiracy.</p>
<p>That can turn a conspiracy theory into a closed loop. After the government released all its documents on the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_UFO_incident">Roswell incident</a>, one conspiracist Goldberg interviewed was convinced there remained “one filing cabinet” that hadn’t been released. He had nothing to support the suspicion, and it’s unlikely that a single filing cabinet could possibly contain all the various paper records a bureaucracy the size of the U.S. government would produce to cover up something as large as a UFO landing, but the man was so invested in his belief and wanted it to be true so badly that he convinced himself it had to be true.</p>
<p>But while conspiracy theories can be alluring, what’s often missed by theorists and skeptics alike is that blaming the government or the Jews or whomever for a tragedy like Sandy Hook means absolving the actual perpetrator of any guilt.</p>
<p><strong style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">Conspiracies are big bucks</strong></p>
<p>Lurking behind any conspiracy theory is what Goldberg calls “conspiracy entrepreneurs.”</p>
<p>“These people live and die on the sale of tapes, on books, on speaking engagements, that’s how people make their bread and butter,” Goldberg said. And there’s a constant need to invent new theories, because eventually the public will tire of existing ones. So any time something like Sandy Hook comes along, these people jump on it for their next round of theories.</p>
<p>The biggest and most obvious conspiracy entrepreneur today is Alex Jones, who has built an empire peddling every conspiracy theory imaginable since 9/11. His two websites combined get an astonishing <a href="http://static.infowars.com/ads/mediakit_public.pdf">11.5 million visitors per month</a>, and over 28 million page views, according to his advertising kit, making InfoWars.com <a href="http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/infowars.com#">the 390th most popular website</a> in the United States. Thus you can see the economics of inventing theories about Sandy Hook, simply because it is there. Indeed, Jones’ traffic has <a href="http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/infowars.com#">shot up</a> since the shooting, according to the analytics company Alexa.</p>
<p>But he is merely the most successful of many, and the latest in a long lineage of conspiracy entrepreneurs going back to the Kennedy assassination. One <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Wx9GxXYKx_8&bpctr=1358345037">popular Sandy Hook truther video</a> already has 8.5 million views on YouTube. With the platform’s ad revenue-sharing model, it’s possible the creators are making real money off this.</p>
<p>That audience is there, in part, due to <a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.aspx">declining faith in American institutions</a>, and not just the federal government. According to Gallup, Americans have less trust in almost every basic American institution today than they did 30 or 40 years ago, from the courts, to universities, to the medical profession, to corporations, to labor unions, to churches — and especially the media. This contributes the sense of paranoia, and leads some people to distrust everything, pushing them deeper into the echo chamber and disregarding anything from the outside world.</p>
<p>Interestingly, while different conspiracy theories have different believers, Shrira said, there is a “core group of people who are prone to believe in conspiracies of all kind.” <a href="http://www.academia.edu/1207098/Dead_and_alive_Beliefs_in_contradictory_conspiracy_theories">A British psychology study</a> published last year found that this core group will even believe in contradictory theories. For instance, the same person who believes that Princess Diana was assassinated is more likely to <em>also</em> believe that she faked her own death. Or the same person who believes that Osama bin Laden is still alive, may also believe that was he dead long before the Navy SEAL raid in 2011. It sells as long as it contradicts the “official narrative.”</p>
<p>This helps explain the appeal of sites like Reddit’s conspiracies section or AboveTopSecret, which provide a forum for sharing theories on everything from Sandy Hook to the Loch Ness Monster. The core believers who regularly use these sites may be the first people to latch onto and promote a new theory, like the ones surrounding Sandy Hook.</p>
<p>Finally, add to the mix a federal government that has hardly done a good job tamping down wild conspiracy theories, thanks to the fact that it has engaged in a few itself. From Watergate, to the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra">MK Ultra experiments</a>, to the Vietnam War and the bombing of Cambodia and the second Gulf of Tonkin Incident, there’s enough out there to confirm anyone’s conspiracy theory about the government who’s looking for an excuse to believe it.</p>
<p>“Of course, those all had evidence,” Goldberg noted, pointing out the gulf that divides the baseless theories from the real ones. Not to mention conspiracy theories proposed by the federal government itself, such as those used to mobilize against Communists or student radicals or civil rights leaders.</p>
<p>“So you have these three different bodies — Hollywood, conspiracy theorists and the government — that are essentially teaching Americans to think conspiratorially,” Goldberg said. “So am I surprised that any time something major happens, there’s a plethora of conspiracy theories? Absolutely not.”</p>
<p></p>The Diffusion of Proteststag:activism101.ning.com,2013-05-01:3143100:BlogPost:323912013-05-01T20:16:58.000ZCromaghttp://activism101.ning.com/profile/Cromag
<p><strong>Excerpts from Koopmans, Ruud (2004) ‘Protest in time and space: the evolution of waves of contention’, in David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule and Hanspeter Kriesi (eds), <em>The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements</em>. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. pp. 19–46.</strong></p>
<p>A simple repetition of past patterns of protest by dissidents is [...] unlikely to lead to such an exposure of political opportunities. Regimes have established ways of dealing with known types of protest and…</p>
<p><strong>Excerpts from Koopmans, Ruud (2004) ‘Protest in time and space: the evolution of waves of contention’, in David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule and Hanspeter Kriesi (eds), <em>The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements</em>. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. pp. 19–46.</strong></p>
<p>A simple repetition of past patterns of protest by dissidents is [...] unlikely to lead to such an exposure of political opportunities. Regimes have established ways of dealing with known types of protest and elite controversies are unlikely to emerge over how to respond to them. <strong>The possibilities for exposing political opportunities are therefore greatly enhanced if there is a novel quality to protest</strong>. Such novelty can consist of new actors involved in protest or a redefinition of their collective identities, new tactics or organizational forms, or demands and interpretive frames that challenge the regime’s legitimacy in novel ways. It is significant in this respect that Eastern European communist regimes were not brought down by traditional dissident movements, but by a much more diffuse challenge that included ordinary workers – posing a particular ideological problem in these alleged “workers’ paradises” – and ethnic and linguistic minorities – whose leverage was greatest where a quasi-federal state structure made it difficult to deny such groups public legitimacy (Beissinger 1996). In the GDR, the linkage of traditional dissidents to the refugee crisis and advocates of free travel was of decisive importance (Joppke 1995).</p>
<p>[...]</p>
<div title="Page 9"><div><div><p>Here we arrive at the <strong>crucial importance of diffusion processes in the expansion of contention</strong>. In the words of McAdam (1995: 231), “…initiator movements are nothing more than clusters of new cultural items – new cognitive frames, behavioral routines, organizational forms, tactical repertoires, etc. – subject to the same diffusion dynamics as other innovations.” Such diffusion processes have commanded considerable attention in the recent social movement literature and there is much we can learn here from more established diffusion theories in other fields. Since an entire chapter is devoted to this important problematic in this volume, I will here only highlight some of the most important characteristics of diffusion processes.</p>
<div title="Page 10"><div><div><p>Diffusion is responsible for the emergent and eruptive character of protest waves that puzzled collective behaviorists and mass psychologists, and was subsequently neglected by the resource mobilization school, probably because this aspect of protest waves stood in uneasy tension with the idea of social movements as carefully planning, organized, rational actors. <strong>What epidemics, fads, contentious innovations, or any other diffusion process have in common is that they are socially embedded</strong>: they can only spread by way of communication from a source to an adopter, along established network links (Strang and Soule 1998; Myers 2000). Granovetter (1973) has argued that “weak ties” are particularly important in the diffusion of innovations because they link constituencies which have relatively few social relations in common, whereas communication along strong network ties is less likely to contain information that is novel to the recipient. In modern open societies, the mass media are the weak tie par excellence, and may communicate innovations between groups who share no social links at all – apart of course from their watching or reading the same news media. Therefore, <strong>the mass media play a crucial – but understudied – role in the diffusion of protest in modern democracies</strong> (Myers 2000).</p>
<div title="Page 10"><div><div><p>A second important characteristic of social diffusion – and here the parallel with contagion and epidemics ends – is that adopters are not passive recipients, but actively choose to adopt a particular innovation or not. <strong>Innovations may be helpful for one group, but seen as useless or inapplicable to its circumstances by another.</strong> The process by which groups make such decisions about the applicability of innovations to their context is sometimes denoted as “attribution of similarity” (Strang and Meyer 1993) or, in a more objectifying sense, as “structural equivalence” (Burt 1987). Apart from internal characteristics of the adopting group, the similarity or equivalence of the political context will play an important role in such considerations. It is certainly no coincidence that the diffusion of contention that started in the autumn of 1989 respected clearly circumscribed geopolitical boundaries. All Eastern European countries whose regimes were directly existentially linked to the Soviet Union were affected by it, as were communist countries in immediate geographical and cultural proximity such as Yugoslavia and Albania. But the wave neither spread to the non-European communist world, nor to non-communist countries within Europe.</p>
<div title="Page 11"><div><div><p><strong>Such limits to the scope of diffusion depend strongly on the actual interlinkages of opportunity structures in different contexts.</strong> Protests could spread across Eastern Europe not just because these were structurally and culturally similar communist countries, but also because a weakening of one regime had immediate consequences for the strength of another. Earlier revolts in the Eastern Bloc had always been smothered in the threat or actual use of military force by the “brother countries”, first and foremost the Soviet Union. Starting with Gorbachev’s explicit indication that the Soviet Union would this time not intervene, every subsequent failure of a regime to contain or repress opposition made the position of remaining hard-liners more precarious until even those who did choose the road of repression such as Ceaucescu in Romania were no longer able to scare regime opponents from the streets. Such “opportunity cascades” may be an important mechanism for protest diffusion. They may, it should be noted, themselves be partly the result of diffusion processes. Innovations also spread within elite networks, subject to similar constraints as protest diffusion. Thus, glasnost and perestroika, Yeltsinite radical reformism, as well as the strategy of mobilizing ethno-nationalism as a means of elite survival, all diffused throughout Eastern Europe’s communist elites, and differential adoption of such strategic models often introduced conflicts within formerly consensual regimes.</p>
<p>The linkage between diffusion and political opportunities is reinforced by a third and final central characteristic of diffusion processes. Contrary to the assumption of irrational contagion that underlies the collective behavior approach, numerous studies have shown that <strong>adoption depends on the perceived success of innovations</strong>. For instance, in his study of the early history of airplane hijackings, Holden (1986) showed that only successful hijackings increased the subsequent rate of hijacking, whereas unsuccessful hijackings had no discernable impact. This is the main reason why protest innovations can only spread if political opportunities are conducive. Innovations that fail to help those who employ them to achieve their aims are unlikely to be adopted by others. However, success or failure may not always be so easy to determine, certainly if more long-term strategic aims are concerned. Especially in authoritarian contexts, the mere fact that mobilization is not repressed may be a sufficient indicator of success for that type of mobilization to spread.</p>
<p>...</p>
<div title="Page 2"><div><div><p><strong>Excerpts from the paper “Diffusion Models of Cycles of Protest as a Theory of Social Movements” n.d. by Pamela E. Oliver (University of Wisconsin) and Daniel J. Myers (University of Notre Dame), <em><a href="http://johnpostill.com/2013/05/01/the-diffusion-of-protests-2/www.nd.edu/%7Edmyers/cbsm/vol3/olmy.pdf"><cite>www.nd.edu/~dmyers/cbsm/vol3/olmy.pdf</cite></a></em></strong></p>
<p>This paper develops a theoretical framework for understanding <strong>social movements as interrelated sets of diffusion processes</strong> and explains why such a conception is broadly useful to scholars of social movements.</p>
<p>[...] We begin with the fundamental observation that <strong>in social movements, actions affect other actions</strong>: Actions are not just isolated, independent responses external economic or political conditions–rather, one action changes the likelihood of subsequent actions. That is, diffusion processes are involved. This inter-action influence has long been recognized. Tarrow’s work on cycles of protest (e.g. 1998) has long recognized these interrelations. McAdam’s work on “tactical diffusion” showed that the civil rights movement was not a steady stream, but a series of bursts of action each driven by a tactical innovation: bus boycotts, freedom rides, sit-ins, demonstrations, and riots (1983). Many scholars have also noted the many ways that protest actions cannot be understood in isolation, but rather need to be viewed as interactions with the police and other social control forces, particularly as the police learn more effective methods of repression over time. Protest actions obviously interact as well with social policy changes and political speech-making (what we often call “elite support”). And, of course, over time one social movement affects another, as tactics and frames diffuse and produce the effects that Meyer and Whittier (1994) call “movement spillover.” The civil rights demonstrations and marches of the early 1960s not only led to civil rights legislation, but indirectly fostered the increased militancy and anger of Blacks and the elite responsiveness which contributed to the wave of black urban riots. The Black movement, in turn, was a direct inspiration for activists who explicitly studied the histories and writings of Black movement activist, including for example the Chicanos who founded La Raza (García 1989) and early feminists (Evans 1980).</p>
<p>[...] In short, <strong>diffusion processes are critical to the evolution of social movements</strong>. Scholars are increasingly recognizing the theoretical importance of diffusion processes, and using diffusion language in discussing social movements. Until recently, however, these discussions have stayed at a fairly superficial level. The fact of the diffusion of action has been repeatedly demonstrated in quantitative data showing the dispersion of events across time or space, and in qualitative research documenting the direct connections between events. A wealth of new data has been and is being collected giving the time series of various kinds of violent and nonviolent events in a number of different nations (Hocke 1998; Jenkins and Eckert 1986; Kriesi et al. 1995; McAdam 1982; Olzak 1990; Olzak 1992; Olzak and Olivier 1994; Olzak, Shanahan and McEneaney 1996; Olzak, Shanahan and West 1994; Rucht, Koopmans and Neidhardt 1998; Rucht 1992). Careful analyses of these data are yielding great payoffs in our understanding of the dynamics of collective events and the interplay between different modes of action by different actors. The combination of these data and recent advances in the technology of modeling diffusion make it possible to give a much more detailed account of the mechanisms of diffusion and to integrate diffusion processes with the other processes known to be important in social movements.</p>
<div title="Page 5"><div><div><p>Taking advantage of these data and technical advances requires <strong>reorientation of both social movement theory and traditional diffusion theory so that the two can be integrated</strong>. In this paper, we discuss the issues involved in integrating these theories, the steps that have been taken so far, and the tasks that remain. Although it is possible to imagine a full theoretical conception that is more complex than we are able to fully portray at present, we believe that the work accomplished so far indicates the tremendous advances that will be possible from completing the process of theoretical integration.</p>
<p>[...] The linchpin of the integration of social movement theory with diffusion concepts is to re-conceive the basic concept of a social movement. As we, among others, have written elsewhere, there has never been much clarity about just what kind of thing a social movement is. [...] If we are to gain the advantages of diffusion theory, we need to give up the conception of a social movement as some kind of coherent entity, and instead <strong>conceive a social movement as a distribution of events across a population</strong>. We use the term “event” here in a general sense to encompass the actions of the various actors in a population, as well as their beliefs. In this sense, specific protest actions are events, but so is a resource flow from one group to another. It is also an event when a certain proportion of the population comes to hold a particular belief. Under this conception, a social movement peaks when there are a lot of protest actions happening involving a large proportion of the population “at risk” for participating.</p>
<p>[...] An emphasis on <strong>the diffusion of action as the core process in a social movement</strong> is central to studies of waves of conflict and cycles of protest. [...] For scholars not used to thinking this way, the transition is difficult, but it is very important if we are to achieve a real understanding of the protest phenomenon. The transition perhaps can be compared to that in the study of evolutionary biology, where it is recognized that a species is not a distinct entity which can make choices about how to adapt to an environment, but a statistical distribution of traits across individual organisms. Species evolve when the distribution of characteristics within a breeding population changes. <strong>Social movements rise when the overall frequency of protest events rises in a population</strong>, they become violent when they ratio of violent events to non-violent events rises, and so forth.</p>
<p></p>
<p><a href="http://johnpostill.com/2013/05/01/the-diffusion-of-protests-1/" target="_blank">Originally posted John Postill Anthropolgy blog</a></p>
<p>John Postill is an anthropologist (PhD, UCL) specialising in <a href="http://johnpostill.wordpress.com/2009/07/31/now-online-what-is-the-point-of-media-anthropology/">the study of media</a>. I live in Melbourne (Australia) where I am a Vice-Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow (2013-2016) at the <a href="http://www.rmit.edu.au/mediacommunication">School of Media and Communication</a>, RMIT University. I am also a Fellow of the Digital Anthropology Programme at UCL.</p>
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</div>Beyond Hopetag:activism101.ning.com,2013-03-19:3143100:BlogPost:317252013-03-19T21:30:00.000ZCromaghttp://activism101.ning.com/profile/Cromag
<h1><span style="color: #333300;">Beyond Hope</span></h1>
<h2><span style="color: #333300;">by Derrick Jensen</span></h2>
<div class="credit" style="text-align: right;">Photograph by Stephen Wilkes</div>
<div class="credit" style="text-align: right;"><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1977360940?profile=original" target="_self"><img class="align-right" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1977360940?profile=original" width="300"></img></a></div>
<p>THE MOST COMMON WORDS I hear spoken by any environmentalists anywhere are, <i>We’re fucked.</i> Most of these…</p>
<h1><span style="color: #333300;">Beyond Hope</span></h1>
<h2><span style="color: #333300;">by Derrick Jensen</span></h2>
<div style="text-align: right;" class="credit">Photograph by Stephen Wilkes</div>
<div style="text-align: right;" class="credit"><a target="_self" href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1977360940?profile=original"><img class="align-right" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1977360940?profile=original" width="300"/></a></div>
<p>THE MOST COMMON WORDS I hear spoken by any environmentalists anywhere are, <i>We’re fucked.</i> Most of these environmentalists are fighting desperately, using whatever tools they have—or rather whatever legal tools they have, which means whatever tools those in power grant them the right to use, which means whatever tools will be ultimately ineffective—to try to protect some piece of ground, to try to stop the manufacture or release of poisons, to try to stop civilized humans from tormenting some group of plants or animals. Sometimes they’re reduced to trying to protect just one tree.</p>
<p>Here’s how John Osborn, an extraordinary activist and friend, sums up his reasons for doing the work: “As things become increasingly chaotic, I want to make sure some doors remain open. If grizzly bears are still alive in twenty, thirty, and forty years, they may still be alive in fifty. If they’re gone in twenty, they’ll be gone forever.”</p>
<p>But no matter what environmentalists do, our best efforts are insufficient. We’re losing badly, on every front. Those in power are hell-bent on destroying the planet, and most people don’t care.</p>
<p>Frankly, I don’t have much hope. But I think that’s a good thing. Hope is what keeps us chained to the system, the conglomerate of people and ideas and ideals that is causing the destruction of the Earth.</p>
<p>To start, there is the false hope that suddenly somehow the system may inexplicably change. Or technology will save us. Or the Great Mother. Or beings from Alpha Centauri. Or Jesus Christ. Or Santa Claus. All of these false hopes lead to inaction, or at least to ineffectiveness. One reason my mother stayed with my abusive father was that there were no battered women’s shelters in the ‘50s and ‘60s, but another was her false hope that he would change. False hopes bind us to unlivable situations, and blind us to real possibilities.</p>
<p>Does anyone really believe that Weyerhaeuser is going to stop deforesting because we ask nicely? Does anyone really believe that Monsanto will stop Monsantoing because we ask nicely? If only we get a Democrat in the White House, things will be okay. If only we pass this or that piece of legislation, things will be okay. If only we defeat this or that piece of legislation, things will be okay. Nonsense. Things will not be okay. They are already not okay, and they’re getting worse. Rapidly.</p>
<p>But it isn’t only false hopes that keep those who go along enchained. It is hope itself. Hope, we are told, is our beacon in the dark. It is our light at the end of a long, dark tunnel. It is the beam of light that makes its way into our prison cells. It is our reason for persevering, our protection against despair (which must be avoided at all costs). How can we continue if we do not have hope?</p>
<p>We’ve all been taught that hope in some future condition—like hope in some future heaven—is and must be our refuge in current sorrow. I’m sure you remember the story of Pandora. She was given a tightly sealed box and was told never to open it. But, being curious, she did, and out flew plagues, sorrow, and mischief, probably not in that order. Too late she clamped down the lid. Only one thing remained in the box: hope. Hope, the story goes, was the only good the casket held among many evils, and it remains to this day mankind’s sole comfort in misfortune. No mention here of action being a comfort in misfortune, or of actually doing something to alleviate or eliminate one’s misfortune.</p>
<p>The more I understand hope, the more I realize that all along it deserved to be in the box with the plagues, sorrow, and mischief; that it serves the needs of those in power as surely as belief in a distant heaven; that hope is really nothing more than a secular way of keeping us in line.</p>
<p>Hope is, in fact, a curse, a bane. I say this not only because of the lovely Buddhist saying “Hope and fear chase each other’s tails,” not only because hope leads us away from the present, away from who and where we are right now and toward some imaginary future state. I say this because of what hope is.</p>
<p>More or less all of us yammer on more or less endlessly about hope. You wouldn’t believe—or maybe you would—how many magazine editors have asked me to write about the apocalypse, then enjoined me to leave readers with a sense of hope. But what, precisely, is hope? At a talk I gave last spring, someone asked me to define it. I turned the question back on the audience, and here’s the definition we all came up with: hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless.</p>
<p>I’m not, for example, going to say I hope I eat something tomorrow. I just will. I don’t hope I take another breath right now, nor that I finish writing this sentence. I just do them. On the other hand, I do hope that the next time I get on a plane, it doesn’t crash. To hope for some result means you have given up any agency concerning it. Many people say they hope the dominant culture stops destroying the world. By saying that, they’ve assumed that the destruction will continue, at least in the short term, and they’ve stepped away from their own ability to participate in stopping it.</p>
<p>I do not hope coho salmon survive. I will do whatever it takes to make sure the dominant culture doesn’t drive them extinct. If coho want to leave us because they don’t like how they’re being treated—and who could blame them?—I will say goodbye, and I will miss them, but if they do not want to leave, I will not allow civilization to kill them off.</p>
<p>When we realize the degree of agency we actually do have, we no longer have to “hope” at all. We simply do the work. We make sure salmon survive. We make sure prairie dogs survive. We make sure grizzlies survive. We do whatever it takes.</p>
<p>When we stop hoping for external assistance, when we stop hoping that the awful situation we’re in will somehow resolve itself, when we stop hoping the situation will somehow not get worse, then we are finally free—truly free—to honestly start working to resolve it. I would say that when hope dies, action begins.</p>
<p>PEOPLE SOMETIMES ASK ME, “If things are so bad, why don’t you just kill yourself?” The answer is that life is really, really good. I am a complex enough being that I can hold in my heart the understanding that we are really, really fucked, and at the same time that life is really, really good. I am full of rage, sorrow, joy, love, hate, despair, happiness, satisfaction, dissatisfaction, and a thousand other feelings. We are really fucked. Life is still really good.</p>
<p>Many people are afraid to feel despair. They fear that if they allow themselves to perceive how desperate our situation really is, they must then be perpetually miserable. They forget that it is possible to feel many things at once. They also forget that despair is an entirely appropriate response to a desperate situation. Many people probably also fear that if they allow themselves to perceive how desperate things are, they may be forced to do something about it.</p>
<p>Another question people sometimes ask me is, “If things are so bad, why don’t you just party?” Well, the first answer is that I don’t really like to party. The second is that I’m already having a great deal of fun. I love my life. I love life. This is true for most activists I know. We are doing what we love, fighting for what (and whom) we love.</p>
<p>I have no patience for those who use our desperate situation as an excuse for inaction. I’ve learned that if you deprive most of these people of that particular excuse they just find another, then another, then another. The use of this excuse to justify inaction—the use of any excuse to justify inaction—reveals nothing more nor less than an incapacity to love.</p>
<p>At one of my recent talks someone stood up during the Q and A and announced that the only reason people ever become activists is to feel better about themselves. Effectiveness really doesn’t matter, he said, and it’s egotistical to think it does.</p>
<p>I told him I disagreed.</p>
<p>Doesn’t activism make you feel good? he asked.</p>
<p>Of course, I said, but that’s not why I do it. If I only want to feel good, I can just masturbate. But I want to accomplish something in the real world.</p>
<p>Why?</p>
<p>Because I’m in love. With salmon, with trees outside my window, with baby lampreys living in sandy streambottoms, with slender salamanders crawling through the duff. And if you love, you act to defend your beloved. Of course results matter to you, but they don’t determine whether or not you make the effort. You don’t simply hope your beloved survives and thrives. You do what it takes. If my love doesn’t cause me to protect those I love, it’s not love.</p>
<p>A WONDERFUL THING happens when you give up on hope, which is that you realize you never needed it in the first place. You realize that giving up on hope didn’t kill you. It didn’t even make you less effective. In fact it made you more effective, because you ceased relying on someone or something else to solve your problems—you ceased <i>hoping</i> your problems would somehow get solved through the magical assistance of God, the Great Mother, the Sierra Club, valiant tree-sitters, brave salmon, or even the Earth itself—and you just began doing whatever it takes to solve those problems yourself.</p>
<p>When you give up on hope, something even better happens than it not killing you, which is that in some sense it does kill you. You die. And there’s a wonderful thing about being dead, which is that they—those in power—cannot really touch you anymore. Not through promises, not through threats, not through violence itself. Once you’re dead in this way, you can still sing, you can still dance, you can still make love, you can still fight like hell—you can still live because you are still alive, more alive in fact than ever before. You come to realize that when hope died, the you who died with the hope was not you, but was the you who depended on those who exploit you, the you who believed that those who exploit you will somehow stop on their own, the you who believed in the mythologies propagated by those who exploit you in order to facilitate that exploitation. The socially constructed you died. The civilized you died. The manufactured, fabricated, stamped, molded you died. The victim died.</p>
<p>And who is left when that you dies? You are left. Animal you. Naked you. Vulnerable (and invulnerable) you. Mortal you. Survivor you. The you who thinks not what the culture taught you to think but what you think. The you who feels not what the culture taught you to feel but what you feel. The you who is not who the culture taught you to be but who you are. The you who can say yes, the you who can say <i>no</i>. The you who is a part of the land where you live. The you who will fight (or not) to defend your family. The you who will fight (or not) to defend those you love. The you who will fight (or not) to defend the land upon which your life and the lives of those you love depends. The you whose morality is not based on what you have been taught by the culture that is killing the planet, killing you, but on your own animal feelings of love and connection to your family, your friends, your landbase—not to your family as self-identified civilized beings but as animals who require a landbase, animals who are being killed by chemicals, animals who have been formed and deformed to fit the needs of the culture.</p>
<p>When you give up on hope—when you are dead in this way, and by so being are really alive—you make yourself no longer vulnerable to the cooption of rationality and fear that Nazis inflicted on Jews and others, that abusers like my father inflict on their victims, that the dominant culture inflicts on all of us. Or is it rather the case that these exploiters frame physical, social, and emotional circumstances such that victims perceive themselves as having no choice but to inflict this cooption on themselves?</p>
<p>But when you give up on hope, this exploiter/victim relationship is broken. You become like the Jews who participated in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.</p>
<p>When you give up on hope, you turn away from fear.</p>
<p>And when you quit relying on hope, and instead begin to protect the people, things, and places you love, you become very dangerous indeed to those in power.</p>
<p>In case you’re wondering, that’s a very good thing.</p>
<p><img style="z-index: 90; border: 0px solid blue; xg-p: absolute; left: 114px; top: 182px;" id="smallDivTip" name="smallDivTip"/></p>
<p><a href="http://www.derrickjensen.org/">http://www.derrickjensen.org/</a></p>The Outsider's Guide to Supporting Nonviolent Resistance to Dictatorshiptag:activism101.ning.com,2012-11-14:3143100:BlogPost:287332012-11-14T00:51:25.000ZCromaghttp://activism101.ning.com/profile/Cromag
<p>A few months ago, a group of experts on nonviolence from around the world gathered in New York to consider how those outside a country subject to dictatorship or repression might help those within it fighting for democracy.</p>
<p>The result was <a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/outsiders-guide.org/The+Outsider%27s+Guide+to+Supporting+Nonviolent+Resistance+to+Dictatorship.pdf" target="_blank">this document</a>, a list of nonviolent techniques that can and have been used against repressive…</p>
<p>A few months ago, a group of experts on nonviolence from around the world gathered in New York to consider how those outside a country subject to dictatorship or repression might help those within it fighting for democracy.</p>
<p>The result was <a target="_blank" href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/outsiders-guide.org/The+Outsider%27s+Guide+to+Supporting+Nonviolent+Resistance+to+Dictatorship.pdf">this document</a>, a list of nonviolent techniques that can and have been used against repressive dictatorships and autocratic regimes around the world. It describes techniques that might be most useful to those outside the particular country concerned. There already exist detailed guides on nonviolent techniques for those inside undemocratic countries, including Gene Sharp's seminal work <em><a href="http://www.aeinstein.org/organizations98ce.html">From Dictatorship to Democracy</a></em>, which is available for download at the <a href="http://www.aeinstein.org/">Einstein Institute</a>.</p>
<p>The document is not a list of recommendations and the authors can take no responsibility for any use made of it. Some of the techniques are illegal in certain jurisdictions (sometimes many jurisdictions) and must be treated in that light.</p>
<p>In all cases, and most importantly, any nonviolent techniques should only be undertaken after careful consideration of the views and interests of the ordinary people and activists who might be most affected, including those "on the ground" in the country concerned. It is their country—and lives—at stake, and their needs are primary.</p>
<p></p>
<p>October 19, 2012 - via <a href="http://www.policyinnovations.org">http://www.policyinnovations.org</a></p>
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<p>PDF of Document below</p>
<p><a target="_self" href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1977360948?profile=original">The%2BOutsider%2527s%2BGuide%2Bto%2BSupporting%2BNonviolent%2BResistance%2Bto%2BDictatorship.pdf</a></p>
<p></p>Breaking Glass Steagalltag:activism101.ning.com,2012-08-02:3143100:BlogPost:271392012-08-02T22:00:45.000ZCromaghttp://activism101.ning.com/profile/Cromag
<p><span class="article-appeared"><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1977361010?profile=original" target="_self"><img class="align-left" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1977361010?profile=RESIZE_320x320" width="221"></img></a></span></p>
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<p><span class="article-appeared"><span class="article-appeared"><a href="http://www.thenation.com/issue/november-15-1999">This article appeared in the November 15, 1999 edition of The…</a></span></span></p>
<p><span class="article-appeared"><a target="_self" href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1977361010?profile=original"><img width="221" class="align-left" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1977361010?profile=RESIZE_320x320" width="221"/></a></span></p>
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<p><span class="article-appeared"><span class="article-appeared"><a href="http://www.thenation.com/issue/november-15-1999">This article appeared in the November 15, 1999 edition of The Nation.</a></span></span></p>
<p><span class="article-appeared">Although Wall Street has pushed for financial deregulation for two decades, it was last year’s merger of Citicorp and Travelers that set the stage for Congress’s effective revocation of the Glass-Steagall Act in late October. The merger was a violation of the longstanding laws separating banking and insurance companies, but Citicorp and Travelers, because they well knew their power to ram deregulation through Congress, exploited loopholes that gave them a temporary exemption. Indeed, further proving that Wall Street and Washington are two branches of the same firm, the newly formed Citigroup announced only days after the deal that it had hired recently departed Treasury Secretary <a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/153974/rubin-con-goes" target="_blank">Robert Rubin</a> as a member of its three-person office of the chairman.</span></p>
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<p>With Citigroup’s co-CEO Sanford Weill and lobbyist Roger Levy leading the charge, industry executives and lobbyists badgered the Administration and swarmed the halls of Congress—vetting all drafts before they were introduced—as the final details of the deal were hammered out. Even more than usual, campaign contributions and lobby money greased the deal. The finance, insurance and real estate industries together are regularly the largest campaign contributors and biggest spenders on lobbying of all business sectors. They laid out more than $290 million for lobbying in 1998, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, and donated more than $150 million in the 1997–98 election cycle—a figure sure to be topped in 1999–2000.</p>
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<p>For their money, the finance industry bought not only the end of the Glass-Steagall Act but also the partial repeal of the Bank Holding Company Act. These landmark pieces of legislation, recognizing the inherent dangers of too great a concentration of financial power, barred common ownership of banks, insurance companies and securities firms and erected a wall of separation between banks and nonfinancial companies. Now the ban on common ownership has been lifted—and the wall separating banking and commerce is likely soon to be breached. The misnamed Financial Services Modernization Act (GLBA) will usher in another round of record-breaking mergers, as companies rush to combine into “one stop shopping” operations, concentrating financial power in trillion-dollar global giants and paving the way for future taxpayer bailouts of too-big-to-fail financial corporations. Regulation of this new universe will be minimal, with powers scattered among a half-dozen federal agencies and fifty state insurance departments—none with sufficient clout to do the job.</p>
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<p>The final two major debates over the bill’s provisions focused not on the core-questions of concentrated financial power and regulatory controls but on issues of privacy and lending practices. A coalition ranging from Representative Edward Markey to Senator Richard Shelby denounced the bill for permitting financial conglomerates to share customer information among affiliates, but their attempt to give consumers a right to block such privacy invasions failed. As a result, holding companies will be able to build individual marketing profiles that will include detailed personal data. Gaining this prerogative was a major consideration, as witnessed by the industry’s threats to walk away from the bill if privacy protections were included. The final hurdle to passage of the bill was the Community Reinvestment Act, which obligates banks to provide credit to citizens in minority and low- and moderate-income areas and which is the <em>bête noire</em> of <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/17/business/economy/17gramm.html?pagewanted=print" target="_blank">Phil Gramm</a> (even <a href="http://motherjones.com/politics/2008/05/foreclosure-phil" target="_blank">more</a> on Gramm), chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. Gramm did not succeed in obliterating the CRA, but with the Clinton Administration’s acquiescence, he went a long way toward eviscerating it. Under the conference bill there will be no ongoing sanctions against holding company banks that fail to meet CRA standards. And it will lessen the number of CRA examinations, making it harder for regulators to insure that banks are complying with their obligations to the poor.</p>
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<p>There is much more that is wrong with the bill: It does not include adequate protections against redlining; it does not require banks to provide basic services to the poor, leaving them at the mercy of check-cashing shops and similar ripoff outfits; and it opens the way for the new conglomerates to gouge consumers. History will record this bill as a landmark in the march toward the consolidation of financial power in America.</p>The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)tag:activism101.ning.com,2012-08-02:3143100:BlogPost:275262012-08-02T21:00:00.000ZCromaghttp://activism101.ning.com/profile/Cromag
<p>In 1919 Rothschild’s Business Roundtable launched the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA) in London. The RIIA soon spawned sister organizations around the globe, including the US Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Asian Institute of Pacific Relations, the Canadian Institute of International Affairs, the Brussels-based Institute des Relations Internationales, the Danish Foreign Policy Society, the Indian Council of World Affairs and the Australian Institute of International…</p>
<p>In 1919 Rothschild’s Business Roundtable launched the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA) in London. The RIIA soon spawned sister organizations around the globe, including the US Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Asian Institute of Pacific Relations, the Canadian Institute of International Affairs, the Brussels-based Institute des Relations Internationales, the Danish Foreign Policy Society, the Indian Council of World Affairs and the Australian Institute of International Affairs. [1] Other affiliates popped up in France, Turkey, Italy, Yugoslavia and Greece.</p>
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<p>The RIIA is a registered charity of the Queen and, according to its annual reports, is funded largely by the oil oligopoly which I have dubbed the Four Horsemen – Exxon Mobil, Chevron Texaco Phillips, BP Amoco ARCO and Royal Dutch/Shell Pennzoil.</p>
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<p>Former British Foreign Secretary and Kissinger Associates co-founder Lord Carrington is President of both the RIIA and the Bilderbergers. [2]</p>
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<p>The inner circle at RIIA is dominated by Knights of St. John Jerusalem, Knights of Malta, Knights Templar and 33rd Degree Scottish Rite Freemasons.</p>
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<p>The Knights of St. John were founded in 1070 and answer directly to the British House of Windsor. The Catholic Knights of Malta, who answer to the Vatican, retreated to Malta after their bruising Crusades defeat and turned that Mediterranean island into a nexus for drugs/guns/oil smuggling.</p>
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<p>The Knights Templar invented insurance, the bond market and the concept of credit cards as they shuttled pilgrims to and fro’ the Middle East during the Crusades. They founded Temple Bar in the center of the City of London, which serves as global administer of British Maritime Law – very quietly the law of the land in many nations, including the US, where if you take an oath in a courtroom adorned with gold fringed American flag, you are bound not by the US Constitution, but by British Maritime Law.</p>
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<p>Freemasons are largely unaware underling agents of the British Empire, who sponsor children’s hospitals, put on circuses and appear in all parades. They serve as a ruse for the City of London’s global domination of the “colonies”.</p>
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<p>On this side of the pond, the City’s domination over US foreign policy and the State Department is exerted via the Council on Foreign Relations.</p>
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<p>Bechtel/Chevron board member and former Reagan Defense Secretary George Pratt Schultz was a long-time current director at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).</p>
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<p>The CFR was created in 1922 and is headquartered in Harold Pratt House in New York City. The building was donated by Pratt’s widow, whose husband made his fortune as a partner in John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company.</p>
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<p>Schulz is a relative of Mrs. Harold Pratt and replaced CFR member Alexander Haig to become Reagan’s Secretary of State. The CFR is the US affiliate of the Royal Institute for International Affairs (RIIA) in London. Both foreign policy think tanks are loaded with powerful leaders of industry, academia and government.</p>
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<p>They hold an enormous amount of sway over US and British foreign policies, providing the glue for the so-called “special relationship” between the US and Britain, whereby the Hessianized US mercenary colony pays for and fights the wars which the City of London both desires and profits from.</p>
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<p>CFR publishes Foreign Affairs, a bi-monthly journal on the global political landscape, which is considered by many in the State Department as a kind of “how-to” guide for conducting foreign policy.</p>
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<p>Founding members of CFR included brothers John Foster and Allen Dulles, columnist Walter Lippman, former Secretary of State Elihu Root and Colonel Edward Mandell House, who as adviser to President Woodrow Wilson pushed through the Federal Reserve Act, creating a private US central bank owned by a few wealthy banking families.</p>
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<p>In 1912, one year before the Federal Reserve was created, House wrote Philip Dru: Administrator. The book describes a conspiracy within the United States bent on establishing a central bank, a graduated income tax and control of both political parties.</p>
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<p>Past funding for CFR has come from international financiers David Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Bernard Baruch, Jacob Schiff, Otto Kahn and Paul Warburg. International banks Kuhn Loeb, Lazard Freres, Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs – whose directorates interlock and whose families have interbred – heavily influence CFR proceedings. [3]</p>
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<p>CFR members are sworn to secrecy regarding goals and operations. But Admiral Chester Ward, a longtime CFR member, let slip that the goal of the group is, “to bring about the surrender of the sovereignty and the national independence of the United States…Primarily, they want a world banking monopoly from whatever power ends up in the control of global government.”</p>
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<p>CFR members have dominated every Administration since FDR and most Presidential candidates come from its ranks. Adlai Stevenson, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Jimmy Carter, George Bush Sr. and Al Gore are all CFR alumni.</p>
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<p>David Rockefeller served as CFR Chairman for some time, giving way to fellow Chase Manhattan chairman/ARAMCO attorney John McCloy.</p>
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<p>Nearly every CIA Director since Allen Dulles has been a CFR member. These include Richard Helms, William Colby, George Bush Sr., Bill Casey, William Webster, James Woolsey, John Deutsch and Robert Gates. Interestingly, current Obama Administration CIA Director Leon Panetta is not a CFR member.</p>
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<p>CFR’s Foreign Affairs consistently advocates US military intervention and is the most widely read periodical at the US State Department. According to both former Deputy Director of the CIA Victor Marchetti and former State Department analyst John Marks, the CFR is the principal constituency of the CIA, since the elite who run the CFR are the ones who own the overseas assets which the CIA and the US military work to guard. [4]</p>
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<p>It is through the CFR that the international bankers and the global intelligence community mingle. The bankers and the spooks share a common goal of keeping the world safe for global monopoly capitalism and often intelligence operatives are recruited from the banking houses where their loyalties to the banking elite have been thoroughly tested. OSS founding father William “Wild Bill” Donovan had been an agent for JP Morgan.</p>
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<p>The revolving door between banking and intelligence swings the other way as well. The very best CIA, Mossad and MI6 agents are recruited to become better paid private spooks for multinational corporate and banking empires as documented in Jim Hougan’s Spooks: The Haunting of America – Private Use of Secret Agents. As author Donald Gibson wrote, “By the early 1960’s the CFR, Morgan and Rockefeller interests, and the intelligence community were so extensively inbred as to be virtually one entity.”[5]</p>
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<p>The CFR is also the primary incubator for Presidential cabinet positions. The Nixon Administration had 115 CFR members, while the Clinton Administration included over 100 CFR alumni. They included CFR President Peter Tarnoff, National Security Adviser Anthony Lake, Vice-President Al Gore, Secretary of State Warren Christopher, Secretary of Defense Les Aspin and his successor William Cohen, Secretary of Treasury Lloyd Bentsen, CIA Director James Woolsey, Colin Powell, Tim Wirth, Winston Lord, Laura Tyson, George Stephanopoulos and Samuel Lewis.</p>
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<p>In the fall of 1998 as impeachment loomed over Clinton, the President rushed to New York to try and muster support from his CFR “handlers”. As publisher John F. McManus stated, “Bill Clinton knows well that he serves as President because the members of the ‘secret society’ to which he belongs chose him and expect him to carry out its plans.”</p>
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<p>Current co-chairs at CFR are Carla Hills – Bush Sr. trade representative who was the chief negotiator of NATFA and other key WTO machinations – and Robert Rubin – former Clinton Treasury Secretary and Citigroup chairman.</p>
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<p>Other current board members include Madeline Albright, Tom Brokaw, General John Abizaid, Fareed Zakaria, Hyatt heiress Penny Pritzker, Blackstone Group insider J. Tomlinson Hill, Caterpillar chair James W. Owens and Carlyle Group co-founder David Rubenstein. [6]</p>
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<p>[1] Fourth Reich of the Rich. Des Griffin. Emissary Publications. Pasadena, CA. 1978. p.77</p>
<p>[2] The Robot’s Rebellion: The Story of the Spiritual Renaissance. David Icke. Gateway Books. Bath, UK. 1994. p.195</p>
<p>[3] The Rockefeller File. Gary Allen. ’76 Press. Seal Beach, CA. 1977. p.75</p>
<p>[4] Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History that Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons and the Great Pyramids. Jim Marrs. Harper-Collins Publishers. New York. 2000. p.36</p>
<p>[5] Battling Wall Street: The Kennedy Presidency. Donald Gibson. Sheridan Square Press. New York. 1994. p.133</p>
<p>[6] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Members_of_the_Council_on_Foreign_Relations#Board_of_directors">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Members_of_the_Council_on_Foreign_Relations#Board_of_directors</a></p>
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<p><strong>June 17, 2012 — by Dean Henderson</strong></p>
<p>Dean Henderson is the author of Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries and Das Kartell der Federal Reserve. Subscribe to his Left Hook weekly column FREE at <a href="http://www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com">www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com</a></p>The WEF Global Agenda Councils: Architects and PR for the Elitetag:activism101.ning.com,2012-08-02:3143100:BlogPost:271372012-08-02T21:00:00.000ZCromaghttp://activism101.ning.com/profile/Cromag
<p>Davos is a municipality of Switzerland and is host to the World Economic Forum (WEF), an annual meeting of global political and business elites (often referred to simply as Davos).<br></br> <br></br> The World Economic Forum is "an independent international organization committed to improving the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas." from the…</p>
<p>Davos is a municipality of Switzerland and is host to the World Economic Forum (WEF), an annual meeting of global political and business elites (often referred to simply as Davos).<br/> <br/> The World Economic Forum is "an independent international organization committed to improving the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas." from the <a href="http://www.weforum.org/community/global-agenda-councils" target="_blank">WEF website</a><strong>;</strong></p>
<p><a target="_self" href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1977360909?profile=original"><img class="align-right" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1977360909?profile=original" width="380"/></a>In 2008, the World Economic Forum created the Network of Global Agenda Councils, comprising Councils on the foremost topics in the global arena.</p>
<p>Each of these Councils convenes relevant thought leaders from academia, government, business and other fields to capture the best knowledge on each key issue and integrate it into global collaboration and decision-making processes.</p>
<p>As multistakeholder groups formed to advance knowledge and collaboratively develop solutions to the most crucial issues on the global agenda, the Councils represent transformational innovation in global governance. Specifically, the Councils monitor key trends, identify global risks, map interrelationships and address knowledge gaps. Equally important, Councils also put forward ideas and recommendations to address global challenges.</p>
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<p><strong><span class="font-size-3">Network of Global Ag</span></strong><span class="font-size-3"><strong>enda Councils Reports</strong> - </span><a href="http://reports.weforum.org/global-agenda-council-2012/?mode=print&c=62,67,68,71,72,73,75,76,77,78,79,80,81,82,83,84,85,87,88,89,90,132,91,92,133,93,95,96,99,101,134,135,103,110,112,113,114,115,117,118,121,137,138,122,123,124,126,127,128,129,140,141,142,143,66,130,74,86,97,104,105,106,116,139,131,69,70,94,98,100,102,107,108,109,111,136,119,120&pp=866" target="_blank">Complete 2011 – 2012 Report</a></p>
<p>Council Members meet virtually and at the Summit on the Global Agenda in the United Arab Emirates. Moreover, they are fully integrated into the broader Forum Community and are regular panelists in sessions at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, and at the Forum’s Regional Meetings and Industry Activities.</p>
<p>In a global environment marked by short-term orientation and silo-thinking, Councils foster interdisciplinary and long-range thinking to address the prevailing challenges on the global agenda.</p>
<p>The Network of Global Agenda Councils has been closely monitoring the most important issues on the global, regional and industry agendas. Each council, consisting of the world’s foremost thought leaders has developed a brief report outlining the key findings from their deliberations over the last 12 months.</p>
<p>Network of Global Agenda Councils<br/> Portfolio of Councils 2012-2014 Term</p>
<p>Issue-focused</p>
<p>Economics & Finance</p>
<p>1. Competitiveness<br/> 2. Emerging Multinationals<br/> 3. Employment<br/> 4. Financing & Capital*<br/> 5. Fiscal Sustainability<br/> 6. Global Financial System<br/> 7. Global Trade System<br/> 8. Infrastructure*<br/> 9. International Monetary System<br/> 10. Logistics & Supply Chain Systems<br/> 11. Long-Term Investing<br/> 12. New Growth Models*<br/> 13. New Models for Travel & Tourism<br/> 14. New Models of Economic Thinking*<br/> 15. Poverty & Sustainable Development<br/> 16. Social Security Systems*<br/> 17. Youth Unemployment</p>
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<p>Environment & Sustainability</p>
<p>18. Biodiversity & Natural Capital*<br/> 19. Catastrophic Risks<br/> 20. Climate Change<br/> 21. Food Security<br/> 22. Governance for Sustainability*<br/> 23. Measuring Sustainability*<br/> 24. New Energy Architecture<br/> 25. Oceans<br/> 26. Personal Transportation Systems<br/> 27. Responsible Natural Resources Management<br/> 28. Sustainable Consumption<br/> 29. Urbanization<br/> 30. Water Security</p>
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<p>Geopolitics & Security</p>
<p>31. Anti-Corruption<br/> 32. Arctic*<br/> 33. Conflict Prevention<br/> 34. Energy Security<br/> 35. Fragile States<br/> 36. Geopolitical Risk<br/> 37. Human Rights<br/> 38. Illicit Trade<br/> 39. Institutional Governance Systems<br/> 40. Nuclear, Biological & Chemical Weapons<br/> 41. Organized Crime<br/> 42. Rule of Law<br/> 43. Terrorism</p>
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<p>Science & Technology</p>
<p>44. Advanced Manufacturing<br/> 45. Biotechnology*<br/> 46. Complex Systems*<br/> 47. Data-Driven Development*<br/> 48. Design Innovation<br/> 49. Digital Health<br/> 50. Emerging Technologies<br/> 51. Fostering Entrepreneurship<br/> 52. Future of the Internet<br/> 53. Intellectual Property System<br/> 54. Neuroscience & Behaviour<br/> 55. Robotics & Smart Devices<br/> 56. Space Security</p>
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<p>Society & Human Capital</p>
<p>57. Ageing<br/> 58. Education & Skills<br/> 59. Future of Government<br/> 60. Future of Media<br/> 61. Future of Universities*<br/> 62. Informed Societies<br/> 63. Migration<br/> 64. New Models of Leadership<br/> 65. Personalized & Precision Medicine<br/> 66. Population Growth<br/> 67. Role of Business<br/> 68. Role of Civil Society*<br/> 69. Role of Faith*<br/> 70. Role of the Arts in Society*<br/> 71. Social Innovation<br/> 72. Social Media<br/> 73. Values<br/> 74. Well-being & Mental Health<br/> 75. Women’s Empowerment</p>
<p></p>
<p>Region-focused</p>
<p>76. Africa<br/> 77. Arab World<br/> 78. China<br/> 79. Europe<br/> 80. India<br/> 81. Japan<br/> 82. Korea<br/> 83. Latin America<br/> 84. Pakistan<br/> 85. Russia*<br/> 86. South-East Asia<br/> 87. Ukraine*<br/> 88. United States<br/> *New Council in 2012</p>The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafiatag:activism101.ning.com,2012-06-25:3143100:BlogPost:273292012-06-25T22:21:26.000ZCromaghttp://activism101.ning.com/profile/Cromag
<h2>How America's biggest banks took part in a nationwide bid-rigging conspiracy - until they were caught on tape</h2>
<h3 class="byline">by: <strong>Matt Taibbi</strong></h3>
<p><strong><a href="http://assets.rollingstone.com/assets/images/story/the-scam-wall-street-learned-from-the-mafia-20120620/306x306/main.jpg" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="http://assets.rollingstone.com/assets/images/story/the-scam-wall-street-learned-from-the-mafia-20120620/306x306/main.jpg"></img></a></strong></p>
<p>Someday, it will go down in history as the first trial of the modern American mafia. Of course, you won't hear the recent financial…</p>
<h2>How America's biggest banks took part in a nationwide bid-rigging conspiracy - until they were caught on tape</h2>
<h3 class="byline">by: <strong>Matt Taibbi</strong></h3>
<p><strong><a target="_blank" href="http://assets.rollingstone.com/assets/images/story/the-scam-wall-street-learned-from-the-mafia-20120620/306x306/main.jpg"><img class="align-right" src="http://assets.rollingstone.com/assets/images/story/the-scam-wall-street-learned-from-the-mafia-20120620/306x306/main.jpg"/></a></strong></p>
<p>Someday, it will go down in history as the first trial of the modern American mafia. Of course, you won't hear the recent financial corruption case, <em>United States of America v. Carollo, Goldberg and Grimm</em>, called anything like that. If you heard about it at all, you're probably either in the municipal bond business or married to an antitrust lawyer. Even then, all you probably heard was that a threesome of bit players on Wall Street got convicted of obscure antitrust violations in one of the most inscrutable, jargon-packed legal snoozefests since the government's massive case against Microsoft in the Nineties – not exactly the thrilling courtroom drama offered by the famed trials of old-school mobsters like Al Capone or Anthony "Tony Ducks" Corallo.</p>
<p>But this just-completed trial in downtown New York against three faceless financial executives really was historic. Over 10 years in the making, the case allowed federal prosecutors to make public for the first time the astonishing inner workings of the reigning American crime syndicate, which now operates not out of Little Italy and Las Vegas, but out of Wall Street. {Illustration by Victor Juhasz}</p>
<p>The defendants in the case – Dominick Carollo, Steven Goldberg and Peter Grimm – worked for GE Capital, the finance arm of General Electric. Along with virtually every major bank and finance company on Wall Street – not just GE, but J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, UBS, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Wachovia and more – these three Wall Street wiseguys spent the past decade taking part in a breathtakingly broad scheme to skim billions of dollars from the coffers of cities and small towns across America. The banks achieved this gigantic rip-off by secretly colluding to rig the public bids on municipal bonds, a business worth $3.7 trillion. By conspiring to lower the interest rates that towns earn on these investments, the banks systematically stole from schools, hospitals, libraries and nursing homes – from "virtually every state, district and territory in the United States," according to one settlement. And they did it so cleverly that the victims never even knew they were being cheated. No thumbs were broken, and nobody ended up in a landfill in New Jersey, but money disappeared, lots and lots of it, and its manner of disappearance had a familiar name: <em>organized crime</em>.</p>
<p>In fact, stripped of all the camouflaging financial verbiage, the crimes the defendants and their co-conspirators committed were virtually indistinguishable from the kind of thuggery practiced for decades by the Mafia, which has long made manipulation of public bids for things like garbage collection and construction contracts a cornerstone of its business. What's more, in the manner of old mob trials, Wall Street's secret machinations were revealed during the <em>Carollo</em> trial through crackling wiretap recordings and the lurid testimony of cooperating witnesses, who came into court with bowed heads, pointing fingers at their accomplices. The new-age gangsters even invented an elaborate code to hide their crimes. Like Elizabethan highway robbers who spoke in thieves' cant, or Italian mobsters who talked about "getting a button man to clip the capo," on tape after tape these Wall Street crooks coughed up phrases like "pull a nickel out" or "get to the right level" or "you're hanging out there" – all code words used to manipulate the interest rates on municipal bonds. The only thing that made this trial different from a typical mob trial was the scale of the crime.</p>
<p><em>USA v. Carollo</em> involved classic cartel activity: not just one corrupt bank, but many, all acting in careful concert against the public interest. In the years since the economic crash of 2008, we've seen numerous hints that such orchestrated corruption exists. The collapses of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, for instance, both pointed to coordinated attacks by powerful banks and hedge funds determined to speed the demise of those firms. In the bankruptcy of Jefferson County, Alabama, we learned that Goldman Sachs accepted a $3 million bribe from J.P. Morgan Chase to permit Chase to serve as the sole provider of toxic swap deals to the rubes running metropolitan Birmingham – "an open-and-shut case of anti-competitive behavior," as one former regulator described it.</p>
<p>More recently, a major international investigation has been launched into the manipulation of Libor, the interbank lending index that is used to calculate global interest rates for products worth more than $3 <em>trillion</em> a year. If and when that case is presented to the public at trial – there are several major civil suits in the works here in the States – we may yet find out that the world's most powerful banks have, for years, been fixing the prices of almost every adjustable-rate vehicle on earth, from mortgages and credit cards to interest-rate swaps and even currencies.</p>
<p>But <em>USA v. Carollo</em> marks the first time we actually got incontrovertible evidence that Wall Street has moved into this cartel-type brand of criminality. It also offered a disgusting glimpse into the enabling and grossly cynical role played by politicians, who took Super Bowl tickets and bribe-stuffed envelopes to look the other way while gangsters raided the public kitty. And though the punishments that were ultimately handed down in the trial – minor convictions of three bit players – felt deeply unsatisfying, it was still a watershed moment in the ongoing story of America's gradual awakening to the realities of financial corruption. In a post-crash era where Wall Street trials almost never make it into court, and even the harshest settlements end with the evidence buried by the government and the offending banks permitted to escape with no admission of wrongdoing, this case finally dragged the whole ugly truth of American finance out into the open – and it was a hell of a show.</p>
<p><strong>1. THE SCAM</strong> <br/>This was no trial scene from popular lore, no <em>Inherit the Wind</em> or <em>State of California v. Orenthal James Simpson</em>. No gallery packed with rapt spectators, no ceiling fans set whirring to beat back the tension and the heat, no defense counsel's resting a sympathetic hand on the defendant's shoulder as opening statements commence. No, the setting for USA v. Carollo reflected the bizarre alternate universe that exists on Wall Street. Like so many court cases involving big banks, the proceeding looked more like a roomful of expensive lawyers negotiating a major corporate merger than a public search for justice.</p>
<p>The trial began on April 16th in a federal court in Lower Manhattan. The courtroom, an aerielike setting 23 stories up, offered a panoramic view of the city and the East River. Though the gallery was usually full throughout the three-plus weeks of testimony, the spectators were not average citizens come to witness how they had been robbed blind by America's biggest banks. Instead, there were row after row of suits – other lawyers eager to observe a long-awaited case, one that could influence the outcome in a handful of civil suits pending across the country. In fact, the defendants themselves, whom the trial would reveal as easily replaceable cogs in a much larger machine of corruption, were barely visible from the gallery, obscured by the great chattering congress of prosecution and defense attorneys.</p>
<p>Only the presence of the mostly nonwhite and elderly jury, which resembled the front pew of a Harlem church, served as a reminder that the case had any connection to the real world. Even reporters from most of the major news outlets didn't bother to attend. The judge in the trial, the right honorable and amusingly cantankerous Harold Baer, acknowledged that the case was not likely to set the public's pulse racing. "It is unlikely, I think, that this will generate a lot of media publicity," Baer sighed to the jury in his preliminary instructions.</p>
<p>Once opening statements began, it was easy to see why the press might stay away. One of the main lines of defense for corrupt Wall Street institutions in recent years has been the extreme complexity of the infrastructure within which these crimes are committed. In order for prosecutors to win convictions, they have to drag ordinary Americans, people who watch and enjoy reality TV, up the steepest of learning curves, coaching them into game shape with regard to obscure financial vehicles like swaps and CDOs and, in this case, Guaranteed Investment Contracts.</p>
<p>So it was no surprise that both the prosecution and the defense began their opening remarks to the jury by apologizing for the hellishly dull maze of "convoluted" and "boring" and "tedious" financial transactions they were about to spend weeks hearing about. Only Wendy Waszmer, the feisty federal prosecutor with straight brown hair and an elfin build who presented the government's case, succeeded in cutting through the mountainous dung heap of acronyms and obfuscations and explaining what the case was about. "Even though some aspects of municipal bond finance are complex, the fraud here was simple," she told the jurors. "It was about lying and cheating cities and towns in a bidding process that was in place to protect them."</p>
<p>The "simple fraud" Waszmer described centered around public borrowing. Say your town wants to build a new elementary school. So it goes to Wall Street, which issues a bond in your town's name to raise $100 million, attracting cash from investors all over the globe. Once Wall Street raises all that money, it dumps it in a tax-exempt account, which your town then uses to pay builders, plumbers, the chalkboard company and whoever else winds up working on the project.</p>
<p>But here's the catch: Most towns, when they raise all that money, don't spend it all at once. Often it takes years to complete a construction project, and the last contractor isn't paid until long after the original bond is issued. While that unspent money is sitting in the town's account, local officials go looking for a financial company on Wall Street to invest it for them.</p>
<p>To do that, officials hire a middleman firm known as a <em>broker</em> to set up a public auction and invite banks to compete for the town's business. For the $100 million you borrowed on your elementary school bond, Bank A might offer you 5 percent interest. Bank B goes further and offers 5.25 percent. But Bank C, the winner of the auction, offers 5.5 percent.</p>
<p>In most cases, towns and cities, called <em>issuers</em>, are legally required to submit their bonds to a competitive auction of at least three banks, called <em>providers</em>. The scam Wall Street cooked up to beat this fair-market system was to devise phony auctions. Instead of submitting competitive bids and letting the highest rate win, providers like Chase, Bank of America and GE secretly divvied up the business of all the different cities and towns that came to Wall Street to borrow money. One company would be allowed to "win" the bid on an elementary school, the second would be handed a hospital, the third a hockey rink, and so on.</p>
<p>How did they rig the auctions? Simple: By bribing the auctioneers, those middlemen brokers hired to ensure the town got the best possible interest rate the market could offer. Instead of holding honest auctions in which none of the parties knew the size of one another's bids, the broker would tell the prearranged "winner" what the other two bids were, allowing the bank to lower its offer and come in with an interest rate just high enough to "beat" its supposed competitors. This simple but effective cheat – telling the winner what its rivals had bid – was called giving them a "last look." The winning bank would then reward the broker by providing it with kickbacks disguised as "fees" for swap deals that the brokers weren't even involved in.</p>
<p>The end result of this (at least) decade-long conspiracy was that towns and cities systematically lost, while banks and brokers won big. By shaving tiny fractions of a percent off their winning bids, the banks pocketed fantastic sums over the life of these multimillion-dollar bond deals. Lowering a bid by just one-100th of a percent, called a <em>basis point</em>, could cheat a town out of tens of thousands of dollars it would otherwise have earned on its bond deposits.</p>
<p>That doesn't sound like much. But when added to the other fractions of a percent stolen from basically every other town in America on every other bond issued by Wall Street in the past 10 to 15 years, it starts to turn into an enormous sum of money. In short, this was like the scam in Office Space, multiplied by a factor of about 10 gazillion: Banks stole pennies at a time from towns all over America, only they did it a few hundred bazillion times.</p>
<p>Given the complexities of bond investments, it's impossible to know exactly how much the total take was. But consider this: Four banks that took part in the scam (UBS, Bank of America, Chase and Wells Fargo) paid $673 million in restitution after agreeing to cooperate in the government's case. (Bank of America even entered the SEC's leniency program, which is tantamount to admitting that it committed felonies.) Since that settlement involves only four of the firms implicated in the scam (a list that includes Goldman, Transamerica and AIG, as well as banks in Scotland, France, Germany and the Netherlands), and since settlements in Wall Street cases tend to represent only a tiny fraction of the actual damages (Chase paid just $75 million for its role in the bribe-and-payola scandal that saddled Jefferson County, Alabama, with more than $3 billion in sewer debt), it's safe to assume that Wall Street skimmed untold billions in the bid-rigging scam. The UBS settlement alone, for instance, involved 100 different bond deals, worth a total of $16 billion, over four years.</p>
<p>Contracting corruption has been around since the construction of the Appian Way. The difference here is the almost unimaginable scope of the crime – and the fact that it's mobsters from Wall Street who are getting in on the action. Until recently, such activity has traditionally been the almostexclusive domain of the Mafia. "When I think of bid rigging, I think of the convergence of organized crime and the government," says Eliot Spitzer, who prosecuted two bid-rigging cases in his career as a New York prosecutor, one involving garbage collection, the other a Garment District case involving the Gambino family. The Mafia moved into bid rigging, he says, because it observed over time that monopolizing public contracts offers a far more lucrative business model than legbreaking. "Organized crime learned their lessons from John D. Rockefeller," Spitzer explains. "It's much more efficient to control a market and boost the price 10 percent than it is to run a loan-sharking business on the street, where you actually have to use a baseball bat and collect every week."</p>
<p>What Spitzer saw was gangsters moving in the direction of big business. When I ask him if he is surprised by the current bid-rigging case, which looks more like big business moving in the direction of gangsters, he laughs. "The urge to become a monopolist," he says, "is as old as capitalism."</p>
<p><strong>2. THE TAPES</strong> <br/>The defendants in the case – Dominick Carollo, Steven Goldberg and Peter Grimm – worked together at GE, which was competing for bond business against banks like Chase, Wells Fargo and Bank of America. Carollo was the boss of Goldberg and Grimm, who handled the grunt work, submitting bids. Between August 1999 and November 2006, the three executives participated in countless rigged bids by telephone, conspiring with middleman brokers like Chambers, Dunhill and Rubin. We know this because prior to the start of the <em>Carollo</em> trial, 12 other individuals, including several brokers from CDR, had already pleaded guilty in a wide-ranging federal investigation.</p>
<p>How did the government manage to make a case against so many Wall Street scam artists? Hubris. As was the case in Jefferson County, Alabama, where Chase executives blabbed criminal conspiracies on the telephone even though they knew they were being recorded by their own company, the trio of defendants in Carollo wantonly fixed bond auctions despite the fact that their own firm was taping the conversations. Defense counsel even made an issue of this at trial, implying to the jury that nobody would be dumb enough to commit a crime by phone when "there was a big sticker on the phones that said all calls are being recorded," as Grimm's counsel, Mark Racanelli, put it. In fact, Racanelli argued, the conversations on the tapes hardly suggested a secret conspiracy, because "no one was whispering."</p>
<p>But the reason no one was whispering isn't that their actions weren't illegal – it's because the bid rigging was so incredibly common the defendants simply forgot to be ashamed of it. "The tapes illustrate the cavalier attitude which the financial community brought toward this behavior," says Michael Hausfeld, a renowned class-action attorney whose firm is leading a major civil suit against Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Chase and others for this same bid-rigging scam. "It became the predominant mode of transacting business."</p>
<p>How and when the government got hold of those tapes is still unclear; the prosecution is not commenting on the case, which remains an open investigation. But we do know that in November 2006, federal agents raided the offices of CDR, the broker firm that was working with Carollo, Goldberg and Grimm. Caught redhanded, many of the firm's top executives agreed to turn state's witness. One after another, these hangdog, pasty-faced men were led up to the stand by prosecutors and forced to recount how they'd been snatched up in the raid, separated and blitz-interviewed by FBI agents, and plunged into years of nut-crushing negotiations, which resulted in almost all of them pleading guilty. Prosecutors would eventually accumulate 570,000 recorded phone conversations, and to decipher them they worked these cooperating witnesses like sled dogs, driving them in for dozens of meetings and grilling them about the details of the scam.</p>
<p>The state's first witness, confusingly, was a CDR broker named Doug Goldberg (no relation to the defendant Steven Goldberg). Almost every executive involved in the trial was absurdly young; many were just out of college when the bid-rigging scam started in the late Nineties. Doug Goldberg graduated from USC in 1993, and his fellow CDR executive Evan Zarefsky still looks to be about 15 years old, suggesting a suit-and-tie version of Napoleon Dynamite. The extreme youth of some of the conspirators was an obvious subtext of the trial, underscoring the fact that far more senior executives from bigger banks like Chase and Bank of America had been permitted by the government to evade testifying.</p>
<p>Right off the bat, in fact, Doug Goldberg explained that while at CDR, he had routinely helped the cream of Wall Street rig bids on municipal bonds by letting them take a peek at other bids:</p>
<p><strong>Q:</strong> Who were some of the providers you gave last looks to? <strong><br/>A:</strong> There was a whole host of them, but GE Capital, FSA, J.P. Morgan, Bank of America, Société Générale, Lehman Brothers, Bear. There were others.</p>
<p>Goldberg went on to testify that he repeatedly rigged auctions with the three defendants. Sometimes he gave them "last looks" so they could shave basis points off their winning bids; other times he asked them to intentionally submit losing offers – called <em>cover bids</em> – to allow other firms to win. He told the court he knew he was being recorded by GE. When asked how he knew that, he drew one of the trial's rare laughs by answering, "Either they told me or some of them, like Société Générale, you can hear the beeping."</p>
<p>Because of the recordings, he went on, he and the defendants used "guarded language."</p>
<p>"I might tell him, if I'm looking for an intentionally losing bid, 'I need a bid,' or something like that," he said.</p>
<p><strong>Q:</strong> With whom specifically did you use this guarded type of language? <strong><br/>A:</strong> With Steve Goldberg and others. <strong><br/>Q:</strong> In your dealings with Steve Goldberg, what, if any, language or other signal did he use that you understood as a request for a last look? <strong><br/>A:</strong> He might ask me where I "saw the market," or he might ask me for, as I mentioned, an "indication of where the market is," an "idea of the market."</p>
<p>The broker went on to detail how he had worked with the GE executives to manipulate a number of auctions. In several cases, he was pushed to make deals with GE by his boss at CDR, Stewart Wolmark, who seemed smitten with GE's Steve Goldberg; jurors listening to the tapes couldn't miss the pair's nauseatingly tight, cash-fueled bromance. In December 2000, for instance, Wolmark helped Goldberg win a rigged bid for a bond in Onondaga County, New York. After the auction, he calls his buddy Steve:</p>
<p><strong>WOLMARK:</strong> Hey, congratulations. You got another one. <strong><br/>GOLDBERG:</strong> Yeah. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. <strong><br/>WOLMARK:</strong> You're hot! <strong><br/>GOLDBERG:</strong> I'm hot? Hot with your help, sir.</p>
<p>Later on, Wolmark basically tells Goldberg he owes a service to his fellow gangster. "I deserve the big lunch now," Wolmark chirps.</p>
<p>"Yeah," says Goldberg. "I owe you something, huh?"</p>
<p>A few months later, in March 2001, Wolmark and Goldberg do another deal, this time for a $219 million construction bond for the Port Authority of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. Wolmark rings up his payola paramour and scolds him for not calling him during a recent trip to Vegas, where Goldberg doubtless spent a nice chunk of the money Wolmark had helped him steal from places like Onondaga County.</p>
<p>"Good time in Vegas, you can't even call me back?" Wolmark laments.</p>
<p>"I don't have time to sleep in Vegas," Goldberg says suggestively.</p>
<p>"There's sleeping," Stewart Wolmark chides, "and there's Stewart."</p>
<p>From there, the clothes just start flying off as the pair jump into a steamy negotiation over the monster Allegheny deal. "I'm all set with $200 million," Goldberg says. "Everything's ready to go."</p>
<p>Then Wolmark asks if GE is ready to pay CDR its bribe. "You got some swaps coming up?"</p>
<p>Goldberg assures him they do. Wolmark then passes the deal off to his own Goldberg, Doug, who handles the actual auction.</p>
<p><span style="float: left; color: #000000; font-size: 35pt; line-height: 0.7; margin: 0.13em 0.1em 0px 0px;">W</span>hen prosecutors tried to explain these telephone auctions at trial, projecting the transcripts of the calls on a huge movie screen set up across the courtroom from the jury, you could see the sheer bewilderment on the jurors' faces. The men on the tapes seemed to be speaking a language from another planet – an insanely dry and boring planet, where there's no color and no adverbs, maybe, and babies are made by rubbing two calculators together. One of the jurors, an older white man, spent the first few days of the trial yawning repeatedly, fighting a heroic battle to stay awake in the face of all the mind-numbing jargon about Guaranteed Investment Contracts. "Who needs Lunesta," joked one lawyer who attended the proceedings, "when you can hear a lawyer talk about GICs right out of the gate?"</p>
<p>The language of the auctions was a kind of intellectual camouflage. If you didn't listen closely, you'd have thought the two Goldbergs were a couple of airmen exchanging weather balloon data, rather than two Wall Street executives plotting a crime to rip off the good citizens of Allegheny County. In that deal, Steve Goldberg of GE originally bid "503, 4" on the $219 million bond, only to be guided downward by Doug Goldberg of CDR. The broker explained in court:</p>
<p><strong>Q:</strong> Can you explain what you understood Mr. Goldberg to say when he was saying 503, 4? What was he bidding? <strong><br/>A:</strong> That was the rate he was willing to bid on this investment agreement. <br/><strong>Q:</strong> How much was it? <strong><br/>A:</strong> 5.04 percent. <strong><br/>Q:</strong> What did you do as a response to his bid of 5.04 percent? <strong><br/>A:</strong> I brought his bid down to 5.00 percent.</p>
<p>In other words, even though GE was willing to pay an interest rate of 5.04 percent, Allegheny County ended up earning just 5.00 percent on its $219 million bond. How much money that amounted to is difficult to calculate, given the way the bond account diminished each year as the county used it to pay contractors; even Doug Goldberg couldn't put a number on the scam. But if the account was full at the start of the deal, GE may have cheated the county out of as much as $87,600 a year to start.</p>
<p>In any case, GE certainly chiseled the Pennsylvanians out of a sizable sum, because soon after, the company paid CDR a kickback of $57,400 in the form of "fees" on a swap deal. The whole deal pleased CDR's higher-ups. "I went to Stewart Wolmark and told him that not only did Steve Goldberg win but that I was able to reduce his rate down four basis points," said Doug Goldberg. "Stewart was very happy and excited."</p>
<p>Over and over again, jurors heard cooperating witnesses translate the damning audiotapes. In one lurid sequence, the bat-eared, bespectacled CDR broker Evan Zarefsky explained how he helped the GE defendant Peter Grimm win a bid for a bond put out by the Utah Housing Authority. The pair had apparently reamed Utah so many times that it had become a sort of inside joke between the two of them. From a call in August 2001:</p>
<p><strong>GRIMM:</strong> Utah, let's see, how we look on that? <br/> <strong>ZAREFSKY:</strong> Good old Utah!</p>
<p>Grimm complains about how much he'll have to pay to win the deal. "These levels are really shitty," he says.</p>
<p>Zarefsky comforts him. "Well, I can probably save you a couple of bucks here," he says.</p>
<p>From there, Grimm rattles off numbers, ultimately settling on a bid of 351 – 3.51 percent. Zarefsky, in almost motherly fashion, guides the manic Grimm downward, telling him, in code, that his bid is 10 basis points too high. "You actually got like a dime in there," Zarefsky says. "You want to come down a dime?"</p>
<p>So Grimm comes back with a bid of 3.41 percent, which turned out to be the winning bid. Utah lost out on 10 basis points, GE bilked the state out of untold sums, and CDR got another nice kickback.</p>
<p>This, basically, is how a lot of the calls went. The provider would tentatively offer a number, and the broker would guide him to a new bid. "You have a little bit of room there," he might say, or "That's gonna put you about a nickel short." Guiding the bidders to the lowest possible bid was called "figuring out the level" or being "in the market"; obtaining information about other bids was called "giving an indicative" or "seeing the market."</p>
<p>The brokers and providers used a dizzying array of methods for rigging deals. In some cases, the broker helped the "winner" by simply excluding other bidders, who may or may not have been in on the scam. In one hilarious sequence that sounds like something out of a wiretap of a Little Italy social club, CDR executive Dani Naeh tells GE's Steve Goldberg that he's not sure he can guarantee a win on a bid for a New Jersey hospital bond. There were too many triple-A-rated companies interested in the bond, Naeh explains, and he couldn't control their bids the way he could those of the lesser, double-A-rated companies he usually did business with. "It would be easier for us to contact other providers who were rated double-A and ask them to submit an intentionally losing bid," Naeh testified. He sounded exactly like a mobster, talking about "our guys" and "our friends."</p>
<p>In some of the calls, jurors could hear the entirety of the dirty deals negotiated, including the bribe paid back to the broker. In one deal involving a bond for the Port of Oakland, California, Steve Goldberg of GE starts to ask his pal Stewart Wolmark of CDR what kind of kickback the broker wants for rigging the deal. Such conversations about payoffs were so commonplace that Wolmark doesn't even have to wait for Goldberg to finish the question:</p>
<p><strong>GOLDBERG:</strong> What are we building in here for the... <strong><br/>WOLMARK:</strong> Swap.</p>
<p>In his testimony, Wolmark explained that he was asking for a swap deal in return for rigging the bid. "He wanted to know what we were going to get paid on the back end," Wolmark explained.</p>
<p>In the call, Wolmark and Goldberg start haggling over the price of CDR's kickback. Wolmark tells Goldberg he only wants what's fair. "Listen, I'm not a <em>chazzer</em>," Wolmark says.</p>
<p>Fans of the movie <em>Scarface</em> will remember Tony Montana's inspired translation of this Yiddish term: "Thas a pig that don' fly straight."</p>
<p>Wolmark reassures Goldberg that as pigs go, he's a straight flier. "You see the kind of mensch I am," he says.</p>
<p>Negotiations ensue. Goldberg tells Wolmark that he can pay him more on the bribe – the swap deal – if Wolmark can help GE save money on the Port of Oakland deal. "I'd like to see if we can pull a nickel out of that swap," Wolmark says. Translation: He wants to boost CDR's take on the kickback by five basis points.</p>
<p>"If I could get to the right level," Goldberg answers, referring to the Port of Oakland deal. Translation: Goldberg will help Wolmark get his "nickel" on the swap deal if Wolmark can help GE "get to the right level" on the bid.</p>
<p><strong>3. THE POLITICIANS</strong> <br/>The <em>Carollo</em> case provides far more than a detailed look at the mechanics and pervasiveness of bid rigging; it offers a clear and unvarnished blueprint of the architecture of American financial and political corruption. In an attempt to discredit the CDR witnesses, defense counsel hounded them about other revelations that surfaced in the government's investigation, particularly those that involved bribery, illegal campaign contributions and pay-for-play schemes.</p>
<p>The defense's cross-examinations were surreal. It was certainly true that some of the government's cooperating witnesses had dubious résumés, so it may have made sense to highlight their generally duplicitous history of tax evasion or lying to investigators. But in their zeal, defense counsel went far beyond simply discrediting the witnesses, spending an inordinate amount of time eliciting even more details about the grotesque corruption scheme their own clients had taken part in. The result was a rare and somewhat confusing spectacle: high-octane lawyers from Wall Street working to rip the lid off Wall Street corruption in open court.</p>
<p>Defense counsel showed us, for instance, how CDR employees were routinely directed by their boss, David Rubin, to make political contributions to select candidates, only to be reimbursed by Rubin for those contributions later on. This kind of corporate skirting of campaign finance limits is something we've always suspected goes on, but we rarely get to see direct evidence of it.</p>
<p>More interesting, though, were the stories about political payoffs. In 2001, CDR hired a consultant named Ron White, a Philadelphia bond attorney who happened to be the chief fundraiser for then-mayor John Street. CDR gave White two tickets to the 2003 Super Bowl in San Diego plus a limo – a gift worth $10,000. As his "guest," White took Corey Kemp, the city treasurer for Philadelphia, who, 16 days later, awarded CDR a $150,000 contract to advise the city on swap deals. But that wasn't the end of the gravy train: CDR doled out those swap deals to selected banks, who in return kicked back $515,000 to CDR for steering city business their way.</p>
<p>So a mere $10,000 bribe to a politician – a couple of Super Bowl tickets and a limo – scored CDR a total of $665,000 of the public's money. If you want to know why Wall Street has been enjoying record profits, here's your answer: Corruption is a business model that brings in $66 for every dollar you invest.</p>
<p>Even more startling was the way that a notorious incident involving former New Mexico governor and presidential candidate Bill Richardson resurfaced during the trial. Barack Obama, you may recall, had nominated Richardson to be commerce secretary – only to have the move blow up in his face when tales of Richardson accepting bribes began to make the rounds. Federal prosecutors never brought a case against Richardson: In 2009, an inside source told the AP that the investigation had been "killed in Washington." Obama himself, after Richardson bowed out, praised the former governor as an "outstanding public servant."</p>
<p>Now, in the <em>Carollo</em> trial, defense counsel got Doug Goldberg, the CDR broker, to admit that his boss, Stewart Wolmark, had handed him an envelope containing a check for $25,000. The check was payable to none other than Moving America Forward – Bill Richardson's political action committee. Goldberg then went to a Richardson fundraiser and handed the politician the envelope. Richardson, pleased, told Goldberg, "Tell the big guy I'm going to hire you guys."</p>
<p>Goldberg admitted on the stand that he understood "the big guy" to mean Wolmark. After that came this amazing testimony:</p>
<p><strong>Q:</strong> Soon after that, New Mexico hired CDR as its swap and GIC adviser on a $400 million deal, right? <strong><br/>A:</strong> Yes. <strong><br/>Q:</strong> You learned later that that check in that envelope was a check for $25,000, right? <strong><br/>A:</strong> Yes. I learned it later. <strong><br/>Q:</strong> You also learned later that CDR gave another $75,000 to Gov. Richardson, right? <strong><br/>A:</strong> Yes. <br/><strong>Q:</strong> CDR ended up making about a million dollars on this deal for those two checks?<br/> <strong>A:</strong> Yes. <strong><br/>Q:</strong> In fact, New Mexico not only hired CDR, they hired another firm to do the actual work that they needed done? <strong><br/>A:</strong> For the fixed-income stuff, yes.</p>
<p>What we get from this is that CDR paid Bill Richardson $100,000 in contributions and got $1.5 million in public money in return. And not just $1.5 million, but $1.5 million for work they didn't even do – the state still had to hire another firm to do the actual job. Nice non-work, if you can get it.</p>
<p>To grasp the full insanity of these revelations, one must step back and consider all this information together: the bribes, yes, but also the industrywide, anti-competitive bid-rigging scheme. It turns into a kind of unbroken Möbius strip of corruption – the banks pay middlemen to rig auctions, the middlemen bribe politicians to win business, then the politicians choose the middlemen to run the auctions, leading right back to the banks bribing the middlemen to rig the bids.</p>
<p>When we allow Wall Street to continually raid the public cookie jar, we're not just enriching a bunch of petty executives (Wolmark's income in 2008, two years after he was busted in the FBI raid, was $2,464,210.18) – we're effectively creating an alternate government, one in which money lifted from the taxpayer's pocket through mob-style schemes turns into a kind of permanent shadow tax, used to maintain the corruption and keep the thieves in place. And that cuts right to the heart of what this case is all about. Wall Street is tired of making money by competing for business and weathering the vagaries of the market. What it wants instead is something more like the deal the government has – regularly collecting guaranteed taxes. What's crazy is that in order to justify that dream of regular, monopolistic tribute, they've begun to see themselves as a type of shadow government, watching out for the rest of us. Amazingly enough, this even became a defense at trial.</p>
<p><strong>4. THE DEFENSE</strong> <br/>There were times, sitting in the courtroom, when I wondered, <em>How did this case even go to trial?</em> What defense attorney would look at the thousands of recorded phone calls, the parade of cooperating witnesses, the stacks of falsified documents, and conclude that airing all of this in court was a smart play? Listening to tape after damning tape played in open court while the defendants cringed in a corner seemed increasingly like a gratuitous ass-kicking, one that any smart defense lawyer would have made a deal to avoid.</p>
<p>But as the weeks passed, I started to get a feel for the defense strategy, which made a kind of demented sense. The lawyers for Carollo, Goldberg and Grimm didn't even bother trying to argue the facts of the case. Instead, in one cross-examination after another, they kept hitting the same theme. Despite the fact that the rigged bids resulted in lower returns, wasn't it true that the cities and towns still received, technically speaking, the highest bid? If a town received a 5.00 percent return on a $219 million bond instead of 5.04 percent, who's to say that wasn't a good price?</p>
<p>John Siffert, the gray-faced and unlikable attorney for Steve Goldberg, put it this way in his cross-examination of CDR executive Stewart Wolmark. Asking about the Allegheny deal, he boomed: "Isn't it fair to say that you believed that by lowering... Steve's bid to 5 percent, Steve's bid was still a fair price to pay?"</p>
<p>Wolmark's answer was both quick and sensible: "I don't determine the fair price," he replied. "The market does." GE was supposed to pay the <em>highest</em> price the market would pay. It wasn't a competitive auction, as required by law.</p>
<p>But Siffert had made his point, and his rhetoric got right to the heart of the defense, which was going to center around the definition of the word "fair." The men and women who run these corrupt banks and brokerages genuinely believe that their relentless lying and cheating, and even their anti-competitive cartelstyle scheming, are all legitimate market processes that lead to legitimate price discovery. In this lunatic worldview, the bidrigging scheme was a system that created fair returns for everyone. If a bunch of Pennsylvanians got a 5.00 percent return on their money instead of 5.04 percent, and GE and CDR just happened to split the extra .04 percent, that was a fair outcome, because that's what the parties negotiated. True, the Pennsylvanians had no idea about the extra .04 percent, and true, they had hired CDR precisely to make sure they got that extra 0.4 percent. But hey, it's not like they were complaining: Until someone told them they were being brazenly cheated, they were happy with their bond service. And besides, it's not like ordinary people understand this stuff anyway. So how is it the place of some busybody federal prosecutor to waltz in here and say what's a fair price?</p>
<p>Siffert tried to lay this outrageous load of balls on the jury using a faux-folksy analogy. "When your refrigerator breaks down, if you're not mechanically inclined, you're at the mercy of that repair person," he told the jury. "And if he repairs the refrigerator, makes it work well, charges you a fair price, you're likely to call on him again when the stove breaks." What he was essentially telling jurors was: This shit is complicated, so best just to leave it to the experts. Whether they're fixing a fridge or fixing a bond rate, they get to set the price, because we're all morons who are dependent on them to make our world work. Siffert, in his scuzzy way, was actually telling us an essential economic truth: <em>You're at the mercy of that repair person.</em></p>
<p>This incredible defense, which the attorneys for all three defendants led with, perfectly expresses the awesome arrogance of the modern-day aristocrats who run our financial services sector. Corrupt or not, they built this financial infrastructure, and it's producing the prices they genuinely think are fair for us – and for them. And fair to them is the customer getting the absolute bare minimum, while they get instant millions for work they didn't do. Moreover – and this is the most important part – they believe they should get permanent protection from the ravages of the market, i.e., from one another's competition. Imagine Jack Nicholson on the witness stand, dressed in a repairman's uniform and tool belt. <em>Who's gonna fix those refrigerators? You? You, Lieutenant Weinberg? You can't handle the truth!</em></p>
<p>That, ultimately, is what this case was about. Capitalism is a system for determining objective value. What these Wall Street criminals have created is an opposite system of value by fiat. Prices are not objectively determined by collisions of price information from all over the market, but instead are collectively negotiated in secret, then dictated from above.</p>
<p>"One of the biggest lies in capitalism," says Eliot Spitzer, "is that companies like competition. They don't. Nobody likes competition."</p>
<p>To the great credit of the jurors in the <em>Carollo</em> case, they didn't buy Wall Street's ludicrous defense. On May 11th, nearly a month after the trial began, they handed down convictions to all three defendants. Carollo, Goldberg and Grimm, who will be sentenced in October, face as many as five years in jail.</p>
<p>There are some who think that the government is limited in how many corruption cases it can bring against Wall Street, because juries can't understand the complexity of the financial schemes involved. But in <em>USA v. Carollo</em>, that turned out not to be true. "This verdict is proof of that," says Hausfeld, the antitrust attorney. "Juries can and do understand this material."</p>
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<p><span style="float: left; color: #000000; font-size: 35pt; line-height: 0.7; margin: 0.13em 0.1em 0px 0px;">I</span>n the end, though, the conviction of a few bit players seems like far too puny a punishment, given that the bid rigging exposed in <em>Carollo</em> involved an entrenched system that affected major bond issues in every state in the nation. You find yourself thinking, <em>America's biggest banks ripped off the entire country, virtually every day, for more than a decade!</em> A truly commensurate penalty would be something like televised stonings of the top 10 executives of every guilty bank, or maybe the forcible resettlement of every banker and broker in Lower Manhattan to some uninhabited Andean wasteland... anything to address the systemic nature of the crime.</p>
<p>No such luck. Instead of anything resembling real censure, a few young executives got spanked, while the offending banks got off with slap-on-the-wrist fines and were allowed to retain their pre-eminent positions in the municipal bond market. Last year, the two leading recipients of public bond business, clocking in with more than $35 billion in bond issues apiece, were Chase and Bank of America – who combined had just paid more than $365 million in fines for their role in the mass bid rigging. Get busted for welfare fraud even once in America, and good luck getting so much as a food stamp ever again. Get caught rigging interest rates in 50 states, and the government goes right on handing you billions of dollars in public contracts.</p>
<p>Over the years, many in the public have become numb to news of financial corruption, partly because too many of these stories involve banker-on-banker crime. The notorious Abacus deal involving Goldman Sachs, for instance, involved a hedge-fund billionaire ripping off a couple of European banks – who cares? But the bid-rigging scandal laid bare in <em>USA v. Carollo</em> is a totally different animal. This is the world's biggest banks stealing money that would otherwise have gone toward textbooks and medicine and housing for ordinary Americans, and turning the cash into sports cars and bonuses for the already rich. It's the equivalent of robbing a charity or a church fund to pay for lap dances.</p>
<p>Who ultimately loses in these deals? Well, to take just one example, the New Jersey Health Care Facilities Finance Authority, the agency that issues bonds for the state's hospitals, had their interest rates rigged by the <em>Carollo</em> defendants on $17 million in bonds. Since then, more than a dozen New Jersey hospitals have closed, mostly in poor neighborhoods.</p>
<p>As <em>Carollo</em> showed us, in open court, this is what Wall Street learned from the Mafia: how to reach into the penny jars of dying hospitals and schools and transform their desperation and civic panic into fat year-end bonuses and the occasional "big lunch." Unlike the Mafia, though, they were smart enough to do their dirt without anyone noticing for a very long time, which is what defense counsel in this case were talking about when they argued that towns and cities "were not harmed" by the rigged bids. No harm, to them, means no <em>visible</em> harm, i.e., that what taxpayers didn't know couldn't hurt them. This is logical thinking, to the sociopath – like saying it's not infidelity if your wife never finds out. But we did find out, and the scale of betrayal unveiled in <em>Carollo</em> was epic. It was like finding out your husband didn't just cheat, but had a frequent-flier account with every brothel in North America for the past 10 years. At least now we know how bad it was. The trick is to find a way to make the cheaters pay.</p>
<p><em><a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-scam-wall-street-learned-from-the-mafia-20120620?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter" target="_blank">This story is from the July 5th, 2012 issue of Rolling Stone</a>.</em></p>
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<p><strong> </strong></p>Why Nonviolent Revolutions Sometimes Failtag:activism101.ning.com,2012-05-21:3143100:BlogPost:267292012-05-21T19:09:58.000ZCromaghttp://activism101.ning.com/profile/Cromag
<p><strong>Insights from Civil Resistance Struggles in China, Panama, and Kenya from 1985-1992</strong></p>
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<p>Academic Webinar</p>
<p>In the 1980s, the world was captivated as East Germans brought down the Berlin wall and the Filipino “people power” movement ousted long-standing dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Yet other civil resistance movements during this time failed to achieve political change. Researchers have largely focused on successful nonviolent uprisings. Little attention has…</p>
<p><strong>Insights from Civil Resistance Struggles in China, Panama, and Kenya from 1985-1992</strong></p>
<p></p>
<p>Academic Webinar</p>
<p>In the 1980s, the world was captivated as East Germans brought down the Berlin wall and the Filipino “people power” movement ousted long-standing dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Yet other civil resistance movements during this time failed to achieve political change. Researchers have largely focused on successful nonviolent uprisings. Little attention has been given to those movements that had great potential but did not achieve their goals. In this webinar, Dr. Nepstad explores three cases of failed civil resistance: the Chinese democracy movement of 1989, the struggle against Panamanian dictator General Manuel Noriega (1987-1989), and the attempt in Kenya to oust President Daniel arap Moi (1985-1992).</p>
<p>She highlights internal movement problems that undermined resisters’ effectiveness such as divided leadership, lack of cross-group cooperation, and insufficient nonviolent discipline. She also focuses on regime counter-strategies, including massive repression, maintaining troop loyalty, and the fragmentation of opposition groups. Additionally, Dr. Nepstad examines the impact of international sanctions, showing how they can generate new allies for authoritarian leaders and shift the locus of power from local resisters to international actors. She concludes by discussing what civil resisters can do to prevent these problems: building unity by emphasizing resisters’ shared goals; implementing careful measures to ensure nonviolent discipline, encouraging security force defections by increasing the costs of regime loyalty, and making judicious choices about international involvement.<br/><br/><a href="http://www.unm.edu/%7Esocdept/faculty/snepstad.htm" target="_blank">Sharon Erickson Nepstad</a> is Professor of Sociology at the University of New Mexico. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Colorado and did post-doctoral studies at Princeton University. She has been a visiting scholar at Notre Dame University’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. Her areas of interest are in social movements, civil resistance, and religion. She is the author of numerous articles and three books: Nonviolent Revolutions: Civil Resistance in the Late 20th Century (published in 2011 by Oxford University Press); Religion and War Resistance in the Plowshares Movement (published in 2008, Cambridge University Press); and Convictions of the Soul: Religion, Culture, and Agency in the Central America Solidarity Movement (published in 2004, Oxford University Press). Her book on the Plowshares movement won the 2009 Outstanding Book Award from the American Sociological Association’s section on Peace, War, and Social Conflict.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/index.php/learning-and-resources/educational-initiatives/academic-webinar-series/2189-why-nonviolent-revolutions-sometimes-fail-insights-from-civil-resistance-struggles-in-china-panama-and-kenya-from-1985-1992#nepstad_video"><strong>Watch this webinar</strong></a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/index.php/learning-and-resources/educational-initiatives/academic-webinar-series/2189-why-nonviolent-revolutions-sometimes-fail-insights-from-civil-resistance-struggles-in-china-panama-and-kenya-from-1985-1992#nepstad_resources"><strong>Additional resources</strong></a></li>
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<p><object width="420" height="315" classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="false"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="never"></param><param name="src" value="http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/8hWFMaxGghw?version=3&hl=en_US&rel=0"></param><param name="allowfullscreen" value="false"></param><embed wmode="opaque" width="420" height="315" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/8hWFMaxGghw?version=3&hl=en_US&rel=0" allowscriptaccess="never" allowfullscreen="false"></embed> <param name="wmode" value="opaque"></param></object>
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<div><a name="nepstad_resources" title="nepstad_resources"></a><u><strong>ADDITIONAL RESOURCES</strong></u></div>
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<li><a href="http://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/images/stories/webinars/nepstad_why_nvr_sometimes_fail.pdf" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/images/stories/icons/pdf.jpg" alt="PDF" border="0" height="18" width="18"/></a><a href="http://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/images/stories/webinars/nepstad_why_nvr_sometimes_fail.pdf" target="_blank"><u><strong>Download Presentation slides</strong></u></a></li>
<li>Nepstad, Sharon Erickson. <em>Nonviolent Revolutions: Civil Resistance in the Late 20th Century</em>. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. <a href="http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Sociology/ComparativeHistorical/?view=usa&ci=9780199778218#Product_Details" target="_blank">Click here to learn more</a>.</li>
</ul>
<p>Source <a href="http://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/index.php/learning-and-resources/educational-initiatives/academic-webinar-series/2189-why-nonviolent-revolutions-sometimes-fail-insights-from-civil-resistance-struggles-in-china-panama-and-kenya-from-1985-1992#nepstad_video" target="_blank">nonviolent-conflict.org</a></p>