Today’s News 18th December 2018

• Russia Continues Military Build-Up On Disputed Islands Claimed By Japan Ahead Of PM's Visit

  Russia has signaled it will continue its controversial build-up of defensive fortifications on a disputed chain of islands near Japan at a time when the United States is increasingly active in the region and has maintained a stance in recent years of voicing support to Japan’s claims over the islands. 

  On Monday Russia announced it had built new barracks for troops in the Southern Kurils as they are known in Russia — referred to as the Northern Territories in Japan — and further said there were plans to construct more facilities for armored vehicles, in defiance of Japan’s urging Moscow to cease militarizing the disputed territory.

  

  Japan has long urged its powerful northern neighbor to cease its military build-up there, recently promising President Putin that the US would not put its forces there should Russia hand the islands back to Japan. Russian officials have expressed deep concerns that Japan could allow the US military a foothold in Russia’s eastern backyard, a legitimately heightened fear especially after Japan’s acquiring and testing of the Aegis Ashore U.S. missile system in recent months, which Russia officials have warned could be placed on the islands should they ever be returned to Japanese sovereignty.

  Putin and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe have held numerous face-to-face meetings to attempt to resolve the crisis, which has been a central issue in relations since the Soviet Union seized the island chain at the end of WWII.

  In recent years the Kremlin has gone so far as to authorize live military exercises and significant troop deployments on the islands, which have been interpreted by Japan as a clear sign Russia maintains them for military offensive purposes. 

  

  According to a Russian Defense Ministry (MoD) statement, Moscow plans “to shift troops into four housing complexes on two of the four disputed islands” by next week. “Also on both islands we have modern and heated storage facilities for weapons and armored vehicles,” the MoD said.

  This comes as the Japanese PM makes plans to potentially visit Russia on Jan. 21 to continue talks over the territorial dispute, according to the Kremlin. 

  

  The Sea of Japan has seen tensions soaring of late after an early December incident involving an American destroyer making a rare passage through waters claimed by Russia, which the US Navy has called “Russia’s excessive maritime claims”. It was the first time a US destroyer has sailed that close to the base of operations for the Russian Pacific Fleet at Peter the Great Bay since the Soviet era in 1987.

  The dispute would likely be more quickly resolved if it weren’t for current tensions between the US and Russia on multiple fronts, as the main question that remains is how the U.S.-Japan security treaty, the core of Japan’s diplomacy, would apply in this case, especially the question of whether Washington would maintain the right to put military bases on the islands.

  

• Paul Craig Roberts Exposes The Myth Of Western Democracy

  Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

  How does the West get away with its pretense of being an alliance of great democracies in which government is the servant of the people?

  Nowhere in the West, except possibly Hungary and Austria, does government serve the people.

  

  Who do the Western governments serve? Washington serves Israel, the military/security complex, Wall Street, the big banks, and the fossil fuel corporations.

  The entirety of the rest of the West serves Washington.

  Nowhere in the West do the people count. The American working class, betrayed by the Democrats who sent their jobs to Asia, elected Donald Trump and the American people were promptly dismissed by the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton as “the Trump deplorables.”

  The Democrats, like the Republicans, serve power, not the people.

  In Europe we see the squashing of democracy everywhere.

  British prime minister May has turned Brexit into subservience to the EU. She has betrayed the British people and has not yet been hung off of a lamp post, which shows how acceptance the British people are of betrayal. The British people have learned that they do not count. They are as a nothing.

  The Greeks voted for a leftwing government that promised to protect them from the EU, IMF, and big banks, but promptly sold them out with austerity agreements that destroyed what remained of Greek sovereignty and Greek living standards. Today the EU has reduced Greece to a Third World country.

  The French have been in the streets in revolt for weeks against the French president who serves everyone except the French people.

  There are currently massive protests in Brussels, Belgium, with half the government also resigning in protest against the government signing a pact that will replace the Belgian people with migrants from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. The corrupt and despicable governments who signed this pact represent foreigners and George Soros’ money, not their own citizens.

  Why are citizens so powerless that their governments can elevate the interest of foreigners far above the interests of citizens?

  There are a number of reasons. The main one is that the people are disarmed and are propagandized to accept violence from the state against them, but not to deliver violence in return against the governments’ illegal use of force against citizens.

  In short, until the conquered peoples of Europe kill the police, who serve the ruling elite and delight in inflicting brutality against those whose taxes pay their salaries, take the weapons from the police, and kill the corrupt politicians who have sold them out, the peoples of Europe will remain a conquered and oppressed peoples.

  Some time past Chris Hedges, one of the remaining real journalists, made it clear that without violent revolution to excise the tumor of government superiority over the people, freedom throughout the West is dead as a door-nail.

  The question before us is whether the Western peoples are too brainwashed, too firmly locked in The Matrix, too exhausted to stand up and defend their freedom. Resistance is happening in France and Belgium, but the government that sold out Greece hasn’t been hung off of lamp posts. Americans are so brainwashed that they think Russia, China, Iran, Syria, North Korea, and Venezuela are their enemies when it is perfectly clear that their Enemy is “their” government in Washington.

  Except for my American readers, Americans are locked in The Matrix. And they will kill in order to stay in The Matrix, where the controlled explanations are reassuring. Anyone who looks to Washington for leadership is an idiot.

  Washington is a master of propaganda. Washington’s propaganda has even infected the Russian government, which from all reports stupidly believes that accommodation to Washington is the secret that will make Russia successful.

  A government this stupid has no chance of survival.

  

• Toronto Home Prices Just Plunged At A Rate Not Seen Since 1996

  A seismic shift is currently underway in the Toronto real estate market which may have finally pricked Canada’s biggest bubble. In October, home prices plunged at the fastest pace in more than two decades, according to new data published by Statistics Canada.

  Statistics Canada’s Price Index for new Toronto homes declined 1.4% in October from a year earlier, the most since September 1996. Across all provinces and territories, home prices increased 0.1%, the slowest pace since 2010, which signals the country’s real estate market has stalled and could reverse into 2020.

  The pace of new home construction crashed by a massive 40.3% in the Greater Toronto Area between October 2017 and October 2018.

  

  Bloomberg describes the turning point in the real estate market as a result of government measures, introduced in 2017 to help cool the city’s red-hot housing market, such as tighter mortgage lending laws.

  “The Bank of Canada also raised its trend-setting interest rate five times between July 2017 and October of this year,” notes Bloomberg.

  “New home prices were advancing at an annual pace of almost 4% late last year before the mortgage rules took effect.”

  Further, the current economic backdrop suggests storm clouds are gathering across the country. Last week, the Canadian 2 and five year bond yields inverted, for the first time since 2007.

  “This is often taken as a signal that investors are more optimistic about short-term prospects versus the long term, suggesting a lack of confidence in continued economic growth. This can also impact bank profitability, as banks pay short-term rates on deposits and take in long-term rates on loans. A flat or inverted yield curve, therefore, could lead to negative net interest margins,” said Steve Saretsky of VancityCondoGuide.

  As Saretsky shows, this can cause bank lending to further tighten, leaving borrowers high and dry when market liquidity is most needed.

  

  While the resulting slowdown from bank lending can be seen in the decline of sales volumes, it is now more noticeably reflecting in home prices. As shown below, Toronto housing sales continued dropping into the lower range of the usual seasonal activity. Inventory has dramatically expanded with listings out-numbering sales by 2.6 times. Rising inventory, declining sales; this market is expected to come under further stress in 2019. 

  

  Toronto’s real estate market is in the midst of a soft landing orchestrated by the government. As the global economy is expected to rapidly slow in 2019, there is a chance the soft landing could turn hard. Storm clouds are here.

  

• Stocks Slide As Xi Speech Disappoints: "China May Face Unimaginable Difficulties"

  There was much anticipation ahead of tonight speech by Chinese President Xi Jinping at the 40th Reforms Anniversary Event.

  

  Hope was high for Xi to highlight potential new reform measures, growth initiatives, and – what the markets want most – moar stimulus.

  He instead offered none of the above, choosing a propaganda-heavy discourse on the Communist Party’s contributions to the success of China.

  

  Main highlights include Xi pointing out that 1978 marked major turning point of far reaching significance and “China’s stability makes it one of the safest nations in the world…” (except if you’re a Canadian businessman)

  China’s had an average +9.5% growth for the past 40 years.

  

  But warned that:

  “China may face unimaginable difficulties ahead”

  The speech was dominated by role of the party in developing modern China

  Says the party has led China on a “soul stirring journey”

  “China has demonstrated the vitality of scientific socialism with indisputable facts.”

  There was no concrete message from Xi’s speech either on the trade friction with the U.S. or growth prospects for 2019.

  “No one is in a position to dictate to the Chinese people what should or should not be done,”

  Xi likens China’s current stage of development to swimming midstream in a river or climbing half way up a mountain:

  “There is no turning back.”

  On reforms, Xi warned:

  “The road of reform and opening are becoming more steep, but we must go forward with conviction, commitment and confidence.”

  On globalization, Xi talked about a “new form of international relations.”

  There should be no “bullying” and there should be respect for different development models.

  China “will never seek hegemony,” Xi says, but we note that China is expanding influence, however, in regions such as the South China Sea, where it has built islands and put military emplacements on them.

  “We will resolutely fight an uphill battle to prevent and defuse major risks, lift people out of poverty, and prevent and control pollution,”

  Xi closed on the same heavy Communist and Marxist evangelism theme, by saying that China is in the process of:

  • Standing up

  • Getting rich

  • Growing strong

  And remember, China is “standing tall and firm in the East.”

  But that was not what the market wanted to hear and investors are disappointed for now as Xi provided no new initiatives…

  

  US Futures are fading also…

  

  And early Yuan gains are leaking away…

  

  And for now, no new measures and the old stimulus measures aren’t working…

  Since June 2018, China has been loosening monetary and fiscal policies in an attempt to refloat the sinking red ponzi amid the shadow banking system’s deflation.

  

  As the following chart from Goldman Sachs shows, it is not working as the Current Activity Indicator continues to slump…

  

  It seems no matter what China throws at it, the economy (or the market) won’t behave as the text-books say it should.

  

• The Empire's Sea Of Woes

  Authored by Robert Gore via StraightLine Logic blog,

  The noose cinches…

  

  Second-rate George H.W. Bush got a first-rate Washington send-off. For one day it interrupted the downtrend in equity markets. It may mark the US apotheosis of inflated grandiosity. Across the Atlantic, Emmanuel Macron, pretentious popinjay of Gallic grandiosity, has gotten a deserved comeuppance. Brexit, Trump’s election, and nationalist uprisings in Southern and Eastern Europe apparently insufficient warning to the globalists who would rule us, the French rioters are sending yet another wake-up call. If that’s not enough, so too are many of the nations outside the Euro-American welfare state asylum.

  The crazies’ kings, queens, and courtiers face a dwindling inheritance and mounting debt, but spend lavishly to keep up appearances. Falling markets and rioting taxpayers are unwelcome reminders that the money’s running out, leaving behind a stack of IOUs that won’t be paid. The aristocracy wants to offload the pain to the peasantry, but the riots demonstrate that the peasantry has other ideas. Our betters also want to blame their sea of woes on Eurasia’s leaders, but Russia, China, Russia, Turkey, and Iran are having none of that. They are, however, delighted to see the West crumbling and will do nothing to stop it.

  Empire is America’s noose, hubris America’s curse. Once upon a time it didn’t matter much to the American people or their politicians what happened in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, or even Europe. During the nineteenth century, for the most part we minded our own business, and what a business it turned out to be. America became the world’s industrial, technological, and commercial powerhouse.

  Success may be the hardest human condition to endure. Few individuals withstand it. For empires, it’s always temporary. They fail and topple from the pinnacle with monotonous regularity. Preceding the fall is that heady feeling of invincibility, just as the those you ignored, scorned, or subjugated on the way up are putting in place their plans to take you down.

  World War II left America and its satrapies at the top of the global heap. They neither recognized that their position was the result of fortuitous circumstances nor that their embrace of income taxes, central banking, welfare and warfare states, and governments’ ever-expanding interference in the lives of their citizens would eventually undercut their preeminence. Not until financial catastrophe, insurrection, and the relative progress of nations outside the empire unmistakably confronts them will they recognize that things have changed.

  Donald Trump, titular leader of the empire, hasn’t gotten the news. He made some encouraging noises during the campaign and early in his administration about taking on corruption and reigning in military commitments, but it’s only been talk. He may yet get a scalp or two from the bungled attempt to depose him, but he hesitated and lost. The incoming Democrat-majority House of Representatives will stymie him at every turn.

  Trump’s foreign and military policy is indistinguishable from the policy of Bush father and son, Clinton husband and wife, Cheney, Obama, and the rest of the neoconservative/neoliberal clown posse who run this country. No kerfuffle is too trivial for the US not to intervene, no hamlet too remote to send the troops and hardware. The only requirements are that the intervention projects power—Washington-speak for forcing somebody to do what they don’t want to do – and funnels money to the connected.

  Trump, Pompeo, Bolton, and the motley menagerie of mendacious mendicants who run the European and Asian divisions of US Empire Inc. might want to ponder the meaning of place names, maps, and their countries’ balance sheets.

  Why is the Persian Gulf called the Persian Gulf, and the South China Sea the South China Sea? Here’s a hint: proximity. The former is next to Persia, the latter China. The difficulties of far-flung interventions are magnified when your naval staging areas are proximate to nations that can put up a fight. Persia, or Iran as it’s now called, would be a lot tougher nut to crack than uncracked nuts Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, or Libya, no matter how many carriers we park in the Gulf. China is an economic and military superpower. Ludicrously, we’re trying to “contain” it in its own backyard while indulging in policy schizophrenia. Trump talks Let’s Make a Deal, but our northern satrapy arrests an important Chinese executive for not observing our Iranian sanctions.

  Russia throws off no handy nomenclatural clues; you have to know some geography for insight into Imperial idiocy. A glance at the map reveals that the Baltic and Black Seas, and the Sea of Azov are proximate—there’s that word again—to Russia. Ukrainian grifter Petro Poroshenko, who in the rogue’s gallery of dubious US allies ranks right up there with Mohammad bin Salman, decides to tickle the bear. Russia responds and the US talks tough while parking ships and flying jets over what are essentially Russian lakes. Putin is not reported to have lost any sleep.

  If hubris and stupidity don’t fell the Empire, insolvency will. France’s revolt can spread like a California wildfire. The dirty secret of the welfare state is that somebody has to pay for it. France has the highest tax burden in the developed world, but there’s a long list right behind where it is almost as onerous. Especially galling is the largess bestowed on immigrants The horror: taxpayers might get the idea that they—not the state and its wards—own their own lives. Around the globe, the French revolt could inspire those stuck with the tab to do something more drastic than vote for candidates who pledge to cut tax rates a percentage point or two.

  Crashing stock markets and a global recession, or worse, would expand the ranks of the Gilets Jaunes. Crashing bond markets would drive up interest rates for profligate governments and tighten the noose, just as they’re faced with aging populations, unfunded liabilities, shrinking economies, and demonstrations and riots. Any sympathy for the ruling class rather than its victims would be woefully misplaced.

  Meanwhile, the Eurasian powers are building a network of trade, telecommunications, infrastructure, and transport links spanning Halford Mackinder’s center of the world. If successful, such links could lead to unprecedented peace and prosperity in that historically troubled region.

  In America, particularly in Washington, the concept of patriotism has tragically transmuted from pride in one’s country and heritage to: We run the world. SLL has said that the eventual goal of President Trump’s foreign policy is to make peace with multipolarity, leaving superpowers China, Russia, and the US dominant in their geographic spheres of influence (see “Trump’s New World Order” and “The Eagle, the Dragon, and the Bear”). Alas, SLL may be wrong. With Pompeo and Bolton whispering in his ear, it now appears Trump is trying to turn the clock back to The Ugly American 1950s.

  To the consternation of faux patriots like Pompeo and Bolton, the effort is doomed. Hubris won’t generate prosperity, pay debts, keep the disaffected off the streets, or challenge the aspirations of competing global powers. The imperial delusion has felled another empire. Its potentates and subalterns won’t realize it until grasping creditors and deplorable barbarians have stormed the gates. By then, it will be too late to forestall the fate that lurks as their deepest fear.

  

• Investigation Reveals US Sportswear Made In Sweatshop By "Re-educated" Chinese Muslims

  Clothes made by detained Chinese Muslims living in a mass detention camp have been traced to a US sportswear company, according to AP, which tracked “recent, ongoing shipments” from a privately-owned, state-sponsored “internment” sweatshop. 

  

  The Associated Press has tracked recent, ongoing shipments from one such factory — Hetian Taida Apparel — inside an internment camp to Badger Sportswear, a leading supplier in Statesville, North Carolina. Badger’s clothes are sold on college campuses and to sports teams across the country, although there is no way to tell where any particular shirt made in Xinjiang ends up.

  The shipments show how difficult it is to stop products made with forced labor from getting into the global supply chain, even though such imports are illegal in the U.S. Badger CEO John Anton said Sunday that the company would halt shipments while it investigates. –AP

  The CEO of Hetian Taida Apparel, Wu Hongbo, confirmed the existence of a factory inside of a re-education compound – one of many across China where some 1 million Muslims, known as Uighurs, are estimated to live in detention where they are forced to give up their language and religion as they are politically indoctrinated. 

  

  “We’re making our contribution to eradicating poverty,” Wu told the AP via phone. 

  A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, pushed back against the “many untrue reports” about the reeducation camps, though she did not elaborate. 

  “Those reports are completely based on hearsay evidence or made out of thin air,” Chunying added. 

  A dozen people AP interviewed who had either been in a camp or had friends or family in one beg to differ – telling the news agency that detainees are given no choice but to work at the factories. 

  Most of the Uighurs and Kazakhs, who were interviewed in exile, also said that even people with professional jobs were retrained to do menial work.

  Payment varied according to the factory. Some got paid nothing, while others earned up to several hundred dollars a month, they said — barely above minimum wage for the poorer parts of Xinjiang. A person with firsthand knowledge of the situation in one county estimated that more than 10,000 detainees — or 10 to 20 percent of the internment population there — are working in factories, with some earning just a tenth of what they used to earn before. The person declined to be named out of fear of retribution.

  Former Xinjiang TV reporter currently living in exile said that during his month-long detention he saw young people who were taken away in the mornings for work in carpentry and at a cement factory without pay. 

  “The camp didn’t pay any money, not a single cent,” said the man, only identified as Elyar due to fear of retaliation against his relatives still living in Xinjiang. “Even for necessities, such as things to shower with or sleep at night, they would call our families outside to get them to pay for it.”

  A Washington DC based Uighur, Rushan Abbas, said that her sister, Dr. Gulshan Abbas, is currently detained at a camp after being taken to what the Chinese government calls a “vocational center.” 

  “American companies importing from those places should know those products are made by people being treated like slaves,” said Rushan. “What are they going to do, train a doctor to be a seamstress?”

  Mainur Medetbek’s husband did odd repair jobs before vanishing into a camp in February during a visit to China from their home in Kazakhstan. She has been able to glean a sense of his conditions from monitored exchanges with relatives and from the husband of a woman in the same camp. He works in an apparel factory and is allowed to leave and spend the night with relatives every other Saturday.

  Though Medetbek is uncertain how much her husband makes, the woman in his camp earns 600 yuan (about $87) a month, less than half the local minimum wage and far less than what Medetbek’s husband used to earn.

  “They say it’s a factory, but it’s an excuse for detention. They don’t have freedom, there’s no time for him to talk with me,” she said. “They say they found a job for him. I think it’s a concentration camp.” –AP

  Congressman Chris Smith (R-NJ) who sits on the House Foreign Relations Committee called on the Trump administration Monday to formally ban products imported from Chinese companies linked to detention camps. 

  “Not only is the Chinese government detaining over a million Uyghurs and other Muslims, forcing them to revoke their faith and profess loyalty to the Communist Party, they are now profiting from their labor,” said Smith. “U.S. consumers should not be buying and U.S. businesses should not importing goods made in modern-day concentration camps.”

  

• The World Google Controls And Surveillance Capitalism

  Authored by Julian Vigo via Counterpunch.org,

  I have been following the scandal of the UK’s Investigatory Powers Act(also known as the Snoopers’ Charter) and Holland’s Sleepwet and their relationship to the encroaching government powers over private data, privacy, data collection, surveillance, and free speech for several years now.  And very much related to these bills created ostensibly to protest us from “terrorism,” is Google’s encroaching powers over our lives, to include the freedom of expression protected by most national laws, not to mention EU and UN Charters, around the planet today.

  

  When the Internet became a tool for communication and research in the late 1980s (usually through universities and research institutes) and later rendered public through commercial Internet service providers (ISPs) in 1991, most people were slow to catch on. Initially, I was inculcated into Internet culture by virtue of being a graduate student at New York University where I came to depend on their computer labs to churn out papers when not using friends’ computers. I still remember Archie, Telnet, and line mode browsers before the release of ViolaWWW.  By the mid 1990s students were curious about hypertext through Memex and Xanada while many others made their personal webpage which they would write in html with the help of on- or off-line instructions.  The concept of a free website builder had not yet emerged and everything was very much ad hoc, individuals figuring out how to fiddle with html as if a late 20th century Mini Cooper under whose hood the user would play around.  And yes, the flashing bright lights that every webpage seemed to embrace as if a will to trigger everyone visiting their page an epileptic seizure.

  These were the golden days of the Internet when anything was acceptable to include the esthetically challenging, old school graphics, and the simple layout with repeating background images that defies any description. These were the days that websites were entirely about content such that if you want to read up on the Klingon Language Institute, presentation was tertiary, if even a concern at all.

  Even by the mid 1990s most businesses had not caught onto the potential of the Internet for marketing, public relations, and advertising.  The finances needed for publicity were still largely functioning through traditional modalities and when companies did not think that people would be using the Internet for commerce, much less research.

  In 1995, when the NSF (National Science Foundation) began charging a fee for registering domain names there were only 120,000 registered domain names. By 1998, this number rose to over 3 million. And while Amazon started in 1994, the birth of eBay the year later kicked off e-commerce definitively.  Still most businesses did not actively incorporate the Internet into their structures and the cost of building a website was not even an afterthought for most given the Internet on a shoestring approach that many of us ran with. I was working on my PhD at this time and finding that my ability to learn languages was directly applicable to computer languages where I was able to volunteer for friends and even carve out a living writing web pages and making early e-commerce sites for friends.  Web designers in Manhattan were quickly becoming desirable and well paid as we rolled towards the new millennium with more and more businesses and individuals realizing the potential of the Internet.

  The thing is until 2000, the Internet existed for most people as this virtual encyclopedia, news reference, information center to check out cinema times. There were even early prototypes of Skype and messenger like ICQ where peer-to-peer communications were viewed as a novelty. I had my first Internet conversation from my apartment in Park Slope to a man living at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro. The Internet was an information highway, unregulated, and quite flexible considering kinds of technology it was slowly replacing.  

  Privacyschmivacy, right?

  However, since 9/11 specifically and more recently around a series of culture wars, we are seeing how governments around the planet from the beginning of the new millennium had locked up ship and set out various legal initiatives that make it possible for governments to spy on its citizens. The US can be credited with fomenting such legislation that claims to do one thing (secure the “homeland”) while in reality, doing something quite different. So 45 days after 9/11 the Patriot Act, a vile piece of legislation that resulted in the disappearance of over 14,000 Muslim men within the United States, was born.  The residual force of the Patriot Act lay in the fact that this law made it easier for the US government to spy on its citizens with the government issuing National Security Letters (NSLs) without the need for a judge to sign off. The Patriot Act gave a new twist to McCarthyism since it put the power of the law into the hands of 43,000 law enforcement agents who had access to phone records collected through the NSLs. While most people today are aware of the importance of Edward Snowden’s and Julian Assange’s efforts to challenge the US government’s illegal acts of espionage on its own citizenry and illegal acts of violence, what many do not remember is how the Global War on Terror (GWOT) instigated much of the laws which rolled out enormous powers to Homeland Security, which decimated in the INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) and put immigration in the same bracket as terrorology.

  From the US to the EU, one thing has become painfully clear to me in recent months: free speech, the freedom of conscience, and privacy are all under threat by big tech companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google. In fact, these companies are far more the enemy of the people than the NSA (National Security Agency) or GCHQ, the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters. And Snowden has said as much referring to how he and his colleagues in the NSA were at the very least subject to some degree of democratic oversight while companies like Google and Facebook, as we saw recently with Zuckerberg’s testimony to Congress this past Spring, maintain a business model which perfectly combines capitalism with surveillance and it is all perfectly unregulated.

  In 2014, John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney introduced the term “surveillance capitalism” in Monthly Review, an independent socialist magazine where they explain its inception from the post-war architecture which combined the vehicle of sales framed within a Madison Avenue centralized corporate marketing revolution together with the creation of a permanent state of war headed by the Pentagon where the Cold War was buttressed by arms and fictional nuclear preparedness on the one hand, and the shop ‘til you drop on the other. The military-industrial complex and the marketing of society, according to Foster and McChesney, constituted the two principle surplus-absorption mechanisms until the financial crisis of the 1970s when a third vector of surplus-absorption was added: that of financialization which supplemented the system as the previous two mechanisms waned:

  Each of these means of surplus absorption were to add impetus in different ways to the communications revolution, associated with the development of computers, digital technology, and the Internet. Each necessitated new forms of surveillance and control. The result was a universalization of surveillance, associated with all three areas of: (1) militarism/imperialism/security; (2) corporate-based marketing and the media system; and (3) the world of finance.

  It is hard to do such a brilliant article justice, but suffice it to say that Foster and McChesney give an excellent history of how the hunt for Edward Snowden was not news. They chronicle a long history dating back to the “Army Files” (also known as CONUS) scandal where the Army had been spying on and keeping files on over seven million U.S. citizens through the use of over 1,500 plainclothes agents.  It was because of the CONUS scandal that Americans came to know of ARPANET, the precursor to today’s Internet where these secret files of Americans were kept and where the “limitless storage of data” proved a threat to healthy democracy.   

  Surveillance capitalism is now part of our everyday where even the follow-up quality control questionnaires and all the privacy tick boxes we are asked to tick form part of a larger private sector databank of information. The problem is that most people think that such information is “harmless” and that it is of little consequence to their safety or privacy. But surveillance capitalism, as Foster and McChesney show us, surveillance capitalism could go much further than any government surveillance:

  Like advertising and national security, it had an insatiable need for data. Its profitable expansion relied heavily on the securitization of household mortgages; a vast extension of credit-card usage; and the growth of health insurance and pension funds, student loans, and other elements of personal finance. Every aspect of household income, spending, and credit was incorporated into massive data banks and evaluated in terms of markets and risk. Between 1982 and 1990 the average debt load of individuals in the United States increased by 30 percent and with it the commercial penetration into personal lives.

  So now with the government having the private sector doing its bidding in terms of farming information of its “client base,” business was not making a killing but private individuals were going further into debt while losing their freedom of privacy. Conterminous to individuals being stripped of their democratic freedom of privacy came the removal of the freedom of speech, recently cemented by the recent “redrafting” of NAFTA whereby major corporations like Google, Facebook and Twitter were positioned to be the main benefactors of what is now called  United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA):

  These big tech companies have been trying to reinvoke their immunity as previously held under Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act through NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) renegotiations. And last month they were successful as NAFTA’s substitute, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement(USMCA), will now extend the immunity Congress had earlier provided with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA) into neighboring North American countries. Not only is this is a gift to the tech industry, but it is a complete paradox. The tech industry lobbied heavily to get back Section 230 immunity by invoking “free expression” for its users while conterminously taking on the policing free speech on its platforms. In short, big tech’s request for absolute immunity, in light of its use of Section 230 to justify political bias and censorship, reveals a troubling present for free speech on the net.

  Over the past year there has been an unprecedented amount of thought policing on social media by Facebook and Twitter where now there are rules that penalize users for “fake news” and other thought crimes while Facebook and Twitter have closed down hundreds of political media pages just before November’s midterm elections.  Censorship is now commonplace on these platforms just as Google is once again facing a fresh wave of criticism from human rights groups over its plan to launch a censored search engine in China, a project called Dragonfly. In an eery twist to the democratization of Information that was once predicted in the early 1990s with the public launch of the Internet, we are now seeing how information, in the wrong hands, is not only not progressive, but is proving to be quite dangerous.

  

  The masses of people playing Candy Crush and using Viber on their mobiles are overwhelmingly unaware of their participation in data mining how their participation poses a danger to a healthy democracy.

  We need to stay informed about the encroachment of big business and social media corporations in our private lives and the depths to which the private sector can farm information. In the end, who controls this information and how it is employed is another and far grimmer question that we must ask, even at the risk of uncovering terrifying and inexorable truths.

  

• New York Subway Facing "Death Spiral" Without $40 Billion Upgrade

  As the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the state-controlled agency responsible for operating the New York City subway and its buses, prepares to shutter a heavily used subway line that connects Northern Brooklyn with Lower Manhattan so that it can undergo necessary maintenance to repair some of the lingering damage from Hurricane Sandy, the recently appointed head of the agency has warned that NYC and New York State are facing a stark choice: Either invest $40 billion in the subway for badly needed upgrades and improvements, or allow one of the world’s most heavily used mass transit systems to sink into a “death spiral,” according to Bloomberg.

  

  NYC Transit Authority President Andy Byford – who was credited with turning around Toronto’s mass transit system before heading to New York – has been telling anybody who will listen (subway riders, taxpayers, business executives and the city council, the name a few) that these upgrades are needed asap. And if Albany won’t allocate the money, the City must do something.

  “You don’t get the billions you need by just going to Albany with a begging bowl,” Byford, recruited a year ago to run New York City Transit, told executives at a Crain’s Magazine breakfast this month.

  As anybody who relies on the subway, or regularly reads the New York Times Metro Section, is probably aware, the subway has been struggling with acute signs of distress – typified by rapidly worsening service – that have intensified in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. So, why is Byford issuing this warning now?

  Well, after months of being stonewalled by the city, Byford is hoping to capitalize on a new power dynamic in Albany after Democrats won control of the State Assembly, creating a state of unified rule in Albany. The subway could be struggling with a nearly $1 billion operating deficit by 2022, which is clearly unsustainable.

  Already, credit ratings agencies like Moody’s have downgraded their outlook on the MTA’s bonds.

  Voters in November flipped control of the state Senate, putting Democrats in charge of both houses of the Legislature and increasing the chances of approving transit funding. Many support Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo’s plan to charge motorists “congestion pricing” fees to enter Manhattan’s business core.

  Still, the MTA – which controls the subways and buses along with commuter trains and some bridges and tunnels – faces a $991 million deficit looming in 2022 and political arguments over who will pay to close it and how.

  On Dec. 13, Moody’s Investors Service revised its credit-rating outlook on the MTA to negative from stable, noting how deteriorating service has produced lower-than-expected revenue as subway and bus ridership declined. That situation could worsen if fares go up, as the MTA board prepares to vote on a 4 percent increase in January.

  Gov. Cuomo is planning to institute “congestion pricing” for cars entering Manhattan’s busiest areas – a plan he hopes will reduce traffic and bolster revenues for the subway. But while any additional money will help, the funds raised by this new tax are expected to merely offset debt service and some operating costs. Meanwhile, investors are becoming increasingly wary.

  “This is going to be a real test year,” said Howard Cure, director of municipal bond research for Evercore Wealth Management, who said he’s become more selective in considering MTA bonds. “Will they get enough revenue? Will they lower their really high construction costs? Will they be able to stop the loss of riders, reducing breakdowns and delays?”

  But with no obvious source to cover the funding shortfall – and the MTA board preparing to vote on a 4% rate hike in January even as the quality of service clearly declines, something that will almost certainly outrage riders – Byford is quickly realizing that there may be no way out of this crisis.

  “I don’t know of any business model where people can charge more money for worse service,” Shameek Robinson of Harlem told Byford during a Dec. 10 gathering in Manhattan.

  Budget analysts say without the fare increase, the agency would face a $1.6 billion operating deficit by 2022. Debt service is already projected to increase 26 percent to $3.3 billion by 2022, consuming 37 percent of fare and toll revenue, state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli reported in October.

  The fare and toll hikes, and most of Cuomo’s “congestion pricing” plan, would merely help to pay annual expenses. While Mayor Bill de Blasio has dropped his opposition to the concept, he still has questions about its details, and some suburban lawmakers have objected to their constituents being asked to pay more.

  And as NYC becomes less hospitable to commuters, expect the crumbling subway to add one more source of downward pressure on already shaky rents and real-estate valuations.

  

• Twenty-One Thoughts On The Persecution Of Julian Assange

  Authored by Caitlin Johnstone,

  1. I write a lot about the plight of Julian Assange for the same reason I write a lot about the Iraq invasion: his persecution, when sincerely examined, exposes undeniable proof that we are ruled by a transnational power establishment which is immoral and dishonest to its core.

  

  2. Assange started a leak outlet on the premise that corrupt and unaccountable power is a problem in our world, and that the problem can be fought with the light of truth. Corrupt and unaccountable power has responded by detaining, silencing and smearing him. The persecution of Assange has proved his thesis about the world absolutely correct.

  3. Anyone who offends the US-centralized empire will find themselves subject to a trial by media, and the media are owned by the same plutocratic class which owns the empire. To believe what mass media news outlets tell you about those who stand up to imperial power is to ignore reality.

  4. Corrupt and unaccountable power uses its political and media influence to smear Assange because, as far as the interests of corrupt and unaccountable power are concerned, killing his reputation is as good as killing him. If everyone can be paced into viewing him with hatred and revulsion, they’ll be far less likely to take WikiLeaks publications seriously, and they’ll be far more likely to consent to Assange’s silencing and imprisonment. Someone can be speaking 100 percent truth to you, but if you’re suspicious of him you won’t believe anything he’s saying. If they can manufacture that suspicion with total or near-total credence, then as far as our rulers are concerned it’s as good as putting a bullet in his head.

  5. The fact that the mass media can keep saying day after day “Hey, you know that bloke at the embassy who shares embarrassing truths about very powerful people? He’s a stinky Nazi rapist Russian spy who mistreats his cat” without raising suspicion shows you how propagandized the public already is. A normal worldview unmolested by corrupt narrative control would see someone who circulates inconvenient facts about the powerful being called pretty much all the worst things in the world and know immediately that that person is being lied about by those in power.

  6. Relentless smear campaigns against Assange have given the unelected power establishment the ability to publicly make an example of a journalist who published uncomfortable truths without provoking the wrath of the masses. It’s a town square flogging that the crowd has been manipulated into cheering for. Narrative control has enabled them to have their cake and eat it too: they get to act like medieval lords and inflict draconian punishment against a speaker of undeniable facts and leave his head on a spike in the town square as a warning to other would-be truth tellers, and have the public believe that such a bizarre violation of modern human rights is perfectly fine and acceptable.

  7. There are people who worked really hard to get journalism degrees, toiled long hours to earn the esteemed privilege of appearing on the front pages of a major publication, only to find themselves writing articles with headlines like “Julian Assange is a stinky, stinky stink man.”

  8. Ordinary citizens often find themselves eager to believe the smear campaigns against Assange because it is easier than believing that their government would participate in the deliberate silencing and imprisoning of a journalist for publishing facts.

  9. And yes, Julian Assange is most certainly a journalist. Publishing important information about what’s going on in the world so the public can inform themselves is precisely the thing that journalism is. There is no conventional definition of journalism which differs from this. Anyone who says Assange is not a journalist is telling a lie that they may or may not actually believe in order to justify his persecution and their support for it.

  10. Another reason people can find themselves eager to believe smears about Assange is that the raw facts revealed by WikiLeaks publications punch giant holes in the stories about the kind of world, nation and society that most people have been taught to believe they live in since school age. These kinds of beliefs are interwoven with people’s entire egoic structures, with their sense of self and who they are as a person, so narratives which threaten to tear them apart can feel the same as a personal attack. This is why you’ll hear ordinary citizens talking about Assange as though he attacked them personally; all he did was publish facts about the powerful, but since those facts conflict with tightly held identity constructs, the cognitive dissonance that was caused to them can be interpreted as feeling like he’d slapped them in the face.

  11. We live in a reality where unfathomably powerful world-dominating government agencies are scrutinized and criticized far, far less than a guy trapped in an embassy who published inconvenient facts about those agencies.

  12. Assange disrupts establishment narratives even in his persecution. Liberal establishment loyalists in America still haven’t found a rational answer to criticisms that in supporting Assange’s criminal prosecution they are supporting a Trump administration agenda. You now have the same people who’ve been screaming that Trump is Hitler and that he’s attacking the free press cheering for the possibility of that same administration imprisoning a journalist for publishing facts.

  13. The precedent that would be set by the US prosecuting a foreign journalist for merely publishing factual information would constitute a greater leap in the direction of Orwellian dystopia than the Patriot Act, for America and for the entire world.

  14. The billionaire media has invalidated itself with its refusal to defend Assange. They know the precedent set by his prosecution for WikiLeaks publications would kill the ability of the press to hold power to account, but they don’t care because they know they never do that. For all their crying about Jamal Khashoggi and Jim Acosta’s hurt feelings, they do not actually care about journalism or “the free press” in any meaningful way.

  15. Whenever I see a blue checkmark account on Twitter bashing Assange I mentally translate whatever they’re saying into “There is nothing I won’t do to advance my career in corporate media. If you’re in a position to promote me I will literally get down on my knees right this very second and let you do whatever you want to my body.”

  16. I sometimes feel like I respect professional propagandists who smear Assange more than I respect ordinary citizens who go around smearing him for free. What do these people think they’ll get as a reward for their work as pro bono CIA propagandists? A gold star from Big Brother? They’re like slaves who beat and betray other slaves that fall out of line in order to win favor with the master, except they’re not even achieving that. The professional manipulators are at least cheering for their own class to continue to have its leadership’s interests advanced; ordinary people who do it are cheering for their own oppression.

  17. Even lower in my view are the self-proclaimed leftists and anarchists who view themselves as oppositional to the establishment but still help advance this smear campaign. It is impossible to attack Assange without supporting the Orwellian empire which is persecuting him. I don’t care what mental gymnastics you’re doing to justify your pathetic cronyism; what you are doing benefits the most powerful and depraved people on this planet.

  18. Anyone who participates in the ongoing smear campaign against Assange and Wikileaks is basically just saying “Extremely powerful people should be able to lie to us without any difficulty or opposition at all.”

  19. Everyone should always be extremely suspicious of anyone who defends the powerful from the less powerful. It’s amazing that this isn’t more obvious to more people.

  20. Contrary to the narratives promoted by establishment smear merchants, Julian Assange is not hiding from justice in the Ecuadorian embassy. He is hiding from injustice. Everyone who knows anything about the US government’s prosecution of leakers and whistleblowers knows he has no shot at a fair trial, and would face brutal mistreatment at the hands of the same regime which tortured Chelsea Manning.

  21. The persecution of Assange is essentially a question that mankind is asking itself: do we want to (A) continue down the path of omnicidal, ecocidal Orwellian dystopia, or do we want to (B) pull up and away from that trajectory and shrug off the oppressive power establishment which is driving us toward either total extinction or total enslavement? So far, A is the answer we’ve been giving ourselves to that question. But, as long as we switch before it’s too late, we can always change our answer.

  *  *  *

  That was fun. So, the best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My articles are entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet new merchandise, buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.

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