Guest Post: The Mound Of Sound

Yesterday, inspired by a link sent to me by The Mound of Sound, I wrote a post on some of the dire implications of the surveillance state and the preparations being made by The Pentagon to deal with mass civil breakdown.
Today, a guest post by The Mound offers a sharp counterpoint to the pessimism of that post:


I thought I was a pessimist until I began delving into online courses on war studies, globalization, global food security, etc.

As Doyle’s Holmes said, “the game’s afoot.” Stuff that would have been considered alarming a generation ago now occurs daily and almost without notice. Our privacy, that one right to which all others are anchored, is gone. Instead of fighting to protect us, our governments increasingly employ the latest technology to intrude on our daily lives. By stripping away our privacy, governments are able to redefine democratic dissent as subversion, even treason.

There’s talk of revolution seemingly everywhere. It may be the inevitable end result of the world paradigm shift enacted by Reagan, Thatcher and Mulroney. Today the Pentagon is preparing for ‘mass civil breakdown’ and preparing to use military force within the United States against civilians in flagrant violation of that country’s posse comitatus rule. Open the link, read it and see if it doesn’t make your stomach churn.

In yesterday’s Guardian there’s an exploration of ‘open source revolution.’ It’s an idea from former CIA spy, Robert David Steele, and it’s an idea worth considering. It may even be our kids’ last, best hope.

Last month, Steele presented a startling paper at the Libtech conference in New York, sponsored by the Internet Society and Reclaim. Drawing on principles set out in his latest book, The Open-Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth and Trust, he told the audience that all the major preconditions for revolution – set out in his 1976 graduate thesis – were now present in the United States and Britain.

Steele's book is a must-read, a powerful yet still pragmatic roadmap to a new civilisational paradigm that simultaneously offers a trenchant, unrelenting critique of the prevailing global order. His interdisciplinary 'whole systems' approach dramatically connects up the increasing corruption, inefficiency and unaccountability of the intelligence system and its political and financial masters with escalating inequalities and environmental crises. But he also offers a comprehensive vision of hope that activist networks like Reclaim are implementing today.

"We are at the end of a five-thousand-year-plus historical process during which human society grew in scale while it abandoned the early indigenous wisdom councils and communal decision-making," he writes in The Open Source Everything Manifesto. "Power was centralised in the hands of increasingly specialised 'elites' and 'experts' who not only failed to achieve all they promised but used secrecy and the control of information to deceive the public into allowing them to retain power over community resources that they ultimately looted."

Today's capitalism, he argues, is inherently predatory and destructive:

"Over the course of the last centuries, the commons was fenced, and everything from agriculture to water was commoditised without regard to the true cost in non-renewable resources. Human beings, who had spent centuries evolving away from slavery, were re-commoditised by the Industrial Era."

Open source everything, in this context, offers us the chance to build on what we've learned through industrialisation, to learn from our mistakes, and catalyse the re-opening of the commons, in the process breaking the grip of defunct power structures and enabling the possibility of prosperity for all.

"Sharing, not secrecy, is the means by which we realise such a lofty destiny as well as create infinite wealth. The wealth of networks, the wealth of knowledge, revolutionary wealth - all can create a nonzero win-win Earth that works for one hundred percent of humanity. This is the 'utopia' that Buckminster Fuller foresaw, now within our reach."

The goal, he concludes, is to reject:

"... concentrated illicitly aggregated and largely phantom wealth in favor of community wealth defined by community knowledge, community sharing of information, and community definition of truth derived in transparency and authenticity, the latter being the ultimate arbiter of shared wealth."

This is the stuff of the ‘social contagion’ that so worries the Pentagon. Whether it will be anywhere near as utopian as Steele envisions is far from clear. If so, it certainly won’t be democratic if it’s to be truly benevolent.

It’s obvious that Steele supports Steady State economics and the rejection of neo-classical economics models of the type still taught in our universities. We will shift to steady state principles because it’s what is demanded when the world runs out of stuff – and we are. It is a transition from a perpetual, exponential growth-based system to an allocation-based system, the sort of thing we have resorted to during wartime. The only alternative to that is a fairly-brutal neo-feudalism but the peasantry is too well armed this time around.

I don’t know if I’ll see this in my lifetime but I expect many of you will. History has shown that, while revolutions can be foreseen (as the Pentagon is doing right now), there’s no way to determine when the actual tipping point will occur. These things usually take everyone at least somewhat by surprise which explains, in part, why they often become ugly, brutal and confused.

Let’s hope Steele is right because what he foresees is not revolution as much as a massive reformation that overthrows our political, social and economic models. Bliss.

Not Good, Not Good At All

The following requires no commentary from me:

UPDATED: They'll Be Watching You

Every breath you take
Every move you make
Every bond you break
Every step you take
I'll be watching you.

-The Police - Every Breath You Take

Recent revelations, some of which I have written about, should make us all acutely aware that in the surveillance state, which now describes much of the world, our privacy is more a cherished illusion than it is a reality. Not only has the Canadian federal government been enjoying easy access to our digital information but also, as we recently learned, it has sent out a directive to all federal departments to report any demonstrations, however big or small, to the Government Operations Centre. Chillingly, a leaked email said, "We will compile this information and make this information available to our partners..."

But it turns out that the above only shows the tip of a very large iceberg.

Yesterday, The Mound of Sound sent me this link from The Guardian. Entitled Pentagon preparing for mass civil breakdown, the piece should give all of us, no matter where we live, profound pause:

A US Department of Defense (DoD) research programme is funding universities to model the dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world, under the supervision of various US military agencies. The multi-million dollar programme is designed to develop immediate and long-term "warfighter-relevant insights" for senior officials and decision makers in "the defense policy community," and to inform policy implemented by "combatant commands."

Launched in 2008 – the year of the global banking crisis (emphasis added) – the DoD 'Minerva Research Initiative' partners with universities "to improve DoD's basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the US."

The above would seem to provide an ominous clue as to its larger purpose. The fact that the Minerva Project was launched the same year as the banking crisis, a crisis that led to deep and extensive civil unrest, suggests that its purpose is control and containment and, by extension, maintenance of the status quo. Back to that in a moment.

Wide-scale surveillance is a given in this quest for 'understanding':

Twitter posts and conversations will be examined "to identify individuals mobilised in a social contagion and when they become mobilised."

Basic tenets of democracy appear to be of no concern to The Pentagon. Indeed, protests to bring about political and economic change are viewed as palpable threats:

Another project awarded this year to the University of Washington "seeks to uncover the conditions under which political movements aimed at large-scale political and economic change originate," along with their "characteristics and consequences." The project, managed by the US Army Research Office, focuses on "large-scale movements involving more than 1,000 participants in enduring activity," and will cover 58 countries in total.

The narrow perspective of the military, which sees all disruptive activity as a threat to the status quo, is confirmed by Prof David Price, a cultural anthropologist at St Martin's University in Washington DC. who previously exposed some truths about the Pentagon's Human Terrain Systems (HTS) programme, whose scenarios

"adapted COIN [counterinsurgency] for Afghanistan/Iraq" to domestic situations "in the USA where the local population was seen from the military perspective as threatening the established balance of power and influence, and challenging law and order."

One war-game, said Price, involved environmental activists protesting pollution from a coal-fired plant near Missouri, some of whom were members of the well-known environmental NGO Sierra Club.

Such war-games are consistent with a raft of Pentagon planning documents which suggest that National Security Agency (NSA) mass surveillance is partially motivated to prepare for the destabilising impact of coming environmental, energy and economic shocks.

To say that this entire mentality is a deep affront to basic tenets of democracy is to state the obvious. To think that this is only a theoretical construct is to be unspeakably naive. Although examples of state repression as a response to protest and unrest abound, one need only remember what happened when the Occupy Movement hit its stride. Closer to home, of course, was the June 2010 G20 Summit debacle in Toronto. Or take a look at how Brazil is currently dealing with protests during the World Cup.

And things will not be getting any better. Climate change, probably our greatest threat, will spark more and more unrest, as will the Harper government's sanctioning of the Northern Gateway Project.

From all of this, one thing is abundantly clear. Rather than constructively responding to citizen concerns, the state will do everything in its power to protect the interests of those who really matter to it. Hint: it isn't us.

And finally, this warning from Dwight Eisenhower, spoken over 50 years ago as he prepared to depart from the U.S. presidency, seems eerily prescient:



Thanks to Anon, who provided the link to the following video, which significantly updates things:

Fundamentalists Strike a Blow Against Censorship

And I, along with countless others, am so, so glad.

This Speaks For Me

H/t Michelle Mainwaring

Thomas Walkom Misses The Mark

One of the reasons I subscribe to The Toronto Star is the quality of its columnists. Tim Harper, Martin Regg Cohn, Thomas Walkom, Heather Mallick, etc. rarely disappoint. However, no one is perfect, and today's column by Walkom is not up to his usual critical standards.

Entitled Conservatives’ downfall could be Stephen Harper’s dismissive tone, the piece seems to suggest that if Harper were nicer, people wouldn't perceive his government in nearly as bad a light as they do:

When the obituary is finally written on Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government, it is the tone that will stand out.

Most of his actions will not. With some notable exceptions (such as gutting environmental regulations), they have not been extreme.

As illustration of the regime's mean-spirited nature, he cites the increasingly antagonistic and divisive tone of Immigration Minister Chris Alexander, (a once well-regarded foreign diplomat whose moral decline since joining the cabinet has been precipitous, egregious and Dorian-Gray like). Responding to criticism of his bill that would give the government the power to strip citizenship away from native-born Canadians who hold dual citizenship, Alexander called into question former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, who, he said, had eliminated treason as grounds for citizenship revocation “at a time when the Liberal Party was playing footsie with Moscow.”

To be sure, the tone of the regime has been relentlessly harsh toward all who question or oppose its policies. It is on daily display during Question Period, where civility and respect were long ago replaced by sneering derision, not only for opposition members, but also for the institution of Parliament and its officers. Well-documented in the blogosphere, such debasement, I have opined in the past, has been intentional so as to discourage an already discouraged electorate from political participation.

Voter alienation is one of the highest costs we are paying with this cabal, but of course, it has wrought much destruction in so many other areas as well.

A very brief overview will amply underscore some of the things Walkom has blithely overlooked:

- a war on science, resulting in the muzzling of scientists and dismantling of world-class research

- an antipathy toward climate change mitigation. As we saw last weak, Harper and Australia's Tony Abbott are true soul mates in this domain.

- the starving of the beast. Every measure to reduce federal revenues, be they through direct cutting of taxes, expansion of Tax-Free Savings Accounts, income-splitting, etc. is consistent with the conservatism espoused by Harperites. The less money there is, the less 'social engineering', as they would call it, the federal government can do. This kind of economic Darwinism, of course, ignores the needs of the many while rewarding and encouraging the indulges of the few.

- harsh mandatory sentencing in a time of declining crime rates.

- the loss of Canada's international recognition as an honest broker. The government's unflinching support of Israel in all matters, and its increasing contempt for bodies like the U.N., betray long-standing traditions that served us and the world so well.

- contempt for privacy. Only now are we waking up to the realization of widespread domestic surveillance sanctioned by the regime, including warrantless requests for information from our ISPs.

Obviously, I have touched on but a few of shortcomings of the current regime. To be fair to Walkom, no one column could be expected to address them. But suggesting the main problem for the government is one of tone does seem to woefully underestimate the damage done by this hateful regime.

What Would Jesus Do?

Surely not what California Pastor John MacArthur suggests here.