The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted…

punditman says...When you look for evidence of creeping fascism, sometimes you have to take a closer look at our brave new world. Here's an interesting article that ends up equating P2P file sharing with activists who monitored police scanners at the recent G-20 summit and told other demonstrators about police movements via Twitter—and got themselves arrested. Some might say they should have been arrested. But what if the police were acting illegally? What if the governments of the G-20 were acting like criminals? Who are the real crooks here. What if punditman forgot a question mark or three. Is that a crime.

New technologies, old battles. What will happen to the Pittsburgh Two? From Iran to the US, apparently the Revolution will not be tweeted...

… at least not if “law enforcers” get their way.

During the G-20 summit in the Pittsburgh area last week, police arrested two activists. These particular activists weren’t breaking windows. They weren’t setting cars on fire. They weren’t even parading around brandishing giant puppets and chanting anti-capitalist slogans.

In fact, they were in a hotel room in Kennedy, Pennsylvania, miles away from “unsanctioned” protests in Lawrenceville … listening to the radio and availing themselves of the hotel’s Wi-Fi connection. Now they stand accused of “hindering apprehension, criminal use of a communication facility and possessing instruments of crime.”

The radio they were listening to was (allegedly) a police scanner. They were (allegedly) using their Internet access to broadcast bulletins about police movements in Lawrenceville to activists at the protests, using Twitter.

Is that a crime? Should it be a crime?

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Ottawa takes on Facebook, Punditman takes on too much

punditman says...

Punditman noticed the following article this morning in the Globe and Mail: Ottawa takes on social media giant for violating Canada's law. Punditman is not a member of Facebook. Punditman spends an awful lot of time on the computer already for work and for Punditmanish reasons and doesn't need yet another reason to be virtual instead of real. Besides, it appears Facebook has come under a lot of criticism and litigation already. Sounds shady.

Punditman has heard reports from other trusted sources that Facebook can be a kind of creepy experience. Why does punditman need to connect with people he hasn't seen in thirty years? What if he didn't like some of his highschool classmates to begin with? Why does he need new "friends" whom he will never meet? What will these people do for Punditman? Punditman's life is hectic enough. If Punditman gets one more social engagement, online or off, Punditman may one day wig out and hermitize himself. Punditman says that punditman sometimes takes on too much.

Punditman realizes he has no privacy and lost it a long time ago, along with everyone else in the digital age. Some people don't realize it; others don't care. Punditman cares. Just last night at the pub, Punditman succumbed to overwhelming social pressure and was part of a group picture taken for a brewery's website. Luckily punditman was wearing sunglasses and so was peacenik. Who knows what nefarious forces might do with those images? Punditman wasn't particularly happy about it.

Why lose your privacy further by joining some frivolous social media site, says Punditman? There are other ways to get in touch with old buddies. I think. There are other ways to network with new people. I think. So the Canadian government is going after Facebook for privacy violations? Is this a step in the right direction? Or is this a joke, considering the far more insidious encroachments on liberty that have been accumulating in the post-9-11 world? Punditman thinks one commentator on the Globe and Mail article has a good point:

So we are worried about Facebook allowing the collection of personal information. What about the US Government? I would like to know how, with no authorization under law in Canada, mutual fund companies can collect personal information from clients that are US citizens and forward that information to the US government. And, if the client refuses to provide the information, the fund company can confiscate 30% of the client's money (not just earnings mind you, but capital too) and turn that over to the US government. Same thing when one company buys out another and some of the registered shareholders are US citizens.

Punditman does not have time to fact-check the above claim, but assuming it is true, Punditman is not the least bit surprised. Encroaching fascism is coming at us in many forms.

On the other hand, Facebook may be a great Canadian company. Punditman could be wrong.

Resist or Become Serfs

by Chris Hedges

America is devolving into a third-world nation. And if we do not immediately halt our elite's rapacious looting of the public treasury we will be left with trillions in debts, which can never be repaid, and widespread human misery which we will be helpless to ameliorate. Our anemic democracy will be replaced with a robust national police state. The elite will withdraw into heavily guarded gated communities where they will have access to security, goods and services that cannot be afforded by the rest of us. Tens of millions of people, brutally controlled, will live in perpetual poverty. This is the inevitable result of unchecked corporate capitalism. The stimulus and bailout plans are not about saving us. They are about saving them. We can resist, which means street protests, disruptions of the system and demonstrations, or become serfs.

We have been in a steady economic decline for decades. The Canadian political philosopher John Ralston Saul detailed this decline in his 1992 book "Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West." David Cay Johnston exposed the mirage and rot of American capitalism in "Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You With the Bill)," and David C. Korten, in "When Corporations Rule the World" and "Agenda for a New Economy," laid out corporate malfeasance and abuse. But our universities and mass media, entranced by power and naively believing that global capitalism was an unstoppable force of nature, rarely asked the right questions or gave a prominent voice to those who did. Our elites hid their incompetence and loss of control behind an arrogant facade of specialized jargon and obscure economic theories.

The lies employed to camouflage the economic decline are legion. President Ronald Reagan included 1.5 million U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine service personnel with the civilian work force to magically reduce the nation's unemployment rate by 2 percent. President Bill Clinton decided that those who had given up looking for work, or those who wanted full-time jobs but could only find part-time employment, were no longer to be counted as unemployed. This trick disappeared some 5 million unemployed from the official unemployment rolls. If you work more than 21 hours a week-most low-wage workers at places like Wal-Mart average 28 hours a week-you are counted as employed, although your real wages put you below the poverty line. Our actual unemployment rate, when you include those who have stopped looking for work and those who can only find part-time jobs, is not 8.5 percent but 15 percent. A sixth of the country is now effectively unemployed. And we are shedding jobs at a faster rate than in the months after the 1929 crash.

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punditman says...The article posits that if the Obama administration doesn't change course--and fast--America is headed towards becoming Weimar Germany. And we all know what followed. So will we see skyrocketing inflation followed by some sort of crypto fascism? Things are not getting better, and that is why Peacenik is practicing his survival skills for two weekends in a row. And that is why Punditman is worried. Is this what America's near future will look like? Scary stuff--and not just for America.

Does America Face the Risk of a Fascist Backlash?

By Robert Freeman, AlterNet

The Right's ability to capitalize on people's sense of grievance must not be underestimated.

In early 1919, Germany put in place a new government to begin rebuilding the country after its crushing defeat in World War I. But the right-wing forces that had led the country into the War and lost the War conspired even before it was over to destroy the new government, the "Weimar Republic." They succeeded.

The U.S. faces a similar "Weimar Moment." The devastating collapse of the economy after eight years of Republican rule has left the leadership, policies, and ideology of the right utterly discredited. But, as was the case with Germany in 1919, Republicans do not intend to allow the new government to succeed. They will do everything they can to undermine it. If they are successful, the U.S. may yet go the way of Weimar Germany.

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punditman says...The link above is a long read for you, dear readers. But hey, it's the weekend and what better way to spend time than contemplating the consequences of a Republican/fascist resurgence?

Bush's War on Civil Liberties

Legislating Tyranny

by PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
and LAWRENCE M. STRATTON

www.counterpunch.org

The George W. Bush administration responded to the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon with an assault on U.S. civil liberty that Bush justified in the name of the “war on terror.” The government assured us that the draconian measures apply only to “terrorists.” The word terrorist, however, was not defined. The government claimed the discretionary power to decide who is a terrorist without having to present evidence or charges in a court of law.

Frankly, the Bush administration’s policy evades any notion of procedural due process of law. Administration assurances that harsh treatment is reserved only for terrorists is meaningless when the threshold process for determining who is and who is not a terrorist depends on executive discretion that is not subject to review. Substantive rights are useless without the procedural rights to enforce them.

Terrorist legislation and executive assertions created a basis upon which federal authorities claimed they were free to suspend suspects’ civil liberties in order to defend Americans from terrorism. Only after civil liberties groups and federal courts challenged some of the unconstitutional laws and procedures did realization spread that the Bush administration’s assault on the Bill of Rights is a greater threat to Americans than are terrorists.

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punditman says...Yes, keep reading folks. This is a good account of the United States' slide toward fascism.

Secrecy is a nasty virus that can lay low the body politic

by Lloyd Axworthy

Global Research,

theglobeandmail.com

Canada's former Minister of Foreign Affairs Speaks Out

There is a disturbing virus settling into Ottawa. Let's call it the Spreading Northern Security Plague, a variation of a virulent strain of illegal counterterrorism practices imported from the Bush White House. Its symptoms were first detected in the Maher Arar case, where a Canadian was sent off to be tortured in a Syrian jail. Only years later was an inquiry established, presided over by a courageous judge who blew the whistle on such nefarious practices by our security forces.

But by then, the disease had become embedded in the body politic of successive governments with all the signs of a well-established syndrome in which security trumps human rights, international covenants can be disregarded, commissions of inquiry can be secretive and dismissive of rule and procedure, and vital information on crucial issues such as the transfer of Afghan detainees is deliberately withheld.

And now, we learn of Abousfian Abdelrazik, a Sudanese Canadian who was imprisoned in Khartoum, allegedly at the request of CSIS, and who has been stranded in the country for nearly five years. That the Canadian government, knowing full well the egregious human-rights record of the Sudanese regime, would leave one of its citizens marooned in the Sudan, is inexplicable.

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punditman says...

As soon as the State has the right to apprehend you without charges or a fair trial, as soon as they can act in the name of "national security" without oversight or transparency, as soon as they can send you on a "rendition" flight, well, you have lost your freedom, buddy boy. And here's an elementary civics lesson: a violation to one is a violation to all. Too bad they don't teach this in Canadian schools, because we now see the result: where there should be outrage and solidarity, there is mostly silence.

Good for Mr. Axworthy for speaking up.