Duboka Država(e)

[fox m.]

Mislio sam da bi bilo dobro da imamo jednu temu u kojoj bi sve relevantno bilo na jednom mestu.

Prvo, neko osnovne informacije i izvori.

Objašnjenje Adam Smitovog termina captured state/zarobljene države

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Indeed, Smith’s single most famous idea – that of ‘the invisible hand’ as a metaphor for uncoordinated market allocation – was invoked in precisely the context of his blistering attack on the merchant elites. It is certainly true that Smith was skeptical of politicians’ attempts to interfere with, or bypass, basic market processes, in the vain hope of trying to do a better job of allocating resources than was achievable through allowing the market to do its work. But in the passage of The Wealth of Nations where he invoked the idea of the invisible hand, the immediate context was not simply that of state intervention in general, but of state intervention undertaken at the behest of merchant elites who were furthering their own interests at the expense of the public.

It is an irony of history that Smith’s most famous idea is now usually invoked as a defence of unregulated markets in the face of state interference, so as to protect the interests of private capitalists. For this is roughly the opposite of Smith’s original intention, which was to advocate for restrictions on what groups of merchants could do. When he argued that markets worked remarkably efficiently – because, although each individual ‘intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention’ – this was an appeal to free individuals from the constraints imposed upon them by the monopolies that the merchants had established, and were using state power to uphold. The invisible hand was originally invoked not to draw attention to the problem of state intervention, but of state capture.

Smith was, however, deeply pessimistic about the stranglehold that the merchants had managed to exert over European politics, and despaired of it ever being loosened. Accordingly, he labelled his preferred alternative – of liberal markets generating wealth to be passed on to all members of society – a ‘Utopia’ that would never come to pass. History has to some extent proved him wrong on this score: we now live in an era of comparative market freedom. But nobody should deny that merchant conspiracy, and the marriage of the state to what we now call corporate power, remain defining features of our present-day political and economic reality.

https://aeon.co/essays/we-should-look-closely-at-what-adam-smith-actually-believed

 

Knjige Mike Lofgrena i Peter Dale Scotta i sjajan mali sajt herinst.

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Mike Lofgren, a former Congressional staffer for the Republicans, in his book The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government, describes the Deep State as a shadow government whose "governing philosophy profoundly influences foreign and national security policy and such domestic matters as spending priorities, trade, book coverinvestment, income inequality, privatization of government services, media presentation of news..."

This has resulted in the paradox of impoverished public services and infrastructure at the same time as billions are spent on foreign wars and mass surveillance.

The existence of the Deep State means that whether the Democrats or the Republicans win elections in the US, economic and security policies do not change much. The real differences are in the arena of "cultural and identity issues". Even presidents have limited power with respect to "very big issues of international finance and national security". Instead they become the front persons for the Deep State. For example, Lofgren says that when Clinton was at the end of his term as president he "signed a bill which took the wraps off derivatives trading. He claimed later that somehow his hand was forced and that it was going to be written anyway and all that; I don't think so. He ended up being paid over $100 million afterwards, mainly by corporate sponsors, to give speeches."

The Deep State, according to Lofgren, consists of "a hybrid association of key elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the United States with only limited reference to the consent of the governed as normally expressed through elections."

Quote

Peter Dale Scott, in his book The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil, and the Attack on U.S. Democracy, describes the Deep State as decision-making and enforcement, particularly with respect to US foreign affairs, that takes place both inside and outside of government and the law. Scott, like Lofgren, claims the Deep State includes agencies set up by the government such as the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) and the NSA (National Security Agency) and powerful banks and law firms, sometimes referred to as Wall Street. To this mix, Scott adds the transnational oil corporations.

The collaboration between Treasury officials, CIA, and Wall Street bankers and oil executives is facilitated by the revolving door. Scott shows that Wall Street played a crucial role in the formation of the CIA in 1947 and aided the large oil companies to maintain their cartels in opposition to government in the 1950s. Allen Dulles, a Republican lawyer at Wall Street law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, was appointed to plan and structure the new agency and he formed an advisory group of six men including five investment bankers and lawyers from Wall Street. Dulles later became CIA director

Kanadski dip stejt:
 

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Kevin Taft, in his book Oil’s Deep State, claims the Deep State in Canada is dominated by the oil industry. He says the Deep State is a "a public-private hybrid that operates outside public view" as a result of "several key democratic institutions" being "captured and held by the same private interest". As a result the Deep State consists of business owners and executives (in Canada's case from the oil industry), together with allied politicians and bureaucrats.

The Harper Conservatives became clients of the oil industry, withdrawing from the Kyoto accord and silencing federal scientists. The federal Liberals and Alberta NDP committed to expanding pipelines and oil sands production. The National Energy Board was tarred by conflicts of interest and the Alberta Energy Regulator was chaired by a former oil executive, while millions of oil dollars flowed to universities. Enough public institutions were captured by the oil industry that a state within a state was created: a deep state.

Duboka i plitka država:

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Jason Royce Lindsey, in his book The Concealment of the State, differentiates between a deep state and a shallow state. Traditionally matters of defense and security have been kept secret but "we now see a shift of even mundane policy decisions to less visible agencies in the Deep State. Examples include budget recommendations, environmental regulations, consumer and workplace safety, scientific investment, transportation planning, and educational policies." Privatisation of public services has further removed public services from the democratic arena.

By bifurcating politics into a deep and shallow state, contemporary states hide their ability to act, but at a cost. Political actors in the shallow state are left to visibly debate policies, which, from the outset, have been closely circumscribed by the actions of the deep state. This shift of responsibility allows politicians in the shallow state to pursue votes with popular, or populist, policies that ignore increasingly hard economic and ecological constraints. To some extent, politicians must engage with their constituents (and with each other) in this circumscribed, populist arena because so many issues of substance have been removed from their sphere of influence.

The shallow state focuses on issues of "national identity, cultural controversy, consumer frustrations, and symbolic acts of solidarity with constituents". The Deep State has taken over decisions about taxation and government spending, with austerity no longer up for public debate. The private interests dominating the Deep State ensured that during the Global Financial Crisis, many nations directed government aid to large financial institutions rather than to public welfare.

Lindsey says that national governments like the US's concede power to transnational corporations, even though it undermines national sovereignty, in order to remain economically competitive and therefore have power and influence in the international sphere.

http://www.herinst.org/BusinessManagedDemocracy/government/national/deep.html

 

btw, koliki je tajming za merge postova? pitam da mi postovi ne bi bili pretrpani, a hoću da ih pišem jedan za drugim

Edited January 21, 2023 by fox m.

[fox m.]

Google osnovan CIA/NSA beards of a feather programom i grantovima.

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The CIA and NSA funded an unclassified, compartmentalized program designed from its inception to spur something that looks almost exactly like Google

Did the CIA directly fund the work of Brin and Page, and therefore create Google? No. But were Brin and Page researching precisely what the NSA, the CIA, and the intelligence community hoped for, assisted by their grants? Absolutely.

https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-cia-and-nsa-research-grants-for-mass-surveillance/amp

 

 

Edited January 21, 2023 by fox m.

[fox m.]

Slajd ekonomistkinje Marijane Macukato.

 

Edited January 21, 2023 by fox m.

[fox m.]

CIA agenti u Guglu.

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Google–one of the largest and most influential organizations in the modern world–is filled with ex-CIA agents. Studying employment websites and databases, MintPress has ascertained that the Silicon Valley giant has recently hired dozens of professionals from the Central Intelligence Agency in recent years. Moreover, an inordinate number of these recruits work in highly politically sensitive fields, wielding considerable control over how its products work and what the world sees on its screens and in its search results.


Chief amongst these is the trust and safety department, whose staff, in the words of then Google trust and safety vice president Kristie Canegallo, “[d]ecide what content is allowed on our platform”–in other words, setting the rules of the internet, determining what billions see and what they do not see. Before Google, Canegallo had been President Obama’s Deputy White House Chief of Staff for Implementation and is currently Chief of Staff at the Department of Homeland Security.

https://mronline.org/2022/07/27/national-security-search-engine/

[fox m.]

CIA, FBI, DoD ljudi u Meta.

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Aaron is CIA. Or at least he was until July 2019, when he left his job as a senior analytic manager at the agency to become senior product policy manager for misinformation at Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. In his 15-year career, Aaron Berman rose to become a highly influential part of the CIA. For years, he prepared and edited the president of the United States’ daily brief, “wr[iting] and overs[eeing] intelligence analysis to enable the President and senior U.S. officials to make decisions on the most critical national security issues,” especially on “the impact of influence operations on social movements, security, and democracy,” his LinkedIn profile reads. None of this is mentioned in the Facebook video.

Berman’s case is far from unique, however. Studying Meta’s reports, as well as employment websites and databases, MintPress has found that Facebook has recruited dozens of individuals from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as well as many more from other agencies like the FBI and Department of Defense (DoD). These hires are primarily in highly politically sensitive sectors such as trust, security and content moderation, to the point where some might feel it becomes difficult to see where the U.S. national security state ends and Facebook begins.

https://www.mintpressnews.com/meet-ex-cia-agents-deciding-facebook-content-policy/281307/

[fox m.]

Od NATOa do TikToka put je kratak.

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Perhaps the most worrying NATO alumnus, from a public perspective, is new Feature Policy Manager Greg Andersen. According to his own LinkedIn profile, until 2019, Andersen worked on “psychological operations” for NATO. This fact, according to MintPress contributor Lowkey, was removed after his tweet raising concerns about the relationship between big tech and the national security state went viral. Lowkey wrote:

https://www.mintpressnews.com/nato-tiktok-pipeline-why-tiktok-employing-national-security-agents/280336/

[fox m.]

Jastrebovka kao Redditov Director of Policy.

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Reddit is one of the world’s most influential news and social media platforms. The website attracted over 1.2 billion visits in April 2021 alone, making it the United States’ eighth most visited site, ahead of other leviathans like Twitter, Instagram and eBay. Now majority-owned by a much larger corporate publishing empire, Reddit is also far ahead of more established news sites, garnering three times the numbers of Fox News and five times those of The New York Times.

That is why it was so surprising that so little was made of the company’s decision to appoint foreign policy hawk Jessica Ashooh to the position of Director of Policy in 2017, at which time it was also the eight most visited site in the U.S. Ashooh, who had been a Middle East foreign policy wonk at NATO’s think tank the Atlantic Council, was appointed at around the same time that the Senate Select Intelligence Committee was demanding more control over the popular website, on the grounds that it was being used to spread disinformation. In her role as Director of Policy, she oversees all government relations and public policy for the company, in addition to managing content, product and advertising. Yet a Google search for “Jessica Ashooh Reddit” filtered between late 2016 and early 2017 (after she was appointed) elicits zero relevant results, meaning not one media outlet even mentioned the questionable appointment.

This is all the more hair-raising, given her resume as a high state official — all of which raises serious questions about the extent of collaboration between Silicon Valley and the national security state.

The Atlantic Council is the de-facto brains of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and takes funding from the military alliance, as well as from the U.S. government, the U.S. military, Middle Eastern dictatorships, other Western governments, big tech companies, and weapons manufacturers. Its board of directors has been and continues to be a who’s who of high U.S. statespeople like Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, as well as senior military commanders such as retired generals Wesley Clark, David Petraeus, H.R. McMaster, James “Mad Dog” Mattis, the late Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft, and Admiral James Stavridis. At least seven former CIA directors are also on the board. As such, the council chooses to represent both political wings of the national security state.

However, what has been lost across the internet is the liberatory potential of these technologies. In the 1990s and 2000s, many predicted that the internet would usher in a new era of egalitarianism and genuine democracy, helping even to reduce barriers and tensions between nations. For a while, the new medium allowed political actors to challenge the status quo and gain huge followings quickly. Alternative media was easily outperforming legacy media, and challenging the status quo when it came to news. Seeing that, the reaction since 2016 has been swift, as the elite have moved to retighten their grip over the means of communication. Ashooh’s jump from national security state official to Reddit Director of Policy is just one more point of reference on that chart.

https://www.mintpressnews.com/jessica-ashooh-reddit-national-security-state-plant/277639/

[reki]

komentar za vidljivost

[fox m.]

FBI ljudi u Tvitteru i povezani australijski jastrebovski think-tank.

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Twitter has been on a recruitment drive of late, hiring a host of former feds and spies. Studying a number of employment and recruitment websites, MintPress has ascertained that the social media giant has, in recent years, recruited dozens of individuals from the national security state to work in the fields of security, trust, safety and content.

https://www.mintpressnews.com/twitter-hiring-alarming-number-spooks-secret-agents/281114/

 

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Social media giant Twitter raised many eyebrows recently when it announced that it had partnered with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) in its fight against disinformation and fake news. ASPI, Twitter revealed in a blog post, had helped identify thousands of accounts that “amplified Chinese Communist Party narratives” around China’s treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. These accounts have now been permanently deleted.

This is of concern because the ultra-hawkish Australian think tank is actually the source for many of the most incendiary claims about China and its foreign policy, and, as Australian journalist and filmmaker John Pilger told MintPress, has been a driving force in the ramping up of tensions between China and the West, something he explored in his 2016 documentary, “The Coming War on China.” Pilger stated that,

https://www.mintpressnews.com/aspi-think-tank-controlling-twitter/279490/

[fox m.]

eBay

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In today’s backlash over Silicon Valley’s contracts with American military and intelligence agencies, people are focused on Facebook, Google and Amazon — while Pierre Omidyar’s eBay has been entirely ignored. But Omidyar has been at the forefront of building out Silicon Valley’s global private-public surveillance apparatus.
 
For the past decade Omidyar has quietly worked to expand eBay’s privatized surveillance-state model beyond online sales and into elections, media, transportation, education, finance, as well as government administration. His vehicle for that: the Omidyar Group, an investment vehicle that bankrolls hundreds of startups, business and non-profits around the world.”
 
By the mid-2000s, when Google was still a small company and Facebook barely existed, eBay had built this global private division into a behemoth: 2,000 employees and more than a thousand private investigators, who worked closely with intelligence and law enforcement agencies in every country where it operated — including the United States, Canada, Brazil, Mexico, Malaysia, India, Russia, Czech Republic and Poland. EBay was proud of its close relationship with law enforcement, touting efforts to arrest 1,000 people a year and boasting that it had handed over user data to the NSA and FBI without requiring subpoenas or court orders.”

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Omidyar’s support for the same neocon guru who oversaw the publication of an article branding NSA spying whistleblower Edward Snowden as a “traitor” should place the ebay founder’s acquisition of the Snowden files in a disturbing light. By establishing The Intercept and recruiting the journalists who possessed Snowden’s leaks, the billionaire effectively privatized the files. Not only did this delay their release, it denied the public access to the information in order to supply his stable of hired reporters with exclusive scoops that continue to appear years after they were leaked. To this day, only a minuscule percentage of the Snowden files have been made public and, for whatever reason, none of those that have been released relate to ebay or its assorted business interests.

https://www.mintpressnews.com/ebay-founder-pierre-omidyar-is-funding-a-global-media-information-war/255199/

[fox m.]

ELON MUSK IS NOT A RENEGADE OUTSIDER – HE’S A MASSIVE PENTAGON CONTRACTOR

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From its origins in 2002, SpaceX has always been extremely close to the national security state, particularly the CIA. Perhaps the most crucial link is Mike Griffin, who, at the time, was the president and COO of In-Q-Tel, a CIA-funded venture capital firm that seeks to nurture and sponsor new companies that will work with the CIA and other security services, equipping them with cutting edge technology. The “Q” in its name is a reference to “Q” from the James Bond series – a creative inventor who supplies the spy with the latest in futuristic tech.Griffin was with Musk virtually from day one, accompanying him to Russia in February 2002, where they attempted to purchase cut-price intercontinental ballistic missiles to start Musk’s business. Musk felt that he could substantially undercut opponents by using second-hand material and off-the-shelf components for launches. The attempt failed, but the trip cemented a lasting partnership between the pair, with Griffin going to war for Musk, consistently backing him as a potential “Henry Ford” of the rocket industry. Three years later, Griffin would become head of NASA and later would hold a senior post at the Department of Defense.

While at NASA, Griffin brought Musk in for meetings and secured SpaceX’s big break. In 2006, NASA awarded the company a $396 million rocket development contract – a remarkable “gamble” in Griffin’s words, especially as it had never launched a rocket before. As National Geographic put it, SpaceX, “never would have gotten to where it is today without NASA.” And Griffin was essential to this development. Still, by 2008, SpaceX was again in dire straits, with Musk unable to make payroll. The company was saved by an unexpected $1.6 billion NASA contract for commercial cargo services. Thus, from its earliest days, SpaceX was nurtured by government agencies that saw the company as a potentially important source of technology.

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Therefore, while the 50-year-old businessman presents himself as a maverick science genius – an act that has garnered him legions of fans around the world – a closer inspection of his career shows he earned his fortune in a much more orthodox manner. First by being born rich, then by striking it big as a dot-com billionaire, and finally, like so many others, by feeding from the enormous government trough.

Perhaps more seriously though, SpaceX’s close proximity to both the military and the national security state marks it out as a key cog in the machine of U.S. empire, allowing Washington to spy, bomb or coup whoever it wants.
 
It is for this reason that so much of the hysteria, both positive and negative, over Musk’s ongoing purchase of Twitter is misplaced. Elon Musk is neither going to save nor destroy Twitter because he is not a crusading rebel challenging the establishment: he is an integral part of it.

https://www.mintpressnews.com/elon-musk-not-renegade-outsider-cia-pentagon-contractor/280972/

Edited January 22, 2023 by fox m.

[Dule_smor]

Cuo sam da je Elon Musk poreklom iz Republike Srpske, jel tako?

[Sting]

Ček to je kao nešto novo? Zar je iko mislio da u SAD postoji mogućnost da se bavis raketama koje mogu da napuste orbitu a da nisi i dilu sa vojskom i obavestajnim službama?

Edited January 22, 2023 by Sting

[fox m.]

Ima ogroman broj ljudi njegovih fanbojeva po mrežama koji veruju u to.

[fox m.]

Inside the secret network behind mass surveillance, endless war, and Skynet

How the CIA made Google - part 1 (49 min read)
 
Why Google made the NSA - part 2 (52 min read)

 

INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, a new crowd-funded investigative journalism project, breaks the exclusive story of how the United States intelligence community funded, nurtured and incubated Google as part of a drive to dominate the world through control of information. Seed-funded by the NSA and CIA, Google was merely the first among a plethora of private sector start-ups co-opted by US intelligence to retain ‘information superiority.’

The origins of this ingenious strategy trace back to a secret Pentagon-sponsored group, that for the last two decades has functioned as a bridge between the US government and elites across the business, industry, finance, corporate, and media sectors. The group has allowed some of the most powerful special interests in corporate America to systematically circumvent democratic accountability and the rule of law to influence government policies, as well as public opinion in the US and around the world. The results have been catastrophic: NSA mass surveillance, a permanent state of global war, and a new initiative to transform the US military into Skynet.

This exclusive is being released for free in the public interest, and was enabled by crowdfunding. I’d like to thank my amazing community of patrons for their support, which gave me the opportunity to work on this in-depth investigation. Please support independent, investigative journalism for the global commons.

[fox m.]

Klasik.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket

 

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War Is a Racket is a speech and a 1935 short book by Smedley D. Butler, a retired United States Marine Corps Major General and two-time Medal of Honor recipient. Based on his career military experience, Butler discusses how business interests commercially benefit from warfare. He had been appointed commanding officer of the Gendarmerie during the 1915–1934 United States occupation of Haiti.

The work is divided into five chapters:
 

1. War is a racket
2. Who makes the profits
3. Who pays the bills?
4. How to smash this racket!
5. To hell with war!

 
It contains this summary:
 
War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

 

[reki]

ja te volim

[cali]

11 hours ago, reki said:

ja te volim

Ko te plaća?

[reki]

Ko da najviše!

[fox m.]

Military-entertainment complex

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It has long been a matter of public record that American spies have targeted and penetrated Activision Blizzard games. Documents released by Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA, CIA, FBI and Department of Defense infiltrated the vast online realms such as World of Warcraft, creating make-believe characters to monitor potential illegal activity and recruit informers. Indeed, at one point, there were so many U.S. spies in one video game that they had to create a “deconfliction” group as they were wasting time unwittingly surveilling each other. Virtual games, the NSA wrote, were an “opportunity” and a “target-rich communication network”.
 
However, documents obtained legally under the Freedom of Information Act by journalist and researcher Tom Secker and shared with MintPress News show that the connections between the national security state and the video game industry go far beyond this, and into active collaboration.

Quote

Tricia Jenkins and Tom Secker deliver a highly original exploration of how the government-entertainment complex has influenced the world’s most popular movie genre—superhero films. Superheroes, Movies, and the State sets a new standard for exploring the government-Hollywood relationship as it persuasively documents the critical role different government agencies have played in shaping characters, stories, and even the ideas behind the hottest entertainment products. Jenkins and Secker cover a wide range of US government and quasi-governmental agencies who act to influence the content of superhero movies, including the Department of Defense, the National Academy of Sciences’ Science and Entertainment Exchange and, to a lesser extent, the FBI and the CIA.
 
Superheroes, Movies, and the State deploys a thematic framework to analyze how five of the key themes of our time—militarism, political radicalism and subversion, the exploration of space, the role of science and technology, and representation and identity—manifest in the superhero genre, and the role of the government in molding narratives around these topics. The book includes interviews with both producers and influencer insiders and covers a wide range of superhero products, from 1970s TV shows up to the most recent movie and TV releases, including the first major analysis of the hit Amazon show The Boys. In addition, it is the first deep exploration of NASA’s Hollywood office and the first detailed account of the role of the Science and Entertainment Exchange, which has worked on thousands of products since its creation in 2008 but is little known outside of the industry. Superheroes, Movies, and the State offers an innovative blend of research methods and interpretive frameworks, combining both production histories and deep readings of superhero texts to clearly reveal how the government-entertainment complex works in the world of blockbuster cinema to shape public perceptions of the United States, war, science, and much, much more.

https://kansaspress.ku.edu/9780700632763/superheroes-movies-and-the-state/

Edited January 24, 2023 by fox m.

[fox m.]

"We are living in a world where we do all the work we pay all the taxes but we own less and less " 

“The problem isn’t that they’re breaking the law. The problem is that they don’t have to break the law”

 

[fox m.]

Kalifornijski vodeni baroni i farmeri koji bi da idu u rat sa Iranom zbog tržišta pistaća.
 

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My interest in water began in Victorville, but it showed me a side of California that I had never realized existed.


People focus on Hollywood or Silicon Valley as the state’s most powerful industries. And indeed, they are powerful. But as I discovered, the true power brokers here are the farmers: They own the water. They own the land. And nothing happens in California without those two things — not even Silicon Valley or Hollywood can change that.
 
This small group of wealthy families run California like their own banana republic. They buy politicians, own towns, import migrant labor, pollute with impunity, and bend everything and everyone to their will. The story of California power is straight out of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. The only difference is that it’s not fiction and it’s not ancient history. It’s happening today. Right now.

https://yasha.substack.com/p/pistachio-wars-the-back-story-571

 

Quote

Last week, filmmaker Rowan Wernham and I launched a Kickstarter for Pistachio Wars, a documentary about the stealth privatization of California’s water — and the small group of billionaires who are driving it.

It focuses on a Beverly Hills billionaire power couple: Stewart and Lynda Resnick. They’re farmers — the biggest and most powerful in California. They’re also water barons. They control more water than the entire population of Los Angeles uses in one year — that’s 4 million people.
 
The doc tells a wild story. And it stands, in a very unexpected way, at the intersection of all sorts of ugly forces that are hitting us at the same time: oligarchy, global warming, environmental destruction, useless consumerism and marketing, the failure of liberal philanthropy, and America’s destructive neoconservative foreign policy. It seems like a lot of disparate issues to tie into a documentary about some pistachio farmers, but they all do come together in Pistachio Wars.

http://exiledonline.com/tag/water-wars/


A Kingdom From Dust
 

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The extraction of water beneath the lake bottom won’t last forever. The state of California has adopted a new law that finally regulates the pumping. When it goes into full effect, in a decade or two, more than a million acres of cropland across the valley will have to be retired. By then, Wonderful, if it still exists, will be a portfolio run by men even farther away than Beverly Hills. The water will be stripped from the land and sold to developers of new towns both here and over the mountain. In my lifetime alone, California has gone from 13 million people to 40 million people. Nothing will stop the houses. The Wheat King begets the Cattle King, and the Cattle King begets the Cotton King, and the Cotton King begets the Nut King and Pomegranate Queen. Like the waters of the lake, the indent of the Resnicks will recede from the land, too. The Yokut had a saying that when the farmer drained the last drops of snowmelt from Tulare Lake, the water would return. It would return as tule fog to remind the white man of his theft. The fog is our history.

 

[fox m.]

Isto od Yashe.
 

https://surveillancevalley.com

Quote

A reporter unearths the true history of the internet: it was built by the government to spy on citizens, at home and abroad. In Surveillance Valley, Yasha Levine traces the history of the internet back to its beginnings as a Vietnam-era tool for spying on guerrilla fighters and antiwar protesters–a military computer networking project that ultimately envisioned the creation of a global system of surveillance and prediction. Levine shows how the same military objectives that drove the development of early internet technology are still at the heart of Silicon Valley today. Spies, counterinsurgency campaigns, hippie entrepreneurs, privacy apps funded by the CIA. From the 1960s to the 2010s — this revelatory and sweeping story will make you reconsider what you know about the most powerful, ubiquitous tool ever created.

"Yasha Levine's bold and sweeping history of the Internet-from its shadowy inception as a military contrivance for counterinsurgency and domestic surveillance, to its current incarnation as a commercialized tool for everyday communication that turns everyone's life into an open book-tells a gripping story of our algorithmic way of life in the making. Defying common Internet tropes that present a battle between valiant and independent rebels versus omnipresent state and corporate powers, no one comes out of this book looking clean. Whatever your thoughts about our digitized world, this book will challenge them." —Stuart Ewen, Distinguished Professor of History, Sociology and Media Studies at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center
 
"Yasha Levine's Surveillance Valley is an important and not well known history of computers and the internet. In our tech driven culture, history is ignored, yet it is only by knowing the history of technologies can we hope to create a much needed politics of technology. Without history, it is impossible to adequately understand any given technology's impact on society...If we want a democratic future, and those controlling and implementing the technology show little democratic inclinations, we need to develop a politics of technology. Levine's history of Surveillance Valley provides an essential first step." —Joe Costello, Author of Of, By, For: The New Politics of Money, Debt & Democracy

 

Edited January 24, 2023 by fox m.

[Lucky]

13 hours ago, fox m. said:

It has long been a matter of public record that American spies have targeted and penetrated Activision Blizzard games. Documents released by Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA, CIA, FBI and Department of Defense infiltrated the vast online realms such as World of Warcraft

ovo me živo zanima kako je izgledalo u praksi :)) dal' su neuki agenti samo blejali sa strane kao lvl1 sedeći u spawn gradu i šetajući okolo ili su zapravo morali da igraju igru? 🙂

a voleo bih i da pročitam neki primer kako su regrutovali ljude u heartstonu ili overwatchu :))

a da budem iskren, nisam čuo ni za jedan slučaj da je zapravo neko objavio da su ga regrutovali na taj način 🙂

[Zwerko]

Sad i ti jebiga - pa nije da će neko sad da dođe i da kaže "e ja sam špijun, regrutovala me CIA u Overwatchu". Cela poenta da si špijun jeste da drugi ne znaju da si špijun... Osim kad dođeš za Novu Godinu u Beograd, onda Vučić zna!

Ja bih pre rekao da je tu priča big data - Blizzard (a i drugi) njima daju uvid u ponašanja igrača, sklonosti i sl i onda na osnovu toga ovi zaključuju ko im od tih treba na osnovu toga kako se ponaša pa mu se jave. A on i ne mora da zna da su mu se javili na osnovu Blizzard podataka, nema potrebe to da mu kažu.