The US Is Trying to Pry Belarus out of Russia’s Orbit

ANDREW KORYBKO } SIMULPOST WITH RUSSIA INSIDER

Lukashenko shaking hands with Russia’s Medvedev. That was then. Now it would seem Lukashenko would be happier shaking Merkel’s or even Kerry’s hand. How naive can people get?

President Lukashenko’s willingness to depart from his so far successful balancing act between West and Russia, should be of concern to Moscow as:

Belarus’ personality-driven system is vulnerable to flattery and direct diplomacyThe country is used by EU to evade Moscow’s legislation and illegally sell their goods on the Russian marketLukashenko is so adamant about bringing Washington to Minsk that he even wants to normalize relations with the USHe wants his country to prosper, but he also wishes to become internationally popular, and EU knows how to play to his ego

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]ill Belarus fall for short-term gain and lose Russia as its closest partner?

Belarus is backtracking on its commitment to Eurasian integration, since President Lukashenko is engaging in an unnecessary high-risk balancing act in order to legitimize his government in the eyes of the West.

The governing structure in the country is peculiar in the sense that it’s largely dependent on the whims of the man in charge, thus making it a personality-driven system that’s vulnerable to flattery and direct diplomacy. Belarus’ center-stage diplomatic role in hosting the Minsk Talks seems to have gotten to Lukashenko’s head , and the de-facto acceptance of his government by Germany and France (evidenced by Merkel and Hollande’s globally publicized visits to the country) may have made him think that he’s now “one of the club”, or perhaps, even a prestigious member.

Lukashenko in the days when he polished his image as a man of the left.

Lukashenko with President Chavez. That was in the days when he polished his image as a man of the left.

Lukashenko has always tried to balance between the West and Russia while retaining a preference for the sovereignty that Moscow allows him in handling his country’s domestic affairs, but he may now be involving himself in matters above his head and beyond his control. It’s unknown whether he can continue to successfully enact his balancing policy under the overly intense pressures of the New Cold War, and it may be that the application of his old “balancing tricks” (milk and energy disputes with Russia, customs crises, strong “independent” political rhetoric, etc.) might cumulatively add up to create situations where he can’t extricate himself without dealing irreparable damage to his relations with Russia.

Here are Belarus’ latest moves and statements from Lukashenko that make one wonder whether he’s already made his choice in turning towards the West:

Complicity In Breaking The Counter-Sanctions

Belarus has been the base that counter-sanctioned EU countries have been using to evade Moscow’s legislation and illegally sell their goods on the Russian market. This breach of trust between close partners underscores the self-interested nature of the Belarusian leadership in advancing its own profit at the expense of its allies, thereby raising questions about its overall reliance in other commitments as well.

If the West ever offered Belarus a “better” economic deal than the one its already signed with Russia, would Lukashenko abandon his ally and take it, or would he remain as loyal to Russia as Syrian President Assad has been to Iran when the Gulf States offered him their own pipeline deal? After all, the Belarusian President spoke about the future possibility of leaving the Eurasian Union when the newly founded organization was only a couple of weeks old, demonstrating that he’s already weighing his options in the event that another opportunity more to his liking presents itself one day.

BELOW: Poster boasting of Lukashenko’s incorruptibility in the face of bribes.

The Francis Flip

Pope Francis played a primary role in brokering the Raul Castro-Obama deal on Cuba’s capitulation, and if he gets to mediate relations between Belarus and the EU, as the Vatican has recently offered to do, then a similar capitulation can also be expected.

Catholic Poland, whose compatriots comprise a very small but politically agitated minority in Belarus, has ambitions of restoring its hegemony over the lands of its former Commonwealth, and it aspires to use identity warfare and the support of the Vatican in bringing this about.

Warsaw already hosts the anti-government Belarussian House and other groups that are dedicated to regime change (of which Warsaw has directly been accused of conspiring to carry out), and in the interests of aggressive papal proselytization in historically Orthodox lands, it’ll doubtless team up with the Vatican in attempting to bring Belarus under its boots.

The intervention of Francis in trying to “improve” ties between the EU and Belarus is just soft power cover in giving Lukashenko a “face-saving” way to surrender if he so chooses.

Washington In Minsk

Some observers such as Daniel McAdams at the Ron Paul Institute of Peace and Prosperity believe that the key characteristic of the Minsk Talks was that the US wasn’t involved in the format, hence why it’s ultimately still in effect today (no matter how imperfect), but if one asked Lukashenko, he’d strongly disagree. He recently spoke favorably about the US possibly getting involved in the format, which would completely upset the diplomatic balance that’s been carefully constructed thus far.

In fact, Lukashenko is so adamant about bringing Washington to Minsk that he even wants to normalize relations with the US, which would lead to an expected influx of American diplomatic and NGO personnel that might be tempted to provoke a repeat of the Ukrainian scenario if Belarus ever stepped out of line afterwards.

It would also create an oddly uncomfortable situation if Belarus, Russia’s CSTO and Eurasian Union partner, gained a clean slate of pristine relations with the US at the same time that Moscow and Washington are battling it out in the New Cold War. Such an occurrence would surely raise concern in the corridors of the Duma and lead to a lot of second-guessing about Belarus’ geopolitical loyalty.

Rethinking The Belarussian-EU Relationship

The Belarusian Foreign Minister was quoted at the beginning of this month speaking about the necessity of normalizing relations with the EU, and considering the inroads that both sides have made with one another over the past year, such a move can’t be discounted.

As with the criticism of Lukashenko’s suggestion that the same be made with the US, it would be inappropriate for Belarus to normalize ties with the EU while its Russian ally (if it can even be called so at that point) is engaged in New Cold War struggle with Brussels, including a sanctions war that Minsk has repeatedly undermined for its own profit.

Lukashenko’s initiative to simultaneously move closer to the US and EU at the height of their asymmetrical hostilities against Russia portends negatively for its faithfulness to Moscow-led Eurasian integration processes.

***

Win-Win Or Win-Lose?

[dropcap]M[/dropcap]insk is under the false impression that siding with the West in the New Cold War against Russia might be a win-win scenario considering the benefits that are being dangled in front of them, however, this is actually a carefully crafted misperception designed to entice and mislead Belarusian leaders into making a major mistake.

While the short-term ‘benefits’ may appear to be shared, the only long-term beneficiary would be the West, which would gain valuable geostrategic advantages from its unwitting Belarusian benefactor.

The West has not wasted any opportunity to "needle" Lukashenko's ego, by an incessant campaign of
Belarus has a very stable national economy (especially when compared to its European counterparts), thus making it an ideal partner in any economic arrangement, ergo why the EU is interested in it. Lukashenko doesn’t simply want his country to prosper, he also wants to become internationally popular as a result, and since Brussels has been courting his ego lately, he’s becoming more amenable to their influence.

Another thing on Lukashenko’s European “wish list” is to receive “regime reinforcement” (the opposite of regime change), in that his government is finally recognized all throughout the continent as democratic and legitimate (which it is) and no longer as the “last dictatorship in Europe”, the notorious American listing which struck straight through his inflated ego. (See image above.)

He enjoys a high level of real popular support among his people, hence why the media stereotype of a Color Revolution (i.e. “a popular uprising”) is impossible, but Belarus is still vulnerable to Color Revolution 2.0 tactics such as those unveiled in Ukraine.

If he doesn’t throw his lot in with the West, he’s afraid that violent street thugs (some of which could even be infiltrated in from Poland and Ukraine) will descend on Minsk the next time there’s an election and attempt to turn the capital into Kiev.

Unbeknownst to him, the West will still apply this tactic whether he’s friendly with them or not, as it’s nothing more than a simple tool to them in pressuring second-rate leaders to do their bidding, which is exactly what Lukashenko would become if tries to join their bloc.

Another factor that must be mentioned here is Lukashenko’s personal psychology, since the individual-centric nature of Belarus’ current political system makes this among the most important variables in considering the possibility of an anti-Russian pivot. The Belarusian leader initially had a superiority complex vis-à-vis Russia during the 1990s, when his country was largely spared from the economic and social turmoil over the early post-Soviet period mostly due to his own personal policies.

In negotiating the Union State of Russia and Belarus, Lukashenko thought that he could overpower Yeltsin in the proposed arrangement and essentially go from being the leader of Belarus to the leader of all of Russia.

The arrival of President Putin on the scene changed all of that, and Lukashenko then acquired an inferiority complex towards Russia and its leader.

Simultaneously, he also harbors a deep-seated inferiority complex against the EU that he’s had since he first came to power, and the combination of two such identical complexes against his two primary neighbors explains his sometimes schizophrenic and unjustified “balancing acts”.

Given his unstable psychological setup, he’s prime for any personal grooming that makes him feel acknowledged, respected, and powerful, which is exactly what the EU is currently doing, and therefore increasing the possibility that he may fully pivot towards them and against Russia.

[box] A. Korybko is a geostrategist based in Moscow. His analyses appear on Sputnik News and Oriental Review. [/box]

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Karl Marx Was Right

CHRIS HEDGES } TRUTHDIG

A bust of Karl Marx. (gravitat-OFF/ CC BY 2.0)

On Saturday at the Left Forumin New York City, Chris Hedges joined professors Richard Wolff and Gail Dines to discuss why Karl Marx is essential at a time when global capitalism is collapsing. These are the remarks Hedges made to open the discussion.

[dropcap]K[/dropcap]arl Marx exposed the peculiar dynamics of capitalism, or what he called “the bourgeois mode of production.” He foresaw that capitalism had built within it the seeds of its own destruction. He knew that reigning ideologies—think neoliberalism—were created to serve the interests of the elites and in particular the economic elites, since “the class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production” and “the ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships … the relationships which make one class the ruling one.” He saw that there would come a day when capitalism would exhaust its potential and collapse. He did not know when that day would come. Marx, as Meghnad Desaiwrote, was “an astronomer of history, not an astrologer.” Marx was keenly aware of capitalism’s ability to innovate and adapt. But he also knew that capitalist expansion was not eternally sustainable. And as we witness the denouement of capitalism and the disintegration of globalism, Karl Marx is vindicated as capitalism’s most prescient and important critic.

In a preface to “The Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” Marx wrote:

No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have been developed; and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself.

Therefore, mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since looking at the matter more closely, we always find that the task itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist, or are at least in the process of formation.

Socialism, in other words, would not be possible until capitalism had exhausted its potential for further development. That the end is coming is hard now to dispute, although one would be foolish to predict when. We are called to study Marx to be ready.

The final stages of capitalism, Marx wrote, would be marked by developments that are intimately familiar to most of us. Unable to expand and generate profits at past levels, the capitalist system would begin to consume the structures that sustained it. It would prey upon, in the name of austerity, the working class and the poor, driving them ever deeper into debt and poverty and diminishing the capacity of the state to serve the needs of ordinary citizens. It would, as it has, increasingly relocate jobs, including both manufacturing and professional positions, to countries with cheap pools of laborers. Industries would mechanize their workplaces. This would trigger an economic assault on not only the working class but the middle class—the bulwark of a capitalist system—that would be disguised by the imposition of massive personal debt as incomes declined or remained stagnant. Politics would in the late stages of capitalism become subordinate to economics, leading to political parties hollowed out of any real political content and abjectly subservient to the dictates and money of global capitalism.

But as Marx warned, there is a limit to an economy built on scaffolding of debt expansion. There comes a moment, Marx knew, when there would be no new markets available and no new pools of people who could take on more debt. This is what happened with the subprime mortgage crisis. Once the banks cannot conjure up new subprime borrowers, the scheme falls apart and the system crashes.

[dropcap]C[/dropcap]apitalist oligarchs, meanwhile, hoard huge sums of wealth—$18 trillion stashed in overseas tax havens—exacted as tribute from those they dominate, indebt and impoverish. Capitalism would, in the end, Marx said, turn on the so-called free market, along with the values and traditions it claims to defend. It would in its final stages pillage the systems and structures that made capitalism possible. It would resort, as it caused widespread suffering, to harsher forms of repression. It would attempt in a frantic last stand to maintain its profits by looting and pillaging state institutions, contradicting its stated nature.

Marx warned that in the later stages of capitalism huge corporations would exercise a monopoly on global markets. “The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe,” he wrote. “It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.” These corporations, whether in the banking sector, the agricultural and food industries, the arms industries or the communications industries, would use their power, usually by seizing the mechanisms of state, to prevent anyone from challenging their monopoly. They would fix prices to maximize profit. They would, as they [have been doing], push through trade deals such as the TPPand CAFTAto further weaken the nation-state’s ability to impede exploitation by imposing environmental regulations or monitoring working conditions. And in the end these corporate monopolies would obliterate free market competition.

A May 22 editorial in The New York Times gives us a window into what Marx said would characterize the late stages of capitalism:

As of this week, Citicorp, JPMorgan Chase, Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland are felons, having pleaded guilty on Wednesday to criminal charges of conspiring to rig the value of the world’s currencies. According to the Justice Department, the lengthy and lucrative conspiracy enabled the banks to pad their profits without regard to fairness, the law or the public good.

The Times goes on:

The banks will pay fines totaling about $9 billion, assessed by the Justice Department as well as state, federal and foreign regulators. That seems like a sweet deal for a scam that lasted for at least five years, from the end of 2007 to the beginning of 2013, during which the banks’ revenue from foreign exchange was some $85 billion.

The final stages of what we call capitalism, as Marx grasped, is not capitalism at all. Corporations gobble down government expenditures, in essence taxpayer money, like pigs at a trough. The arms industry with its official $612 billion defense authorization bill—which ignores numerous other military expenditures tucked away in other budgets, raising our real expenditure on national security expenses to over $1 trillion a year—has gotten the government this year to commit to spending $348 billion over the next decade to modernize our nuclear weapons and build 12 new Ohio-class nuclear submarines, estimated at $8 billion each. Exactly how these two massive arms programs are supposed to address what we are told is the greatest threat of our time—the war on terror—is a mystery. After all, as far as I know, ISIS does not own a rowboat. We spend some $100 billion a year on intelligence—read surveillance—and 70 percent of that money goes to private contractors such as Booz Allen Hamilton, [which] gets 99 percent of its revenues from the U.S. government. And on top of this we are the largest exporters of arms in the world.

The fossil fuel industry swallows up $5.3 trillion a year worldwide in hidden costs to keep burning fossil fuels, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This money, the IMF noted, is in addition to the $492 billion in direct subsidies offered by governments around the world through write-offs and write-downs and land-use loopholes. In a sane world these subsidies would be invested to free us from the deadly effects of carbon emissions caused by fossil fuels, but we do not live in a sane world.

Bloomberg News in the 2013 article “Why Should Taxpayers Give Big Banks $83 Billion a Year?” reported that economists had determined that government subsidies lower the big banks’ borrowing costs by about 0.8 percent.

“Multiplied by the total liabilities of the 10 largest U.S. banks by assets,” the report said, “it amounts to a taxpayer subsidy of $83 billion a year.”

“The top five banks—JPMorgan, Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., Wells Fargo & Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc.—account,” the report went on, “for $64 billion of the total subsidy, an amount roughly equal to their typical annual profits. In other words, the banks occupying the commanding heights of the U.S. financial industry—with almost $9 trillion in assets, more than half the size of the U.S. economy—would just about break even in the absence of corporate welfare. In large part, the profits they report are essentially transfers from taxpayers to their shareholders.”

Government expenditure accounts for 41 percent of GDP. Corporate capitalists intend to seize this money, hence the privatization of whole parts of the military, the push to privatize Social Security, the contracting of corporations to collect 70 percent of intelligence for our 16 intelligence agencies, as well as the privatization of prisons, schools and our disastrous for-profit health care service. None of these seizures of basic services make them more efficient or reduce costs. That is not the point. It is about feeding off the carcass of the state. And it ensures the disintegration of the structures that sustain capitalism itself. All this Marx got.

Marx illuminated these contradictions within capitalism. He understood that the idea of capitalism—free trade, free markets, individualism, innovation, self-development—works only in the utopian mind of a true believer such as Alan Greenspan, never in reality. The hoarding of wealth by a tiny capitalist elite, Marx foresaw, along with the exploitation of the workers, meant that the masses could no longer buy the products that propelled capitalism forward. Wealth becomes concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite—the world’s richest 1 percent will own more than half of the world’s wealth by next year.

The assault on the working class has been going on now for several decades. Salaries have remained stagnant or declined since the 1970s. Manufacturing has been shipped overseas, where workers in countries such as China or Bangladesh are paid as little as 22 cents an hour. The working poor, forced to compete with the labor of those who are little better than serfs in the global marketplace, proliferate across the American landscape, struggling to live at a subsistence level. Industries such as construction, which once provided well-paying unionized jobs, are the domain of nonunionized, often undocumented workers. Corporations import foreign engineers and software specialists that do professional work at one-third of the normal salary on H-1B, L-1 and other work visas. All these workers are bereft of the rights of citizens.

The capitalists respond to the collapse of their domestic economies, which they engineered, by becoming global loan sharks and speculators. They lend money at exorbitant interest rates to the working class and the poor, even if they know the money could never be repaid, and then sell these bundled debts, credit default swaps, bonds and stocks to pension funds, cities, investment firms and institutions. This late form of capitalism is built on what Marx called “fictitious capital.” And it leads, as Marx knew, to the vaporization of money.

Once subprime borrowers began to default, as these big banks and investment firms knew was inevitable, the global crash of 2008 took place. The government bailed out the banks, largely by printing money, but left the poor and the working class—not to mention students recently out of college—with crippling personal debt. Austerity became policy. The victims of financial fraud would be made to pay for that fraud. And what saved us from a full-blown depression was, in a tactic Marx would have found ironic, massive state intervention in the economy, including the nationalization of huge corporations such as AIG and General Motors.

What we saw in 2008 was the enactment of a welfare state for the rich, a kind of state socialism for the financial elites that Marx predicted. But with this comes an increased and volatile cycle of boom and bust, bringing the system closer to disintegration and collapse. We have undergone two major stock market crashes and the implosion of real estate prices in just the first decade of the 21st century.

The corporations that own the media have worked overtime to sell to a bewildered public the fiction that we are enjoying a recovery. Employment figures, through a variety of gimmicks, including erasing those who are unemployed for over a year from unemployment rolls, are a lie, as is nearly every other financial indicator pumped out for public consumption. We live, rather, in the twilight stages of global capitalism, which may be surprisingly more resilient than we expect, but which is ultimately terminal. Marx knew that once the market mechanism became the sole determining factor for the fate of the nation-state, as well as the natural world, both would be demolished. No one knows when this will happen. But that it will happen, perhaps within our lifetime, seems certain.

“The old is dying, the new struggles to be born, and in the interregnum there are many morbid symptoms,” Antonio Gramsci wrote.

What comes next is up to us.

[box] Christopher Lynn “Chris” Hedges is an American journalist, activist, author, and Presbyterian minister. Hedges is also known as the best-selling author of several books including War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning—a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction—Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, Death of the Liberal Class and his most recent New York Times best seller, written with cartoonist Joe Sacco, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt. [/box]

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The Conservative Faith: Nothing to Brag About [annotated]

PREAMBLE: PORTRAIT OF A CONSERVATIVE

William F. Buckley, Jr.: master of snobbish affectation and a lightweight intellectual despite profuse (and incessantly self-promoted) pretensions bolstered by a hefty gallery of sycophants. True to his class, he played dilettante in the US army and even the CIA, where he stayed for 2 years in the 1950s. Typical of his temperamental impudence, in 1954, Buckley co-wrote a book McCarthy and His Enemies with his brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell Jr., strongly defending Senator Joseph McCarthy as a patriotic crusader against communism. In McCarthy and his Enemies he asserted that “McCarthyism … is a movement around which men of good will and stern morality can close ranks.” So much for this much admired icon of American conservatism.
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[learn_more caption=”MR. BUCKLEY AND DEMOCRACY”]

Buckley in his older age. Some have seen in his deterioration a Dorian Grey portrait of his inner faith.

Buckley in his older age. Some have seen in his deterioration a Dorian Grey portrait of his inner conservative faith.

Buckley’s opposition to Communism extended to support of the overthrow and replacement of leftist governments by non-democratic forces. Buckley supported Spanish authoritarian dictator General Francisco Franco who led the rightist military rebellion in its military defeat of the Spanish Republic. He called Franco “an authentic national hero,” applauding his overthrow of Spanish Republican “visionaries, ideologues, Marxists and nihilists.”[61] He supported the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet that led the 1973 coup that overthrew Chilean president Salvador Allende’s democratically-elected Marxist government, referring to Allende as “a president who was defiling the Chilean constitution and waving proudly the banner of his friend and idol, Fidel Castro.”[62] SOURCE: Wikipedia. [/learn_more]

[box type=”download”] Editor’s Note: For a long time and especially in America conservatives have enjoyed a spectacular place in society, one of widespread respect and even admiration, not to mention social envy by many social climbers, as a large number of people correctly associate the word “conservative” with propertied, well established individuals, families and institutions. Many others, either ignorant or socially insecure people mindlessly adopt the label to describe themselves as “conservatives” because they find it “safe” or even “chic” (ie., they intuitively understand that wrapping themselves in such a label will trigger no trouble or controversy, make them sound discriminating, and even project a certain caché, as the whole capitalist status quo and its ruling circles are grounded in conservatism). The problem with such posture is that such individuals are wrong. There is nothing admirable about conservatism in practice, nor in its historical record. In fact, calling someone a conservative should be rightly looked upon as a pejorative, a four-letter word, as a label identifying a social cell viciously opposed to the well-being of the majority, of the social body as a whole. The acceptance this word and the political philosophy behind it receive in American society and elsewhere is largely a product of the social and political power of the propertied class, which dominates all major opinion-forming institutions—from the presidency to parties to universities to media, school curricula, etc.—and not of its intrinsic merit, which is next to none. Fact is, conservatism is a downright ugly, mean-spirited creed. Its adherents have always retarded social progress and caused (to this day) immense unnecessary suffering. In this article Eric Zuesse dissects “conservatism” for what it really is. And just as Archbishop Dom Helder Camera said about capitalism, that to “examine it is to indict it,” so it is with conservatism. Our only critique of this essay is that it takes a lot of space discussing religion-instigated conservatism, and even theories of psychologism to explain the persistence and influence of conservatism, while paying less attention to the conservatism issuing from established wealth, in other words its class origins in accumulated and well entrenched wealth. The main existential problem in the world today is not so much that many nations, from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia, Iran, and even far too many Americans are fundamentalists, and are led (and followed) by many reactionaries; it is that the Anglo-American plutocracy and its European and Japanese vassals are leading the world to utter destruction via constant wars (and the high probability now of a nuclear war) and ecological suicide in pursuit of further wealth and economic dominance. It is therefore the sheer conservatism and non-negotiable savage capitalism of the Western elites that constitutes the main danger.—P. Greanville[/box]

Social Science Findings about Conservatism

By Eric Zuesse

WHAT IS CONSERVATISM?

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he great empirical social psychologist who specialized in studying bigotry, Bob Altemeyer, in his 1996 The Authoritarian Specter, and his other writings, reported his exhaustive empirical studies, of more than 50,000 individuals in many countries, demonstrating that bigotries against each and every minority group were the highest amongst the individuals who scored as being the most religious in any religion. In each religion, the more fundamentalist (believing in the inerrancy of some Scripture) one was, the more bigoted one tended to be, not just against non-believers, but against homosexuals, Blacks, and so forth. Religious belief, in other words, causes bigotry. His studies also found that his scale for “Right-Wing Authoritarianism” (RWA) or what’s commonly called conservatism, was exhibited the most strongly by fundamentalists. Moreover, as one would expect from persons of faith (even of an atheistic one; i.e., belief in an atheistic ‘inerrant Scripture’), people of high RWA tended to make incorrect inferences from evidence, accept internal contradictions within their own beliefs, oppose constitutional guarantees of individual liberty, believe more strongly in sticks than in carrots to correct a person’s behavior, and were closed-minded to criticism of themselves.

…

In 1992, Altemeyer had co-authored in the International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, “Authoritarianism, Religious Fundamentalism, Quest, and Prejudice,” which examined “the relationships among right-wing authoritarianism, various indices of religious orientation, and prejudice. Measures of religious fundamentalism … were good discriminators between prejudiced and unprejudiced persons.”

…

Three authors — Westman, Willink and McHoskey — published, in the April 2000 Psychological Reports, their study “On Perceived Conflicts Between Religion and Science: The Role of Fundamentalism and Right-Wing Authoritarianism,” and reported that Fundamentalism and Right-Wing Authoritarianism varied together (or tended to be the same group), and that both groups were hostile toward science, and even toward technology.

…

Furthermore, a summary, and meta-analysis, of not just Altemeyer’s, but numerous other empirical psychological studies of conservatism, was published in the May 2003 Psychological Bulletin under the title “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition.” This dealt with confirmation bias, which is the prejudice that people have to pay attention to what confirms their prior beliefs and to ignore what disconfirms or conflicts with their prejudices. Conservatives were found to have this bias even more than liberals do. (An excellent summary of this article was “Conservatives Deconstructed,” by Joel Bleifuss, in the 19 September 2003 In These Times. Another was U. Cal. Berkeley’s press release on this study, “Researchers Help Define What Makes a Political Conservative.”) Not only did this research find strong correlations between conservatism and dogmatism, but one of the strongest correlations it discovered was between conservatism and fear of death. Because the meta-analysis was partly funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health — which are federally funded — it excluded any exploration of the correlation between conservatism and bigotry, and also excised religion as a factor. Despite this, Britain’s Guardian reported, on 13 August 2003, “Republicans are demanding to know why” this study “received $1.2m in public funds.” Even though investigation of the links between conservatism, religion, and bigotry was excluded from being researched, the findings still managed to offend conservatives to such an extent that it was unlikely any scientific study of conservatism would be able to be funded in the U.S. in the future, until Republicans decisively lost power in Washington. “Death anxiety” was found to be the factor which was the most strongly correlated with “political conservatism.” Next was “system instability” (meaning anything that endangers the existing cultural order). Nothing else was even close to those two factors in predicting an individual’s conservatism. In other words, it found: Conservatism is driven by fear. (In the case of the superrich, the classical “ruling class,” those fears are compounded by the fear of dispossession of their wealth and social privileges.—Eds).

[dropcap]A[/dropcap] study by Bouchard and four other authors, published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, in 2003, and titled “Evidence for the Construct Validity and Heritability of the Wilson-Patterson Conservatism Scale: A Reared-Apart Twins Study of Social Attitudes,” reported that political conservatism correlated at a stunningly high rate with Altemeyer’s Right-Wing Authoritarianism, and that it also “demonstrated significant and sizable genetic influence,” so that the inclination to be conservative or religious is influenced not only by one’s environment but by one’s genes. In other words, such conservative traits as lack of compassion, preference to use sticks instead of carrots, etc., are partly a reflection of one’s genetic make-up or temperament, and not entirely a result of one’s training. Furthermore, a 17 November 2014 study in Current Biology, “Nonpolitical Images Evoke Neural Predictors of Political Ideology,” showed a huge difference between liberals and conservatives that can be measured by their MRI brainwave activity that results from pictures that are presented to them of mutilated bodies: conservatives consistently are more disturbed by those pictures. That too indicates a physical basis for conservatism, in fear of death.

Why America is led by scumbags—(Summary)
“It’s a population unlikely to sustain democracy — fundamentally hostile toward democracy, favorable toward aristocracy; more respectful of people who take for themselves than of people who give of themselves; more trusting of people who exploit than of people who serve; more-comfortable being led by the callous than by the compassionate — a fundamentally myth-dependent deceived population…”

The “Wilson-Patterson C Scale” was introduced by G.D. Wilson and J.R. Patterson in their 1968 “A New Measure of Conservatism,” in the British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology. It is similar to Altemeyer’s scale — an alternative to it. The Wilson-Patterson scale was used to measure “conservatism” in that Current Biology article.

…

The observation is commonly made that conservatives are driven by fears, such as of “the other,” and are therefore obsessed with military solutions, and police solutions, and with having guns themselves – all solutions which enable them to force their own way, against the will of “the other,” regardless of whether “the other” is “the Jew” or “the Black” or “the socialist” or “the homosexual,” or whatever. Religion is, for its buyer, a way to deal specifically with his fear of death. But for the seller of religion, it’s a way of enslaving buyers to the seller’s personal ends (which can likewise be a craving for salvation — ergo: proselytizing so as to win eternal life).

…

The rather blatant ugliness of the personality traits and beliefs correlating with political conservatism (e.g., opposition to equality of opportunity, eagerness to punish people, especially high fear of death, widespread bigotry, etc.) has led some conservatives to attack this entire body of research. For example, the proud conservative John J. Ray, in The Journal of Social Psychology, in 1985, headlined “Defective Validity in the Altemeyer Authoritarianism Scale,” and in a “Post-Publication Update” on the web he said that, “Altemeyer (1988, p. 239) reports that Right-Wing Authoritarians as detected by his scale, ‘show little preference in general for any political party’! In other words, according to the RWA scale, half of Right-Wing authoritarians vote for Leftist political parties! So how can they be rightist if they vote for Leftist parties?” However, Altemeyer wrote what Ray quoted here only as a scholar (in order to appear not to be “biased” against conservatives, in order to mollify them), not at all as a scientist (social or otherwise). Though most of Altemeyer’s assertions were supported by empirical data that he cited, this particular assertion from him was not, and was purely a go-along-to-get-along statement, which here backfired against him. Altemeyer provided no data whatsoever to support that allegation which Ray quoted; and, in fact, Altemeyer promptly proceeded, right after that statement, to assert that his actual studies showed the exact opposite. For example: “In every sample of Canadian students and parents I have studied over the last 15 years” (and he was Canadian himself, so this referred to most of his data), the more conservative party’s “supporters have scored significantly higher (as a group) on the RWA scale than” the liberal party’s “backers.” And, “In the United States, … Republican supporters scored significantly higher on the RWA scale than Democrats at each of six state universities I visited.” So, there was no exception to the correlation between RWA and exhibited political conservatism. Conservatives simply don’t want to know how ugly-charactered they are, but it’s demonstrated consistently by the actual and now massive data, regardless whether conservatives want to see themselves as they actually are, which empirical studies also show that they refuse to do.

The 2016 GOP clown brigade.

…

Regarding Ray’s charge of “defective validity” of RWA, numerous independent studies have shown otherwise. For example, “Evidence for the Construct Validity and Heritability of the Wilson-Patterson Conservatism Scale” said that, “the Conservatism Scale” exhibited high “validity. It correlates .72 with RWA, a scale which has been extensively validated … and which is considered by some to be ‘the best current measure of” authoritarianism. A 1991 study was cited as the source of that evaluation.

…

LEADERS’ CONSERVATISM v. FOLLOWERS’ CONSERVATISM

Subsequently, the first major competing scale for conservatism, the Social Dominance Orientation or SDO Scale, was developed by Felicia Pratto and Jim Sedanius, and introduced in the 1994 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, as “Social Dominance Orientation: A Personality Variable Predicting Social and Political Attitudes.” There are about 15 questions on the scale, and they all relate to “groups” and to whether (for example) “It would be good if groups could be equal,” and, “In getting what you want, it is sometimes necessary to use force against other groups.” It was the first authoritarianism-measure that failed to correlate with either of the Altemeyer-Wilson ones (“RWA” or “C” Scales). Whereas both types of conservatism (the Altemeyer-Wilson, and the SDO) correlate with sexist, racist, homophobic, and anti-dissident attitudes, SDO correlates more with prejudice against subordinates and victims, regardless of category. Young males, perhaps due to high testosterone, were found to score especially high on the SDO scale. Also, high SDO people tended to be more economic, and high RWA people tended to be more cultural, conservatives. Altemeyer’s 2006 The Authoritarians theorized that high-SDO people tend to be conservative politicians, whereas high-RWA people tend to be conservative voters. Altemeyer also hypothesized that George W. Bush was probably high on both forms of conservatism. Furthermore, Chris Sibley and Marc Wilson issued in the April 2013 Political Psychology, “Social Dominance Orientation and Right-Wing Authoritarianism: Additive and Interactive Effects on Political Conservatism,” which showed that when individuals were studied over a period of time, an increase in one score turned out to correlate with an increase in the other score, even though a high-scorer on one scale had no tendency to be a high-scorer in the other. Furthermore, “Both constructs are associated with increasing political conservatism, and the lowest levels of conservatism (or highest levels of political liberalism) are found in those lowest in both SDO and RWA.” So: those are two different types of supporters of conservative political parties. However, Altemeyer’s hypothesis that one conservative type are the leaders, and the other are the followers, has not yet been tested, even though it makes sense and would be extremely important in explaining history if it’s true.

…

Conservatives, such as Ray, have similarly condemned the SDO Scale as indicating anything about conservatism. They don’t say they’re personally insulted by the scientific findings on conservatism; they say it’s no science at all. Basically, they reject the sampling methods, or even, sometimes, the basic mathematical methods: factor analysis, and cluster analysis, of data.

…

[dropcap]C[/dropcap]learly, SDO focuses more on raw power, and RWA focuses more on majority-minority in terms of religion, gender, ethnicity, and all the rest. Recent studies of psychopaths have shown psychos to be power-focused. Sibley and Wilson have done a study, “Does endorsement of hierarchy make you evil? SDO and psychopathy,” which found that though there was only a moderate degree of correlation between the two, “higher SDO at time 1 is associated with an increase in psychopathy at time 2, and vice-versa.” In other words: those two traits reinforce each other. (However, that paper has not been peer-reviewed.) And a 2014 study by Dhont and Hodson, in Personality and Individual Differences, titled “Why do right-wing adherents engage in more animal exploitation and meat consumption?” found that: “Right-wing adherents do not simply consume more animals because they enjoy the taste of meat, but because doing so supports dominance ideologies and resistance to cultural change.” In other words: High SDO produces increased meat-consumption.

Reactionary Texan preacher John Hagee, who specializes in defending Israel's war and apartheid policies, enjoys a huge success as the head of a megachurch in San Antonio and a legion of followers via television.

Reactionary Texan preacher John Hagee, who specializes in defending Israel’s war and apartheid policies, enjoys huge success as the head of a megachurch in San Antonio and a legion of followers via television.

Research into SDO is in its infancy, as is research into psychopathy. However, research into “authoritarianism” or “conservatism” is in its adulthood, with an enormous scientific literature, having started in 1950 with Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality, which was inspired by the then-recent case of Adolf Hitler.

Jimmy Swaggart was another rightwing/religious charlatan whose hubris and overreach finally brought about his downfall.

Furthermore, in June 2008, the Pew Forum on Religion in Public Life issued their “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey,” based on “interviews with more than 36,000 Americans.” On subject after subject, it was found that the more religious a person was, the more conservative he tended to be. “Almost twice as many people who say religion is very important in their lives are conservative (46%) compared with those for whom religion is less important (25%).” Strikingly, in America, the highest percentages of liberals (respondents who “Lean Democrat”) were found in minority religions. 77% of “Hist. black churches” were of this category. 66% of “Buddhist” were. 66% of “Jewish” were. 63% of “Muslim” were. 63% of “Hindu” were. By contrast, 48% of “Catholic” were. 43% of “Mainline churches [Protestant]” were. 34% of “Evangelical churches” were. The most-extreme rightwing Americans were “Mormon,” only 22% of whom leaned Democratic. (An article on the Web, “Sampling of Latter-Day Saint/Utah Demographics,” notes that on strikingly many demographic variables, Mormons are in the extreme #1 or else in the very last position, as compared to all states or religious groups.) Mormons tended to be concentrated in Utah, where they constituted the overwhelming majority.

Swaggart at last eating humble pie in front of millions.

As a general rule, being conservative went along with being a member of fundamentalistic majoritarian faiths, basically white Christians in the United States. Regarding “Government Assistance for the Poor,” the least supportive Americans were Mormons, and then Hindus (their caste system enshrines inequality), followed by white Protestants (equally Evangelical and Mainline). The Americans most supportive of tax-funded assistance to the poor were black Protestants, followed by Muslims and Buddhists, then Jews. One might infer from this study that the more that a given religious believer lives amongst others of her own faith, the more conservative she’s likely to be. Perhaps being a minority tends to drive a person to consider other cultures’ viewpoints, and not to take Scripture as being quite so infallible. One key question asked of respondents was “When it comes to questions of right and wrong, which of the following do you look to most for guidance?” The group highest citing “Religious teachings and beliefs” were “Jehovah’s Witness,” followed by “Mormon” and then by “Evangelical.” The lowest were “Buddhist,” then “Hindu,” then “Jewish.” This is consistent with people tending to be more skeptical of their Scripture to the extent that they lived and functioned amongst non-believers in that particular Scripture. This is more particularly consistent with Altemeyer’s having found that communists in the Soviet Union tended to be highly authoritarian, whereas communists in the U.S. were not. The Scripture in the Soviet Union was Karl Marx, Das Capital. Communism was just an atheistic religion. (This is actually a gross oversimplification that devalues and eliminates the historical and cultural continuum of the Russian people and the historical context in which the Soviet Union existed.—Eds.)

“Stagarite” posted at www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/7/12/175319/372, “Literature Review: Authoritarianism,” providing a good summary of scientific research (as of 2002) regarding the conservative personality. Bruce A. Robinson posted at www.religioustolerance.org/chr_prej.htm “The Relationship Between Church Membership and Prejudice,” in which a dozen early studies, from the 1940’s through the 1960’s, examining the relationship between religion and bigotry were referenced. Their general drift, even in those early times, was that people who are more religious were generally also more bigoted.

Improbably for his nonexistent credentials (but most logically in the US political culture) Marco Rubio, as fraudulent a candidate as one can find is currently leading the pack among GOP hopefuls.

Improbably due to his nonexistent credentials (but most logically in the US political culture) Marco Rubio, as fraudulent a candidate as one can find, is currently leading the pack among GOP hopefuls.

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n September 2006, the Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion issued a study, “American Piety in the 21st Century,” which contained “Selected Findings from The Baylor Religion Survey.” This study claimed to be “the most extensive and sensitive study of religion ever conducted.” Under its heading “Religion and Politics” was reported that, among the five listed “Religious Indicators” examined for Christians (“Biblical Literalism,” “Religious Attendance,” “Evangelical Protestant,” “Mainline Protestant,” and “Catholic”), overwhelmingly the strongest correlation with conservative political attitudes was fundamentalism (“Biblical Literalism”). Specifically, fundamentalists were far more supportive than anyone else of “Spend more on the military,” “[Politically] Advocate Christian values,” “Punish criminals more harshly,” “Fund faith-based organizations,” and “Allow prayer in [public] schools.” They were far less supportive than anyone else of “Abolish the death penalty,” “Regulate business more closely,” and “Protect the environment more.” All five categories of Christians opposed “Distribute wealth more evenly”; and three categories of Christians were especially opposed to the proposal to distribute wealth more evenly: (1) Religious Attendance (or frequency of church-attendance), (2) Evangelical Protestant, and (3) Biblical Literalism. This study provided 100% confirmation of the political strategy of prominent American conservative aristocratic families, and of Bush advisor Karl Rove, to seek Republican votes from the most literal, Bible-believing, Christians. Another interesting finding was that, whereas 50% of Christians whose income was under $35,000 described themselves as “Bible Believing,” only 38% of Christians whose income was more than $100,000 did. This suggests that, whereas America’s rich were overwhelmingly the financiers of the Republican Party, America’s poorest (who were strongly Democratic as an entire lot) were still ripe to vote Republican if they belonged to that half of America’s poor who view themselves as “Bible Believing.”

The thick crust of historical and political ignorance that befouls US politics permits any kind of imbecility to be widely embraced by significant segments of the population. The idea that Obama—a Wall Street imperialist shill is actually a socialist is one of them, popular with the Yahoo crowd.

The thick crust of historical and political ignorance that befouls the US political mind permits any kind of imbecility to be widely embraced by significant segments of the population. The idea that Barack Obama—a Wall Street imperialist shill —is actually a dangerous socialist is one of them, popular with the Yahoo crowd, and fostered by Fox News and similar disinformation channels.

During 13-15 March 2015, CNN polled on whether respondents preferred that “The candidate has never been wealthy,” or instead that “The candidate has had economic success in their life”; and Republicans chose the rich by 63%/27%, while Democrats chose the rich by 52%/43%. Independents chose the poor by 49%/44%. Independents there were the least conservative, the most progressive, though not very progressive; Republicans, by contrast, were extremely conservative, very authoritarian, wanting their boss as their President. The most authoritarian region of the country was the South, which chose the rich candidate by 59%/35%. The West was close behind: 54%/39%. Third was Midwest: 49%/42%. Least authoritarian was Northeast, which preferred the poor candidate by the bare margin of 47%/46%. As regards population-density, Urban and Suburban were both authoritarian by 55%/38%, and Rural were barely authoritarian, by 48%/43%. Young were the least authoritarian, old were the most. Overall, Americans were authoritarian, preferring the rich candidate by 53%/40% (as if, other things being equal, the poor candidate shouldn’t be expected to have overcome greater obstacles and shown more skill of political leadership in order to achieve a given degree of political renown and appeal than the rich candidate who has achieved that same political level). It’s a population unlikely to sustain democracy — fundamentally hostile toward democracy, favorable toward aristocracy; more respectful of people who take for themselves than of people who give of themselves; more trusting of people who exploit than of people who serve; more-comfortable being led by the callous than by the compassionate — a fundamentally myth-dependent deceived population.

Here are some of my previous reports summarizing the research on that political-cultural disease — the disease of a nation rather than of merely a person — conservatism:

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/04/29908.html

“Study Shows Republicans Favor Economic Inequality”

Posted on April 5, 2014

——

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-zuesse/the-rich-and-educated-bel_b_4377474.html

“The Rich And Educated Believe Wealth Correlates With Virtue, Says Study”

Posted: 12/05/2013

——

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/04/first-ever-political-study-top-1-found-extreme-conservatism-intense-political-involvement.html

“First-Ever Political Study of Top 1% Has Found Extreme Conservatism, Intense Political Involvement”

Posted on April 2, 2014

——

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-zuesse/gallup-poll-finds-democra_b_4683688.html

“Gallup Poll Finds Democrats More Compassionate; Republicans More Psychopathic”

Posted: 01/29/2014

——

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-zuesse/studies-find-that-conserv_b_4558541.html

“Studies Find that Successful People Tend to Be Bad”

Posted: 01/10/2014

——

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/03/gallup-finds-among-conservatives-education-increases-false-belief.html

“Gallup Finds: Among Conservatives, Education Increases False Belief”

Posted on March 29, 2015

——

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/04/breakthrough-study-proves-good-luck-causes-people-become-conservative.html

“Breakthrough Study Proves: Good Luck Causes People to Become More Conservative”

Posted on April 2, 2014

——

Concerning that last-mentioned one, more should be said here about it:

That February 2014 study, by Andrew J. Oswald and Nattavudh Powdthavee, is one of the most important ever done. Its title was “Does Money Make People Right-Wing and Inegalitarian? A Longitudinal Study of Lottery Winners.” It was important because, as it noted at the end, “To our knowledge, these are the first fixed-effects results of their kind, either in the economics literature or the political science literature.” Freed of scholar-speak, that was saying: No previous scientific study has been done of whether the correlation that conservatism generally accompanies wealth is causal in either direction: from wealth to ideology, or from ideology to wealth. They found a definite causal relationship: wealth causes conservatism. Or: “[lottery] winners tend to support a right-wing political party, and also to be intrinsically less egalitarian.” Furthermore: “This money-to-right-leaning relationship is particularly strong for males (we are not certain why). It is also of a ‘dose-response’ kind: the larger the win, the more people tilt to the right.” There was no other difference between people who won lotteries and people who didn’t; the winners simply became more conservative after they won. Here is how the “Abstract” put that: “Money apparently makes people more right-wing.”

This helps to explain why other studies have found that “Successful People Tend to Be Bad,” and why “Gallup Poll Finds Democrats More Compassionate; Republicans More Psychopathic,” and why “Study Shows Republicans Favor Economic Inequality.”

It also helps to explain why the exit polls in the 2012 Obama-Democrat v. Romney-Republican U.S. Presidential contest showed that Romney’s voters tended to be much higher income than Obama’s voters. Unfortunately, public-opinion polls don’t often ask questions to find correlations between party-affiliation and income, but all of the evidence that does exist on this important topic indicates that conservative voters tend to be richer than progressive voters. Furthermore, the Americans on both the Forbes and on the Bloomberg lists of billionaires are about 70% Republicans and 30% Democrats, versus the usual norm amongst the U.S. population, of 55% Democrats to 45% Republicans (not including Independents). The Oswald-Powdthavee study helps to explain why that’s the case: lucky people tend to be conservatives; it’s not the case that conservatives tend to be lucky people. Conservatives are no luckier than non-conservatives. They’re also not more competent than non-conservatives. Instead: Success causes one to be a conservative. No matter how progressive or conservative one is before one becomes rich, one become even more so after one has become rich.

They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity, and of Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics. [/box]

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Remember: All captions and pullquotes are furnished by the editors, NOT the author(s).

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Robert Scheer and Chris Hedges: They Know Everything About You

COMPILED BY THOMAS BALDWIN, ADJUNCT EDITOR } CROSSPOST WITH PROGRESSIVE ACTIVISTS VOICE

Tactical tools for activists.

Posted on May 20, 2015 by doctom2010

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his is a seven-part series of an interview by Chris Hedges of Robert Scheer regarding Scheer’s book, “They Know Everything About You”. It actually is a lively conversation between the two of them on a wide range of important subjects and challenges facing America and the world today. Each one is about 20 minutes and is well worthwhile. These programs were taken directly from TRNN.com (The Real News Network http://therealnews.com/t2/ ). Each one contains a full transcript and only a small sample of the beginning is given here. This series was also published at Dandelion Salad, (www.dandelionsalad.wordpress.com).—TB

Scheer & Hedges: They Know Everything About You (1/7)

CHRIS HEDGES, JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR: Hi. I’m Chris Hedges. Welcome to The Real News.I’m speaking with Robert Scheer, one of the premier journalists, certainly one of the journalists I admire most in the United States, the editor of Truthdig. And I write a column for Truthdig for Bob. And we’re talking about his new book, They Know Everything About You: How Data-Collecting Corporations and Snooping Government Agencies Are Destroying Democracy, which is a brilliant explication of the security and surveillance apparatus and the fusion of government and corporate power into every aspect of our lives.And let’s begin a little bit about how this started, how it began.

PROF. ROBERT SCHEER, JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR: Well, I think the surveillance state has been with us in one form or another. You just go watch the movie Selma and look at what was done to Martin Luther King. And I remember those days well. I was editing Ramparts magazine. We exposed the CIA. In turn, they went after us. We were audited, we were followed, our office was broken into. And we published King. And I remember the way King began to be seen not as a convenient icon, but rather as a radical thinker, and it was particularly when he opened his support to SNCC, the younger radicals in the civil rights movement, and then when he came out against the Vietnam War, when he gave that speech–actually, he did it before, but the most prominent was his speech at Riverside Church where he condemned the U.S. government.

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=13847

Scheer and Hedges: They Know Everything About You (2/7)

CHRIS HEDGES, JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Chris Hedges. And this is part two of my interview with the author Robert Scheer, who wrote They Know Everything about You, his brilliant study of the security and surveillance apparatus and how we got there.In this book, Bob, you begin, at least from my reading of it, by positing that the security and surveillance apparatus really began as a commercial enterprise, primarily, and that government then came in, then saw what was going on, saw its usefulness in terms of the data collecting, and came in later. Would that be–?

“These radical movements that opened up that space in American democracy, all of those movements have been shut down in the name of anticommunism, starting with Wilson but running right through, past McCarthy…”

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=13850

Scheer and Hedges: They Know Everything About You (3/7)

CHRIS HEDGES, JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR: Hi. I’m Chris Hedges for The Real News.Welcome to part three of my interview with Robert Scheer, the author of They Know Everything About You: How Data-Collecting Corporations and Snooping Government Agencies Are Destroying Democracy.So let’s begin a little bit with the nature of totalitarianism. I would certainly argue that when government has the capacity to watch you 24 hours a day, then you can’t use the word liberty. That’s the relationship between a master and a slave. It doesn’t matter whether they use this power at the moment. They are certainly using it against people–Muslims, Occupy dissidents, environmental activists, and others. But they have that capacity now to use it against all of us should they decide to use it.The storage of all of our personal information, this is the classic, or even the core definition of a totalitarian system, where you have the ability, should you decide to criminalize an entire group of people–we spoke about that in part two–as Hannah Arendt mentioned, to instantly sweep them up. And you in part two talked a little bit about a kind of innocent discussion about the Federal Reserve. That’s a kind of a very good example of how that happens.I don’t share your optimism. I think that we’re already there. I think that at a moment of crisis, whether that’s environmental, whether that’s financial, whether that’s an act of catastrophic domestic terrorism such as 9/11, these people are totally ready to go.And I would also want you to address a little bit, you know, at this point, is there really a difference between corporate and governmental power. I would argue that at this point they’re completely fused.

PROF. ROBERT SCHEER, JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR: Okay. So let me take the first part. I think the founders of our country understood exactly what you said before and that any government, any government has the capacity to become coercive, destructive, in the extreme. And they were talking about themselves.

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=13865

Scheer and Hedges: They Know Everything About You (4/7)

CHRIS HEDGES, JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR: Hi. I’m Chris Hedges for The Real News. Welcome back to part four of my discussion with Robert Scheer about his book They Know Everything About You: How Data-Collecting Corporations and Snooping Government Agencies Are Destroying Democracy. Let’s get into this issue that we discussed at the end of part three about the reaction on the part of private corporations Google, Apple, and others, because the exposure of their complicity with the security and surveillance state (which, as you point out, is global) hurts their business model (they are beginning to create systems of encryption), and whether you think that that will be an effective check on this intrusion of the security and surveillance apparatus into our personal lives.

PROF. ROBERT SCHEER, JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR: I think it’s a real eye-opener for them. And I think that there’d been this incredibly naive notion in Silicon Valley. A lot of the research for this book was done talking to these people. And somehow they were the libertarians unleashed, and the government was made up of fuddy-duddy people, and they didn’t really understand modern technology. And they were creating a new culture, a new world, in which people get to see all kinds of ideas and think all sorts of thoughts and everything.And, you know, the price of that is you still had to be nice to these government folks–for a number of reasons. You wanted tax breaks. You wanted them to intervene with foreign governments. You wanted military contracts. You know, after all, Amazon, Jeff Bezos, who bought the The Washington Post, he is now building the big cloud that is going to contain our information for NSA and the CIA.So they are complicit. There is a profit sector in government.

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=13870

Scheer and Hedges: They Know Everything About You (5/7)

farmers.

So they created mechanisms by which we would never have a voice–the Senate, the Electoral College. That’s how you had Al Gore win 500,000 more votes than Bush and Bush still wins or Nader did not lose the election. Everything was built into the system to create a kind of protection of rights for a very select few. And we saw throughout American history–and Zinn does this in his book–the struggle by labor, by women, by African-Americans, the Communist Party. We have erased the importance of the Communist Party in this country all through the ’20s and ’30s. These radical movements that opened up that space in American democracy, all of those movements have been shut down in the name of anticommunism, starting with Wilson but running right through, past McCarthy. Labor is a spent force. You talk about labor, where you have less than 12 percent of the American workforce is unionized. Only 6 percent of the labor force in the private sector is unionized. We have created an oligarchic state, a form of neo-feudalism. You have half this country living in poverty or near poverty. We have a looming climate crisis, especially since we are not–and Barack Obama drills like Sarah Palin–we are not able to stop the ravaging of the planet, whether it’s the tar sands or dropping drill bits up into the summer Arctic sea ice by Shell Oil, profiting off the death throes of the planet. These people are barreling forward in terms of the impoverishment of the working class, the destruction of the environment.And they have created mechanisms–they certainly are prepared for unrest. They have run scenario after scenario after scenario, and they have created mechanisms–militarized police, drones, security and surveillance–an evisceration–Obama’s assault on civil liberties is worse then, as I said before, anything Bush has done. They’re ready to go. They know something’s coming, and they’re totally prepared.And I don’t see in that mechanism that they have put into place–and what they have done in terms of creating both a legal, a judicial, and a security system that is so powerful, so pervasive, and, as you said, far beyond anything the Stasi ever dreamt of–I don’t see how at that point appealing or believing that the system is reformable is anything but futile.

PROF. ROBERT SCHEER, JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR: Wow. So let’s go have a drink. HEDGES: Well, I want to resist. But it’s how you resist. SCHEER: Yeah, I understand that. HEDGES: And you resist through acts of civil disobedience, by shutting the system down.

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=13874

Scheer and Hedges: They Know Everything About You (6/7)

CHRIS HEDGES, JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR: Hi. Welcome back. I’m Chris Hedges for The Real News. And I’m speaking with Robert Scheer about his new book, They Know Everything About You: How Data-Collecting Corporations and Snooping Government Agencies Are Destroying Democracy. We have in previous discussions had some dispute about whether we are destroying it or whether it’s destroyed. And we’re going to try and talk in this last section a little bit about the culture of violence in the United States, which makes it very different from many other countries–Canada would be a good example–and how in a moment of societal breakdown that violence will manifest itself.
…
So let me begin. We are a deeply violent culture. We always have been. It is the nature of imperialism, which–of course, we colonized ourselves, and in a way that’s very different from Europe, with the subjugation and campaigns of genocide against Native Americans. The whole institution of slavery was one that was kept in force by coercion, and then the subjugation of African-Americans after emancipation through convict leasing, up to Jim Crow laws, up to the current system of mass incarceration, which of course targets, as Michelle Alexander has pointed out, primarily people of color, poor people of color. We have one of the highest rates of gun ownership in the industrialized world, 83 weapons, I think, per 100 Americans. I believe I have that figure right. Not only are there young African-American men that are killed week after week after week, even after these killings are caught on videotape and in most cases the police are not charged. I mean, since Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, we’d had 11 people shot dead in the St. Louis area. And that’s just writ large. We have these bizarre school shootings, largely carried out by people who come out of the white survivalist cult. It’s not violence by African-Americans. Adam Lanza’s mother was a survivalist. And then we have proto-fascist entities–the Christian right, Tea Party, militias, the Minutemen, and others who celebrate not only the gun culture, but celebrate or, I think, express those fundamental tenets of fascism, which is where you direct your rage and legitimate despair towards the vulnerable, towards undocumented workers, Muslims, homosexuals, liberals, intellectuals, feminists. And in a moment of breakdown–and I think we are headed for some type of breakdown–all of these groups are empowered to express themselves in our society through violence.

…

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]nd I think that especially having come out of disintegrating societies–I’ve covered the war in Yugoslavia or I covered the civil war in El Salvador–I’m cognizant of how swiftly societies can unravel, how quickly law and order breaks down, how fragile social, political, and cultural systems are, and how easily neighbor can kill neighbor, how swiftly human beings can be acculturated to carry out atrocities. That’s one of the most disturbing things that comes out of being a war correspondent. And I think in this last segment I’d like to have you look at, a little bit, that reality, the reality of American violence, our propensity for violence, and how, as things unravel, that may express itself within American society.

PROF. ROBERT SCHEER, JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR: Well, there’s no question about our propensity for violence. I was in Vietnam, both the South and the North, and I saw what carpet bombing does and I saw the destruction. I mean, three and a half million people were killed, Indochinese people, along with 59,000 Americans, and there was no rhyme or reason. And the bloodlust, the vengeance, the indifference to human life, the idea that maybe these people had families who cared, loved, you know, the people we’re bombing, napalming, and so forth, that’s pretty blatant. I still have not gotten over the bombing of Japan and Germany, even though we’re on the right side, the dropping of the bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=13879

Scheer and Hedges: They Know Everything About You (7/7)

PROF. ROBERT SCHEER, JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR: Yeah, this is a fundamental disagreement we have. I just think, you know, my own parents and, you know, going to work and the kinds of jobs–my father was, you know, running knitting machines and my uncle was a welder and so forth. I’m just thinking of those jobs and how much discretionary time you had or how–. You know, you go and it’s early in the morning, five or six o’clock, and you get on that subway train. And I’m sure there’s a comparable farmland experience I didn’t grow up in. But my father was a German father farmer who came here at the time of the First World War and so forth. But, you know, you go to work and you’re running this machine, and then maybe you get a half hour for lunch or something, and then after–and then maybe you want to do something nice. If you’re younger, you go hear some music or do something. But then you’ve got to get back on that train and you work, and then you’ve got to get up and do it the next day, and maybe on the weekend you can go a little fishing or have a picnic or something.

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=13885

Bios of Robert Scheer and Chris Hedges

[box] Robert Scheer is editor-in-chief of Truthdig and has built a reputation for strong social and political writing over his 30 years as a journalist and author. His latest book is They Know Everything About You: How Data-Collecting Corporations and Snooping Government Agencies Are Destroying Democracy.

Chris Hedges, whose column is published Mondays on Truthdig , spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years. He has written nine books, including “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle” (2009), “I Don’t Believe in Atheists” (2008) and the best-selling “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” (2008). His book “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning” (2003) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. [/box]

This compilation was produced by Thomas Baldwin.

[box] Thomas Baldwin holds a Ph.D in Physics and an MBA in Management. His first career in Physics began at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory where he was a Solid State researcher specializing in neutron radiation damage of metals. In 1969 he received the national Sidhu Award for being “an outstanding scientist for contributions in the field of diffraction.” He went on to Southern Illinois University to become a professor and Chair of the Department of Physics. While at SIUE he also earned an MBA degree and in 1980 he left the academy to strike out on his own as an independent consultant in energy related issues at the Colorado Research Institute. At present a resident of Biloxi, Mississippi, his focus is educating and mobilizing around major problems in the political sector and public institutions, especially systemic issues afflicting democracy, capitalism and social welfare. A founding editor of Progressive Activists Voice, he also serves as Adjunct Editor with The Greanville Post. [/box]

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