Big Brother and your keystrokes

February 10

GUEST: Thom Hartmann, top rated progressive syndicated talk show host, and New York Times bestselling author of over 30 books, talks about his latest work, The Hidden History of Big Brother In America: How the death of privacy and the rise of surveillance threaten Us And Our Democracy.

The Hidden History of Big Brother In America

Activist Radio has been lucky enought to have Thom Hartmann on the program for a number of times over the last three years. This time we talked about the emerging surveillance state and how our democracy is withering under the assault of Big Tech.

Hartmann shows us the roots of Big Brother in the early history of our nation, from the whipping of Quakers, through the horrors of the slave trade. This background helps readers understand why search engines and other internet sources of personal data have become commodified and weaponized. Big Brother is a seeker of power, and in the internet age that means spying on all of us.

In fact, Orwell's novel 1984 employs a similar form of domestic spying, a two way TV screen in every room that is almost impossible to avoid. The internet goes about its spying in a much less obvious way. Simply by collecting every keystroke we do day after day, large corporations and our government can collect the minute by minute thought processes of almost everyone. Then comes AI (artificial intelligence) to make the data for each person into a whole, so that each of us can be studied and in the end manipulated. Some of the best thinkers of our time describe the power of AI as an existential threat to our species, in addition to being a tool to destroy our democracy. 

So instead of coming up with crazy ideas about vaccines putting computer chips in people's arms, we ought to be focusing on how to keep our internet lives out of the hands of corporations. It would make sense for AI to create these crazy conspiracies so that we don't hold corporations and our government accountable. For every battle about wearing masks, there is less attention being focused on the collection and manipulation of our data trails. But conspiracy theories have long been a tool of the state. Create enough crazy ideas and no one will be able to organize around anything. 

Read Thom Harmann's Hidden History to understand how we should be protecting our democracy in 2022. 
 

Realizing the power structure that actually exists

February 3

GUEST: Coco Das, member of the National Editorial Board of Refuse Fascism, talks about why white nationalists and racists have to be resisted in the streets as well as in the election booths.

We Refuse to Accept a Fascist America

Will there be a time when the far right in our country simply take control? Trump's plan certainly had a chance of overthrowing our government, by creating chaos, and then taking control using the National Guard. The pieces hadn't quite been put in place, however. His vice president wouldn't go along, nor would any number of top brass in the Pentagon. But it was closer than most of the media will admit. 

Perhaps the establishment (white, well connected, rich and privileged) couldn't really see any advantage in capturing Congress and driving a stake through the US Constitution. Why bother with all that uncertainty? The elites of our nation already control the government and the armed forces. Billions are still coming into their offshore bank accounts, and their grip around the throats of working class Americans just keeps getting tighter. Any drama on the streets only calls into question a century of carefully planned class war. 

Coco Das is talking about another way. From a left perspective, the violence of the right and the neoliberalism of our economy are but two aspects of the same fascism. After 1928, the most powerful German industrialists worked closely with Hitler's Nazi Party. In fact, they funded it, much like the Koch Brothers and other billionaires have paid for the Republican white nationalist movement. 

Das sees an emerging left that will challenge these fascists in the streets. And perhaps she is right. Our Constitution was broken long ago, and only exists as a fig leave to cover a very destructive rule of the rich.   Change will only come when a majority of our citizens realizes the power structure that actually exists, rather than the one our corporate controlled media paints for us. 

Handling this gross inequity on the cheap

 

January 27

GUEST: Tracy Givens Hunter, Director of Public Policy and Education Fund of New York Navigator Program, Board DEI Co-Director for NYCLU, and organizer for Black Lives and End the New Jim Crow Network, talks about the Justice Roadmap and the evils of mass incarceration.

Tracy Givens Hunter "Undoing Racism"

Justice Roadmap

The Justice Roadmap makes interesting reading. The report delves into all the ways that the criminal justice system targets poor and Black people. Many of the ways aren't well known, so it is more like a primer on injustice for the rest of us who have never been incarcerated.

The Kerner Commission Report that came out in 1968 was also great on details. This voluminous study was a roadmap for the future, with a dire warning that injustices would continue to fester unless certain steps were made. But the steps were not little ones. It called on a massive infusion of resources and funds to bring the nation's Black population out of Jim Crow. 

“White society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”   -Kerner Coommission

Without this monumental effort, the report warned that society would "fracture" into two radically unequal societies, one for African Americans and the other for whites. President Johnson, who had ordered the report, ignored it. So did the general public. Perhaps today's incarceration nightmare is more about handling this gross inequity on the cheap then it is about oppressing the nation's Black population. 

We have Adamer Usmani coming up as a guest. He is assistant professor of sociology at Harvard University, and we talk about his article in the Jacobin, "Did Liberals Give Us Mass Incarceration?" Stay tuned to Activist Radio!

Trade lives for millions

January 20

GUEST: Donald Cohen, director of In the Public Interest, author of articles in the New York Times, LA Times, the New Republic and the Huffington Post, talks about his latest book, The Privatization of Everything: How the Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back.

The Privatization of Everything

Each privatization that Donald Cohen discovers in his new book is like a detective story. There is public health, water resources, toll roads, environmental resources, the criminal justice system, public schools, etc. Each segment of what used to be our government's responsibility has been infiltrated, monetized and turned into some grotesque piggy bank for Wall Street billionaires and their financial corporations.  

Some of this book is funny. Those in government responsible for the public good are swindled time after time, and we as taxpayers are always left holding the bag. Slapstick really, because the process is so predictable, and our elected officials so stupid. 

But what can we expect in a system that allows unlimited campaign donations by the very rich? Perhaps government officials are not as moronic as they seem to be. In a thriving kleptocracy, these officials are simply corrupt, lining their pockets with public money while we all suffer the consequences. That's not really as funny, because the joke is on us.

This book is really about the death of the public good. Our present system is all about unlimited greed and the transfer of money from the nation's poor to its very rich. Even our incomprehensible war machine is driven by the profits of the gargantuan weapons makers, eager to trade lives for millions in weapons sales. Perhaps our corrupt system of government will collapse by itself, or ultimately be torn down by some right wing mob. 
 

The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war

January 13

PRESENTE! We remember Chuck Kaufman, grass roots organizer and cofounder of Alliance for Global Justice, talking about his life's work, confronting US imperialism, neoliberalism and oppression in Latin America.

The Alliance for Global Justice

How much power does Nicaragua, a small country in Central America, really have? And why does the full force of the US Empire continually try to frustrate the will of the Nicaraguan people?

I think the answer requires a new look at US foreign policy. The empire demands that all resources in the Third World be open to commercial exploitation. Countries that try to divert profits to benefit their own people always run into trouble.

So the history of the Nicaraguan revolution shows us what our corporate controlled foreign policy really is: the crushing of any truly democratic reform in countries under US domination. Thus our approach to the world is singularly anti-democratic, despite the fact that almost all our military invasions and occupations of other countries is done in the name of protecting democratic rights. Yes, our foreign policy is exactly opposite to what our leaders say it is. 

The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink. -George Orwell

  

Nicaragua is a danger to the empire in that it presents a mirror to its failings. People like Chuck Kaufman are unafraid to hold up that mirror so that all of us can see. Let us remember the heroes of this age who dedicated their lives to the truth. The rest of us are sometime revolutionaries, but we can recognize their great courage. Presente! You will always be with us.

The New Cold War and speciocide

 

January 6

GUEST: Ted Snider, an analyst of U.S. foreign policy, columnist at AntiWar.com, and frequent contributor to Truthout and Mondoweiss, talks about the dangers and lies of America's New Cold War.

Ted Snider on Mondoweiss

This is a cartoon from an Indian newspaper. The diminutive tiger represents another nuclear power hopefully staying out of way of the impending confrontation. 

We all hope to stay out of the way. But in this smaller world, one nuclear exchange will end up threatening everyone. There is no country or people who will be immune. Yes, we will all learn the meaning the word, speciocide. 

Like global warming, most people try to avoid the worst that could happen until it rips the roof off their house. The leaders of this decade are just gamblers, unwilling to sacrifice their careers to tell the truth. And we have seen a measurable decline in state responsibility since the 1980s. Bribes are now legal, and the rich and their corporations have been very successful in buying up anyone who runs for office. Both parties now belong to the very rich, who dream of spaceships to help them escape the doom that we all see coming. 

We survived one Cold War, and perhaps we will be very lucky again. Analysts like Ted Snider ask us to take another look. Must we all be passive until its over? Must we accept what the pro-war media feeds us every day? Must our political discourse be one set of lies against another? Or is speciocide the evolutionary price we will all pay for failing to adapt?

Farewell to the facade of democracy

 

December 30

GUEST: Matthew Hoh, US Marine veteran with two deployments to Iraq, former Department of Defense and State Department war analyst, and contributing writer for the Guardian, the Huffington Post, Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, talks about the US military empire and why it remains addicted to war.

Nearly 3/4 of the world’s dictators receive US weapons

Matthew Hoh has seen it all first hand, with two war tours and then various analyst jobs in the Department of Defense. And he tells it like it is. War is our most important product.

Perhaps we can trace this back to the end of World War II, when our country eagerly ramped up its military capabilities rather than scaling them down because there was no country left to fight. 

The invasion of Korea was a part of the new war culture. We weren't content to have a unified Korea if it wasn't under our military influence. We killed two to three million Koreans but only achieved a military stalemate. Vietnam was next. We didn't belong there any more than we belonged in Korea. But we bombed and slaughtered them too. All the Vietnamese were seeking was freedom from being occupied. The US killed two to three million Vietnamese before our armies were finally driven out.

Perhaps militarism is a disease that counties get when they are too powerful. Other empires have behaved in a remarkably similar way. England ruled the world for over two centuries by invading and brutally exploiting foreign peoples. Other empires like Rome and Athens have acted remarkably the same. First came the military dominance, and then the great wealth extracted from occupied countries. Somewhere in the process, their democracies collapsed, replaced by a brutal and very unequal society. 

Too simple? Probably. But making the comparisons help us understand the endless wars the American Empire will pursue in the twenty first century. The downfall of our democracy is even now something that we as citizens are becoming acutely aware of. January 6 was a close call, and if it weren't for Trump's failure to adequately prepare for the coup, he would still be ruling.

Is it the fault of the two major parties? I think the last two Democratic presidents have been as guilty as the Republicans. Clinton and Obama were warmonger presidents, eager to push China and Russia into military confrontations. There is no peace party, despite what Democrats claim. If that is what the party runs on next time, it will be time to bid farewell to the facade of democracy that we have all grown up believing.