REDEYE 4/13/11
Wednesday, March 30, 2011 at 9:38PM U.S. plans online fake opinion chats
GW, 3/25 — The U.S. military is developing software to manipulate social media sites secretly, using fake online personas (known as sock puppets) to influence net conversations and spread pro-U.S. propaganda.
Ntrepid, a newly formed corporation registered in Los Angeles, has been awarded a $2.76m contract with U.S. Central Command (Centcom), which oversees U.S. armed operations in the Middle East and central Asia, to develop an “online persona managements service” that will allow a single U.S. serviceman or woman to control 10 identities based all over the world.
The project has been likened to China’s attempts to control free speech on the internet. It might enable the U.S. military to create a false consensus, crowd out unwelcome opinions and smother reports that do not correspond with its objectives….The languages to be used will include Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and Pashto.
Mexico fence serves only as killer
GW, 3/25 — …Border mayors came to the view that the fence was built…to provide middle America with an illusion. “This fence is a placebo. It gives somebody in mid-America a fluffy warm feeling. It really provides no real deterrent…They’re backing up vehicles and climbing over. It’s a very expensive joke.”….
But the fence has not been without impact…Some now cross deeper into the desert, and pay with their lives. They take to back trails….Their corpses are increasingly found…and the bodies are little more than skin on bone. Some immigrants, lost and knowing what awaits them, have hanged themselves from trees.
Last year, the bodies of more than 400…immigrants were found in the desert….Charley Bruce, former sheriff [said] the hypocrisy of his fellow Americans…vilify immigrants and then hire them to clean their houses, tend their gardens and build their swimming pools…
Boss loans make Afghans slaves
NYT, 3/16 — …The young man had twice escaped to join the Afghan Army, but when his father needed another loan from Mr. Bacha, the boss told him: “No. You must bring your son back here. Or else bring me the money you owe me and leave the house I have provided you.”
…Like tens of thousands of Afghans, the Muhammads are trapped in a seemingly endless cycle of poverty that keeps them indebted to their employers….They borrow from their employers, who generally pay them pennies an hour for their grueling labor — barely enough to survive and too little to pay off debts that only grow with each passing year….There is no escape for them or for their children, who are bound by their parents’ contracts….[They] are worn down, exhausted by 12-hour days that start before dawn….
The workers say the loans…are a blessing and curse, keeping them alive but eternally bound to the kilns and the difficult, low-paying jobs.
“We are slaves here because when you owe…money, then of course you’re a slave.”
Uprisings could spark world youth
NYT, 3/21 — About one-fourth of Egyptian workers under 25 are unemployed, a statistic that is often cited as a reason for the revolution there. The U.S….[has] an official unemployment rate of 21 percent for workers ages 16 to 24.
My generation was taught that all we needed to succeed was an education and hard work. Tell that to my friend from high school who studied Chinese and international relations at a top-tier college. He had the misfortune to graduate in the class of 2009….After more than a year he moved back in with his parents…The true unemployment rate for young graduates is most likely even higher….
Millions of young people…are…losing their faith in the future….All that matters is finding rent money….
As governments across the developed world balance their budgets…the young will bear the brunt of the pain: taxes on workers will be raised and spending on education will be cut....
Uprisings…are a warning for the developed world….Indeed, the “desperate generation” in Portugal got tens of thousands of people to participate in nationwide protests on March 12. How much longer until the rest of the rich world follows their lead?
No U.S.-U.N. move vs. oily Saudis
GW, 3/25 — Did you hear it? The clamour from western governments for democracy in Saudi Arabia? The howls of outrage from the White House…about this month’s shootings, suppression of protests and the arrival of Saudi troops in Bahrain? No? Nor did I.
Did we miss it, or do they believe that change is less necessary in Saudi Arabia than it is in Libya? If so, on what grounds?....
Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister...recently promised to “cut off the fingers of those who try to interfere in our internal matters.” In other parts of the world this threat would have been figurative; he probably meant it. If mass protests have not yet happened in Saudi Arabia, it’s because the monarchy maintains a regime of terror, enforced with the help of torture, mutilation and execution….
Why? Future weapons sales doubtless play a role. But there’s an even stronger imperative. This month the French Bank Societe Generale warned that unrest in Saudi Arabia could push the price of oil to $200 a barrel…
As a result, political disruption there is threatening to…western governments….Few governments of nominal democracies are likely to survive the economic dislocation that a sustained price of $200 would deliver.
Oil dependency means dependency on Saudi Arabia. Dependency on Saudia Arabia means empowerment of its despotic monarchy.
At 93, militant calls to young
NYT, PARIS 3/10 — As a hero of the French Resistance, Stephane Hessel was in exile with Charles de Gaulle, in London, imprisoned in concentration camps, waterboarded in Nazi torture sessions and saved from hanging by swapping identities with an inmate who had died of typhus.
Now, at 93, he is the author of a best seller that has become a publishing phenomenon in France…It urges young people to revive the ideal of resistance to the Nazis by…resisting the “international dictatorship of the financial markets”….In particular Mr. Hessel protests France’s treatment of immigrants, the influence on the media by the rich, cuts to the social welfare system, French educational reforms and, most strongly, Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.
“When something outrages you, as Nazism did me, that is when you become a militant, strong and engaged.”
Exec greed fed Japan nuke crisis
NYT, TOKYO 3/20 — New questions are arising about whether Tokyo Electric Power Company executives wasted precious time in the early hours of the nuclear crisis, either because of complacency or because they did not want to resort to emergency measures that could destroy the valuable plant….A former Tepco executive told the wall street journal on Saturday that the company had hesitated to ruin the plant with seawater.
Mexico priests rake in drug money
NYT, 3/7 PACHUCA, MEXICO — The large orange chapel here, with its towering cross, would be just another Roman Catholic Church if not for a bronze plaque announcing that it was “donated by Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano” — better known as “the executioner” commander of the ruthless crime syndicate called the Zetas….
The Roman Catholic Church in Mexico has been trying to confront its historic ties to drug traffickers. Long dependent on gifts, but often less than discriminating about where they come from, the church is grappling with its role as thousands die in turf wars among rich, and sometimes generous criminals.
But at the local level, the co-dependency of the church and the cartels often endures….Sociologists outlined a “religious economy” in which priests administered sacraments in exchange for exorbitant donations…Some priests say, “Hey, the guy who owns the factory, he’s a bastard, but we take his money, so why not take the drug money?”
Even if the money that built the church might have been earned through crime, even killing? “I’m not interested.”
….but darting eyes and quick answers revealed something different: fear. No one else interviewed outside the church was willing to provide a name….The Catholic Church, the government or the neighbourhood – were they took weak to stamp out the influence of the Zetas’ commander, even by just removing the plaque?
“Exactly,” [priest] Tellez said, smiling, seemingly glad someone else said it first. “Exactly.”
Haiti’s 1804 revolution lingers on
NYT, 3/16 — In Haiti….’cut off their head and burn down their houses,’ Dessalines told his troops, who went on to win a historic…victory over the French army in 1804. Two centuries later, the elite, some whom are descendants of the French colonists, still have a profound fear of the poverty-stricken general population. They understand fully that the triumph of the slaves never brought about the structural changes in Haitian society for which those early, bloody battles were fought. The ruling class still fears the overturning of the customary order. Revolution is a scary thing.
When the slaves gathered in 1791 to plot the end of French rule, there were about 500,000 of them on the island, and some 40,000 French colonists. Today there are…about nine million people living in unimaginable poverty, while a microscopic elite guards among themselves whatever wealth is to be had here.
U.S. system sinks into irrationality
NYT — …A rational political system would long since have created a 21st-century version of the Works Porgress Administration — we’d be putting the unemployed to work doing what need to be done. In the political system we have, however,…”Job one is to stop wasteful Washington spending.”
Can’t use Marx; can’t make sense
NYT, 3/20 — Closing of the book of almost any book aspiring to analyze a social or political problem. Practically every exmple of that…no matter how shrewd or rich its survey of the question at hand, finished with…prescription that is utopian, banal, unhelpful or out of tune with the rest of the book. When it comes to social criticism, no one, it seems, has an exit strategy.
Consider a few cases of hard-headed criticism yielding suddenly to unwarranted optimism. Allan Bloom’s “Closing of the American Mind” (1987), still influential,…features on its last page this though: “I still believe that universities, rightly understood, are where community and friendship can exist in our times…They have served us well.” Al Gore’s Bush-ea polemic “The Assault on Reason” (2007)…still ends with the former vice president declaring, “I feel more confident than ever before that democracy will prevail.”
If book don’t take refuge in unfounded hope, they may descend into banality. “Irrational Exuberance” (2000), by the Yale economist Robert Shiller, became deservedly famous for its uncommon prescience in warning about the financial bubble. But its takeaway advice, including nuggets like “Investors Should Diversify” and “Retirements Plans Should Be Put on a Sounder Footing” might have come from almost any financial magazine.
Even those social critics who acknowledge the difficulty of their solutions cannot help offering up the equally quixotic hope that people will somehow rise up spontaneously against the diagnosed ills….Mencken suggested that his pervasive attitude stemmed from the unrealistic hopes vested in democracy itself, which he said “came into the world as a cure-all and…remains primarily a cure-all to this day.”
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