Bird’s Eye: Two on the ongoing conversion of North America into totalitarian fiefdoms of the corpocracy, an interesting observation by Juan Cole on the ongoing Egyptian election, and Naomi Wolf on the terror industry, and how we know it’s run to augment government power, not to maximize our safety.
* Federal Cuts Target ‘Living Laboratory’ In Northern Ontario Lakes Ottawa Citizen
Now all federal funding is being cut — about $600,000 from DFO for the basic station and $1.2 million in salaries for the scientists. Universities also support the station when they send biologists there to study, but this won’t be enough to keep it open. All ELA staff have received “affected” letters. Reaction from Canadian and U.S. biologists has been mostly shock, as no one else in the world does work like this and many of them use ELA facilities or data.
“ELA is just one example underway, albeit a major one,” said Jeremy Kerr, a University of Ottawa biologist who runs the Canadian Facility for Ecoinformatics Research Biology. “This is barely even Round One yet. I think they mean to eliminate the government’s capacity to measure anything that might stand in the way of unfettered resource extraction, while demonizing any who dare to speak out. How did we get to this position? It is amazing to have descended so far, so fast, and with barely a whimper. And now scientists have lost access to the primary sources of scientific equipment and facilities operation (in the Experimental Lakes). Everything about this is wrong, wrong, wrong.”
* Congress Wants the Department of Defense to Propagandize Americans Juan Cole Informed Comment
Two congressmen are attempting to insert a provision in the National Defense Authorization act that would allow the Department of Defense to subject the US domestic public to propaganda. The bipartisan amendment was introduced by Rep. Mac Thornberry from Texas and Rep. Adam Smith from Washington State.
Nothing speaks more urgently to the creeping fascism of American politics than the assertion by our representatives, who apparently have never read a book on Germany in the 1930s-1940s or on the Soviet Union in the Stalin period, that forbidding DoD and the State Department from subjecting us to government propaganda “ties the hands of America’s diplomatic officials, military, and others by inhibiting our ability to effectively communicate in a credible way.” And mind you, they want to use our own money to wash our brains! (Editor’s note: See JFK’s quote of the week, below)
* Are Egyptians Voting Ideologically? Juan Cole Informed Comment
The Muslim world, and especially the Arab world, has been depicted by some Western historians and social scientists as exceptionally impervious to democratic ideals and practices. Much of this Muslim or Arab exceptionalism derives from twentieth-century attempts to justify Western imperialism (rule over the Muslims for their own good by Europeans). Some of it is also rooted in apologetics for the Israel project, which is opposed by most Arabs and Muslims; if there is something wrong with the latter, then their complaints about the displacement and denationalization of the Palestinians can be dismissed…
There is something else going on. Most likely it has to do with the way the peasants of Egypt and Algeria made the transition to urban modernity, and likewise the Chinese. Some of the lack of democracy even derives from Western intervention against it (colonial regimes were poor teachers of democratic habits, and parliamentary regimes were overthrown by the West via coups from time to time, rather setting things back).
As for why Egyptians vote as they do, like any electorate they are complicated and even individual voters could go either way often. Egyptians did not give a majority to the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis because a majority of them is pious (and 24% of Egyptians are definitely not hard line fundamentalists of the Salafi sort!) My interviewing suggests that in the parliamentary elections they wanted parties that a) were not connected to the corrupt and hated Hosni Mubarak and b) would be honest and transparent and avoid stealing from them or dunning them constantly for bribes. The Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis fit those bills. In contrast, a lot of the left had its roots in Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser’s progressive thought, and they were initially tainted with the brush of the longstanding military regime (Nasser was a leader of the Young Officers who made the 1952 coup, to which the current military junta is the heir).
* The Spectacle Of Terror And Its Vested Interests Naomi Wolf The Guardian
You know we have “terror theater” in the US because nations such as Israel, which are genuinely focussed on deterring terrorism, downplay risk and threats rather than trumpeting them, as DHS does. If the threat is real, they don’t reveal all the details of the latest “planned attack” to the news media – because they are busy investigating real planned attacks, rather than doing corporate PR and product placement. Instead of TSA groping, aviation security, from Britain to Israel, to Spain to Norway, uses much less invasive and more acute security processes, such as face-to-face, in-line interviewing. They do not sell commercial products that subvert recall surety issues, such as the various costly and vastly lucrative new “Global Entry Trusted Traveller Network”, an apparent government program that is not transparent or accountable. You can sign up for for a fee of $100 a year, after an interview. No TSA representative I interviewed knows who owns the initiative, which they said was private, not a government program; nor could they tell me where the money really goes.
Actual terrorism-fighting nations would never devolve such security concerns to private contractors or sell easier travel access for cash – because it is both dangerous and absurd to do so. In fact, what the FBI and CIA and the Pentagon are up against is that people – including Americans – are waking up to the fact that there would be no enemy if we weren’t manufacturing new terrorists by taking out civilians in Pakistan, Yemen and Afghanistan. An end to foreign wars (which are already costing us thousands of casualties a year) would be a much more effective counter-terror strategy than this hyped, synthetic threat to justify a corporate surveillance-and-security product gold rush. Instead, we are treated to a spectacle orchestrated by alarmist officials who keep holding frightening press conferences promoting the threat of dazed, poor, drugged-out “lone wolves”. The true, Orwellian agenda is to support a vast new crony-capitalist industry that uses terror theater to turn open democracies into surveillance societies.
