Squaring circles

Close encounters of the low-tech kind

By Todd Gitlin 

Only Martians, by now, are unaware of the phone and online data scooped up by the National Security Agency (though if it turns out that they are aware, the NSA has surely picked up their signals and crunched their metadata). American high-tech surveillance is not, however, the only kind around. There's also the lower tech, up-close-and-personal kind that involves informers and sometimes government-instigated violence. 

Just how much of this is going on and in how coordinated a way no one out here in the spied-upon world knows. The lower-tech stuff gets reported, if at all, only one singular, isolated event at a time - look over here, look over there, now you see it, now you don't. What is known about such surveillance as well as the suborning of illegal acts by government agencies, including the FBI, in the name of counter-terrorism has not been put together by major news organizations in a way that would give us an overview of the phenomenon. (The ACLU has done by far the best job of compiling reports on spying on Americans of this sort.) 

Some intriguing bits about informers and agents provocateurs briefly made it into the public spotlight when Occupy Wall Street was riding high. But as always, dots need connecting. Here is a preliminary attempt to sort out some patterns behind what could be the next big story about government surveillance and provocation in America. 

Two stories from Occupy Wall Street
The first is about surveillance. The second is about provocation. 

On September 17, 2011, Plan A for the New York activists who came to be known as Occupy Wall Street was to march to the territory outside the bank headquarters of JPMorgan Chase. Once there, they discovered that the block was entirely fenced in. Many activists came to believe that the police had learned their initial destination from e-mail circulating beforehand. Whereupon they headed for nearby Zuccotti Park and a movement was born. 

The evening before May Day 2012, a rump Occupy group marched out of San Francisco's Dolores Park and into the Mission District, a neighborhood where not so many 1-percenters live, work, or shop. There, they proceeded to trash "mom and pop shops, local boutiques and businesses, and cars," according to Scott Rossi, a medic and eyewitness, who summed his feelings up this way afterward: "We were hijacked". The people "leading the march tonight," he added, were "clean cut, athletic, commanding, gravitas not borne of charisma but of testosterone and intimidation. They were decked out in outfits typically attributed to those in the 'black bloc' spectrum of tactics, yet their clothes were too new, and something was just off about them. They were very combative and nearly physically violent with the livestreamers on site, and got ignorant with me, a medic, when I intervened... I didn't recognize any of these people. Their eyes were too angry, their mouths were too severe. They felt 'military' if that makes sense. Something just wasn't right about them on too many levels".

He was quick to add, "I'm not one of those tin foil hat conspiracy theorists. I don't subscribe to those theories that Queen Elizabeth's Reptilian slave driver masters run the Fed. I've read up on agents provocateurs and plants and that sort of thing and I have to say that, without a doubt, I believe 100% that the people that started tonight's events in the Mission were exactly that". 

Taken aback, Occupy San Francisco condemned the sideshow: "We consider these acts of vandalism and violence a brutal assault on our community and the 99%". 

Where does such vandalism and violence come from? We don't know. There are actual activists who believe that they are doing good this way; and there are government infiltrators; and then there are double agents who don't know who they work for, ultimately, but like smashing things or blowing them up. By definition, masked trashers of windows in Oakland or elsewhere are anonymous. In anonymity, they - and the burners of flags and setters of bombs - magnify their power. They hijack the media spotlight. In this way, tiny groups - incendiary, sincere, fraudulent, whoever they are - seize levers that can move the entire world. 

The sting of the clueless bee
Who casts the first stone? Who smashes the first window? Who teaches bombers to build and plant actual or spurious bombs? The history of the secret police planting agents provocateurs in popular movements goes back at least to nineteenth century France and twentieth century Russia. In 1905, for example, the priest who led St Petersburg's revolution was some sort of double agent, as was the man who organized the assassination of the Czar's uncle, the Grand Duke. As it happens, the United States has its own surprisingly full history of such planted agents at work turning small groups or movements in directions that, for better or far more often worse, they weren't planning on going. 

The Princess and the Brotherhood

For nine decades, Egypt has fled modernity

By Mark Steyn

After midday prayers on Wednesday, just about the time the army were heading over to the presidential palace to evict Mohammed Morsi, the last king of Egypt was laying to rest his aunt, Princess Fawzia, who died in Alexandria on Tuesday at the grand old age of 91. She was born in 1921, a few months before the imperial civil servants of London and Paris invented the modern Middle East and the British protectorate of Egypt was upgraded to a kingdom, and seven years before Hassan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood.

A long life reminds us of how short history is: Princess Fawzia outlived the Egyptian monarchy, and the Nasserist fascism and pan-Arabism that succeeded it, and the doomed “United Arab Republic” of Egypt and Syria, and the fetid third-of-a-century “stability” of the Mubarak kleptocracy. And she came within 24 hours of outliving the Muslim Brotherhood’s brief, disastrous grip on power. In the days before her death, it was reported that 14 million people took to the streets of Egypt’s cities to protest against Morsi (and Obama and his ambassador Anne Paterson). If so, that’s more than the population of the entire country in the year Princess Fawzia was born. The Mubarak era alone saw the citizenry double from 40 million to 80 million, a majority of which live on less than two dollars a day. The old pharaoh was toppled by his own baby boom, most of whom went for Morsi. The new pharaoh was toppled by his own stupidity. The Muslim Brotherhood waited 85 years for their moment and then blew it in nothing flat.

And so the “Arab Spring” ricochets from one half-witted plot twist to another. Morsi was supposedly “the first democratically elected leader” in Egypt’s history, but he was a one-man-one-vote-one-time guy. Across the Mediterranean in Turkey, Prime Minister Erdogan could have advised him “softly softly catchee monkey” — you neuter the army slowly, and Islamize incrementally, as Erdogan has done remorselessly over a decade. But Morsi the “democrat” prosecuted journalists who disrespected him, and now he sits in a military jail cell (next to Mubarak’s?). And so the first army coup in Egypt since King Farouk’s ejection in 1952 is hailed as a restoration of the idealistic goals of the “Facebook revolution,” although General Sisi apparently has plans to charge Morsi with “insulting the presidency.” That’s not a crime any self-respecting society would have on its books — and anyway the Egyptian presidency itself is an insult to presidencies. Morsi’s is the shortest reign of any of the five presidents, shorter even than the first, Mohamed Naguib, who was booted out by Nasser and whose obscurity is nicely caught by the title of his memoir, I Was an Egyptian President.

Egyptian nightmare for Erdogan

The scenes in Cairo and other Egyptian cities stand as a warning sign

By Victor Kotsev 

ISTANBUL- While the Turkish government spent much of the last couple of years branding itself as a paradigm for Egypt and other Arab Spring countries, the reverse is now taking place: Egypt is becoming the nightmare scenario for Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The violent phase of the protests in Istanbul, Ankara and other Turkish cities is over, for now, but the struggle to set their legacy has only just begun, and Erdogan would be well-advised to take a lesson from the mistakes of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood. 

True, the danger of a military coup in Turkey at the moment is close to zero, if only because Erdogan has locked up an entire army college (some 330 officers) on charges of plotting against him. But the parallels between the two countries run far beyond the superficial. For the record, so too did Egyptian still-President Mohammed Morsi try to purge the army last year, although he only removed a few top generals. 

Most importantly, both countries are experimenting with moderate political Islam, and the experiments have produced mixed result as far as genuine democracy is concerned. It is true that Islamic radicals (extremists) and Islamic conservatives (moderates) are two very different species which have fought in the past, and it is also true that the Turkish government, in particular, has implemented a number of popular reforms. However, another fact is that the moderate Islamists' majoritarian understanding of democracy is radically different from that of more liberal constituencies present in both countries. 

The Turkish and the Egyptian governments - both democratically elected - have cracked down on the press, rolled back some civil liberties and planned to change the constitutions in ways many citizens found unacceptable. Enter Taksim square and Tahrir v. 2.0. 

The dangers of social friction become more acute as the economy declines. Egypt is in dire straits, while Turkey is currently widely lauded as an economic miracle, not only in the Middle East, but also in Europe. Erdogan deserves much of the credit for this, though the painful economic reforms executed by the previous government, which led to its downfall, also contributed. 

However, there is a growing financial bubble in Turkey. Whether it is fueled by hot Arab money or by Western investors seeking to escape the low returns in the US and Europe as well as the dangers of Greece and other countries offering higher yields, many analysts expect it to pop in the next year or two. What would happen then is anybody's guess. 

Turkey, similarly to Egypt, has experienced many military coups in the past decades, the most recent one in 1997. And while the danger has been neutralized for now, remnants of the deep state, where the military continues to be embedded, remain powerful. So when Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc threatened to unleash the army on the demonstrators some two weeks ago, he was playing with fire, just as the Egyptian authorities were forced to do when they sent the army to quash riots in the city of Port Said earlier this year. 

Portugal, Greece risk reawakening euro zone beast

A restless summer

A teetering Portuguese government has underlined the threat that the euro zone debt crisis, in hibernation for almost a year, may be about to reawaken.

From Greece to Cyprus, Slovenia to Spain and Italy, and now most pressingly Portugal, where the finance and foreign ministers resigned in the space of two days, a host of problems is stirring after 10 months of relative calm imposed by the European Central Bank.

Portuguese Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho told the nation in an address late on Tuesday that he did not accept the foreign minister's resignation and would try to go on governing.

If his government does end up collapsing, as is now more likely, it will raise immediate questions about Lisbon's ability to meet the terms of the 78-billion-euro bailout it agreed with the EU and International Monetary Fund in 2011.

Portugal had been held up as an example of a bailout country doing all the right things to get its economy back in shape. That reputation is now harder to sustain and even before this latest crisis, the International Monetary Fund reported last month that Lisbon's debt position was "very fragile".

Coming soon after the near-collapse of the Greek government, which has been given until Monday to show it can meet the demands of its own EU-IMF bailout, the euro zonemay be on the brink of falling back into full-on crisis.

The lonely flight of Edward Snowden

Is the Manchurian kid leading America to Tyranny ?

By Peter Van Buren 

As a US State Department whistleblower, I think a lot about Edward Snowden. I can't help myself. My friendships with other whistleblowers like Tom Drake, Jesslyn Radack, Daniel Ellsberg, and John Kiriakou lead me to believe that, however different we may be as individuals, our acts have given us much in common. I suspect that includes Snowden, though I've never had the slightest contact with him. 

Still, as he took his long flight from Hong Kong into the unknown, I couldn't help feeling that he was thinking some of my thoughts, or I his. Here are five things that I imagine were on his mind (they would have been on mine) as that plane took off. 

I am afraid
Whistleblowers act on conscience because they encounter something so horrifying, unconstitutional, wasteful, fraudulent, or mismanaged that they are overcome by the need to speak out. There is always a calculus of pain and gain (for others, if not oneself), but first thoughts are about what you've uncovered, the information you feel compelled to bring into the light, rather than your own circumstances. 

In my case, I was ignorant of what would happen once I blew the whistle. I didn't expect the Department of State to attack me. National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Tom Drake was similarly unprepared. He initially believed that, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation first came to interview him, they were on his side, eager to learn more about the criminal acts he had uncovered at the NSA. Snowden was different in this. He had the example of Bradley Manning and others to learn from. He clearly never doubted that the full weight of the US government would fall on him. 

He knew what to fear. He knew the Obama administration was determined to make any whistleblower pay, likely via yet another prosecution under the Espionage Act (with the potential for the death penalty). He also knew what his government had done since 9/11 without compunction: it had tortured and abused people to crush them; it had forced those it considered enemies into years of indefinite imprisonment, creating isolation cells for suspected terrorists and even a pre-trial whistleblower. It had murdered Americans without due process, and then, of course, there were the extraordinary renditions in which US agents kidnapped perceived enemies and delivered them into the archipelago of post-9/11 horrors. 

Sooner or later, if you're a whistleblower, you get scared. It's only human. On that flight, I imagine that Snowden, for all his youthful confidence and bravado, was afraid. Would the Russians turn him over to Washington as part of some secret deal, maybe the sort of spy-for-spy trade that would harken back to the Cold War era? 

Even if he made it out of Moscow, he couldn't have doubted that the full resources of the NSA and other parts of the US government would be turned on him. How many CIA case officers and Joint Special Operations Command types did the US have undercover in Ecuador? After all, the dirty tricks had already started. The partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, who broke Snowden's story, had his laptop stolen from their residence in Brazil. This happened only after Greenwald told him via Skype that he would send him an encrypted copy of Snowden's documents. 

In such moments, you try to push back the sense of paranoia that creeps into your mind when you realize that you are being monitored, followed, watched. It's uncomfortable, scary. You have to wonder what your fate will be once the media grows bored with your story, or when whatever government has given you asylum changes its stance vis-a-vis the US. When the knock comes at the door, who will protect you? So who can doubt that fear made the journey with him? 

Could I go back to the US?
Amnesty International was on target when it stated that Snowden "could be at risk of ill-treatment if extradited to the US". As if to prove them right, months, if not years, before any trial, Speaker of the House John Boehner called Snowden a "traitor"; Congressman Peter King called him a "defector"; and others were already demanding his execution. If that wasn't enough, the abuse Bradley Manning suffered had already convinced Snowden that a fair trial and humane treatment were impossible dreams for a whistleblower of his sort. (He specifically cited Manning in his appeal for asylum to Ecuador.) 

So on that flight he knew - as he had long known - that the natural desire to go back to the US and make a stand was beyond foolhardy. Yet the urge to return to the country he loves must have been traveling with him, too. Perhaps on that flight he found himself grimly amused that, after years of running roughshod over international standards - Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, "enhanced interrogation techniques", "black sites" - the US had the nerve to chide Hong Kong, China, and Russia for not following the rule of law. 

He certainly knew that his own revelations about extensive NSA cyber-spying on Hong Kong and China had deeply embarrassed the Obama administration. It had, after all, been blistering the Chinese for hacking into US military and corporate computers. He himself had ensured that the Chinese wouldn't turn him over, in the same way that history - decades of US bullying in Latin America - ensured that he had a shot at a future in someplace like in Ecuador. 

If he knew his extradition history, Snowden might also have thought about another time when Washington squirmed as a man it wanted left a friendly country for asylum. In 2004, the US had chess great Bobby Fischer detained in Japan on charges that he had attended a 1992 match in Yugoslavia in violation of a US trade ban. Others suggested that the real reason Washington was after him may have been Fischer's post 9/11 statement: "It's time to finish off the US once and for all. This just shows what comes around, goes around." 

Fischer's American passport was revoked just like Snowden's. In the fashion of Hong Kong more recently, the Japanese released Fischer on an immigration technicality, and he flew to Iceland, where he was granted citizenship. 

I was a diplomat in Japan at the time, and had a ringside seat for the negotiations. They must have paralleled what went on in Hong Kong: the appeals to treaty and international law; US diplomats sounding like so many disappointed parents scolding a child; the pale hopes expressed for future good relations; the search for a sympathetic ear among local law enforcement agencies, immigration, and the foreign ministry - anybody, in fact - and finally, the desperate attempt to call in personal favors to buy more time for whatever Plan B might be. As with Snowden, in the end the US stood by helplessly as its prey flew off. 

How will i live now?
At some point, every whistleblower realizes his life will never be the same. For me, that meant losing my job of 24 years at the State Department. For Tom Drake, it meant financial ruin as the government tried to bankrupt him through endless litigation. For CIA agent John Kiriakou, it might have been the moment when, convicted of disclosing classified information to journalists, he said goodbye to his family and walked into Loretto Federal Correctional Institution. 

Snowden could not have avoided anxiety about the future. Wherever he ended up, how would he live? What work would he do? He's just turned 30 and faces, at best, a lifetime in some foreign country he's never seen where he might not know the language or much of anything else. 

So fear again, in a slightly different form. It never leaves you, not when you take on the world's most powerful government. Would he ever see his family and friends again? Would they disown him, fearful of retaliation or affected by the smear campaign against him? Would his parents/best friend/girlfriend come to believe he was a traitor, a defector, a dangerous man? 

All whistleblowers find their personal relationships strained. Marriages are tested or broken, friends lost, children teased or bullied at school. I know from my own whistleblower's journey that it's an ugly penalty - encouraged by a government scorned - for acting on conscience. 

If he had a deeper sense of history, Snowden might have found humor in the way the Obama administration chose to revoke his passport just before he left Hong Kong. After all, in the Cold War years, it was the "evil empire", the Soviet Union, which was notorious for refusing to grant dissidents passports, while the US regularly waived such requirements when they escaped to the West. 

To deepen the irony of the moment, perhaps he was able to Google up the 2009-2011 figures on US grants of asylum: 1,222 Russians, 9,493 Chinese, and 22 Ecuadorians, not including family members. Maybe he learned that, despite the tantrums US officials threw regarding the international obligation of Russia to extradite him, the US has recently refused Russian requests to extradite two of its citizens. 

Snowden might have mused over then-candidate Obama's explicit pledge to protect whistleblowers. 

"Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government," Obama then said, "is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism... should be encouraged rather than stifled as they have been during the Bush administration." It might have been Snowden's only laugh of the flight. 

I don't hate the US ... but believe it has strayed
On that flight, Snowden took his love of America with him. It's what all of us whistleblowers share: a love of country, if not necessarily its government, its military, or its intelligence services. We care what happens to us the people. That may have been his anchor on his unsettling journey. It would have been mine. 

Remember, if we were working in the government in the first place, like every federal employee, soldier, and many government contractors, we had taken an oath that states: "I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same." We didn't pledge fealty to the government or a president or party, only - as the Constitution makes clear - to the ultimate source of legitimacy in our nation, "the people". 

In an interview, Snowden indicated that he held off on making his disclosures for some time, in hopes that Barack Obama might look into the abyss and decide to become the bravest president in our history by reversing the country's course. Only when Obama's courage or intelligence failed was it time to become a whistleblower. 

Some pundits claim that Snowden deserves nothing because he didn't go through "proper channels". They couldn't be more wrong, and Snowden knows it. As with many of us whistleblowers facing a government acting in opposition to the Constitution, Snowden went through the channels that matter most: he used a free press to speak directly to his real boss, the American people. 

In that sense, whatever the fear and anxiety about his life and his future, he must have felt easy with his actions. He had not betrayed his country, he had sought to inform it. 

As with Bradley Manning, Obama administration officials are now claiming that Snowden has blood on his hands. Typically, Secretary of State John Kerry claimed: "People may die as a consequence to what this man did. It is possible that the United States would be attacked because terrorists may now know how to protect themselves in some way or another that they didn't know before." 

Snowden had heard the same slurs circling around Bradley Manning: that he had put people in danger. After the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to speak of the war on terror, there is irony too obvious to dwell upon in such charges. 

Flying into the unknown, Snowden had to feel secure in having risked everything to show Americans how their government and the NSA bend or break laws to collect information on us in direct conflict with the Fourth Amendment's protections. Amnesty International pointed out that blood-on-hands wasn't at issue. "It appears he is being charged primarily for revealing US and other governments' unlawful actions that violate human rights." Those whispers of support are something to take into the dark with you. 

I believe in things bigger than myself
Some of the charges against Snowden would make anyone pause: that, for instance, he did what he did for the thrill of publicity, out of narcissism, or for his own selfish reasons. To any of the members of the post-9/11 club of whistleblowers, the idea that we acted primarily for our own benefit has a theater of the absurd quality to it. Having been there, the negative sentiments expressed do not read or ring true. 

Snowden himself laughed off the notion that he had acted for his own benefit. If he had wanted money, any number of foreign governments would have paid handsomely for the information he handed out to journalists for free, and he would never have had to embark on that plane flight from Hong Kong. (No one ever called Aldrich Ames a whistleblower.) If he wanted fame, there were potential book contracts and film deals to be had. 

No, it was conscience. I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere along the line Snowden had read the Declaration of the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal: "Individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience. Therefore individual citizens have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring". 

Edward Snowden undoubtedly took comfort knowing that a growing group of Americans are outraged enough to resist a government turning against its own people. His thoughts were mirrored by Julian Assange, who said, "In the Obama administration's attempt to crush these young whistleblowers with espionage charges, the US government is taking on a generation, a young generation of people who find the mass violation of the rights of privacy and open process unacceptable. In taking on the generation, the Obama administration can only lose." 

Snowden surely hoped President Obama would ask himself why he has pursued more than double the number of Espionage Act cases of all his presidential predecessors combined, and why almost all of those prosecutions failed. 

On that flight, Snowden must have reflected on what he had lost, including the high salary, the sweet life in Hawaii and Switzerland, the personal relationships, and the excitement of being on the inside, as well as the coolness of knowing tomorrow's news today. He has already lost much that matters in an individual life, but not everything that matters.   

Sometimes - and any whistleblower comes to know this in a deep way - you have to believe that something other, more, deeper, better than yourself matters. You have to believe that one courageous act of conscience might make a difference in an America gone astray or simply that, matter or not, you did the right thing for your country. 

The march of protest

A wave of anger is sweeping the cities of the world. Politicians beware

The Economist

A FAMILIAR face appeared in many of the protests taking place in scores of cities on three continents this week: a Guy Fawkes mask with a roguish smile and a pencil-thin moustache. The mask belongs to “V”, a character in a graphic novel from the 1980s who became the symbol for a group of computer hackers called Anonymous. His contempt for government resonates with people all over the world.

The protests have many different origins. In Brazil people rose up against bus fares, in Turkey against a building project. Indonesians have rejected higher fuel prices, Bulgarians the government’s cronyism. In the euro zone they march against austerity, and the Arab spring has become a perma-protest against pretty much everything. Each angry demonstration is angry in its own way.

Yet just as in 1848, 1968 and 1989, when people also found a collective voice, the demonstrators have much in common. Over the past few weeks, in one country after another, protesters have risen up with bewildering speed. They have been more active in democracies than dictatorships. They tend to be ordinary, middle-class people, not lobbies with lists of demands. Their mix of revelry and rage condemns the corruption, inefficiency and arrogance of the folk in charge.

Nobody can know how 2013 will change the world—if at all. In 1989 the Soviet empire teetered and fell. But Marx’s belief that 1848 was the first wave of a proletarian revolution was confounded by decades of flourishing capitalism and 1968, which felt so pleasurably radical at the time, did more to change sex than politics. Even now, though, the inchoate significance of 2013 is discernible. And for politicians who want to peddle the same old stuff, the news is not good.

Online and into the streets

The rhythm of protests has been accelerated by technology. V’s face turns up in both São Paulo and Istanbul because protest is organised through social networks, which spread information, encourage imitation and make causes fashionable (see article). Everyone with a smartphone spreads stories, though not always reliable ones. When the police set fire to the encampment in Gezi Park in Istanbul on May 31st, the event appeared instantly on Twitter. After Turks took to the streets to express their outrage, the flames were fanned by stories that protesters had died because of the police’s brutal treatment. Even though those first stories turned out to be wrong, it had already become the popular thing to demonstrate.

Snowden Shrugged

Is the NSA whistleblower the ideal Ayn Rand hero?

By JUSTIN RAIMONDO

I don’t know exactly when the world turned into an Ayn Rand novel. It seems, in retrospect, to have been a gradual process, a slow realization that life is imitating art in the most curious, even uncanny way. I do know when the realization hit me: it was when I learned that Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks now holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, had arranged for Edward Snowden’s escape from Hong Kong, and that the 30-year-old whistleblower was accompanied on the plane to Moscow by a veritable platoon of high-powered Wikileaks lawyers. In a flash, the image of Ragnar Danneskjöld—the philosopher-turned-pirate of Atlas Shrugged, who raided the ships of the future collectivist regime—appeared before me clear as day.

In the novel, Danneskjöld is a pirate whose decade-long career of raiding and robbing government facilities has made him a notorious figure. Hank Rearden, Rand’s prototypical industrialist, meets him one night in a wood, as if by chance. Backed into a regulatory corner by government bureaucrats and their crony capitalist friends, Rearden is walking alone down the road when Danneskjöld suddenly appears, as if out of the mist. They engage in conversation; Rearden is wary. When Danneskjöld reveals his identity, explaining that he has come to return some of his money stolen by the “looters” in Washington, the good bourgeois industrialist, speaking out of one side of Ayn Rand’s mouth, expresses shock and disapproval. Danneskjöld’s response is very Assange, in style if not in content:

“Why should you be shocked, Mr. Rearden?” says Danneskjöld—speaking out of the other side of Rand’s mouth, the swashbuckling Romantic side—“I am merely complying with the system which my fellow men have established. If they believe that force is the proper means to deal with one another, I am giving them what they ask for. If they believe that the purpose of my life is to serve them, let them try to enforce their creed. If they believe that my mind is their property—let them come and get it.”

Does the World Not Have the Courage or Decency to Protect Mr. Snowden?

The U.S. vs. Edward Snowden

By Gordon Gekko

Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary — the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there's a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trimtab. It's a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trimtab. Society thinks it's going right by you, that it's left you altogether. But if you're doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go.

So I said, call me Trimtab.

--Richard Buckminster Fuller

Who is Edward Snowden?

Actions speak louder than words, and by his actions alone Edward Snowden has proved himself to be a real American Hero, a Patriot and somebody worthy of being called a Citizen of the World.  The sheer amount of personal risk he took was by no means trivial, and the reason he took it for makes it even more significant. I know some people are doubting his credentials and motives now, but it only exemplifies how cynical and cruel we - our current so-called “civilization” - has become. I’ve read his posts on Arstechnica, and to me he just comes across a normal kid of our generation who’s sick and tired of the corrupt and decaying system – the only difference being that he had the courage to do something about it.  Moreover, the fact that he’s being hounded by the western global leadership only further goes to prove that he’s done NOTHING wrong. He put his and his family’s life on the hook just so millions could benefit. He had the courage and conviction to stand up to the most powerful government and military force in the world on the grounds of principle alone. He EXACTLY represents what America was and is all about – an individual standing up against tyranny, an individual standing up for his beliefs - and he is doing EXACTLY what the Constitution of the United States demands of its Citizens. And instead of hailing him as a patriot for being a defender the Constitution, many in the public are calling him a traitor. Indeed:

Every nation gets the government it deserves.

--Joseph de Maistre

So far people of the United States have shown to be extremely deserving of their current government.

The morons and mafia agents in Congress (who, by the way, had special exemptions for themselves from NSA surveillance – the mind BOGGLES at the SHEER HYPOCRISY here) decrying Edward’s actions as treasonous are themselves guilty of treason. They have utterly and completely FAILED to uphold the Constitution of the United States. Read the following from the Declaration of Independence and tell me if we are in a different situation today or if Edward’s actions were not aligned with what the Constitution required of him (or all of us, for that matter):

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security

After Morsi, the geopolitical fallout

The Plot Thickens

By Kaveh L Afrasiabi 

The Egyptian military's decision to issue an ultimatum to Mohamed Morsi has been decried by supporters of the embattled president as an illegal coup attempt to dethrone a democratically elected leader. After several cabinet ministers quit in an expression of solidarity with demonstrators in Tahrir Square who are seeking an end to his rule, agreement to substantial "power-sharing" looks like Morsi's only route to avoid a collision with the military and his inevitable ouster. 

A military takeover in Egypt would force the Arab world's biggest nation into a new and uncertain phase of political crisis with clear geopolitical ramifications. The list of questions awaiting answers is long, and includes concerns about the duration of the military government and how quickly a transition to another civilian government could take place through an election, how Morsi's supporters will respond, and the likely level of violence following the coup? Finally, what foreign policy adjustments will the Egyptian military make after toppling Morsi?

It is instructive to review Morsi's foreign policy during the (short-lived) experiment of the Muslim Brotherhood's setting of the foreign policy agenda in Egypt. From the outset, Morsi sought to adopt an "independent" line and made it known to Western powers that the past era of sheepish obedience to their interests was over. Egypt was to act according to its own interests. 

It was the pursuit of this new orientation that brought Morsi to Tehran last August to participate in the Non-Aligned Summit, an occasion which he used to express solidarity with the Syrian people fighting against the Assad regime, and to propose a "Syria quartet", including Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. The Saudis never showed interest in this proposal and boycotted the quartet's meeting in Cairo last year. Nor did the Saudis or the Qataris, two principal financial backers of Cairo, ever welcome Morsi's initial toying with the idea of a diplomatic rapprochement with the Islamic Republic.

Does Too Much Debt Really Matter?

An American economist looks at Europe

By Pedro Schwart

Economists, especially in Europe, seem to be divided into two irreconcilable camps over the question of 'growth versus austerity'. From 2008 to 2012, the talk was all of consolidating public budgets, increasing taxes, closing down or merging unsafe banks, selling their assets at fire-sale prices, cutting down on pension and health entitlements, firing public employees, reducing trade union privileges and opening labor markets to competition—the classic panoply of measures the IMF used to demand of Third World countries when it moved in to rescue them. This time and for the Eurozone, the IMF was content to play second fiddle: the rescuers were Germany and other northern and central European countries; the peccant countries they had to rescue were those on the outer fringes of the Eurozone. The expectation was that this hard medicine would bear fruit at the latest in 2013 and bring renewed growth and employment after four years of contraction. Unexpectedly, and for reasons we hope to discover someday, there was a second dip in the recession. Public opinion, especially in countries suffering from high unemployment, became restless. In despair many Europeans leaders turned their eyes towards the United States, hoping to learn the lessons of its money-printing Federal Reserve and bond-issuing Treasury. The European Central Bank chief Signor Draghi promised to do "whatever it takes" to save the euro; Signor Monti was dealt a sharp lesson by Italian voters; the French President and the Spanish Prime Minister demanded growth-fostering measures to ease public deficit reduction; the European Council set in progress a program to help employ young people; and the European Community as a whole launched a plan to better rail and road transport on the Continent. Frau Merkel was cast into the role of a Dickensian Gradgrind who wanted everybody to stick to "Facts! Facts! Facts!" The policy climate had changed.

These moves were dictated by political convenience, but the change in policy direction was reinforced by the effect of a scientific dispute that reverberated beyond the confines of Academia; an econometric mistake committed by Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff seemed to put the austerity camp in disarray. At least this is how Paul Krugman, in line with many others, presented his case for a deficit financed stimulus.

The Reinhart-Rogoff slip-up

The controversy went like this. Reinhart and Rogoff (2010) had come to the not-so-surprising conclusion that an excessive accumulation of public debt tended to reduce the rate of growth of a country. They went further. They thought they could see a threshold in the historical series of their sample of countries, whereby a debt equivalent to more than 60% of GDP in developing economies and of 90% for advanced economies was accompanied by a non-linear reduction in growth. Though Reinhart and Rogoff in their paper (2010) allowed for the possibility that the causation could go from low growth to high debt due to falls in tax revenues, the implication was that it was debt that led to lower growth when it went over the threshold of 60% and 90%. This is how, in discussions about austerity versus stimulus, I myself, along with many others, understood the results.

I don’t want my awareness raised, thanks.

Hands up if you're fed up of experts thinking they're more 'aware' than us plebs

By Frank Furedi 

Last Thursday was Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Awareness Day. If you missed it, that’s probably because every week there are awareness days. We’re swamped by them. There are literally thousands of organisations whose mission is to raise our awareness. There is also a vast number of politicians, policymakers, experts, professionals, academics and earnest volunteers who are all devoted to the cause of raising awareness.

Those who set themselves up to raise the public’s awareness are not just providing information; they’re also making a statement about themselves, about who they are. They, unlike those who require their support, are aware. Awareness is presented as a state of being all of us should aspire to attain. In its common usage today, the term awareness resists any clear definitions. It is not simply about knowing or understanding. So AIDS awareness, for example, is not reducible to knowledge of that disease; rather, it implies the adoption of the values of safe sex and the lifestyle associated with its values. People who are aware are likely to demonstrate this fact publicly, by wearing the right-coloured ribbon or bracelet or T-shirt and using the appropriate language. To be aware is to be on the morally superior side: not eating meat; not practising unprotected sex; not smoking; exercising regularly; riding a bicycle; recycling… these are just some of the rituals that signal that a person is aware.

Campaigns designed to raise awareness are as much about advertising the status of the campaigners as they are about changing the outlook of a target audience. For example, advocates of breastfeeding produce literature that affirms the virtuous nature of their own lifestyles while also inviting those who have not seen the light to become aware. The very term ‘raising awareness’ involves drawing a distinction between those who are enlightened, who are aware of something, and those who are not. It draws attention to the fundamental contrast between those who know and those who are ignorant, between the morally superior and the morally inferior. So someone who allows his children to eat junk food is not only unaware and ignorant; he’s also morally questionable.

Awareness-raising campaigns impute to their advocates the values of intelligence, sensitivity, broadmindedness, sophistication and enlightenment. For that reason, the mission of raising awareness has become a key cultural resource for those who want to distinguish themselves from others. Awareness-raisers are invariably drawn towards inflating the behavioural and cultural distinctions between themselves and the rest of society; they are preoccupied with constructing a lifestyle that contrasts as sharply as possible to the lifestyles of their moral inferiors. What is really important about their lifestyles is not so much the values they exhort, but that they are different, in every detail, from the lives led by obese, junk-food eating, gas-guzzling, xenophobic and fundamentalist consumers of the tabloid press and junk culture.

Last curtain falls on Nabucco pipeline

Nabucco's demise affects the politics of energy supply along the entire Southern Gas Corridor to Europe

By Vladimir Socor

Nabucco-West, the pipeline project that was to have carried Azerbaijani gas from Turkey to the Central European Gas Hub near Vienna, is exiting from the stage after the rival Trans-Adriatic Pipeline project (TAP, Greece-Albania-Italy, led by Norwegian Statoil) prevailed last week in the contest for priority access to Azerbaijani gas.

On June 26, the gas producers' consortium at Shah Deniz in Azerbaijan communicated this decision to the parties and to the European Union in Brussels. There will be no encore for Nabucco-West. "The Nabucco project is over for us. Our goal now is European gas for European customers," Gerhard Roiss, CEO of Austrian OMV, the Nabucco consortium's lead player, said.

Initiated in 2002, the Nabucco project held potentially winning cards of a strategic nature. Along with intrinsic comparative advantages, Nabucco long enjoyed the European Commission's political and (unofficially) advisory support. Given this project's superior potential, the commission prioritized Nabucco as the mainstay of the planned Southern Gas Corridor to Europe. However, missteps in Vienna detracted from the project's credibility, ultimately offsetting its advantages.

The proposed 3,900-kilometer pipeline, with a 56-inch (1,420-millimeter) diameter and an annual 31-billion-cubic-meter (bcm) design capacity, seemed moribund by 2011. The transportation project's ambitions were outrunning the actual gas field development in the Caspian basin by many years. Consequently, Nabucco lacked supply sources and investment capital while facing steep cost increases for the project.

The project company could not deal with these problems by citing outdated cost estimates, or by voicing wildly premature hopes to access gas from northern Iraq (a hope that could not even look optimistic since it presupposed a long, expensive connector pipeline). By 2011, Nabucco was losing credibility all around in its then-existing form.

Outside the consortium's official framework, OMV from time to time took some steps of its own that were inconsistent with the Nabucco project's logic. At one stage, OMV attempted a hostile takeover of Hungarian MOL. When this failed, OMV sold its large package of MOL shares to Russian Surgut Neftegaz, which used it for its own hostile takeover attempt against MOL.

At some stage, the Austrian side proposed allowing Gazprom to use part of Nabucco's capacity in the future for Russian gas, which would have defeated this project's supply diversification goals. While the Baumgarten terminal was a major selling point for Nabucco, OMV at one time agreed to share control of the terminal with Gazprom, until the European Commission invalidated that agreement.

In early 2012 Azerbaijan gave Nabucco a chance to survive in a more realistic form. Azerbaijan's State Oil Company (SOCAR) initiated the Trans-Anatolia Pipeline Project (TANAP) to build the gas pipeline across Turkey to Europe, with Azerbaijan as main shareholder and project operator. TANAP, in effect, replaced Nabucco on Turkey's territory, taking over the burden of responsibility for two-thirds of Nabucco's route.

This enabled the Nabucco company to reconfigure its project as Nabucco-West, from the Turkish-Bulgarian border to the continental gas hub at Baumgarten near Vienna. Its length now reduced to 1,300 kilometers, Nabucco-West looked more affordable and possibly bankable.

Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution

Have a drink and relax. It's going to take more than five minutes to go through this one.

by Murray N. Rothbard

Law is a set of commands; the principles of tort or criminal law, which we shall be dealing with, are negative commands or prohibitions, on the order of "thou shalt not" do actions X, Y, or Z.[1] In short, certain actions are considered wrong to such a degree that it is considered appropriate to use the sanctions of violence (since law is the social embodiment of violence) to combat, defend against, and punish the transgressors.

There are many actions against which it is not considered appropriate to use violence, individual or organized. Mere lying (that is, where contracts to transfer property titles are not broken), treachery, base ingratitude, being nasty to one's friends or associates, or not showing up for appointments, are generally considered wrong, but few think of using violence to enjoin or combat them. Other sanctions, such as refusing to see the person or have dealings with him, putting him in Coventry, and so on, may be used by individuals or groups, but using the violence of the law to prohibit such actions is considered excessive and inappropriate.

If ethics is a normative discipline that identifies and classifies certain sets of actions as good or evil, right or wrong, then tort or criminal law is a subset of ethics identifying certain actions as appropriate for using violence against them. The law says that action X should be illegal, and therefore should be combated by the violence of the law. The law is a set of "ought" or normative propositions.

Many writers and jurists have claimed the law is a value-free, "positive" discipline. Of course it is possible simply to list, classify and analyze existing law without going further into saying what the law should or should not be.[2] But that sort of jurist is not fulfilling his essential task. Since the law is ultimately a set of normative commands, the true jurist or legal philosopher has not completed his task until he sets forth what the law should be, difficult though that might be. If he does not, then he necessarily abdicates his task in favor of individuals or groups untrained in legal principles, who may lay down their commands by sheer fiat and arbitrary caprice.

Thus, the Austinian jurists proclaim that the king, or sovereign, is supposed to lay down the law, and the law is purely a set of commands emanating from his will. But then the question arises: On what principles does or should the king operate?[3] Is it ever possible to say that the king is issuing a "bad" or "improper" decree? Once the jurist admits that, he is going beyond arbitrary will to begin to frame a set of normative principles that should be guiding the sovereign. And then he is back to normative law.