Robert Parry — The Dawn of an Orwellian Future

In early May 2017, the Times chimed in with a laudatory article about how sophisticated algorithms could purge the Internet of alleged “fake news” or what the mainstream media deems to be “misinformation.”

As I wrote at the time, “you don’t need a huge amount of imagination to see how this combination of mainstream groupthink and artificial intelligence could create an Orwellian future in which only one side of a story gets told and the other side simply disappears from view.”…

That has been a core principle since the days of the Enlightenment, that truth best emerges from withstanding challenges in the marketplace of ideas. Overturning that age-old truth – by today unleashing algorithms to enforce the Official Narrative – is a much greater threat to an informed electorate and to the health of democracy than the relatively few times when some kid makes up a bogus story to increase his Web traffic.

Employing the manufactured fake news meme to suppress dissent and manufacture consent in creating a consensual reality based on the official narrative.

Those that have eye to see are witnessing is a soft coup being conducted in a soft fascist state.

Consortium News

The Dawn of an Orwellian Future

Robert Parry

Carol Anderson — Trump Exposes the GOP's Dirty Secret: They Build Everything by Nurturing White Rage

America's soft fascism disguised by code words is now out in the open.

Shortly before he died, Reagan’s strategist Lee Atwater explained the game plan of the Southern Strategy in a matter-of-fact clinical policy. “By 1968 you can’t say ‘n***r’ — that hurts you, backfires,” Atwater emphasized. “So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff. And you’re getting so abstract now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.” But Donald Trump doesn’t do abstract and that is what has sent the GOP into a tizzy.

Nixon and Reagan mastered this by adapting to the new racial terrain carved out by the Civil Rights Movement. As Nixon aide John Ehrlichman explained to Harper’sDan Baum in 1994, “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be against black[s], but by getting the public to associate . . . blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing” the drug “we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

But that lie was infinitely effective in driving policy. In 2008, the NAACP reported that “five times as many whites are using drugs as African Americans, yet African Americans are sent to prison for drug offenses at 10 times the rate of Whites.” Consequently, blacks comprising just 13 percent of the U.S. population made up “59% of those in state prison for a drug offense.” Packaged and sold as keeping neighborhoods and families safe, the Nixon administration’s well-targeted lie, which was expanded upon by Ronald Reagan, and taken up by Democrats such as Bill Clinton to prove that they could be “tough on crime, too,” has worked masterfully. Because many states disfranchise those with felony convictions, the Sentencing Project reports that 2.2 million African Americans or 7.7 percent of black adults have been legally stripped of their voting rights; as compared with 1.8 percent of the non-African American population.…

And that’s the problem. What the GOP is really mad about is that Donald Trump has made visible what many have tried so hard to hide.AlterNet

Trump Exposes the GOP's Dirty Secret: They Build Everything by Nurturing White Rage
Carol Anderson

See also

Back when Dick Cheney was being hailed for calling out Donald Trump’s racism, I notedone aspect of that radio interview that largely escaped notice: his embrace of the myth that the American continent was empty when his Puritan ancestors got here.

Cheney didn’t stop there. He then emphasized that one of his ancestors arrived as a religious refugee, a Puritan. “A lot of people, my ancestors got here, because they were Puritans.” Cheney suggested, then, that the place was empty when William Cheney arrived in the 17th century. “There wasn’t anybody here, then, when they came.”

Should be "the myth of (white) American exceptionalism."

empty wheel Pat Buchanan, Dick Cheney, and American Exceptionalism

Tyler Cowen — What the hell is going on?

Donald Trump may get the nuclear suitcase, a cranky “park bench” socialist took Hillary Clinton to the wire, many countries are becoming less free, and the neo-Nazi party came very close to assuming power in Austria. I could list more such events.

Haven’t you, like I, wondered what is up? What the hell is going on?

I don’t know, but let me tell you my (highly uncertain) default hypothesis. I don’t see decisive evidence for it, but it is a kind of “first blast” attempt to fit the basic facts while remaining within the realm of reason.…

Marginal Revolution
What the hell is going on?
Tyler Cowen | Holbert C. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University and serves as chairman and general director of the Mercatus Center

Jon Perr — GOP Majority Whip John Cornyn threatens judges and judicial nominees

Soft fascism. Cornyn has a history of it.

Daily Kos
GOP Majority Whip John Cornyn threatens judges and judicial nominees
Jon Perr

digby — When fascism came to America ... it was wearing a black robe

“I think privacy is actually overvalued,” Judge Richard Posner, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, said during a conference about privacy and cybercrime in Washington, D.C., Thursday. 

“Much of what passes for the name of privacy is really just trying to conceal the disreputable parts of your conduct,” Posner added. “Privacy is mainly about trying to improve your social and business opportunities by concealing the sorts of bad activities that would cause other people not to want to deal with you.”…

“If the NSA wants to vacuum all the trillions of bits of information that are crawling through the electronic worldwide networks, I think that’s fine,” he said.

In the name of national security, U.S. lawmakers should give the NSA “carte blanche,” Posner added. “Privacy interests should really have very little weight when you’re talking about national security,” he said. “The world is in an extremely turbulent state—very dangerous.”

Hullabaloo
When fascism came to America ... it was wearing a black robe
digby

Don Quijones — The Deadly Threat of Non-Lethal Weapons

…non-lethal weapons represent a fast-growing multi-billion dollar business for military contractors. According to the report Non-Lethal Weapons: Technologies and Global Market 2012-2020, published by Homeland Security Research, the Non-Lethal Weapons (NLW) market is forecast to emerge as a key domain for asymmetric warfare and law enforcement technology providers: 

“Governments worldwide have undoubtedly understood the function of non-lethal weapons following lessons learned in Egypt, Israel, Iraq and Afghanistan. Unforeseen street riots and mass demonstrations over the last decade have revealed the loopholes in the security dogma of the 21st century.” 

“There is a growing demand from combatant commanders, law enforcement officers and political establishments for NLW capabilities. This demand is driven by the need to help them win the hearts and minds of the non-combatant population and prevent world outcry and media attention due to non-combatant casualties. As a result, many governments have entered into non-lethal weapons R&D and procurement dedicated to the full spectrum of public safety, law enforcement, crowd control and asymmetric warfare.“…

Besides the clear dangers they pose to human health, non-lethal weapons arguably pose an even graver threat to the basic notion of civil engagement that underpins any system of participatory democracy. The rights of assembly and peaceful protest are — and must remain — fundamental pillars of any self-respecting democracy (which obviously excludes Spain these days). However, the use of non-lethal weapons to police public demonstrations risks enshrining a collective punishment approach to public order policing which would, in turn, effectively mean the de-facto criminalisation of virtually all forms of political or social protest. 

While “non-lethal”, or better put “less lethal”, weapons may offer police forces and governments the enticing prospect of enhanced social control — especially at a time when economic and political forces are alienating both the lower and middle ranks of society — they would do well to remember the following cautionary words from the late John F Kennedy:

“Those who make peaceful protest impossible make violent revolution inevitable.”

Raging Bull-Shit

The Deadly Threat of Non-Lethal Weapons

Don Quijones

Brad Friedman — Snowden on the Dangers of the 'Privatized' National Security State, in the Interview the U.S. 'News' Networks Didn't Bother to Show You

I'm not the only one that thinks we are living in a fascist corporatist state.

Brad Blog
Snowden on the Dangers of the 'Privatized' National Security State, in the Interview the U.S. 'News' Networks Didn't Bother to Show You
Brad Friedman

Theresa Riley, Bill Moyers & Company — Wisconsin Democrat who infiltrated ALEC: ‘They don’t want people involved in the political process’

I'd be shocked it this were not already so well documented. But here is a first hand report by an "infiltrator" on the neoliberal mind in action.

Here's an illustration of their idea of representative democracy."

One guy I was talking to, who was from one of these right wing think tanks was saying we need to curb Obama’s reckless power with these administrative regulations, and he wanted a federal constitutional amendment saying Congress has to approve federal regulations. I said, I don’t think most people are going to want to amend the Constitution for that. I don’t think that ignites people. Maybe it does on the far right, but most people don’t really care about that. And he said, “Oh, well, you really don’t need people to do this. You just need control over the legislature and you need money, and we have both.”

That sentiment was underscored so many times to me, that they don’t want people involved in the political process, or in the policy process. And that seems to be the intent in a lot of ways: You have a think tank in every state and all they do is come up with these very, very regressive policies, you have corporations who are going to benefit so they fund it all, and then you have the legislators as your foot soldiers to carry out the tasks.

The best government that money can buy. And the best equipped security force to enforce it. The difference between fascism and communism is that fascism is corporate statism, and communism is corporate statism. Just a matter of emphasis. A neo-feudal elite are in control in both.

 I was really impressed by their infrastructure. I mean, we would never duplicate something like this on the left because, first of all, we would never take instructions from corporations, but the coordination that they have between these policy think tanks, the money and the legislators, in terms of just driving an agenda, it’s incredible. I’ve never seen anything like it. I’m fascinated by it because I’ve never seen anything like it from the left. I was the public policy director at Planned Parenthood, so I’m very familiar with building infrastructure. We did a lot of that in the state of Wisconsin. But we have nothing that I know of on the national front that connects all these things.

It is a well-oiled machine. They’re really organized, they’re really coordinated and they have the resources. And they’re not afraid to push it when they have the opportunities. Now they have 24 state legislatures that are Republican controlled and they have Republican governors. So they’ve had incredible success. They’ve had 71 bills introduced just this year that make it harder for most people who are injured to access the courts. We’ve certainly seen that here in Wisconsin. That was one of the first things that Walker did when he came in was push this tort reform through.

The Raw Story
Wisconsin Democrat who infiltrated ALEC: ‘They don’t want people involved in the political process’
Theresa Riley, Bill Moyers & Company

Leslie Savan — The Koch Influence

At one point an ITVS vice-president spelled it out: “We live in a world where we have to be aware that people with power have power.” ITVS cancelled the project in April.

The Nation
The Koch Influence
Leslie Savan

Alex Kane — How America's National Security Apparatus -- in Partnership With Big Corporations -- Cracked Down on Dissent

A new report is an eye-opening look into how the U.S. counter-terror apparatus was used to track the Occupy movement.

Counter-terror police officers collaborated with corporate entities to combat protests. Undercover police officers monitored and tracked the Occupy movement. A right-wing corporate-backed group hired a police officer to help protect a conference. These are some of the details revealed in anew report published by the Center for Media and Democracy’s Beau Hodai, along with DBA Press. The revelations are based on government documents the group obtained.

The report, titled "Dissent or Terror: How the Nation's Counter Terrorism Apparatus, In Partnership With Corporate America, Turned on Occupy Wall Street,” is an eye-opening look into how the U.S. counter-terror apparatus was used to track the Occupy movement in 2011 and 2012 and also help protect the business entities targeted by the movement. The report specifically looks at the activities of “fusion centers,” or law enforcement entities created after 9/11 that transform local police forces into counter-terror units in partnership with federal agencies like the Department of Homeland Security. The fusion centers devoted a lot of time--to the point of “obsession,” the report notes--to monitoring the Occupy movement, particularly for any “threats” to public safety or health and to whether there were “extremists” involved in the movement.

The documents obtained for the report from government agencies reveal “a grim mosaic of ‘counter-terrorism’ agency operations and attitudes toward activists and other socially/politically-engaged citizens over the course of 2011 and 2012,” writes Hodai. He adds that these heavily-funded agencies indisputably view Occupy activists as “terrorist” threats. Additionally, Hodai writes that “this view of activists, and attendant activist monitoring/suppression, has been carried out on behalf of, and in cooperation with, some of the nation’s largest financial and corporate interests.”

AlterNet
How America's National Security Apparatus -- in Partnership With Big Corporations -- Cracked Down on Dissent
Alex Kane

Soft fascism becoming hard fascism.

Michael Snyder — Corporatism: A System Of Control Designed By The Monopoly Men Of The Global Elite

In early America, most states had strict laws governing the size and scope of corporations. Individuals and small businesses thrived in such an environment, and the United States experienced a period of explosive economic growth. We showed the rest of the world that capitalism really works, and we eventually built the largest middle class that the world had ever seen.

But now we have replaced capitalism with something that I like to call "corporatism". In many ways, it shares a lot of characteristics with communism, and that is why nations such as communist China have embraced it so readily. Under "corporatism", monolithic predator corporations run around sucking up as much wealth and economic power as they possibly can. Most individuals and small businesses cannot compete and end up getting absorbed by the corporations. These mammoth collectivist institutions are in private hands rather than in government hands (as would be the case under a pure form of communism), but the results are pretty much the same either way. A tiny elite at the top gets almost all of the economic rewards.

There are some out there that would suggest that the answer to our problems is to move more in the direction of "socialism", but to be honest that wouldn't be the solution to anything. It would just change how the table scraps that the rest of us are getting are distributed.

If we truly wanted a return to prosperity, we need to dramatically shift the rules of the game so that they are tilted back in favor of individuals and small businesses. A much more pure form of capitalism would mean more wealth, less poverty and a more equitable distribution of the economic rewards in this country

The Economic Collapse
Corporatism: A System Of Control Designed By The Monopoly Men Of The Global Elite
Michael Snyder
(h/t Zero Hedge)

Chris Hedges calls "fascism"

Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the PCJF, said in a written statement about the released files: “This production [of information], which we believe is just the tip of the iceberg, is a window into the nationwide scope of the FBI’s surveillance, monitoring, and reporting on peaceful protesters organizing with the Occupy movement. These documents show that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are treating protests against the corporate and banking structure of America as potential criminal and terrorist activity. These documents also show these federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America.”

The FBI documents are not only a chilling example of how widespread this surveillance and obstruction has become, they are an explicit warning by the security services to all who consider dissent. Anyone who defies corporate power, even if he or she is nonviolent and acting within constitutional rights, is a suspect. These documents are part of the plan to make us fearful, compliant and disempowered. They mark, I suspect, a government attempt to end peaceful mass protests by responding with repression to the grievances of Americans. When the corporate-financed group FreedomWorks bused in goons to disrupt Democratic candidates’ town hall meetings about the federal health care legislation in August 2009, Eric Zuesse of the Business Insider notes, “there was no FBI surveillance of those corporate-organized disruptions of legitimate democratic processes. There also were no subsequent FreedomWorks applications for Freedom of Information Act releases of FBI files regarding such surveillance being used against them—because there was no such FBI campaign against them.”

The combination of intimidation tactics by right-wing fringe groups, which speak in the language of violence and hate, with the state’s massive intrusion into the personal affairs of the citizen is corporate fascism. And we are much farther down that road than many of us care to admit. [emphasis added]

Truthdig
Chris Hedges: New Documents on Activist Surveillance May Be "Just the Tip of the Iceberg"
Chris Hedges | News Analysi
(h/t Kevin Fathi via email)

Fabius Maximus — Attention Americans: the Revolution has begun. You must choose a side

You might sneer and laugh at Wikileaks and Anonymous as quixotic — foolish and vain efforts. But the government knows better, and devotes great effort to stamp out these sparks. Without wider support our ruling elites will successfully suppress these movements. With our support these can mature into powerful engines of reform.

My guess: The government will crush these rebels. More rebels will appear. With them lies our only remaining hope for reform. The Republic’s fate is their fate. What we do now, and during the next few years, will decide its future. That’s the meaning of Democracy: its survival lies in our hands.

FabiusMaximus.com
Attention Americans: the Revolution has begun. You must choose a side.
Fabius Maximus

FM may not have the economics right but he has the politics down.

Plug this into your reading of Strauss & Howe's The Fourth Turning and Ravi Batra's The New Golden Age: The Coming Revolution Against Political Corruption and Economic Chaos.

WashingtonsBlog — The Real Reason America Is Drifting Towards Fascism

I would say that the US has been in the grip of soft fascism since the Vietnam Era, and that the trend has been rising in the direction of hard fascism since 9/11.

The Real Reason America Is Drifting Towards Fascism
Washingtons Blog

Eric Dolan — Associated Press calls white supremacists a ‘white rights group’

The Associated Press has come under scrutiny from liberal blogs after the news organization published an article that referred to the group European American Action Coalition as a “white rights group.”

The language was first used by the local Philadelphia newspaper Scranton Times-Tribune, according to Daniel Denvir of City Paper. When Denvir contacted the Associated Press for copy of their story, he was rebuffed.

“What possible purpose would there be for me to send you this story when you’re trying to cause trouble for how it was written?” Karen Testa, the East Region Editor at the Associated Press, told Denvir. “That’s a good way to build a journalism career,” she added before hanging up.

Crooks and Liars called the language a “frightening demonstration of the mainstreaming of white nationalism” and the article was also criticized by Pam’s House Blend.

Raw Story
Associated Press calls white supremacists a ‘white rights group’
Eric W. Dolan

Trend watch: More evidence of creeping fascism becoming galloping fascism? (A characteristic of fascism beyond corporate statism is extreme nationalism and racial purity.)

As has already been mentioned, Romney choice of Ryan sends a signal to minorities and makes the GOP a whites party along the model of Pat Buchanan.

Related: Muslim group: Republican ‘Islamophobia machine’ encouraging violent attacks by Stephen C. Webster at Raw Story.

In-person voter fraud ‘virtually non-existent’: report by Eric W. Dolan at Raw Story. "Suppression of voter fraud" is a disenfranchisement plan aimed at minorities and the poor, another characteristic of soft fascism.

Criminalizing Photography by James Estrin at The New York Times

It’s not just news photographers who should be concerned with this. I think every citizen should be concerned. Tourists taking pictures are being told by police, security guards and sometimes other citizens, “Sorry, you can’t take a picture here.” When asked why, they say, “Well, don’t you remember 9/11?”

I remember it quite well, but what does that have do to with taking a picture in public?

Greg Jaffe — A decade after the 9/11 attacks, Americans live in an era of endless war

Endless war = dictatorship forever.

Fascism is capitalism plus murder.

▪ Presidential Agent II (1944)

The Washington Post | National Security
A decade after the 9/11 attacks, Americans live in an era of endless war
Greg Jaffe
(h/t Glen Greenwald @ggreenwald via Twitter)

I don't want to be all conspiratorial about this, but it is happening all around us now as even domestic security forces are militarized and the president is given the power to indefinitely detain and even assassinate US citizens.

Woj — ECB's Means (Lost Decade With High Unemployment) To An End (Structural Reform)

By working to prevent an all out collapse of the EMU, Draghi is merely taking the necessary actions to maintain his position. If Spain or other European countries must “suffer from a decade of recessions with unemployment over 20%” in order to implement the desired structural reforms than so be it. Whether or not that outcome is politically feasible remains an open question, but I have my doubts. Draghi was not the first to claim “it will be enough" and won’t be the last to make that claim either.

Read it at Bubbles and Busts
ECB's Means (Lost Decade With High Unemployment) To An End (Structural Reform)
Woj

The not so hidden agenda. The race in the West — Europe, the UK, and the US — the work force of the developed world to compete at the same level of wages and benefits as the emerging world is on. The belief is that wages and benefits in developed countries will fall as they rise in the emerging world, splitting the difference. The good news — outsourcing no longer a threat to employment in the developed world. The bad news — falling standard of living and rising inequality as the global economy heads toward a world of have's and have-not's in a neoliberal "paradise."

They actually think that this is workable politically. I suspect they realize it is not possible without political repression. So get ready for soft fascism.

Just as policy direction leads to totalitarian communism as the extreme on the left, so too does it lead to institutional fascism as the extreme on the right.