Chile: The poster boy of neoliberalism who fell from grace — Branko Milanovic

It is not common for an OECD county to shoot and kill 16 people in two days of socially motivated riots. (Perhaps only Turkey, in its unending wars against the Kurdish guerilla, comes close to that level of violence.) This is however what Chilean government, the poster child of neoliberalism and transition to democracy, did last week in the beginning of protests that do not show the signs of subsiding despite cosmetic reforms proposed by President Sebastian Piñera.

The fall from grace of Chile is symptomatic of worldwide trends that reveal the damages causes by neoliberal policies over the past thirty years, from privatizations in Eastern Europe and Russia to the global financial crisis to the Euro-related austerity....

Global Inequality
Chile: The poster boy of neoliberalism who fell from grace

Branko Milanovic | Visiting Presidential Professor at City University of New York Graduate Center and senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), and formerly lead economist in the World Bank's research department and senior associate at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

See also

FAIR
The Revolution Isn’t Being Televised - Media uninterested in protest movements around the world

Alan MacLeod

BBC News — Wall of Grief: Putin opens first Soviet victims memorial

At the opening ceremony, Mr Putin said: "An unequivocal and clear assessment of the repression will help to prevent it being repeated."

"This terrible past must not be erased from our national memory and cannot be justified by anything."

BBC News
Wall of Grief: Putin opens first Soviet victims memorial

See also

Yesterday (30 October), Vladimir Putin attended the unveiling of the ‘Wall of Grief’, a monument erected in Moscow to the victims of communist repression. This is the third major such monument constructed in Moscow this year, the other two being the Sretenskii Monastery (about which I wrote earlier) and a memorial at the former Butovo firing range.

You might imagine that these strong signals of disapproval of communism would have some effect on how the media represents Putin and the state he leads. For instance, you might imagine headlines like ‘Putin condemns Stalinism’, or ‘Russian state turns it back on communist past’, combined with some analysis of how this connects to other similar official condemnations of the Soviet Union. Well, if so you’d be wrong. For the most part, Western media haven’t bothered covering the story at all, but let’s look at those which have....

It’s interesting to see how this works. Putin unveils a monument to Stalin’s victims, but Western reporting doesn’t focus on that, nor link it to other memorials which repudiate communism (Butovo, Sretenskii, etc), but instead uses the event as what journalists call a ‘hook’ to write a story about political repression under Putin and the Russian state’s alleged rehabilitation of Stalin. And the sources it cites are the likes of Sobchak and Kasparov.ru, who represent a tiny and extreme fringe of Russian public opinion. Unfortunately, this is all too typical of how Russia is reported....

Irrussanlity
Wall of Grief
Paul Robinson, Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa

Jack Peat — Trump pardons Arpaio: This is his human rights record

American soft power takes another hit, coming soon after the torchlight march in Charlottesville reminiscent of the rise of the Nazis in Germany in the lead up to WWII.

The London Economic
Trump pardons Arpaio: This is his human rights record

Jack Peat

Donald Trump’s pardon elevates Arpaio once again to the pantheon of those who see institutional racism as something that made America great.

Arizona Republic Editorial

Alleen Brown — Standing Rock Documents Expose Inner Workings Of “surveillance-Industrial Complex”

Occupy redux. Protesters encounter the might of the corporate state apparatus operating secretly.

Another paradox of liberalism involving where and how to draw lines.

America has not seen this level of intensity since the Vietnam anti-war movement.

The Intercept

Standing Rock Documents Expose Inner Workings Of “surveillance-Industrial Complex”

Alleen Brown

Alleen Brown — Leaked Documents Reveal Counterterrorism Tactics Used at Standing Rock to “Defeat Pipeline Insurgencies”

A shadowy international mercenary and security firm known as TigerSwan targeted the movement opposed to the Dakota Access Pipeline with military-style counterterrorism measures, collaborating closely with police in at least five states, according to internal documents obtained by The Intercept.

The documents provide the first detailed picture of how TigerSwan, which originated as a U.S. military and State Department contractor helping to execute the global war on terror, worked at the behest of its client Energy Transfer Partners, the company building the Dakota Access Pipeline, to respond to the indigenous-led movement that sought to stop the project.

Internal TigerSwan communications describe the movement as “an ideologically driven insurgency with a strong religious component” and compare the anti-pipeline water protectors to jihadist fighters.

"It can't happen here," morphs into "It can't be happening here, can it?"

Warning: SCARY.

The Intercept
Leaked Documents Reveal Counterterrorism Tactics Used at Standing Rock to “Defeat Pipeline Insurgencies”
Alleen Brown

Is Internet censorship looming large? Looking like it.

Censorship is descending on the Internet.

QCHG is the British counterpart of NSA.

The Guardian
Facebook and Twitter should do more to combat fake news, says GCHQ

Josh Halliday

Also

“Facebook itself will not decide what is real and what is considered fake. Instead, it is enlisting The Poynter Institute, a Florida journalism school, to sift through content,” they continued. “The Poynter Institute is the host of the International Fact Checking Network which bills itself as a ‘global alliance of fact checkers’. Its members include ABC News, Politico, The Associated Press, Snopes.com and The Washington Post.”

Breitbart question the partisanship of some of the "fact checkers," but not The Poynter Institute. Here are some of the entities behind it.

Poynter's IFCN has received funding from the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, the Duke Reporters’ Lab, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Google, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Omidyar Network, the Open Society Foundations and the Park Foundation.

Not exactly objective, are they?

Breitbart

Report: Facebook Users Begin Receiving Pop-Up Warnings When Trying to Share ‘Fake News’

Also

Bloomberg View's Leonid Bershidsky blasts Poynter's IFCN as biased.

Bloomberg View

Facebook, Keep the Fact-Checkers in Their Place

Leonid Bershidsky

Also

Media Bias Fact Check has a list of the supposedly least biased news sources. They are all establishment entities that are in general agreement on the "facts."

Also

Ex-CIA agent Larry C. Johnson's blog No Quarter  has been taken down, as you will see if you click on the link. Disappeared.  Now that is scary. 

Is totalitarianism looming?

Bill Van Auken — Brazilian army sent into streets of Rio amid mounting protests

The government ordered 9,000 troops to Rio Tuesday as the state teeters on the brink of insolvency and faces growing opposition to austerity and privatization.

How's that soft coup working for you?

The use of the army to carry out policing functions has become increasingly frequent as Brazil continues to face its worst economic crisis in a century, and with the Temer government’s approval ratings falling to the abysmal level reached by former Workers Party President Dilma Rousseff before her impeachment on trumped-up charges of budgetary manipulations last August.

WSWS
Brazilian army sent into streets of Rio amid mounting protests

Bill Van Auken

Yves Smith — Witch Hunt: “Fake News” Software Touted by CBS Smears Naked Capitalism, ShadowProof, TruthDig, Others; Creator Admits He Made Up Who Went on Hit List

One of most pernicious means underway to crush independent news sites is the release of software tools that brand them as unreliable. This means that hidden developers and the parties that fed them information are beyond any accountability, yet would serve as censors....

The plot thickens. And under capitalism, the push will be on to monetize this.

Naked Capitalism
Witch Hunt: “Fake News” Software Touted by CBS Smears Naked Capitalism, ShadowProof, TruthDig, Others; Creator Admits He Made Up Who Went on Hit List
Yves Smith

Sarah Lazare — Paper Owned by Trump's Son-In-Law Runs Alarming Op-Ed Calling for FBI Crackdown on Anti-Trump Protests

File under "It can't happen here."

The New York Observer, a newspaper owned by Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, published an opinion piece Friday calling for the FBI to launch a coordinated crackdown on nationwide anti-Trump protests, mobilizations and recount efforts.

Titled “Comey’s FBI Needs to Investigate Violent Democratic Tantrums,” the article was written by Austin Bay, a retired U.S. Army Reserve colonel and adjunct professor at the University of Texas in Austin.

Kushner, who is married to Ivanka Trump, purchased a majority stake in the New York Observer in 2006 for roughly $10 million and currently operates as the outlet’s publisher.
Bay’s opinion piece appeals to FBI director James Comey to “conduct a detailed investigation into the violence and political thuggery that continue to mar the presidential election’s aftermath,” including a “thorough probe of the protests—to include possible ties to organizations demanding vote recounts.”

“The hard left’s violent reaction to Donald Trump’s election is vile and dangerous,” writes Bay. “Peaceful protests? No, the demonstrators vandalize and destroy. They have two goals: intimidating people and sustaining the mainstream media lie that Donald Trump is dangerous.”...

Jim Naureckas, editor of Extra!, the media watchdog magazine of Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, told AlterNet that Bay's op-ed is one of the most disturbing things he has seen since the election. “To have the incoming ruler’s son-in-law using his paper to call for the federal police to investigate protests against the ruler, that is pretty far gone,” he said. “It struck me as a ‘first they came for the communists’ moment.”

“He ties up this conspiracy of protesters, people seeking recounts and George Soros into one vast conspiracy that the FBI ought to get to the bottom of,” Naureckas continued. “It shows you the outlines of how you would justify a complete crackdown on dissent. It’s frightening.”…

AlterNet
Paper Owned by Trump's Son-In-Law Runs Alarming Op-Ed Calling for FBI Crackdown on Anti-Trump Protests
Sarah Lazare

Dave Lefcourt — Why did it have to be this way?

Deve Lefcourt reviews some of US history and concludes:

We have a free press in name only. It's become an unofficial complicit enabler of the government, accepting the government's version of events so the people get from the MSM only what the government provides as its version of events. 

Only the alternative press, mostly internet sites like this one-named as one of the 200 providing "fake news"- can people get a broader version of events, many times questioning the "official" government version. 

If somehow alternative news sites are banned or as been suggested that Google or Facebook act as censors determining what is "fake news" then the Constitution will have been stood on its head, completely subverted and we will have become the dystopian world George Orwell wrote about in his novel, 1984. 

The US will have descended into absolute tyranny.

As to the question why did it have to be this way? Well we weren't vigilant. We took our freedoms for granted. We let it happen. The next question may very well be can the damage be corrected?

I suggest re-reading the Declaration of Independence. 

OpEdNews
Why did it have to be this way?

Dave Lefcourt

Renee Parsons — Obama and Propornot

A few weeks prior to the November 8 Presidential vote, I began the draft of an essay expecting a future attack by the government on the First Amendment citing President Obama’s most recent mellifluous verbal assault on free speech as HRC’s campaign speeches indicated that protecting a diversity of opinion would not be a top priority in her Administration.

Now in retrospect, it appears that Obama and HRC were both, most likely in the loop and knew what was coming as they prepared the way with subtle (and not so subtle) references to taming that messy, wild. wild west otherwise known as the world wide web.…

During a visit to the White House Frontiers Conference in Pittsburgh on October 13th, the President, known for his smooth, glib reassurances so successful at placating the public, suggested that “we are going to have to rebuild within this wild-wild-west-of-information flow some sort of curating function that people agree to” and that “democracy requires citizens to be able to sift through lies and distortions” and further that “those that we have to discard, because they just don’t have any basis in anything that’s actually happening in the world.” The President continued that “there has to be some sort of way in which we can sort through information that passes some basic truthiness tests.”...

This is an important contribution to this debate. The best part about PropOrNot is at the end.

Counterpunch
Obama and Propornot
Renee Parsons, member of the ACLU’s Florida State Board of Directors and president of the ACLU Treasure Coast Chapter, and an elected public official in Colorado, an environmental lobbyist and staff member of the US House of Representatives in Washington DC

Donn Marten — Treacherous Congress Quietly Moving to Eradicate Alternative Media

This is going to come down to freedom of the press and what the definition of "press" is. Obviously, the Establishment wants press to mean only the the mainstream media and is setting up to further marginalize alternative media by denying first amendment rights and protections.

Another paradox of liberalism surfaces.

OpEdNews
Treacherous Congress Quietly Moving to Eradicate Alternative Media
Donn Marten

Annie Machon — The West’s Shift Toward Repression

Disclosure: Consortiums New is on The List provided by PropOrNot of Russian propaganda fronts and useful idiots.

The West’s “liberal democracies” are undergoing a shift toward repression with new initiatives to spy on citizens and punish whistleblowers who expose government abuses, observes ex-British intelligence officer Annie Machon.

Consortiums News
The West’s Shift Toward Repression
Annie Machon, former intelligence officer in the UK’s MI5 Security Service

Ivan Stamenkovic — It’s Outrageous That I’m Facing 45 Years In Prison For Filming A Climate Protest

Amy Goddman was exonerated for doing her job as a reporter. Not yet Deia Schlosberg.

My name is Deia Schlosberg and I am an independent filmmaker and climate reporter. I was arrested while filming an act of nonviolent civil disobedience in North Dakota and I’m currently facing felony charges that I believe are unjust. I am a climate reporter; my specialty is following the story of how humankind is creating a grave problem for civilization by continuing to flood the atmosphere with greenhouse gases through the burning of fossil fuels and other industrial processes. I don’t think there is nearly enough reporting on climate change nor the movement of people around the world working to lessen the impacts of climate change.…

When I was arrested, I was doing my job. I was reporting. I was documenting. Freedom of the press, guaranteed by the First Amendment, is absolutely critical to maintaining an informed citizenry, without which, democracy is impossible.

Counter Current News

It’s Outrageous That I’m Facing 45 Years In Prison For Filming A Climate Protest
Ivan Stamenkovic

The Intercept on what The Man is up to

What The Man is up to.

The Intercept
FBI and Police are Knocking on Activists’ Doors Ahead of Republican National Convention
Alice Spen

State Department Turns Blind Eye to Evidence of Honduran Military’s Activist Kill List

Alex Emmons

Andrew Fishman — As Brasília’s Corruption is Exposed, Lawmakers Try to Criminalize Dissent

Leaked secret audio recordings of Brazil’s most powerful figures have sparked a series of explosive scandals in the nation’s ongoing political crisis. Now, Brazilian lawmakers are trying to outlaw publication of such recordings.

A bill, which has been idling since last year in the Câmara dos Deputados, Brazil’s lower house of Congress, has picked up new steam this month. The proposed legislation seeks to criminalize the “filming, photographing or capturing of a person’s voice, without authorization or lawful ends,” punishable by up to two years imprisonment and a fine. If the recording is published on social media, the penalty rises to four to six years.
When it was originally introduced, the bill was criticized as one of many proposed draconian measures designed to protect politicians and a direct threat to freedom of expression and the press.

The anti-recording bill was introduced in 2015 by Deputado Veneziano Vital do Rêgo, of interim President Michel Temer’s increasingly right-leaning PMDB party. Rêgo, who voted for the impeachment of now suspended Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, has reason to fear being secretly taped: he is a suspect in 35 pending investigations for various financial and administrative crimes, as of April, according to Transparência Brasil, a leading anti-corruption watchdog, and the fact-checking website Agência Lupa.

More of "our guys."

The Intercept
As Brasília’s Corruption is Exposed, Lawmakers Try to Criminalize Dissent
Andrew Fishman

Claire Bernish — New Report Proves Police Preparing For Rioting On A National Scale

A new report from analysts with industry research group, Sandler Research, forecasts the Global Riot Control System Market for the next four years — but beyond a burgeoning market to parallel the expanding global police state, it appears world governments are also keenly aware of civilian discontent.…

Mint Press News
New Report Proves Police Preparing For Rioting On A National Scale
Claire Bernish

France 24 — Jailed Saudi blogger wins EU rights prize

A Saudi blogger sentenced in 2012 to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes for insulting Muslim clerics has won the European Union's prestigious Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought.

EU lawmakers said Thursday that they had chosen to honour Raif Badawi as a symbol of the fight for freedom of speech. The prize was to be announced publicly later at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France.

France 24

Jailed Saudi blogger wins EU rights prize

Noah Smith — The Forsaken

Not about economics. Or maybe it is, if Marx is right about economic infrastructure being socially determinative.

Noahpinion
The forsaken
Noah Smith | Assistant Professor of Finance, Stony Brook University

teleSUR Military-Style Tactics Used Against Ferguson Protests, Report

More US soft power down the drain, as if there were any left in Latin America.

The police deliberately denied Ferguson protesters the right to free speech using military-style tactics of crowd control last summer, the U.S. Justice Department says.

teleSUR
Military-Style Tactics Used Against Ferguson Protests, Report