This is Naked Capitalism fundraising week. 865 donors have already invested in our efforts to combat corruption and predatory conduct, particularly in the financial realm. Please join us and participate via our donation page, which shows how to give via check, credit card, debit card or PayPal or our new payment processor, Clover. Read about why we’re doing this fundraiser, what we’ve accomplished in the last year,, and our current goal, rewarding our guest bloggers.
Yves here. Many many commentators, including ones on this site, have been describing the increase of the surveillance state and how the private sector has both enabled it and does its own spying for fun and profit. Rather than say the quiet part out loud, our soi-disant elites are instead trying to pretend we are all on board with new Orwellian reversals of traditional meaning, here of the word transparency.
By Thomas Neuburger. Originally published at God’s Spies
A brief one for today, but a shocker if you haven’t heard this already.
Klaus Schwab is the founder of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and has been its chairman since 1971. The WEF famously (or notoriously) hosts the annual Davos conference, at which world political and thought leaders meet to discuss, well, the future of the world.
Critics of the Davos forum, for example, the Transnational Institute (TNI), say“the Forum is planning to replace a recognised democratic model with a model where a self-selected group of “stakeholders” make decisions on behalf of the people. The think tank summarises that we are increasingly entering a world where gatherings such as Davos are ‘a silent global coup d’état’ to capture governance.” (see link for footnotes)
If you’re one of those who believe that Davos, indeed, is one of the conferences in which elites “make decisions on behalf of the people,” you’ll love what the elites’ elite is saying now. Listen; the clip is short.
That Word Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means
As many have pointed out, this definition of “transparency” turns the term on its head. In Davos Man’s mouth, it means, “I get to see everything you’re doing; you get to see nothing I’m doing.” About the latter, witness the “prosecution unto death” being visited on Julian Assange for the crime of revealing American war crimes, among other secrets. Chris Hedges:
The current American Empire, damaged and humiliated by troves of internal documents published by WikiLeaks, will, for this reason, persecute Julian for the rest of his life. It does not matter who is president or which political party is in power. Imperialists speak with one despotic voice.
Julian, for this reason, is undergoing a slow-motion execution.
If you look around the country, you can see “transparency” growing as you watch. It’s been happening since September 11, 2001, the day Osama bin Laden told Bush to take our freedom, and Bush said yes.
George W. Bush, who stole your freedom
And the program’s still growing:
Total Information Awareness was what the U.S. government’s massive surveillance used to be called:
Total Information Awareness (TIA) was a mass detection program by the United States Information Awareness Office. … Admiral John Poindexter called it a “Manhattan Project for counter-terrorism”. According to Senator Ron Wyden, TIA was the “biggest surveillance program in the history of the United States”.
Later they got smart and rebranded it, but no one changed what it did.
Even Democrats Promote Mass Surveillance These Days
Democrats used to be opposed to programs like this, some of them anyway. Witness Ron Wyden’s statement above.
Today, not so much:
House Democrats scrapped a vote to reauthorize national security surveillance authorities that have been expired since March after Republicans revolted from the measure following tweets from President Donald Trump urging them to oppose it.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said Thursday morning that he was pulling the bill to renew three authorities under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act from the floor at the request of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a recognition the votes were not there to pass it.
Does this concern you at all? It does me.
Does it make Democrats harder for independents to like? I would think so.
And yet they still do it. Ever ask yourself why?
