The last decade, as well spawning many bad big things, gave birth to entire industries devoted to making bad, if only in ways a magnitude smaller or so than economic collapse.
Chief among these was the private-sectoring of homeland security. Across the country, small shops set up everywhere to sell security and intelligence contracting to state and city governments.
The businesses, often called terrorism research businesses and intelligence fusion centers, are probably already taking a bead on Occupy Wall Street and selling themselves to authorities only too willing to take advantage of such services. All in the name of the grand phrase, public safety.
Last year I wrote about one such company briefly, uncovered by the local newsmedia in Pennsylvania, when it began distributing terrorism reports naming various progressive groups, and the indie film-maker auteur responsible for Gasland (the expose on the natural gas “hydro-fracking” industry.)
What to do if you’re in the business of counter-terrorism in, say, a place like Pennsylvania? And there just aren’t enough jihadists around to fill a decent report for the state government client. Answer: Reclassify democratic activity as trouble. Problem solved!
From my old homestate of Pennsylvania, this bit of unintentional dark humor, courtesy of the Associated Press:
Information about an anti-BP candlelight vigil, a gay and lesbian festival and other peaceful gatherings became the subject of anti-terrorism bulletins being distributed by Pennsylvania’s homeland security office, an apologetic Gov. Ed Rendell admitted.
Also in the anti-terrorism bulletin: “[Events] likely to be attended by environmentalists …”
And who was getting the funding for this valuable intelligence on the state of homegrown terrorism?
Something called the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response, in Philadelphia, to the tune of $125,000 …
On page 11 of the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response’s sample May 2009 anti-terrorism briefing, the organization lumps a number of equally surprising activities under the topic “Domestic/Eco-Terror Alerts.”
Among these, “the Rainforest Action Network is holding training at campuses across the [continental United States]. The training is designed to inspire ecological activity — from legitimate canvassing to illegal direct actions.”
The very legit Rainforest Action Network is here. It looks like a happy place.
In another posting, the company’s Terrorism Research bulletin, entitled “Actionable Intelligence Briefing,” reads: “Ecological activists in [San Francisco, Phoenix, Tuscon and Sonora} will be protesting the intent of Mexico to build a toxic waste dump on land belonging to the O’odham Indians.”
Other “domestic/eco-terror alert” entries include notes on protests of the Bank of America bailout scheduled for Senator Dianne Feinstein’s office, “a protest march … held by people opposed to the closing of some schools in New York City, “eco-activists” from Earth First! holding a summer training camp, institute analysts noting an appearance by Karl Rove as an opportunity for “anarchist groups,” as well as a variety of anti-war and anti-cruelty-to-animals protest events.
The anti-terrorism briefing booklet makes a practice of classifying people and groups who protest corporate activities as anarchists.
“Working with organizations that refuse to surrender their domestic or international operations to terrorism,” reads the pamphlet.
Terrorism, in this case, seeming to broadly rope in constitutionally protected activities contrary to the interests of corporate and government clients.
What would actually be surprising would be if companies like this, all fruit of the homeland security boom, weren’t already working OWS. Readers, and many Americans — generally, know there is certainly no shortage of people at the top of national government, as well as at the bottom of local townships, willing to immediately renew contracts to local goons promising to keep them appraised on people alleged to be causing civil unrest.
Invariably, all these businesses are spin-offs from the national security infrastructure, employing ex-law enforcement, military and intelligence
men only marginally interested in rights, due process of law and democracy. On a much smaller level, they follow the business practices of the big mercenary army/private security companies like Blackwater.
And they have exploded with taxpayer funding during the past decade.
Another small homeland security industry now of importance is the one devoted to “non-lethal” weaponry in the United States. Small and large businesses, as well as the big arms developers, got involved in peddling various new arms to the government and police forces, all using the argument that technological advances would allow for non-bloody crowd control.
The most public example was The Sheriff, a high-powered microwave gun mounted on a Hummer and developed by Raytheon. The Sheriff took over a decade of taxpayer investment and an incredible public relations effort to push it (one that failed spectacularly) as a revolutionary weapon which could be used to disperse crowds.
Publicly, it was a disaster. The Sheriff was taken to Afghanistan a year or so ago and quietly brought back without firing one microwave shot in anger. It was, and still is, simply viewed as a device for torturing people who can’t fight back.
At which point in time Raytheon began peddling a much smaller mounted version of it for use in the California prison system.
The essential point to be made is a simple one. All the arguments for the development and use of “non-lethal” weapons rely upon the success in getting people to believe there is some magic point of force application in which people are not irrevocably injured or killed.
In real life, this point is imaginary. It does not exist. And there is no scientific method that can be used to find or elucidate it. As any perusal of the literature on use of tasers, rubber bullets and tear gas quickly reveals.
However, the argument remains seductive particularly when governments or law enforcement need rationalizations for using force short of bullets on the unarmed.
What the “non-lethal” weapon does is set the bar downward for the use of force. When one equips a military or law enforcement agency with weapons which the average soldier or policeman believes will not hurt people because they have been told there is a science to them making them safe, the problem becomes obvious.
With the images of tear gas and people wounded in Oakland and other protests flashing around, you can bet there are at least pitches being made to sell use of more non-lethal weaponry. The only consolation is one of coincidence. Economic collapse has made it much harder for local government to buy the newer non-lethal weapons developed during the war on terror. The money is no longer there.
An example of the companies involved in this kind of thing was written about a couple of months ago here.
One motorized crowd control system, it generates loud screeching noise with the idea that ear pain makes people run away, was deployed in Pittsburgh where it has been mostly just a nuisance.
It came out of the idea that sound could be used to shatter the ear drums of “terrorists” on airplanes, without killing passengers.
If common sense is telling you that such a thing is fairly dubious, you’re not alone. However, that has never impeded the development of such things.
When still free-lancing for the Village Voice, I wrote a little about this.
[The company] certainly has expertise in this [non-lethal] area. It has manufactured something called the Sticky Shocker, a technological annoyance that looks like the giant cocklebur from hell. It’s designed to lodge on people with “tenacious glue” and barbs in order to dispense stunning volts.
Although the latest hazard to humanity hasn’t been tested on live subjects, Jaycor material claims it is voltage-regulated according to some Underwriters Laboratories standard of acceptable partial electrocution. One can only wonder at the way such a remarkable standard was arrived at—perhaps by dropping hair dryers or radios into bathtubs occupied by volunteers?
It is patently obvious that a vehicle-mounted shocking water hose is an atrocious mechanism that would instantly doom the career of anyone who ordered its use on American streets.
While this particular thing no longer appears to be around, the logic behind is still alive and well.
Captured on video, a young war vet hit with a tear gas round or flash bang grenade, and sent to the emergency room with a brain injury.
It’s worth saying none of the one percent have been punished like this fellow who was simply being part of an essentially peaceful national protest against inequality and mass unemployment. Not one of them has been dragged through the street or treated harshly and attacked by the peace-keeping forces.
It is unsurprising this has happened. The entire history of squashing dissent in the last ten years for the sake of plutocracy more or less guaranteed an inevitable overreaction by police somewhere.
The question once the protests started and refused to voluntarily move for anti-mess ordnances used against the poor was where it would happen first.
The primary threats to US security are all internal.
This is a a topic you have never seen taken up by the national threat apparatus and its culture of lickspittle shoeshine men in the think tanks. They’ll never touch it unless it’s to come down on the side of the “rule of law,” neatness and imagined potentials for cultivation of “homegrown” terror.
The internal security threats — corporate America’s business interests being incongruent with genuine democracy, justice and stability — have been significant. It’s just that it has taken massive economic failure and someone being wounded by a tear gas round for everyone to get the unpleasant message.
One challenge facing OWS is the anti-democratic use of cleanliness ordnances to break up groups and encampments.
This AP story delivers the basics: employing a handful of stories about the smell of urine, common in cities, and other petty things involving alleged attraction of rats and being unable to guarantee safety, to destroy a democracy movement spanning the country.
The first graph:
Fed up with petty crime, the all-night racket of beating drums, the smell of human waste and the sight of trampled flowers and grass, police and neighbors are losing patience with some of the anti-Wall Street protests around the U.S.
In Oakland, Calif., police in riot gear fired tear gas and bean bags before daybreak Tuesday to disperse about 170 protesters who had been camping in front of City Hall for the past two weeks, and 75 people were arrested.
The mayor of Providence, R.I., is threatening to go to court within days to evict demonstrators from a park.
And businesses and residents near New York’s Zuccotti Park, the unofficial headquarters of the movement that began in mid-September, are demanding something be done to discourage the hundreds of protesters from urinating in the street and making noise at all hours.
Noise.
‘[The grass is getting damaged, and they want to close the restrooms and begin preparing the park for winter,” reads one concern in Providence.
If damaged grass and wanting to “close restrooms” are the best one can come up with, then there’s essentially no significant complaint other than the powers at be are now angry the protests have gone on too long.
In college towns across the USA during football season, every weekend is a potpourri of waste, damaged grass, regurgitated booze, noise and the smell of urine far beyond the scale of OWS protests.
The complaints voiced in the AP story are penny ante considering what the movement stands for. However, dissent has long been conditioned out of many in the US culture of lickspittle. Business that pollutes on a grand scale, however, is OK.
When no one is breaking the law one of the first things authority tries to do is redefine breaking the law downward.
This almost always means getting at people for making a mess, loitering, urinating (wooahh, now that’s something that never happens in cleanly American gathering places) too much eating in public, being noisy (which would seem required for democracy) or attracting vermin (and getting stupid people to believe that a plague might break out if something isn’t done).
There are the kinds of laws which are traditionally enforced all the time around the country, rather selectively, when those in control wish to harass unpopular property owners or chase the homeless from place to place.
In the past few decades such things have been used to criminalize just being poor in the US. OWS protests, paradoxically, are inspired by inequality, unfairness and poverty.
These kinds of practices and the people who call for them also justify a rebellion.
It’s no secret mainstream journalists have a hard time describing complex realities with even remote accuracy. Today’s breed can’t even get history when it’s right at their fingertips on the web.
Best example, right now, Associated Press’s story on the disassembly of a large Cold War bomb, the B53.
The last of the nation’s most powerful nuclear bombs — a weapon hundreds of times stronger than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima — is being disassembled nearly half a century after it was put into service at the height of the Cold War.
The final components of the B53 bomb will be broken down Tuesday at the Pantex Plant near Amarillo …
According to the American Federation of Scientists, it was 600 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, at the end of World War II.
The reporter, Betsy Blaney, gets the name of FAS wrong.
She neglects to mention the yield of the B53 — 9 megatons or the equivalent of 9 million tons of TNT. (By contrast, the Hiroshima bomb was 12-15 kilotons, or 12-15 thousand tons of TNT.)
The B53 was a thermonuclear device (which means fusion triggered by a fission “fuse”). The Little Boy at Hiroshima, as many know, was an atomic fission bomb. Details, but important ones and easy to make clear. There’s a big difference between the two, one obviously germane to the story of nuclear weaponry, a bit gone entirely missing from the Associated Press story.
AP’s story is so poor the best the reporter comes up with is a factoid about 300 lbs of explosive needing to be taken part. In a bomb that weighed 8-10 tons and blew up with the force of 9 megatons.
The news agency even failed at accurately doing the simplistic, “Hey, lookit the big old bomb!” story.
One wonders if this is noted in some NYC goon security firm dossier. Click it up a few times dear readers, perhaps every one makes them take notes and snapshots for their PowerPoint presentations.
When the masters of the universe think the paupers are finally out to get them, they make calls to the local private goons.
The ultra-rich bankers, hedge fund managers and private equity executives of New York City have long enlisted private security firms to help safeguard them and their wealth. But as the mood on Main Street turns increasingly hostile, New York’s financial titans are cranking their security measures up to 11. For the high-end security firms that provide the moneyed elite with specialty services like around-the-clock bodyguards and elaborate home security systems, Occupy Wall Street has been a stimulus package all its own.
“Executive protection, as the guard-the-rich industry is known, got an initial jolt from the financial crisis of 2008. Lloyd C. Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, got permission from a local review board to build a six-foot-high security gate outside his Hamptons house in April 2008, the month after Bear Stearns collapsed,” the story adds.
Other vignettes:
Another client, a C-suite executive at a large Wall Street firm, recently asked [Mr. Viollis, a security for the plutocrats man] to send undercover agents to Zuccotti Park to find out if the protesters were planning to harm him or his colleagues. (Mr. Viollis said he would probably decline the request.)
One executive contacted Insite requesting help planning his escape from the United States in the event the federal government was overthrown, said Howard A. Shapiro, Insite’s chief technology officer. The executive wanted to know how much gold to keep on hand and how to escape the United States by submarine in the event of a major incident.
Ex-CIA, ex-Secret Service, and military men populate the field of goon security for the wealthy. It’s a bit of a scientific business, notes the story.
An ex-Secret Service man makes the observation that the presence of so much public resentment and crowds make it an easier step for someone to begin a more focused research job aimed at ferreting out the habits and locations of the banksters.
It’s worth adding that crowds with pitchforks, historically (and very recently) don’t seize people they don’t know on sight or who aren’t in uniforms designated for select treatment.
Which still leaves out all of Wall Street. None of the Blankfeins and Jamie Dimons of this country have the face recognition of a Moe Ghadafi. (It’s interesting to note that the habits of such, which usually involve plastering their pics everywhere in country, becomes a serious liability when the iron hand of internal security disappears.)
Until you have such recognition, chances are you’ll be pulled from a culvert or waylaid on the way to the limousine are probably remote. Which also explains why the white trash commonly seen ad nauseam in US televised criminal proceedings inevitably require police protection post courthouse.
Logically, public figures — people constantly on television and in magazines — have much more to worry about from crowd-source menaces.
Which goes back to the interpretation of that,elucidated in the Lloyd Blankfein Rule.: If no one knows your name, and many still don’t, you still retain some security based on anonymity no matter the level of general rage directed at your profession.
Today’s notes from the Jeff Bezos virtual sweatshop known as Mechanical Turk furnish more odium.
Whenever you think you’ll just bust if things don’t get more amoral and depraved in pursuit of profit in corporate America, there’s Mechanical Turn to cheer you up and reward.
First question: Who actually does jobs that pay $.02, take fifteen minutes to an hour, and are furnished by anonymous employers who threaten you with blacklisting and ejection from the service if you don’t do right?
Yes, it’s true.
At the Bezos virtual sweat shop you can actually be run off for not being an up-to-snuff slave human machine. You can pick up a horribly blemished resume/HIT report card for being deemed insufficient at jobs which pay pennies.
The Bezos virtual sweat shop has also created a sub-contracting industry for third party virtual sweatshopping. The most obvious example is in verbatim audio transcription.
This company wouldn’t exist, it seems, without Mechanical Turk.
On its website, we read:
Unlike other transcription companies which rely purely on human based transcription, we enable our human transcribers to be more effective through the use of our proprietary web-based transcription workflow management system.
Proprietary workflow management system = hundreds of postings for transcribing the audio flatus of corporate America’s infinite meetings on Mechanical Turk.
“Our transcriptionists must go through our online scoring system, which tests their transcription ability, provides feedback, and helps them improve their transcription quality until it is at the highest quality as measured over the course of a variety of jobs,” it continues.
This means the subcontractor uses the Amazon system and site to run you off should you prove to be an inaccurate or otherwise poor intellectual sweat laborer.
Another great category of work, which you should probably stay away from if you’re a sweat-laborer, is article creation.
“Write an article containing x-number of words on [you name it]” they read.
Most of these appear to be ads by a variety of scumbags in the business of uploading Astro-turfed content pushing businesses, services and products on the web.
You can tell they’re scumbags, and that they expect scumbags to work for them by the screechy commands, demands and veiled threats inside the solicitation.
The commands warn the sweat laborer not to “plagiarize” because the content will be checked by “plagiarism checker” which seems to mostly indicate the employers are trying to generate stuff that won’t get downgraded by Google search robots in spam blogs and miscellaneous insta-sites. Rather than prevent people from gaming the job.
Since these things pay almost nothing why would anyone game them wholesale, anyway?
Also in this category, the jobs for virtually nothing in which one writes phony posts and articles for web places trying to gin up the appearance of actual use and enjoyment.
One of the Bezos sweat shop’s core industries appears then to be generation of content for cheap for the poisoning of Google search.
Of course, there are some interesting tasks.
Generally speaking, you can’t go wrong with university studies.
Academics have not yet lost all their moral underpinnings in 2011 America and research ethics prevent them from getting involved in fraud, cruelty, sadism and capitalizing wholesale on the desperation of others.
Solicitations to take surveys from university departments, or to take part in quick social cognition and decision-making research experiments, are straightforward and honest. And what small compensation they offer is always on the high end of the MTurk scale.
One such Mturk-mediated survey on political attitudes was aimed at determining the test taker’s beliefs vis-a-vis human rights and fairness in this country. And soliciting attitudes over potential protest and violent rebellion against the government.
Imagine that! Fascinating!
DD even found a rock critic/altie mag editor using the virtual sweat shop to get an interview transcribed!
“Mexifornia??? is a case in point. California once was the symbol of the American dream. Today, it is sinking into a Third World abyss. Among large parts of Los Angeles, English can no longer be heard. Some neighborhoods are no-go areas. They are occupied by Mexican gangs and drug cartels. In the Golden State’s public schools, from kindergarten through the third grade, almost 2 out of 5 students have English as their second language. In the Central Valley, the state’s agricultural region, one can go for hundreds of miles and hear only one language: Spanish …
Yet Americans remain strangely silent. We are witnessing the emergence of a multicultural, multiethnic and multilingual Tower of Babel. Unless it is demolished, it will tear America apart. Today, Texas students are being told to pledge allegiance to Mexico and sing its anthem. Tomorrow, they may be told that the U.S. flag and the Constitution of our Founding Fathers represent a foreign regime occupying foreign soil.
Welcome to the United States of Mexico.
They really would like to see Hellfire missiles on the Predator drones at the border.
Not quite willing to take a backbreaking job that pays only a bit above the national poverty level, a news piece today has Alabama farmers complaining Americans won’t do the work illegals and other immigrants will do in the fields.
Alabama’s anti-illegal law has resulted in a severe agricultural employee shortage as experienced workers have fled the fields and state.
Potato farmer Keith Smith saw most of his Hispanic workers leave after Alabama’s tough immigration law took effect, so he hired Americans. It hasn’t worked out: They show up late, work slower than seasoned farm hands and are ready to call it a day after lunch or by midafternoon. Some quit after a single day.
In Alabama and other parts of the country, farmers must look beyond the nation’s borders for labor because many Americans simply don’t want the backbreaking, low-paying jobs immigrants are willing to take …
Part of the problem, which isn’t baldly stated, is that many perceive the work to be slave labor.
It pays very poorly, is backbreaking and comes with significant physical hazard over the course of growing season — like sizable exposure to pesticides/toxic chemicals, dehydration, heat stroke and heat exhaustion.
Such jobs also have no benefits.
In the story, the growers see things differently. And this has seemingly led them to think they can inspire people to come into fields by calling out Americans as lazy, worthless and “not physically fit.”
In fact, as an expert interviewed for the story notes, American farms have essentially turned back the clock to the Forties.
“This is a sector and an industry … that a long time ago, going back to the 1940s and probably before that was abandoned,” the man told CBS. “It was abandoned to foreign workers.”
The base wage for an experienced field picker is defined in this way:
A crew of four Hispanics can earn about $150 each by picking 250-300 boxes of tomatoes in a day, said Jerry Spencer, of Grow Alabama, which purchases and sells locally owned produce. A crew of 25 Americans recently picked 200 boxes — giving them each $24 for the day.
The new story is determinedly obtuse on what this means, or at least the growers are.
This comes to $750 a week, or a bit over $570/week after taxes in Alabama, for an experienced employee who produces a high rate of return under the toughest conditions.
And that comes to $27,648.00 per year with no benefits. which is about only $5,000 over the poverty line for a family of four, according to US data.
There are three — maybe four, options, of course. Raise wages. Automate. Try waiting until people are really desperate. Or wait until the anti-immigration law is perhaps shot down by the US government and go back to hiring illegals.
Only two of these fit in a moral society (or are a right thing to do).
Rick Perry would use Predator drones to secure the border. Herman Cain would use alligators and electrical fences. The unemployed and poor could be booed. Before we hit them with guided missiles. (Even Joe Arpaio blanched a little at this today when questioned by Martin Bashir at lunchtime on MSNBC. We can’t give people a death sentence, or something to that effect, he stammered out. Oh, no?)
Anyway, Mr. Rick has missed that boat by at least two years although General Atomics must have certainly been thrilled to hear him say it.
And drones for everything had a hand in inspiring Sleep Dealer, a foreign film with a great premise: Use of drone camera live streaming of people being Hellfire’d in reality entertainment shows in the US, use of Mexican labor to operate robots in America, and US multi-nationals buying up all water in Mexico, gouging for it, and using remote-controlled machine gun posts to kill people trying to steal it.
Sadly, over the course of 90 minutes or so the movie just wasn’t very good.
The trailer makes it seem better which may indicate it could have used a good editing.
Predator drone used in border patrol at 1:45.
Now, The National Anthem would be a great tune to use as part of the soundtrack for a dystopian reality-based movie along the lines of Sleep Dealer. Reality-based because you can’t satirize this country anymore. Anything you think might work at that is already happening.
Anyway, you’d pay to see my idea executed as a movie. I just know it.
At Google, it’s the I-fart-sunshine crowd, where all the employees and bosses are “rockstars,” apparently because of free hair cuts and one-on-one meeting and shit.
To keep employees motivated, agencies need to build a culture of learning, where employees leave more enriched at the end of each day.
A kulchur of learning to enrich you. Please.
Not every project is going to be awesome.
Keeping your rockstar employees on board has always been important, and don’t think that economic uncertainty will keep your employees around. Your company has worked hard to recruit some bright people …
What kind of swine do you have to be to use the word rockstar in reference to employees in corporate America?
In the basements of the Disneyland and Paradise Pier hotels in Anaheim, big flat-screen monitors hang from the walls in rooms where uniformed crews do laundry. The monitors are like scoreboards, with employees’ work speeds compared to one another. Workers are listed by name, so their colleagues can see who is quickest at loading pillow cases, sheets and other items into a laundry machine … Isabel Barrera, a Disneyland Hotel laundry worker for eight years, began calling the new system the “electronic whip” when it was installed last year. The name has stuck.
Tom Bray, a bellman at the Disneyland Hotel for 24 years, makes $8.25 an hour, plus tips, which can be unreliable.
By Local 11’s math, when Walt Disney ran the company in 1966, he made 108 times as much as one of his hotel housekeepers. Bob Iger, the current chief executive, makes 781 times as much as a housekeeper.
After making $28 million in total compensation last year, Iger’s base pay was just increased 25%.
I wonder if there’s an electronic whip in Iger’s office.
