02.13.15
But Obergruppenfuhrer…
Stitch Nazis ruling an alternative America. Told ya. Jeff Bezos still not ready to dominate, then screw, sci-fi entertainment.
Life in our corporate Gau gets much better ratings.
01.19.15
If I had a dime for every play…
I’d still have only eighty dollars.
“President Barack Obama will use his State of the Union address Tuesday night to stake out a populist vision of tax reform and new middle-class benefits [to be paid for by a capital gains tax increase on the wealthy] — and practically dare Republicans to say no,” writes Politico.
Indeed, they have taken that dare & already said “NO!” It’s just theater.
And the President will be booed by half the room, as well he should be, because we voted for the other side a couple months ago and that wasn’t theater. Even though a polling says his popularity is at some kind of high.
So share this song [1] in defense of the swag of wealthy Americans. It never gets old. I even made the lyrics scroll so you can sing along!
1. I know you would never share it. I write it to be irritating. I’m fully aware that me asking someone to share something from here on the Internet is like asking for a new car.
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01.08.15
Jesus of America: Proven by poll/science
What you already knew, what I made a sermon and a song about, reported by one of the Culture of Lickspittle’s shoe-shine class poor man’s intellectuals at the Washington Post’s “Wonk blog”:
Most of America’s richest think poor people have it easy in this country, according to a new report released by the Pew Research Center. The center surveyed a nationally representative group of people this past fall, and found that the majority of the country’s most financially secure citizens (54 percent at the very top, and 57 percent just below) believe the “poor have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.”
[And a] quarter of the country … feels that the leading reason for inequality in America is that the poor don’t work hard enough.
Now go listen to the sermon, Jesus of America, and tell me it’s not better than anything you can read on the matter.
“[He] is not the one who fed the poor loaves and fishes. This is not the Jesus who liked lepers. He found the liberty, the land of liberty and freedom; we told him what to do.
Jesus of America says don’t feed the poor; if you do, they’ll come right to your door. They’re gonna wind up like stray cats, around your door on the floor, begging for loads of kibble and rich food. Everyone knows they’re just selfish animals.
That’s what Jesus said.
And remember, it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a poor man to get into the kingdom of Heaven.
Buy a copy of the album, Loud Folk Live, five bucks — cheap. Or review a copy. Or talk about it. Or something. Or not.
The New York Times continues its series, more or less described as Wrestling with the problem of WhiteManistan, in Sunday’s edition entitled, “Is Life Better in America’s Red States?”
The answer is “Yes.” But with a deadly qualifier.
It’s cheaper to live in the neo-Confederacy but it’s based on destructive model that ends in national entropy in the collapsed democracy. The economic success of New Dixie, if you can call it that, depends on continually depressed and compressed labor costs coupled with fossil fuel mining booms.
The latter also threatens quicker ruin from global warming.
The Times contributor recognizes this as a serious problem with national, even global, consequences:
But fracking and sprawling your way to growth aren’t a sustainable national economic strategy.
The allure of cheap growth has handed the red states a distinct political advantage. [The red state] economic system may be outmoded and obsolete, but it is strong enough to blight the future. The Democrats may be able to draw on the country’s growing demographic diversity and the liberal leanings of younger voters to win the presidency from time to time, but the real power dynamic is red.
“Despite their longstanding divisions, red state and blue state economies depend crucially on one another,” writes Richard Florida for the newspaper.
Florida seems to imagine there must be a solution. We must somehow learn to go forward.
But you can’t really speak the truth about WhiteManistan in a big newspaper. It’s too depressing.
There is no way forward in my lifetime. The division is permanent. The present is blight. The question is how fast it worsens in the coming years. And how much money one has to be insulated from the consequences.
01.02.15
I just wanted to watch the Rose Bowl
You feel it in about every aspect of American life. The relentless corporate grasping, an environment in which every minute of every day is taken up with the extraction of every last bit of profit possible from the populace.
The television slate of bowl games yesterday neatly illustrated it. And I’m not talking about the ridiculous corporate brand names the the country’s most odious firms have insisted on strapping onto these things.
What I am talking about has to do with control of the American web. I haven’t had television for three years but I can tell you that three years ago I could still watch most college football game broadcasts on the web free at ESPN’s web portal. This did not seem to be a big deal.
Yesterday, and for most of the past two years, that’s been a memory. Corporate America has taken complete control of the web and now it’s a toll road.
At least ninety-eight percent of the games this holiday season were pay-walled, requiring you to sign in using your cable tv provider credentials.
Corporate America doesn’t call it that. It’s changed the meaning of the word free into there’s another automatic ticket cost for that. Because the only way to watch ESPN’s tv feed on the net is by having a business contract with the web content providers that have deals with them.
The only actual free part, and it was meager, was on ESPN3.
There the sports network offered a minimal slate of the lower tier bowl games free but only as streams called Skycam or Spidercam.
A Skycam stream is a feed from behind the line of scrimmage of the team that has the ball. There is no play by play or instant replay. You also cannot hear the announcer at the field.
Think of it as the worst end zone seating available except with no play-by-play calling and no scoreboard. You can Google the live score in another browser window.
But you still get force fed all the commercials in full HD in the breaks.
Now, go ahead. Sneer at me for watching college football. But I’m here by myself in Pasadena and that’s what I was going to do. Watch the Rose Bowl. I live here.
For the Rose Bowl, it was the “Spidercam” feed on ESPN3.
Four minutes in, the network pulled the plug on that, too, although it had allowed morning viewing of the Michigan State/Baylor and Wisconsin/Auburn games.
Suddenly, a pop-up appeared on the Rose Bowl stream, one insisting you prove you were getting internet access from an accepted provider.
Finding a pirated stream and getting past the advertising overlays designed to put ransomeware on your system took me another ten minutes. I lost the first quarter of the Rose Bowl doing it but then watched, uninterrupted, the rest of ESPN’s live broadcast.
So I did get to watch.
But the wall-to-wall avarice shown by the already insanely wealthy agencies of college football, ESPN and the cable providers is just another illustration of things very worthy of hate and destruction.
In the morning the Rose Parade was free. Corporate America also couldn’t monetize the sky over Pasadena. I stepped outside to see the yearly stealth bomber flyover of the Rose Bowl, just a little northwest of me, before the kick-off at two o’clock.
But living in this country you have the feeling business would have been into your pocket for even that if there was a way.
Please provide your log-in credentials from our list of providers before you can step outside.
As a related thought question: Do you think corporate America is worth defending from cyber-attacks?
For Heaven’s sake, if “yes,” why?
12.12.14
He’s Doing God’s Work
How a New York Times Dealbook blog post might have read, but didn’t:
Speaking at the Dealbook conference in Manhattan, chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs Lloyd Blankfein said Wall Street had come to occupy an unwelcome position in Washington similar to where the military was during the Vietnam War protests. “I certainly don’t think it’s a virtue to declare a big segment of the economy off limits,” Mr. Blankfein said.”
““You’ve seen a little bit of a tension between capital and labor,??? he said. This response when asked about Uber and the billions being taken off workers by the Silicon Valley predatory system known as “the sharing economy.”
Mr. Blankfein also likes Hillary Clinton, just as she likes Wall Street and Goldman Sachs. He wouldn’t mind if she was
Queenthe next President.“I’ve always been a big fan of Hillary Clinton,??? he said.
Mr. Blankfein also voiced dismay that Senator Elizabeth Warren’s vehement opposition to the nomination Wall Street plutocrat Antonio Weiss for Sec’y of Treasury was gumming up the works.
After all, what was wrong with Mr. Weiss getting a 20 million dollar pay-out for leaving the Street and joining government?
“Why does the country benefit from making something hard so much harder???? Mr. Blankfein said.
Times tells us that it stands still in the USA. So you will want to hear “Let’s Lynch Lloyd Blankfein” from the album Loud Folk Live which you should also buy before Christmas because it’s cheap — 5 dollars (!) — and you can hear your host make jokes.
The picture of Mr. Blankfein is really boss, too, perfect for the song. So click that SoundCloud link!
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12.06.14
The Scamming Economy: Red hot tech innovation
Tech industry start-ups love the operation of the sharing scamming economy.
At its base is a smartphone driven global network that reduces people to pieceworkers. That is poverty level pay work akin to jobs from the 18th and 19th century, only made new through the smartphone and the desktop for the 21st.
Old piecework slavery is now called being a micro-entrepreneur. Perhaps micro because the compensation is microscopic.
From the San Jose Mercury News we get a press release for it, dressed up as business news, tipped by Frank from Pine View Farm.
What’s often known as the “sharing economy” — represented by legions of Airbnb hosts, drivers for Lyft and Uber and countless other micro-entrepreneurs — has increasingly gone mainstream, creating thousands of jobs and new business models in the process.
Now Peers, a San Francisco-based organization that has advocated for sharing economy startups during various regulatory battles, is pivoting to focus on a growing issue: the myriad needs of the workers involved.
How does someone who earns money as an independent contractor deal with taxes? What happens when a car-sharing driver gets in an accident? Is there a mortgage broker who will work with someone who has income from three sharing economy sources? And how does a sharing-economy worker plan for retirement?
“There’s a new class of worker, and by some estimates it’s 2 million workers globally making $10 billion a year,” said Shelby Clark, executive director of Peers. “We think there are major gaps for workers in the sharing economy, and we want to create solutions.”
Solutions, indeed. What the fugleman from Peers is counting on is nobody in the readership pausing to do a brief calculation.
So let’s do it for them.
If you consider Shelby Clark’s figure of earnings accurate even though there is no reason to do so, 10 billion divided by 2 million equals $5,000/year.
In the United States, where the cost of living is high, that optimistic new piecework wage, technology enabled, boils down what’s left of the middle class to well below the poverty level.
Where can you live in the US on $5,000/year?
Certainly not in southern California.
Piecework jobs have always existed. Corporate America has a love affair with them because they do away with labor protections, paying of benefits and decent pay for a days work.
Most recently the Economic Hardship project, a journalism effort led by author Barbara Ehrenreich, developed this story, published in Elle called Hypereducated and on Welfare.
The people in the story don’t need the sharing economy and smartphone apps to provide work, to lift them up. They already have work that takes up all their time, provides no security, no benefits, and leaves them broke.
Much political rhetoric these days is devoted to the importance of broadening access to college—and there is plenty of evidence that it’s still better financially to have a degree than not—but in the postcrash world of 2014, a good education may not keep you from hovering near the poverty line. The number of people with graduate degrees receiving food assistance or other forms of federal aid nearly tripled between 2007 and 2010, according to the U.S. Census. More specifically, 28 percent of food-stamp households were headed by a person with at least some college education in 2013, compared with 8 percent in 1980, according to an analysis by University of Kentucky economists.
In the US, people earning the kind of money theoretically attributed to the sharing economy are eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit, EBT (food stamps), WIC (women, infants and children food program) and the Obamacare Medicaid expansion.
These services make up part of America’s poor social safety net. But altogether they are much better than any clip job services offered by tech industry start-ups.
People beneath the poverty line certainly can’t pay mortgages and they don’t get and can’t afford to pay extra for workman’s compensation, another cracked rip-off proffered in the Mercury News piece.
Pay day loans, dollar stores and food banks are what people who drop into the $5,000/year category use. These services exist for the poor. There is no improvement to be gained from trivial Silicon Valley start-ups entering the same area.
Indeed, how would a smartphone app that deducts a fee for use fit into a dollar store economy other than as another fee squeezed from the working poor?
In the Nineties when I first moved to southern California I had a job sifting quarterly federal tax returns for the Internal Revenue Service.
Normally, this had been a civil service job. But the IRS had outsourced some of it in California to Manpower, making you a more poorly payed contract worker. A pieceworker. With no benefits.
Like the snake-oil salesman of the sharing economy, Manpower offered the contract employees what it call “benefits” and “services.” You could buy a health insurance policy through them, deducted from your wage, already reduced from what full civil service employees with benefits received.
It was a junk insurance program that paid zero except a bit in a catastrophic illness which inevitably would lead to your death. These types of policies, theoretically, were outlawed by Obamacare.
And earlier this year I posted on the tech business, Captricity, that received a contract from the FDA that reduced digitization of documents to piecework performed by crowd-sourcing on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.
Think of it this way: It was the exchanging of civil service labor with pieceworkers earning nickels and dimes for the same process.
From it:
Marvel at the promotional video uploaded by the Empire of Bezos to showcase “Amazon Web Services.??? It’s awesome in that it has the FDA’s Chief Health Informatics Officer, Taha Kass-Hout, going on for four minutes about the miracle of “turning manual submissions from the public into machine-readable information with 99.7% accuracy??? without once mentioning Mechanical Turk or that the work is performed by digital sweat-shopping.
Instead Kass-Hout relates how the FDA had a “19th century problem??? of backlogged paperwork …
It’s truly Orwellian, releasing a stink of vague obfuscation so that people who don’t know a thing about what’s going on in the background are led to believe it’s just another marvelous technical wonder on the road to the glorious future…
The Obama administration has put on a public populist face, one that chides the Republican Party and corporate America for allowing inequality to balloon and the compensation of workers to flat-line. And here is the man from the FDA, talking about a technical work-around that simply relies on paying people virtually nothing for record transcription work.
Implemented by a crappy and very small tech firm in the Silicon Valley, one that laughably maintained a blog with a post entitled “Evidence-Based Research to Combat Global Poverty.”
“We think there are major gaps for workers in the sharing economy, and we want to create solutions,” the person from Peers tells the Mercury News reporter.
“The Peers website allows people to find work in the sharing economy and manage their new lives as micro-entrepreneurs,” continues the newspaper. “Peers links to scores of sharing economy startups, including Vayable, where you can earn money by leading cultural experiences for travelers, and Urbansitter, a platform for nanny and baby sitting jobs.”
Much like TaskRabbit, another sharing economy start-up and old-fashioned Craigslist. And, of course, a tech platform that allows you to earn cash for stuff you don’t need anymore has always existed: It’s called eBay. Or the yard sale, of which there are many, in Pasadena.
Poverty wage workers have always been provided with services with which to liquidate their lives. Clip job service additions courtesy of the tech industry are not progress, innovation or wonderful.
“How does a scamming sharing economy worker plan for retirement”? asks reporter Dana Hull.
Pieceworkers can’t plan for retirement. How does one have a retirement on a couple insecure free-lancer jobs, with no benefits, that earn, at best — $5,000/year, plan for retirement?
It’s utterly ridiculous.
12.02.14
It’s the season for Jesus of America
As usual, it’s the perfect season for shining American character, its reverse-Robin Hood-ism, you know, the theology that teaches it is virtuous to grind tax the poor while rewarding the wealthiest.
Since Romney’s defeat, some Republicans have gently urged their party to ease up … their campaign to force low-income workers to pay more taxes. But adding the cultural-legal panic to the preexisting class-war panic was apparently enough to turn the GOP’s grudging acceptance of the low-income tax breaks into full-scale opposition …
So first Republicans made the tax breaks for business permanent, while allowing the tax breaks for low-income workers to expire at the end of 2017. Since they would no longer be tied to tax breaks for the more affluent constituencies that have influence with Republicans, this would mean they would almost certainly expire. Families earning $10,000 to around $25,000 a year would lose nearly $2,500 a year — a punishing blow to the working class.
The Democratic Party, lousy with high-button body lice OK with giving more to America’s superior class expressed admiration for the idea, Harry Reid and Charles Schumer of New York being its biggest endorsers. The President threatened a veto and, the New York magazine writes, the Democrats “beat a hasty retreat.” For now.
But you know it is always the perfect season the pure milk of American kindness.
And it is best heard in the magnificent sermon delivered at the beginning of Jesus of America from Loud Folk Live.
It is here and you should tick up the numbers and take time to irritatingly jam it down the throat share it with everyone you feel to be a deserving friend!
It’s also the shopping season! Why, just yesterday was Cyber Monday in which everyone was urged most urgently to buy on-line in a deluge of e-mail and web advertising blandishments.
[He] is not the one who fed the poor loaves and fishes. This is not the Jesus who liked lepers. He found the liberty, the land of liberty and freedom; we told him what to do.Jesus of America says don’t feed the poor; if you do, they’ll come right to your door. They’re gonna wind up like stray cats, around your door on the floor, begging for loads of kibble and rich food. Everyone knows they’re just selfish animals.
That’s what Jesus said.
Remember, wealthiness — next to Godliness, that’s what Jesus teaches. Jesus of America says “Guns, not butter!” The rest is all for naught.
Jesus of America says never feed the poor, they’re just too lazy, they’ll never work at all. Jesus of America says tax the weak and sick! They’re always going to be that way, never worth a lick.
— from the Book of WhiteManistan, 1: 1-5
12.01.14
Computer Security for the 1 Percent (continued)
In this week’s chapter of computer security news from corporate America of no value to 99 percent of the people who live here:
Security researchers say they have uncovered a cyber espionage ring focused on stealing corporate secrets for the purpose of gaming the stock market, in an operation that has compromised sensitive data about dozens of publicly held companies.
Cybersecurity firm FireEye Inc, which disclosed the operation on Monday, said that since the middle of last year, the group has attacked email accounts at more than 100 firms, most of them pharmaceutical and healthcare companies.
Victims also include firms in other sectors, as well as corporate advisors including investment bankers, attorneys and investor relations firms, according to FireEye.
The cybersecurity firm declined to identify the victims.
How can you tell if you’re a computer security servant for the corporate dictatorship and its precious loot?
1. Part of your business plan is to find hackers targeting Wall Street, the “stock market,” company e-mail folders of bloated, parasitic American financial and business titans (and their flunkies), etc.
2. Your business is leasing computer security services to Wall Street, big companies on the “stock market,” and trying to secure the e-mail folders of bloated, parasitic American financial and business titans (and their flunkies).
3. Your business is news writing about the great problem of potential wealth stealing by hackers targeting Wall Street, big American corporations, and the invasion of e-mail folders belonging to bloated, parasitic American financial and business titans (and their flunkies).
You good computer security servant, you! A grateful nation thanks you.
From the Keepin’ It Real in the Corporate Dictatorship desk:
Amid
emptytalk in Washington about corporate tax reform, the study said the seven companies, which in 2013 reported more than $74 billion in combined U.S. pre-tax profits, came out ahead on their taxes, gaining $1.9 billion more than they owed.At the same time, the CEOs at each of the seven companies last year was paid an average of $17.3 million, said the study, compiled by two Washington think tanks.
The seven companies cited were Boeing Co (BA.N), Ford Motor Co (F.N), Chevron Corp (CVX.N), Citigroup Inc (C.N), Verizon Communications Inc (VZ.N), JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N) and General Motors Co (GM.N) …
Earlier this month, on the protecting-the-shit-of-the-plutocrats-or-the-country-will-fall beat:
The huge cyberattack on JPMorgan Chase that touched more than 83 million households and businesses was one of the most serious computer intrusions into an American corporation. But it could have been much worse.
Questions over who the hackers are and the approach of their attack concern government and industry officials. Also troubling is that about nine other financial institutions — a number that has not been previously reported — were also infiltrated by the same group of overseas hackers, according to people briefed on the matter…
“It was a huge surprise that they were able to compromise a huge bank like JPMorgan,??? said Al Pascual, a security analyst with Javelin Strategy and Research. “It scared the pants off many people.???
Several financial regulators have warned that a coordinated attack on the banking system could set off another financial crisis.
I’ll bet. I want to see another financial crisis. Don’t disappoint us now.
Priceless quote:
The push by government officials is a stark acknowledgment of the vulnerability of financial institutions — even after they have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to protect themselves — to an attack if one of their vendors is not fully prepared. The problem is causing some security consultants to privately consider whether the sprawling financial firms with operations across the globe may be “too big to secure.???
Hundreds of millions of dollars to protect themselves! Why, that’s only an order or more of magnitude less than the money Uncle Sam paid them back on its tax returns in 2013.
11.29.14
The Fop & His Briefcase
Milk toast of privilege Arthur Brooks occasionally shows up here, mentioned for bizarre columns at the New York Times, pieces peddling his belief that true happiness comes from embracing your entrepreneurial self and, further, combining it with a faith-like fervor and devotion.
Shorter version: A religious joy is derived through being a salesman in America.
Some excerpts from the past, this in March:
The American Enterprise Institute’s Arthur Brooks comes in for special mention because I used a quote from him yesterday.
The essence, envy of the wealthy is bad for America:
“[We] must recognize that fomenting bitterness over income differences may be powerful politics, but it injures our nation. We need aspirational leaders willing to do the hard work of uniting Americans around an optimistic vision in which anyone can earn his or her success. This will never happen when we vilify the rich or give up on the poor.
“Only a shared, joyful mission of freedom, opportunity and enterprise for all will cure us of envy …”
Like Paul Ryan, Arthur Brooks is just another wealthy libertarian dickhead.
He is most famous for writing a series of books promoting the insipid idea that only through entrepreneurship can all Americans know true happiness and freedom.
In other words, those who run their own small businesses are the most happy of Americans. Of course, Arthur Brooks has never been an American entrepreneur, making his living only writing that it is the best thing in life, over and over, for a right-wing business institute.
But never you mind that. As a logical Brooks extension, people who are Christian, centrist-to-right and supporters of totally free markets, are the most happy of all.
In October, Brooks sought to coin a new name to describe burgeoning tech companies like AirBnb, a firm that leverages the lousy economy and its desperation by making it easier for people to sub-let their living quarters to the more well-off, through smartphones.
Brooks thought these firms, the engineers of the new sharing economy were getting a bad rap. This because many thoughtful people now consider sharing economy a two-word synonym for scamming.
AirBnb was part of the “helping industry,” said Brooks:
As in, “Everyone wants to help. Wouldn’t you want to be part of such an industry, helping people with more money than you by cheaply renting your home to them at their convenience????
Quotes:
WHAT is a “helping industry????
To hear him tell it, [AirBnB co-founder Nathan Blecharczyk] started the business because it was fascinating and fun. And most of all, he says, because it could help ordinary people who needed an affordable place to stay or had some excess capacity in their homes. That’s right — Nate sees Airbnb as a “helping industry.???
Some will howl at this …
Ordinary people, especially vulnerable people without power and privilege, find Airbnb empowering and useful. It lifts Americans up …
Any of us can work in a helping industry. That includes teachers, nurses, stay-at-home parents … The blessing of our free enterprise system is that any of us can sanctify our work. We just need to ask if what we are doing truly lifts others up.
As an example of how the helping industry lifts people up, allowing them to sanctify their work, Brooks dug up a woman, down on her economic luck, who now uses AirBnB to lease out her home to strangers a few days a month while she sleeps on the couch for free, courtesy of her parents or a friend.
Just so you know, the word sanctify means to “set apart as or declare holy.” This shows the intense weirdness of the mental space in which Arthur Books resides.
It’s all through his work: a mish-mash of stupid armchair philosophies insisting Christian faith, fulfillment and happiness come naturally from existence as a capitalist small businessman.
In this week’s column, the semi-celebrity pundit devotes his time to describing how being gifted with two briefcases by Mormons in Provo buoyed him. And how that can be a lesson for all to find their way to a state of good will and tranquility.
It’s genuinely fucked. Brooks apparently doesn’t see that he’s being given briefcases, swag, what it’s called in the entertainment industry, because he’s someone who gives speeches and is rewarded just for being that special someone, like a columnist at the NY Times:
SEVERAL years ago, I visited Provo, Utah — in the heart of what its residents call “Happy Valley??? — to deliver a lecture at Brigham Young University. My gracious hosts sent me home with a prodigious amount of branded souvenirs: T-shirts, mugs — you name it. The Mormons are serious about product placement.
One particularly nice gift was a briefcase, with the university’s name emblazoned across the front …
[It] soon had a major effect on my behavior. I found that I was acting more cheerfully and courteously than I ordinarily would — helping people more with luggage, giving up my place in line, that sort of thing. I was unconsciously trying to live up to the high standards of Mormon kindness …
Almost like magic, the briefcase made me a happier, more helpful person.
This was something called moral elevation continued Brooks. And we could all have it, by getting nice things, perhaps, or by watching episodes of Oprah.
And such moral elevation is needed now, more than ever, in our time of paralysis, political and economic dysfunction. We can choose to reject negativity.
So Arthur Brook went back to talk to the Mormons in Utah, and told them his theory of moral elevation.
But later in the week, Arthur was feeling down again, discouraged by the “negative tenor” of the upcoming election.
Then something miraculous happened:
It was at that moment that the mail arrived with a package from Utah: a new briefcase from my friends.
To paraphrase and steal from Shakespeare: Were you like this you’d throw yourself away.
It’s also Small Business Saturday, another thing designed as a suck-up to the American myth that small businesses and entrepreneurs mean everything to our country.
Which is why everything in the dollar stores, Wal-Mart and the super-market chains are made by small businesses, right?
Fuck Small Business Saturday.
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11.21.14
‘Cyberwar is Bullshit’ Took long enough
A very young person named Russell Brandom at clickbait news site, The Verge, has discovered this is so.
He’s figured out, rightly, that cybersecurity in the US, and — in general, and among its toadies in the West, is solely for protecting the shit of the 1 percent.
Former NSA director Keith Alexander, the million dollar, then 600,000 dollar man for protecting Wall Street from the depredations of Chinese and Russian hackers is the leading man for it. He is custom-made as the apparatchik-of-protection for the banksters and they, in turn, deserve him.
In another way of saying it, there’s no reason at all that anyone without a mansion in the Hamptons should care that hackers are into giant American corporations of finance and manufacturing. Only those at the very top derive any benefit at all from cybersecurity. Everyone else gets zero to very little.
So if you found spyware on your computer tomorrow, the NSA would not help you. Maybe you could reach someone at the FBI who cared, but I wouldn’t bet on it. US Cyber Command is designed to defend military and government infrastructure. When James Clapper talks about defending the nation from cyberattack, these are the people he means. Everyone else is on their own …
In fact, most of the cyberdefense money is actively making things worse. The techniques behind these weapons were all actively developed by organizations like the NSA before trickling out to more oppressive regimes. The same agencies are lobbying against encryption that might protect your conversations from being stolen, and planting backdoors in the algorithms you might use to encrypt your files. They’re buying up software vulnerabilities and keeping them secret, leaving the door open for anyone who discovers them in the future.
Hey, go read Bill Blunden and Violet Cheung’s Behold a Pale Farce: Cyberwar, Threat Inflation & the Malware Industrial Complex. (A review is here.)
If you read the entire piece at the Verge (it’s short), you’ll also see they’re naive, or perhaps ignorant, about the line on Mandiant.
Mandiant was quickly identified as part of the problem.
Its security story/analysis, delivered so self-servingly by the New York Times, was quick convenience for Keith Alexander’s NSA narrative that Chinese hackers were stealing the entire country’s economic future, a now laughable assumption then taken seriously until Edward Snowden showed up and began showing details on the nature of the American cyberwar machine.
Anyway, readers know I wrote a lot on these matters. That is until the natural nausea that results from dealing with the stories of American computer security experts got to be too much.
Sou can also read read Computer Security for the 1 Percent, or the Cyberterrorism tab on this blog.
Or Hacking to Save Corporate America. (AKA Stooging for the Man)
Or Poverty and the Annual National Security Ogres & Wealth Festival.
Or “Pentagon declares Chinese cyberespionage the cause of all woe.”
Hey, those are some snappy titles. Funny, even! National Security Ogres & Wealth Festival — a great name for a record album or band.
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