07.09.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 12:39 pm by George Smith
Last week GlobalSecurity.Org was consulted by a reporter from the Associated Press on the Dark Seoul/Operation Troy report on recent cyberattacks in South Korea issued by McAfee. I looked it over and talked with her awhile over the subject.
Mostly, what I said — whether it ever gets published is immaterial at this point — was that it was a straightforward analysis on the use of malware to get into South Korean networks. The final component in it, code that “wiped” the master boot record seemed childish, something that was normal for virus-writers to put in their creations 20 years ago. (The AP piece that resulted is here. Martha Mendoza gave the McAfee report to GlobalSecurity and called me.)
In fact, naming conventions within the code — and the hacking group names cited in the McAfee report — were standard computer hacker and cyber-vandal stuff.
Typically, the news media has tried to make it into something a little more than what McAfee corporate was willing to put on paper in “Dissecting Operation Troy: Cyberespionage in South Korea.”
And this is easily illustrated by comparing excerpts from the McAfee report on Dark Seoul/Operation Troy with a sample story today, taken from the Washington Times.
The WaTimes:
Highly trained, well-funded and very persistent computer hackers have been seeking to steal secrets from U.S. and South Korean military networks for at least four years, according to new data released by security researchers.
The hackers have all the characteristics of state-sponsored cyberattackers, said Ryan Sherstobitoff of the computer security firm McAfee Inc.
“The people behind this are highly trained, well-funded and very persistent,??? Mr. Sherstobitoff said. “They’ve been targeting the networks for years.???
The hackers, who identified themselves as the “New Romantic Cyber Army,??? used crude attacks and aped the tactics and jargon of so-called “hacktivist??? groups, such as the anarchistic coalition Anonymous.
But behind the scenes, they were exploiting highly specialized and targeted cyberespionage tools to burrow into classified networks of the U.S. and South Korean military.
“The primary mission was to steal secret military data,??? Mr. Sherstobitoff said. “That’s been in the shadows until now.???
The Pentagon had no comment Monday.
The “very advanced, very sophisticated??? cybertools …
But what Ryan Sherstobitoff told the WaTimes isn’t what he and the two other McAfee employees whose names are on the report acturally write.
From its initial summary:
Our analysis of this attack—known first as Dark Seoul and now as Operation Troy—has revealed that in addition to the data losses of the MBR wiping, the incident was more than cybervandalism. An analysis of malware samples dating back to 2009 suggests the ongoing attacks on South Korean targets were actually the conclusion of a covert espionage campaign …
State sponsored or not, these attacks were crippling nonetheless. The overall tactics were not that sophisticated in comparison to what we have seen before. [Bold mine] The trend seems to be moving toward using the following techniques against targets:
• Stealing and holding data hostage and announcing the theft. Public news media have reported only that tens of thousands of computers had their MBRs wiped by the malware. But there is more to this story: The main group behind the attack claims that a vast amount of personal information has been stolen. This type of tactic is consistent with Anonymous operations and others that fall within the hacktivist category, in which they announce and leak portions of confidential information.
• Wiping the MBR to render systems unusable, creating an instant slowdown to operations within the target
An excerpt from the reports “Analysis” section:
What were the motives behind these attacks and why did the attackers chose certain targets? The attacks managed to create a significant disruption of ATM networks while denying access to funds. This wasn’t the first time that this type of attack—in which destructive malware wiped the systems belonging to a financial institution—has occurred in South Korea. In 2011 the same financial institution was hit with destructive malware that caused a denial of service.
The attackers left a calling card a day after the attacks in the form of a web pop-up message claiming that the NewRomanic Cyber Army Team was responsible and had leaked private information from several banks and media companies.
They also referenced destroying the data on a large number of machines (the MBR wiping) and left a message in the web pop-up identifying the group behind the attacks. The page title in Internet Explorer was “Hey, Everybody in Korea???????
The report goes on to explain the terminal part of the operation — by two groups which were probably the same (the second being named the Whois Hacking Crew) was preceded by a period of a couple of years in which south Korean networks had been penetrated by the same malware and related offshoots, the function of which was to scan hard disks for military subject files, zip them into an archive, and pipe them off to the intruders.
However, was this search a sophisticated one, as described by the media?
Not really, from the evidence in McAfee’s own report.
Here’s the germane material:
Drive scanning locates classified information on target systems and gives the attacker an overall idea of what these military networks have. The malware searches the root disk, counts the number of interesting files, and determines the level of that system’s importance to the attacker. The search criteria are primarily specific file extensions and keywords in document titles. The keywords are all military specific. Some refer to specific military units and programs that operate in South Korea.
[I’ve included a partial list of the search terms, which are elementary.
Really, anyone could come up with them and terms specific to South
Korea aren’t their in abundance, certainly nothing an outsider wouldn’t be expected to be aware of.
“Key Resolve drill,” for example, is just the name for a world publicized yearly joint exercise between the US and South Korea.]
Operation
Division
Corps
Brigade
Solidarity
Army
Navy
Battalion
Air force
U. S. Army
Joint Chiefs of Staff
Defense
Tactics
Password
North
Infantry
Key Resolve drill
Attack
Artillery
Engineer
One could conclude it would have been almost as specific to have just copied off the entire data volume of the disks.
The McAfee paper puts forward no proof the files grabbed using this search procedure were classified. Some may have been. Perhaps all were. Or maybe few or none. There is no way to make an estimate.
In the Associated Press’s piece on the matter, the McAfee researchers had this to say:
McAfee also said it listed only some of the keywords the malware searched for in its report. It said it withheld many other keywords that indicated the targeting of classified material, at the request of U.S. officials, due to the sensitivity of releasing specific names and programs.
“These included names of individuals, base locations, weapons systems and assets,” said Sherstobitoff.
Perhaps. Or maybe not.
US base locations, weapons systems, assets — even individuals (for example, commanders) are not secret in South Korea. Indeed, entire orders of battle and weapons systems are publicly available on the web. Rather notably, ahem, at GlobalSecurity.Org! For which I am a Senior Fellow! And which is a go to resource for thousands and thousands of American military men (civilian and enlisted) and those interested in global military affairs around the world!
Dear me, Ryan Sherstobitoff.
There is one matter worth noting, a critical difference between news reporting on Dark Seoul and the McAfee white paper on it.
The McAfee white paper, Shertobistoff et al, does not use the term “North Korea” even once.
More bluntly, McAfee corporate, being corporate, didn’t formally publish any explanation that “North Korea” was the responsible party.
It employs only the weasel-term, “state sponsored,” but did not — in print — even come down unequivocally on that.
In interviews, Sherstobitoff went well beyond what was actually published by McAfee, adding a variety of assertions and claims not put down on the digital paper.
Subsequently, every news piece came down with North Korea as the culprit.
“Was North Korea behind Operation Troy?” I was asked by the Associated Press.
I told the agency there was no way to tell from what what was in the report. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe a hacking gang. The wording included in the analysis, the destructive code “dropper” made it look childish and antique, like something virus writers did two decades back.
Whatever, I agreed with the assertion in the report that the tools and methods used, in the words of the McAfee authors, “were not that sophisticated in comparison to what we have seen before.”
From the Washington Times today:
Analysts say that the revelations about these attacks ought to prompt U.S. officials to reassess North Korea’s cybercapabilities.
Pyongyang’s hackers now must be rated “as good as Iran,??? said James A. Lewis, a cybersecurity scholar at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“The Iranians moved up quickly,??? Mr. Lewis said, noting the recent spate of “denial of service??? attacks against U.S. banks laid at their door.
U.S. officials have said the greatest danger posed by cyberattacks is disruption of vital infrastructure, such as electric power transmission.
For the AP, Lewis was also quoted:
“I used to joke that it’s hard for the North Koreans to have a cyber army because they don’t have electricity, but it looks as if the regime has been investing heavily in this,” said Lewis.
If so, opinions would vary on whether this constitutes getting your money’s worth.
What actually happened during the North Korea imbroglio, though?
The Hermit Kingdom had a ritualized fit over the annual joint US/South Korean military exercise. It fueled it missiles, made silly videos, threatened that it would attack Guam, Hawaii or the west coast of America with a nuclear strike, shut down a joint business operation with South Korea and … and … and …
Nothing. The Hermit Kingdom’s ruler, the pudgy kid, had no cards to play.
But according to a news story, like many today, in the Washington Times, North Korea is punching above its weight (although never mentioned by McAfee) in cyberspace, as good as Iran.
Iran. Does it even matter?
Well, of course it matters to cybersecurity companies and the South Korean IT business workers who had to restore systems when master boot records were wiped, which would have taken time, but which was reversible.
The question unanswered is how critical was the loss of at least public (but not provably secret — although the latter is a very broad term — from) information, from Internet-connected military networks, but not classified networks, according to the South Korean military.
In summary, from the NewRomanic Cyber Army and keyword searches for “artillery,” “defense,” “secret” and “air force” to North Korea as a cyberpower, to “disruption of vital infrastructure, such as electric power transmission.”
In one thousand words or less. This is called putting your fingers on the scale.
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07.08.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 3:45 pm by George Smith
Teaser excerpts from Shit from WhiteManistan, a new Taschen coffee table art book on folk customs in America.
Plate 1: Sedition is Tradition Memorial Parade, July 4, Water Moccasin, NC.
Plate 2: Celebration gathering on news that a nuclear attack sub being refurbished in the nearby Norfolk navy yard was being renamed the John Wilkes Booth. (Lexington, VA.)
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Posted in Bioterrorism, Ricin Kooks at 9:41 am by George Smith
The look of national bioterrorism defense entitlement spending in Omaha, Nebraska. The flush days may be ending.
“Federal funding for the Special Pathogens and Biosecurity Laboratory at University of Nebraska’s Medical Center peaked at $1.2 million, has been sliced in half in recent years, and could get whacked again,” reads the Omaha World Herald caption on the picture.
It’s the type of article that shows up about once a month now, bioterrorism defense scientists at obscurely named labs built in the great counter-bioterror boom after anthrax, exuding woe that their work is being, or could be, slashed.
The country way over-invested in bioterror defense in the wake of 9/11. Free money went out for almost a decade. No results were required and none were furnished. During the time the public was bombarded with assertions that catastrophic bioterror attacks were easy to mount and likely.
None of the claims of the threat-mongers materialized. That’s zero.
Many of our most famous bioterror defense researchers grew wealthy during a period when millions of other Americans saw their economic futures languish or go up in smoke. Infrastructure repair and spending for the public good shriveled but national security spending ballooned.
Now, in some places, it is getting a much needed haircut. But still not enough.
It’s a hard fact the poor in America have no political voice. But those in national security work always do.
The Omaha World news piece tries to paint a picture of a high tech lab engaged in secret and sensitive work, vital to the safety of citizens.
It does not help the case, however, to mention ricin as a big thing.
From the Herald:
The three-ring binders, each one containing its own nightmare, line one shelf in the lab.
“Bacillus anthracis,??? one binder is labeled …
“Ricin,??? another binder is labeled. That would be the powdery poison that a Mississippi man allegedly mailed to President Barack Obama this spring in the upside-down days after the Boston Marathon bombing.
There are other binders, many others, but as I write down their names, the Omaha scientists who run Nebraska’s Special Pathogens and Biosecurity Preparedness Laboratory politely ask me to stop …
This bookshelf of horrors needs to stay secret, they say.
“We’d let you read this, but then we’d have to lock you up for 10 years,??? says Dr. Steven Hinrichs, director of the Nebraska Public Health Laboratory, which oversees the biosecurity lab.
He points to the ricin binder. He is joking. At least I think he is.
However, the public knows there’s not much book in ricin terrorism having experienced a uniquely remarkable period of it this year.
Ricin, or more descriptively — castor powder, in mail is hardly a hazard. This despite the national line, now twelve years old, that it is profoundly deadly and easy to make.
Yes, powder from beans is easy to make.
A crazy beauty in a Halloween cat-suit did it. A karate studio instructor starring in a Bud Light beer Battle of the Bands promotion did it. And a guy in Washington who looked like he fell off the nasty end of a garbage truck also did it.
In the long period between now and the beginning of the bioterror defense boom there’s been essentially no change in the science used to examine ricin or samples suspected to be contaminated with it. In fact, the science is the almost the same as when I was in grad school working protein biochemistry in the mid-Eighties.
I know. I’ve seen the work from ricin cases, been asked about it from a professional’s standpoint.
There’s nothing new needed for ricin. The FBI gathers its evidence and does preliminary testing. Then it sends its sample to the mega-bioterror defense lab built in the response to Bruce Ivins, the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center (NBACC) in Maryland.
Then the NBACC, despite its vast resources and its ability to do the work in house, outsources the determinative work to yet another lab. And it’s all part of the chain of over-spending established during the war on terror.
Think of it as nationally hiring crews of hundreds to screw in a couple light bulbs.
Why?
Perhaps because they were given way too much money.
Because the national leadership over-reacted over a long period of time. Because no very-important-person can suggest the bioterrorism threat has been hyped and inflated and that the response to it is now glaringly inappropriate without losing their career.
The Omaha scientists find their lab “increasingly starved for once-plentiful federal cash,” writes Matthew Hansen for the newspaper.
Then, as many journalists have done before him, he puts his fingers on the scale:
What if everyone decides the [bioterror threat] is no big deal?
An amount of ricin roughly equivalent to three grains of salt can kill a human. A Mississippi man tried to send ricin to the president of the United States in April. A Texas woman — a small-time actress in the TV series “The Walking Dead??? — tried to send President Obama ricin in May.
And yet you would’ve barely known that if you looked at the front page of a newspaper. The first ricin story got crowded out by the Boston bombing, and the second barely made a blip in the 24-hour news cycle.
It’s laughable.
You couldn’t get away from Shannon Richardson during the days leading up to her arrest and after. Her husband made celebrity morning television to speak tearfully of his scheming wife. Thousands of pictures of castor seeds and Shannon in various fetching outfits overflowed Internet gossip sites.
James Everett Dutschke became ubiquitous on the evening news. His
coincidentally bad timing with respect to his ricin mail scheme, coming as it did during the week of the Boston bombing, gave the incident even more publicity.
No, the public got a very good look at ricin terrorism. And there was a cognitive disconnect between what it saw and what it had been told about the allegedly deadly horror of it over the last twelve years.
The [scientists of the Special Pathogens and Biosecurity Laboratory at UNMC] bring up the fact that you can find recipes on the Internet to cook up any number of biological horrors,” adds the reporter.
Something that’s been said thousands of times in the last dozen years. Repeated ad nauseum in the news, worked into television shows, dramatic series and movie plots.
Mostly it’s been convenient bullshit. That it has lost a lot of its power to frighten and persuade is not really a case of public apathy.
But it has always had a lot to do with those defending their career turf.
A secret three-ring binder for lil’ ol’ me? Tee-hee.
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07.07.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Shoeshine at 3:12 pm by George Smith
Nick Bilton, the New York Times tech journalist who gave the country Cody Wilson and the 3D-manufactured plastic gun fills up space today with the future urban paradise created by the self-driving car. It’s something only one of the privileged shoeshine boys of American tech plutocracy could write.
Self-driving cars will always be for the topmost in US society. As inequality continues to surge, unless they’re giving them away, they’ll never make a dent in southern California in what’s left of my lifetime. Indeed it’s laughable to posit that southern California’s great servant underclass would ever benefit from self-driving cars.
Do they even know about Google’s many vanity projects?
Bilton’s fantasy, excerpted:
As scientists and car companies forge ahead — many expect self-driving cars to become commonplace in the next decade — researchers, city planners and engineers are contemplating how city spaces could change if our cars start doing the driving for us. There are risks, of course: People might be more open to a longer daily commute, leading to even more urban sprawl.
That city of the future could have narrower streets because parking spots would no longer be necessary. And the air would be cleaner because people would drive less. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 30 percent of driving in business districts is spent in a hunt for a parking spot, and the agency estimates that almost one billion miles of driving is wasted that way every year.
“What automation is going to allow is repurposing, both of spaces in cities, and of the car itself,??? said Ryan Calo, an assistant professor at the University of Washington School of Law, who specializes in robotics and drones.
Harvard University researchers note that as much as one-third of the land in some cities is devoted to parking spots. Some city planners expect that the cost of homes will fall as more space will become available in cities. If parking on city streets is reduced and other vehicles on roadways become smaller, homes and offices will take up that space. Today’s big-box stores and shopping malls require immense areas for parking, but without those needs, they could move further into cities.
“People might be more open to a longer daily commute, leading to even more urban sprawl.”
It’s worth repeating, enough to make you fall from the chair in laughter if you’ve ever spent time in Los Angeles County and the Inland Empire.
Who, exactly, is on our soCal roads who doesn’t already do an excessive commute in a region that defines urban sprawl in the continental United States?
And Google and expensive self-driving cars for the upper class and their servants will fix it. Sure. Google will fix everything, just as it does now, only better.
Here’s what might fix it.
Mass unemployment, underemployment and inequality climbing inexorably higher. Potentially, there could be less cars on the roads because people won’t be able to afford to drive.
That will alleviate congestion and make inner-city parking easier for the haves.
One professor of “the Internet and society” at Stanford, Bryant Walker Smith, imagines his driver-less car becoming an extension of his home.
This next bit, on the other hand, is perfectly great. Escape from WhiteManistan can definitely see the overlords and minders this way in a decade or so:
“I could sleep in my driverless car, or have an exercise bike in the back of the car to work out on the way to work,??? he said. “My time spent in my car will essentially be very different.???
Your Personal Fitness Gym car, streaming smoothly along amidst the the hundreds of thousands of late models and junkers that must be kept going by the slave labor class.
Here’s a thought question.
What’s the future potential for class resentment in the servant class to boil over into vandalism and sabotage of self-driving cars? You still have to rub elbows, or bumpers, on those big freeways and cities, wizards of tomorrow.
Oh, the future’s brimming with promise
And the promise is heading our way
So keep your eyes on that shining horizon
Make way for tomorrow today!
Daring new devices will help us to succeed
Better tools for living will meet our every need
Incredible inventions through new technology
Extending life’s dimensions for all humanity!
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Posted in WhiteManistan at 11:55 am by George Smith
Because nothing says you’re just an ordinary white guy ordering a hamburger at the lunch joint with everyone else like going to the Austin capitol building park on a Sunday afternoon with your assault rifle as a gesture of good will and civic outreach. The heart swells at the unique citizenship of an assault rifle carrying-biker wrapped up and looking like the Invisible Man in an old army helmet, only with the American flag colors in place of the bandages. Or the utterly unsurprising image of a fellow who appears to have creatively modified his Klan uniform into just a normal bed sheet or something.
Visit Texas today! The barbecue is great!
Everything is bigger in Texas!
Just normal friendly folks like you!
Even made the police a little nervous as you can see here.
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Posted in WhiteManistan at 9:40 am by George Smith
For sheer pathetic embarrassment there is little that tops a bunch of middle-aged white guys in the south waving confederate flags in 2013. Let’s march on the court house, boys! Who’s with me? Yearrghhhh!
From a Roanoke, VA, newspaper:
Supporters of a Sons of Confederate Veterans anti-ordinance rally held at Hopkins Green in Lexington wave flags to protest a Lexington City ordinance that would effectively ban flags, such as the Confederate flag, from flying from public lamp posts.
The city did not wish to be vexed by pests using its property and banned all non-governmental flags. A Federal Court affirmed the ordinance.
The comments are worth browsing, coming as they do from always the most eloquent and vigorous of WhiteManistan.
“When will this crap cease, the battle flag is a Christian symbol and it represents valor, honor, family, duty, and it has nothing to do with slavery,” protests one citizen. “The war for Southern Independence was economic because Lincoln knew the south was a rich nation, and losing cotton would be detrimental to their economy …”
And then it really gets in gear.
Damn Commies!
H/t to Frank at Pine View Farm for the eagle eye.
One paradox associated with the benighted who treasure the Stars and Bars is the belief that it marks them as rebels. This is seen throughout lily white country music, more prominently among the young artists who use it in videos as touchstone for fans.
Because it’s common it’s actually a sign of dim-witted conformity: Please like me because I’m part of the social club (albeit, one of a clueless tribe working at being seen as people who deserve being shunned.)
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07.06.13
Posted in Ted Nugent, WhiteManistan at 11:15 am by George Smith
I’ve refrained from commenting on the Washington Post’s feature-length profile of Ted Nugent for the 4th of July weekend because of its nature as a troll piece.
The purpose of a newspaper troll piece is to put something up so ridiculous and annoying it guarantees eyeballs from around the web.
And so it is with the piece on Ted Nugent. Reporter Steve Hendrix visited Nugent in Waco, using the opportunity to get the man to admit he’s thinking of running for President.
Of course this is a lie. Even Nugent knows he couldn’t get elected, except in a region that puts people like Louie Gohmert in office.
It’s almost worth wishing for because a Ted Nugent for President run would hasten the GOP’s total collapse. Ted Nugent’s appeal is in rallying the crazy stupid, stupid crazy, and mean — of WhiteManistan.
Hendrix writes this, at one point:
There are Web sites devoted to collecting and sorting and linking to the vast litany of misdeeds and accusations Nugent has accumulated over the rock-star decades: his recent no-contest pleas to deer hunting with bait in California and taking one black bear too many in Alaska (he says both prosecutions were politically motivated) …
That would be here, for one, where Hendrix picked up the information on Nugent being tossed from a big summer festival in Michigan back in 2003 for flinging slurs — one of them being the “n-word” — on a radio show. It was published on DD blog, along with a packet of old clippings about the matter, three years ago.
A correction the Post added to Hendrix’s Nugent profile best captures its meretricious quality:
An earlier version of this article incorrectly says that he raised five children. Nugent fathered nine children, three of whom lived at home with him. This version has been corrected.
Perhaps the correction could have added the majority of Nugent’s children were illegitimate, although the story makes it obvious once you dig through enough of it.
The article makes one good, if obvious, point. Ted Nugent is catnip for the mainstream media. He is one of America’s most visible raging assholes and there’s a lot of money in that.
Nugent-like characters are not uncommon in American history. Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn and Gordon Liddy come to mind. In the past, however, their nasty character eventually achieved a counter-productive critical mass, doing them in. That doesn’t happen now, more just means more.
Yes, by all means, Ted Nugent for President! He’ll be the only person ever to run for the office who was investigated by the Secret Service for potentially threatening remarks made in reference to the current office-holder. When the Secret Service arrives at your door, everyone knows it’s to hand out the John Wilkes Booth Memorial Medal of Good Citizenship.
Could you think of a better qualification in the Republican Party? Bring on the merriment that the world might be made richer with the laughter.
Will really rally the missing women, Hispanic, gay, African American and youth vote.
No link. Too easy.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 10:21 am by George Smith
A day old feature from the Toronto Star is here.
McAfee was in Canada for a seven-day shoot on a documentary of his life, “Who is McAfee?”
As well-publicized as he’s been it’s hard to imagine something of such short work winding up well-received.
However, McAfee is a good self-serving interview and tells the newspaper he is trying to carve out a new niche entertainment:
He plans to stick around for a year or so, working on his new “career??? in entertainment.
“The end product is something that hopefully might educate me or at least might validate my own opinion of myself,??? says McAfee. “I don’t mean opinion of good guy/bad guy, but opinion of what’s actually happening in life.
If he keeps making videos like the last, it could work well.
McAfee has acquired a new companion, a 30-year old stripper from Miami. The old young gals from Belize now left behind.
McAfee’s new flame was photographed for USA Today here.
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07.05.13
Posted in Bioterrorism, Ricin Kooks at 3:08 pm by George Smith
A Buffalo family was not pleased to find they had sold castor seeds to accused ricin mailer J. Everett Dutschke.
From a Buffalo newspaper, an interesting story, in which an alert couple notified authorities they’d sold castor seeds to him:
Earlier this year, [Ross Miller of Elma, NY], [a] 44-year-old artist and small-businessman assisted the FBI as a witness in a case involving letters that were poisoned with a deadly substance called ricin and mailed to President Obama, a judge and a Republican senator, Roger F. Wicker of Mississippi.
Miller, who has been visiting loved ones in East Aurora and Elma this week, said he was shocked and upset to learn that someone may have used beans he sold to make a substance intended to hurt or kill public officials.
“We were very upset. It was irritating and nerve-racking. I found it offensive that somebody would use a bean product that we sold them to try to kill someone,??? Miller told The Buffalo News.
The Millers, meanwhile, had been following news reports in the case. They realized that ricin could be made from ground-up castor bean shells …
“We’d been … hoping that nobody used any beans that were bought from us to make ricin,??? Miller said.
“We checked our records to see if we’d ever sold any beans to anyone in that part of Mississippi. My wife keeps extensive records, and she found out that we had sold some beans to??? Dutschke last year.
He was a faceless Internet customer who spent about $20 on about 100 castor beans the Millers sent to him.
The realization that they may have sold beans used to make ricin that was sprinkled on a letter to the world’s most powerful leader scared and deeply concerned the Millers …
[The Millers, after making inquiries, were put in touch with] W. Chad Lamar, the federal prosecutor in Mississippi who was handling the ricin case …
“The Millers’ information was very helpful, especially after Dutschke had denied ever buying castor beans,??? [a lawyer friend of the Millers] said.
The Millers told the newspaper their craft business will no longer sell castor beans. They were not very profitable, anyway, Ross Miller informed.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Decline and Fall at 2:13 pm by George Smith
CAHY — or my abbreviation for Corporate America Hates You, its open hostility to people — is recognized as real. Awhile ago I wrote about it, in the economy of strangle:
In Sunday’s New York Times, a front page piece on how corporate America has shifted to staffing with part-time employees, to avoid benefits and the payment of wages:
While there have always been part time workers, especially in restaurants and retailers, employers today rely on them far more than before as they seek to cut costs and align staffing to customer traffic. The trend has frustrated millions of Americans … reducing their pay and benefits.
“We’re seeing more and more that the burden of market fluctuation is being shifted onto the workers, as opposed to the companies absorbing it themselves,??? said Carrie Gleason, the executive director of the Retail Action Project, an advocate for retail workers …
Here is seen the maximizing of profit by compressing wages and having government programs in the tattered safety net picking up the slack. This from corporate America, where the prevailing sentiment during the last four years is that socialism and entitlement has run rampant.
However, the kind of entitlement spending that allows corporate American to pay people so poorly that there aren’t yet food riots [because 48 million working people are compensated with a food stamp benefit] is apparently OK.
The answer isn’t near at hand.
It will be generational as the current climate of corporate predation can’t be changed, only slowly replaced.
And the only way it can be supplanted is through the strengthening of labor after decades of attack from the private sector. And law requiring that people must be paid a living wage.
At PBS today, a discussion on the inexorable decline of labor in the US, accelerated by “innovation” that does not achieve any social good.
The PBS piece explains how capital has stayed the same globally, but an explosion in labor availability and ease of using it, has radically reduced what people can earn.
The piece also dallies with what this means for the future and none of the prognostications are good.
Near the end of it, a couple statements stick out, both having to do with a recognition that social norms have changed and not in any good way. Destruction of union power and compensation became normalized and, increasingly, technology driven.
From PBS:
Gary Marcus, a psychologist at NYU: “I have a question for those of you here that are more optimistic about the future. What specifically do you think might be the future economic domains in which there might be large-scale employment? I’m not interested in the cases where there’s a cool new job that really, really smart people who read Wired magazine can do. What I am interested in are new occupations that hundreds of thousands of people could do, in game-changing ways like when the automobile industry once opened up.”
Thomas Kochan, MIT: “In terms of a market failure, it’s the reality that it’s not in the interests of any individual firm in the United States to try to solve the jobs problem. So, we’ve got to figure out a way to deal with that…and the only way that you solve this is by getting people and institutions and organizations to work together, to engage these issues collectively.
“It’s about an institutional failure over the last 30 years. With the decline of the labor movement, you’ve seen a lot of institutions go downhill equivalently. We don’t see the kind of dialogue, we don’t see the enforcement of our social norms and social policies that discipline corporations, and that really provided the kind of collective spreading of wage patterns and wage norms across the society.
“We’ve got to rebuild those, but we can’t try to rebuild them in an old-fashioned way. Now we’re in a more digital economy, a more knowledge-based economy, and we need to invent the new institutions that will cut across and aggregate these interests to address these challenges. We’ve got to get the education community working with business and employers, working with labor and civil society.
“I’m not a believer that technology is going to naturally eliminate jobs and cut income, but if we don’t do anything about it, if we just leave it, as we have, to individual market forces and to individual corporate actions and to individual technology innovations, then that’s probably where we are headed.”
Hanan Kolko, a labor lawyer: “Until this social norm of trying to crush unions and workers in general is changed, you’re going to have more and more instability for working people. And it’s a very bad thing for the economy, because at the end of the day, if there’s not enough aggregate demand, there’s not going to be enough people with money to buy the stuff to keep our economy going. This is a structural change in the social norms of our economy that makes me pessimistic about the future.”
Last week the blog addressed it in a response to an LA Times piece on “concierge apps,” or trivial technologies that exist to pit all-against-all in free-lance labor bidding wars, driving earning power downward for the sake of superfluous vanity work. (Paradoxically, while this was published the Times was going through another wave of layoffs brought on by a poor profit picture brought about by the digital sharing and content-is-free economy.)
These are technologies which do not increase the economic pie. They only fractionate it in favor of the holders of the technology and at the expense of low-wage workers who cannot defend themselves from it.
As far as innovation goes, it is not a future.
Specifically, we can talk about Uber, the Silicon Valley cab-summoning app that serves limousines and free-lance drivers to the top most and that part of the upper middle class which retains work as high-button servant labor.
Los Angeles sent Uber a “cease and desist” order to stop operations in the county and the company ignored it.
The LA Times piece provided precious little about the problem a company like Uber professes to solve using smartphone innovation.
That problem is claimed to be transportation dysfunction and lousy cab service.
First, transportation is hard in LA County because of its sheer size. It’s an automobile economy.
There is a need for shuttle service to airports. And, indeed, there is an effective network of shuttle companies. They work and anyone who has lived here a long time has come in contact with them.
Uber cannot improve upon it. The job remains the same whether summoned by smartphone app or through the old fashioned way of simply calling them by voice.
Shuttle drivers don’t get rich. They are not parasites who need cutting down by digital innovation. But what Uber purports to do in such things is just use technology to summon a swarm of free-lance workers to undercut business and undermine costs. This is not expansion of an economic pie.
It is the same with cab drivers. Do you know anyone who is one making as much money as a Silicon Valley tech company CEO?
So concierge apps be damned as progress. Parasitic apps for chiseling the cost of labor is a much better description.
Companies like Uber, or TaskRabbit, call themselves leaders in the emerging world (and here is another Orwellian tech industry term) of the sharing economy.
If it is so much about sharing, how come most in American society receive so little benefit?
The destruction of payment for recorded music was the first grand achievement of the sharing economy. Sean Parker, for example, one of the founders of Napster, is now wealthier than Croesus, so much so that when he’s pilloried for excess he shows everyone he really is that venal by writing about how his posh wedding was ruined.
More descriptive of the sharing economy, a White House economic advisor recently wrote a widely, ahem, shared essay on how the old pop music industry was gutted by technology, turned into a winner-take-all struggle in which only the biggest names thrive.
This was placed within the larger context of how inequality is very high in the US, and rising, as those with access to the means of the sharing economy employ it to take larger and larger pieces from an economic pie through divestment from fair compensation for labor. More gallingly, the Internet does not create fabulous opportunity because perceptions of popularity mean a lot when society is grossly unequal. In other words, algorithms that put something in the first page of results because of counts of various things make everything below the top few rungs displayed untenable.
Now you can surely say that Apple and iTunes store funneling digital music purchases through a country with a legal mechanism for tax evasion is innovation. And Google’s development of YouTube as a service that provides a great deal of free pirated music with the salve that by attaching a link to a copy of it at the iTunes store is certainly some kind of wee innovation. But you can also call such things parasitic or predatory.
Last, from the Guardian, “In the digital economy, we’ll soon all be working for free – and I refuse”:
[In] Jaron Lanier’s new book Who Owns The Future? … he argues: “Capitalism only works if there are enough successful people to be customers.” Lanier, a computer scientist and a musician, is rightly called a visionary because he sees what is happening, when everything is live-streamed but no one knows the name of the person who made the music any more. Content is free.
Governments play up the idea that a digital future creates jobs rather than eats them up. Culturally, there is now a fantasy world of start-ups and blogs and YouTube TV where a very few people manage to make money but most work simply for “experience”…
He describes a winner-takes-all world, with a tiny number of successful people and everyone else living on hope. “There is not a middle-class hump. It’s an all-or-nothing society.”
But the digital economy operates as a kind of sophisticated X Factor. Someone will make it, sure. For more than 15 seconds even, maybe. But most won’t. This is why Lanier says the internet may destroy the middle classes, the people who can’t outspend the elite. And without that middle group, we cannot maintain a democracy.
This is why it is easy to root for the downfall of Uber.
The California Public Utilities Commission could see that the company is not really tech innovation at all, that what urban parts of the state do not urgently need from a company like Uber and its rivals is more poorly paid free-lance cab and shuttle drivers. The place won’t fall if it never gains traction.
I can compare a world class innovation in the US, with the alleged world class innovation of free digital music content.
There are three electric guitars that are historic technology: The Fender Telecaster, the Fender Stratocaster, and the Gibson Les Paul. The three defined pop music around the world, the first two being invented by Leo Fender and co-workers in California.
Leo Fender did not invent the idea of an electric guitar. Technically, he was not even the first to bring one into market. But he was the first to produce a genuinely great iconic model that revolutionized that market.
The invention of the Telecaster and the Stratocaster electrified pop music creation in the United States. It created jobs, entire large industries. The pop music industry, from the Sixties to the Nineties, simply would not have existed as it did without Fender innovation and all the companies it did business with and competed against.
Electric guitars were not about fractionating the economy, using widgets to chisel labor costs downward, or make millions of people claw against each other for the privilege of almost-unpaid work. (Despite what you may have experienced in struggle for a major label contract.)
The coming of the electric guitar did not take everything the majority had and throw it in the trash for the profit of a small slice at the very top.
When you see terms like concierge app or the sharing economy, you should choke. They always mean a lot of people are about to lose big.
Corporate America Hates You — from the archives.
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