Presumed Guilty

In the justice system of the US the individual is presumed innocent until proven guilty.  There is a system of law built on that assumption and its framework requiring requests to seek personal information on individuals under criminal investigation is encoded into the US Constitution in the Bill of Rights:

Amendment IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Amendment V

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Amendment VI

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

Amendment IV sets up the Judicial Branch as the one to authorize Warrants as the Executive Branch is the one doing the work of enforcing the law and cannot be said to be disinterested in a case, thus requiring a third party to adjudicate the request.  The Legislative can't do that as it only makes the law, and the Executive is the enforcer of it, so by default it is the Judicial Branch that does that work.  What you do in your life, what things you get and how you get them are thusly protected from government scrutiny because you are presumed innocent of any crime to start with.

Amendment V puts in place the requirement of due process of law, which means that the steps of collecting evidence, going to a Judge for a Warrant, and then proceeding through a trial is required and guilt ascertained before any penalty may be put in place by government on an individual.  Amendment IV creates the process of required collection only after suspicion of criminal conduct is raised, and then evidence gathering after that via the Warrant process.  That is the due process of law and it is sustained by Amendment V.

Amendment VI sets up the requirement that all information collected by law enforcement on an individual in a criminal proceeding be handed over to that individual and those representing his defense in court.  Also the defendant can call witnesses including those who have done the collecting and analyzing of data as that is part and parcel of the evidence itself.  With that the due process of law is given a final safeguard to allow a defendant to see exculpatory data, examine the process used to gather the data and see if any of their fundamental rights were violated in its collection.  That isn't just to keep law enforcement in line, but to allow the innocent a chance to demonstrate that the prosecution was not thoroughly done and that they have the wrong person involved.

Got it?

Suspicion of criminality.

Collection of data.

Required intercession of a Judge for Warrants to examine personal property and how it is acquired.

Charges put against an individual in open court.

Handing over all collected evidence and allowing the process of discovery to be a two-way street so that the investigators can be put under scrutiny as well.

Counsel to assist in aiding the defense of the accused.

Trial by Jury.

A process made to safeguard your rights and liberty.

Now fast forward to PRISM, NSA and its massive data collection storehouse in Utah.  A place that is set up to gather as much information as possible, and it does not respect borders and collects everything.  Yes the NSA is collecting data on you, too, and if you are lucky it will just sit on a disc in an array in UT... until some bureaucrat gets a Warrant to investigate you.

Notice what has just happened?

By pre-collecting data you are now Presumed Guilty of a crime.  This is the tool of an authoritarian if not totalitarian State seeking to have its own way with individuals by having necessary records to accuse individuals of activities that are unlawful.  Are you violating the law?

Take a look at the list of federal regulations.  Since the start of the Regulatory State, back in the early part of the 20th century, agencies/departments with Congressionally authorized power to make and enforce regulations have blossomed to go into every corner of daily activity.  From the car you drive to the food you eat to the medications you take to the bed you sleep on: all of that is gist for the regulatory mill of fines, penalties and investigation.  On any given day you are in violation of dozens of federal regulations just by using common sense to live your life, and with the extension of federal power into banking, commerce, investments and a plethora of other areas, your chance of being a criminal jumps by leaps and bounds.  It is worth checking out Glenn Reynolds' latest paper on this topic to see how bad it is: Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything is a Crime.

If you are presumed guilty that means that your personal expectation of privacy is out the window... say, as a side light, those supporting this set-up cannot be for Roe v. Wade as it supports a personal right to privacy under a framework of law that requires collection of evidence to start at suspicion of wrong-doing, not beforehand.  By trying to pin privacy to 'emanations' and 'penumbras' and not to Amendment IX and X, the SCOTUS has set up the overturning of privacy rights as a Judicial feature that can be undone with a single gavel.  Isn't that sweet?  If you are pro-information collection State you are against Roe v. Wade.  Ah, what a tangled web they weave, no?

Back to the presumption of innocence being overturned by pre-collection of data.  The system described in the Bill of Rights is a hard one and puts the onus of hard work on the State, not the individual.  The State must figure out if you have committed a crime, it must show evidence that points to this, it must do the gumshoe work of collecting data de novo (which is to say afresh, although past convictions will stick to you like glue), process the evidence and then actually go to a public court to bring charges.  This is not an unburdened system and it is the burdening that protects your individual rights.  Want a Police State?  Make it easy to get data on people!

Here is a bit from an article at The Week:

Armed with what amounts to a rubber stamp court order, however, the NSA can collect and store trillions of bytes of electromagnetic detritus shaken off by American citizens. In the government’s eyes, the data is simply moving from one place to another. It does not become, in the government’s eyes, relevant or protected in any way unless and until it is subject to analysis. Analysis requires that second order.

The court in question, BTW, is a FISA court, not a public court and it is a panel of Judges, not one with a sole jurisdiction involved.  Their proceedings remain secret and are never published so you can't find out what the NSA has been doing.  This is where the rubber hits the road and do note that over collection and pre-collection is a feature, not a bug of this system.  Government has already collected your data, so all it requires is a bit of judge shopping by DoJ to get that information released, like AG Holder did with the multiple investigations into journalists from AP, FOX and CBS.  Get a judge willing to let you do the dirty deed (and at the federal level you can have a large choice of jurisdictions as a prosecutor and even judges within a jurisdiction) and then just hit up the NSA for its pre-gathered evidence.

From a Politico story on this we get this:

And Rep. Aaron Schock (R-Ill.) told POLITICO that the classified intelligence briefing sessions he’s attended haven’t disclosed details on the two data-gathering programs as were unveiled this week.

Schock, in Congress since 2009, said he had “no idea” about the phone data gathering, or any briefings for House members to discuss it, until news reports this week.

Like other members who said they learned of the data-gathering efforts when they were revealed in the Guardian and the Washington Post, Schock said the administration classified briefings he’s attended have revealed very little information.

“I can assure you the phone number tracking of non-criminal, non-terrorist suspects was not discussed,” he said. “Most members have stopped going to their classified briefings because they rarely tell us anything we don’t already know in the news. It really has become a charade.”

Well if you see everyone as potentially violating federal laws and regulations, then the idea of 'non-criminal suspects' flies out the window as there are none.  The prejudice in the system of pre-collection goes to full fruit at this point and the burden of demonstrating innocence now falls to those being investigated.  And as it isn't just DoJ that has policing powers, as DHS, EPA, and multiple other agencies/departments have shown, the NSA now gets to serve as a central point of common information and maybe even the coordinator between agencies for sharing information as it has this lovely pre-collection warehouse to store all of that lovely agency/department data for use by others.  Isn't that grand? 

And since terrorists use narcotics trafficking, white slavery, trafficking in illegal gems or semi-precious stones, etc. to do their deeds, and that has an environmental impact, particularly in parks along the porous borders, the pre-justification for collecting that data into a single storehouse is now evident.  Instead of separate and defined jurisdictions and powers, the technology creates a single system with the complete set of governmental powers to wield against an individual based on any infraction of any regulation that no human can be expected to know and requires an automated system to just catalog it.

Who knows if you are violating any of those laws, rules and regulations covering a vast array of separate domains?  You certainly can't say if you are or not because you don't know them all and you can't know them all.

The very first thing authoritarian to totalitarian systems do is put in place a system of justice whereby you are presumed guilty.  Add in layers of unknowable law, secret courts without well defined jurisdiction, judge shopping across known jurisdictions and within known jurisdictions and all you need is one magic 'go ahead and get them', turn the key to the NSA storehouse, and within hours you can be getting summons for taking that tag off your mattress, using marine gas to fill up your car, using a detergent additive with too much phosphate... and if you don't give in or even know how to respond, well, it only starts with fines.  Soon jail time starts to get put in as you are a serial abuser of the system, donchyaknow?

And do note that with Obamacare your medical records, what you take and who you've seen are also part of that.  Be hell to get stuck in an audit with the IRS asking you about the cost of your recent colonoscopy and wanting pictures, now, wouldn't it?  Just ask Tea Partiers and patriotic groups about that sort of scrutiny with just the current IRS.  Oh, they have police powers, too, as part of Treasury.  Isn't that swell?

Your safeguard against such a condition?

The presumption of innocence.

The goal of any tyrannical or despotic State?

Presumption of Guilt.

It is shown not in what they say, but in what they do.

And the pre-collection and storage of data demonstrates that they operate on a Presumption of Guilt, not one of Innocence.

Partisanship isn't all political

Yet more of my raw commentary from Hot Air, this on the long starting IRS scandal with the investigation of conservative non-profit organizations, which we are also getting hints of it going to Jewish groups and for-profit organizations in business.  Here I lay out something basic to keep track of in this thread on the topic:

Obama refuses to put the IRS in its proper place – he calls it an ‘independent agency’ but it isn’t. The IRS is under the Treasury Dept.

Now if the Tea Party groups reporting the increased forms and illegal questions are right, then this started in 2010 and it came from the one place that had one of the fastest nominees to go in place because of the financial ‘crisis’: Tim Geithner.

Tim Geithner was pro-Obama while in the Federal Reserve and knew the ropes, and was supposed to be wicked smart while being unable to do his own taxes. TurboTax Tim should have had a real good idea how to run the Treasury Dept. and yet within a year and half of his being in charge you get this sort of thing going on.

Thus TurboTax Tim is either:

- absolutely incompetent, doesn’t know any of the ropes in the financial side of DC and has no clue about how to properly run a large organization,

OR

- ran a department where it was not only allowed but encouraged by lack of oversight to start running a partisan investigation of those that the Administration didn’t like politically.

It can’t be both due to the amount of time TTT had in the FR: he did, indeed, ‘know the ropes’ and had progressed up the ladder of leadership high enough for Obama to appoint him. Basically the first option is non-viable as a cover-up fallback line.

That means TTT had put into place individuals who would run a partisan IRS. It takes a good six months to a full year for someone to actually figure out a high level federal job (look at every Administration post-WWII for this, as few get off the ground smoothly with appointees) and then start actually exercising decent oversight (or lack thereof) from their positions. Factor in time to go through the Senate and time to figure out the job and you get nearly a year and a half because the Senate wasn’t being all too swift on appointees.

If one remembers back to articles during the 2008-09 time frame pointed out that TTT was pro-Obama early on while he was at the Federal Reserve, so this raises the question: what, exactly, were the policies of the Federal Reserve and were they being influenced by Geithner towards partisan ends?

Any investigation of the IRS under Geithner must ALSO look at the Federal Reserve and start giving IT scrutiny because any head of the Treasury coming from the Federal Reserve that allows such things to go on under his command may also have had problems at his prior job.

If the IRS has problems, then Treasury has problems.

If the head of the Treasury Dept. had this sort of problem under his command then scrutiny into prior job activities in the financial sector under federal oversight must be performed because of the rapid pace in which the partisanship started.

Thus the Federal Reserve tenure of Tim Geithner going all the way back to his early NY Fed. days must be on the agenda. Not just a standard scandal due to an Administration, but also this actor put in place by them in the Dept. where it originated.

IRS then Treasury.
Treasury then Geithner.
Geithner then Federal Reserve.

Let your Congresscritter know as they might be a bit overwhelmed by the rush of events to figure this one out.

ajacksonian on May 14, 2013 at 7:28 AM

And then adding on to that just a bit later:

 

Spot on analysis. And TTT and the REB were college bosom buddies.

AH_C on May 14, 2013 at 7:44 AM

My thanks!

I try to state only what is the blindingly obvious to me and the early help of TTT with Obama was something the Left cheered about at the time. Go back to late 2008 to early 2009 in the HA archives and you can pull up some of the articles and commentary.

TTT was one of the engineers of the fiscal situation in 2008, along with a couple of his cohorts (Bernanke and Paulson), and they were strong-arming the bailouts through Congress and Bush, and then threatening banks who weren’t taking them when Obama came to office.

Something was and is seriously wrong with the Federal Reserve and its role in the financial crisis and the rise of Obama, then the slathering across all banks the problems of the few (mostly Citibank) is deplorable. It shows partisanship and an attempt to centralize the fiscal power of the US in the Federal Reserve by using it to partisan ends to get people into power to further go after organizations questioning the scope of US power: Tea Party groups.

Going after Tea Party and limited government organizations is not just a help to Obama but to the FR to escape scrutiny in ITS role in the fiscal mess we are in. It isn’t the sole author, but it is a major co-author and beneficiary of the Obama spending as it now has pent-up digital cash with which it can threaten the entire global banking system by destroying the value of the US dollar. To-date that money hasn’t been released and so inflation is low… the moment it gets into circulation your dollar will drop to some small fraction of its buying power and hyper-inflation ensue.

This time bomb must be stopped as well as the threat of financial destruction via the FR.

The IRS is just one part of a larger machine.

Pay attention and remember that fire must also be aimed at Geithner, Treasury and the Federal Reserve to get to the bottom of this. Geithner is a partisan and has been one to his own ends and beliefs before Obama. If you think a partisan federal government is a problem, imagine a partisan financial system that isn’t answerable to government.

ajacksonian on May 14, 2013 at 7:58 AM

I can point out that if one were a partisan in favor of an increased role for the Federal Reserve in controlling government policy or to evade government scrutiny, then working to quash those supporting those things would serve a dual function.  Also note that by Obama's attempt to make the IRS an 'independent agency' he is trying to isolate it from the Treasury Dept. and Tim Geithner's oversight.  This is not the case, of course, and Tim Geithner has control over these events by his position in the Treasury Dept.  It is odd to see a President try to protect an underling who should be easily bus-bound, but that is the case here.  It is by that odd protection that one must ask: why is President Obama trying to protect Tim Geithner?

And what was Geithner's agenda in the Federal Reserve and his role in the lead-up to the financial crisis?

End Game Against Freedom

What is the End Game of the global elites against freedom and liberty?  We can see its path by addicting populations to 'social' provisions such as 'retirement' and 'health care', which are different things than living a good life or providing good doctors and medicine.  This is the Redistributive State which seeks to undermine freedom by giving people material goods in return for those people relinquishing ever more control of their lives to the State.

This can be done by means of an Elite funding or promulgating a lower societal uprising so as to force society to be under enough pressure to call for a crackdown on those putting them at risk.  It is a mug's game, a violent game of 3 Card Monte in which those seeking to lead a normal life are The Mark.  When you agree to the 'good' that such government provided social programs can do at the cost of taking money from those who have rightfully earned it via their liberty, you agree to limit the liberty of all: of the rich to be rich, of the poor to realize that they are the source of their own problems, and of the middle class to purchase the passivity of the poor with the wealth of the rich and hoping for a few scraps for themselves.  When you wash, rinse and repeat this sort of thing you are in the  process of breaking the will of individuals to have a free society, to stand up for freedom and ridiculing them because they actually support the ability of people to get rich and of the poor to also have that same opportunity.  What is offered is the class system, at first, which turns into a self-fulfilling Caste System with those at the upper levels dictating to the rest of society how it shall act in its own terms.

The modern West is in one or more cycles of this, but it is interesting to look at one society where this has reached an end-game: there are no longer any illusions of providing social goods because they aren't necessary as the will of those to have a civil society have been broken.  In China there is so much autocratic control and police suppression that it is hard to get information out, but in another place there is just enough of a shame culture left and the attempts to have a veneer of civilization remaining that we can get a look at what this looks like.

I've reported on the Red Mafia before a number of times, and this time I'm coming at it not from the 'find all low level sources to piece together a framework' end, but at the other end of what happens when a very few who actually want to do their jobs in government AS jobs in government actually give the high level framework in stark detail.  I found this through Amazon Pime's service in  film documentary by Andrei Nekrasov who recounted the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in Poisoned by Polonium.  I had looked at part of the aftermath of this assassination of Litvinenko, but the lead-up to it and the high levels of corruption and societal abuse it points at is telling.  It is a film I urge everyone to see since, if you want to see where a quasi-western State ends when its elites assume autocratic control, there is no better overview of just how this can come to be.

The events the film reviews are centered on the post-Soviet collapse in the 1990's where the productive capacity of the old Soviet industries came under the sway of two general classes of individuals: old Soviet elites and organized crime.  In some cases there is no differentiating between the two because they have a connecting link in the secret service, the FSB which used to be the KGB, and actually dates back to the Czar's Cheka.  At one point they are actually referred to in their modern FSB incarnation under that term: their name changes but their methodology of violence in service to State remains. 

From Litvinenko we hear about this directly:

In our country, the special services are, in fact, a secret political organization that uses sharp methods, secret methods, not against spies and terrorists, but solely to keep a ruling class in power.  In 1999, for example, to seize power, the FSB used secret methods that are only allowed against terrorists and spies.  If the army were to seize power, they'd roll in with tanks and guns and fly in with jets maybe.  But everyone would notice. The FSB, on the other hand, has secret methods, and nobody noticed anything until chekists made up the government and seized every organ of power.  If the KGB was the armed unit of the Communist Party, then the FSB is the armed unit of – of a caste of corrupt Russian officials.

Normally a 'Police State' is something created by a dictator or tyrant as a means to control the population by deploying the police as parts of the government with the sole aim to keep the people controlled by police power.  In the case of Russia this has been flipped around where it is the Secret Police that now put forward their own minions into politics to give a veneer of choice but, in actuality, by their brutal and repressive methods that they keep secret but are whispered about, there is no choice at all.  Really if something is undertaken to sway the public via terrorist means promulgated by the Secret Police who, exactly, is going to investigate them?  Anyone seeking to do so can be intimidated via the system that is in place of informers, records, laws promulgated to help keep the police in power, and then enforced by a corrupt legal system upon those who try to bring the actual truth forward.

With tin-pot tyrants if you have a revolution to get rid of the tyrant, can you be sure that it wasn't the secret police that actually instigated the revolt to put themselves into power?  And when a society shucks off its old totalitarian State apparatus, what happens if it actually keeps the secret police around?  Unfortunately this last question is answered in Russia.

One of the men a special unit of the FSB was to frame a man or take him out of ciruclation , and that manwas Lt. Colonel Trepashkin who was starting to piece together just what was going on inside Russia.  He recounts his story:

My first conflict in the '90s was with today's FSB director Patrushev.  I rounded up a gang that laundered money, murdered people, consisted of war lords.  At some point, I had finally managed to get them, but then the problems really started.  There was that classic chain of protection that gangsters always have whether in the FSB, the military intelligence, or in the police.  I was told to drop the case.  I said "Why, these are criminals, we have to indict them.  I won't drop it!"

The agent inside the FSB who was told to frame him so that Trepashkin would be stopped and was recorded on tape in case anything happened to any of the men from the special group in the FSB:

Trepashkin knew something, and they were afraid he'd reveal it in court.  That was my first assignment in the new department that I found really suspicious.  We ended up avoiding it and never completed it.  At the concluding session of 1997 – [..] My boss Kamyshnikov came to me and said, "You must kill Berezovsky."

There is one relevant question that can be asked of Russian society, however, before going on to how the FSB got into power: were the Russian people ready for freedom from an autocratic, indeed, authoritarian State?  For that there is an answer from Boris Berezovsky:

Berezovsky -  So we can put forward – So a certain hypothesis can be put forward.  The better the opportunities a political system offers its members, the citizens, the more efficient the system is.  But the citizens must accept, voluntarily, certain limitations on free will.  A transition from a totalitarian system to a liberal one can only take place when enough of its citizens learn to accept certain inner limitations of free will.

Nekrasov – Perhaps the transition from external limitations to inner ones.

B – Exactly!

N -  Inefficient systems force external limitations.

[..]

B – What a price humans have to pay for knowledge.  How hard it is to rise above the common wisdom.

N- Is it even more difficult for Russians, would you say?

B -  I know what you mean.  The Russian mentality is that of slaves. That's why the system of forced limitations is so welcome. So why then am I advocating liberalism in Russia?  Am I contradicting myself, advocating freedom for the Russians, going against the nation's character?  So, is Russia ready, which means her people ready to take up the responsibility of freedom? I think they are ready.  Because once the tyrannical dictate was lifted, millions of entrepreneurs appeared, a myriad of independent politicians and journalists appeared.  Russia turned out fully prepared for this crucial, historical step.  We only needed to move forward and consolidate that freedom.  And so my main conflict with the authorities today  is about individual independence.  All those stupidities – media controls, "vertical power" – have one result.  Destruction of freedom in the minds of Russia's citizens.

One can see where Boris Berezovsky is a very dangerous man to the FSB and those that they support.  The betrayal of freedom in Russia post – USSR started at those places that were the worst off condition-wise.  This exploitation would not only put the criminal oligarchs in power, but they would do so with the help of the FSB and the new Duma which had barely gotten time to get itself together.   The film recounts a cover-up of this period in which Vladimir Putin was involved with a company he had going in Germany which was in contact with the Colombian Cartels and served as a money laundering outfit.  Putin was, at that point, head of the FSB while sitting on the board of that company.  This is recounted by Jürgen Roth, a German writer who has been tracking the Red Mafia's work:

Jurgen Roth - When the premesis of the SPAG here in the Frankfurt area were searched around lunchtime – Well, the offices were searched all day.  But around lunchtime, the Chancellor's office was informed.  That same day, the Russian Interior Ministry was tipped off about the search, which is strange.  Even before the search took place, the public prosecutor's office in Frankfurt tried to suppress the case.  What was on their mind was that Putin was central to this whole affair.  The prosecutor investigating the case didn't get any help. 

It all started with a report about money laundering in Liechtenstein.  In this report the BND, the federal intelligence service, there was a note about the SPAG company laundering money for Russian criminal organization called Tambovskaya.  And so the Public Prosecutor Kirkpatrick opened an investigation.  Soon after that, it was confirmed that money laundering was taking place, that the Tambovskaya connection existed and that Putin might be involved. 

When the company was founded, Putin was on the board of directors for half a year in 1993.  After that he was on the advisory board until 2000.  During that time he was in St. Petersburg and also already director of the FSB.  So he was on the advisory board of SPAG while he was the director of the FSB. 

Now I am familiar with the workings of the FSB.  If someone somewhere so much as farted, he got a written report about it.  And it's hardly plausible that Putin was not informed about all this, about what was going on with SPAG's money and that the people behind it were criminals, classic mafiosi.  He was under investigation for accepting large sums of drug money,  which is undisputed.

N- That was ascertained?

R – It was ascertained by the courts in Liechtenstein.  You can also track his longtime intelligence connections to Germany, to Dresden. I've got a list of all the intelligence officers from the GDR era, and Putin is on it.  Even back then, he kept close connections with the entire intelligence community involved in dirty business.

N – The East German?

R – The GDR intelligence service.  Stasi.

N- Corruption and things?

R – Not only corruption.  Corruption – That's a matter of course.  No one even discusses that anymore.  It's more to do with spying and destruction.  How do I destroy a political opponent?

This is not the first instance that Putin was involved with underhanded dealing for personal gain via criminal means.  This starts with a lead that Litvinenko gives:

Shortly after I gave the interview on Radio Liberty, publications appeared that accused me of slandering our president.  Not to mention that Putin was caught stealing metal assignments and funds in the early '90s in St. Petersburg.

To properly understand what Putin was doing in Leningrad it is important to hark back to what else was going on in the Non-Ferrous Metals outfits at the time, and here I wall draw on my prior piece A taste of Oil For Food and its chefs, which goes over the process of 'tolling'.  With the Russian economy crippled by State facilities being unable to make any payroll at all, the workers were down to barter of goods their facilities produced in exchange for other goods from other workers in other facilities.  This was causing problems as stuff like food wasn't made locally and had to be brought into many regions and without a cash  based system to work with, there was no way to barter ovens, say, for eggs, cheese and milk.  Those who stepped in to put money into these facilities were generally of two major classes: rich elites of the former Soviet State, and organized crime.  Some facilities did try entrepreneurial capitalism, yes, but for large metal works, aluminum plants, steel foundries, titanium smelters... heavy industry in other words... you needed cash.  Lots of cash.  And these 'investors' wanted a 'sweet deal' from the new government and they insisted on 'tolling'.

This form of 'tolling' is unlike having to pay a certain charge on a toll-based road, however, as that is a government tax on use of that road by those who travel on it.  Here it is something else entirely: the agreement by the government not to put a tariff on goods that the producers get in exchange for their output.  What this put in place was a system whereby the workers actually got paid a pittance, almost all of what was produced went outside the country, what came back after sales had no tariff on them and were then sold at above market prices locally.  If you run this sort of system then those running the business get to keep their overseas money, put a small amount in goods to come back, garner a huge windfall of increased prices for those goods versus what a competitive market would garner and then pocket those profits, as well.  Because State power is used to enforce who gets market share and is able to exclude exterior competition and their better managed systems, what you get is a near monopoly on certain regions and markets by what is effectively monopolies run by organized crime.  Isn't it great when you get to write the bills to be passed like this?

From this the section of the film in which Leningrad (St. Petersburg) comes into clear focus because the situation was one in which Putin was part of a transactional scheme to exchange raw materials for food, or metals for food in 1991-92.  Any FSB agent who understands this sort of region and its criminal element is set to make out like a bandit which is, exactly, what Putin did and was written up and dismissed from the program by local officials about the external affairs office and has since been made to disappear as a document and is very difficult to find copies of it anywhere, even on the Internet.  The value of the amount embezzled was $11.5 million which meant that the citizens of St. Petersburg would go hungry and food would be rationed there for the first time since WWII.  That amount is a low-end figure as it doesn't go into specific foodstuff costs which were left out from the contracts.  From the report:

There are reasons to suggest that partners did not intend to import foodstuffs to St. Petersburg.

[..]

The recommendations to refer the case to the city prosecutor's office and to remove Mr. Putin from his position.

In 2000 another investigation clarified that because of what happened St. Petersburg did not receive foodstuffs in excess of $92 million, but the total cost left unjustified to the committee amounts to $850 million.  All from an organization that was being run by Mr. Putin.

And how did Vladimir Putin get into power?

If you are the head of a secret police organization using illegal means to enforce power, to work with organized crime, and to partake of such crimes as well, and you have the power and means to undercut the judiciary and subvert military officers, then you are left with very little to resist you.  With that said there is one pretext for a State assuming additional powers and that is war.  In this case the war in Chechnya and, most critically, the second phase of it that started with the bombing of a bridge and then an apartment complex in Moscow.

Those bombings had one strange artifact to them: in the case of the bridge bombing there was an FSB agent found dead at the site of it and in the apartment complex bombing an FSB agent was indicted for having supplied the necessary explosives.  Or should it be said that these were Special Agents, for they were.  The denial of the FSB is, ostensibly, 'we couldn't have done it'.  Even though agents of the FSB are implicated.  Indeed this brings into question why a tank column was stopped outside of Grozny for days and then bombed just before the other attacks.  Tank columns do not stop by roadsides for days at a time as that is wasteful in men and resources who can be better used for doing other things, like not needing field maintenance.  If you are trying to put together a meme of advancing terrorist attacks, would there be a better way to do it than just as it was done?  Because terrorists, you see, don't work on 'front lines' and don't need to 'advance' via announcing themselves with periodic attacks along a given axis of movement: they are not military units.

To get more State power over media, over the economy, over people, is there any means better than a war?

If the secret police of a State using illegal means put forward a program to require the current regime to delegitimize itself, would there be any better way than to start what is, essentially, a civil war and then assert 'special powers' in 'rooting out terrorists' by that self-same secret police?  And then, in the midst of awful, bloody fighting, wouldn't it be nice to have political backing, even if from extreme nationalists, for such activity?  Because that also came with the Chechen war and is one of the most startling visual artifacts of the documentary: skinheads chanting for Putin while waving a flag with a black hammer and sickle in a white circle on a red field.  The swastika replaced by the hammer and sickle.  And chants for killing them all, the Chechens and, although none had any involvement in this, the Jews.

With the election of Vladimir Putin also came the election of a high number of FSB agents and officials also 'winning' elections so that every organ of the State was soon in control of the government.  Some may remember the terrorist attack on the theater in Russia where patrons were held captive by 'terrorist' gunmen.  One of those was an FSB agent who was put into a high position by Putin some months after the 'terrorist attack'.

If China points to international socialism becoming a formulation of national socialism, which is to say fascism, then when genocidal war is mixed into that, as is the case in Russia, you get a form of fascism known as Nazism. Of course it will be denied up and down the line, yet the supporters of State power continue to show up with proper symbology be it that twisty, interlocking geometric design of the New Dawn party in Greece, or the swastika replaced hammer and sickle flag in Russia.  This, most virulent form of socialism at the nationalist scale, is a horror for mankind... although not a lesser horror than international socialist kind as both look to kill to get to and remain in power.  Often with tens of millions dead in that quest.

The true horror is the attitude taken by prosecutors and governments outside of Russia when companies started by FSB agents or organized crime in Russia, and it is hard to say which is worse at this point, are then suspected of criminal acts.  Money laundering, drug running, and, of course, murder using exotic means like a highly rare, short lived, radioactive metal like Polonium.  Litvinenko thought he was safe in Great Britain, but safety is only an illusion unless the State will actually do its job to keep you safe from exterior attack... not turn a blind eye towards it or refuse to ask hard questions or even seek to shut down inquests.  Yet, in the West, we see that in Great Britain and Germany, and if that sort of thing is going in those States, one with the longest history of people seeking democratic freedom and the other the one place that should have learned its lessons about the horrors of NOT investigating such things, then what does that say about the rest of Europe and the West as a whole?

In the US we have a man like Eric Holder who, it must be remembered, was involved in some very sorry episodes in the Clinton Administration, proving to be duplicitous in the Elian Gonzales affair, who also put forward a pardon for Marc Rich.  The same Marc Rich who would show up in post-Soviet Russia to bring 'tolling' as a concept with him to teach to the oligarchs.  It is certain Vladimir Putin knew of Marc Rich – as the head of the FSB that would not escape his notice.  And as Marc Rich had investments in operations going across Russia, east to west, it is very likely that Vladimir Putin had more than a nodding acquaintance of Marc Rich's tactics and techniques.  Did Putin actually know Marc Rich, a man then on the lam from the FBI for questioning with an international search warrant out for him prior to his pardon?  Especially as Putin used the methodologies that Rich brought with him to absolute perfection, can that be just chalked up to being a real good study of those techniques?  You don't use them by accident, that's for sure, but with criminal intent as the two commissions investigating the starving of St. Petersburg pointed out.  And as the courts in Liechtenstein also pointed to in the case of SPAG.  Makes you wonder where SPAG got its money, doesn't it? 

Back to Eric Holder, for a moment, how does such a man pushing for a known organized crime participant to get a pardon, which he must have known in his position at the FBI, get a 'pass' by any political establishment?  How does a duplicitous public official with policing powers entrusted to him violate that trust and, yet, get promoted?  How does criminal operations of running guns to Mexican Cartels, and to other non-State operators overseas, against the treaties we have signed with these Nations, actually get a yawn from the media?

What does the End Game Against Freedom look like?

Vladimir Putin had many contacts in the intelligence and police community overseas.

Here's a thought.

President Eric Holder.

But only after some suitable 'national emergency' has taken place in which 'extraordinary powers' need to be used to 'stop' advancing 'attacks' by organizations that don't do advancing 'attacks'.  That is the equivalent in the US.

The End Game Against Freedom is a Police State.

Run by the Secret Police, not a dictator creating one but a dictator put in power by one.

Who watches the Watchmen?

10 Minutes Into The Future

I thank my lady for the title of this article! It was and is apt.

For many the concept of cyberpunk dystopianism was first introduced in Max Headroom, seen in the Max Headroom series on ABC from MAR 1987 to MAY 1988.  With fourteen shows produced, 13 were aired in the US and the 14th was aired as part of the Australian run of the series. It is a blended-season program much like The Prisoner by Patrick McGoohan which ran 17 episodes. Both programs had a first and second season squashed into a limited production run.  Max Headroom had an abbreviated first season and second season while The Prisoner was scheduled for a second season but had that cut and McGoohan wanted to wrap up the entire thought schema in one season a bit longer than normal.

Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future was a tv-movie in the UK, and the tagline '20 Minutes into the Future' was seen at the start of each episode of the series. Many of the elements seen in Max Headroom draw their lineage through cinematic productions of dystopian futures.  The most notable of them is Blade Runner (1982) directed by Ridley Scott, and the entire look of the city of Network 23 and Max Headroom could fit seamlessly into that dystopian future without missing a beat.  The same low level social dynamics of a post-futuristic world gone to ruin is part and parcel of both, down to fires in oil drums and the real lack of cars at street level.  So, too, are the social interactions between levels of society similar from the highest corporate level (Dr. Eldon Tyrell in Blade Runner and Ped Xing in Max Headroom) through the techno-geniuses that support them (J. F. Sebastian in Blade Runner and Bryce Lynch in Max Headroom) all the way down to the lowest level operatives of Matt Deckard and Edison Carter, who are the draw and appeal for their differences in being perhaps not human and more than just human both at the same time although in starkly different ways.  One can picture Matt Deckard confronting Roy Batty and then having Edison Carter land in on the confrontation with the help of Blank Reg and Big Time Television.

For all of that there are other precursors to cyberpunk television beyond just Blade Runner, although it hands off so many visual cues that the relationship is hard to miss. What makes it distinct from the 1980 made for TV movie Brave New World, is that the Aldous Huxley dystopianism is one of anti-septic neatness which is reflected by the anti-septic nature of thinking.  That world is a world which, however, bears resemblance to both Blade Runner and Max Headroom in that books are absent not because they are repressed or destroyed, like in Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 which was made into a BBC film in 1966, but because they are unwanted by a population now beyond learning.  Like in Fahrenheit 451, however, television now plays that central role which makes for the dystopian Max Headroom vision, and it is far more powerful than the multi-wall arrangements in Bradbury's work and closer to the Big Brother two-way dystopia of Orwell's 1984.  Much of the television movie adaptation in 1954 or the regular movie adaptation of 1984 in 1956 carries through as cinematic reminders in later works, often with the stark external scenery updated to cast a pall in colors that are dark and muted in modern works, of which Max Headroom takes part.  Coming from that lineage of Big Brother, two-way television, corporations blending into the State, and the removal of knowledge media from the world, Max Headroom gives us a glimpse of the cyberpunk pathway.  This is a pathway that has an endpoint in other films like Mad Max (1979) and Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981) complete with mohawk haircuts and lots of leather jackets and leggings.

It is amazing to think that in the span of 1979 to 1982 the entire cyberpunk dystopian future was encapsulated visually and thematically with the decaying and corrupt State with corporatism (and one can't help but see Rollberball (1975) as a precursor to this). From a 1984 collapse through the time of Max Headroom and Blade Runner is a part of this arc.  After that then goes through a further decay because they depend on resources that are failing, until the world falls into complete ruin in Mad Max and Mad Max 2.  The relatively anti-septic dystopian vision of an Aldous Huxley requires a system that is, itself, so highly dependent upon automation and resources that it cannot last. The enforced ignorance and numbing of the senses are preludes to the ideas later reviewed by other dystopian works,the outcome of which gets a transition phase seen in A Clockwork Orange (1971) where Anthony Burgess juxtaposes wartime lack of morality with everyday life and puts them together.  Stanley Kubrick in many ways sets the tone for the later dystopian works in that film to show a highly decadent society with highly authoritarian State on the verge of internal collapse as the State comes to embrace barbarism fully.  In Max Headroom those who see such barbarism are in the minority, but have Edison Carter to intrepidly risk life and limb to get the story of how the corporate world and utilization of State power by Network 23 is going wrong.

If there is anything that Max Headroom does represent it is that cry against the dying of the light, the collapse of the civilized State into its corporatist system which is, itself, not sustainable without a civilized population at its core.  That State has already removed the off-switch from televisions and utilize two-way technology to track ratings and, thusly, power.  Blood games (ala Rollerball) are not embraced while shrugging off the deaths of citizens due to commercials is seen by the new generation of elites as the price to pay for ratings.  From that and the body banks, lifted nearly directly from Larry Niven's Known Space works, comes a lowered valuation of life even when the birth of a baby is still seen as a special event even though the backdrop of the life that child will have is a grim one.  This is dystopian fiction with a bite to it and the slow degradation of man to becoming viewer in the hands of the media is one that begins to overwhelm, indeed not just co-opt but buy out, the State.  The adoring media of the Left today becomes the controlling media of politics and society tomorrow.  Big Brother is Network 23, indeed Orwell only lacked putting the BBC behind Big Brother to complete that circle in 1984.

For all of the darkness of a world sliding into Mad Max realms, there are glimmers of a future that doesn't need to be this bad.  First and foremost is that the Tyrell Corporation, Big Brother nor the Fordian State of Brave New World all lacked an older cohort that remembers not just ethics but displays them.  In this Network 23 has a person that is unlike all the others in a position of power in those dystopian futures: someone who has qualms about what he has helped to create and sees it as toxic.  That person is not Edison Carter, per se, nor Theora Jones his controller to get him to stories, nor Murray their producer, all of which are front-line functionaries to the programming for live shows which can be replaced or interjected at a moment's notice.  That person who is so different is Ben Cheviot who demonstrates ethical underpinnings in pulling lethal commercials and allows for the complicity of Network 23 working to get blood sports into the line-up even against the pull of ratings. For all the fun (or not so fun) parts shown for everyone else in the system, Ben Cheviot has a keen awareness of just what can and cannot be done to start showing the problems of the system that he has helped to promote.  Edison Carter would be a top, and soon dead, journalist as seen in the first program if not for Ben Cheviot willing to back him against the rest of Network 23's interests of the moment. While Ben Cheviot got to the Board of Directors of Network 23 he must have demonstrated competence and ability to deal with competitors to a large degree as it is a cut-throat position just to be on that board.  By having a better 'feel' for viewership and how ratings work, he is able to become the Chairman of the Board and allows Edison Carter to start showing the underbelly of Network 23, the State and corporations... because it is good for ratings.  Ethics sells.  Ethics are power when chained to moral certainty.

Edison Carter, Theora Jones, Murray, Blank Reg and others also show this form of moral certainty and ethics that go with them.  In many ways Blank Reg (a Blank is someone who has gotten themselves erased from all records to be truly free) lives that life of moral and ethics, live or die, continually and is an energetic force to be reckoned with.  Although pirate station Big Time Television may not get the ratings, it does work a wedge into television of an older sort that he still remembers.  In this way Blank Reg is the counter-part to Ben Cheviot, although the two could never be mistaken, their firm standing upon what they see as right and wrong is not only similar but their requirements have put them in crucial positions on either side of the Network/public divide in which the State is part of the Network.  Blank Reg isn't just hitting at the television level but at the level of a Blank, which is to say trying to get people to actually ingest more than television as part of their thought processes.  Like Brave New World books aren't burned, just not circulated or used, they are seen as relics of a past long gone and no longer needed.  Yet it is Blank Reg who tries to get people interested in reading (are they even literate anymore?) and touts books as 'a non-volatile storage media... you should have one'.  In our modern age of e-readers what will become of books?  Not text on screen but printed books?  That non-volatile storage media is immune to EMP and CME effects, they will survive them while your e-reader, your PC, your laptop, the servers that serve up text, and the rest of the modern infrastructure goes away.  Hardcopy back-up can be burned but cannot be erased, cannot be changed once printed, and if carefully tended can last many life times.  Your PC is obsolete the day you buy it.  Ditto your cellphone and all other digital media.

The people of that digital media are represented by Bryce Lynch, late teen techno-nerd, and his work for Network 23.  Bryce is somewhat detached from the goings-on around him and in his own self-created world of technology.  He is more than willing to create commercials that kill (although only as a side-effect of those who no longer exercise ANY), more than able to take a brain-dump of Edison Carter for the old Chairman of the Board to protect him, and then willing to help Edison Carter at various points throughout the program.  In many ways a family style dynamic between Edison, Theora, Bryce and Ben form, although it is very underplayed it does have effects on Bryce to both humanize him and show that he does care about people close to him.  He takes part in the creation of digital personalities from direct brain dumps, starting with his pet parrot (who shows up in the first episode and then is replaced by a screen of the digital parrot thereafter in its cage) and ending with Edison Carter which yields the namesake of the show: Max Headroom.

Max Headroom is only tangentially the star of his own program, with Edison Carter (the source for Max's altered ego) being the real one.  Max is a completely digital being (although there were no digital effects when the series was produced to make him, so it was done through SFX with make-up and only a digital background done for later episodes) who is born in the lab of Bryce Lynch.  Max's home is the Network 23 internal network which has external feeds to two-way televisions.  Thus Max starts out with the ability to grow in capability and, when he is threatened with erasure, he can leave Network 23 for the rest of the external system.  Max, as Edison's altered ego with far fewer inhibitions, is in turns smarmy, insightful, comical and devious and a total creature of the Network ratings system.  Yet he is also its critic beyond mere critique, as he asks what are the effects of this visual pap that is pushed out to the world at large? 

For all of the sometimes juvenile humor of Max, he is also a person that grows beyond that rather shallow exterior of head and shoulders, giving insightful questions into the nature of authority, television, the State and the human condition.  While he may no longer remember much of what it feels like to have a body, Max Headroom grows into this larger system that gives him more than a physical presence and one that is at once as omniscient as Big Brother and as limited as the humor of a teenager.  Scary in one regard, yes, but he does not have a controlling nature and is as irrepressible, and yet open, as Edison Carter.  For an altered ego he is still learning about the Id and Super Ego, those parts necessary to create a solid moral view with ethics and compassion.  That he has that capability and shows it is beyond any doubt, because Edison Carter has them.  That these are skewed by his environment is also without a doubt as Max Headroom is at once more and far less than human, and for all the faux humbleness of a game show host he often displays real doubts about himself and who he is.

So if, when the show was aired, it was 20 minutes into the future where is it now?

My lady answered 10 minutes and she is absolutely right on that in many ways.

What would it take to subvert the modern Internet into a purveyor of Network 23 (and other networks in the power grab)?  The answer is very little: a government power grab in support of television over other forms of communication, probably done by 'emergency measure' as is hinted at in 1984.  Two-way television is, essentially, here in many regards but to be truly controlled as is seen in 1984 or Max Headroom would require a wholesale change of television sets... without off buttons.  And as the Internet now is part of the cellphone network, it would also control your two-way digital phone as they already do for emergency tracking.  Adjust the software and the 'off button' goes away.  As a 'government emergency' requires control of information, any information deemed 'subversive' or 'anti-government' will be removed as 'dangerous speech'.  Like the blog post you are reading.

To be clear the Internet is a threat to centralized power as it is a distributed, shared set of networks (a network of networks) that works via a set of common address standards.  Any government that can get a hold of the address look-up tables can, quite literally, partition the networks from each other.  By blocking off entire blocks of networks and then screening them, speech and thought that isn't sanctioned is restricted.  What happens after that is a promulgation of 'sanctioned' software that only allows for connections to sanctioned blocks of the network.  Like Network 23 and its cohorts in Max Headroom.  With that said there is a set of hacker skills that has permeated society as, from the very first episode, we see that Theora (Edison's controller for live feeds) has skills to get past common and everyday computer security not only inside Network 23 but outside of it as well.  In contrast Murray, members of the Board of Network 23 and various others do not have such skills to any great extent, but members of the Blank community do as it is a survival necessity.  Edison Carter has rudimentary security skills, mostly to deal with physical security, and his friends also have a range of skills from simple deception of security systems to skills close to those of Bryce Lynch.   

Getting around security blocks to get information is one of the skills necessary in the newsroom, necessary to criminals, necessary to the Blanks and only the elites can do without even the basics of them.  In a post-Internet segmented world the ability to get around the segmentation and through security routines: the very security that the Networks and others seem to think they need make common trespass against such systems widespread not out of malice but to just get work done and no one thinks anything is wrong about it.  Even when they go after the most secure records, it is done with an acknowledgement that there are penalties, but nothing morally wrong about it.  Pervasive security doesn't make anything more secure and, contrarily, makes going against security measures common place.  For all the security that Network 23 and others seek, they just add complexity to getting around such measures and get no real security against the mildly determined.

At the top of this realm is Max, although he is unskilled at security circumvention he is born directly into this cyberworld.  He can and does run afoul of security measures, yes, but he also demonstrates an ability to move from network to network, area to area, building to building without much regard for who owns what or what security measures they have in place.  If the centralized network headquarters are bastions of security, the outlying network is a hodge-podge of everything from insecure televisions to relatively secure private systems.  And make no mistake about it, in the world of Max Headroom all security is relative and no one has planned on a sentient cyber entity moving through systems, which raises a whole question of just what is security to such a being?

The physical problems of any of the relatively advanced, that is to say further along in the timeline of decay, worlds that are represented by the generic continuum that coalesced in the late 1970's and early 1980's is one that comes quickly to our civilization once basic maintenance and upkeep can no longer continue.  Cities like Gary, IN and Detroit, MI starkly show how entire sections of cities can go to ruin in less than a decade through depopulation alone.  The hints in Blade Runner and Max Headroom of A Clockwork Orange style elitist inculcation of barbarism leading to decay and retribution would leave our current physical infrastructure in such ruins as seen in those worlds.  Even with such relatively minor organizations (or lack thereof) like the current OWS movement (backed by Unions, socialists, communists and anarchists) the decay inside those encampments has shown rapes, murders and the spread of communicable diseases that are at a first point on a decay continuum.  If the goal of those backers is to get city blocks set ablaze with radical and relatively pointless intent and violence, then the dystopian continuum at A Clockwork Orange will be set and in place.  It is but a short transition through a 1984 regime that then seeks to restore some order and, lacking that, collapses back to corporatism of a Blade Runner or Max Headroom style outcome. 

This outcome is not hard to get to, at all, and while those who seek power may think they can get it permanently, what they actually get is transient power as no centralized system can run a complex world.  The problem in bringing on the moral and ethical decay necessary to get to that point is that it cannot and will not stop at the lowest levels, no matter how many are killed in the attempt, because the decay has already started by those who brought it on.  When you welcome in barbarism as a means to an end you don't find yourself civilized once you have done so as you have let go of the very support of civilization necessary to be civilized.  In the world of Max Headroom there is a desperate attempt to retain and spread the necessary morality and ethical backing is being done by a very few at Network 23.  We never learn much of how the world got to the point of the Max Headroom world, which points to just how unpleasant the transition was.

The trick is not to get to that point in the first place and to retain civilized habits and remind our fellow citizens of those necessary habits and costs to oneself as the price to have a technological civilization.  Civilization isn't free, and your freedom is without price.

We are all plumbers now

Joe Wurzelbacher had the temerity to believe that if you are playing catch football on the front lawn of your home and a politician comes up and asks if you have a question for him, that you can, indeed, ask him a question and maybe, with some luck, get an answer.

He did.  Here is the YouTube capture of that on Fox News:

And now the political Left is out for blood, going after Joe The Plumber.

In 24 hours we get more investigation of Joe The Plumber, than we have gotten in 24 months on Sen. Barack Obama.  Indeed, the rabid attack on him, his personal affairs and his actual plumbitorial status have been called into question.  This is a guy working for a company doing plumbing work, who is middle class, at best, not seeking political limelight and figured that it was a free country in which the common man, when asked by a politician who is also a citizen if he wanted to ask a question, that he could do so and get an answer.  He probably expected what he ALWAYS gets from politicians: "I will get back to you on that."

If there was any surprise it was Sen. Obama deciding to give an ANSWER.

Yes, as soon as a politician on the Left says anything about wanting to 'spread the wealth around' via increasing taxes and meets up with someone who will be HURT by that, well, the ability to become unhinged is quite astounding.  First there was this strange idea that someone Sen. Obama approached might be a 'plant'!  Unfortunately, as I've looked at before, such plants live better in the hothouse of a debate audience, not out on the street where all sorts of foreign things can get to their leaves, roots and infest their limited shade. 

Then comes the 'he isn't a plumber' by some definition of a local council and possible Union backing.  Of course his business that he WORKS FOR has to certify his work and he is a JOURNEYMAN who is seeking to get his license and one of those must LEARN his trade under a more experienced individual.  But beyond that, and really taking the cake, are those on the left who think that certification in a profession means someone actually DOES A GOOD JOB.

Ok, I grew up in the environs of Buffalo in one of its better suburbs, which put me about a mile from the city line and in what the rest of America would call 'lower middle class'.  My relatives, aunts, uncles, cousins, and a large number of their friends were what we would call 'blue collar working class' or even 'working poor'.  Strange that they did not seem to be 'oppressed by the system' and led good lives working a wide range of jobs in: knitting factories for conveyor belts, food distribution warehouses, construction work, long-haul trucking, tool and die making and mechanical product finishing, compressor construction, food services industry... friends of the family worked in similar jobs in precision metalworking, surveying, metal casting, carpentry, electricians, and, yes, plumbing.  In my family, my father was in the lower echelons of electrical engineering for large motors and I had a cousin working for a huge aluminum conglomerate in the smelting operations control sector.  Other jobs taken by family members, including myself, included cafeteria management, clearing warehouses (you can't really call it cleaning them), secretarial work for a small business in school supply, putting up pools, checking finance drafts against payouts for banks, and a wide range of other things.  My post just previous to this looks at the DIY spirit in which everyone had the basics of knowing that if you couldn't find the exact right person to do something yourself, your friends and family members could find one for you.  And if worse came to worse, you could, indeed, DIY with some help of a friend or two.

I have some news for the elitists who think you need a certification to do plumbing work: that would be news to my father who did that in the home and understood its principles and how to properly solder seal a fixture.  Worked, too.  And if you needed something major done, you basically went the Friend-Of-A-Friend route and found someone who did good work, was reliable and charged decently.  Even if it *was* under the table, you did not give a good, hot damn for paying off bureaucrats when what you needed was good work at a reasonable price.  I've met a person or two who *never* seek to leave the 'journeyman' status as they have a good and portable skill without any overhead that can allow them to quickly move from company to company when times are rough.  If you do that for 20 years you probably have someone who is better than any certified master of the trade.

When these people want to strike out on their own and form a small business, they seek backers amongst their friends and family, who know they do good work and know how to manage themselves in many different situations.  They will do the base minimal amount to get the check boxes checked without wanting a high cost bureaucratic overhead,and so they form up garages, small shops, appliance repair stores, plumbing concerns, electricians businesses, and on and on and on.  Each and every damned tax aimed at the 'rich' seems to end up hitting these people squarely in the stomach, and their businesses SUFFER because of high minded people wanting to 'spread the wealth around'.

I've got a newsflash: they ARE spreading the wealth around by HIRING people to do GOOD WORK and PAY THEM.

Pay them a damned sight more than welfare or minimum wage, too.  I've personally seen small businesses where the OWNER is NOT the highest paid individual because that owner of the business values good people with good work reliability, high skills and the ability to GET JOBS DONE.  Scary, isn't that?  An owner of a business not creaming off the top and being the highest paid individual in the company?  Tells you something about how much they value good work and a damned good work ethic, and deny themselves so that those they hire can make a good wage and feed their families.  They do that because they are dedicated to their business, not making a buck for themselves. 

When you tell *that* class of business owners that they need to 'spread the wealth around', then you have just handed out the worst possible insult to them that you can imagine.  And you are also insulting their workforce, even if it is under 10 people, who KNOW that is how that owner operates and dedicate themselves to doing good work to show that they earn their pay and actually deserve it.

I know this from the best experience possible: seeing it in action during the first 25 years of my life growing up as I did in the family I did.

I frequented businesses and garages where the owner and three other guys did FANTASTIC WORK at a DECENT PRICE and would regularly come in UNDER their cost estimates.  I've been to the family run hardware stores looking for nearly impossible to find parts and having someone rummage around for it, find it, and then sell it to me at markup on the original cost... and if the part had been sitting there for 20 years, I got a BARGAIN.  I've been to auto wrecking yards looking for small parts and coming in with a tray of same and the owner looking at me and saying 'take it, no one ever bothers with that stuff' and I was willing to pay upwards of $50 bucks for stuff I had to dig around and find myself.  He wouldn't hear of it.  He got himself a loyal customer, who found this man through his OTHER customers, many of which were the shops I used.

Do I know guys like Joe The Plumber in my life?

Hell YES.

I never, in my life, expected to see a politician or his adoring followers EVER attempt to demean someone like Joe The Plumber.  These are the working stiff backbone of our society that keeps it working well on a friendly basis and you cannot enforce friendliness upon them from on high.  I've even known racists and bigots who would STILL do work contrary to their outlook and do it WELL because, hey, 'a buck's a buck, a customer's a customer, you know?'  Somehow the color of money and doing a good job would OVERRIDE those things.  That is not to say that all such will do that, but it is interesting to note that for all the 'racial problems' I hear of in America, no one addresses the fact that the GOD DAMNED WORK STILL GETS DONE BY SOMEONE.

As my Uncle Ed used to do when hearing 'how bad things were', he would look out the window and say:

"It can't be that bad.  No bodies in the streets."

His younger brothers fought in World War II and they survived the Great Depression, so he just might have had something there.

As for Joe, he wanted to see if he could get a LOAN to buy a business to run it: he did not earn over $250,000, he was going to have to borrow it.  And even if he did that he did not expect to change his living circumstances as he knew that running a business left him little for himself in the way of pay.

And he is excoriated over a tax lien?  And Sen. Obama's Treasurer ISN'T?

Joe The Plumber might be some distant relation to Charles Keating and yet Sen. Obama hobnobbing with a multi-billionaire involved in the Oil For Food scandal, Tony Rezko and a contract in Iraq that saw a man prosecuted there and now in Chicago supporting Sen. Obama ISN'T IMPORTANT?

Excuse me?

That is over-the-top hypocrisy of the first order by all those looking at Joe Wurzelbacher and trying to run him down.

Particularly if his own BOSS lied to him about the status of the company and how work is done.

And, yeah, I've seen that happen too.  Cutting bureaucratic corners to make a living, and then having a load of bricks dropped on you for doing that.  Believe it or not, sometimes that happens to good companies who are trying to obey the law and can't keep up with every freaking change done by politicians at the behest of labor unions, regulators and bureaucrats.  Each of which makes it more expensive to have a small business... big businesses can absorb that cost and pass it along as a minor increment in cost. 

Small businesses CAN'T.

What do you call it when government regulations reward large businesses by removing the competitive ability of small ones, and then dictating how the large businesses will be run?

It has a word in the political lexicon attached to it.

Fascism.

Those who support big government and 'spreading the wealth around' via it?

Fascists.

What does mandating 'good behavior' and punishing those that do not have the same political view require?

A Totalitarian State.

Yeah, kinda apparent by the way the Left is reacting.  Apparently they also forget that such States tend to 'eat their own young' and supporters at a horrific rate.  No matter how nice the State, the greatest threat to it are those who brought it into power...

Because we are all starting to look like plumbers to the Elite.

Good luck on the stopped up drains.

When two threads meet

It is not all that often that my reading in paper meets up with an interesting idea on the net and the two actually have a direct crossing point.  The posting was a link by Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit to a look at SF movies by our friend and taser volunteer at Popular Mechanics, Eric Sofge, to see about the prophetic forecasts of SF.  This is a pretty much perennial late-night topic at SF conventions when there is nothing better to talk about, although most of that usually looks at the literary form, not the cinematic form.  Still, anyone who has been in a few of those knows the basic ground rules:  which film best depicts realistic science and science based extrapolation that could or has been done since its showing up?

Like all good sessions this one has a different form, however, as SF also looks at humanity, society and government, and how they respond to the changes in science.  Here the criticism of the 'utopian' form is a high art, and each casts their eyes to things like Orwell's 1984 (available at The Complete Works of George Orwell site) or Huxley's Brave New World (available at Huxley.net), and similar views on works that do not concentrate specifically on the outcomes of government and society, but use them as the gestalt of presentation, like Frank Herbert's DUNE or Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series.  From great works to lesser ones (like William F. Nolan's Logan's Run) the ability of film to capture these views has been difficult.

Where this intersects with my current reading is the book by Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism.  The review of western and US history, in particular, is deeply disturbing as it shows that the 'memory hole' of 1984 is being married up with the 'do it for your own good' view of Brave New World, to give us something far worse than either:  a technocratically led society where the elite get to decide for the masses what is good for the masses and the State.  This set of views is the Americanized form of Fascism, and the details of the much over-glorified 'progressives' and current crop of 'Third Way' politicians (stretching the bipartisan envelope to include Bill Clinton, George W. Bush to the current nominal selectees of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain) each pressing for technocratic 'experts' and 'government control' over aspects of life in the US that would be chilling to anyone told of such in the 19th century.  The lauding of the 'good' of technology would then be criticized at separating out control of it from society and given to that institution least suited to controlling it: government.

This anti-individual form of 'progressive' views, where the State controlled by 'experts' wipes away the 'primitive common man' was actually presented before 1984 or Brave New World, in cinema.  That work was by the same man that coined the term 'Liberal Fascism' to describe the route that progressives during the 1930's  should take to head towards the future:  H. G. Wells.  The work that would embody this is The Shape of Things to Come (available as etext at Adelaide University) which Wells, himself, turned into the screenplay for the movie Things to Come.  The film version in particular, is highly prophetic, but the book version, also, has its shares of prophecy, including a Polish Corridor struggle leading to a World War. 

Concentrating on the film version, the next World War, like the first, would not end quickly and would be global in fighting and outcome: technology would allow for it to spread to all corners of the earth and then drag on for decades.  As the war continues the civilization would falter and then decline as natural resources and the productive capacity were either ravaged by war or lacking fuel.  The warm and friendly Everytown at the beginning of the film in the mid-1930's has turned into a rubble strewn husk of a town ruled by a local warlord.  In from the air would arrive a well dressed, sophisticated man in uniform who would be announcing that a new order was arriving from those who knew better on how to control technology and, thus, society.  This airman represented the very lofty group 'Wings Over The World' which would then drop non-lethal 'Gas of Peace' bombs to knock everyone out and allow a benign take-over of society.  After that, 'civilization' run by the technocrats would have returned, glorious new cities arise and a large broadcast system so that everyone could hear and see the State announcements invented to keep folks informed of the latest techno-marvel.

As prophetic SF it is one of the most chilling views of the future, the nature of Fascism and the concept of a 'good State' controlling everything and removing the 'unhealthy' views of 'primitive' man.  Things to Come is one of the clearest, most forceful of the Anglo views of Fascism of the mid-1930's and the greatest pronouncement of the 'good' that will come to mankind when the State is in control of everything.  It is also one of the smoothest bits of support for technocratic dictatorship ever produced outside of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy or Stalin's USSR (which has a long and storied legacy of same dating back into the 1920's with The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, being a prime first example of the genre in the non-prophetic, propagandistic method).  The technology, itself, during the beginning and middle portions of the film are all well known, and it adheres to the SF view of 'invent as little as possible and then show how it changes society and culture'.  The war of tanks, aircraft, nerve gas, and then disease warfare gets out of hand and things collapse with the original war becoming a series of local survival conflicts as the basis for industrial society are lost.  Indeed, this would be one of the first 'post-apocalypse' films and The Road Warrior would fit right in to this view of the world.

While metal monocoque aircraft were not unknown during the filming of Things to Come, in 1935-36, the film sticks to the known 'fabric falcons' of biplanes for viewer familiarity.  Thus when 'Wings Over The World' delivers its benign bombs from huge mono-wing, metal skinned aircraft, they have a dramatic and cinematic flavor when compared to the older wood and fabric aircraft that mankind has been stuck with.  The aircraft used looks very much like a post-WWII heavy bomber, like the B-36, thus making it a harbinger of what technological change could look like.  Delivery of of various forms of 'knock-out' gas have been used to varying degrees of success, but conceptually remains a distinct possibility as a 'non-lethal agent' if destructive side-effects can be avoided which has been troubling to date as dosage cannot be precisely administered.

Hands down, for predicting technology, Things to Come tops just about everything else on the list because it did invent sparingly and along basically known lines of science.  The large generators and such are extrapolated from then known designs, and are more or less infeasible due to sizing constraints.  Likewise the super video system (and this hearkens over to Blade Runner) is outside the envelope of now current technology, but not beyond thin-film display technology now starting to come into the marketplace.  And in a greatly amusing twist for the modern viewer, the basing of 'Wings Over The World' is out of Basra.  Iraq. 

And set on eliminating all other Nation States to subsume humanity under one, single State.

Perhaps Saddam watched the movie?

It is in the societal realm that Things to Come is less than prophetic and trying to be visionary, but grasping propaganda, instead.  The film's view, from Wells, is one that sees man 'liberated' from his base needs and ending with this line to re-inforce *why* a global state is such a good idea:

"...if Man is merely an Animal then he must fight for every scrap of happiness he can, but if he is something more, then he must strive for more — the Universe or nothing - which shall it be?"

That is the harsh and diametric view that is the point of Fascism:  the way to the glorious State to rule everyone and everything, or nothing.  It is also a very Christian view of the divinity of man, and if we could just set ourselves free from base desires we could have the universe and eternal happiness right here on Earth.  And what better instrument to *supply* that eternal happiness than the State, and what better State to do that than the one that benignly eradicates all other States that do not fit with this pre-conception of man?

When I hear those saying that the UN is a 'first try' at a global state and that it is 'inevitable', please do watch Things to Come.  The implication of a global state is that we cannot come to agreement amongst ourselves and are foredoomed to self-annihilation without it.  And if we put the 'experts' in control of everything and homogenize humanity and get rid of different cultures to form a common one, then all will be sweetness and light with the State telling us what is good and bad for us as individuals.  And if 'multiculturalism' is pressed into service to 'raise all cultures to equality' then those that harbor concepts that murder of women for any acts of marital transgression are EQUAL to those where a court would step in to administer fair and even justice without regard to sex, race or ethnicity.  That, too, homogenizes culture and removes differences especially when done from the top-downwards as stoning from religious views becomes exactly as equal and uplifting as due process in a court of law for equal justice.  Discrimination becomes injustice, and allowing injustice to murder and not recriminate it become justice. 

If the idea of a technocratic elite led by 'the best principles' going in to bomb primitives and then removing 'unwanted views' is anathema to you, then why is it perfectly acceptable to press 'unwanted views' upon everyone else and claim that all these views are equal?  That *is* the 'Wings Over The World' view, save that they have decided one way and you another, but the concept being pressed is exactly the same: a given political view needs to be impressed upon everyone to eliminate all differences to get a homogenous humanity to control.

That *is* Fascism: State control over society from cradle to grave.  No exceptions allowed or permitted.

In the genre of resistance to Fascism and State control, SF does have some pretty dark novels like Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (which, ironically, had been deeply censored since its first printing and was only restored for its 50th Anniversary) and many films have given us those views from the previously mentioned film versions of 1984 and Brave New World, to such originals as Gattaca.  One would think that the individual fighting against the all-powerful State would be compelling cinema and gain some popularity as one can be looking at the future and yet still basing the premise of the individual's struggle to be superior to that of the State's need for control.  In cinema we do get films like the darkly conspiratorial Total Recall, in which who is trying to control the protagonist or if, indeed, there is even a 'reality' or a 'conspiracy' are all thrown up for grabs, to such light things as The Truman Show.  What we are served up, instead, are the 'resistance to the conspiracy du jour' like The Bourne Identity or The Manchurian Candidate, which both offer up villains that have become staples for films needing generic villains:  Corporations, Government Agencies, or the nefarious cross-mixture of Corporations and Government.  The flip side of these sorts of films are those where government by its size is benignly evil, so that 'doing good' means you end up getting targeted.  Here the list gets a bit more diverse with the very humorous Brazil being a top candidate to the more traditional Blue Thunder where the nefarious government/military/corporation conspiracy complex is trying to foist a super armed helicopter on the LAPD under the guise of 'protecting the Olympics', all the way back to Fritz Lang's Metropolis, where robotics meant to keep the workers under control ends up overthrowing the existing order of things with much chaos ensuing.

The very last category is the one where the pressure to conform from government and society is arrayed against the individual.  While 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 are part of this genre, actually getting past the immediate films to find similar works gets difficult.  Here the tools of government to make individuals conform is paramount, as once control over society is established, nothing is off-limits to the State to 'do good'.  When the rest of humanity is controlled by the State either via drugs, 'discipline', 'training', or pure removal from the population (either via imprisonment or killing) the totalitarian State has no limits to disallow any form of coercion.  Only if an individual is of interest to the State for reasons of the State are there limits, and the rare individual that has such value points out to where it will go to excess for those with lesser or diminished value to the State as individuals become replaceable elements in the entire working setup. 

Because most stories would end up in the end of the individual involved, this genre remains the darkest as the final extinguishing of human identity into group identity is not a pretty sight to behold.  When governments are given such free reign, as they have been under many authoritarian and totalitarian states, the horrors of torture rooms, rape rooms, and feeding individuals into plastic shredders and taking that on video tape to distribute in his neighborhood as a warning, makes this a very, very grim view of the world. From the Cold War era comes most of these as allegorical tales about the subversion of individuals into communal thinking, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which has a true alien life replacing people we know with ones that only seem like humans.  The 1978 version was, perhaps, the most chilling as the psychologist, who is seen as the quintessential 'expert', played by Leonard Nimoy, underwent no real change in personality at all.  While there are many 'invasion' themed films, actually seeing humanity having given itself willingly into this condition is rare and the fight against conformity even rarer.

That is why Fascism is so very compelling: to get from your current state to the 'desired' end-state, it should really happen instantaneously.  No fuss, no muss, no bother.

Modern 'progressives' want to get to that State, but find the intermediate steps to be temporarily good, but counter-productive in the longer term.  Still the supposed 'good' of coming to depend on the State for everything is worth the 'ills' and 'problems' which can then be raised to heights and pontificated about to bring about more State controls that never, truly, address the ills and make the problems, themselves, more intractable and insoluble.  Giving racial 'preferences' instead of 'righting past wrongs' continues on a set of race-based agendas far past righting a wrong.  Encouraging welfare and then having children out of wedlock makes those women doing so perpetually dependent upon the State and destroys family life by not holding men accountable as fathers.  That ill brings up 'youth pregnancy' as culture collapses without stability of male and female views in a family, and in no time at all you get a child brought up believing they are entitled to having the basics of life provided for them ad infinitum.  Soon a once vibrant culture deteriorates into crime and disorder as the order provided by the family and teaching the necessity of law disappear.  Each 'crisis' to handle the problem with a State funded handout makes the entire cycle worse and destroys individuality in an attempt to create a true nameless, faceless class of identical individuals with identical beliefs.  Attempt to instill 'pride' fall flat as there is nothing to be prideful *of* if one does not have a basis for having a self-perception beyond race and class.  Soon race and class identity are pushed which makes the entire suite of problems 'intractable' and 'needing more money from government' for an ill that was best solved by the people involved getting a hand-up via self-responsibility and self-reliability.  Remove the latter and the ability of an individual to *be* individual falls.

Those that sign up to this are seeking a 'Third Way' that is not 'Right' or 'Left' but is wholly totalitarian in outlook and schema.  If these 'experts' are so smart, how come they cannot run a government agency efficiently?  And if so wise, why do they fail to give prudent advice when raised to positions of even trivial power and, in business, government and industry, become petty and controlling over such small amounts of responsibility handed to them?  To correct *that* comes 'oversight' which then requires more 'experts' and, incidentally, more cost and overhead that is non-productive.  But never fear, government will step in with *more money* to 'fix' the problem and put more people into that system... which we call 'health insurance' but is, in fact, a subsidy given to a paperwork management system that sometimes delivers 'health care'.  After inflation the cost difference between what your grandparents, who used 'health care' sparingly and took care of themselves, and your cost is that not of greed but of paperwork, overhead and 'management' between what goes on between you and a doctor.  Never fear, however, the State will 'help' by adding more 'oversight' and putting more people into the system.

Between point A and point B there is a treadmill running ever faster and elevating as you work harder to stay in place.  Point B looks so great to get to!  Until you realize that no matter how fast you run, how hard you try, you will soon be giving up everything to stay in place... until you are exhausted and give up to those who have been egging you on for the 'greater good' and 'benefits' to be provided at point B.  All those lovely things are, like in Stalin's USSR, only cardboard cutouts filled with nothing although they look like such pretty things on the outside.  And every time a goody is added, you are told to give more and more effort as it really is worth the cost... isn't it?  That is what we are told when government is supposed to do more and more and more, while being less and less and less capable and efficient of doing anything.  That may start off sounding like a lovely 'Wings Over The World' ideal, to push more to government until it is everything... but, if you are lucky, you end up with Brazil and NOT 1984.

What Things to Come left out between A and B was the unfortunate part of what happened to the diverse peoples of the world once the ever benevolent technocrats got to them.  If a society did not want or, by their own view, *need* rescue... that is too bad, they GOT IT ANYWAYS.  All to that 'greater good' of 'progress'.  What is forgotten is that 'change' is NOT progress.  I am sure that 'Wings Over The World' changed a *lot* of things... but I wouldn't call it progress by any extent of the imagination.