Wired State

Pre-Occupied

Typical "meme" ad from Adbusters Culturejammers.

I've been collecting some notes for awhile to write something about Kalle Lasn, the odious Adbusters fellow who instigated the whole Occupy Wall Street mayhem, but have been busy and seem to keep putting it off.

But I just want to park here something to keep following, which is Lasn's latest call to harass Goldman Sachs with unruly crowds from the Occupy dregs.

I caught sight a few weeks ago of Democracy Now a short blurb, faithfully reporting Lasn's call to shut down 73 global offices of Goldman Sachs.

Well, hmm, it's been two weeks now, what happened? Everyone was supposed to use the tweet hash tag #Goldman.

I checked and found nothing for awhile, and now just found something from yesterday, with a wan 5 re-tweets -- and most of the use of the hashtag is in fact on neutral or positive stories, i.e. that Goldman is selling gold; perhaps it's time to buy? etc.

Did the action fizzle before it started?

Imagine that, despite the Globe & Mail also giving it upbeat replay, and of course Forbes, which should re-dub itself Capital Tool Breaker sometimes, I swear (and you have to wonder why the guy covering Brazil and Russia has to cover the Occupy Wall Street's calls for demonstrations).

So what's up?

When I caught sight of the fact that none other than the Kremlin had hired Goldman Sachs to be their PR booster to get investments, I had to wonder if Kalle Lasn would eventually get a memo that the big action should be called off.

That is, he wouldn't have to be on the agitprop dis list, or even be an agent of influence, to "just know" that if the illustrious Motherland had hired Goldman Sachs, they shouldn't be savaged -- at least not yet, before they managed to turn the tables on the Magnitsky list announcement, which already had seen Rsusia "cleverly" announce a list of American torture suspects -- and of course, that's a ludicruous mixture of people whose torture advocacy actually has been repudiated, like John Yoo, and the prosecutor who rightfully prosecuted Victor Bout, the notorious arms dealer. Goldman may not be in Magnitsky-list reversing, but it's interesting.

Naturally, every time you try to criticize Russia, some prog wit tells you that American "banksters" should be arrested. Well, actually, they are, like this very Goldman Sachs trader. But it's never enough, and they aren't interested really in justice to restore the system; they're interested in overthrowing the system.

It's just a hunch there could be a connection here to the fizzle, but another possible link is Obama, of course. Now, given how Goldman Sachs has bankrolled Obama's election and re-election, you could posit that the radical left pressuring Obama might target Goldman. But maybe not; maybe they are also susceptible to signals from Obama to shut up.

And it's interesting that the new US ambassador to Canada, where Kalle Lasn lives, is the Goldman Sachs guy, Bruce Heyman, a partner in Chicago.

Well, I just look at these strange coincidences regarding first, Russia's hiring of the would-be target of Goldman Sachs -- because the old trails of Soviet influence of Western social movements are still heavily worn, and show up obviously in RT, the Kremlin's TV station, and its guests.

And then I notice Obama's new Canadian ambassador-designate (he still has to be approved by Congress).

Of course, it could be just that the "action" didn't get started yet, or Occupy just doesn't get the following it once had (that seems for sure) despite still-positive press coverage. I see there's a hideous attempt to whitewash the Occupy story with this saccharine new video, Occupy Love. Do watch Occupy Unmasked as an antidote I just bought this and it's really quite something to see -- many scenes of violence, and some defectors telling the truth about Occupy.

 

 

Googlization of Obama for America, Organizing for Action

Yes, soon, I may be able to retire from blogging about the Wired State, which I'm not particularly good at, because there are better bloggers with more resources and more attention on this subject now, for example at Red State.

I didn't use to read Red State much at all, but after the elections, when they repudiated the crazies in the GOP like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Bachman, etc. there was hope. After all, I had just voted Republican for the first time in my life as a protest. I don't think I could become a Republican party member, but I'd like the party to get better than it is.

I only care for about half of what I read on Red State -- so much of it leaves me cold because it's either about gun stuff, which I don't support, or it's about that day-to-day political scrum of domestic issues on the Hill about who said what or who fought with whom or wasn't righteous enough -- and I can't get hugely interested in that.

But I like Tech at Night (I wish the guy would just write and stop clearing his throat all the time and apologizing) and there have been some great pieces on the whole Google problem and politics which have been very well done.

Obama, Google and the Democratic Party

Today, there is a great expose on Google and the intimate connections with the Democratic Party.

Of course, I noticed the picture of Eric Schdmit and Harper Reed on Google+ back in November on election day, and it's taken them all this time to notice it, even though I put links in the comments a few times to my piece, Harper Reed and the Soulessness of the New Machine. It is almost impossible for any new voices to get attention there -- though they promise you a blog page (like Daily Kos) and they promise to elevate some of the blogs, I simply never got the blog page because evidently they are either overwhelmed or don't like me. Oh, well.

Neil Stevens has a great piece, Whose Side is Google On? which really gives the lie to the constant refrain from techies that there are a mixture of political views in these big companies. Of course there aren't. Geez, look at the campaign chart above! Says Stevens:

A few years ago, Google was deeply in bed with the left wing activists like Moveon.org and Free Press pushing for Internet regulation. When Obama was elected, Google got even more deeply embedded with both the left and the government.  At this point, Republicans began paying more attention to Google and Google realized it had a political problem.

So, after years of lining up with the left to demand more government regulation of the internet, Google changed course. (“Google cozies up to the GOP“)  Google promoted their Republican lobbyists, hired Republican consultants, sucked up to conservative organizations and even hired a squishy Republican, Susan Molinari (R-MSNBC) to run their DC office.

Stevens asks whether Google will jump back into the arms of Moveon.org and CAP etc. on "net neutrality". Oh, of course they will. They never left. They feel they can move in for the kill now with Obama II.

Ben Howe talked about Google as the Democrat's Private Intelligence Agency.

Remember that enormous, sophisticated data operation the Obama campaign had? The one that gave them massive daily data on public opinion trends in almost every segment of potential voters.

It’s almost as if Democrats had access to some sort of huge database of real time information about what the public was reading or writing online. The kind of breathtakingly large, real-time data that could be used for real-time trend analysis, predictive modeling and even behavioral manipulation.

Well, I've been trying to find the smoking guns on that, and of course, in this discussion here over Katherine Maher's article on Westphalia, they all vigorously deny it.

My hunch is actually that Eric Schmidt is not going to stay with Google. I don't know why I feel that. I just do. Maybe because he sold his stock, and because his title is demoted, and because his trip to North Korea to snuggle with the Dictator and bond over connectivity cults wasn't so well-received and even got sort of upstaged by his own daughter's blogging.

But Google may be calving off other nonprofits to permeate society better and maybe they'll have him run one.

Google Running Intel for Dems?

Ben Howe says:

The real threat is that Google, or perhaps just a few people within the leadership of Google, may be quietly operating as a private intelligence agency for the left.

And every time you use Google or Gmail you could be contributing just a little bit more of your behavioral data to the left.

Well, they probably are doing that. But he has no proof. You can be sure that Google would work very hard to keep traces of anything like that out of the public eye. If you notice, the top Googlers really are very well hidden, and aren't even in Google -- McLaughlin doesn't have a Wikipedia entry -- neither to others in the top echelons, current and former. Do they have a deal with Jimmy Wales? Or are they just good at working their own non-secret-for-them algorithms?

Ben Howe is on stronger ground when he simply researches the connections of all the leadership and the engineers to Obama's campaign and OFA:

Obama’s impressive data team also boasts a large number of high-profile connections to Google, starting at the top with Rayid Ghani, OFA Chief Scientist. Not only has Ghani keynoted an address at Google Research Labs, according to his online CV (PDF), but he also spoke this month at his grad school alma mater Carnegie Mellon University in a lecture series sponsored by – you guessed it – Google. Ghani’s former department at Carnegie Mellon boasts seven alumni on Google’s payroll on their website.

Ghani’s role on the Obama campaign was to direct Project Dreamcatcher, which used “text analytics to gauge voter sentiment” about issues and speeches. I wonder how he came up with that idea? Could it have been in talking with Katharina Probst, Senior Software Engineer and Tech Lead at Google, who, according to her own site, is “working on new features for Gmail and Gmail Ads?” (Google is currently facing some heat over how it exploits Gmail user data for advertisers – but they would never exploit user data to help the Obama campaign, right?)

 

They Have All Come Out from Under the Berkman Center's Overcoat

Ben Howe also notes Catherine Bracy, OFA Community Outreach Lead, Product Manager, Tech4Obama Program Manager, and co-director of Obama’s San Francisco technology field office and formerly of the Berkman Center "an administrative director at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, which receives millions in funding from Google," says Howe. Well, no surprise there; I have spent a lot of time over the years arguing with people from the Berkman Center like Ethan Zuckerman, an avid GrumpyCatFitz follower, and Jillian York, who is no longer there but is now at EFF.

I was trying to undertand what all the neuralgia was from York over my probing on her position about "net neutrality". I put all the tweet fights here on Storify. She claimed she wasn't flogging it at the OSCE Internet 2013 meeting because it's a domestic issue and that's "not her job". I pointed out that it was a position of EFF's, where she worked, and she could hardly separate from it. She claimed it was a division of labour between foreign and domestic affairs and that EFF didn't really lobby on "net neutrality". Oh, come now. I pointed out the blog illustrating that a former intern at EFF had gone on to become the Free Press advocacy director on "net neutrality," surprise, surprise. She made it seem like this was some terrible exaggeration and mocked it by saying OMG, we cited someone's blog! Well, it's not just someone's blog, it's your former guy, now in this other group that does your agenda. She thinks that the microscopic differences between all these Mitch Kapor groups, despite the overlapping of boards and funders, are somehow significant. They aren't.

One of the things I really, really complained about all last year was the way these copyleftists were taking the "net neutrality" gambit and trying to insert it into international fora and put it on par with the problem of countries like Russia filtering the Internet or countries like Tajistan simply blocking all of Facebook or trying to -- not to mention the arrests of bloggers such as in Azerbaijan.

There was no question that Rebecca MacKinnon, on the US dime, speaking as the keynote speaker at the OSCE Dublin conference, pushed for "net neutrality" as did the UN rapporteur Frank Le Rue, somewhat indirectly, and some European states. The US activists also got various Serbs and Azeris and others to speak up from their NGOs about the issue -- and of course there is a very active Dutch group called Free Press (which claims it is not related to the US Free Press group) which is pushing it -- I got into a debate with their staffer and really challenged them doing this -- "net neutrality" in the hands of oppressive governments in fact means further granting of control of the Internet for filtration and censorship -- it's the old New Information Order gambit of yesteryear at UNICEF, or the World Information Society summits in which journalists and ISPs are pressed into service to fulfill "progressive agendas" that are "helping mankind," and then of course kill off competition, markets, freedom.

The fight is more dramatic in Europe where they have a history of distrust toward private media, more state broadcasting for TV, and a natural inclination to have the state then run the Internet, too, in the name of "freedom from capitalism" which they view as a negative -- much the way Lessig calls markets a "restraint" -- or worse.

Fake Claim that Comcast 'Censored' OWS

Free Press' rep at OSCE Internet 2013 Tim Carr openly called for "net neutrality" and gave a talk claiming falsely that Comcast censored OWS and Amazon censored WikiLeaks -- wildly tendentious stuff that no one was available to push back on from the panel, which left me just being able to question some of it from the floor, which was limited. Free Press is of course a Marxist front group (McChesney).

I'm reading an old Rand study now, The Organizational Weapon: A Study of Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics by Philip Selznick. I swear every word reads like the "community organization" background of Obama, and the vehicle that Obama for America is now morphing into. It's refreshing to read a book where there is no apology for frank discussion of how communists infiltrate organizations because they were really doing that and it was really visible just after the war.

We shall speak of organizations and organizational practices as weapons when they are used by a power-seeking elite in a manner unrestrained by the constitutional order of the arena within which the contest takes place. Thus the partisan practices used in an election campaign -- insofar as they adhere to the written and unwritten rules of the contest -- are not weapons in this sense. On the other hand, when members who join an organization in apparent good faith arei n fact the agends of an outside elite, the routine affliation becomes "infiltration".

As this book was published in 1952, there's no Internet -- but that means there's no distraction to studying how organizations work, how people are indoctrinated into them, how recruitment and ideological zeal is cultivated and of course loyalty.

With the whole Google and Wired State sort of thing, it's not like they have to have a YPSL-style summer camp to indoctrinate cadres. There's no need for boot camp when you have bar camp. Through all the various conferences and unconferences, bar camps and TED talks and Sun Valley and Roots Camp and Wikimania and even Tech @State, people find each other and bind and develop that formulation of "the line" that is so important to cadre organizations.

What does "cadre organization" mean to me? It doesn't have to mean some literal communist cell or even special indoctrination; it means people who work with a very aggressive line that does not brook dissent, and who react to outside criticism by either trying to vilify the critics as in the wrong political opponents' group, or demean them as "trolls," or say that they are so complex and technical that the average person just can't understand them. You see all of that cadre work on this thread related to the Westphalia article I discussed.

RightsCon

I think one of the ways the ideological line was crafted and advanced was through RightsCon (aptly named, as it is a con using rights as a cover). This will be back again this fall. Here the Silicon Valley regulars leading the charge like EFF (John Perry Barlow) took advantage of the fact that the Ebay VP's wife, Elaine Donahoe, as an Obama bundler, was named as US ambasador to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. She still holds that post. And that office has been used to advance Internet Freedom, in part understood in the classic way, but also as a toehold to give MacKinnon a platform and slip in the "net neutrality" stuff and anti-SOPA and anti-CISPA work.

At this Rightscon, Silicon Valley was able to bring in all the top human rights officials, like the Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights Michael Posner (whom I've known and worked closely with for  some 30 years) and all the leading human rights groups, and lobby them to their heart's content with no outside critics, trying to convert them to their vision of "Internet freedom". They didn't succeed in totalling throwing these people to adopt "net neutrality" -- but they didn't have to, as the purpose was to soften them up to the approach of moral equivalence between control of the Internet by China and Russia and "control of the Internet" through something like SOPA. The result was collaboration, many more meetings to come, and of course, the deploying of budgets.

I don't know who will fill Posner's post now that he is leaving. He and several other key human rights leaders like Harold Koh, the legal advisor, and Samantha Power, the democracy staff person at the National Security Council, are leaving. Maybe they don't feel they can justify drones. Or Bradley Manning's pre-trial detention. Or any number of things. I will be very, very interested to see who gets in that spot at DRL, whether it will be one of these very copyleftist-primed cadres or whether it will a a veteran style civil rights leader like Gay McDougall. In a way, it doesn't matter, as this office already has Dan Baer in charge of the Internet Freedom portfolio, and he may be friendly to all the copyleftist types, but he is under adult supervision at State that means he cannot go too far with this (I hope).

There's no question that these folks are battered mercilessly by the left and those far more radical than they are or can be.

US Delegation at OSCE Gets it Right

There's nothing objectional of the "net neutrality" or "anti-SOPA" stuff in this speech delivered by Baer at OSCE last week.  But it has some generic phrases that have been tooled-and-died to fight internal bureaucratic battles with those that might worry if they pass CISPA that it will enable countries like Russia to say they are doing no different (that's actually not the case, because the nature of the regime matters). Says Baer:

But just as we support individuals who are targeted every day for exercising their rights online, we are conscious of a broader threat to the future of Internet openness. Right now, in various international forums, including OSCE, some countries are working to change how the Internet is governed. They want to replace the current multi-stakeholder approach, which supports the free flow of information in a global network, and includes governments, the private sector, and citizens. In its place, they aim to impose a system that expands control over Internet resources, institutions, and content, and centralizes that control in the hands of governments. These debates will play out in international forums over the next few months and years.

Katherine Maher goes much further -- it's clear from her piece that she'd just as lief not have governments at all in her notion of multi-stakeholder approach, except as possibly cash cows to just keep supplying broadband to the masses -- she romanticizes -- and misreports -- the origins of the Internet:

And unlike almost every other global resource in history, the Internet largely escaped government regulation at first -- probably because no one could figure out how to make money from it. From the outset, it was managed not by governments, but by an ad hoc coalition of volunteer standards bodies and civil society groups composed of engineers, academics, and passionate geeks -- awkwardly dubbed the multistakeholder system.

In fact, it was managed by the US government in DARPA and ARPANET and all the rest, and the USG then handed it over to nonprofits like ICANN with the understanding that they would be good stewards. It's not clear that they are. Whenever people hear the term "standards bodies", they genuflect and grow very pious -- as if technical standards are beyond the ability of mere mortals to question.

But that's sheer nonsense, as these bodies like IEEE and IETF are not democratically run with due process like Congress -- they can be swayed by whoever shows up and behaves the most aggressively. I constantly cite from personal experience the example of the Virtual Worlds working group in IETF which was run by a loose consortium of companies and coders who argued about things like copyright, but which then got entirely taken over by the US military. Completely. And they have been unfriendly to copyright and push the open source line as a cost-cutting measure (supposedly) -- they want to be able to download and save all the OAR files and have them as freebies and not pay for virtual builders or worry about licensing fees or problems.

Problems involving people's ownership rights; their livelihoods as designers; issues of identity, geospatial location; proximity data; privacy; on and on and on -- these are not mere technical problems. They are profoundly human problems and they should not be left only to Google and its chosen Democrat or OFA apparatchiks to manage for all of us. We need to fight hard against all of this.

 

 

The Fake Propaganda that "Banksters" Haven't Been Prosecuted: They Have

Occupy Wall Street protest in October 2011 in Chicago. Photo by Chicago Man.

Some Twitter goof named Louis Leo IV, whose profile says

Trial Lawyer, Blogger & Founder of @PplOverPolitics #POPnetwork http://PeopleOverPolitics.Org  - Fuck The #NDAARuling! Take Action: http://STOPNDAA.Org

has challenged me on Twitter:

@catfitz what the hell kind of human rights activist are you? what do you know about crime? Or what Aaron allegedly did? @trevortimm @lessig

This is over the pieces I have done here, here , here and here challenging the establishment geek opinion about Aaron Swartz, the "Internet freedom fighter" (suicide bomber?) who committed suicide rather than facing six months of jail on charges of computer fraud and tampering AKA hacking.

BTW, I've signed petitions of concern about some aspects of the NDAA, but I find a lot of the leftist shrieking about it to be way overblown. Anyone who writes "people over politics" on their web site lets me know that they favour exactly the kind of "people's politics" that communism was known for. No thanks.

You can see the Twitter exchange on my feed, but let me take up a particular meme that this law-farer on behalf of the copyleftist and open-source cult cause perpetrates like so many others:

The treatment #AaronSwartz received from our gov compared to the #banksters who are "too big to jail" shows we have no real #justice system.

Oh, nonsense. Aaron Swartz deserved to be jailed exactly the six months offered him in the plea-bargain, and whether or not "banksters" deserve to be jailed is a matter for the courts -- which of course law-faring lawyers like this aren't really ultimately interested in, because they favour revolutionary "justice".

This is the kind of cultic thinking you can expect from Anonymous, WikiLeaks and the Swartz fanboyz but it's a completely skewed notion of what real justice is all about.

First of all, the proposition doesn't have to be mutually exclusive. For example, you could have justice for the "banksters," let's say, and yet Swartz could still be guilty of computer hacking and rightly face a sentence -- and as we know, even his big guru, law professor Lawrence Lessig believes he "crossed a line".

But in fact, it isn't true that the "banksters" are never prosecuted. This is one of the big lies that Anonymous constntly purveys on Twitter, and it's worth going through and debunking it here.

First of all, let me point out that I don't have any felt need to keep "banksters" out of jail, if they are guilty. My family lost a condo to Wells Fargo. When my mother died, we discovered she had missed her last payment. We offered to pay it until we could figure out what to do, and they wouldn't accept our payments until after probate which actually took years. Meanwhile, the one-bedroom assisted-living apartment went into foreclosure, and we spent money on lawyers trying to wrest it back. Finally we got it in hand and re-financed it because we had all these other bills to pay on the estate. We tried renting it and couldn't for love nor money -- the housing market collapsed. We ended up getting some fraction of the mortgage for rent; we tried selling it and there were absolutely no takers, not even for a pittance because in the strange mathematics of the recession, new condos were being built and people preferred buying those. We happened to be in ground zero for foreclosures...

Now, why didn't I write a weepy petition against Wells Fargo on changes.org like other people? Why don't I wail about "banksters"? Well, perhaps things could be changed about Wells Fargo -- and when they invaded my neighbourhood here in New York by buying out some other smaller bank, I completely avoided them, but I can't really blame "the Man" for our family's troubles.

Between us, we didn't have the $2000 a month to keep this property going until better times -- isn't that our problem? We're poor -- but we also made choices. Other things were more important than this.

More to the point, why did my parents have to spend their hard-earned savings over more than 40 years of marriage on this condo that they didn't even live in most of the year? My parents were not rich; they were lower middle-class workers who fell out of the middle class, in fact, when my father was laid off from his big company job at Xerox with thousands of other workers in Rochester, NY in the 1970s. They had a house whose mortgage was finally paid and they sold it and took an apartment to enable themselves to travel and do other things. Maybe they should have rented in Florida, too? This wasn't much of an "investment" it turned out -- it was kind of a rip-off. Was it beyond their means? And so on. Life is complicated. "Bankers" are not always to blame.  The guy who sold them the assisted-living arrangement wasn't evil; he was their friend and neighbour with whom they likely played golf. All over America this story repeated itself in different forms, with richer or poorer people, but it had to do with the American dream, not greed and evil in every instance.

I simply refuse to accept life as black and white as the Occupy Wall Street goons and Anonymous loons do.

And here Leo claims, like others that "no" people are prosecuted. Nonsense. Here are a bunch of cases just by Googling -- beyond Madoff, who is the textbook case.

Oh, if you Google "Wall Street investors jailed" you won't find it because the propaganda pages have tied up Google search results, but try "Wall Street investors sentenced":

o A former investment manager known as Wall Street's "bad boy" was sentenced Thursday to 12 years in prison.

Ross Mandell was sentenced by Judge Paul Crotty for his conviction at trial last summer on conspiracy and securities fraud charges. The government said he defrauded U.S. and European investors of $140 million and asked that he be sent away for life.

o Raj Rajaratnam, a billionaire investor, once ran the Galleon Group, which became one of the world’s largest hedge funds. On May 11, 2011, he was found guilty of fraud and conspiracy, becoming the most prominent figure convicted in the government’s crackdown on insider trading on Wall Street.

More on him here and here.

o Two former hedge fund managers were found guilty on Monday of fraud and conspiracy, the latest convictions in the government’s campaign to eliminate illegal conduct on Wall Street trading floors.

After two full days of deliberations, a jury convicted Anthony Chiasson, a co-founder of Level Global Investors, and Todd Newman, a former portfolio manager at Diamondback Capital Management. The two had denied charges that they participated in a conspiracy that made more than $70 million illegally trading technology stocks.

o This past Friday, a judge in New York sentenced Mark Kurland, co-founder of New Castle Partners, a $1 billion hedge fund investment firm with offices in Manhattan, to two years and three months in prison for his role in an insider-trading scheme.  U.S. District Court Judge Victor Marrero also ordered Kurland to forfeit the $900,000 he received through his illegal trades.

o  A former top Wall Street executive who gave inside information on bank stocks to an X-rated movie actress was sentenced today to eight months in prison.

James McDermott Jr., 49, turned toward more than 50 spectators at his sentencing and apologized to his wife and two daughters.

“Where I see weakness and cowardice, they saw strength and courage,” he said in a firm voice, which had become a fixture on TV financial programs when he was chief executive of the New York investment bank Keefe, Bruyette & Woods.

o Former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. director Rajat Gupta is the highest-profile of more than 70 defendants convicted of insider trading in New York federal court in the past three years.

But this month he will likely receive a more lenient sentence than the 11-year-prison term given to Raj Rajaratnam, to whom Mr. Gupta provided his illegal leaks, legal experts say.

The sentence may have reverberations beyond the 63-year-old Mr. Gupta, a former chief of consulting giant McKinsey & Co. It will be widely watched in executive suites nationwide because it will be among the first handed down to a major corporate figure in the recent insider-trading crackdown. Previous sentences have largely involved traders, lawyers, lower-rung corporate employees and others.

Even LIBOR, the stuff of endless libertarian and leftist conspiracy theories, has been punished:

Two former UBS traders have been charged with manipulating international interest rates, and their ex-employers have agreed to pay a total of $1.5 billion in fines, penalties and disgorgement, the FBI said. The case involves manipulation of the London Interbank Offered Rate, a key factor used in derivatives trading, at UBS Securities Japan Co. Ltd. The company is a subsidiary of Swiss banking giant UBS AG. Officials said two traders - British citizen Tom Alexander William Hayes, 33, and Roger Darin, 41, of Switzerland - are both charged with conspiracy, while Hayes is also charged with wire fraud and price fixing. The FBI said an international investigation revealed that Hayes allegedly began the scheme in 2006, when assigned to the UBS Tokyo office.

So wait. With all these "banksters" of Wall Street -- there more than 70 defendants convicted of insider trading in New York federal court in the past three years -- why is Occupy Wall Street, Anonymous and the other goons still baying for their heads?

It's almost impossible to find out the truth when you search on Google because of their propaganda.

Chief among these agitpropsters has been Matt Taibi, formerly of the eXile, who has always been a big copyleftist and fan of Anonymous tactics against people the copylefists hate. In Rolling Stone, he published an article asking "why the Wall Street traders" weren't sentenced -- but of course they eventually were -- he was just impatient and wanted to string them from the lamp-posts like the other Bolsheviks.

Liberal financial news sites kept asking "why no one was jailed" even when people were jailed in reality.

So what was the problem? Maybe Gupta and Rajaratnam just aren't white enough for them as Indians. They don't fit the stereotype they needed of some rich, WASP-y white guy whom they'd like to nail to the wall?

Or maybe these other guys, even being white and rich, just aren't famous enough? What's the problem?

Well, they want to have certain symbolic figures that they think symbolize those whom they believe is responsible for the recession -- like Jon Corzine.

The libertarians bay even louder for his head than the Occupy Wall Street kids, because he was a Democratic governor of New Jersey along with being CEO of Goldman, Sachs. Then as CEO of MF Global Inc., he lost $1.6 billion of customer money. Yet you hear more from people who didn't lose investments than those who did because he's a whipping boy for their frustration with cronyism.

I have no special feeling for or against Corzine because he has just never been relevant to me. If someone has the goods on him, let him be prosecuted. If you think he's been let off scot-free, then gather the evidence and campaign for his prosecution. Who could stop you? It's not like you're in Russia where you could end up jailed or dead for consumer rights or anti-corruption activism.

But what is REALLY the story here? Is it REAAAAALY about justice?

I don't think so. I think that only if the head of Citibank or something was put away in jail for 50 years would the mob be happy -- and likely not even then.

Because they aren't really about due process, justice and the rule of law -- they are for exploiting the notion of legalism in law-faring -- abusing law to try to fight political battles -- in service to their socialist/leftist/anarchist ideology.

That's what Leo is all about; that's what most twitterers on this subject are all about.

Eric Schurenberg of CBS summed up this problem very well in an article on CBS. Now, for the OWS set, CBS will be evil imperialist Amerikan TV borg that they will think of as corrupt and hand-in-hand with Wall Street. Nonsense. TV as an industry is dying and suffering losses. And there's nothing wrong with making media a business anyway. Hey, how about your friend Al Gore who sold his little-watched lefty Current TV to the Arabs at Al Jazeera?! He is now richer than Romney with that little caper.

Here's what Schurenberg writes:

In a front-page story in this morning's New York Times, Gretchen Morgenson asks the question that has occurred to almost everyone with a pulse since 2008: Why, two years after a horrific financial crisis, have no financial executives gone to jail? Morgenson contrasts the handling of this disaster with the wave of prosecutions that followed the savings and loan fiasco in the 1990s and sent more than 800 bank officials to jail.

In pursuing the inquiry, Morgenson follows a long line of journalists, some of whom have reached damning conclusions. Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone, for one, blames the limp law enforcement on cozy relationships in the financial industry between regulators and the regulated. William Greider in The Nation, attributes the absence of perp walks to prosecutors' reluctance at this point in the economic recovery to bring down weakened financial firms with a civil death sentence, like that administered to Arthur Andersen over the Enron scandal. Guilty bankers get a get-out-of-jail card because, as Alain Sherter of BNET puts it, they're "too big to prosecute."

There is one other simple explanation, however. The bankers are probably not criminals.

Wall Street firms' shareholders should have fired the executives who were asleep to the risks their firms were taking and disgraced them, not rewarded them. They should start now to rein the grotesque pay packages that led the shareholders' stewards to take reckless risks. And yes, if executives committed "massive fraud," they should be tried. But despite the fury a nation justfiably feels towards financial executives, criminal fraud is not what seems to have happened-at least not clearly enough to convince a jury.

And that's the size of it. They cannot be found guilty because capitalism is not a crime. Wheeling and dealing on Wall Street is not a crime. It is already regulated. You can argue about how much more it should be regulated, but Occupy Wall Street isn't concerned to keep Wall Street as an institution; they want to dismantle it, and as one of their avowed Commie professors said, they want to "take their stuff" because they think it needs to be forcibly "redistributed". Like Bolsheviks.

I'm completely uninterested in that politicized and revolutionary approach. Even if OWS seized Wall Street's assets, jailed all the investors or even killed them, and redistributed their wealth, it wouldn't bring back my parents' condo. Hell, even if they said they'd send me a check for my parent's condoor the debts we incurred trying to save it paying lawyers and such,  I'd tell them to go fuck themselves. That is not how you get justice -- through violence, coercion, destruction.

 

 

 

Twitter Turns Over Records to Court in Occupy Case -- Good!

Photo by Matt McDermott of the Brooklyn Bridge occupation, October 1, 2011. McDermott is one of many demonstrators pushing the line that demonstrators were "lured" although his own photos and captions document how they went into the road deliberately. He styles the "backing up" of the police as a lure, when in fact it's merely a positioning when faced with a large crowd disobeying direct orders not to go on the bridge -- period. Biased activists like McDermott can never explain why these marchers went off their route in the first place and stormed the bridge.

Twitter had to turn over its records to the court in the case of an Occupy demonstrator.

Good!

I can see absolutely no reason why these records shouldn't be turned over. These aren't private messages, these are the public tweets of a demonstrator defiantly marching on the Brooklyn Bridge, bragging about his civil disobedience on Twitter and expecting no consequences, and it is absolutely material to the case. The judge wants to show that in fact this alibi that the Occupiers have put out in the media ever since the Bridge Occupation -- to the effect that the police "lured them off the path" and "into arrest nets" -- is pure baloney.

Of course, we know it's baloney from having followed it and heard from eye witnesses and other less, er engaged media. If you read the Twitter feed of this loon who uses the hipster Twitter handle of @destructuremal, you can see he specializes in rants against the Man, and frequently illustrates he has a father complex by hashtagging "nodads". Sigh. Here's one:

I'M ALL UP IN UR CAPITAL, ACCELERATIN' UR DEMISE

Mkay. Actually, it's the sectarian wack-a-doole Occupy that is in demise, not capital, but...whatever.

If the tweets were public, but just not accessible now because either the guy deleted them after the fact or they  can't be pulled up on laggy dysfunctional Twitter, why can't we have them in court as part of the discovery? Truly.

The judge first used a gambit which I think was iffy -- he opined that tweets are not the users' property, but the property of the company Twitter. Well, I'd have to study the TOS again, but I don't think Twitter makes that claim, the way a lot of platforms do. That is, they'd like to have safe harbour status like any of the Internet social media giants facing tons of lawsuits, so they probably had their lawyers all over that. As users, we don't want content owned by the company and this isn't a good gambit to be deploying.

What's much more substantive and operative is the need to challenge the narrative of "we was lured" -- and the need to uncover that. I'm all for that.

And interestingly enough, the "reporter" who actually most contributes to the debunking of that narrative -- inadvertently! -- is none other than Natasha Lennard, the radical Occupy supporter who worked as a freelancer for a time at The New York Times, after stints at Salon and Politico, and then was, er, let go. Whereupon she bitched on Salon, Why I Quit the Mainstream Media. Or was fired?

What's interesting is that I was the first to uncover and publish the fact that Natasha had spoken at the Bluestockings Book Store teach-in on Occupy, covered on video by Jacobin, a radical leftist publication. I put up a blog with a link to the video on October 22, which I uncovered even before I did the blog, and included some notes from this long discussion among old and new lefties on what the politically correct "line" should be on Occupy. (Do the Jacobins favour guillotines?) The discussion made it clear that far from an unbiased journalist, or even a reporter cloaked in the typical "progressive" cocoon of the New York Times journalist milieu, she was very supportive of Occupy and picked and chosed what she covered about it.

I recall even posting a comment among the zillions of comments about Occupy on Breitbart, and interestingly, Lee Stranahan then did a blog the next day (October 23) referencing this very video, which I think was fairly obscure, but not mentioning me. Now, it's quite possible he did find this all on his own, but I do have to wonder. Anyway, I was first! He wrote a letter complaining to the Times about this bias -- actually, I did, too, but just didn't think to save and publish it, although I've referenced the problem in subsequent comments.

And here's what's relevant about what Lennard wrote for the Times:

The Internet was filled with pointed suggestions that officers from the New York Police Department led protesters onto the road as a trap to perform mass arrests; indeed, some video footage seems to show officers leading protesters onto the “illegal” section of the bridge. From what I saw, however, a couple of dozen marchers made the decision to move off the sidewalk into the road at the bridge’s entrance to chants of “off the sidewalks, into the streets.”

This breakaway group quickly gained support of surrounding marchers, numbers of whom jumped over barricades on the sidewalk’s edge to stream into the road, until hundreds of people eventually covered the passageway usually intended for a steady flow of traffic.

“ ‘Whose bridge? Our bridge!’ the marchers chanted as they walked onto the Brooklyn Bridge. Two vehicle lanes occupied,” I posted on Twitter at the the time. The mood was celebratory and confrontations with the police were not widely expected.

People who are being "lured" into their arrest wouldn't be crying "Whose bridge? Our bridge!" -- that's what occupiers chant as they commit occupation, or civil disobedience.

So despite her very biased approach to all this, Lennard was enough of a reporter to say that she saw marchers making the decision to go off the footpath and lure others -- not police. About police, she said videos only "seem" to indicate this. I hope the judge includes her report in his evaluation of the testimony!

After all, she was arrested and then let go, because she was "only doing her duty". Of course her tweets show her tilt toward Occupy -- and then she concedes it in her swan song to the mainstream media in Slate.

At the time, only James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal would report the truth about this Twitter dude bragging about his exploits and then expecting not to take the rap for them. Everyone else was getting all victimological about it. Of course, there was the obvious socialist tendentiousness around it.

My beef with Occupy all along isn't just the incitement to violence, the extremism, and the outright old-style communist Bolshevism in a lot of what they're doing, even if they also had earnest young people who owed school loans or authentic social movement types among them.

No, what I loathed about them was their unwillingness to concede what civil disobedience is: it means going limp, being arrested, and taking your medicine -- time in jail or a fine.

What these entitlement-happy freaks would do instead would claim their "rights" were violated even as they violated the law; they would fight and even push and hit policemen or knock fences around instead of peacefully demonstrating; and they would act as if they had an inherent right to take over spaces and foment revolution without any consequences.

So I'm all for them facing due and lawful consequences to their civil disobedience, because they did decide to walk off the path and make a deliberate nuisance of themselves -- they were not "lured".

 

UN Rapporteur Frank La Rue Attacks US Over OWS in Latest UN Hustle

Sigh.

Frank La Rue, the UN's special rapporteur for freedom of expression, who has already promoted a troublesome resolution at the UN that invites more state participation in the Internet than less with the "development rubric," is now focusing on the US -- despite American diplomats' role in helping him pass his beloved resolution that just about declares Internet access as a "right".

And to make an inside baseball point, he's out of his mandate, strictly, as study and pronouncements on US treatment of Occupy Wall Street should really be done by another mandate, on freedom of peaceful assembly -- also brought into being by US persistence against severe human rights violators -- and whose stress on "peaceful" would certainly make many of the OWS claims of "violations of rights" wither on the vine.

My problem with this manipulative gambit from La Rue and the cheerleading of his action by the "progressives" isn't that I think the US should be shielded from UN criticism. Actually, we'd never have to worry about that problem EVER occuring as the UN is notorious for selectively obsessing about the sins of the US and Israel before they will ever cross the street to care about Sudan, Syria, Iran, etc.

No, it's about the timing of what is clearly a provocation and the likelihood that the US will do nothing to challenge it for fear of seeming illiberal -- enabling yet another round of bad-faith activity at the UN to persist.

BALANCING THE SADDLE-BAGS

Of course, these rapporteurs have to be impartial and be willing to criticize the great powers -- it's a very important system in the UN to keep protected which is always under assault by oppressive regimes trying to cover up their crimes.

And to be sure, Frank La Rue has expertly balanced his saddle-bags like the most savvy of rapporteurs with his list of fact-finding trips and with his list of statements on country situations which carefully includes Western states that don't really need his help, new democracies like Hungary that have real press freedom problems but which are already addressed by regional and national bodies and movements, and severe offenders like Iran.

Yet it's more than fine to ask whether his criticism of the US over OWS now isn't the usual third-world anti-American animosity at play here, and whether there isn't a microscope being applied to our liberal democracy at a time when situations in Russia, for example, like the firing of a journalist for writing supportively of the Magnitsky List, or the killing of a Siberian journalist, or beating of Russian demonstrators, aren't getting the attention they deserve from this rapporteur.

If I had time, I'd go read all his press releases and other statements and likely find the same technically perfect geographical balancing act there, although it would leave some egregious media freedom issues underserved -- "geographical distribution" always does that at the UN, and in fact undermines rather than upholds universality.

But in selectively picking on the US over OWS at this time, Frank La Rue is just "taking out insurance" against abusive regimes who endlessly demand "parity" with the US, and getting on the "progressive" and libertarian band-wagon, fanned very actively by the Open Society Institute and other "progressive" organizations that have worked with La Rue. They all accept the narrative of the left-leaning National Lawyers' Guild that has adopted the cause of monitoring very supportively the Occupy urban camp-outs, claiming that police efforts, sanctioned by local and national leaders, to dismantle these camps are somehow free-speech violations. 

NO GOOD DEED GOES UN-PUNISHED

He's doing this despite the after-glow of the US helping him get his pet resolution passed last month precisely because he needs to fend off other third-world US haters that are no doubt down his throat for that resolution. He needs to prove to them he is "balanced".

Focusing on the infamous pepper-spray incident, where a policeman appears to be casually --and brutally -- dispersing a sit-in -- is emblematic of this position of concern that the "progressives" adopt. Two police have been placed on administrative leave pending an investigation. Could we ever get something like that going in Russia or China?

I'm certainly not for people being pepper-sprayed needlessly. My son was needlessly pepper-sprayed and hospitalized. Has yours been? I file complaints when I see excessive force used by the NYPD. Do you?

IS THERE A RIGHT TO ENDLESS URBAN PROTEST CAMPING?

Yet few ask how the UC Davis scene came about. An alternative account struggling to be heard in the politically-correct din, from an eyewitness on campus lets us know that students in fact surrounded police trying to disperse them, and the police had to summon extra help, and then had a harder job of dispersing what was now an obstructive sit-in blocking police themselves and other traffic on the campus. The New York Times denies this -- but then, they would, as they take the side of OWS in most of their reporting. Even Wikipedia lets us know there are counter-narratives, and we all await the outcome of the investigation. The UC David Chancellor apologized for the incident and said she had urged no force be used:

"I want to unequivocally apologize to the entire community for the appalling use of pepper spray. I will do everything in my power to make sure nothing like that ever happens again." She said, "My instructions were for no arrests and no police force. I explicitly directed the chief of police that violence should be avoided at all costs."^[55]

It's not like the cop just casually came up and sprayed pepper spray at the kids -- there were hours of interactions before that in which police kept trying to get people to disperse who were trying to make an Occupy camp-out on a college campus -- people who weren't even students and were outside agitators as well as students who didn't reflect the wishes of the whole student body.

Sure, people get to demonstrate but there are lawful restrictions as to time, place, and manner, and what Occupy does, as I've explained again and again, is try to lawfare their way out of legitimate prosecution of their civil disobedience by not acknowledging even that it *is* civil disobedience, and instead shrilly demanding right of way for disruptive urban campouts and traffic blockages as "freedom of assembly".

I'm not sure we will ever hear the truth, no matter how carefully calibrated the investigation -- an apt indication of the wildly skewed and politically-correct environment this is all taking place in is that when one member of the investigative body was from Kroll, which holds security contracts in the UC system was included, students rebelled because Kroll was tied to another agency which "works closely with the financial sector on Wall Street". There isn't anything these radicals won't find tainted with capitalism and Wall Street, and that is the issue, not impartiality.

Truly, the administration and the whole student body have to be asked: what do you guys want here? Socialism or capitalism? And are you willing to have radical student campouts disrupt your life endlessly instead of studying, and call that freedom? Please do tell us.

But Frank wasn't there to observe OWS in Zuccotti as I have been multiple times -- sure, they seemed like a peaceful bunch at the start, but there isn't an absolutely right to all-night camp-outs. And they turned rowdy, disruptive and problematic even for Mayor Bloomberg, who was initially tolerant of them, when they began shitting in the street, annoying passers-by, barging into local stores and demanding bathrooms and service and free food, well beyond the capacity of the local merchants to address, and then drumming and shouting and making noise all night so that the people who lived in the area couldn't sleep. Not to mention using illegal drugs, creating health hazards with loads of garbage and junk and rain-soaked bedding and rotting food, and even being involved in crimes like sexual harassment and rape, as well as theft and assault.

Enough got to be enough, and the mayor ordered the camp disbanded. Is Frank defending the absolute right for Marxist-Leninists, anarchists, class-hating hipsters and others to endlessly camp and disrupt? If so, he or some other OWS fan should bring the case of the Zuccotti dismantling to the UN Human Rights Committee. I'd be sad if that important body had to start dealing with frivolous cases, but I do think that it would help dissipate some of this fake "rights" speak coagulating around the anarchist and even violent OWS cause. I think the case will disintegrate on impact. No independent expert nor state-engaged hack (of which there are both in these treaty bodies) will defend the right of protesters to endlessly camp out and disrupt society in the name of radical revolutionary socialism. If they can find some incident of excessive use of force in roughing up a journalist or demonstrator, let them find it and let them condemn it. I'll eagerly await their findings. Their findings will not be about the US having some systematic policy of stifling assembly and media like Russia or China.

DO YOU GET A PASS IF YOU PROTEST AGAINST 'BANKSTERS'?

And I don't think that banking malfeasance entitles you to as pass from prosecution for your civil disobedience, although some leftists do, as the Huffo points out and La Rue readily concedes, championing their cause.

Even civil libertarians disagree whether the right to freedom of expression under First Amendment jurisprudence means all-night camping with fires, food, tents, crowds, etc. are all legitimate. Let them test their theory in court. I don't think they will fly.

I find it the most reprehensible moral equivalence to compare people demonstrating in Tahrir Square in Egypt, who lived under a dictator who jailed and tortured opponents, who were facing economic hardships, to the hipsters in OWS who have the leisure time and affluence to demonstrate over their college tuition bills or who are dysfunctional enough to be street people in the first place.

OWS is an appalling movement ideologically, which I've found from lots of up-close study of the meetings in person and also reading of the writings of the idealogues.

EVIL GREEDY CAPITALISTS ARE EVIL

But La Rue is not just examining whether Art. 19 and Art. 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Liberties were violated, given his mandate's jurisprudence. He's not just looking at freedom of the media and freedom of expression, he's got a "progressive" third-worldist agenda, and that is to demand socialism and demand the overthrow of capitalism. Take a look:

La Rue said the protesters are raising and addressing a fundamental issue. "There is legitimate reason to be indignant and angry about a crisis that was originated by greed and the personal interests of certain sectors," he said. That's especially the case when the bankers "still earn very hefty salaries and common folks are losing their homes."

I find this sort of facile and Marxist dogmatic analysis of the savings-and-loan crisis and the recession to be unjustified, wearisome and ultimately stupid and unhelpful.

Bankers earning "very hefty salaries" isn't against the law; it isn't against the UN covenants, either. It's just against UN socialist cultural belief.

People losing their homes isn't against the law; it may be against certain UN covenants on economic rights the US hasn't signed, but it's more about -- again -- a sin against UN socialist cultural belief.

UN officials love to talk about "greed" -- all capitalism is "greed" to them. They scarcely differentiate.  It's not just greedy bankers who caused the NINJA loans; it's greedy community organizers with stealth socialist ideals demanding housing and education for free or low-cost for everyone to fit their ideals, and the politically-greedy Clinton Administration and even the Bush Administration being guilt-tripped into giving it to them with less and less questions being asked.

Sure, evil banksters are evil. But so are unscrupulous loan sharks and mortgage hustlers who took advantage of poor people with the "no income no job applications" (NINJA). The Internet accelerated and enabled the hustling of bad mortgages and loans and their conversion to toxic "investment products" as the aggregate debt was passed along. And here we are all. Yeah, we get it that there are regulatory actions to be taken and lessons to be learned. But the key one is not that socialism should replace capitalism, or that Wall Street, the stock market, the free enterprise system should be overthrown, dismantled, and destroyed (and surely Soros, who is funding the organizations engaged in all this agida with La Rue, doesn't personally believe this).

And that *is* what OWS wants, and if you don't want to hear it from me, just read their websites, General Assembly transcripts, and go to their demonstrations and read their signs. These are class-warrior anarchists who hate capitalism and think socialism or even outright communism will work.  That's what I mean about the stupid part.

La Rue thinks that he can trump any legal concerns about unlawful civil disobedience by invoking this "higher cause" of people "rightfully" challenging "greed". And I'm sorry, that's just plain Bolshevism. The idea that there are sectors with "personal interests" that prevail over people's needs is a conspiracy theory, not an analysis. It's not a report on freedom of expression rights being applied; it's a shrill and politicized provocation.

WRITING A LETTER

This being the ineffectual UN not at its best, one doesn't have to worry that La Rue will get too far with this deliberately obnoxious posturing -- all he's going to do is write a letter (and that's about all he can do, other than making a fact-finding visit or writing a report).

La Rue said he is in the process of writing what he called "an official communication" to the U.S. government "to ask what exactly is the position of the federal government in regards to understanding the human rights and constitutional rights vis-a-vis the use of local police and local authorities to disband peaceful demonstrations."

The US should be urged to answer this letter, and not ignore it like so many authoritarian governments ignore such UN letters. And if anything, La Rue should be encouraged to make a fact-finding visit to the US -- but here a debate really needs to be had about whether he's outside his mandate looking at assembly and not media -- but hey, let him come in tandem with his fellow special rapporteur for that cause.

But let them not speak just to the ACLU and the National Lawyers Guild and Human Rights Watch and self-criticizing Obama operatives, but let them talk to those with alternative accounts, neighbourhood organizations who struggled to deal with OWS and let them examine carefully the police brutality allegations against the allegations that also bear examination of violence, even assault of police, and of course blocking traffic and obstructing business.

I welcome any and all rapporteurs coming to the US -- something they are not shy about doing as they come here in greater proportion than they do to China or Russia, which give them less access. But it's important to see that this is a political hustle:

New York Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Donna Lieberman welcomed the international scrutiny.

"We live in a much smaller, connected world than we ever did before, and just as Americans watch what goes on in Tahrir Square and in Syria, the whole world is watching us, too -- and that's a good thing," Lieberman said.

"We're kind of confident that we're living in the greatest democracy in the world, but when the international human rights world criticizes an American police officer for pepper spraying students who are sitting down, it rightly give us pause."

It's not about just sitting down, Dianna. It's about camping out and disrupting the campus and the ultimately, it's about blocking the police themselves and defying legitimate calls to disperse. Why do OWS demonstrators get to do this with impunity? What are you -- and they -- really trying to use these rights for?

You like so many activists seem to have forgotten the 1960s and 1980s when there was a kind of compact: demonstrators who want to make a point about an evil war or evil missiles go limp, and allow themselves to be arrested. They don't whine that their civil rights are violated when they know they are engaged in civil disobedience in the first place.

 

Wiring the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy

Lolcat by anomalous4.

Oh, did you think I made up that headline? You'd be wrong. It actually comes from a fascinating piece by Matt Bai in The New York Times in 2004.  I fell upon it was I was looking for information about the Rappaports, the *other* funders of the anti-copyright organizations of Mitch Kapor and the various lefty geek causes.

This article by Bai is really helpful in understanding what George Soros and other "progressives" (as they prefer to call themselvse to get the word "left" or "socialist" out of the description) did in recently announcing a $100 million campaign to counter the Republicans in the November presidential elections.

The Democratic Party establishment was dismayed, because this money is going to "grassroots" organizations like American Bridge 21st Century, America Votes, and Moveon.org to "get out the vote" instead of countering negative Republic attack ads on TV. They think it's duplicating efforts the party is already making, or wasting money.

They don't get it.

What this money is really about is the vast opportunities of social media as the new negative attack ad milieu instead of TV. Who needs TV? TV is Fox News. Who watches TV? Not enough people. Fox News has 2 million viewers. Huffington Post has 39 unique visitors a month. So you crank out a lot of advocacy pieces in Huffpo and drive traffic with social media links, or you just get legions of Facebookers and Tweeters to rant in hatred about Romney and in praise of Obama.Voila -- free attack ads.

The staffing for the new hate campaign will come from these newly-flush non-profit campaign groups -- the 527s.

Sure, they can spend time recruiting new voters, focusing especially on the dynamic young Hispanic population, the fastest growing youth population in America. They can continue to do ACORN-style work in recruiting blacks, other minorities, poor people in the resentment and entitlement queues. But that isn't really how they will win -- if they do win.

They plan to win on social media, as they did in 2008 with only $13 million of the Democracy Alliance rich guys' money, and the budgets are for social media, which folds in easily to any nonprofit's financials for the year.

They will use concocted stories like the Romney bullying story in the Post, or various other 15-minute-scandals of the day they can leverage, real or imagined, like Komen and Sarah Fluke. The Democrats started perfecting this viral hate campaign technique back in the days where they had the guy dress up as a chicken and go around heckling Bush supporters.

Nobody can ask for equal time for the other view, or charge you money, for putting an attack phrase on your personal Twitter account, can they?

The Tea Party is now scrambling to get followers on Twitter, but the system is so rigged, they will lose -- at least, on Twitter (although not at the actual ballot box which we will still have -- at least for this election!).

Unlike the early Twitter adapters -- mainly lefty geeks -- who used scripts to jack up their follower count to the tens of thousands, and who are perched in the recommended list of the Twitter devs so they add even more followers -- any newcomers can't compute. Sure, somebody with a huge amount of old media attention like Michelle Malkin will get and add thousands of followers. But the average Joe on Twitter can't break the 1000 ceiling, let alone the 2000 ceiling. That's because Twitter's algorithms are set up so that you can't follow other people (to get them to follow you back) until you get more followers after about 1,000.

It's very hard to crack that 1,000 as I've learned from being on Twitter on two acccounts, one since 2007. What happens is that people harass you for your alternative, i.e. non-progressive views, and sic Anonymous and others to have porn stars or hecklers on anonymous accounts follow you. Then these throw-away accounts get banned for spam or abuse reports by multiple people, or they delete their accounts, or you block them, and then your algorithms are thrown off, making you appear to be an account that is not worthy to be allowed to have more followers because it's churning with spam.

There isn't a universal limit as I've found -- if you have lots of normal people, i.e. not hecklers or spammers follow you, you will get more following ability -- but not by much. I could have 100 more people follow me on Prokofy, but not get above 2,000; on catfitz, I slowly add some every day, but constantly meet the ceiling of 2,000 because of the harassment-followers problem.

Twitter should just let us follow as many people as we want, putting normal checks on spammers and SEO annoyers by putting flood gates on the speed of following, not the quantity of followers. There is no reason not to do this -- except it would disturb the political hegemony that the early adapters and their lefty political friends and lobbyists in Washingon already have. Oh, and the usual geek reason: deliberately throttling the system as a solution to deal with their crappy code and failure to scale up.

There are reports that Republicans and Tea Party have more *accounts* on Twitter. But do they have more *followers*? I don't see that they do, looking through lots of them, anecdotally, to be sure. I'd like to hear a non-biased report on this. The way it looks to me, the lefties have the edge from their boost from the devs in "recommend". Twitter doesn't recommend Michelle Malkin or Jennifer Rubin. It recommends Scoble, who tilts to the left, for his tech cred, or it recommends Alec Ross, Obama's social media guru, or various other trendy social media characters who scan as "progressive" like AplusK (Ashton Kutcher).

It's not just the recommends; the top "community organizers" have padded up their accounts with junk, letting SEO gurus and other idiots follow them and follow them back just to get the boost up the chain past the 2,000 ceiling limit and beyond. I personally won't do that, because I hate polluting the Twitter conversation. I like to find interesting people, then look at who they follow or who is following them to gain more interesting people I can at least put in a list if not follow. I hate finding prostitutes and SEO jerks in their list, instead of real people.

Soros and company are going to inject an enormous amount of money into these astroturf one-way non-interactive groups like Daily Kos, Moveon.org. There is no open forum where you can discuss the issues of the day openly and adversarily with Moveon.org. You can only go click on pre-prepared  petitions that their cadres have already designed for you. Daily Kos might let you open up a blog, but it will be in the long tail, and there, too, the cadres decide everything.

Center for American Progress and the other "progressive" think tanks aren't going to debate the issues surrounding Obama -- they are going to annoint and bless and disseminate them as gospel, describing other people as ignorant or biased or unscientific along the way -- you know, like Jon Stewart and staff do on his popular show.

Matt Bai's article is interesting in that as far back as 2004, he saw that what the purpose was, was not just to try to get Kerry elected as president (they failed), but to defeat the Democratic Party itself and hollow it out and make it turn to the left. It was viewed as failed and ineffective.

You wish we had multiple parties in this country, so that these socialists would stop doing things so stealthily, and just make a socialist party like their DSA, and see who shows up. The Tea Party could make a Christian-Democratic Union or whatever; we could have four parties. Those of us who aren't socialists but not conservatives would go into the Democratic Party where we started.

But that is not to be. And I fear what Soros is doing is more about creating front groups with conveyor-belts to take over the executive than it really is about election politics or creating pluralism or conditions for a fair fight. Soros said he was only get into election politics that one time, just to get rid of Bush. Now he has to come back to keep Obama -- and Obama isn't even so important because it's about setting the stage for 2016.

Even so, I think it will fail. I think it won't be as close as the 2000 election. Because I think the negativity that the firestorm of "grassroots progressives" will unleash on social media will not be persuasive, will be sectarian and stupid, and will not win.

The smart people who just want conveyor belts to power like Micah Sifry at Tech President are now doing things like currying favour with Daryl Issa, the Californian Republican who helped defeat SOPA. Better to have those "bi-partisan" chits ready in case Romney is elected in fact. The tech set can go right on infiltrating all the tech budgets and getting their people in everywhere with the 2.0 stealth campaign and not worry who is technically president.

The problem with the groups like Moveon.org, whatever their millions, is that they don't have authenticity. People don't like having only a few issues dictated to them. They might in fact oppose SOPA or be ready to sign a petition against the NDAA. But then after that, it can get more granulated and diverse, and these organizations, without any real roots in real communities, but only existing on the Internet, just get useless and dense and stupid -- and even harmful. Who wants Code for America and Tim O'Reilly to take away all the IT budgets in a town depending on them for jobs, by evangelizing their open source cult?

Notice that the grown-ups in charge here have given up trying to fight Citizens United as such. It's too late for that. The money is already flowing, and the PACS are already forming on the left, too, with a "can't beat 'em, join 'em" philosophy. I knew that the angst about CU had no traction when Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures wasn't saying a peep against it -- how could it, when he hoped to spend his own money on campaigns to help the left.

OWS is still mumbling about CU, but OWS has dwindled to a nothing now -- Amnesty International may still be goofy enough and enamoured with leftism to put them on their platform for annual meetings, but watch what Micah Sifry does: he might have put WikiLeaks or OWS as a subject on conferences or seminars, but his annual jamboree for $495 a ticket has not a single one of those types at the podium. Instead, he has the CTO of America and some token Republicans.

Of course, I may be wrong about Romney but that would be sad. I hate seeing what Soros fertilizer does to lay down a layer of astroturf all over our democracy. These groups funded aren't democratic but are fronts run by cadres to maneuver public opinion and votes. They don't have authenticity. The Tea Party was authentic but probably isn't going to make a big comeback.

Maybe something different will happen?

 

Are OWS May 1st Actions Going to Fizzle Today? And is PDF Leaving the Radicals Behind?

Say, I wonder if the Occupy Wall Street May 1st stuff is going to fizzle today.

My guess is that it will, because I see one indication -- there isn't much chatter at all in my kids' Facebook and Meebos and whatnot -- the usual clueless kiddies and mindless morons in their lists who usually go to OWS events aren't yammering about going to any of these activities or even skipping school.

The Pied Pipers are out asking kids not to go to school, and grown-ups not to go to work and -- get this! -- Moms not to go shopping! No shopping!!! What kind of commie nonsense is that?!

I really think OWS is a bust now, and hitching their wagon to the classic communist holiday of May 1st, used from time immemorial for all the red and socialist demonstrations, is just a complete non-starter.

This is not a country where the majority of people want to go communist, or even socialist, despite the rantings of, oh, my former EurasiaNet colleague, Ted Rall, for example -- a cartoonist who has a manifesto linked to eurasianet.org with his radical ideas. One notion he had that if everybody could be assured that they'd keep their house and their job, they wouldn't mind waking up the next day and living under an anarchist or communist government. Sigh.

There are all kinds of pickets by OWS, and I wonder if anyone will show up. Notice that on their website now, they frankly, unabashedly, without any bullshit, call for World Revolution.

They didn't do that when they were first starting out in stealth-socialist mode as just activists and community organizers and Concerned Folk, but now they are. It's good they're playing their hand, because it helps to explain why they are a bad idea.

Sending white powder to banks is also the sort of thing that does not attract the masses. It's nasty. It self-isolates.

Here's what these anonymous fucktards wrote on the notes in the envelopes -- the powder in fact was harmless, but was just decided to scare people (remember the anthrax scares after 9/11?)

"This is a reminder that you are not in control," said a message that arrived with the envelopes. "Just in case you needed some incentive to stop working we have a little surprise for you. Think fast you have seconds."

OWS claimed no connection. Did they denounce it robustly? No. Is it exactly like their storm-troopers in Anonymous in language and concept? Oh, exactly.

No doubt some of the unions with their rent-a-crowds will turn out -- the other day I was walking past the SEIU building in Washington, DC and they had a banner out, "We are the 99%." What a lot of idiocy.

What does the poster remind me of? Toxicity.  The style is a little Soviet avant-garde poster art of the 1920s, a little gothic, a little Wiccan. Sums it up, eh?

I can't believe the actions tomorrow are THAT big a deal when the...New Jersey Star-Ledger...is leading the pack on news coverage in Google search results for the terms "Occupy Wall Street May 1". Fortunately, the Times hasn't gotten giddy (yet). They probably, in their infinitely good news judgement, decided there isn't a story yet.

Here's the thing. I think that Obama and other politicians and the various leftist movements that hope to bring him back to again in the fall for a second term are actually putting a lot of daylight between themselves and OWS, because it turned so nasty, violent, lice-ridden, rigid, and unpleasant in so many places (especially Oakland).

Here's an interesting bellweather of how important OWS and WikiLeaks (Jacob Appelbaum) are to Micah Sifry's Personal Democracy Forum, which had several public panel discussions on these topics throughout the last years:  not very much.

They've been dropped.

For one, PDF spends more time schmoozing with those actually in power trying to subvert them, at love-ins like "Transparency Camp" in Washington, DC. Listen to the new "line" from the former Nation cadre:

Now, at places like Transparency Camp, we're glimpsing the emergence of a new culture, one that isn't inherently out to "Fight the Man" or disassociate itself from the mainstream of society, but that is aimed at making democracy and government work better. For the fun of it, you might say that this counterculture is a "count culture." It's powered by our ability to count everything (data); our ability to publish to the web (what you say can count); and a desire to make sure that everyone counts as full members of society.

More intriguingly, look at the PDF speakers' line-up. It's striking. First, there's Rob Bluey, a guy from the Heritage Foundation perching up top the list to give the semblance of "bi-partisan" and "pluralism" -- and it almost works.

But more to the point, look at the rest of the list. Yes, there's Gramps, John Perry Barlow, who has outrageously radical views but can be a "star" on a panel. But...

o No Robert Scobles -- I guess he's yesterday's newspaper.  No Jeff Jarvis, either.

o But no Jacob Appelbaum or Briggit Jonsdottir of WikiLeaks -- good!

o No Evgeny Mirozov

o No Rebecca MacKinnon

o No Tim O'Reilly

o No Zeynap Tufecki

o No Dave Winer, God no

In other words, none of the Silicon Valley cultists, opensourceniks, "Internet freedom fighter types".

Instead -- Jaron Lanier, my favourite technologist because he criticizes Silicon Valley  -- is even a featured speaker! yay! It's too bad I don't have $495, and too bad that the PDF operatives reject my request for press passes.

There's another speaker not in the lefty cult --Jessica Beinecke -- A Voice of America program host introducing American culture and language to China.

Of course, with Sascha Meinrath, director of Open Technology Initiative at New America Foundation, where MacKinnon and others are, you do have that lefty "progressive" viewpoint included. But it's less focused on smashing the security state like WikiLeaks and OWS, and more focused on process-oriented "gov 2.0" open government stuff, which of course is a very baggy concept that means different things to different people, but isn't quite the hateful "Internet freedom fighter" radicalism of some of the speakers I just noted weren't on the list.

And of course a featured speaker is Todd Park, the very CTO of America itself -- can you imagine, in CTO of US, Inc? What a job! What power! (But Beth Noveck isn't on the list, former White House official serving as deputy of the office of science and technology). Park was a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, which is the bastion of the prog movement, so that's that. But he represents, obviously, somebody way more "establishment" than Jacob Appelbaum or Clay Shirky (also missing). I suspect he is not, like Anil Dash (when he was working as a consultant for the White House) going to show up in a goatse t-shirt.

Chris Soghoian is on the list because he's the new star on the Internet circuit, and Soros-backed, and not tainted by the radicalism of some of the others -- yet (although he shares much of their views).

All in all, you can see what Micah is doing here: he wants his team to come to power, so no more of this WikiLeaks stuff and not even the tech obsession of Robert Scoble!

Now the concentration is on how lists can be made automatically of supporters and how they can be reached on social media so they will vote for Obama -- that's all! And not by tired old Moveon.org or even the Daily Kos. It's something to be done by "David Binetti, Co-Founder and CEO of Votizen, a web service that unites social networks and voting, as well as Co-Founder of USA.gov" -- not Arun Gupta of OWS.

 

 

 

 

 

FCC Seeks Comments on Interruption of Wireless Communications During Flash Mobs -- But FCC Should Not Determine Policy

Police emerge from station at BART during protest. Photo by Steve Rhodes. Aug 15, 2011.

 

“Those who quote Benjamin Franklin out of context to justify the coercive and even violent disruption of Anonymous and Occupy Wall Street against a liberal democratic state deserve neither attention nor engagement."

Well, after quite a lot of jostling on this not-very-user-friendly electronic filing site, I managed to file my comment in response to the FCC's request for public comments on the issue of interruption of wireless communications during public emergencies like flash mobs -- such as occurred at BART last year.

The FCC wants the authority to shut down or order to open up any wireless services that companies or local authorities have closed. They shouldn't have that authority. They don't have that authority now. They should stay out of the business of adjudicating the First Amendment and stay out of local government.

Yes, policies are needed to resist the takeover of liberal democratic government by authoritarian movements like Anonymous and LulzSec and such, or Occupy Wall Street. These movements have grown more radical and violent and they are determined to take over the public space in the name of revolution. You know, like Smolny? I see no reason why they get to do that.

"Internet freedom fighters" like Rebecca MacKinnon are complaining about the authorities' determination to shut off wireless if they have to stop these flash mobs with the usual invocation of the violation to free speech rights and the usual false comparison to China.

I know most people don't bother with these new-fangled gov 2.0 gimmicks like this FCC comment system -- it's just for the Beth Novecks of the world and their friends, and various lobbyists. You have to be willing to make your real name and address public, and few want to do that. These sites really should make a sign-up system based on your name and address, but then enable you to make a handle connected to that. But I hope some people will try, at least on this matter of challenging the FCC's overreach once again. Why aren't the libertarians doing this?

The tech press had a few notices of this but most often without any link to the actual filing page -- I guess they figured either readers wouldn't bother, or their friends at the FCC could cope just fine without input.

It's still not too late and you have until COB on tomorrow, April 30th to file your comment -- which can be just a paragraph if that's all you have to say. Go here to this page describing the issue and then you will find the link to the filing page. Tip: use Internet Explorer instead of Mozilla Firefox or other browsers. These government form pages are awfully finicky. I found my entry hung a half dozen times on both express and regular version of the submission app so I switched to IE and *finally* got it through. Maybe my comment (below) was too long for the "express" version but I found the attached document which I made RTF to go through better wasn't completing either.

As I note in my comment, a lot depends on whether you can physically shut off wireless in a limited area. I believe you can, from what I have seen and heard and read. But there are issues, even there, as the APCO submission indicates regarding the "bleeding over" of communications on some channels for emergencies and for citizens to receive updates on their phone, and nearby channels.

Look, I know the difference between Turkmenistan, where the government shut off THE ENTIRE CELL PHONE SYSTEM because their citizens were hearing too much about the Arab spring and state malpractice like failure to tell people the extent of a weapons depot explosion that was said to kill numerous people outside of Ashgabat. There's THAT, which is despotism, and then there's...just shutting down for a few hours the ability of the script kiddies in Anonymous to whistle to their little friends on the Internet to come on down and say "The Internet is here!" to disrupt BART. No thank you. You don't pretend you are engaging in an act like Turkmenistan or China when you are acting to PREVENT the takeover of the liberal state by the illiberal who instantly take away everybody else's freedoms.

Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer and not a telecommunications expert. So I might get the facts wrong or not understand something about this situation. That's easily corrected by further reading and by explanations in laymen's terms. What I won't accept is that I don't get to challenge the FCC's invasion of First Amendment adjudication and that I don't get to challenge Big IT's ad imperative here under the guise of "preserving freedom of speech."

Next opportunity to test all these theories: Chicago, during the forthcoming NATO summit in May.

Natasha Lennard Distracts from Crime with Fake Privacy Gambit

"Who Owns Your Tweets"? asks radical writer Natasha Lennard provocatively, trying to convert the criminal actions of blocking traffic into some kind of "information security" and "privacy" and even "copyright" issues -- and failing to tell you the actual story.

I told you we'd be seeing more of this as OWS gets more and more desperate: we are.

My response:

Truth in reporting -- Natasha doesn't "cover" the OWS movement, she *participates* in it. So this is a diary entry, not a "news report."

Read about her radical views here

Lennard abets the whole OWS agitprop that "a New York Times reporter was arrested" making it seem as if some terrible media violation occurred. But a real NYT reporter, a full-time staff professional, would have better judgement. Lennard was only a free-lancer who wrote three articles on the OWS which she herself takes part in, and the Times, giddy with the revolutionary potential of OWS and not having their own sources, used her stuff. They don't any more.

(And as you can see from the Slate piece, she cunningly abets the whole fakery of Malcom Harris, whom she admits is her good friend and a prankster, in lawfaring around his stunt to knowingly occupy the bridge and then pretend to be a free-speech victim.)

There's nothing wrong with having radical views and taking part in radical actions. But if you break the law and block traffic or refuse to disperse, you'll take the consequences. So let's not call this some sort of "repression of journalism" when it is merely lawful response to unlawful direct action. And let's not call a judge's subpoena of your Twitter communications some kind of free speech horror when you have used it to incite crime.

There's also a lot of fancy footwork in this article obfuscating the fact that your medical records are private, and there are laws covering them, but your tweets are public. The Internet is not special; it is like a phone service. Law-enforcers requests with a warrant your phone communications; law-enforcers request your Twitter communications including your private messages, and this is lawful.

Why is this lawful? Because there is *probable cause* that you have committed a crime. This article COMPLETELY avoids telling you the content and the circumstances here, and takes part in the Occupy Big Lie:

You can't cry "foul" when you use Twitter to taunt police and announce that you are going to deliberately occupy the Brooklyn Bridge, despite obvious legal restrictions, and then pretend to be aghast that police arrest you for going off the sidewalk. James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal had these people's number:

These people may be tech-savvy, but they're so street-dumb that it apparently didn't occur to them not to post incriminating statements all over the Internet. A further irony is that the claims of "entrapment" are not only false but inverted. The lawbreaking "protesters" evidently sought to provoke arrests, which they then claimed were unjustified. If we were prosecuting these cases, we would demand a formal apology to the NYPD as a condition for any plea bargain.

And no, Twitter feeds are not works of art or literature. They are public communications with a private component. When they are used to incite imminent violence, or plan and incite and implement criminal actions, they don't get a pass under the First Amendment.

There isn't any prosecutorial overkill here. My son was there while this was going on, held up in traffic for hours while this menace was occurring; we all saw the tweets, the Facebook statuses and the photographs filling up Flickr that in fact are incriminating: there was a deliberate plan to occupy the full of the Brooklyn Bridge to deliberately block and disrupt traffic, and that was wrong and unlawful. You don't get to harm other people to make your point. Demonstrations can be restricted in time, place, and manner. You violate it for your subjective reasons, you take the consequences.

Lawfaring to try to coercively install radical rule isn't going to work.

I'll add this: I hope this trial doesn't go away. I really do hope it establishes that no, your social media communications are not some special, autonomous fairy-dusted place where you get to incite violent revolution and "direct action" online and in the real world and expect to forever get a pass under the privacy wrap.

As I noted when I saw the first rounds of this Big Lie from OWS, the "Internet freedom fighters" are waging war to demand maximum access for disrupters and rioters on social media and minimum -- or no! -- interference by government. They need to be disabused of their coercive notions, for the sake of all of our freedoms.

 

How the Big Platforms Are Positioning Themselves to Win the Next Elections

The next presidential election will be fiercely contested and the country will be very split, as split as it was in the Bush-Gore election of 2000. Obama was able to come to power after years of conservativism because conservatives changed their vote, but the Democratic senator from Illinois was able to capture the whole nation because of the emerging tool of Twitter and Facebook and other Internet sites and the determination of the emerging Silicon Valley Internet companies to get a president favourable to their agenda. 

Their agenda wasn't even entirely coherent to themselves, but they were moved first by the instinct for self-preservation, like all beasts, and tended to pick the issues that would sustain them -- any bill protecting intellectual property would hit hard against their established "California Business Model" of free accounts, free uploads of copyrighted material, selling of ads with that hijacked material, hiding behind the "safe harbour" concept of no accountability for encouraging and indulging such behaviour, then play "catch me if you can" with separate DMCA takedown notices filed one after another by intellectua property owners.

Then continue through other topics -- some on foreign policy, such as being friendly to China, so that Silicon Valley's back end -- the gadget and parts manufacturers in China -- could stay safe. Liberal immigration laws -- so that Indian programmers who take lower wages could come into the country and also to provide start-up entrepreneurs with incentives to come to the US (policies I happen to be for, but not everyone is).

Silicon Valley may not have started out with taking on the question of abortion -- but today, when the breast-cancer foundation Komen decided to suspend funding to Planned Parenthood, which provides abortions, "the Internet" (as it likes to call itself) was ready to take down Komen with massive amounts of hateful blog posts, even hacking of Komen's site. The tools for this mob attack were ready, willing and available, well out of their "beta phase" by now -- and not a single Silicon Valley executive arched an eyebrow. The "netizens" were on the move.

Fast-forward four years later, and you see that while Obama himself is threatened in part by a backlash of his own making as Republicans stormed the House in state elections, "the Internet"lobby of Silicon Valley, the tech press, and millions of micro-bloggers on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr have had resounding political successes, completely over-riding Congress as it sought to pass two bills to protect intellectual property -- the Stop Online PiracyAct and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (SOPA/PIPA). By literally going on strike and blacking out pages for the day upon right millions have come to rely, like Wikipedia, Silicon Valley flexed its muscles hard -- and in ways that some "thought leaders" were given pause, such as David Pogue of The New York Times, part of the enthusiastic tech press that helps Silicon Valley sell the gadgets (and rarely criticize them).

Silicon Valley lobbyists (it wasn't a grassroots effort, the grassroots were whipped by the companies and their elitist bloggers, the netroots) marshalled the troops with hysterical hypotheticals making it seem as if every teenager who uploaded a copyrighted music video or put a link on his Tumblr blog was going to be responsible for the entire website being taken down.

The result of the most massive and rapid lobbying operation in history -- using the particular accelerating and amplifying tools of social media -- is that Congress didn't vote on the bills, they simply postponed them, and many believe they are now basically dead, while Congress limps back to try to "fix them," i.e. eviscerate them to prevent erosion of Google's business model (upload first, chase with DMCA takedowns later).

That's scary, when our elected representatives don't get to even vote on bills they draft, but are silenced by mobsters who are no less forceful and unaccountable just because they come in modern cyber clothing.

Even more scary, having "the Internet" in the palm of its hand, two leading companies who led the anti-SOPA charge, Twitter and Google, went on within a week of their victory over Congress (not victory in Congress but over Congress) to impose censorship-by-country, enabling authoritarian governments to request that people tweeting in their country have their tweets removed and made invisible in that country.They didn't bother to get any bill through congress or make sure that they were consistent with an existing Internet Freedom act on the floor -- they just did it. They are big enough. They are bigger than countries. They can do what they want.

While some human rights groups like Amnesty International and the Reporters Without Borders spoke up in criticism of this undemocratic action by Twitter and Google, tech activists and academic commentators like Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the social media academic Zeynep Tufecki and Alex Howard, the O'Reilly lobbyists in Washington  applauded the move as "transparent" and "providing tools for activists" because the accounts being blocked would be visible on an EFF-run site "Chilling Effects" (this would help EFF's cause of tracking and exposing calls for blocking of unlawfully posted copyrighted material, and would then enable the bullying of any company who filed such DMCA notices.)

So outrageously, these social media gurus had had led the charge on SOPA, claiming falsely that it was "censorship" were now not only strangely tone-deaf to real censorship with real-world governments now occurring with their beloved platforms, they were crafting philosophical positions that helped justify this unconscionable action on the part of the platforms.

Now let's look at the next round in the struggle for Silicon Valley and its related networks to take over the elections.

There's no question that Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc. are going to want Obama as president, not only because the developers tilt to the liberal and left persuasion but because they will want to ensure that they seal their non-democratic victories overthrowing Congress on SOPA (millions of people not writing to their congress people to urge them to vote a certain way, but millions of people getting Congress not even to put the bills up for a vote!).

So they will invest even more heavily in making their existing tools available for political empowerment of themselves (and speak airily as if they are "empowering" their customers) by controlling the ads and search results they see -- with its new "privacy" policy, Google now owns you across all its properties and you must use your real name to post your political views on Google+ -- and it watches your every search and every gmail communication and ties it to those views expressed on its new geek-dominated but millions-strong social network G+. 

An entire separate discussion could be held about how these platforms, with their pre-fixed tribes of "thought leaders" and their friends who were their earliest beta testers and "recommended" accounts now have mouthpieces with the most followers -- and mouthpieces who can mute and ban any critic. I'm going to return to documenting how this can happen with a few field cases of my own soon.

Here's my prediction about the 2012 elections:  Obama will win not because he really has over 50 percent of the nation's voters, but because the amplification and whipsawing effect of "the Internet" will throw the vote. The vast array of tools available now for online "thought-leaders", bullies, e-thugs in the storm-trooper hackers called "Anonymous" -- all of these will be used to do "whatever they have to do by any means".  If you thought the Anonymous-backed Occupy Wall Street was annoying during the primaries in Iowa and other states, you haven't seen anything yet.

How could this be if social media is "neutral"? The Tea Party is on Twitter, right? Many people are disenchanted with Obama, many would prefer to move back to the Republican Party or more undecided will now be drawn to Mitt Romney, the likely Republican candidate. There will be massive agitation for both candidates on social media, which will be a deciding factor (the 2 million-strong audience of Fox TV will be drowned out, and all the cries of "Orwell" made by the insecure "progressives" like Bill Moyers will be revealed as ridiculous).

Yet even while in theory "both sides" get to use social media, social media is not neutral.  There are no major tech-backed social-media visible figures of the right or even center. The "progressives" rule the ways. Silicon Valley has every tech leader from Scoble to Dan Gillmor to Jeff Jarvis to Cory Doctrow to the all-powerful Joi Ito on its side articulating the "progressive" views of the platformistas. Who is on the other side? Me? Please name me any figure of the center or right, who will support a Republican candidate, who has a more than 296,000 followers like Google Ideas Council on Foreign Relations fellow Jared Cohen or even 46,000 like former Obama White House spokesman PJ Crowley or 22,000 former Policy & Planning head at State like Anne-Marie Slaughter. Well?

Michelle Malkin has 223,000 -- but that's significantly below Cohen, and there aren't the figures on the right that are the equivalents of Crowly or Slaughter (if you can refute this, please do, I'm not seeing it.) Social media works in clusters, as one or two thought leaders tweet and idea and get their hordes of followers to retweet them. They then get a sounding-board first on the middle-level leaders with the 20,000 or 50,000 level, then those at the higher levels.  Twitter is really broadcasting of the one-to-many, just arranged on the Plotinus principle of cascading levels of worlds  -- *hardly anybody talks back, they just dutifully talk back*.

How did it get to be this way? Activism of any kind tends to be liberal and leftist activism -- conservatives tend not to get active as they preserve institutions and the status quo -- the Tea Party radicalism isn't new in American politics, but it isn't so typical, either, and has been overshadowed by the far more radical leftist/anarchist Occupy Wall Street in many cities.

Social media is already pre-packed with partisan thought leaders in a number of ways:

o the devs are "better worlders" and "progressives" or at least tilt toward liberalism. While some old Silicon Valley companies may have Republicans as leaders or board members, new social media companies most certainly do not.

o the beta test device ensures that these devs first put in their like-minded friends into the service first, so that they get a head start adding friends and followers -- on Twitter, power-users got to use scripts to make those additions before the devs did two things: a) banned those automatic scripts b) put in a ceiling of 2,000 for people you follow yourself until you yourself fit a secret algorithm -- as more people follow you, you can then follow others. Since the main way you get followers is by followering other people who follow you back, this keeps many people trapped under the 2,000 threshold and invisible on Twitter services for ever.

o Twitter recommends people to follow to new members -- and these include many of their power bloggers in the tech field

o Twitter enables the tweet that is retweeted the most times during any important event to remain on top, and thereby get even more followers because it's in the view (This is hugely annoying when you're trying to follow fresh news in emergency but it ensures the Twitter thought leaders get to shape every single major event, for ever).

o Google's algorithms enable Wikipedia to occur almost always as the top search result on any term, and Wikipedia of course is part of the "progressive" Silicon Valley lobby (their page blackout had the most public resonance as millions of teenagers doing their homework came to hate and vilify Congress as an institution in the mistaken, whipped-up hysterical belief that it was going to "black out" Internet pages like Wikipedia (which supposedly would be taken down by SOPA if infringing content was found on any one of them -- absurd and not at all possible with this bill).

o On Google+ and to some extent Facebook, thought leaders can mute and block or remove the posts of any critics, ensuring that their "broadcast field" for legions of re-posters is unimpeded and clear to resonate only with their own agenda. They can also count on fiercely loyal fanboyz and fangirlz who will browbeat critics on their own and hound them off the comments if they can't achieve this on their own with the platform's tools.

There's more that has to do with the role of muting and blocking by these people and how search works, but this is enough to explain what we're dealing with going into these elections.

Roughly speaking, the left owns social media, and the right owns some TV and radio stations. The left will win.