By Andrew SALMON

Let us start with a statement of fact; ‘Everything Happens Somewhere’! So therefore, it should follow that knowing ‘where’ matters? Nearly all data can be linked to a physical location and time. Location is a powerful way to connect people to place, transactions to actions, responses to trends, and customers to where they do business and the kind of business they do.

However, location isn’t just a common thread connecting disparate data sources and breaking down silos, often it provides the most transformative insights. Leading organizations tap into location intelligence to solve business problems and uncover new opportunities.

Location intelligence is powered by what is generally referred to as a Geographic Information System or, as we commonly call, a GIS. A GIS is a platform that provides a framework of capabilities to manage, visualize, analyze, optimize and ultimately understand the significance of location, place & geography. A GIS helps to transform businesses and organizations across a wide range of industries by enabling a better understanding of the impact and influence of ‘where’ things are.

The science of where

To truly understand the impact and influence of ‘where’, we need to understand the subtleties of ‘location’, ‘place’ and ‘geography’ in the context of the intelligence that each source of data provides.

When we first moot the concept of ‘location, place and geography’, people look confused, instinctively thinking that these three terms mean the same thing. They don’t! Location, Place and Geography, offer very different levels of insight.  It is Location, that connects people to place; With ‘Location’ we create information through location-based visualization. This basic manipulation of data answers the question … ‘Where is it?’ It is Place, that then helps us understand the impact and influence of where things are; Using ‘Place’ we develop greater meaning through location-based analysis. This deeper dive into our data answers the question … ‘What is going on around me?’ And, it is Geography, that provides a common canvas on which we make decisions; With ‘Geography’ we develop greater insight through location-based optimization. In this final stage of analysis, we start to enquire … ‘How can I make it better?’

This is the essence of what we call ‘The Science of Where’.

Making sense of complex situations

We live in a complicated world. And Location is the science of our world allowing us to organize and apply thinking related to human and natural activities.  This world that we live in is constantly changing, some would say it is still evolving. We are part of this living, changing system, that touches all of our lives.  As individuals, it touches our friends & families; as workers, it touches our organizations & businesses; as citizens, it touches our cities & communities; and as human beings, it touches our whole planet.

The global use of location intelligence is expected to double by 2025, becoming a $25 billion industry according to BusinessWire.com. It is anticipated to expand at a compound annual growth rate of over 15% over the forecast period. A key driver in this growth is the growing use of location, place and geography by the private sector.

My experience of working closely with public and private sector organizations is that location, place and geography is now accepted as a key platform for making informed business decisions. And given the ubiquitous nature of geography, the use and application of location and place are practically limitless.

Driving digital transformation

Not only do we live in a complex world, but we also live in a world that is being constantly monitored and measured, with billions of devices connected to the Internet. We call this The Internet of Things (IoT).  By the end of next year it is reported that there will be 25 billion IoT devices, rising to 80 billion by 2025. By 2023, there will be 3.5 billion cellular connections alone, with an annual anticipated growth rate 30%, giving rise to over 25 million apps. And, all of this ‘connectedness’ will generate 50 Trillion Gb of data and $4Trillion in revenue opportunity.

And as result of all of this ‘connectedness’, senior business executives now have access to unprecedented amounts of data on which to support, drive and evolve their digital transformation program. A recent Deloitte Industry 4.0 survey of 361 executives across 11 countries shows that 94% report digital transformation as their organization’s top strategic initiative.

These executives understand that location data provides unique insights, revealing hidden patterns and relationships in their data that subsequently drive stronger decision-making. With over 80 percent of business data containing geographic information, location intelligence delivers insights into markets, customers, services, logistics, supply chains, and asset, facilities & risk management. It will continue to evolve and will increasingly play a greater role in not only the digital transformation of organizations but also the digital transformation of society on the whole.

Underpinning the “digital twin”

Given all of this measurement, we can now create, what we refer to as a digital twin; a digital replica of a living or non-living physical entity. For many, a “digital twin” conjures notions of something akin to science fiction. However, this isn’t beyond our comprehension or experience today. We are already creating digital twins of Cities (Smart Cities), Airports (Schiphol Airport)and Ports (Port of Rotterdam).

With Location Intelligence we can also create a digital twin of our businesses. We do this by knowing where things are; customers? staff? Competitors? prospects? assets? fleet? Where should I build something? Where should I avoid building? Where do I have coverage? Where is coverage absent? Where are your services needed; Where are they not needed? Where is demand coming from? Where is it likely to increase? By bridging the physical and the virtual business worlds, data is transmitted seamlessly allowing the virtual entity to exist simultaneously with the physical entity.

Think about your smart phone, your Fitbit, every lifestyle device and app that is capturing information about you. Where you had dinner, the cup of coffee you put on your loyalty card, your last credit card transaction; even, how you got here, where you came from and the route you took is a source of location insight. Each is a point in time and space, yet when combined they create, what amounts to, your digital twin, a twin that you are unlikely to ever meet! That same data, especially when aggregated, anonymized and analyzed is revolutionizing our understanding of people and places, experiences and expectations.

Helping us see what others can’t

Location Intelligence lets you transform data into actionable insight, helping you to see what others can’t. If a picture paints a thousand words, then a map paints a million! Given the unique ability for geospatial information to provide a common canvas on which to make complex business decisions, ‘geography’ is now considered a new business platform for change and transformation at local, national and global levels of business.

Taking geography into consideration when examining key performance indicators, evaluating current market conditions, and analyzing trends, brings to life patterns and influences that are otherwise difficult to recognize when using tables or graphs. The concept of ‘geography as a platform’ may be new to the business world but evidence suggests there is no better way to assimilate and communicate business information and market trends than understanding and knowing ‘where’.

Knowing where things happen, where your coverage is poor, where your assets are located, where your resources are best deployed, where you have under-supply, where you are prone to certain problems, where your services are needed, where demand is coming from and where it’s likely to increase, are all fundamental ‘location’ based questions that businesses need to answer.

And, if we accept this proposition, then every aspect of driving business success and maximizing return on investment should be considered “location” dependent.

Geospatial World via activistpost.com

By Mnar MUHAWESH

The ongoing assault on Palestine has captured the world’s attention. The latest violence was sparked by an attack on the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem by Israeli security forces, resulting in over 300 casualties, as Muslims had gathered to celebrate Ramadan in the region’s holiest place of worship. Outside, far-right groups cheered as the mosque was damaged, and launched pogroms against non-Jews inside Israel.

In response, Hamas began firing rockets into Israel, which, in turn, spurred a massive Israeli retaliation that has seen hundreds killed, thousands injured, and forced tens of thousands to flee their homes.

Images of worshippers suffocating due to Israeli tear gas, Gazan buildings being leveled in airstrikes, and mortally wounded children have gone viral, reaching millions. But perhaps not as viral as they should have been if we had an open and uncontrolled social media ecosystem.

Palestinians the world over have reported having their content being taken down and their social media accounts blocked on a host of platforms — including Facebook, Instagram and TikTok — for spurious reasons, including anti-hate speech violations. When pressed for comment by MintPress, Facebook told us that their widespread suppression of Palestinian content at a time of such tensions was merely a technical error, stating:

We know there have been several issues that have impacted people’s ability to share on our apps, including a technical bug that affected Stories around the world, and an error which temporarily restricted content from being viewed on the Al Aqsa mosque hashtag page. While both issues have been fixed, they never should have happened in the first place. We’re so sorry to everyone who felt they couldn’t bring attention to important events, or who felt this was a deliberate suppression of their voice. This was never our intention.

Yet, even as they insisted nothing suspicious was afoot, MintPress CEO and Palestinian rights activist Mnar Muhawesh Adley had both her professional and private Facebook accounts restricted, just as thousands were turning to her for information and views. Other American outlets suffered similar consequences. The Grayzone reported that their interview with Palestinian journalists in Gaza was removed without explanation by YouTube.

This is, unfortunately, all too common a story for activists the world over. During U.S.-backed coup attempts in Venezuela and Bolivia, progressive and antiwar voices in those countries found themselves locked out of their suspended social media accounts at precisely the time it was most crucial for their voices to be heard, suggesting some sort of collusion.

In recent years, social media monopolies like Twitter, Facebook and Reddit have developed increasingly close links to the U.S. national security state. In November, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and IBM signed a contract with the CIA worth tens of billions of dollars to provide the agency with tech solutions and intelligence support, instantly making the firms among the largest military contractors in the world.

Silicon Valley is well aware of this, and is even leading the charge to turn social media into a weapon for the West. “What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century, technology and cyber-security companies [like Google] will be to the twenty-first,” boasted Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen. All of this results in a situation where it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between big tech and big government.

Facebook has long worked alongside the NATO-cutout organization The Atlantic Council in order to determine what content is appropriate and what isn’t, effectively giving the national security state control over the world’s news feeds — the most influential source of information and news globally. And in 2019, a senior Twitter executive was unmasked as an active-duty officer in the British Army’s 77th Brigade — a unit dedicated to online warfare and psychological operations. Mainstream media almost completely ignored the revelation, and Gordon MacMillan is still head of editorial for the Middle East and North Africa on Twitter.

The Israeli state, too, has many deep connections with the social media giants. Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked boasted that she worked closely with Facebook to censor Palestinian voices, with the Silicon Valley corporation agreeing to take down around 95% of the content she asked them to. Today, former Director General of the Ministry of Justice Emi Palmor sits on Facebook’s advisory council, the board ultimately responsible for content moderation on the world’s largest news and social media platform. In her previous role in the Israeli government, Palmor directly oversaw the systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the stripping of the Palestinians’ legal rights.

Discussing the big-tech censorship of Palestinian voices and the collusion between Israel and Silicon Valley are Mickey Huff, Suhair Nafal and Jessica Buxbaum.

Mickey Huff is Professor of Social Science and History at Diablo Valley College, California and is director of the media freedom foundation Project Censored. He hosts the Project Censored Radio Show. His latest book is “Project Censored 2021: State of the Free Press.”

Suhair Nafal is a Palestinian-American activist living in California. Earlier this year, she was taken to court by an IDF soldier who sought $6 million in damages after Nafal called her “evil” in a Facebook post. Bizarrely, the prosecution attempted to get the California judge to apply Israeli law to the post.

Jessica Buxbaum is an Israeli-American journalist based in Jerusalem and a contributor to MintPress News. Her latest article is “Facebook, Social Media Giants Admit to Silencing Palestinian Voices Online.”

mintpressnews.com

The emergence of the internet was met with hope and enthusiasm by people who understood that the plutocrat-controlled mainstream media were manipulating public opinion to manufacture consent for the status quo. The democratization of information-sharing was going to give rise to a public consciousness that is emancipated from the domination of plutocratic narrative control, thereby opening up the possibility of revolutionary change to our society’s corrupt systems.

But it never happened. Internet use has become commonplace around the world and humanity is able to network and share information like never before, yet we remain firmly under the thumb of the same power structures we’ve been ruled by for generations, both politically and psychologically. Even the dominant media institutions are somehow still the same.

So what went wrong? Nobody’s buying newspapers anymore, and the audiences for television and radio are dwindling. How is it possible that those same imperialist oligarchic institutions are still controlling the way most people think about their world?

The answer is algorithm manipulation.

Here’s @YouTube‘s CEO openly admitting to:

1) Ranking corporate news higher in YT’s algorithim
2)Suppressing independent news/politics channels
3)Suppressing people creating content “from their basement” (THE ORIGINAL PURPOSE of YT)

This is scandaloushttps://t.co/B8G2AYvBul

— Jordan (@JordanChariton) April 22, 2021

Last month a very informative interview saw the CEO of YouTube, which is owned by Google, candidly discussing the way the platform uses algorithms to elevate mainstream news outlets and suppress independent content.

At the World Economic Forum’s 2021 Global Technology Governance Summit, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki told Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson that while the platform still allows arts and entertainment videos an equal shot at going viral and getting lots of views and subscribers, on important areas like news media it artificially elevates “authoritative sources”.

“What we’ve done is really fine-tune our algorithms to be able to make sure that we are still giving the new creators the ability to be found when it comes to music or humor or something funny,” Wojcicki said. “But when we’re dealing with sensitive areas, we really need to take a different approach.”

Wojcicki said in addition to banning content deemed harmful, YouTube has also created a category labeled “borderline content” which it algorithmically de-boosts so that it won’t show up as a recommended video to viewers who are interested in that topic:

“When we deal with information, we want to make sure that the sources that we’re recommending are authoritative news, medical science, et cetera. And we also have created a category of more borderline content where sometimes we’ll see people looking at content that’s lower quality and borderline. And so we want to be careful about not over-recommending that. So that’s a content that stays on the platform but is not something that we’re going to recommend. And so our algorithms have definitely evolved in terms of handling all these different content types.”

Progressive commentator Kyle Kulinski has a good video out reacting to Wojcicki’s comments, saying he believes his (entirely harmless) channel has been grouped in the “borderline” category because his views and new subscribers suddenly took a dramatic and inexplicable plunge. Kulinski reports that overnight he went from getting tens of thousands of new subscriptions per month to maybe a thousand.

“People went to YouTube to escape the mainstream nonsense that they see on cable news and on TV, and now YouTube just wants to become cable news and TV,” Kulinski says. “People are coming here to escape that and you’re gonna force-feed them the stuff they’re escaping like CNN and MSNBC and Fox News.”

It is not terribly surprising to hear Susan Wojcicki admit to elevating the media of the oligarchic empire to the CEO of a neoconservative publication at the World Economic Forum. She comes from the same elite empire management background as all the empire managers who’ve been placed in charge of mainstream media outlets by their plutocratic owners, having gone to Harvard after being literally raised on the campus of Stanford University as a child. Her sister Anne is the founder of the genetic-testing company 23andMe and was married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

Google itself also uses algorithms to artificially boost empire media in its searches. In 2017 World Socialist Website (WSWS) began documenting the fact that it, along with other leftist and antiwar outlets, had suddenly experienced a dramatic drop in traffic from Google searches. In 2019 the Wall Street Journal confirmed WSWS claims, reporting that “Despite publicly denying doing so, Google keeps blacklists to remove certain sites or prevent others from surfacing in certain types of results.” In 2020 the CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet admitted to censoring WSWS at a Senate hearing in response to one senator’s suggestion that Google only censors right wing content.

Google, for the record, has been financially intertwined with US intelligence agencies since its very inception when it received research grants from the CIA and NSA. It pours massive amounts of money into federal lobbying and DC think tanks, has a cozy relationship with the NSA, and has been a military-intelligence contractor from the beginning.

We should be extremely alarmed that the Atlantic Council—funded by NATO and the state department and Gulf monarchies and weapons companies—is telling Facebook who to delete https://t.co/7N6fDjDSHR pic.twitter.com/W2zLmx1MKI

— Rania Khalek (@RaniaKhalek) August 25, 2018

Then you’ve got Facebook, where a third of Americans regularly get their news. Facebook is a bit less evasive about its status quo-enforcing censorship practices, openly enlisting the government-and-plutocrat-funded imperialist narrative management firm The Atlantic Council to help it determine what content to censor and what to boost. Facebook has stated that if its “fact checkers” like The Atlantic Council deem a page or domain guilty of spreading false information, it will “dramatically reduce the distribution of all of their Page-level or domain-level content on Facebook.”

All the algorithm stacking by the dominant news distribution giants Google and Facebook also ensures that mainstream platforms and reporters will have far more followers than indie media on platforms like Twitter, since an article that has been artificially amplified will receive far more views and therefore far more clicks on their social media information. Mass media employees tend to clique up and amplify each other on Twitter, further exacerbating the divide. Meanwhile left and antiwar voices, including myself, have been complaining for years that Twitter artificially throttles their follower count.

If not for these deliberate acts of sabotage and manipulation by Silicon Valley megacorporations, the mainstream media which have deceived us into war after war and which manufacture consent for an oppressive status quo would have been replaced by independent media years ago. These tech giants are the life support system of corporate media propaganda.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

The Google-owned video sharing platform YouTube has demonetized numerous independent media accounts, a jarring escalation in the steadily intensifying campaign against alternative news outlets online.

Progressive commentators Graham Elwood, The Progressive Soapbox, The Convo Couch, Franc Analysis, Hannah Reloaded and Cyberdemon531 have all received notifications from YouTube that their videos are no longer permitted to earn money through the platform’s various monetization features, as has Ford Fischer, a respected freelancer who films US political demonstrations. No explanation has been offered for this decision beyond the vague claim that “your channel is not in line with our YouTube Partner Program policies” due to “harmful content”.

Like all large online platforms, YouTube’s appeals process is notoriously opaque and unaccountable. These accounts could remain demonetized for months, or forever, without any clear explanation at all. Ford Fischer, who has been in this situation before, said on Twitter that his account was left demonetized for seven months before YouTube reversed its decision.

“Last time you demonetized my channel, I spoke out for seven months. I didn’t delete a single piece of content. You admitted you were wrong. I forgive you. Please don’t do this again,” Fischer tweeted.

“No superchats, no ad revenue, no YouTube premium money,” tweeted Elwood, who also said “I have a call with my lawyers later today.”

“You guys have destroyed my channel without legit explanation as to why,” tweeted Jamarl Thomas of Progressive Soapbox. “No videos are given — and frankly there is literally zero ‘harmful’ content on my channel. This is a radically bad error that needs to be corrected.”

The Convo Couch’s Jonathan Mayorca tweeted the notification he received from YouTube which gave the reason as “Harmful content: Content that focuses on controversial issues and that is harmful to viewers,” saying no specific video or subject was named. Nobody receiving these notifications appears to have any idea what is meant by “harmful” or “controversial” or why YouTube is mentioning them in the same breath as though these two things are connected or synonymous in some way.

You guys have destroyed my channel without legit explanation as to why. No videos are given – and frankly there is literally zero “harmful’ content on my channel. This is a radically bad error that needs to be corrected. @TeamYouTube @YouTubeCreators @YouTube

— ProgressiveSoapbox (@theProgSoapbox) February 3, 2021

YouTube has been providing template responses saying “We recommend making the needed changes to your content and reapply in 30 days” while refusing to specify what the “needed changes” even are.

Speaking for myself, I can say with absolute certainty that I would not be able to create content at anywhere near the pace I do were I not making enough money from it to do it full time. Life is far too demanding with far too much else going on for me to be able to maintain anything like daily output; being financially deplatformed and having to get another job would force me down to an essay a week in my spare time, if that. Anyone who works in independent media full time knows this, and so do the powerful people who are steadily ratcheting up the campaign to silence anyone who hasn’t passed through the gatekeepers of the plutocratic media.

Financial deplatforming is censorship. People were given an opportunity to devote themselves to the vocation of creating media outside the gatekeeping apparatus of billionaire news institutions, which is arguably the single most important vocation anyone can give themselves to in our world right now, and they built their lives around their ability to do this. Now it’s being ripped away from them; their literal jobs are being taken away. They were offered a reason to think they’d be able to make a living doing very important work, and then they were sucker punched with what amounts to political censorship.

This has been a continually escalating trend for years. The general population is herded onto huge monopolistic social media platforms offering democratization of information where your voice can be heard, and then those platforms proceed to censor an increasing amount of political speech in increasing coordination with the US government.

If the democratization of information online is successfully reversed and the mass media gatekeepers are again the sole authorities on what’s real and true, people will be locked into forming their ideas on how to think, act and vote based on what they are told by the same plutocratic media institutions which have been deceiving them into every war and manipulating them into accepting the status quo for generations.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

Though they claim to champion privacy, companies like Google and Amazon are making a fortune contracting with the government.

By Ivan ELAND

The “de-platforming” of Donald Trump by Twitter, Facebook, and Google-owned YouTube—that is, Big Tech—recently garnered big headlines. Trump’s change in status has raised cries among some conservatives of “censorship.” Yet a more libertarian view holds that these are private companies that have a right to control their own content, just as private broadcast and print media do. The word “censorship” has been traditionally and more appropriately applied to government violations of the Constitution’s First Amendment guarantee of free speech.

More disturbing might be Big Tech’s aiding of law enforcement’s violations of the rights of individuals at home and contributions to the military’s violation of human rights abroad. Despite its reputation for independence, it has recently been revealed that Big Tech’s relationship with the American national security establishment may be stronger than was previously thought. At some tech firms, workforce opposition has arisen over company contracts with the military and law enforcement. Yet these employee objections have usually led the companies to hide such government business through the use of mundane and nondescript subcontractors.

Big Tech has had a long-standing relationship with the U.S. government and military. During World War II, the government used IBM’s punch card technology to keep track of prisoners at unconstitutional domestic internment camps housing Japanese Americans, who even government reports admitted posed no threat to the American war effort. (At the same time, Nazi Germany was using similar IBM technology.) The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the Department of Defense (DoD) funded research on computing in the 1960s that led to the Internet and later to Siri. Such spinoffs are beneficial, but it is more efficient for the private sector to invest in them directly. Less positively, Honeywell Aerospace manufactured fragmentation bombs, which killed many civilians during the Vietnam War. Silicon Valley was no stranger to military contracts, with Lockheed (now Lockheed Martin), builder of military aircraft, missiles, satellites, and other defense systems, being the biggest player there during the 1980s.

Nowadays, Big Tech companies have loads of contracts with the military and law enforcement. Tech Inquiry, a non-profit organization promoting tech accountability, has reported that DoD, ICE, FBI, DEA, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons have thousands of contracts with Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Dell, IBM, and Hewlett Packard. Microsoft is by far the contract champion, with 5,000. Amazon and Google trail with 350 and 250, respectively.

For example, Amazon’s facial Rekognition software could easily be misused by the government, yet the company is still marketing it to government agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Furthermore, Amazon’s cloud services are employed by Palantir, a company that creates databases for ICE. Microsoft even admits that its software allows ICE to “utilize deep learning capabilities to accelerate facial recognition and identification” of immigrants. Dell also licenses software to ICE.

Google was involved in Project Maven to provide artificial intelligence for U.S. drone warfare in foreign nations. American presidents have used drones to illegally kill people, including Barack Obama’s assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. Awlaki was an American citizen, killed by his own government without charges, a trial, or sentencing. Almost 4,000 Google employees demanded the company end the contract and some resigned over it. Yet Google is now providing off-the-shelf technology for drones.

Big Tech is even helping foreign governments conduct what can be legitimately called “censorship.” For example, Google, in a project called Dragonfly, sold the oppressive Chinese government a censored version of its search engine. Microsoft beat out Amazon for a whopping $10 billion JEDI (Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure) contract to provide cloud computing for DoD.

Big Tech should be leery of working with both the U.S. and foreign governments—and not only because many of their employees object to contracts that can result in deaths or the violation of human rights. Government money never comes without strings attached. Contracting with the government will bring a slew of regulations that can change the commercial nature of any business, rendering it less creative and innovative.

Nonetheless this admonition may fall on deaf ears—because the government is so big and spends so much money in the private sector that it is hard for tech companies to avoid being tempted by its pot of gold. Although it pretends differently, Big Tech has a long and lucrative relationship with government contracting and, unfortunately, that business will probably continue to grow in the future.

theamericanconservative.com

YouTube, whose corporate owner Google is arguably the most powerful company on earth, is now deleting user videos which claim the US election was fraudulent.

YouTube’s official statement on its decision to do this is very revealing, not so much for what it says as for what it does not say.

At no point does the video publishing platform attempt to argue that it is removing these videos because they jeopardize anyone’s health or safety, as it did when it began deleting videos deemed to be spreading misinformation about Covid-19.

At no point does it attempt to argue that these videos are inciting violence, as it did when it began deleting QAnon videos.

At no point does it claim that these videos are misleading voters, as it initially began collaborating with the US government to prevent, since all the voting is over and done with.

It’s simply deleting the videos because they are believed to be wrong. This is an important distinction, because it’s a marked deviation from the previous policy of content deletion used by YouTube and other new media platforms.

1/ Our goal this election was to connect people to authoritative info, limit harmful misinfo & remove violative content. Subsequently, authoritative news was widely watched & recommended, and since Sept, we removed 8K+ channels for violating our policies. https://t.co/3It2xphe70

— YouTubeInsider (@YouTubeInsider) December 9, 2020

“Yesterday was the safe harbor deadline for the U.S. Presidential election and enough states have certified their election results to determine a President-elect,” YouTube writes. “Given that, we will start removing any piece of content uploaded today (or anytime after) that misleads people by alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, in line with our approach towards historical U.S. Presidential elections. For example, we will remove videos claiming that a Presidential candidate won the election due to widespread software glitches or counting errors. We will begin enforcing this policy today, and will ramp up in the weeks to come.”

I neither know nor care whether the sort of election fraud alleged to have taken place in the contest between Joe Biden or Donald Trump actually happened; I know the processes by which candidates are elevated to run in a US general election are corrupt and rigged from top to bottom, so the question of whether additional manipulation took place between two establishment-approved imperialist oligarch lackeys in a pretend election is not particularly interesting to me. But this new move by YouTube is a major escalation in the continually escalating rollout of internet censorship protocols by US government-tied Silicon Valley megacorporations.

Even if America did not have the single most flawed election system in the entire western world (and it does), and even if it had been conclusively proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that no election fraud of any sort took place (and it hasn’t), it would still be a massive escalation beyond previous online censorship protocols to begin censoring people simply because they are wrong. People are allowed to be wrong. A free society allows people the right to voice wrong beliefs because the only alternative is creating a monolithic Ministry of Truth which has authority over what the right and wrong beliefs are.

Those of us who’ve been warning of the dangers of government-aligned plutocratic corporations lowering their standards for silencing speech further and further were not committing a slippery slope fallacy; it’s not fallacious to warn of a slippery slope when the slope is demonstrably real. The fact that we’ve been methodically paced from accepting the cross-platform deletion of Alex Jones a couple of years ago to random internet users being silenced for no other reason than expressing wrongthink today shows us the slope is very real and very consequential, and our slide into information totalitarianism will continue if something major does not change.

“Do I believe the 2020 election was stolen? No. But I also didn’t believe the election was stolen from Hillary Clinton in 2016, when the Internet was overrun with conspiracy theories nearly identical to the ones now being propagated by Trump fans.” https://t.co/nvH0isGvaN

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 11, 2020

Matt Taibbi has written a solid article condemning YouTube’s latest ramp-up and highlighting the double standard in the way Democrats have been pushing narratives about Trump colluding with Russia to fraudulently steal the 2016 election for four years with no consequences whatsoever while Trump supporters are banned from doing essentially the exact same thing. I would add that the primary source of this double standard is not ideological bias (though that’s surely a factor as well) but the coziness these Silicon Valley tech giants have formed with US government agencies who signed off on Russiagate but not on Trump’s claims. It’s not so much a liberal bias as it is a US intelligence cartel bias.

In reality, there was never any more evidence for liberal claims of Russia interfering with the US election in any meaningful way than there is for election fraud in 2020. Actual journalists and impartial social media platforms would have recognized the indisputable fact that the Russian hacking narrative was extremely porous and remains completely unproven, and the narrative about Russian memes swaying the election is a complete joke. The only thing giving the Democrats’ claims more narrative weight than those of the Republicans today is that one was endorsed by the US intelligence cartel (the same US intelligence cartel which just so happened to wind up advancing multiple preexisting agendas using Russiagate) and the other was not. That’s it.

Those who understood that whoever controls the narrative controls the world and that plutocrat-controlled mass media is the linchpin of the oligarchic status quo were very excited about the arrival of the internet, because they understood its information-democratizing potential. Now we’re all watching those hopes slowly eroded into nothing as the same power structures which control and influence the mainstream media now work to take full control over online information.

But Not Videos Claiming Donald Trump is a Russian Agent, Because That’s the Acceptable Election Conspiracy Theory https://t.co/gtfz4WZTlX

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) December 9, 2020

“On average 88% of the videos in top 10 search results related to elections came from authoritative news sources (amongst the rest are things like newsy late-night shows, creator videos and commentary),” YouTube boasts in the aforementioned statement on its deletion of wrongthink election videos. “And the most viewed channels and videos are from news channels like NBC and CBS.”

As though rigging your algorithms to give users results which link to the same plutocratic media outlets who’ve helped deceive the public about every war and continuously manipulate them into believing status quo politics totally work is something to be proud of.

If information which isn’t approved by the powerful continues to be squeezed into smaller and smaller fringe circles, the information-democratizing potential which once gave revolutionary thinkers so much hope will be completely nullified, and all that will remain is a network which allows establishment power structures to distribute propaganda much faster than they could back in the days of the old media. Here’s hoping our rulers fail in their attempts to do this, and that we succeed in our desire to stop them.

caitlinjohnstone.com

We have have been discussing how writers, editors, commentators, and academics have embraced rising calls for censorship and speech controls, including President-elect Joe Biden and his key advisers. The erosion of free speech has been radically accelerated by the Big Tech and social media companies. The level of censorship and viewpoint regulation has raised questions of a new type of state media where companies advance an ideological agenda with political allies.  The state media criticism was never more compelling than in the announcement of YouTube this week that it would now remove videos that question the victory of President-elect Joe Biden.  The election is over but YouTube will now scrub away any dissenting views that the election was marred by fraud. It now appears to be protecting history itself from things deemed disinformation — the ultimate calling of the corporate censor.

YouTube (which is owned by Google) announced “We will start removing any piece of content uploaded today (or anytime after) that misleads people by alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 US Presidential election.” The company used the end of the “safe harbor” period for counting votes to justify censor those with lingering doubts or those who want to post explanations of why the count remains suspicious, including presumable an array of members of Congress who have called for investigations.

For free speech advocates, the move is a raw example of corporate censorship but Democrats and many liberals applauded the action. Indeed, the Columbia journalism dean has lamented that these companies are not cracking down on free speech to a greater extent and blaming their own greed for not being greater censors.  It appears that Big Brother is now being embraced as a protector of truth.

Like the “false facts” removed by China’s censors, the Biden victory is treated like a state fact that cannot be challenged or questioned. As someone who has stated for weeks that Biden is the president-elect and criticized conspiracy theories, I do not subscribe to the view that the election was stolen. However, millions of votes — both Republican and Democrat — hold that view. Indeed, some polls show up to 90 percent of Republicans believe that election was not fair and honest.  Roughly half of the country voted for President Donald Trump and many of them hold this view.

The best way to address such views is to expose them to debate and challenge. That is the value of free speech. Otherwise, you end up on a slippery slope of censorship of any views that you deem harmful or misleading.

This action notably occurs just weeks after companies blocked discussion of the Hunter Biden story. It was only after the election that the CEOs then said it was a mistake.  Biden is now under federal investigation and the laptop and its disturbing emails now appear to be legitimate.  Yet, Democratic Senators demanded more censorship as the CEOs were apologizing for spiking a legitimate news story that was damaging to Biden. Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal declared that he was “concerned that both of your companies are, in fact, backsliding or retrenching, that you are failing to take action against dangerous disinformation.” Accordingly, he demand an answer to this question:

“Will you commit to the same kind of robust content modification playbook in this coming election, including fact checking, labeling, reducing the spread of misinformation, and other steps, even for politicians in the runoff elections ahead?”

YouTube has eagerly embraced the call for censorship by Blumenthal and others. It is now protecting not the election but history from what it considers disinformation.  It is the very Chinese model embraced directly or indirectly by some American academics and journalists.  We are watching free speech drain away to the applause of those eager for less freedom.

jonathanturley.org

Today, the Internet is everywhere. Well over half of the planet’s entire population either likes to be on the Internet or has to rely on the web for business, work, and social engagement. People read the news, send notes to loved ones, birthday cards, do their job – increasingly via Skype and Zoom. Others seek answers to an urgent question. More than four billion people see the Internet as central to the way how they communicate, learn, study, go shopping, participate in the business, and organise themselves socially as well as politically.

Among the big five or what the French like to call GAFMA – Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple – two corporations stand out: Google and Facebook. They are euphemistically called “social media”. In fact, they are hardly social. Instead, they are profit-making multinational corporations. In some countries, Facebook has become synonymous with the Internet – a dream of every monopolist. Simultaneously, Google occupies the largest share of all online searches. Search engines are a crucial source of information, and monopolist Google accounts for around 90% of all searches. These two monopolists complement each other. One holds the monopoly of Internet searches while the other holds the monopoly over social engagement.

As much as we like Google and Facebook, these Internet platforms come at a substantial cost. Both corporations apply what a recent Amnesty International report describes as a “surveillance-based business model”. It turns people – users – into sellable products who are sold to advertisers. Facebook and Google users get free services but are sold for a profit. It follows what the economists say – “There Is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch”. This means someone has to pick up the tab.

In the case of Facebook and Google, it is the advertisers who pay Facebook and Google to provide the services many like and rely on. In the language of managerialist CEOs, it is “we don’t monetize the things we create, we monetize users”. Click on to Facebook and Google, and you instantly become a product to be sold.

To perfect their business model, Facebook and Google seek to know as much about their product –you – as possible to sell advertisers what they want, namely a cohort for targeted marketing. It is the opposite of Coca Cola’s marketing. Advertisers don’t want what to target a massive amount of people who don’t use their product. To those, Coca ads are useless – a waste of money for Coca Cola.

Instead, advertisers want to target their ads more precisely. As a consequence of this system, a minute after you have searched for baby food on Google or Facebook, for example, the first ad for baby food comes to you. This is how it works. Except that Facebook and Google have created a gigantic surveillance apparatus to spy on their customers to be able to sell to advertisers what they most want. And this is where the problem comes in.

Facebook and Google collect a huge amount of data on what we search, what we look at, where we go on the net, who we talk to, what we say and write, what we read, what we buy, etc. This is not just an intrusion into the lives of billions of people globally, but an outright assault on privacy. The abuse of privacy is part – actually “the” core – of Facebook and Google’s business model. It engineers profits.

One of the most noted and perhaps most severe cases remains Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica. The scandal involved data from 87 million people’s Facebook profiles. These were harvested and used to micro-target and manipulate people for political campaigning. It was the application of Facebook’s business model to the political advertisements that supported Donald Trump.

Much of this can occur because Facebook and Google operate in a still mostly unregulated area or as Google CEO, Eric Schmidt once said, “the world’s most ungoverned space.” So much for the neoliberal myth that business is drowning in red tape. For Facebook and Google, there is no tape, never mind red tape.

Lacking regulation and oversight, Facebook and Google became giants. Google makes 84% and Facebook makes 98% of their profits from advertising. Appropriately, both corporations should be called marketing corporations and not social media. On the Internet, Facebook and Google hold a duopoly – a world that sounds so much nicer than what they really are: monopolies. Again, and again, reality disproves neoliberalism’s claim – there is a free market. In the world of Facebook and Google, there is no free market. To them, neoliberalism is nothing but a useful ideology to con the public, great public relations – nothing more.

Typically for monopolists, Facebook and Google have cartelised social networking and searching the Internet. Facebook moves towards the three billion-member margin, while Google runs 90% of all searches. For many, without Facebook and Google, there would be no Internet. To perfect their system, both corporations increasingly rely on state of the art artificial intelligence (AI). Additionally, both are serious hoarders when it comes to collecting and storing data. Facebook and Google hold very serious data vaults furnished by a speedy decline in the cost of data storage.

Beyond AI and data hoarding, Facebook and Google are ready to apply their monopoly to the next two Internet frontiers: the Internet of things (IoT) as well as understanding (read: entering) the human brain. In the not too distant future, Facebook’s Portal and Google’s Home Assistant will be able to link your iPad to your phone, your TV, your fridge, your heating system, and your automatic sprinklers. To pay for all this, Facebook has moved into a new global currency called Libra. In other words, your money is no longer safe and nor is your health. Facebook has been given access to patient data in the UK already. These are only the things we know about. But as Donald Rumsfeld who once said,

“there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know”.

In other words, there is an awful lot we do not know about Facebook and Google. Just as the author of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff says about Facebook and Google, “they know everything about us; we know almost nothing about them.” The same could be said about the CIA, Gestapo, KGB, MI5, NSA, Stasi, etc.

Facebook and Google also hoard metadata. This is data about data. For example, the data your computer saves behind each picture you store: date, time, location, etc. For Facebook and Google, this includes email recipients, location records, and the timestamp on emails and photos. In other words, Facebook and Google know about the juicy photos you received from your partner last night! The myth of privacy is only for those who still believe sending something via the Internet is not like sending a postcard – everyone can read it.

It is also for those who mistakenly believe “I have nothing to hide!” IT security experts like to reply, “give me your credit card and pin number and drop your pants”. Of course, we have all have something to hide. Private security experts talk about rings of privacy we have around us. These privacy rings become successively more private, the closer they become.

Much of this has very serious implications. The UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights suggests that when Facebook and Google analysed metadata, they create insights into people’s intimate behaviour, social relationships, private preferences, and identity. Unlike the CIA, Gestapo MI5, and Stasis, they are not so interested in your as a petit-bourgeois revolutionary, but as a consumer. And for that, it is helpful to predict patterns of behaviour. Facebook and Google know that you need contraceptives before you know it.

To understand our sexual identity, political views, personality traits, or consumption patterns, Facebook and Google use sophisticated algorithmic models. As the aforementioned, Eric Schmidt says, “we know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about”. In that the old PR dream comes true: we cannot tell you what to think, but we can tell you what to think about. We make you think about Pizzagate and Hillary Clinton’s child pornography ring, and you vote Trump! It may not be that simple for some people, but propaganda has always worked for some. Beyond that always lurks the intrusion into privacy, violating three basic principles:

1) the freedom from intrusion into our private lives;

2) the right to control information about ourselves; and

3) the right to a space in which we can freely express our identities.

The surveillance-based business model of Google and Facebook undercuts each one of these three elements. The fact that Facebook and Google are harvesting, analysing, and most importantly, monetisation our data remains absolutely central to their business model. This has a grave impact on our three privacy rights. Not surprisingly, the above mentioned UN commissioner emphasises that Facebook and Google’s analytical power of data-driven technology carries very serious risks for people and societies. This can hardly be overestimated.

For Facebook and Google, this colonisation of privacy remains imperative. Facebook and Google use fine-grained, sub-conscious and personalised algorithmic persuasion technologies which significantly impact on the cognitive autonomy of individuals and their right to form opinions and take independent decisions. Machine learning is now able to scan Instagram posts for signs of depression more reliably than human reviewers. Facebook told advertisers, it could judge when teenagers were feeling insecure, worthless, or needed a confidence boost. Link this to TikTok, and you realise that they know more about your teenage daughter than you do.

Teenagers might like to appear on TikTok and Facebook, but that is likely to lead to social isolation. Facebook, despite the promises of Mark Zuckerberg, easily leads people to become isolated from one another as each individual engages with their own highly personalised experience of Facebook. This increases as Facebook provides information that is ever more uniquely tailored to them based on algorithmically driven profiling.

Such tailoring can easily manipulate people’s political opinions. It is the micro-targeting of political messaging, which is able to limit people’s freedom. Paradoxically, the more people express themselves on Facebook; the more Facebook creates and fosters a worldview that is actually inhospitable to pluralistic political engagement. It creates echo-chambers and polarises people into an us-vs.-them groups. These are rabbit holes of toxic content.

On the one hand, Facebook has already admitted that it is intentionally making people addictive. On the other hand, it systematically privileges extreme content, including conspiracy theories, misogyny, accidental misinformation and deliberate disinformation, as well as racism. This keeps people on their platforms for as long as possible. The sensational eliminates the rational. Perhaps Facebook more than Google, spreads anti-refugee sentiment, for example. It fosters anti-refugee sentiment online. This can easily lead to hate crimes. It is not surprising to see that in many countries and, in poll after poll, people overestimate the level of foreigners in their country. This was to be expected because of Facebook and Google’s algorithm privilege false and incendiary content.

In sum, their unique position as the two prime gatekeepers to the Internet has allowed Facebook and Google to have a significant influence over people. People are more or less stuck with two monopolists because for many leaving Facebook and Google is no longer a realistic option. Even when this means that Facebook and Google have quietly erased privacy, the unavoidable conclusion is that Facebook and Google can afford to abuse privacy because people have no choice but to accept their dictate.

This phenomenon is known as network effect – the more users a platform has, the more valuable it becomes. The value of Facebook and Google is undeniable. In the case of Facebook, it is even worse. Many people join Facebook because their friends are on Facebook. This makes it harder for them to leave. At a corporate level, Facebook and Google have created an area surrounding them in which competitors can no longer take root. It kills new entrees, and it kills competition. This is known as Facebook and Google’s kill zone.

As a fig leaf, the state can never grow tired of pretending to uphold one of neoliberalism’s fundamental ideologies, the free market. The liberal state also pretends to protect individuals. As a consequence, in June 2019, for example, the US Federal Trade Commission levied a record $5bn penalty against Facebook. At this time, Facebook was valued at $140bn. In other words, it is a fine of 3% of Facebook’s value – it’s a bit like a $3 speeding fine to ordinary people. Not surprisingly, when the Mickey Mouse fine was announced, Facebook’s share price went up – perhaps because the FTC did not impose a significant enough fine. A $3 speeding ticket is not a meaningful fine.

Even more laughable was a French court’s €50 million ($58 million) fine against Google. Google is a multinational corporation with a net worth of $280bn. A $50m fine translates into 50,000,000. Google’s $280bn represents 280,000,000,000. Put differently and not to confuse millions with billions; the French fine represents one 5,600^th of Goggles value. Rest assured, Google was shaking with laughter. Inconsequential fines like these tell corporations one thing: carry on! There is no corporate criminality.

Fines against corporations of the size of quantum particles for which you need to Hadron Collider to find them in their corporate reports are possible, in part, because powerful lobbying has made these corporations untouchable. Corporate lobbying assures that Facebook and Google pay next to no taxes – unlike us – but it also assures such corporations that they get off the hook easily.

Like many other corporations, Facebook and Google run extensive corporate lobbying operations. This is part of the business just as it is for the Mafia to pay off a police officer or judge or both. Google spent more money than any other company to lobby the EU, followed by Microsoft, Shell and Facebook. In 2018, Google spent $21.2 million in lobbying the US Government (up 17.6%). By comparison, Facebook had spent $12.6 million (up 9.6%).

Apart from this, Facebook and Google also engage in propaganda – or public relations as it is called nowadays. Propaganda just sounds bad. As the Godfather of US public relations, Edwards Bernays once said,

When I came back to the United States … “propaganda” got to be a bad word because the Germans using it, so what I did was to try and find some other words, so we found the words “public relations”.

To make its “corporate propaganda work” (truth) or “engage in public relations” (PR-talk), Facebook and Google fund a wide range of think tanks to bolster their arguments and to make these arguments public. For example, both corporations, their lobbyists, and their think tanks foster the argument that tech companies cannot be regulated – utter nonsense, but it works.

In the end, two multinational corporations virtually run the Internet as monopolists raking in tremendous profits. The business model they use turns users into products. These are then sold to advertisers. Best of all, we are made to believe that these corporations are social media. In reality, they are monopolists that have made serious inroads into people’s privacy.

With the advent of artificial intelligence, this will only get worse. AI is most likely to advance the fastest and furthest on Facebook and Google. Both have the funding and, more importantly, the drive (read: profits) to push AI. Once they have linked AI to IoT (the Internet of things), Facebook and Google might become not only more powerful but also more indispensable. With that, an all-new Super-Google-Facebook-Big-Brother will be watching you!

counterpunch.org

In our piece on California secession, we showed how swiftly DNC allied media like Bloomberg News lined up to build support for an openly secessionist movement led by Governor Newsom.

Our series for SCF on the rising ‘National Labor Movement’ has proven extraordinarily prescient. Our first piece outlined some of the basics of America’s next great awakening, ‘Rage and Bloodshed Ahead: Democrat Betrayals and the Coming National Labor Movement’ . It was written surrounding the ‘betrayal’ of Bernie Sanders by the DNC, and showed how the denial of a legal movement to eliminate private health insurance and improve working conditions at this critical moment in history, would lead towards an organic, bottom-up, militant labor movement. It will transcend the traditional left-right paradigm, and view power as people vs. elites. It would only be realized by being one and the same as much of the Trump populist base. This means embracing many of their truths, such as Deep State discourse as well as WHO skepticism.

Components of the coup tactic – color revolution against Trump

Secession movements are a part of the Color Revolution tactic, not just nation-wide ‘uprisings’ which are generally hyped in media and produced for virtual consumption as much within the country as it is for international audiences. We saw secession used in the Yugoslavia case, in the Libya case, and in the Syria case.

Another component of the Color Revolution is the traditional use of coup tactics. That’s the use of law-fare, abuse of the legal, constitutional nature or powers of the various branches of governments, including the weaponization of the judicial system, and the internal use of the intelligence services against a target. We saw this used successfully in Brazil with the ousting of Dilma, and unsuccessfully (so far) with the failed coup of the National Assembly led by U.S backed Guaido, against Venezuelan President Maduro.

Remember when the Deep State in 2016, in dealing with a probable Trump victory (they were working with real numbers, not the MSM projected model), began to promote CIA officer David Evan McMullin, of the National Clandestine Service unit as the never-Trump Republican ‘Independent candidate’ that the electoral college could be urged to ‘elect’ instead of Trump?

Did this not set the stage for the candidacy of Pete Buttigieg? Isn’t it odd that Biden has announced his candidacy/presidency as merely a transition for CIA agent Pete Buttigieg? How good is Buttigieg’s SHADOW app team at hacking elections? This is an app team made of Google and Apple veterans.

Remember that that Clinton and Obama were able to get the CIA to give an illegal briefing to the electoral college electors that Trump was a Russian asset and reminded them of their oath to the constitution, and their right to confer their votes onto another candidate?

But the most telling feature of the Color Revolution is the mobilization of mass publics using opposition party structures, NGO’s, and labor unions. This is the primary factor that distinguishes the Color/Spring strategy from the traditional coup d’état – the spectacle of public support. When we see this factor included, we know we are dealing with a Color strategy.

And so now, with the inclusion of labor, we can say with high confidence that all tactics of the Color Revolution strategy are being used by some vectors of American power against the executive branch.

We must consistently emphasize the holographic nature of this campaign underway. It cannot create a genuine level of excitement to actually remove Trump by way of an election. But Soros (et al) type NGO’s and labor union staff (not members, but the paid staff) will play dress-up as Amazon workers, nurses etc., and simulate protests. MSNBC, CNN etc. will use carefully cropped footage to create the false sense of mass. Fake news will report that ‘strikes’ (staged protests) consisted of thousands of workers at times and places that had hundreds at most – and again, these would be NGO employees and union staff with some minimally acceptable ‘turnout’, not chiefly workers themselves.

Therefore, when Covid-19 is potentially used as a pretext,

Labor must resist being operationalized for a Google online election

The Color Revolution tactic is potent not because it manufactures discontent per se (though it can), but because it more often uses real existing mass grievances, and weaponizes them for regime change operations. In the case of the U.S in the emergent phase, it is in trying to use the genuine discontent of everyday Americans, and cynically manipulate this into an ‘electoral victory’ (we say in scare-quotes for reasons to be explained) in the fight for the White House come November.

It may indeed seem strange, even otherworldly, that the hitherto foreign deployed tactic of the Color Revolution would finally be used within the United States by one vector of power against another. This is so immense in its proportion and significance, because it solidifies the reality that there is an actual and open inter-elite conflict within the U.S, with tremendously destabilizing potential outcomes.

We believe this coming election, therefore, will be highly irregular – as it already has been. We have already seen the cancellation of the Democratic primary in the state of New York on the basis of coronavirus. This establishes yet another critical precedence towards coming election irregularities. We may expect ‘online voting’ and more – methods which will make electronic voting kiosks seem as good as traditional paper ballots in comparison. That means we’ll be asked to largely trust Google’s ‘Chrome’ app to provide ‘security’ on the results of that election. Americans must resist this next step in the privatization of the electoral process.

The weaponization of organized labor is fantastically evil for numerous reasons, not least because the DNC as a long-time enemy of working people, will deliver a failure on its promises to labor so absolute that it can only be realized as a betrayal – frustrating legitimate organizing attempts for many years to come.

But just as the high potential of a Deep-State orchestrated irregular election is the opposite of a reason to cancel the election all together, the manipulation of organized labor is not a reason to oppose organized labor. Rather it is a call to eliminate the DNC allied labor bureaucracy, and work towards the legitimate and independent realization of genuine militant labor unions free of that moribund institution rooted in the betrayal of the American worker.

Clinton, the Waltons, and Bezos

The tight relationship between the Waltons, Bezos, and Clinton  (or the DNC) should be known, as so much has been written about that subject that any reliable search engine will provide millions of hits.

But what is often under-reported was how the Clinton campaign in 2007 attempted to arrange a yellow union campaign to ‘mobilize’ Walmart workers into a ‘union’ based on the – indeed actual – unfair treatment that Walmart employees face. The aim was to use that organizing campaign to springboard into an issue-based campaign for the ‘fight for $15’, but not actually produce a union. Note – 13 years later, there is still no Walmart worker’s union.

Clinton’s strategy was more successfully used by Obama.

Again, we explain that in the swing states like Colorado, the Obama victory in 2008 was predicated on pseudo  labor organizing campaigns that started in the preceding year which, whether successful or not, created an SEIU army to do precinct walking and phone banking for Obama. The big promises made by Obama like EFCA, healthcare for all, and the ‘fight for $15’ were all abandoned as soon as Obama won.

As despicable as all that is, it was perfectly legal and ignoring the entire ugly history of labor’s relationship with the Democrat Party since Truman and Taft-Hartley, not a bad strategy provided that the Democrats would make good on their commitments. In truth, they rarely if ever have.

What we find today is indeed much worse. These organizing campaigns at Amazon and Walmart are being allowed by the directors of Amazon and Walmart themselves – and why? Because they will not produce real unions. The firing of Amazon employees for organizing was a publicity stunt aimed at disguising the ‘yellow union’ nature of these company union endeavors at Amazon and Walmart.

Another publicity stunt that is supposed to lend a sense of reality to the ridiculous, is the resignation of Amazon Vice President Tim Bray. Bray cited the ‘mistreatment of Amazon workers’ and the firing of worker safety and union organizing activists.

We know this is as fake as a three dollar bill because Bray was there all the while as Amazon systematically fired pro-union workers over the years. This is the same dystopic company that Bray helped run that RFID chipped employees as to track their bathroom visits and moments of being inert, so as to make sure that Amazon employees never took an unearned breather.

The inauthenticity of this ‘organizing campaign’ plan is clear as day when we consider the particular emphasis placed on the upcoming election. Yes, Amazon employees need a union, but not a fake yellow union co-sponsored by the DNC and Bezos himself.

Layers of color revolution holography

Why would a genuine militant labor movement be so heavily focused, and have its sense of urgency and immediacy, placed around an upcoming election and its immediate aftermath? That is not how labor campaigns are conceived when the goal is to create a union. Yet this is what we are hearing from corrupt labor union insiders like Jane McAlevey.

The reason is because the McAlevey promoted scheme is neither genuine nor militant. Their goal is not to create a real union, but to create a public simulacrum and issue-based campaign that seeks to condemn the Trump administration over health concerns of workers relating to the Coronavirus and ‘opening up’.

Their biggest problem is that Biden hasn’t actually said anything of substance, nor has he proposed anything to the left of what Trump has actually accomplished already. It’s Trump who delivered a moratorium on student loans, Medicare for all for coronavirus treatments, a freeze on certain types of evictions and foreclosures, stimulus payments directly to citizens (so-called ‘one time UBI’).

McAlevey et al view the workers as pawns in some larger scheme, based in some progressivist ideological imperative, far beyond the real needs and dreams of actual American workers. These think-tankers see organizing targets as ‘strategic’ if they mobilize black and women voters – precisely two demographics where either Obama was stronger or where Trump is stronger than Biden. In contrast, the real National Labor Movement will reflect the fact that 78% of the American labor force is white.

Just how connected is Jeff Bezos to the DNC? So much so that Andrew Yang’s proposal of UBI was based around a hard-sell to the US public on the inevitability of Amazon ultimately taking over a large majority of the whole retail market – the only issue at hand was whether Amazon would be taxed somehow to pay for a UBI. But in-fact, it was about directing other tax revenues, such as those from small and medium businesses, as well as remaining larger brick-and-mortar retailers, and re-funneling them back to a UBI model which Amazon can distinctly benefit from.

Incidentally, isn’t it odd that in the midst of this pandemic response in the US, businesses were shut-down but Amazon was considered essential? Bezos’ wealth increased by $25 bln during quarantine, and magically expedited the very same ‘forecast’ made by Andrew Yang’s pitch for UBI.

And this UBI would be entirely in line with Amazon’s strategy to date, who like McDonald’s, relies on their profits ultimately being subsidized by social-net policies, to maintain the semblance of sustainability to their model based on sub-sustenance wages. What we add now is a subsidization for Amazon salaries paid from the taxes on companies who do not require their paid salaries be subsidized.

This gives us yet another damning evidence as to the hyper-real, simulated nature of the present ‘organizing efforts’. They are merely election ploys that will ultimately undermine real worker’s power at the shop-floor level, and continue to erode public confidence in the aims of labor unions. When people today see SEIU and Teamster (CTW) unions as merely pawns of the DNC and its corporate donor class, they aren’t wrong.

Fifty-five percent of American workers have a favorable view of unions. Labor unions weren’t formed by Democrats nor did they rely on an abstract ‘power analysis’ performed at the level of ivory tower think tanks. Unions were forged in the face of illegality, forcing themselves onto the stage of history. They organized not where it was proscribed by intellectuals, not where it was tactical, and not where it was conveniently timed for a Democrat election. They were organized, christened by bloodshed, and at great human cost. Their militants were shot, hung, lynched by Pinkertons and corrupt police squads. They were not blessed by Amazon executives or schemed by Hillary Clinton, but by the martyrs of Haymarket. The Atlantic-Council/Deep-State press like The New York Times, MSNBC, Vice Magazine, and the Washington Post won’t give the rising National Labor Movement friendly treatment. Its leaders will be called terrorists, the rank-and-file will be called extremists. There will be kidnappings and car-bombings. They will never oppose or attempt to organize small and medium businesses. That’s how we’ll know the coming National Labor Movement has been born – and what we are seeing from the DNC is certainly not it. But those with an ear to the ground can nevertheless hear the real thing coming.

Flores can be reached at FindMeFlores@gmail.com