Automation: A massive problem mostly ignored.

Yesterday I posted about the singularity and how it seems to be a front for exceptionally unpleasant people. In the process of looking into that Martin Ford and his book "Lights in the Tunnel" was mentioned a lot on Wikipedia (I think he was stealth advertising) and it raises a problem that I'd been kind of hazily aware of, not least because of a Paul Krugman article I read last week.

The essential idea Ford (and others) puts forward is that with improvements in technology and increasing automation an increasingly large sector of the economy will not require human workers at all. While this has already happened to an extent automation up to this point has mostly complemented human workers, that is to say labour saving devices meant fewer employees doing more work and other jobs created by the technology taking up the slack. Well for the past couple of decades that slack has been taken up by the service sector. The bad news is automation of the service sector seems to be imminent, with self service checkouts and Online shopping we are already seeing the beginnings of this. In a piece written a few years ago (so it sadly doesn't cover the most recent financial crisis) Marshall Brain wrote a piece detailing how rapid and large scale automation of the service sector is likely to be.(Marshall Brain is the founder of HowStuffWorks.com with a surname like that I suppose it was inevitable)

Something he highlights, which in retrospective seems painfully obvious, is the existence of Jobless Recoveries. Traditional economists have explained away improved growth alongside continuing unemployment because jobs are apparently a "lagging indicator" but it would seem increased automation would explain this equally well if not better. Ford notes that offshoring is linked to automation, deskilled jobs and computers / high bandwidth long distance communication allow jobs to be much more easily exported to places where labour is cheapest. However with automation seemingly poised to replace these jobs altogether it seems China and India's current economic booms may be shortlived.

The general way of things up to now, or at least up to recently, has been that as automation has eliminated some jobs the slack has been taken up elsewhere but as Brain points out (scroll down to "Creating new jobs") there seems to be little place for new jobs to be found, Ford argues an exception is Green Jobs and building a renewable energy infrastructure but even that is short term, once its built the new of jobs required to maintain it will not take up anywhere near all the slack. Worse still even in the near term it wont just be low skilled jobs that will be automated, as mentioned in Krugman's article above and by Ford in an excerpt from his book.

This leads to two possible scenarios, the more optimistic one being that the massive efficiency increases of robotic labour are shared with the general population and the large numbers of people placed into long term, or likely lifelong unemployment are given a decent standard of living funded by the massive surplus robots can create. This is potentially possible and I'm inclined to believe that to some extent the Middle Eastern and now Spanish uprisings are the first wave of backlash against economic automation. The truly massive levels of youth unemployment, Spain has a Youth unemployment rate of 45% are leading to the young taking to the streets and demanding change. They may not get it but it is a potentially hopeful sign.

The less optimistic scenario is much less optimistic. The evidence of US wages being stagnant since the 70s would suggest the benefits of automation and increased efficiency have flowed solely to a very small part of the population who are at the very top of the pile. Without intervention automation, with massively reduced labour costs and no wages going to an increasing slice of the population, the rich will get even richer even faster. We have seen evidence for this in the aftermath of the 2008 crash with Billionaires getting much richer even as the rest of society faces financial crisis and austerity measures. Indeed austerity measures are a good example of this trend, with the poorer in society becoming worse off even as the amount of wealth in society increases. Then you have movements like the Tea Party wanting to cut Medicare and privatise social security, this does not bode well for a future American society looking after the permanently unemployed.

Indeed, as an increasingly large amount of the population becomes essentially surplus social unrest could well increase. This however may not happen due to increasingly powerful surveillance systems in the West being used to prevent organisation and action. While western troops / police might not fire on civilians (the 2008 RNC Protests suggest that they might well do so) Blackwater / Xe mercenaries and automated drones definitely would. The counter to this is a probably vain hope the human elements of the military (if they existed) would revolt if this happened. Thus there is something of a timelimit, once humans have been removed from military and policing operations (if that is indeed possible) the super wealthy minority would likely be utterly secure and looked after by automated systems and robotics. This in turn could lead to a slow genocide as the majority of the population were left to starve to death or perhaps even a more rapid active genocide.

Three things are factors in this happening. Firstly there is the speed and range of automation, if for whatever reason important parts of infrastructure can't be automated or automation is slow allowing things to build to a head a more egalitarian distribution of the benefits of automation may occur. Secondly there is the issue of Awareness if people become aware they're likely to be out of a job permanently in a decade they may well start to look to softening their landing before they become powerless. This is likely why there is no mention of automation in the mainstream media. Thirdly there is the possibility of robotic efficiency being so great that it is inevitably shared more widely. This a very optimistic scenario but there may simply be an upper limit to what the tiny elite can use and control meaning the crumbs left to the rest of society are big enough to allow the global majority to lead decent lives. I certainly wouldn't count on it happening but it is possible I suppose.

I think point two has the most potential to avert catastrophe for the majority which is why I'm going to make a request of you. Spread the word about this. You need not link my blog post, just cherry pick links or even just explain it to people you know. This is seemingly a major factor in the current state of things and yet no one is talking about it, not even dedicated left wing media outfits. People need to know this stuff.

Here are a few key conversation points:
1)Jobless recoveries amid continuing growth.
2)Robots in the service sector, especially self service checkouts, What will replace those jobs?
3)Krugman and Ford's point about higher skilled jobs such as radiology being replaceable.
4)If those jobs can't be replaced what on earth is going to happen?

Spreading the word as widely as possible can only be a beneficial thing.

I forgot to work this into the text but Jeremy Rifkin also covered this topic in The End of Work but I can't find much to cite from this but still, worth knowing about if you're interested in the topic.

The Singularity movement as Eugenics 2.0

With the total failure of the May 21st rapture to come to pass I decided to have a look at the atheist/nerd version of the rapture, that is the Singularity and while I am in no position to judge how plausible it is I did notice something odd. A lot of the people who are ardent believers are noticeably right wing. Vernor Vinge, the guy who coined the term Technological Singularity is an Anarcho-capitalist. Another prominent speaker in the movement, Robin Hanson is a professor of economics at George Mason University (a Koch Brothers controlled institution) and his views on the economics of the Singularity is very much along Libertarian lines. Then theres the corporate sponsorship of the Singularity University which according to wikipedia: "Corporate founding partners and sponsors include NASA, Google, Nokia, Autodesk, IDEO, LinkedIn, ePlanet Ventures, and the X-Prize Foundation."

This seemed odd to me hey, nerds tend to libertarians and heck corporations sponsor everything these days. However while drifting around Wikipedia trying to get a better insight into the whole movement I was lucky enough to stumble upon a brief mention of David Correia as strident critic of the movement and a footnoted link to this Counterpunch article which expands greatly upon what had caused me to be suspicious and highlights links to US military funding via DARPA. At the very least this article makes a strong argument for much greater suspicion about the movement and its' actual, rather than stated, goals.

http://www.counterpunch.org/correia09152010.html

Some excellent opinion pieces.

Al Jazeera has put up a number of excellent opinion pieces today.

Dominic Strauss Kahn
I had some suspicion that DSK being charged with Rape might be politically motivated, though I had assumed it was more likely to be Sarkozy's doing than anyone else's. Now I do not suggest the victim is lying, just that the timing is suspicious, Elliot Spitzer was found to be a user of prostitutes at a very fortuitous time for the GOP but he had actually committed that crime for instance. These two pieces examine this possibility from different angles:

Danny Schechter looks at The Financial world as a hypsexualised environment and examines how intelligence agencies and banks who were not fond of some of the things DSK was saying might have exploited already known about "foibles" to shut down a potential threat.

Pepe Escobar expands on just why DSK could have needed neutralising pointing out that he was trying to make the IMF slightly less of a machine designed to carve up the world for the benefit of a plutocratic elite. As Escobar highlights the endorsement of Joseph Stiglitz could well have lead the financial elite to get rid of him.

This does not of course mean DSK did not commit rape, it just means a lot of very powerful people had reason to have him disgraced. On a more positive note it strongly suggests Noam Chomsky is a really decent guy, hes been a thorn in the right's side for decades and they haven't gotten anything to stick to him.

Obama's Speech
I haven't read or watch the whole speech so I can't really offer much comment but reading around the apparent Israeli chagrin at the 1967 borders proposal (something the UN has always endorsed) one realises that Obama has given Israel all they could really want in that speech. Still no harm in acting angry and hoping for more.

Richard Falk looks specifically at how the speech favours Israel and examines within this context what Palestinians can do.

Joseph Massad looks at how the speech impacts US Imperial policy in the middle east depressingly but not surprisingly he finds it to be a lot of hypocrisy and a continued pursuit of the status quo. The point about Obama giving a speech for the West and specifically for America is an interesting one. Sure the US has always been insular but given Obama's popularity and prominence as a non-white Western leader and the clear political awakening going on in the Middle East to be so tone deaf to the views and opinions of Arabs is unwise. I mean sure he probably assumes he can use violence and financial coercion to force the Arabs back under dictatorships but it never hurts to at least pretend not to be a monster.

Miscellaneous

I probably wont link this unless I do it here so here we go. Jonny sent me this and it's an article in an Indian newspaper about how China has pledged to protect Pakistan from future US incursions. Now you'd think that would be big news, but no, the western media obviously don't want to get too stuck into the regional political situation. America and friends are saving Afghanistan from Muslims or something and no other nation really exists in that scenario.

Tarak Barkawi examines how accusations of "radicalisation" are being used to attack freedom of speech at universities. He also broaches the subject of neo-liberalisation of University management.

Finally there is a review of a book by Francis Fukuyama, he who is mocked over the misinterpretation of his statements regarding the "end of history". It is a critique of the anti-state sentiment of right wingers in both the US and the UK. Such a prominent conservative making such a strong case against neo-liberal ideology is I think noteworthy and worth keeping an eye on. Then again, maybe he'll be arrested for an embarrassing crime within the next couple of weeks.

Israel's reasonable response.

This is no about Obama's speech that he delivered yesterday, I may do a post collecting different people's analysis but I'm not sure, so often Obama has said a lot of pretty things and then done pretty much none of it. With a year and a half to go in his first term actions are more of an issue than slogans.

No instead we're looking at an OP-ED piece in the NYT that Jonny linked me to last night. This one. He framed it saying something along the lines of he was astounded at how audacious it was. As per my usual world weary act and a general numbness to Israel's free wheeling evil I dismissed this assertion and pointed out it was in the NYT afterall.

On reflection though I was wrong and Jonny was right, this is shocking and it is audacious. In writing, deliberately released just the day before Obama's big speech we have a senior member of Israel's ruling party openly advocating ethnic cleansing. To wit:

[following annexation of all remaining Palestinian territory] These Palestinians would not have the option to become Israeli citizens, therefore averting the threat to the Jewish and democratic status of Israel by a growing Palestinian population.

Now the Nazi comparisons are easy and unarguably apt but I'd instead like to compare this assertion to a hypothetical one made by a Serb, a member of Milosevic's party in the mid to late 90s. First with the Bosnians and then with Albanians in Kosovo you had a situation where Muslim ethnic groups were trying to break away from a violent and repressive regime. When they did violence and, in the case of the Bosnians, genocide occurred. But lets backtrack to when Bosnian and Kosovan independence was more talk than action, can one really imagine a Serb politician being given a platform in a major American and International Newspaper to threaten violent mass expulsion from what was then Yugoslavia?

One of course cannot. Yet Israel, useful tool of the Energy and Arms industries is allowed to have its' politicians issue outrageous threats against a repressed minority that is trying to assert its' statehood in a peaceful and democratic manner in line with international law and the UN charter. While the NYT editors temper circulation boosting Wikileaks revelations with descriptions of why Julian Assange is a poopy head they seem totally willing to print statements of intent regard massive breaches of international law that would bring misery to millions. Though to be fair to the NYT it is not like any of her rivals either domestic or foreign have thought it worthy of mention. Nor is there any political reaction, HAMAS is a dismissed as a negotiating partner because it refuses to recognise Israel as a nation state, yet Israel is being hailed as an ardent pursuer of peace in the aftermath of Obama's speech, and this unmentioned piece.

There is, I think, some hope to be drawn from this though. I am fairly sure if Israel actively pursued this policy they could annex all Palestinian land and drive them out. At the same time I think the US could win in Afghanistan if they used a few nukes. The fact is though that some victories are simply too costly to be pursued, in a world where Israel's image is consistently becoming murkier and European popular support for Palestine is growing rapidly and even in the US questions are starting to be asked Israel will suffer a great deal if they do this. Similar economic sanctions to those suffered by South Africa would likely be imposed by the EU.

Plus Israel is not a monolithic bloc, there is a sizeable minority of Israelis who would not stand for such an action, likely leading to considerable internal unrest.

Thus if the Israeli establishment is feeling forced to shift from a position of ever claiming to be the innocent victim to issuing threats such as this perhaps the plan to push for the recognition of Palestine as a sovereign state has some potential for the Palestinian cause.

Counter-revolution to the Arab Spring

Obama is delivering a speech about the Arab Spring today and it will most likely be just as full of lies as his 2009 speech in Cairo (worth bearing in mind how when he no doubt mentions in today's speech how awesome democracy how willing to give a speech in a client dictatorship he was two years ago.)

Thus I highly recommend Joseph Massad's editorial about how the Euro-American / Saudi counter-revolution to the Arab Spring is going and what it entails. Read it here and bear in mind how little this resembles the mainstream coverage of the region.

Patch Adams was a real person.

I just watched the Latest Onion A.V. Club Inventory on Youtube and they pointed out Patch Adams was a real person. Surprisingly he seems to be a really great guy and a devoted political activist for Healthcare reform in the US.

Glenn Greenwald Q&A at Brown

I admit I am somewhat schizophrenic about Glenn Greenwald praising him one minute and questioning him the next but he seems an odd mix of genuine concern about civil liberties and still thinking the CATO institute is pretty good (he tweeted about a drug conference there the other day).

Nonetheless this lecture and Q&A is very good. In the lecture part he does cover some old ground so if you're pressed for time skipping to the Q&A bit at around the 50 minute mark may be worthwhile.

Bill Gates: Liberal Communist

please note, Zizek, as a political philosopher, uses Liberal in a very specific sense regarding Liberalism as an ideology as opposed to the much more generalised usage prevalent in the USA

This article by Slavoj Zizek is from 2006 but still makes worthwhile points about the lauded charity of men like George Soros and Bill Gates and how it is used to justify damaging and negative actions on their part. Zizek draws comparisons to Andrew Carnegie which he is right to do but I feel it is important to note the deeper roots of this practice, that of Noblesse Oblige where aristocrats for centuries have thrown the peasants a few crumbs to keep them in line.

However the key thing to remember about Noblesse Oblige is not just that it is a manipulation tactic, a damage control method, but also that it is a tactic of legitimation. The elite are right to do whatever evil they will because they know best how to do decent and good things. Or to put it another way "You lefties are just jealous of Bill Gates' success, after all, now he is rich look at all the good he is doing!" It aims to propagate the idea the general public don't know how best to improve things and that the concentration of wealth required for individuals to be able to fund grand charitable projects is desirable.

How the US and the west is transitioning to Fascism.

William I. Robinson has written an editorial for Al Jazeera that details how the US is on the verge of fascism he is not using the term fascism lightly either. It pulls together a lot of threads explaining why things are as they currently are but one especially good point it makes is an explanation of why Obama is doing what he's doing.

If you had any lingering support for the New Atheists...

...now is probably a good time to abandon it. I though Hitchens was the worst one of the bunch but Richard Seymour at Lenin's Tomb highlights a post Dawkins made in which he calls Islam unmitigated evil.

I've heard from time to time critics say atheism as an ideology is very much a first world thing and not something that can be applied globally. I still believe that is not universally the case but the New Atheism that has become very popular in the last few years does seem to have a strong first world and perhaps even a colonialist component.

And speaking of colonialism and religion in Africa I'll highlight this article by the war nerd (one of several he did on the subject in the space of a few days) which examines the situation of religious and ethnic tensions in Africa, especially West Africa. Makes it a bit clearer why Dawkins, a right winger, wants to protect Christianised Africans.

Adam Curtis has a new series coming out soon

Its about computers and their affects on our everyday lives. Watch a trailer here.

Looks good, but its an Adam Curtis documentary, of course it looks good.

I love the Onion.

Sure its not been nearly as good since it went on TV, for one thing the blonde lady just isn't as good as many of the actors she turfed out but still, the razor sharp observations persist:

Hans Rosling on Stats

Hans Rosling makes stats more interesting than one could imagine possible, watch it Here

Aliens tech is now real.

We have long known that monstrous parasitic alien lifeforms with acid for blood exist but now the other half of James Cameron's 1986 classic is starting to be realised. Helmet cams were used by US Special forces so Obama could watch, allegedly only until the mission to kill Osama Bin Laden started, yeah just like you told your mother you'd change the channel if the film got too violent or rude.

To be fair I don't think helmet cams themselves are too new, I'm pretty sure they were proposed for British Police a few years ago but it all went quiet, the coppers are fine with CCTV but something that records their own actions on duty is somehow much less worthy in their view. But the way the system of transmitting via WiFi back to a helicopter (much like the APC in Aliens) and then up to a satellite and command is really close to how the film portrayed it.

Tune in next time for more trenchant examinations of how I think something in real life is similar to a film!

We support such charmers.

Not an indepth post but I was just reading the BBC website's monthly column of obituaries for more obscure people (yes the hallmark of adulthood that is the greater interest in obituaries has hit me) and the first lady of the South Vietnamese regime that was the US puppet until support was switched to a military junta in 1963 has recently died, heres her summary:

Dubbed by her opponents as a latter-day Lucrezia Borgia, Madame Nhu was one of South Asia's most powerful women. She was effectively the first lady of South Vietnam between 1955 and 1963 during the regime of her unmarried brother, Ngo Dinh Diem. She also participated in the nepotism and corruption that was a feature of his presidency, giving government positions to her relatives and living a luxurious lifestyle. She became famous both for her glamorous appearances in figure-hugging clothes and her drive to outlaw abortion and make adultery and divorce illegal. She also attempted to ban beauty pageants, musical entertainment and boxing matches. She was widely condemned for her dismissive attitude to Buddhist monks who had begun setting fire to themselves in public as a protest against Diem's repression of their religion. Her offer to bring fuel and matches to the self-immolations alienated even her own family and, more importantly, undermined American support for the Diem regime. Her power abruptly ended in 1963 when Diem was assassinated, and she was forced into exile in France.

Seriously where do we dig these loonies up from? The article, which cover a lot of more benign figures can be found here.

Emmanuel Goldstein is dead Part 2.

Probably to your surprise I am doing a second posting about this today. To start off with I recommend two Alternet articles: This one lays out the more mainstream concerns of the aftermath of Bin Laden's death and this one gives a reasonable assessment of how OBL's death doesn't really improve the lives of most Americans one bit.

Now on to some more speculation.

4)I'm going to couch this in terms of TV but thats because I've been watching a lot of it today. The "death" of Osama Bin Laden, a figure who as aforementioned had been reduced to little more than occasional obscure audio messages of dubious provenance, could've been prompted for another reason. TV shows often have an arc across a season in which the protagonists of the show face a particularly dangerous foe. While some opponents last for longer its general a good idea to cycle through villains. When first introduced a villain has mystery and that leads them to be more scary and unpredictable, so an interesting and engaging character. Over time though a villain will often become well known and, well, familiarity breeds contempt. On top of that if a foe lingers for a long time the show can start to slow down and you have increasing difficulty explaining why your protagonists can't deal with them.

Can you see through my elaborate metaphors? Yes, Osama as a concept of evil, a rallying cry and justification for certain foreign policy decisions had really run its' course and was starting to make the American Empire look weak, with all those trillions of dollars spent on defence they couldn't kill one guy? Plus as has been pointed out Americans now care more about the economy than being afraid of brown bogey men. Obviously the old method of keeping Americans scared has run out and a new one rolled out. Otherwise they might start asking questions the elite don't want asked.


5) Following on from that a similar reason for wrapping up the threat of Bin Laden could well be due to extremely pressing foreign policy concerns elsewhere. After all the song and dance made about the danger he posed until he was dead it was really quite hard to shift foreign policy focus. That may well be why Obama was so focused on killing him, he has shown himself to be a traditional US Imperialist and likely wants to move away from the strange neo-con crusades of the W Bush White house.

With OBL dead there is plenty of excuse to shift to other concerns. The most likely new direction is probably South America. In the past decade it has shifted from being a subdued back yard for America, something it has long been, to a largely leftist region that is rapidly gaining regional solidarity and moving away from Washington's roadmap. Still as Honduras's Coup showed countries in the region can be realigned to US interests. I have no idea if other nations will be retaken so easily but I imagine the Obama Whitehouse strongly desires to regain control of the region and its' natural resources and having an excuse to shift focus to South America from the AFPAK region is mighty handy for them.

6)Of course, just because a course of action seems to be the best one from the outside doesn't mean that is the one that'll be pursued, maybe because of info outsiders aren't privy to or maybe because of regime politics. I have absolutely no inside track or real understanding of how Obama's government functions but I would say the appointment of General Petraeus to head the CIA shows Obama maybe doesn't have total control of the direction his regime takes (to be fair there are compelling arguments for why Obama would actively choose to appoint him but thats not what I want to focus on here.) Petraeus has been a booster for invading Iran for instance which in the US Empire's current weakened state would be tantamount to suicide.

Then again, W Bush's legacy is a wide variety of ways for the US Empire to commit suicide. Going back to the issue of Pakistan I raised in Part 1 while I said it gave the US carte blanche I think that should be clarified via the can should gap. Yes you can do a thing but that does not mean you should do a thing. There are broadly justifiable actions the US could in the near future take in Pakistan but they would be exceptionally unwise to do so. As aforementioned the US is not pleased Pakistan has overthrown their client dictator. This can be rectified, as happened in Honduras and many other places, by the CIA and other intelligence agencies in quite subtle ways that really don't place the US Empire under much threat even if they fail.

There are strong hints however that America is taking a much more dangerous path that OBL's death could justify ramping up. The drone bombings and incursions into Pakistan by ground troops are not subtle and are already having considerable blowback, ramping that up in a country with nuclear weapons and a large population that holds pretty fundamentalist views would be bad at any time, let alone in the midst of two ohther wars and maybe a third in Libya. Oh and of course lets not forget in the Kashmir region Pakistan shares a border with India AND China, spillover that brought those two countries into the mix could be absolutely catastrophic.

Lord knows what will actually happen.

Oh and now you've read all this heres a much more concise and better summary: http://www.explosm.net/comics/2409/ Thanks Jonny.

Good news from Arizona.

Well maybe anyway, dictatorships don't tend to fall apart just because a couple of the inner circle go away. I'm getting ahead of myself, two key members of Sheriff Joe Arpaio's regime have been forced to resign due to some internal politicking. Any set backs for the most prominent dictatorship within the continental US is a good thing though surely?

Emmanuel Goldstein is dead.

So Bin Laden is apparently dead. The vast majority of the media is going to take this story at face value so while they may be right to do so I'm going to look at the holes and questionable details in all this. To defend myself from the fact at least some of what I say here will look very silly in the coming months I will state this is my initial reaction to the news.

Firstly for several years the only evidence we've had that Bin Laden was alive was the odd taped audio message. Then after he was killed instead of recovering the body to put on show or at the very least have some nominally independent autopsy done his body is dumped at sea. We're almost certainly going to get pictures of the body released but creating photos of the body of someone who hardly anyone has seen for years is pretty doable for the US. More to the point if they had recovered the body so as to dump it at sea why not just hold on to it?

Secondly the timing is odd while it certainly wont hurt Obama in 2012 the election is a year and a half away, plenty of time for the right to trash and undermine the achievement or just plain focus on something else as the elation at Bin Laden's death fades away. On the other hand domestic dissent is growing, the Ryan plan is mobilising boomers' inherent selfishness and protests against austerity are ongoing across the US, most notably in Wisconsin. Now while this unrest was focused on the GOP business interests may well no want any dissent blossoming and so had a wonderfully patriotic distraction occuring. Heck protesters could be dismissed as anti-American for daring to protest at this time of national triumph.

Also a more outlandish point but one I feel worth making, we've had two big patriotic distractions that bolster the status quo and conservative entrenched interests in just a couple of days, first the Royal Wedding and now this. If one did want to distract against something pretty big happening that would upset people those would be pretty solid ways of doing it.

Thirdly this gives carte blanche for further incursions by NATO forces into Pakistan. Obama pointedly commented the attack on the compound was solely a US operation. Worse this compound was near a major Pakistani training base and in an area popular with retired members of the Pakistani military. Pakistani opposition to NATO ground incursions and Air Raids which killed multiple civilians has reached a fever pitch so some kind of justification was needed. Further though Pakistan has been very naughty recently, having the gall do things like charge CIA operative Raymond Davis with murder just because he killed a few Pakistani citizens, heck they've been very naughty for a while what with them overthrowing US puppet General Musharraf (who now lives in Britain with UK tax payer funded protection) and trying to act as a sovereign nation, using democracy to select leaders who might not favour US interests.

With the nature of the killing of Bin Laden in central Pakistan, just miles from the capital Islamabad the US is going to pretty much have a free hand to pursue regime change back to a client dictator.

There are other issues at stake but for now thats what springs to mind, I'll probably try and expand on this later in the day.

Iraq Reverting to Police State.

In The Shock Doctrine Naomi Klein convincingly shows that the US following the 2003 invasion had no desire for Iraq to become a democracy and it was only by mass protests (that the western media ignored) that the Iraqis got democratic elections. Well Iraqis have been doing mass protests throughout the Arab Spring, albeit for improved conditions and not regime change. Again the western media have studiously ignored it, Iraq is "liberated" and "democratic" so to report on protests would show how inaccurate all their previous reporting has been. Even more depressingly US trained Iraqi security forces are cracking down on the free press within the country.

It would seem that the US is attempting to make Iraq into the puppet dictatorship they always wanted it to be. Though to be fair as Chomsky pointed out the US will endeavour to return all the rebellious countries in the region to client dictatorships.

Justice for a rape survivor, 20 years later.

This article by Liz Seccuro is deeply disturbing. Unsurprisingly I suppose when rape is being discussed but it isn't just the terrifying nature of a rape itself that disturbs. Just as bad is the college administration's seemingly deliberate obstruction of justice. Why would they for instance lie to her about police jurisdiction? Did they not want bad publicity or was one of the rapist's parents a major donor. When a woman is brave enough to pursue justice and the strains that will put upon her and is still prevented from doing so I think we are forced to take a long hard look at our assumptions about this society being egalitarian.