Tuesday, September 3, 2019

Powers That Be






A republic is a form of government in which a state is ruled by representatives of the citizen body. Modern republics are founded on the idea that sovereignty rests with the people, though who is included and excluded from the category of the people has varied across history.

A democracy is a form of government in which the leaders are chosen by the citizens’ votes, and in which the people have a say in decisions about the state’s affairs. The primary characteristics of democracy include political freedom, rule of law, and legal equality. In order for these principles to be authentic, every eligible citizen must have equal access to the legislative process, and the legal system.

Tyranny is government by a ruler or small group of people who have unlimited power over the people in their country or state and use it unfairly and cruelly: a situation in which someone or something controls how you are able to live, in an unfair way.

Fascism is a way of ruling that advocates total control of the people. Fascism is a totalitarian philosophy of government that glorifies the state and nation and assigns to the state control over every aspect of national life

Corporatism is a political ideology which advocates the organization of society by corporate groups, such as agricultural, labor, military, scientific, or guild associations on the basis of their common interests. To understand the larger objectives of the global and financial elite it is important to understand the global financial interests they seek to protect and global financial exploitation of national markets:
  • Multinational corporations purchase controlling interests in various national elements of developed industrial western nations.
  • The Multinational Corporations making the purchases are underwritten by massive global financial institutions, multinational banks.
  • The Multinational Banks and the Multinational Corporations then utilize lobbying interests to manipulate the internal political policy of the targeted nation state(s).
  • With control over the targeted national industry or interest, the multinationals then leverage export of the national asset (exfiltration) through trade agreements structured to the benefit of lesser developed nation states – where they have previously established a proactive financial footprint.
America's biggest companies have paid no federal taxes. The world’s richest 1 percent own 45 percent of the world’s wealth. 10 percent of the global population own 84 percent of global wealth.

Mike Lofgren, a congressional staff member for 28 years, joined Bill Moyers to talk about what he calls Washington's "Deep State," in which elected and unelected figures collude to protect and serve powerful vested interests. “It is how we had deregulation, financialization of the economy, the Wall Street bust, the erosion or our civil liberties and perpetual war," Lofgren tells Moyers.

The military-industrial complex (MIC) is an informal alliance between a nation's military and the defense industry that supplies it, seen together as a vested interest which influences public policy. John Perkins describes the methods he used to bribe and threaten the heads of state of countries on four continents in order to create a global empire and he reveals how the leaders who did not “play the game" were assassinated or overthrown.

All of the leading Republican presidential candidates either outright deny climate change exists, doubt it is a serious problem, or insist that no action should be taken to assuage the potential “environmental catastrophe.” The world’s leading climate scientists (IPCC) have warned there is only a dozen years for global warming to be kept to a maximum of 1.5C, beyond which even half a degree will significantly worsen the risks of drought, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of millions of people.

Emerging technologies also affect society, policy, and culture. An algorithm is a set of instructions designed to produce an output: a recipe for decision-making, for finding solutions. In computerized form, algorithms are increasingly important to our political lives. Algorithms are critical ingredients in devices and services that affect our behavior - what we buy, what we consume, and how we travel, and how we vote. Because of the size of its population, China has recognized the potential for algorithmic manipulation.

Algorithms in themselves are neither 'good' nor 'bad', but where the public has little access to information about the workings of algorithms in decision-making, there is a serious lack of transparency and therefore accountability and choice and has become a looming challenge for privacy, democracy, and national security. Dataism is a term that has been used to describe the mindset or philosophy created by the emerging significance of Big Data. Google and Facebook and even supermarkets know more about you (your choices) than your parents do and tech knows you better than you know yourself.

Automated decision-making systems like predictive policing or remote welfare eligibility no longer simply help humans in government agencies apply procedural rules; instead, they have become primary decision-makers in public policy. Algorithms play a potentially harmful part in driving the content we’re served by social media and search engines, leaving some consumers particularly susceptible to fake news and propaganda or, a less than comprehensive views of current events.

We need to address the political context of algorithms. Even if we achieve perfect transparency in policy algorithms, it might not change their innate biases.  Like drones, decision-making algorithms are a form of politics played out at a distance, generating a troubling amount of emotional remove. Historian and futurist Yuval Harari has a story about the future that is unsettling. He says that in a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power. An American presidential candidate who tells the American public the truth has a 100 percent guarantee of losing the elections.

Governance by algorithms is real and ominous. Google's prevailing culture appears to be hostile to right-wing political views. So a political candidate is designed for a campaign that denigrates Caucasian males and conservatives. Like Trump the real agenda is hidden.







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