Raiders of the century

Image by Mark Hirschey

OTHING serves as a better example of the brokenness of the system than the taxing situation and bailouts in today’s society. The richest people get labeled “job creators” and are therefore entitled to massive tax breaks and when they fail it is us, taxpayers, who are forced to give them yet more of our tax money. The source of this paradox is of course the influence of money in politics. The golden rule is that those who make the gold make the rules and until or unless we fight back, the corporate press will continue to portray billionaire as “job creators” and then brainwash people into the consensus that the richest people are so wonderful and “successful” that we should not bother taxing them. Many of them who run “foundations” do so not just for PR but also to evade tax. They have legalised their own tax evasion by buying our supposedly “elected” politicians.

TRANGE developments in the United States and the United Kingdom^* have taken away our liberties and assured us that it’s for our own benefit (to stave off the terrorists, pedophiles, looters and so in). Last year I wrote about it in this blog. People must remember that once we lose our rights it is nearly impossible to get them back, unless there is some major revolution or revolutionary event (like the US in 1932). Nowadays, as many transactions and communications are carried out and routed digitally, the loss of freedoms can be technological in nature. In Techrights, for instance, the issue of knowledge being privatised (with patents) is being addressed, along with censorship and other questions. What’s good about being a technologist those days (I consider myself an academic, sysadmin, programmer, and activist) is that it’s us technologists who can make a lot of difference in restoring or preventing the erosion of human rights. Sometimes it is up to us to explain to people what is going on and persuade those in power not to misuse their power, e.g. by passing the SOPA. Now is a good time for those with the time and the means to serve a good cause by sacrificing a bit for the betterment of society.
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^* More countries are affected, but I am especially concerned and familiar with places where I and my loved ones live.

IKE nuclear physics, good science can be exploited for bad causes. Getting access to powerful methods need not necessarily mean that this power will be benign. In fact, a lot of funding comes towards science for malicious reasons, such as war. Just look how much money gets funneled by the military industrial complex into aviation and other such research faculties/industries. There is a danger, however, which has a lot to do with how Computer Vision gets tied up with Big Brother connotations, even though Computer Vision gets used a lot to save people’s lives, e.g. in computer-guided surgeries. It would be a travesty if everyone extrapolated ideas to only show the negative uses of these ideas while ignoring the underlying science. Computer graphics is a generative science, whereas Computer Vision is more analytical. Both use models to understand nature, but one synthesises it, whereas the other converts it into information. If we are doing to assume that information collection is always a bad idea, then the World Wide Web too can be considered harmful.

N THIS weird age when corporations are assumed to have the rights of individuals (e.g. privacy) while evading the liabilities and burdens of individuals (e.g. tax, which they can evade using loopholes) it makes one wonder what became of so-called democracy and capitalism. This was not the vision people had after they had laid the foundations for what they considered to be a humane system. Nowadays, our society is based upon ever-increasing debt and a debt that our descendants are expected to pay back. It’s a society where corporations (and their owners) gain vast amounts of money at the expense of real people and when things go awry, corporations will get bailed out and in some cases left alone when they hurt people (e.g. BP in the gulf). There is a massive looting — “piracy” one might say — going on all the time. All the power and welth gets passed to corporations, which now control the political systems too.

If we wish to cautiously proceed with the idea that corporations are like people, then we must subject them to the same standards and restrictions we apply to individuals. Otherwise, civilisation as we know it will sooner or later collapse.

CIENTISTS are trained to honestly report on findings. Lawyers, on the other hand, are trained to defend a side — any side for that matter — regardless of what’s just and what’s unjust. They are paid to have subjective arguments.

Political moves are hinged not on facts but on influence, and studies that are used to support actions are typically funded by those with influence. It’s all stacked. Politicians are selected based on their obedience to influence; it’s a complex selection process where candidates who do not surrender to influence simply cannot get funded.

This problem is inherent in the UK, not just the US. Spend some time checking the professional background of politicians, who were not really elected but rather installed for people to approve at the ballots.

Some people choose to ignore politics, knowing very well that it’s all corrupt. Others, however, choose to participate not as voters but as critics and reformists. There is a lot that can be done to bring real “Change”, just not enough people eager to make it happen. These people are not lazy. In their defence, they are kept ignorant by the media and kept busy at work all day. They have not the time to digest information and take necessary action. The system has them tamed and closed to ideas that contradict media consensus.

here is an initiative to distract the British public from the real problems, which revolve around a debt crisis. While many of the country’s richest people receive unjust tax exemptions (Vodafone, for example, enjoys a tax dodge of over 7 billion pounds, or 30 times the estimated aggregate cost of all the recent riots and the damages caused throughout), the centralised media seeks to characterise the victims — not tax evaders — as the danger to this country’s future.

Earlier this month, events resulting from genuine grievances were collectively painted only as vandalism and looting, even though that is a gross generalisation – an oversimplification to be exploited by opportunistic politicians . The real issues were left buried under the rug and a mesmerising picture of buildings/buses on fire was implanted in people’s minds in order to make oppressive new legal instruments seem acceptable and even necessary.

These events we are seeing are not unprecedented. The burning of the Reichstag in the 1930s, for example, was used as a pretext in Germany in order to eliminate civil liberties that had been approved in 1919. Based on The Star, a respected daily newspaper, our Prime Minister is now blaming civil rights for the riots, seeking to remove these and by doing this potentially criminalising some forms of union or civil protest.

The argument is not one of left versus right wing, which would be a false dichotomy. It is not about rioters and non-rioters, either. The real issue at hand is class war and the ascent of suppressive policies that limit free speech on the Web and freedom of expression on the streets, however non-violent these may be. Do not fall for the illusion that the lower economic class is the enemy; do not allow draconian new policies to pass, either, mainly because history shows that the decline is democracy is steep and irreversible one it commences.

urial of one’s problems is not the solution to these problems. Burial of a state’s problem is not the mass arrest of the symptom of this problem.

Last week there was a lot of unrest in the UK. It was only the rioters whom the media chose to focus on. It was intentional. Allow me to explain.

Grouping or stereotyping the unrest is a way of evoking a sense of urgency in the fight against dissent. All those who point out that there is societal disparity can easily be classified as “part of the problem”, which is no longer a problem of disparity but a problem of looting and vandalism. The media really squeezed the juice out of last week’s events as it showed people gore or fire. People, in turn, are likely to run into the state’s authority for protection — the same authority which often neglects to publish rich offenders (tax evasion and other very costly crimes).

A week after the protests (collectively referred to as “riots” in the media) began, the storm began to quiet down and national debates approached their conclusion. That having been said, there are some lessons we must take from the whole episode:

1. Genuinely non-violent people who merely attend the streets at times of unrest because they are concerned will be associated — deliberately — with a violent crowd. The message to take from this is that the presence of an anarchistic element in the crowd can depress and gag legitimate attempts to make oneself heard. There are proven cases from other countries where agent provocateur and ‘plants’ were used for this.

2. Freedom of speech is only respected as long as it is not dissenting or revolutionary in nature.

3. Class hypocrisy does not enter the debate, at least not in the mainstream, and when people raise the offences of the Prime Minister or even a history of arson conviction for his deputy, those allegations of hypocrisy are faced with resistance going along the lines of, “you help the looters” (or “help the enemy,” which is how people defend unjust wars). It does not matter how much looting occurs at a ‘legalised’ level (like tax avoidance or lies that lead to wars of vested interests), this does not matter when the poor people rebel. This in its own right is indicative of discrimination based on class.

Those who write more objectively or at least attempt to assess the arguments of both sides are not apologists for looters. They are apologists for truth.

I was actually there at the City Centre for over an hour just before the Manchester riots broke out. I wanted to see for myself what it was all about, not through the lens of corporate media but from the point of view of a bystander. My friends and I left the area just minutes before a shop was put up in flames. The following day it was unsafe to return to the same place, maybe even forbidden. There was no distinct racial characteristic when it to the people who were there to cause trouble (the racists are just being opportunists here). It seems like more an economic commonality. Poor people are not happy in this country and maybe their grievances are somewhat legitimate.

An hour ago at the streets around here (Manchester City Centre), a couple of young people, maybe about 14 years of age, approached me in an attempt to sell me a bike. I wasn’t sure if it was stolen or maybe they were just so poor that they needed to sell their bike. Either way, this is a symptom of a real problem. The older generation in this country collected massive debt at the expense of the young people, who are there to suffer the consequences for many decades to come. I occasionally hear similar frustration from friends of mine. We live in a bubble economy.