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We Need to Destroy the Election-Rigging Industry Before It Destroys Us

posted by janrinok on Tuesday March 27 2018, @07:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the legal-but-immoral dept.

canopic jug writes:

Companies learning to flip elections perfected their tactics in smaller or emerging countries, such as Latvia, Trinidad, or Nigeria, before turning to markets involving elections in developed nations. Paul Mason suggests that while at the moment there is a lot of angst from people being reminded of how their harvested data is used, it is really the union of private espionage, cracking, and "black ops" capabilities that should be setting off alarms.

Disturbingly, both CA and SCL have high-level contracts with governments, giving them access to secret intelligence both in the US and the UK. SCL is on List X, which allows it to hold British secret intelligence at its facilities.

It now appears that techniques they used in Ukraine and Eastern Europe to counteract Russian influence, and against Islamist terrorism in the Middle East, were then used to influence elections in the heart of Western democracy itself.

Let's be clear about what we're facing. A mixture of free market dogmatism plus constraints imposed by the rule of law has led, over the past decades, to the creation of an alternative, private, secret state.

When it was only focused on the enemies and rivals of the West, or hapless politicians in the global south, nobody minded. Now it is being used as a weapon to tear apart democracy in Britain and the US we care — and rightly so.

From New Statesman: We need to destroy the election-rigging industry before it destroys us

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by jimbrooking on Tuesday March 27 2018, @08:14PM (16 children)

    by jimbrooking (3465) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday March 27 2018, @08:14PM (#659132)

    I ran across an article from the Guardian, a British newspaper. It seems to confirm what I've come to believe: American democracy is under seige and has been for decades. The "haves", the 99% or whatever you want to call them, personified by the Koch brothers, have instituted a long-term, stealthy (by design) war on democracy, and by all measures, they are winning. Here's the link to the article:

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/19/despot-disguise-democracy-james-mcgill-buchanan-totalitarian-capitalism/ [theguardian.com]

    And this is the book on which the Guardian article was based:

    http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/533763/democracy-in-chains-by-nancy-maclean/9781101980965/ [penguinrandomhouse.com]

    I just finished the book I recommend it highly to anyone who thinks the "free market" is the be-all and end-all of economics and economic politics. It is a heavily researched and footnoted, yet very readable account of how the "economic freedom" crowd is incrementally taking over the USA using diabolical strategies hatched over the past 70 years or so. The funding is largely Koch in origin. My reading staple lies in the genre of mysteries, horror and the like, but I will say that MacLean's book is the scariest thing I have ever seen.

    Hey y'all frogs: enjoy the warm bath! ( Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog [wikipedia.org] )

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 27 2018, @08:22PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 27 2018, @08:22PM (#659138)

    America is not a free market. We are far closer to Mussolini's vision of an ideal fascist state than Adam Smith's vision of a capitalist one.

    An economic system where government and private business are technically separate but exert influence on each other to the extent that they operate as a single entity is about the farthest thing from a "free market" as you can get. The entire recent conversation about "election meddling" unfortunately centers around Facebook, a company that's been in bed with the US intelligence sector since its inception. They're basically an arm of the CIA.

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by dry on Wednesday March 28 2018, @12:58AM (2 children)

      by dry (223) on Wednesday March 28 2018, @12:58AM (#659264) Journal

      A free market includes the freedom to buy politicians, laws and elections. And being a free market, it will reward efficiency and it is always more efficient to change the rules to heads I win and tails you lose then to actually produce a superior product.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @02:29PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @02:29PM (#659523)

        A free market does not entail the ability to buy politicians to establish different rules for your competitions and ensure a monopoly. That is the opposite of a free market.

        Play your semantic games if you want, but a "free market" extends to everyone, not just billionaires. If America were a free market, I would be able to start a barber shop without restrictive licensing. Dental assistants would be able to clean teeth without working under a dentist. Cable companies would be able to serve new areas without jumping through hoops to gain access to the infrastructure AT&T bought exclusive rights to ten years ago.

        • (Score: 2) by dry on Wednesday March 28 2018, @02:50PM

          by dry (223) on Wednesday March 28 2018, @02:50PM (#659533) Journal

          Ah, the limited free market where you are free to do stuff but others aren't free. Why should the freedom of the other barbers be limited? Why should the freedom of dentists be limited and why should the freedoms of the cable companies be limited?
          The thing is freedom goes both ways, your free to open a barbershop and the other barbers are free to band together and stop you. Perhaps you're arguing for regulations?

  • (Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Tuesday March 27 2018, @09:06PM (4 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday March 27 2018, @09:06PM (#659153) Journal
    Democracy in Chains is a complete fabrication, a libel of an economist/philosopher, James M. Buchanan. For example [independent.org]:

    So perhaps I can be forgiven for my misunderstanding of her method in this book. Early in Democracy in Chains, in a preface entitled “A Quiet Deal in Dixie,” MacLean recounts an exchange, a conversation really, between two conservatives. One is the president of a major southern university, the other is an academic worker intent on reverse-engineering a repressive sociopolitical order in America, working from the ground up, using shadowy methods and discredited theories.

    The academic writes a proposal for a research center where these ideas can be given a pestilential foothold, a source of viral infection hidden in a legitimate academic setting. The goal, as MacLean tells it, was to begin a Fabian war to re-establish a repressive, plutocratic society ruled by oligarchs. MacLean has actually examined the founding documents, the letters in this exchange, and cites the shadowy academic as saying: “I can fight this [democracy] . . . I want to fight this.” (xv, emphasis in original reference).

    In his proposal, the professor expands on the theme, which I quote directly from Democracy in Chains (xv, emphasis in original): “Find the resources, he proposed to [the University President], for me to create a new center on the campus of the University . . . and I will use this center to create a new school of political economy and social philosophy.” Wow! That’s pretty big stuff.

    Except . . . there’s something odd. The italicized text above is written in the first person and is also italicized in the original setting. But, the italicized passage has no quote marks. It’s not footnoted.

    I was curious about that omission, so I tracked down the founding documents themselves: “Working Papers for Internal Discussion Only—General Aims” (1959) and “The Jefferson Center for Studies in Political Economy and Social Philosophy” (1956) (both from Special Collections, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.). And it turns out that the reason there are no quote marks, and no footnotes, is that this exchange, and in particular the first-person italicized portion, never actually took place. It’s not a quote. No, seriously: It’s not a quote. It’s made up. Fabricated. Fictional.

    Or

    MacLean decided a systematic review wasn’t necessary, because she found what she needed. For example, on page 66 of Democracy in Chains, we learn of the attempt by segregationist forces to support vouchers. MacLean says, “The economists made their case in the race-neutral, value-free language of their discipline, offering what they depicted as a strictly economic argument—on ‘matters of fact, not values.’” MacLean quotes nothing that would cleanly support the claim that Buchanan advocated vouchers for the purpose of achieving segregation.

    0 The problem is that this view does not withstand even minor scrutiny as an actual account of Buchanan or Public Choice. Buchanan’s support for vouchers and for school choice arose from a deeply held concern for individual liberty. In fact, since the theme of Democracy in Chains is that Buchanan opposed majority will, the example of desegregation seems an odd choice for MacLean to emphasize. It was after all desegregation that was imposed, at the point of a bayonet, at the command of an anti-majoritarian institution, the Supreme Court. The electoral majority in Arkansas, and in rural Florida where I grew up, and in much of the South, strongly preferred a repressive apartheid society where African-Americans were denied the basic rights guaranteed to all U.S. citizens.

    Or

    It happens that Duke University’s Department of Political Science is located on Duke’s main campus, in Durham, N.C., and is listed in the phone book. Anyone at Duke who wanted to find it would have no difficulty doing so. Further, the department has important resources for any scholar with a serious interest in researching James Buchanan. The department has two past presidents of the Public Choice Society (Geoffrey Brennan and Michael Munger), and one current president (Georg Vanberg). We are not fringe members of the Duke community; I was chair of Political Science for ten years, Vanberg is the current chair, and Brennan was the long-time Director of the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Program. Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, Geoff Brennan was the long-time associate of Buchanan, producing three major coauthored books, more than ten journal articles, and two major edited works that dealt with Buchanan’s overall contributions to political science and philosophy.

    In short, I would expect that a sophomore undergraduate who was writing a paper on Buchanan, even a one-off paper for a classroom assignment, would have recognized the value in consulting Brennan, at a minimum, and probably also Vanberg (who was a family friend of Buchanan since childhood). But neither Brennan nor Vanberg were ever consulted, nor even contacted, by MacLean. Nor, if it matters, was I.

    The reason this matters is that all three of us, Brennan, Munger, and Vanberg, can attest that Buchanan was extremely cautious about the propriety of taking money from sources that attached any kinds of strings or conditions to a grant. Most particularly, in terms of the narrative in Democracy in Chains, James Buchanan never accepted funds directly from the Charles G. Koch Foundation, if those funds had any sort of ideological condition or litmus test.

    So notice some of the situations described here: fabricated quotes, interpreting what is said in the worst possible light, and not consulting living experts on Buchanan. But it doesn't stop there [spectator.org].

    You lose interest in looking up the footnotes to see how she’s misrepresenting the subject. You just assume she is, because her method is obvious: paragraph after paragraph of mini-quotes you can’t trust. Still, you plod onward to discover the bits so hilariously wrong that it doesn’t even matter why MacLean wrote them. On page 198, for example, she presents us with Bill Kristol, founder of the Weekly Standard, who in her words is a “top libertarian.” It’s merely funny that she thinks Ed Meese is a libertarian; that she adds in Kristol, whom movement libertarians regard as a warmongering neocon antichrist, is sublime.

    On page 140, she nearly tops that with a comment on the naming of The Cato Institute. “The name was a wink to insiders: while seeming to gesture toward the Cato’s Letters of the American Revolution, thus performing an appealing patriotism, it also alluded to Cato the Elder, the Roman leader famed for his declaration that ‘Carthage must be destroyed!’ For this new Cato’s mission was also one of demolition: it sought nothing less than the annihilation of statism in America.”

    There's a really simple explanation for this book. With the Trump election there's a lot of butthurt suckers out there waiting to be parted from their money. She's just working the crowd. And she picked a comfortably dead academic because he can't sue for the extensive libel of his character and life.

    Now, on to your own words:

    of how the "economic freedom" crowd is incrementally taking over the USA using diabolical strategies hatched over the past 70 years or so

    Who knows, maybe there is such a conspiracy using such "diabolical strategies". They certain have the money and resources to give it a go and a history of economic freedom advocacy. But maybe we should have some sort of non-fiction evidence first rather than an outright lie, eh?

    • (Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday March 28 2018, @02:40AM (3 children)

      by Gaaark (41) on Wednesday March 28 2018, @02:40AM (#659302) Journal

      "Who knows, maybe there is such a conspiracy using such "diabolical strategies""

      I don't know how much fiction her story is, but just by looking around you can see the rich are using a strategy to make things go their way...you don't need people like her (the sheeple do, but they'll never listen).

      Smart people just need to look up once in a while and they need to protest and wake the sheeple.

      --
      --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 28 2018, @05:31AM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 28 2018, @05:31AM (#659359) Journal

        I don't know how much fiction her story is, but just by looking around you can see the rich are using a strategy to make things go their way...you don't need people like her (the sheeple do, but they'll never listen).

        You don't need liars like her, unless you're trying to snow the sheeple. Sorry.

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 28 2018, @11:03AM (1 child)

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 28 2018, @11:03AM (#659437) Journal
        To add to my previous post, there is a lot more criticism where the two linked articles came from. Much of it is of the form, take an assertion from the book, trace it back to its original quote, and see that the quote in context has little to nothing to do with the assertion.

        The reason I'm aware of this particular book is because I read up on criticism of it back last year and found myself interested in the psychology of the author. Why would she assault some dead academic? It seems so bizarre. It's also a glaring example of recent historical revisionism (would be my principle example of SJW run amok). There seem to be two sorts of reviews. The first group speaks of how well-written and stirring it is. The second group did some actual fact checking and determined that the thing is a load of crap.

        I now steer you to the definitive critic of her work, Phil Magness [philmagness.com], who wrote several articles on his blog analyzing this particular book and the claims it made. For example [philmagness.com]:

        One of the most inflammatory charges of Nancy MacLean’s new book Democracy in Chains holds that James M. Buchanan, and by extension his department and research center at the University of Virginia, served as something of an intellectual buttress to the segregationist forces of 1950s and 1960s Virginia politics after Brown v. Board. MacLean has very little direct evidence for this charge – in fact she’s even conceded in a couple of interviews that she has no direct documentation of Buchanan ever writing anything in favor of segregation. Her footnotes are similarly flimsy on this point and she resorts to misreading and misrepresenting Buchanan’s work on school choice to make her argument (Steve Horwitz documents the issues here [don't have time to link -khallow]).

        To bolster her non-existent case, MacLean resorts to playing a game of six degrees of separation in which she deploys a heavy stream of innuendo and unfounded supposition to write Buchanan into the pro-segregation political apparatus of Harry Flood Byrd, Sr. and a Richmond newspaper editor. As I’ve documented in my previous posts, she also fabricates claims out of thin air that allege Buchanan’s intellectual debts to the pro-segregation Vanderbilt Agrarians and to the 19th century pro-slavery politician John C. Calhoun. Remarkably, there’s almost no evidence for any of these claims – just a fanciful tale that is increasingly taking on conspiratorial overtones in the way that MacLean has mounted her defense.

        Plenty more where that came from. My view is that all she needs to do is sex it up a little more and she'll have the next Secret History [wikipedia.org] or Protocol of the Elders of Zion [wikipedia.org]. Maybe Buchanan showed his demonic form on occasion or drank more than the usual amount of blood of the newborn. These details matter.

        Very quickly, I became interested merely because of the psychology of the author. It seems to be a straightforward case of a budding con artist mixing with a very gullible audience. In addition to the book itself, we then had bizarre behavior from the author, MacLean such as a Koch-driven conspiracy [washingtonpost.com] (note how she gives a very different story to the linked NPR interview than she had on her Facebook page) to discredit her and the keen, unprompted observation that libertarianism appeals to autistic people [reason.com].

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @11:38PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @11:38PM (#659760)

          and the keen, unprompted observation that libertarianism appeals to autistic people [reason.com].

          A bit too close to home, eh, khallow? Khallow? Khallow!!!! Damn autistics! Never look you in the eye when they are lying.

  • (Score: 2) by krishnoid on Tuesday March 27 2018, @09:09PM

    by krishnoid (1156) on Tuesday March 27 2018, @09:09PM (#659155)

    Once again, though, disruptive technology [youtube.com] will save us, at least temporarily.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @12:58AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @12:58AM (#659263)

    It seems to confirm what I've come to believe
    That is called cognitive bias.

    You will ignore what does not match it. Your brain has declared that you are smart. So therefore your theory is right. It is a logical fallacy.

    "free market" works best for the longest. It *will* degenerate into a feudal state. If not kept in check. It does have a flaw of being subverted by money and power. You are not invited.
    "Socialism" almost always degenerates into fascist states. We have a fairly exhaustive list of them. It is also heavily researched. The "free market" flaw is even more prevalent here. Think about that nice revolution all of these systems call for. Notice how pretty much every time they overthrow a gov they become even worse than what they overthrow? They seize "the means to production" then basically keep it for themselves. You are not invited.

    Do not think you have nailed what the best economic solution for every out there. You have not. Just like millions before you.

  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday March 28 2018, @01:41AM (3 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 28 2018, @01:41AM (#659279) Journal

    Looks interesting. Odd, though, that this author focuses on the Koch brothers, but I see no mention of Soros. In effect, we have two ideologically opposed rich families fighting for control of the US political machine. Where's the book that exposes that warfare? For that reason, the author is somewhat suspect - there might be some tacit approval of Soros' actions and methods.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @04:46AM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @04:46AM (#659342)

      Soros does not actually exist. He is creation of the Kock Bros, the Mercer Family, Adelson, and Bill Gates and Peter Thiel. Why, do you think, there is one billionaire bête noire of the right, but dozens of billionaire scumbags trying to subvert democracy through Cambride Analytics and like? Could it be, Runaway, that you are the one who is bamboozled, the victim of fraud and misinformation? Could it not be that you are just enough of an idiot to be taken in by all the bullshit, and then repeat it on an internet forum? Is that even remotely possible?

      • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday March 28 2018, @02:03PM (1 child)

        by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 28 2018, @02:03PM (#659505) Journal

        No, 'cause I'm not taken in by your inanities, or your insanity.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @11:42PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @11:42PM (#659762)

          Of course not, Comrade Runaway! But that is the first requirement of successful propaganda, the blithe ignorance of the victim that it is propaganda, and immunizing them from all attempts by others to rescue them.

  • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Wednesday March 28 2018, @08:16AM

    by NotSanguine (285) <{NotSanguine} {at} {SoylentNews.Org}> on Wednesday March 28 2018, @08:16AM (#659404) Homepage Journal

    I just finished the book I recommend it highly to anyone who thinks the "free market" is the be-all and end-all of economics and economic politics. It is a heavily researched and footnoted, yet very readable account of how the "economic freedom" crowd is incrementally taking over the USA using diabolical strategies hatched over the past 70 years or so. The funding is largely Koch in origin. My reading staple lies in the genre of mysteries, horror and the like, but I will say that MacLean's book is the scariest thing I have ever seen.

    Yes. This. And for those of you who don't read books or prefer video, you can see a book discussion by the author of Democracy In Chains [penguinrandomhouse.com] over here [c-span.org]. Professor Maclean covers the major themes of her book and details the research she did in getting the information that's in it.

    I also highly recommend the book and/or the video.

    Another book which isn't really related, but addresses many of the issues we're seeing is How Democracies Die [c-span.org] which details the causes and results of the failure of democracy around the world in the 20th century, and draws parallels to what's going on in the US and other Western democracies. An excellent book, and the video details most of the major themes.

    --
    No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr