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Break ’em Up; Recovering our Freedom from Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money, Zephyr Teachout, 2020

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This is a compact must read book. Here are some highlights:

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Antitrust Can’t Bust a Monopoly of Ideas WSJ

The highest and best goals of America–equality and freedom–require government to protect citizens from any group or any person wielding too much power. We used to do pretty well, using antitrust, campaign finance laws, public utility regulation, labor laws, and other anti-monopoly tools. But in recent years, our government has failed on all these fronts. Meanwhile, corporations have disabled key institutions designed to protect against arbitrary power.

After the crash of 2008, the impunity of elite networks was on full display when no banker was jailed for lawless activity. Pharmaceutical and big tech corporations regularly get away with laughably trivial fines for their major violations of the law…Public courts have been replaced by arbitration in which judges are paid by corporations, reasons aren’t given, and no one knows what happens.

Unelected “megalomaniac President” Zuckerberg: “In a lot of ways Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company.” Facebook “set up a more democratic or community-oriented process that reflects the values of people around the world.”

The will to power is connected to the desire for material accumulation, but it is made of something different, and Zuckerberg clearly has it. The ability to affect the lives of everyone on earth, to know everything about them, to shift elections, to change the practice of democracy–these are not unforeseen by-products of a business plan. They are not an accident. They are the point.

People in power are more likely to interrupt, to look away when others speak, to touch others inappropriately, to say what they want, to take risks…They are more likely to be rude, hostile, and humiliating. They are more impulsive,more self-centered in their choices, which they make obliviously, because they are less able to read other people’s reactions. People in power rely more on stereotypes when making judgments about others, with less awareness of unique or individual traits. They aren’t good at describing the interior lives of others, and are bad at guessing what others want or feel.

Researcher Jake Dunagan: “The experience of power might be thought of as having someone open up your skull and take out that part of your brain so critical to empathy and and socially-appropriate behavior.”

Denmark has appointed an ambassador to deal directly with the quasi governments of Google, Facebook, and Amazon.

At the heart of (Antonin) Scalia logic in the Gilmer case, and entire series of cases involving arbitration agreements, is a fantasy of choice–a fantasy that relies on a nonexistent power dynamic and and set of unavailable non-arbitration options…Scalia’s contract logic reflects neoliberalism, a powerful ideology in American legal thought. Neoliberalism is defined by a deep skepticism of democratic institutions, which it treats as corrupt and unreliable, and a mirror-image faith in market institutions, which it treats as responsible and reliable. For most of Anglo-American history, a whole series of principles shaped contract enforcement. Corrupt contracts weren’t enforced, and contracts with real power imbalances were not enforced. The neoliberal view is that freedom of contract should be presumed and contracts almost always enforced…If you sign a contract, the presumption is that you signed it freely, and freedom is treated as a formal matter, not a contextual one…Was Scalia cynically serving big business or naively imagining a world that didn’t exist?

Political parties are being replaced by corporate-run institutions. Big corporations, which consider political strategy essential to their overall strategy, increasingly use the tools of authoritarianism–centralized regimes, opposition suppression, forced public displays of alignment–to hold on to their power, and they do it in the name of free speech. A persistent paranoia has naturally slipped into politics as these institutions are corroded, and this has led millions to flee politics as quickly and quietly as possible, and millions of others to embrace the nihilism of Donald Trump and Fox News.

The cutting edge of monopoly racism is, as with so much else, in big tech companies, where a toxic combination of power and opaque bias is repackaged and defended as neutral algorithms…When doing web searches, poor people are shown worse jobs and apartments, while elites with purchasing power get access to real estate deals and better employment opportunities…Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple pose unique race bias dangers in two ways. First, they are among the few companies with the resources to extract and exploit publicly available datasets in combination with their own data, creating data monopolies. Second, their choices about what data they use to serve what content have uniquely powerful impacts on everyone in society…Finally, they don’t just passively allow bias, they make money off it.

Researcher Marshall Steinbaum:

“Permitting consolidation and vertical integration and control in supply chains has made labor markets less competitive and worsened outcomes for workers, which is in direct contradiction to the (untested) economic assumptions that motivated the Chicago School’s antitrust takeover in the first place.” Monopoly turns out to be a major driver of inequality…With the massive collapse of an economy into sectors that are each dominated by corporate monopolies, workers may be in great demand, but they are not in a good position to bargain for a fair portion of the value they create…In simple terms, “Capital won, labor lost.”

Wall street has been a driving force behind the gutting of antitrust laws, because when it is allowed, monopoly power is a means of taking a big chunk of money and multiplying it, without adding any value. Access to seed capital, combined with bad antitrust policy, meant big unearned profits…Warren Buffet, one of the richest men in the world, has made his money by investing in already-monopolized industries…He invests in closed markets, monopolies, and oligarchies…He prefers businesses with substantial “moats”, or, as a friend of his called it, “unregulated toll bridges.”

Business school graduates today are taught to invest in the areas where antitrust fails.

In 1967, the Chicago School of Economics launched an all-out war against American predation rules…after President Reagan (in the 1980’s) installed new judges, and economic departments were flooded with Chicago School scholars, the new theory won…The new court decisions did not get rid of predatory pricing laws as a concept, but they made it so difficult to prove a predatory pricing claim that in practice any lawsuit became nearly a dead letter.

The monopoly-predation-subsidy-capital cycle goes like this:
1. The promise of monopoly power attracts excess capital investment;
2. with that investment, the company can engage in predatory pricing to push out competitors and win subsidies;
3. only the biggest companies win individual company subsidies, which they use to push out remaining competitors and reinvest in politics.
4. they then use the investment in politics to block antitrust and influence tax code;
5. without being subject to antitrust and having to pay taxes, they can promise more monopolistic behavior and attract more capital investment.

These new judges–including Justice Antonin Scalia and judges Frank Easterbrook and Richard Posner, the biggest defenders of big business–overturned decades of case law. They treated all mergers as presumptively positive. They effectively wrote predatory pricing out of the Clayton Antitrust Act, concluding that almost any price-cutting was good for customers–even if price-cutting was designed to push out competitors and monopolize a market. They reinterpreted antitrust laws as consumer price-protection tools. They rejected a vision that these laws were designed to curb despotism. They rewrote hundreds of years of contract law, excising the power analysis that once accompanied contract interpretation.

Clinton, Bush, and Obama all presided over an ongoing merger wave that would have horrified any 1960’s judge. From 1992 to 2016, antitrust was not even in the Democratic Party platform.

In sum, from 1980 to today, antitrust was triply depoliticized. First, courts treated the body of antitrust laws as if they were designed only to serve consumer welfare, not growth and abuses of political power in the private realm. Second, practitioners of antitrust–prosecutors, judges, and law professors–depoliticized their own roles, allowing technically trained economists to make the big judgements about what society should look like. They deferred to professional elite economists, whose jargon is complicated and whose claims to special knowledge make it hard for people to feel comfortable challenging them. Giving economists the final say also allowed practitioners to avoid responsibility and to treat decisions as if they were required by abstract laws instead of as hard political decisions that shape power in society. Third, and most bizarrely, these same practitioners treated antitrust as if it were a job for courts, not Congress.

We are in the early stages of a major battle to reinvigorate the anti-monopoly movement. There are huge toolboxes of existing laws that can be enforced right now; a lot of bad Supreme Court precedents that can be overturned by congress; and new laws that need to be passed to address weaknesses in the old laws and new obstacles. The new antitrust era, to meet the crisis of concentration we now face, will require us to do all three.

The Federal Trade Commission–right now– can also play a critical role in changing basic competition rules. As Sandeep Vaheesan argued in a significant article in 2017, the FTC has substantial power, to define the scope of federal laws. Congress, anticipating changing business practices and changing methods of unfairness, purposefully gave the FTC the power to define “unfair methods of competition.” Executive agencies have enormous discretion to act, as Vaheesan points out, the FTC can and should change merger law by making mergers presumptively illegal in competitive markets, and should lay out particular clear, bright line rules–like speed limits– against certain kinds of “vertical” behavior, like when Tyson forces farmers to use building firms it prefers.

The next president (Biden), in particular will have outsized power when it comes to antitrust; she (or he) can unilaterally promulgate new merger rules, directing the FTC to adopt clear guidelines that declare that it will oppose mergers of a certain size and percentage of the market. The new guidelines for the Department of Justice and the FTC can adopt the posture that policing conduct violations is a top priority. They can strongly signal that they won’t stand for a few small changes, but will require structural reorganization.

Even with strong enforcement, we need new laws. Congress should start by overturning all the bad decisions made by Reagan judges. That alone would serve to sharpen the swords of the laws already on the books.

When people are allowed to amass great pools of capital, one of two things happens; The logic of investment overcomes the moral sensibilities of the people who hold the investments, and the investments agents’ instructions to maximize profit sever the moral relationships between people and their impact on the world. Or the logic of power overcomes the moral sensitivities of those who hold too much power, and they start governing from a place of whimsy and self-importance, disconnected from human reality and unable to honestly perceive the world over which they trample. Both outcomes lead to destruction, instability, and cruelty.

For today’s neoliberal economist, market freedom does not mean moral action or thought in the commercial realm, it only frees the buyer and seller from state interference; the only morality in a market lies in cheaper consumer goods. Efficiency has become more than a value, it’s become something approaching an unhealthy, elite obsession.

As (Langston) Hughes understood, the biggest, most powerful dream of America, the one we can’t forget, the one that underpins the right to eat, breathe clean air, have dignity, is the dream that people, not kings or lords or dukes, should govern themselves. The basic dream of America is the fight against illegitimate power. Money is not a legitimate source of political power. The only source of legitimate power over others–the power to imprison, the power to tax, the power to make decisions–flows from we the people.

Monopolized; Life in the Age of Corporate Power, David Dayen, 2021

This book is one of the most depressing, even apocalyptic in recent memory. It is also well researched, organized, and important.
Each chapter addresses an industry segment that has fallen to monopoly: Airlines, Big Agriculture, Journalism and media, Broadband Internet, Opioid medication, Banks, Offshoring essential products, Amazon and Google, Hospitals Supply chains, Rental Housing after 2008, Prisons and Immigrant detention. The book is focused on monopolies in each of these segments. Warren Buffet is mentioned as a significant investor in monopolies in each chapter. Dayen estimates that twelve mega-billionaires like Warren Buffet effectively control the entire US economy today. What can these handful of men possibly do with the wealth they have accumulated? This is from Jeff Bezos, currently the wealthiest:

The only way I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space Travel

Tesla’s Elon Musk seems to share Bezos’ sentiment. Dayen — “Our overlords literally shoot money into space while millions around them suffer.” Here is Buffet;

We think in terms of that moat and the ability to keep its width and its impossibility of being crossed.

Dayen — “Morningstar offers an economic moat index fund of the twenty companies with the highest walls around their businesses.”

The average age of a farmer in America is fifty-eight. In Iowa, 60 percent of all farm owners are over the age of sixty-five; just 1 percent are thirty-four or younger. More than half of all Iowa farmland is rented out, and the startup costs of land, machinery, and other inputs are a huge barrier to entry. A substantial number of farm owners are elderly widows who inherited the land. As they pass on, Iowa could be transformed.

As Iowa and other agricultural states empty out and businesses close, the states turn into people less deserts. Mono culture (single crop) farming with huge chemical inputs are transforming formerly fertile land into barren deserts. Deserts can take many forms and empty farmland is only the first discussed here.

The news deserts created primarily by the dominance of Facebook and Google and by the crippling of the media business model have grave implications for democracy…it’s undeniable that corruption spreads, conspiracies are fostered, and truth is obscured where journalism is absent.

This is the curse of bigness in San Francisco, a city so teeming with money that nobody can afford to open a store to take it…But the truth is that the San Francisco Bay Area is the nation’s second-most dense…Big money has created a vicious spiral: a winner-take-all city keeps accumulating vacant lots, dead-eyed commuters drive for hours to their barely affordable homes, landords must keep rents astronomically high to cover their own astronomically high loans. The concentration of extreme wealth isn’t just bad for the losers in depressed counties and towns. It’s bad for the winners.

Urban deserts are not limited to Flint and Detroit Michigan, to Oakland California and Philadelphia and Baltimore. Try living in today’s San Francisco. Several of my son’s San Francisco old high school friends are living lives as nomads in the city, complete with vans.

In telecommunications including cellphone and broadband America is a disgrace with the highest prices and lowest quality and service anywhere in the world. At America’s founding, postal service was guaranteed to every American. FDR’s Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) together with massive western dam projects guaranteed electrical power to every American. At one time every American was guaranteed phone service. Dayen describes Chattanooga, a big beneficiary of the TVA, and its TVA run utility the Electric Power Board (EPB) which decided to upgrade using fiber optics to improve the reliability of its electric grids. In 2007 EPB decided to offer fiber optics to every home in its service area paid for by a $219.8 million bond. Comcast sued to stop the plan alleging illegal cross-subsidy of electric rate payer funds. Comcast lost and residents of EPB’s service area have access to gigabit broadband access supporting phone and internet service. If you are not in EPB’s service area you are in the communications desert.
I live in the heart of Phoenix Arizona and have access to Centurylink’s (baby Bell) DSL “service” of 16MB sometimes at a cost of about $50 per month. I have a grandfathered T-Mobile prepaid phone that gets no signal at my home even after the T-Mobile Sprint merger. I can make phone calls from my home via Android wifi on my T-Mobile phone or via voice over IP (VOIP) through google voice.
I live five miles from Phoenix’s TV Towers but receive no over the air (OTA) signals for any major network on my TV. Using advanced rooftop antennas and signal amplifiers, I used to be able to receive 5 major networks 95 miles line-of-site to the towers on Mount Lemon near Tucson. Continued reduction in transmit power by network operators has reduced reception to 3 major networks today. Even these 3 are sensitive to weather. I tried to raise the issue of reduced OTA transmitter power over the publicly owned airwaves with newly elected Senator Mark Kelly and was blown off by staff members.
If you live in rural America chances are you have no access to broadband. Urban Americans may typically have two “options” for broadband, your baby bell or surviving phone company and one cable operator. Both will have atrocious customer service and questionable reliability and unconscionable low speeds. Somewhere in a streaming chain, maybe the local broadband supplier is able to restrict speeds or break a stream altogether. We could get better service almost anywhere in the world. Most Americans live in a communications desert.

Dayen talks about the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) banking business that came into it’s own in the 1960s. Today it is a huge industry dominated by the six too big to fail banks.

As of 2019, the six biggest banks–JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley–control $10.5 trillion in financial assets. These banks also happen to be serial transnational criminal enterprises, paying $182 billion in (inadequate) penalties for rap sheets of incomparable length. Few of the violations even relate to the financial crisis’s run-up and aftermath, though those were significant. Incidents of debt collection fraud, market rigging, money laundering, misrepresentations to clients, kickback schemes, and unlawful securities sales all occurred after the crisis.

The media has focused on stock buyback after tax reductions and record profits but gives little attention to the bigger story; mergers of corporations into ever larger and more unaccountable monopolies. The six big banks are key players in these mergers pocketing huge fees for their services. Goldman Sachs, in one merger featured in the book involving United Natural Foods Inc. (UNFI), continued to change the terms of the merger to favor themselves and even created and sold derivatives for hedge funds wanting to bet against the merger.

Mergers in the health care industry, especially hospitals has created large healthcare deserts in America. Hedge funds often buy hospitals for their real estate value and close them after gutting their operations. Millions of Americans are left with few options and long travel distances and time to seek services.

Monopolies create highly vulnerable supply chains often with sole source and offshore production. Dayen talks about an acute shortage of saline drip bags (cost $1) because production in sole source Puerto Rico was disrupted. This failure disrupted services in hospitals across the country. Covid19 protective equipment like masks, shields, gowns, etc. were simply not available for months. Then there are sole source parts like faulty batteries for the F-35 $100 million fighter jets that made them unable to escape Hurricane Michael in 2018. All current US Weapons systems are dependent on parts from China! Supply deserts are disruptive and dangerous and we are inundated in them.

Ten million American homes were lost to foreclosure as a result the 2008 financial subprime disaster. Dayen has an earlier book Chain of Title focusing on the struggle of American’s being illegal foreclosed on as a result of the massive production of fake documents purporting to support the existence of loans. Aaron Glantz in 2019 published Homewreckers, showing the macro side of how all these illegally foreclosed homes ended up in the hands of hedge funds and other bottom feeders and were removed permanently from the American supply of individually owned homes. Dayen here talks about how these new owners, without experience in real estate rentals and without any regard for the law or people converted these homes into badly or unmaintained rentals and profited from illegal fees, penalties, evictions, and extortion while the huge inventory of once livable single family homes are turned into slums. These few corporations make the Trumps and Kushners of the world look like petty thugs. Meantime, Americans looking to buy homes find limited options and soaring prices. Welcome to the housing desert.

We know how to handle monopolies. You restore the interpretation of the antitrust laws to cover the full spectrum of harms, beyond just consumer welfare. Then you break up dangerous concentrations of economic power, block mergers that would excessively consolidate markets, regulate natural monopolies as public utilities, structurally separate functions where necessary, intervene in the public interest so citizens are protected and empowered, and vigilantly examine markets to prepare for monopolies to emerge again. Maybe that sounds impossible in the abstract. But it is entirely possible under existing law that either hasn’t been enforced in decades or has been misinterpreted for decades. We have over a century of experience with both successfully preventing unnecessary concentrations and failing to do so. The mechanisms are clear; getting the political class to enforce them is the stumbling block.

Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society, Ronald J. Deibert, 2020

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Deibert is professor of Political Science and founder and director of the Citizen Lab at the Monk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto. He is also co-founder and a principal investigator of the OpenNet Initiative and Information Warfare Monitor projects. He was one of the founders and former VP of global policy and outreach for Psiphon.

A central theme of this book is the growth and dominance of Surveillance Capitalism by a handful of enormously rich and powerful companies and individuals.

Today it is virtually impossible to protect yourself from privacy encroachment via the Internet even using tools like Tor or end to end encryption like that found on Signal and WhatsApp. When Citizen Lab researchers cross international borders they must totally erase their Chromebooks to prevent seizure of their work. Much of Citizen Labs work is uncovering security and privacy vulnerabilities in existing Internet products such as Zoom with vulnerable camera and microphone control and the big hack of 2020. A huge problem with the Internet is its dependency on multiple layers of independently developed software deployed without adequate attention to security issues and problems. Governments may compound the security problem by requiring exploitable back doors, promoting faulty encryption that they can break, or the forced disclosure of encryption keys as a precondition for use in their jurisdictions.

Using Privacy Badger, Deibert found fifteen trackers on LinkedIn and a comparable number of trackers on the New York Times “Privacy Project” site.

As I write this book, the nerves of our World Brain are vibrating with full-on assaults on truth, science, ethics, and civility.
It’s a perfect storm–tools that enable precise details about people’s preferences and habits; Sophisticated machines that can swiftly analyze and then manipulate data as points of leverage around human emotions; unethical companies willing to do anything for a profit; and clandestine government agencies that lack public accountability but do have big budgets and a blank cheque to use social media as an experimental laboratory for their dark arts. The potential implications of this perfect storm should be profoundly unsettling for everyone concerned about democracy, the public sphere, and human rights.

Receiving special attention here is Isreali-based NSO Group and their flagship spyware Pegasus which the Saudi government used to spy on Saudi dissident and exile in Canada student Omar Abdulaziz and his friend Jamal Khashoggi. Citizen Lab had a bead on the number of Pegasus infected phones and realized that one of those phones was in Montreal. Going door to door with a short list of Saudi dissidents in Montreal, they uncovered the needle in the haystack Omar Abdulaziz and were able to confirm that his phone was infected. It is more than likely that information from this infected phone informed Saudi intelligence of Omar’s conversations with Khashoggi and may well have led to Khashoggi’s assassination by MBS.

Deibert estimates that 90% of the most active campaigners in the 2011 Arab Spring have vanished, in large part due to the use of NSO Group’s spyware.

Citizen Lab was able to infect an Iphone with Pegasus spyware in a laboratory environment and to reverse engineer Pegasus itself.

The spyware was extraordinarily sophisticated; it included exploits that took advantage of three separate flaws in Apple’s operating system that even Apple was unaware of at the time…After disclosing the vulnerabilities to Apple, which pushed out a security patch to more than one billion users, and publishing our report on targeting Mansoor, we reverse engineered Pegasus and began scanning for and monitoring NSO’s infrastructure and government client base.

Finding exploitable flaws in operating systems can be sold for as much as $1 million.

Also receiving special attention is China’s security apparatus courtesy of the Chinese government obsession with the Tibetan refugees settled in Dharamsala particularly with the Dalai Lama. Deibert representing Citizen Lab made numerous trips to Dharamsala and had a personal audience with the Dalai Lama. Citizen Lab’s history studying GhostNet goes back to 2009 when China’s large-scale electronic espionage program used to spy on individuals, organizations, and governments was discovered. The threat actors breached 1,295 computers in 103 countries over a two-year period, predominately focusing on governments in Southeast Asia. Citizen Lab’s first report on GhostNet was issued in 2009.

…recent years have brought about a disturbing descent into authoritarianism, fueled by and in turn driving income inequality in grotesque proportions and propelling the rise of a kind of transnational gangster economy. There is today a large and influential class of kleptocrats spread across the globe and supported by a professional service industry of lawyers, shell companies, accountants, and PR firms, the members of which move seamlessly between the private sector and agencies of the state…They thrive by victimizing innocent others, undermining individuals and organizations that seek to hold them to account, and using the power of the state for personal gain. There is no jurisdiction that is immune to corruption and authoritarian practices–only greater or lesser degrees of protection against them.

…In fact, the most disturbing dynamics are playing themselves out within normally liberal democratic countries. Hyper-militarized policing practices that draw on big data and AI-enabled surveillance tools are creating states on steroids…Meanwhile the constraints on abuse of power seem quaint and old-fashioned, as if constructed for a different time and context. We now have twenty-first century policing practices with nineteenth and twentieth century checks and balances.

The growing critical commentary on social media and surveillance capitalism is at a stage similar to the environmentalism of the 1960s and 1970s. The works of Shoshana Zuboff, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Bruce Schneier, and others are, in this respect, the social media equivalent of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Barry Commoner’s The Closing Circle, and Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb. They have dissected what’s wrong and have helped wake us up to a serious pathology, but they have yet to carve out a confident alternative way to organize ourselves.

Commenting on Europe’s GDPR and California’s Consumer Privacy Act, Deibert says “However promising, these statutes on their own are not so much prompting a fundamental behavior shift as they are further trivializing informed consent.”

Thanks to the Snowden disclosures, we now know that a flawed encryption protocol was foisted clandestinely on much of the world by the U.S., Canadian, and U.K. signals intelligence agencies, which enable them to crack the code of their adversaries communications. Critical infrastructure throughout the world depended on the integrity of the protocol. It’s unclear how many governments or criminals knew of and exploited it, or whether people were harmed in the process–but it is conceivable some malfeasance took place because of it.

Deibert takes us into a brief history of “republicanism” from the Greeks to the U.S. founding fathers, to today. “…One shorthand way to think about republican political theory is to take virtually anything that Republican Senate majority leader Mich McConnell advocates and think of the exact opposite of that position.”

Critical to the proper functioning of civil society is an educated and fully informed, enlightened citizenry. With this in mind, Deibert presents the mission statement of his own University.

The University of Toronto is dedicated to fostering an academic community in which the learning and scholarship of every member may flourish, with vigilant protection for individual human rights, and a resolute commitment to the principles of equal opportunity, equity and justice…
Within the unique university context, the most crucial of all human rights are the rights of freedom of speech, academic freedom, and freedom of research. And we affirm that these rights are meaningless unless they entail the right to raise deeply disturbing questions and provocative challenges to the cherished beliefs of society at large and of the university itself…
It is this human right to radical, critical teaching and research and which the University has a duty above all to be concerned; for there is no one else, no other institution and no other office, in our modern liberal democracy, which is the custodian of the most precious and vulnerable right of the liberated human spirit.

Herbert Marshall McLuhan (July 21, 1911 – December 31, 1980) was a Canadian philosopher, whose work is among the cornerstones of the study of media theory. He joined the University of Toronto in 1946 and taught there until his death. Harold Adams Innis (1894 – 1952) was a Canadian professor of political economy at the University of Toronto and the author of seminal works on media, communication theory, and Canadian economic history.

Ron Deibert follows in an important tradition at the University of Toronto.

The First Cell; and the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last, Azra Raza, 2019

Dr. Azra Raza and Dr. Harvey Priesler

This book is intended as a wake up call for all of us that may have assumed cancer research was making progress. The articulate Dr. Raza has spent her career helplessly watching patient after patient die with only fifty year old therapies available (slash, poison, burn), including her own husband Harvey, himself a specialist in the very cancer that killed him. The book combines introducing us to some of her special and unique patients with a description of the complexity of cancer that is impenetrable reading for us laymen, to a plea for rebooting the entire field of cancer research and treatment. It is best to present the very articulate argument for rebooting our approach in Dr. Raza’s own words.

Over the twelve-year period from 2002 to 2014, seventy-two new anti cancer drugs gained FDA approval; they prolonged survival by 2.1 months. Of eighty-six cancer therapies for solid tumors approved between 2006 and 2017, the median gain in overall survival was 2.45 months…A study published in the British Medical Journal showed that thirty-nine of sixty-eight cancer drugs approved by the European regulators between 2009 and 2013 showed no improvement in survival or quality of life over existing treatment, placebo, or in combination with other agents.

Identifying predictive markers that allow for individualizing therapy by matching drugs to patients remains the treasured yet elusive holy grail of oncology… More than 90 percent of trials ongoing around the county make almost zero attempt to save tumor samples for post hoc examination to identify predictive biomarkers…Who is pushing this short-term agenda driven by the singular goal of getting a drug approved with alacrity as long as it meets the bar of improving survival by mere weeks in a few patients?

A pioneering and revolutionary paper was published in 1976 by Peter Nowell. His clairvoyance about cancer being an evolving entity has been largely ignored. From “The Clonal Evolution of Tumor Cell Populations”:
Peter Nowell

Tumor cell populations are apparently more genetically unstable than normal cells, perhaps from activation of specific gene loci in the neoplasm, continued presence of carcinogen, or even nutritional deficiencies within the tumor. The acquired genetic instability and associated selection process, most readily recognized cytogenetically, results in advanced human malignancies being highly individual karyotypically and biologically. Hence, each patient’s cancer may require individual specific therapy, and even may be thwarted by emergence of a genetically variant subline resistant to the treatment. More research should be direct toward understanding and controlling the evolutionary process in tumors before it reached the late stage usually seen in clinical cancer.

…in 2009, Gina Kolata reported in her New York Times column the jaw-dropping statistics that despite the infusion of more than $100 billion into cancer research, death rates for cancer had dropped by only 5 percent between 1950 and 2005 when adjusted for size and age of the the population. The war on cancer was not going well.

A review of where the research funds go reveals the inherent biases perpetuated by the peer-review process as detailed by Clifton Leaf in his eye-opening book, The Truth in Small Doses: Why We’re losing the War on Cancer and How to Win It. Enormous sums of money from the government continue to fund the same institutions and universities over and over…The saddest part is that upon serious examination of what is published, 70 percent of the basic research is not reproducible and 95 percent of clinical trials are unmitigated disasters.

A recent study titled, “Death or Debt? National Estimates of Financial Toxicity in Persons with Newly-Diagnosed Cancer,” published in the October 2018 issue of the American Journal of Medicine, tabulated the chilling economic burden borne by patients with newly diagnosed cancer. Using the Health and Retirement Study Data, this longitudinal study identified 9.5 million estimated new cases of cancer between 1998 and 2012 in the United States. Two years from diagnosis, 42.5 percent of individuals had depleted their entire life’s assets, and 38.2 percent incurred longer-term insolvency, cancer costs being highest during treatment and in the final months of life. The most vulnerable groups were those with worsening cancer, older age, females, retired individuals, and those suffering from comorbidities like diabetes, hypertension, lung and heart diseases, belonging of a lower socioeconomic group, or on Medicaid.

The unfortunate reality is that not a single marker for response is examined in the majority of clinical trials being conducted even today. Why? Because this is how the system has evolved. The pharmaceutical industry sponsoring the trials is only interested in reaching a statistical end point to get their agent approved. The companies have usually invested almost a billion dollars already to bring an agent to the point of a phase 3 trial. It would add a staggering amount of money to their stretched budgets to perform such detailed biomarker analysis. I suggest saving all the money being squandered on testing the agents in pretherapy, preclinical models of cell lines, and mouse models and instead investing the resources in biomarker analysis. Some bold changes are needed at every level. To harness rapidly evolving fields like imaging, nanotechnology, proteomics, immunology, artificial intelligence, and bioinformatics, and focus them on serving the cause of cancer patient, we must insist on collaboration between government institutions (NCI, FDA, CDC, DOD), American Society of Clinical Oncology, American Society of Hematology, funding agencies, academia, philanthropy, and industry.

Contrast the putative scientific gold standard of a reproducible animal model with the known fact that every patient’s cancer is a unique disease, and within each patient, cancer cells that settle in different sites are unique. When a malignant cell divides in two, it can produce daughter cells with the same or radically different characteristics because during the process of DNA replication, fresh copying errors constantly occur. Even if two cancer cells have identical genetics, much like identical twins, their behavior can differ depending on genes expressed or silenced according to the demands of a thousand variables, such as the microenvironment where they land, the blood supply available to them, and the local reaction of immune cells. The resulting expansive variety of tumor cells that exist withing tumors are unique within unique sites of the body. Multiply this complexity further by adding the host’s immune response to each new clone and you get a confounding, perplexing, impenetrable situation in perpetual flux.

So what is the solution? The first step is to descend from our high horses and humbly admit that cancer is far too complex a problem to be solved with the simplistic preclinical testing platforms we have devised to develop therapies. Little has happened in the past fifty years, and little will happen in another fifty if we insist on the same old same old. The only way to deal with the cancer problem in the fastest, cheapest, and, above all, most universally applicable and compassionate way is to shift our focus away from exclusively developing treatments for end-stage disease, and concentrate on diagnosing cancer at its inception and developing the science to prevent its further expansion. From chasing after the last cell to identifying the footprints of the first.

The heyday of reductionism, looking for one culprit gene at a time and searching for the one magic bullet, is over. The era of big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and wearable sensors has arrived. The study of cancer is evolving into a data-driven, quantitative science. Merging information obtained from liquid biopsies (RNA, DNA, proteomics, exosome studies, CTC), with histopathology, radiologic, and scanning techniques, aided by rapid machine learning, image reconstruction, intelligent software, and microfluidics can–and will–revolutionize the way we diagnose and prevent rather than treat cancer in the future. The ideal strategy will emerge from harnessing cutting-edge technology for a multidisciplinary systems biology approach through a consilience of scientists with expertise in molecular genetics, imaging, chemistry, physics, engineering, mathematics, and computer science.

Research is also ongoing in all these areas funded by the National Institute of Health, but the investment remains paltry compared to funding provided for studies conducted on cell lines and animal models. Through redirection of intellectual and financial resources from the same old grant proposals to grant incentives for early detection using actual human samples, and by posing exciting challenges to competitive scientists, progress will be accelerated dramatically. The piece that is missing from the equation is an admission of failure of current strategies and a willingness to take a 180-degree turn to start all over again.

Antonio Fojo of the NCI extrapolating the implications of one trial:

“In the lung cancer trial, overall survival improved by just 1.2 months on average. The cost of an extra 1.2 months of survival? About $80,000. If we allow a survival advantage of 1.2 months to be worth $80,000, and by extrapolation survival of one year to be valued at $800,000, we would need $440 billion annually–an amount nearly 100 times budget of the National Cancer Institute–to extend by one year the life of the 550,000 Americans who die of cancer annually. And no one would be cured.“

This is how complex cancer is. It is pure arrogance to think the problem can be solved by a few molecular biologists if they put their minds to it. Cancer is a perfidious, treacherous, evolving, shifting, moving target, far too impenetrable to be deconstructed systematically, far too dense to lend itself in all its plurality to recapitulation in lab dishes or animals.

Permanent Record, Edward Snowden, 2009

Ed and Lindsay out in Moscow

Ed Snowden was only 29 years of age when he blew the whistle on NSA’s mass surveillance of all Americans (in fact on everyone in the world). Here is the story of his own arc of growing up, engaging in a highly successful technical career, and then deciding to throw it all away to tell journalists and the world what their government was secretly doing.

Ed was born in 1983, the year that ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency, later DARPA adding Defense to the title) made the ARPAnet (using the TCP/IP protocol) publicly available for the first time. In 1983 the Mosaic pioneer browser existed at the University of Illinois. The world wide web (WWW) was invented at CERN in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee. IBM introduced the PC in 1981, and Ed’s first computer, a Commodore 64 was introduced in 1982. In other words, Ed grew up at precisely the time that PC’s and the Internet were new. Ed became a very young, natural self described Geek and is mostly self educated since computers and the Internet were far more interesting than school and Ed was very talented in this new world.

Ed claims to be able to trace his ancestry on his mother’s side from the Mayflower itself and his fathers side to fighting in the Revolutionary War and every war thereafter. Early on his family moved from North Carolina to Maryland where his father worked on technology for the Coast Guard, and his mother worked at the NSA in human resources. Both parents held security clearances. Government service was the natural career path for his family. Unfortunately, modern government service requires a college degree and Ed finished high school with a GED. When the 9/11 attacks happened, Snowden signed up for army special forces and at 5’9″” and 124 pounds he went off to Fort Benning for basic training. He stress fractured a leg and the army, to avoid liability, granted Ed release from service with no black marks. While recovering from his injury, Ed came up with plan B. He would apply for a high level security clearance (requiring one year of vetting). The security clearance was granted and the CIA, much reduced after its failures in the 9/11 attack, hired Ed to babysit its headquarters computer systems. Thus started Ed’s meteoric but short career of government service which saw Ed stationed at the US embassy in Geneva Switzerland, and then, with the NSA, a stint at the Yokota Air Force Base on Honshu in Japan, and finally assignment to the NSA facilities near Waipahu Hawaii.

In 2009, while Ed was in Japan, a single document was flagged by the NSA’s repository as not belonging there. He noticed the document was classified TOP SECRET//STLW//HCS/COMINT//ORCON/NOFORN. STLW stands for STELLARWIND. Ed says only a few dozen people would have access to this document (plus system administrator Ed Snowden). This document was the authorization for mass surveillance of all American’s communications. Neither anyone in Congress nor the White House would have access to this document. The NSA continued to deny it was mass surveilling Americans. Daniel Ellsberg, in his Doomsday Machine book about our nuclear program describes the security classification system and security clearances that are understood by almost noone in politics nor the public.

Meanwhile the age of surveillance capitalism was fast arriving with Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, etc. gathering and exploiting users data for profit. Worse, they were freely sharing this private data with the government. Ed says he (his right to privacy) was first betrayed by his government, then by his beloved Internet, and finally, by his own body. He was diagnosed with epilepsy (not the grand mal seizure variety) and took the job in Hawaii to reduce his level of stress. In Hawaii, he had the leisure to start collective data to prove the NSA was spying on everyone and to further understand the different programs and tools available to the NSA and its contractors. His final exploration was of the program XKEYSCORE which allowed the government and its contractors to find anything about a persons digital history.

Bill Binney

Ed here honors his whistleblower predecessors from Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo to Thomas Tamm who reported extensively on warrantless wiretapping in the mid 2000’s. Included are Perry Fellwock, who in 1971 revealed the existence of the NSA for the first time. He also lists Bill Binney, The Good American, Drake, Wiebe, and Loomis. Finally special mention of Chelsea Manning for leaking war crimes documents via Wikileaks. He gives special thanks to Sarah Harrison, journalist and editor for Wikileaks, who arrived in Hong Kong to assist Ed in his search for asylum and who accompanied Ed to Moscow.

Poitras Greenwald Lindsay Citizenfour Oscar

Ed does a good job of describing the ever increasing use of contractors by the government. He attributes this trend to budget issues and seems unaware of the worldwide neo liberal political movement to attempt to privatize all previously public functions of government from education to defense to incarceration to water. This privatization is highly profitable, leads to corrupt revolving door policies where government officials are able to grant contracts and special privileges to private for profit corporations with the understanding that they will be rewarded when they leave government to join the very companies they enriched.

For more on the surveillance state, see this work that includes Snowden’s disclosure.

Ed believes that the only current way to control surveillance is through the extensive use of encryption which the government cannot break. He also advocates the use of TOR or “onion routing” which uses a worldwide network of TOR servers to break the connection between the originating IP address and the destination IP address making it impossible to track communications using IP addresses. TOR was developed by a mathematician and a computer scientist at the Naval Research Laboratories and was designed to protect military and government communications using the public Internet. Ed was teaching classes in these subjects in Hawaii when he blew the whistle. Ed was also handing out printed copies of the US Constitution to his coworkers. This at the same time a supposedly constitutional law professor, Barrack Obama, was in the White House busily ignoring the very Constitution he was supposedly so expert at.

Ed decries the rise of cloud computing as a return the bad old days of centralized mainframe computing and points out your cloud computing authorization contract passes ownership of all your data to the cloud’s owners. If your data including photos are in a cloud they are no longer yours.

Kochland; The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America, Christopher Leonard, 2019

The Fred C. Koch Family
Fred C. Koch died Nov 17, 1967 Mary R. Koch died December 21, 1990 Charles Koch died Aug 23,2019.

Charles Koch

In a 1974 speech (Charles) Koch attacked the entire narrative behind the New Deal (based on Keynesian Economics), claiming that Roosevelt’s legislation was not, in fact, in response to a lack of federal-level regulation. Koch said that when the New Deal was passed, the economy was already “polluted by massive governmental manipulations of the money supply.”…The business community needed to wage a long-term campaign that would change the way Americans thought about the markets and the role of government (Hayek, Mises, Friedman). Koch said that the campaign should have four elements; 1) Education; 2) Media outreach; 3) Litigation; and 4) Political Influence.

David and Charles Koch

Based on his long term vision, Koch founded the Cato Institute, contributed to the Heritage Foundation and other right wing think tanks; rebuilt the law and economics departments of George Mason University near Washington in the image of the Chicago school, and created the Mercatus Center another free market think tank. This center offered free seminars to more than 4,000 federal judges from all 50 states. Koch was central to the creation of ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, which writes right wing laws and pressures state legislatures to pass them. Koch is behind the Americans for Prosperity lobby that was central to defeat of the Obama era cap and trade legislation in 2010, the only serious effort by congress to limit carbon emissions. In the 2010 midterm election, the Republicans gained control of the house and senate, in large part due to the emergence of tea party candidates and Koch’s Americans for Prosperity efforts.

David and Charles Koch

Koch Industries was to benefit enormously from Federal Action, particularly from the Clean Air Act of 1970. Refineries already operating in 1970 (Koch had two) were “grandfathered” in to the era of clean air regulation. The unintended consequence of this legislation was to halt the construction of new refineries, assuring that no new competition would enter the business. Existing refinery owners immediately started gaming the act; for example companies could be exempted if curbing pollution would be unreasonably expensive. This assured that new technologies would never be implemented in the existing refineries. The EPA was to enforce the New Source Review program which prohibited new refineries from entering the game. The last refinery built in the US was completed in 1977. The EPA needed to rely on state regulators to enforce the New Source Review and these state regulators were simply outgunned and overwhelmed by the giant refinery corporations. Koch’s two refineries were able to increase their capacity more than ten fold and were able to introduce new outputs and products at will. Much of this expansion was achieved without first obtaining permits that would have limited pollution from the plants. Koch refused to invest in suggested new pollution control measures.

Pine Bend Refinery Rosemount, Minnesota

In mid 1996 a sour water stripper that limits the amount of ammonia that was pumped into the wastewater treatment plant ceased operating properly. Repairing the stripper would require shutting down the refiner which Koch refused to do. Instead Koch flushed the ammonia rich waste into large detention pools on the far end of the refinery. When these filled they began spraying the contaminated water onto the surrounding wetlands and fields. In January 1997, Heather Faragher, The only employee trained in waste water management at Koch’s refinery but without the authority make changes at the refinery, told the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, which was responsible for enforcing federal EPA standards, everything that Koch had been doing at the refinery. in 1998 the MPCA fined Koch $6.9 million for pollution. Federal criminal charges in 1999 resulted in a criminal fine of $6 million, $2 million to the County Park system. Koch also agreed to pay the EPA a $3.5 million fine. Similar events happened at Koch’s Texas refinery, causing Charles Koch to initiate a new program to assure that Koch was in compliance with all state and federal regulations (100% compliance, 100% of the time). He hired a group of regulatory compliance attorneys locating them at company headquarters in Wichita Kansas with the authority to force all company divisions to comply with regulations and with the authority to shut facilities down if necessary. He was driven to this measure to avoid future big fines, to protect Koch’s now tarnished reputation, and to prevent state and federal officials from inspecting and investigating his operations. Privacy and secrecy are Charles Koch’s highest priorities.

A big disappointment in this 600 page book is the failure to address the extent to which Koch benefits financially from direct government subsidies. The topic receives one short mention with no figures of the scale of corporate welfare or crony capitalism enjoyed by Koch. Charles Koch often speaks about his opposition to government subsidies but there is no evidence in this book that Koch has ever turned down a single subsidy. The book does mention that fracking was developed largely due to government subsidies and Koch indirectly benefited as fracking increased the production of oil and natural gas so that the US is now energy independent. One would dearly love to know the extent to which Koch’s remarkable success was due to direct government subsidies.

The fossil fuel industry has always depended on trading, the buying of crude oil, natural gas, etc. and on selling refined or manufactured products. Historically this trade has not been done using established commodity markets. Koch established a separate trading division located in Houston. Charles Koch insisted that his traders have the best available information including the best weather forecasts. Koch invested heavily in computers and developed elaborate models of the relevant markets. Central to the success of Koch trading was the availability of inside industry information which can be used freely and legally in Koch’s markets. Market volatility is what drives profits in trading and Koch’s traders became expert in exploiting volatility. In the cold winter of 2000, one trader placed large bets on the volatility of natural gas prices and earned Koch $75 million. The trader’s base salary was $60,000 and he earned $4 million in a bonus. Koch keeps a close leash on its traders and knows on a day to day basis company exposure to its trader’s bets. Unlike banks, wall street firms and insurance companies, Koch has never experienced unexpected losses from a rogue trader. In 2000, as Clinton was leaving office, his administration passed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, leaving the market for derivatives unregulated and in the dark. Thus Clinton set the stage for the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. This book explores how fossil fuel industry traders quickly learned and adapted to this new age of unregulated financialization. We think of Wall Street, the banks, and the insurance companies, but the fossil fuel industry reaped enormous profits from exotic and dark trades.

How Koch Became an Oil Speculator Powerhouse

Companies like Enron and Koch all engaged in illegal trading activity, best exemplified by California’s electric utility deregulation fiasco that started in 2000. ALEC was instrumental in getting the disastrous neoliberal bill passed in 1998. The New Deal Era public utilities system for electrical power was replaced by a radical new system. The existing utilities retained their geographic monopolies with set maximum electric rates, but they were stripped of their generators. Power generation was privatized and the utilities were required to buy power on a daily basis. An emergency state agency was created to buy electricity when the markets failed. A massive daily trading system emerged. The new system was quickly overrun by unusually hot weather. The scale of Koch’s illegal trading activities in California electric power were dwarfed by the scale of Enron and other huge energy companies and largely escaped being tarnished further by its illegal trading. Charles Koch’s 100% compliance order somehow did not include the trading division. Enron’s fraud and illegal activities forced it out of business in 2007.

California Electricity Crisis of 2000-2001

Charles Koch was a keen student of the latest management theories. Early in his career, he adopted the teaching of Edward Deming who revolutionized Japanese manufacturing practices after WWII. His typical management hire was a young graduate of a midwestern university often with an engineering degree and often someone raised on a farm with midwestern work habits. Charles Koch believed he could educate the young graduates to his philosophy and new hires spent hours in seminars and training. The new hire would then be assigned a job and his performance closely watched. If he was successful, he would then be reassigned to another position that might be totally alien to the experience and training of the employee. They might find themselves moved from a refinery to a trading desk where a whole new set of skills is required. If successful there, the employee might be moved to another position, maybe in fertilizer or pipelines or most anything. If the employee does not succeed in their new assignment they are terminated from Koch. Its a bit like the father that throws his child in the deep water to see if they sink or swim. In spite of this style of management, employees at Koch, if they succeed, seem extremely loyal to Charles Koch and enjoy long careers. In 1969, two years after Charles Koch became CEO, Laurence J. Peter published a book describing what became known as the Peter Principal. Organizations continue to promote their workers until they reach a point where they are no longer able to successfully perform the functions required by their position. This book makes no mention of the Peter Principal but Charles Koch, whether he knew the principal or not, seemed to embrace it and used advancement within Koch to test and challenge his employees until they break at which point they are removed.

In 1987, an investigative report published in the Arizona Republic charged that the oil companies were stealing oil from native American reservation oil fields. Several US Senators got interested and the largest oil companies told them to look at Koch. The Senators got an FBI agent assigned to investigate and he started observing Koch trucks and gaugers as they pumped oil from the field tanks to their trucks, measuring the amount of oil taken using gauge sticks inserted into the field tanks before and after the pumping. The drivers would record the amount of oil taken and leave a ticket at the site. This ticket determined what Koch owed for the oil taken. When the truck was emptied at its destination an accurate measure of the oil taken could be obtained. The work of the guagers is only approximate and Koch trained the drivers never to be short, i.e. never to have the oil actually delivered be less then the ticket left at the site. To be short meant an immediate termination. The drivers were never instructed to steal oil, they were instructed never to deliver less oil than Koch was obligated to pay for. The obvious and only was to assure that they were not short was to always be long. The Senate passed the investigation to the Justice Department which made Koch hand over its records for three years. In each of these years Koch received an average of 400,000 Barrels of oil per year worth about $10 million that they didn’t pay for. The Justice Dept. didn’t want to charge individual drivers but thought it would be difficult to charge the top executives for the theft. The case did go to trial and was settled for an undisclosed amount. There was bad publicity for Koch but no lasting consequence. This is just another example of Koch pushing beyond the limits of legal and normally understood ethical behavior.

Additional Details on Oil Theft from Christopher Leonard

Two sections of the book deal with Koch treatment of unions, first the union at the Minnesota refinery, and second the Georgia Pacific division unions. The stories are different but similar. Koch refuses to negotiate, changes the work rules, slowly squeezes wages, moves union pensions to 401K s and interferes with health care programs. It is pretty miserable to work a union job at Koch but the alternatives are worse. Charles Koch’s toughness is illustrated by his reaction to a union strike at the Pine Bend refinery in Minnesota, which in 1970 was still a strong union state. Charles Koch hired a Texas oilman whose hero was George Patton to run the refinery. When the workers voted to go on strike, he hired enough non union workers to keep the refinery running and flew them on site by helicopter. The skeletal crew lived on site with their boss. When the teamsters refused to cross the picket line, Koch negotiated a deal whereby Koch drivers would replace the teamsters for the drive through the picket line, load the truck, and return it to the teamster driver. When the strike extended, Koch built a separate road entrance bypassing the picket line and convinced the teamsters to drive their trucks through the new entrance. For specialized maintenance requiring workers from other unions, Koch eventually convinced them to make repairs in spite of the strike. In this way the refinery union was slowly isolated and weakened. They eventually settled on Koch’s original terms, but after losing more than a year of wages.

Georgia Pacific’s plants and warehouses were subjected to modern software systems designed to increase worker productivity. This increased productivity was accompanied by a corresponding increase in injuries, some of them fatal. These injuries would result in OSHA investigations and modest fines, but any government interventions were anathema in Koch’s culture. While trying their best to prevent injuries, the numbers stayed stubbornly high. Stressed employees will make mistakes and the only solution is to decrease the pressure. On the contrary Koch would fire employees that were considered too cautious and careful because that meant they worked slower. Had the OSHA fines been in the millions, I have no doubt Koch would have figured things out to reduce or eliminate injuries.

Koch created a Value Creation Group but this got subdivided and one of the subdivisions was Koch Agriculture. Koch had virtually no experience in agribusiness volatility. In 1997 Koch saw an opportunity to buy century old Purina Mills headquartered in nearby St. Louis. The problem with private equity acquisitions is that is drew Koch into businesses where it had no expertise. They agreed to pay $670 million for a company worth $109 million. Koch borrowed $570 million and put up $100 million of its own money for the purchase. Koch tried to impose the Koch culture on a company with its own very different and well established culture with the result that key employees left the company in droves. Due diligence failed to uncover massive contracts between Purina and hog feedlots which required Purina to produce piglets that the feedlots were under contract to buy and grow using Purina food. When the hog market imploded, the feedlots defaulted on their contracts (that Koch didn’t know existed) and Purina was forced into bankruptcy. Purina and the creditors lawyers believed the Koch corporate veil that was supposed to protect the holding company, was flawed, and Koch was forced to settle by putting up another $60 million in cash to get rid of Purina. Charles Koch fired everyone associated with this disaster and closed the entire acquisitions division.

Koch began a complete reorganization of the business in 1999. Over the years Koch had acquired a wide hodgepodge of unrelated businesses. Koch unloaded many of its pipelines, sold a small chemical company and other odds and ends. At the core of the new structure, Koch Petroleum was rename Flint Hills Resources. Others were simplified and reorganized into Koch Minerals, Koch Supply & Trading, and Koch Chemical Technology Group. New leaders were appointed to run these consolidated businesses. Koch Industries became little more than a holding company protected by a legally impenetrable veil to protect it from problems in its divisions. Charles Koch also finally put to rest the 20 year long legal feud with brother Bill and could totally focus on growing Koch. Koch’s spectacular growth after 2000 was the result of operating one of the largest private equity operations in the country. Private equity finds distressed public companies that can be purchased cheap, converted from publicly traded or coop into privately held companies. Charles Koch from the beginning wanted his company to remain private, to operate in secret, and to forego dividends in favor of reinvesting profits to grow the business. He was proving that he could learn fast from past mistakes, correct them mercilessly and move on. He initiated his “10,000 percent compliance” program discussed earlier at this time to keep the government and regulators off his back. Clinton ushered in the age of financialization in 2000 and George W Bush from Texas and Dick Cheney entered the White House. Koch was set for a decade of spectacular growth.

In 2003, Farmland a depression era coop headquartered in Kansas City wanted to sell a group of liquid nitrogen fertilizer plants all located close to their midwest farm customers. The most expensive component, at 80% in the production of liquid nitrogen is natural gas and domestic natural gas was very expensive. Lower cost imported fertilizer had undermined Farmland’s market. Koch had inside information that fracking was about create a vast increase in the supply of natural gas and prices would plummet. This purchase would mean a significant reentry into agribusiness and the acquisition team didn’t know if Charles Koch was ready to forget the Purina experience but he fully backed acquisition. Natural gas prices plunged and the fertilizer plants became immediately profitable.

Also in 2003 Georgia Pacific approached Koch to see if they were interested in purchasing several struggling pulp mills in Georgia and Washington – Oregon. The mills came with several unionized warehouses for the mill’s products. When the Koch team visited Georgia Pacific’s Atlanta headquarters (51 stories tall) they saw a bloated, hyper luxurious operation. At the same time DuPont came on the market. Overall, Koch was looking at corporate takeovers worth more than $25 billion. Koch acquired both DuPont’s Invista for $4.4 billion and Georgia Pacific for $21 billion. Charles Koch had always disliked borrowing, but borrowing is the foundation of the private equity business. Find an under performing company with lots of cash flow and buy it with borrowed money. Make sure the holding company is protected from the creditors, turn the companies around and use the resulting cash flows to repay the loans. Koch was now willing to borrow seemingly unlimited money to fuel its acquisition appetites. Both DuPont and Georgia Pacific were heavily dependent on the building of new housing which was a hot market right up to the sub prime mortgage crash of 2008. Charles Koch did not panic but scaled back operations at all affected acquisitions and waited to weather the downturn storm.

June 29, 2012 (Reuters) – DuPont Co has settled a $745 million lawsuit brought by Koch Industries Inc’s Invista unit over safety and environmental problems at plants once owned by the large chemical company.

How The Kochs Are Fracking America

The crash of 2008 made fracking economically viable and the supply of natural gas exploded. Then drillers in North Dakota applied fracking to crude oil successfully for the first time. There was an area called the Eagle Ford Shale region near Corpus Christi where Koch’s second light crude refinery was located. Koch’s planners decided on a plan to build pipelines between Eagle Ford and Corpus Christi and to buy and build a ship slip to export any excess crude oil. Charles Koch embraced the plan immediately and only wanted to assure the plans were big enough. Oil from fracking start to flow in 2010 when by the end of the year 139,000 barrels a day were being produced. By 2014 production hit 1.68 million barrels a day roughly 20% of all crude oil produced in the US that year. Because the 1970 Clean Air Act effectively prevented the building of new refineries, Koch’s Corpus Christi refinery enjoyed enormous profits from the newly available light crude.

Koch Brothers War on Renewable Energy

Through this same period the Kochs focused their political attention on fighting renewal energy initiatives at the state level (ALEC), fighting any carbon restrictions at the state and federal level, and rolling back CAFE auto efficiency standards. Charles Koch and his company became much more visible as a result of these massive anti environmental efforts and he started experiencing demonstrations at his gatherings and now requires constant security protection. Gone were the days when Charles could drive his modest old station wagon from the family home to Koch headquarters.

The Power Broker; Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, Robert A. Caro, 1975
This classic Pulitzer Prize work at 1162 pages details the 44 year career from 1924 to 1968 of Robert Moses, the most powerful builder in New York history. Born in 1888, Moses grew up at the birth of the automobile, was educated at Yale and Oxford and earned a PhD degree from Columbia. Starting his career as a reformer helping Governor Al Smith reorganize the government of the state of New York, he asked Smith to be named Commissioner of Parks and Parkways for Long Island and Moses drafted the legislation creating the position from which he could not be removed and in which he had absolute power of property condemnation, which he called “appropriation”. He built a reputation for incorruptibility and non partisanship; a man who got things done. Politicians including FDR in 1932, while disliking Moses and his methods, relied on his accomplishments in their campaigns. Moses took over New York City’s parks consolidating the system into a single commission under his total control. He next took over the stalled Triborough Bridge effort drafting his own Triborough Authority legislation to allow his absolute control including bond issuance. His legislation allowed him to hold simultaneously state and city positions, previously not allowed.

Robert Moses Building Randalls Island in 1936
He completed the Triborough system and the West Side Highway including the Henry Hudson Bridge. When traffic levels assured that the bonds could be repaid in eight years or less Moses redrafted the legislation to extend the Authority to cover any bridge or highway in the New York Area and to allow the bonds to be refinanced which allowed the Authority to live forever. The surpluses from tolls were to give Moses a funding power independent of city, state, or federal influence.

The entrance and exit ramps would have required demolition of historic Castle Clinton and much of Battery Park.

Ole Singstad Rendering of the Battery Park Bridge

Just before WWII, Moses proposed a huge bridge connecting Battery Park in Manhattan to Brooklyn. A tunnel, designed by Ole Singstad who finished the Holland tunnel and designed the midtown and Lincoln tunnels, was already planned for the same route. Conservationists were unable to stop Moses proposed destruction of the historic park and contacted Eleanor Roosevelt who told FDR of the plans. The bridge required War Department approval which was denied. Moses was never able to prove FDR was behind the War department decision. For revenge, Moses moved the hugely popular at 2.5 million visits per year, free, Aquarium out of the CLinton Castle and threatened to destroy the Castle itself. He didn’t and Battery Park was later given to the Federal Government for preservation.
Moses added the East River New York Tunnels to his bridge and highway authority and Singstad, who played a significant role in defeating the bridge never designed or built a tunnel in New York again. His existing tunnel plans were implemented exactly as he had drawn them up.
In the mid 1950’s Moses joined with the separate Port Authority, which operated the George Washington Bridge and the Hudson river tunnels to New Jersey, to take advantage of the new Interstate Highway Federal program. Moses was nominal head because of his long relations with Washington. Under the agreement, the Port Authority would add a second level to the George Washington bridge and build interstate highways in New Jersey and connect Staten Island to New Jersey to handle traffic from Moses Verrazano Narrows bridge which he would build between Long Island and Staten Island as well as connecting highways. Tolls were not allowed under the Interstate Highway program.
The Port Authority had opened, in 1950, a multi level commuter bus station on 8th Ave one block from the Lincoln Tunnel entrance. The buses had their own road connecting the station to the tunnel and dedicated lanes through the tunnel assuring that bus commuters would never be stuck in traffic. Under the station was a subway station. When the Port Authority planned the World Trade Center they made provision for subway stations directly under the Center with high capacity escalators to the mall and offices. They also planned a direct PATH link from Hoboken NJ to the Center. Hoboken NJ was the location of the commuter train and bus station connecting to PATH. Imagine if Moses had this foresight into mass transit when he was building Idlewild and the Expressways.
As if this were not enough power for one man, Moses became head of New York electric power where he built huge hydroelectric dams on the St. Lawrence near Niagara. After WWII he extended his power to include nuclear power generation.
At his peak, Moses held 14 independent power positions simultaneously.
During Moses’ entire 44 year career the city and state of New York never spent a single dime on mass transit development and the city and state even failed to maintain the existing plant. In 1924, when Moses came to government, New York Subways were the envy of the world. By 1968 these subways were perhaps the worst in the world. When building his expressway to Idlewild (now Kennedy) airport Moses refused to consider adding a center median rail system. He did the same for the Long Island Expressway denying requests to add a center rail for mass transit. The long Island railroad was allowed to deteriorate even though large numbers of city commuters were dependent on it. It was around this time that planners discovered that Moses had built his many parkways with bridges and overpasses so low buses were precluded from using them. Moses, who never had a driver’s license and had never experienced a traffic jam doomed the entire New York metropolitan area to perpetual traffic jams. His vision was for scenic drives along the water so he built the West Side Highway right on the Hudson River denying Riverside park users access to the River except for exclusive yachting clubs.

His thinking had been shaped in an era in which a highway was an unqualified boon to the public, in which roads were, like automobiles, sources of relaxation and pleasure. Changing realities could have changed his thinking but he was utterly insulated from reality by the sycophancy of his yes men; by his power, which, independent as it was of official or public opinion – of, in fact, any opinion but his own — made it unnecessary for him to take any opinion but his own into account; by, most of all, his personality, the personality that made it not only unnecessary but impossible for him to conceive that he might have been wrong; the personality that needed applause, thereby reinforcing the tendency to repeat the simplistic formula that had won him applause before; the personality that made it possible for him to relate to the class of people that owned automobiles and were repelled by the dirt and noise, such as the dirt and noise he associated with trains; the personality that made him not only want but need monuments and that saw in highways- and the adjunct suspension bridges (“the most permanent structures built by man”) – the structures that would leave a clean, clear ineradicable mark on history; the personality that, driven by the lust for power, made him anxious to build more revenue- (and power-) producing bridges and parking lots (and highways to encourage their use) and that made him indifferent or antagonistic to subways and railroads which would compete with his toll facilities not only for users but for city construction funds. He was insulated from experience. Most of the millions who used his roads were now using them primarily not for weekend pleasure trips but back and forth to work twice a day, five days a week, and driving was therefore no longer a pleasure but a chore; but for Moses, comfortable in the richly upholstered, air conditioned, soundproofed rear seat of his big limousine, driving was still as pleasurable as it had always been. Robert Moses, who had never had to drive in a single traffic jam, really believed that his transportation policies would work.

This blogger experienced the result of his work in 1977 when a group of us traveled by van from Tarrytown NY, home of Washington Irving, to Kennedy Airport on a Friday afternoon following a week of training. Our driver didn’t use a single highway during the entire trip. When we asked him about the route, he explained that side streets were the only to get us to our flights on time. We traversed the entire city from the north and couldn’t use even one of Moses’ creations.

The press treated Moses uncritically with the New York Times leading the cheers until a couple of young, unintimidated investigative reporters with smaller papers started, in 1959, digging into his Title I Federally subsidized housing and slum clearance programs. Soon the reporters were inundated with tips and material on the corruption and suffering. Targets for slum clearance were often not slums at all but stable well maintained neighborhoods. “Slum” clearance was destroying of lives of tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers including hard working respectable families. The resulting deluge of stories of horror and corruption forced even the NYT to assign investigative journalists to the stories.

The Incorruptible, Uncorrupting, Apolitical, Utterly Selfless Public Servant Moses had been a synthetic character, largely puffed up by the press. That character had endured for thirty-five years. But in 1959 the process of deflation by the press-a process that had been going on intermittently for several years-had begun in earnest. In that process there had been a large amount of unfairness. But that process had in the end arrived at the truth. At the beginning of 1959, the Moses image had stood in most of its glory, intact except for a few small chips. At the end of 1959, it lay in unsalvageable ruins. Popularity, Al Smith had warned him, was a slender reed. Now the reed was broken.

Moses resigned his position as head of Title I but his reputation was forever tarnished.

Moses with Nelson
Moses had survived many attempts by governors and mayors to reduce his power and all, including FDR had failed.
Then, in 1959 Nelson Rockefeller became governor of New York. Nelson was 50 and Moses was in his 70’s. Nelson was a Rockefeller, with access to power never before seen by Moses in a mayor or governor. Nelson was tougher than Moses. Rockefeller pressured Moses to give up all his parks posts so Nelson could give them to Nelson’s brother Laurance, a man with impeccable credentials in New York’s conservation movements serving for 27 years on the Palisades Interstate Park Commission. The well conceived and run Palisades Interstate Park had been funded heavily by the Rockefellers. Moses made a huge mistake, accusing Nelson of nepotism in the press. All Moses’ park positions were stripped but in compensation Nelson offered Moses Presidency of the 1964 Worlds Fair to be held in Flushing Meadows.

Moses at Flushing Meadows Park
The position came with very attractive compensation which could help Moses pay for care for his ill wife. Moses took the job thinking he could turn Flushing Meadows into a huge Park after the fair ended. The Fair, as the earlier one in 1930 was a financial disaster complete with Moses lavish contracts to friends. In the end Moses had less than $8 million to pay off $24 million in loans. He used the $8 million to create a small park on the site and the creditors were given nothing. Nelson stripped Moses of his remaining highways position and Moses was down to one title, the one that counted, head of the Triborough Authority.
Nelson moved slowly in his efforts to create the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) to encompass mass transit and bridges and highways. Nelson ambiguously offered Moses a significant role in the new setup which Moses interpreted as head of Triborough and a position on the board of the MTA. Moses believed he held a trump card that the bondholders would have to approve any change to their bond contract which they would never do without Moses’ approval. The bondholders had agreed that any dispute which arose would be handled in litigation by Chase Bank’s lawyer Thomas Dewey. Moses prepared the Triborough Authority to bring suit. Chase was at that time a private bank owned by the Rockefellers and controlled by David Rockefeller who Moses had worked with for decades. The Rockefeller brothers met at Nelson’s apartment and agreed to a plan. Moses held fire believing Nelson would keep him on at Triborough but on March 1 1968 Triborough went out of business merging into the MTA. Moses was stripped of control of Triborough and offered a consultant’s position at $25,000 per year plus his limousine and driver and secretaries. He was never consulted or given meaningful work again. Moses, at age 79, took the job. Moses lived to the age of 92 dying in 1981 on Long Island.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism; The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, Shoshana Zuboff, 2018

This is a look at the transformation of Google, Facebook, and others from their initial mission to serve their users to the exploitation of those users by selling their privacy to the highest bidder to achieve enormous personal wealth and power.

In her personal experience Zuboff describes sitting as a nineteen year old in the back of a seminar where Thomas Friedman (founder of the Chicago school of economics) instructs doctoral students who will soon run the economy of Chile after the CIA inspired coup and assassination of elected President Salvador Allende in favor of the Pinochet military dictatorship in 1973.

Thomas Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, economics as ideology and their opposite John Maynard Keynes

Zuboff also briefly alludes to debates she had at Harvard with the aging and discredited behaviorist BF Skinner, author of the novel Walden Two. She spends time in the book discussing Alex Pentland of the MIT media lab who she considers a BF Skinner intellectual successor armed with the tools Skinner could only dream of having and using. She calls Pentland a high priest of Surveillance capitalism. Pentland helps provide the intellectual justification that legitimizes instrumentarian (a new word coined by Zuboff) practices. Pentland never mentions Skinner in his work but his behavior modification goals are the same.
BF Skinner at Harvard and Alex Pentland of MIT Media Lab

Zuboff explains why user consent through opt-in or opt-out has been rendered meaningless under Surveillance Capitalism. To read a single contract agreement in detail might take hours and with third parties almost always involved there may be 1,000 individual contracts to read and digest. If you opt out surveillance capitalists will threaten to downgrade your system and will probably still collect and distribute your information without your permission. You have no way to find out what they are doing. If you ask for the information collected, as a Belgium privacy attorney attempted to do of Google, they are unable to retrieve it for you. It is buried somewhere in a second tier of automatic computation technology. The user has no way of determining what software is currently running on your computers or smart phones or what peripherals like GPS, cameras, microphones, etc. have been usurped for external control. To add insult to injury, you will pay for the transmission bandwidth they secretly steal from you to illegally surveil your activities. If you have installed smart home devices like thermostats or security systems you have no way to know what these smart devices are observing and collecting. Your car driving behavior can be monitored with bad insurance consequences, not only by your new car, but by your smart phone. Your new car can be disabled by the finance company and its GPS location sent to the REPO people to come get your car. Then imagine advances in voice and face recognition and you start to get the terrifying idea. Then imagine all of this surveillance capability in the hands of a non democratic government like China. You can’t do anything at all without the state monitoring (and influencing) your behavior.

What does older capitalistic history teach us?

It (government interventions into free market capitalism) appeared in the trust busting, civil society, and legislative reforms of the Progressive Era. Later it was elaborated in the legislative, judicial, social, and tax initiatives of the New Deal and the institutionalization of Keynesian economic during the post-World War II era; labor market, tax, and social welfare policies that ultimately increased economic and social equality.

In fact the Bretton Woods conference of 1944 created a new world economic order based on a US-centric dollar based fixed exchange rate system, created the IMF and World Bank, and was a complete repudiation of Keynesian economics. This system worked only so long as the US remained the dominant manufacturing power, creating large trade surpluses that the US could recycle as investments. When trade reversed around 1970 and the US became a trade debtor nation, the American economy shifted from manufacture to financialization, convincing trade creditors to invest their surpluses with Wall Street, who kept inventing new and innovative ways to use the mountains of cash suddenly at their disposal. The Neoliberal contribution to all this was the erosion of government regulation of corporations and the use of IMF and Worldbank loans to vulnerable nations and colonies whose defaults resulted in the massive transfers of state owned commons into private hands like Wall Street hedge funds. See Greek Spring by Yanis Varoufakis. None of this history is clear from her book. For an excellent introduction to macro economics from Bretton Woods to the present see Yanis Varoufakis’ minotaur book. The breakup of the Soviet Union in the 1990’s was another opportunity for the Neoliberals who descended on the former Soviet Union members with plans to transfer all public commons into private hands. The result was to create a new class of asset owners in each country that more resembled a mafia than capitalists. We remain in this condition to this day. The massive and fundamental shift of the American economy from manufacture to financialization is not mentioned by Zuboff.

To her credit, Zuboff does site French economist Thomas Piketty’s monumental work on wealth and income distribution in England and America from the eighteenth century to the present.

A market economy…if left to itself…contains powerful forces of divergence, which are potentially threatening to democratic societies and to the values of social justice on which they are based…If we are to regain control of capital, we must bet everything on democracy.

Our present economic system has been accurately described as corporate welfare with massive government subsidies for agriculture, energy, extraction, and other industries. Hayek and Friedman would turn over in their graves if they knew where American capitalism has taken us. This trend reached its pinnacle (we only hope) with the Bush-Obama massive bailouts of the financial institutions and Zuboff’s beloved General Motors after the sub-prime financial scandal-crisis of 2008. Shiela Bair (W appointee to head the FDIC) was fully prepared to break up the big banks starting with Citibank using her FDIC authorization and charter, but was prevented from doing so by Tim Geithner who was shockingly appointed by Obama as his treasury secretary. See more at Scamming a President. No meaningful reforms were enacted to prevent a recurrence of this collapse and we anxiously await the next iteration.

Zuboff mentions Rand Corporation futurist Herman Kahn’s 1967 book The Year 2000, where the author anticipates the future possibilities of computer power intrusions into our lives characterizing this as “a twenty-first century nightmare”. She says Kahn was the model for the character of Dr. Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 movie. No!

Herman Kahn wrote an earlier book published in 1960 “On Thermonuclear War” where Kahn speculated that it would be possible to create a “Doomsday Machine“; a vast collection of nuclear weapons connected to an automated trigger mechanism that, upon detection of a threat and without any human intervention, would initiate nuclear holocaust. Most experts at the time believed such a system could not be built. In fact the Soviet Union built just such a secret machine called The Dead Hand whose current status is unknown. See Daniel Ellsberg’s Doomsday Machine book. Kahn’s 1960 book was the inspiration for Kubrick’s movie where the Soviet Union have successfully built a doomsday machine but have kept it secret from the US. The character Dr. Strangelove is a caricature of a former Nazi scientist, not Kahn. Kahn was a consultant on the movie.

Zuboff uses a discussion of totalitarianism to illustrate how slow academics and intellectuals are to understand completely sui generis unprecedented developments. Our understanding of totalitarianism came into focus only in the 1960’s, well after the demise of European Fascism and dramatic changes following Stalin’s reign of terror. She points out that between 1930 and 1953 Stalin appears ten times on the cover of Time magazine. She leaves out any discussion of Mao’s China, but China emerges later in her discussion of State uses of surveillance capitalism.

She introduces and coins Instrumentarian power as a contrast to totalitarian power.

Instumentarian power moves differently and toward an opposite horizon. Totalitarianism operated through the means of violence, but intrumentarian power operates through the means of behavioral modification, and this is where our focus must shift. Intrumentarian power has no interest in our souls or any principal to instruct. There is no training or transformation for spiritual salvation, no ideology against which to judge our actions. It does not demand possession of each person from the inside out. It has no interest in exterminating or disfiguring our bodies and minds in the name of pure devotion. It welcomes data on the behavior of our blood and shit, but it has no interest in soiling itself with our excretions. It has no appetite for our grief, pain, or terror, although it eagerly welcomes the behavioral surplus that leaches from our anguish. It is profoundly and infinitely indifferent to our meanings and motives. Trained on measurable action, it only cares that whatever we do is accessible to its ever-evolving operations of rendition, calculation, modification, monetization, and control.

Deng Xiaoping Architect of Democracy Free Capitalism in China

Instrumentarian power in the hands of non democratic States like China is almost beyond comprehension in its potential power. Yanis Voroufakis describes Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew and his disciple Deng Xiaoping who transformed China’s economy using the Singapore model as democracy free capitalism.

Voroufakis primary point in Voroufakis Ted talk is that Western capitalist corporations are hording massive mountains of profit, investing only in corporate consolidation, and are in direct contradictions of Keynesian economics to recycle surpluses to level the cycles of boom and bust. These uninvested surplus mountains may doom democracy and life as we know it.

Industrial capitalism depended upon the exploitation and control of nature, with catastrophic consequences that we only now recognize. Surveillance capitalism…depends instead upon the exploitation and control of human nature. The market reduces us to our behavior, transformed into another fictional commodity and packaged for others’ consumption.

Surveillance capitalism’s successful claims to freedom and knowledge, its structural independence from people, its collectivist ambitions, and the radical indifference that is necessitated, enable, and sustained by all three now propel us toward a society in which capitalism does not function as a means to inclusive economic or political institutions. Instead, surveillance capitalism must be reckoned as a profoundly antidemocratic social force.

As Thomas Paine noted in the Eighteenth century; “…a body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody, ought not to be trusted by any body.”

Surveillance capitalism’s antidemocratic and anti egalitarian juggernaut is best described as a market-driven coup from above. It is not a coup d’etat in the classic sense but rather a coup de gens: an overthrow of the people concealed as a technological Trojan horse that is Big Other…It is a form of tyranny that feeds on people but is not of the people.

The young people we have considered…are the spirits of Christmas yet to come. They live on the frontier of a new form of power that declares the end of a human future, with its antique allegiances to individuals, democracy, and the human agency necessary for moral judgment. Should we awaken from distraction, resignation, and psychic numbing…it is a future that we may still avert.

Zuboff starts her book with the assertion that Surveillance capitalism cannot be controlled or contained through the lens of antitrust or privacy. She mentions the EU regulation the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which only went into effect in May 2018 and only within the EU. It is too early to see if this ambitious effort will have any impact as it works its ways through EU regulators and the courts. She appears sceptical. For the Guardian’s take on GDPR. So what do we do?

If democracy is to be replenished in the coming decades, it is up to us to rekindle the sense of outrage and loss over what is being taken from us. In this I do not mean only our “personal information”. What is at stake here is the human expectation of sovereignty over one’s own life and authorship of one’s own experience. What is at stake is the inward experience from which we form the will to will and the public spaces to act on that will…That Surveillance capitalism has usurped so many of our rights in these domains is a scandalous abuse of digital capabilities and their once grand promise to democratize knowledge and meet our thwarted needs for effective life.

For more on the despotic behavior of Facebook and Google

Anti-Social Media; How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy, Siva Vaidhyanathan, 2018

Even when we post and share demonstrably false stories and claims we do so to declare our affiliation, to assert that our social bonds mean more to us than the question of truth…How do we train billions of people to value truth over their cultural membership when the question of truth holds little at stake for them and the question of social membership holds so much?

The social aspect of social media trumps any effort to build or spread civic responsibility into the system. Facebook is a pleasure machine. The pleasure is light and fleeting. That’s what keeps us coming back. But Facebook is also an anxiety machine, an anger machine, and a resentment machine…but the resentment is deep and durable.

Facebook attracts us, hooks us, encourages us to declare our affiliations, divides us, and tracks every single interaction along the way. Facebook’s surveillance system is part of its pleasure system. They cannot be severed.

The influence of Facebook on the violent attacks in Charlottesville is difficult to trace but important to address. I live in a nation that no longer seems able to filter out of its public sphere the most odious calls for an ethnically pure state, that has a major political party that can no longer resist fringe elements, and has a media ecosystem that rewards the most alarming and spectacular claims and is now willing to take seriously the claims of white supremacists. One man sympathetic to white supremacists even assumed the presidency in 2017 because the established filters all failed. Facebook did not generate these problems. It did amplify and normalize them by scrambling our senses of truth and justice and fracturing a sense of collective national fate. Mostly Facebook makes it hard to think.

Between Google and Facebook, we have witnessed a global concentration of wealth and power not seen since the British and Dutch East India Companies ruled vast territories, millions of people, and the most valuable trade routes. Remarkably, and unlike the East India Companies, Google and Facebook have achieved this feat nonviolently and with only tangential state support…They did all this by inviting us in, tricking us into allowing them to make us their means to wealth and power, distilling our activities and identities into data, and launching a major ideological movement – what Neil Postman described yet only predicted in 1992: technopoly.

Postman: “It (technopoly) consists of the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks it authorization in technology, finds its satisfaction in technology, and takes its orders from technology.” This ideological domination demands a sacrifice of all previously stable belief systems. So trust in institutions, ancient or modern, erodes. Local identities and traditions are rendered valueless except as raw material for remixes, parody, tourism, tapestries, and games rather than expressions of deep human narratives and connections.

Postman: “Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World. It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant.” If it didn’t happen on Facebook, it didn’t happen.

The problem is, Facebook by 2013 already was so dominant that for may people absence from Facebook meant invisibility

The most fruitful response to the problems that Facebook creates, reveals, or amplifies would be to reinvest and strengthen institutions that generate deep, meaningful knowledge. We must support scientific communities, universities, libraries, and museums around the world. We must foster deliberation through publically funded better journalism, forums for debate, and commissions that could harness expertise to address our most pressing challenges.

Modi Duterte Trump

The book is very good on the exploitation of Facebook by despots such as Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Narendra Modi in India. He talks about the efforts of the Trump campaign to target potential Hillary voters with negative information, such as highlighting the Bill Clinton record of criminalizing crack cocaine, black incarcerations, and Hilary comments on blacks. These efforts probably further suppressed Hillary’s votes in key states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

In the meantime, Vaidhyanathan continues to use Facebook.

No Place to Hide; Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State, Glenn Greenwald, 2014
This book seems to be a collection of five articles. For this reader, Part One, Ten Days in Hong Kong, is the most interesting.
On Dec 1 2012 (The first published article, featuring the FISA Verizon order appeared in the Guardian on June 5,2013, more than five months later.) Glenn Greenwald (GG) receives an email from “Cincinnatus” saying he has important documents to share but GG must first install PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) encryption on his computer. GG ignores the email. Three days later he receives another email from C asking him to confirm he received the first email. GG immediately says he got it and later that day he receives an email with detailed instructions for installing the encryption program. GG does nothing for seven weeks. He thinks encryption would be useful for his work so he emails C on Jan 28, 2013 saying he will get someone to help him install the encryption. GG still does nothing and C steps up his efforts, producing a ten minute video “PGP for Journalists” on how to install the program. GG does nothing.
PGP Public Key Encryption

On April 18, GG flew to New York to give some talks. On landing GG receives an email from Laura Poitras (LP) the documentary filmmaker saying she needs to meet him in person the next time he is in New York. GG had written an article detailing all the times Poitras was detained at US airports and her equipment seized. After the article the harassment at the airports stopped. GG arranged to meet LP at a restaurant in Yonkers. She changed tables several times at the restaurant and told GG to remove the batteries from his cellphone. She then showed GG a couple of emails she received asking LP to work with GG. GG thinks the sender is real but they do nothing and GG returns to Brazil.

On May 11 GG receives an email from a technical expert he and LP had worked with in the past asking GG if he is ready to install the PGP encryption. He responded yes and was told to expect a Fedex package in Rio de Janeiro. The package was held in customs for a week enhancing the paranoia. The day after the package finally arrives, GG receives an email from LP saying they need urgently to talk but only via OTR chat. GG figures the source must have sent LP some documents. LP is far less a technophobe than GG so must have installed PGP. GG had used OTR in the past and now managed to install it and sign up for an account. LP tells GG they need to go to Hong Kong immediately to meet the source. GG thinks the source has to be guy in his late fifties with a thirty year career with the NSA living somewhere along the Washington beltway. Hong Kong makes no sense.

The source was getting upset with LP and GG delays and was discussing involving the Washington Post. That finally got GG into gear. The source agreed to chat over OTR and GG assured him he was committed to the story but he still can’t make sense of Hong Kong. LP had shared some PRISM material with the Washington Post and they responded with an army of lawyers and foot dragging, greatly worrying the source. GG asked to see some documents before he came to Hong Kong and the source patiently walked him keystroke at a time through the PGP installation process. GG was embarrassed by his lack of proficiency but the source assured him he had lots of free time then. Once installed, the source sent GG about 25 documents, the tip of the iceberg.

The documents convinced GG that he needed to go to Hong Kong immediately and that He would need major institutional support to get this material out. GG had been working at the Guardian for only nine months but had little contact with their editorial staff. GG immediately Skyped Janine Gibson British editor in chief of the US edition in New York gushing about the material. Gibson told GG to get off Skype immediately. GG flew to New York and agreed to meet LP in New York. GG arrived in NY May 31. GG and LP book a non stop flight from New York to Hong Kong but then Gibson drops that the Guardian insists on involving long time Guardian journalist Ewen MacAskill who will fly with them to Hong Kong. LP is furious and GG doesn’t know their minder MacAskill. LP was afraid a third person might freak the source but GG understood that the Guardian wanted a long time company man on the scene. LP relents but only if MacAskill stays away from the source until she and GG are ready to introduce him.

Snowden Journalists MacAskill, Greenwald, and Poitras

LP insists that GG buy a new air gapped (never connected to the Internet) laptop before they leave. As they drive to the airport LP gives GG a tutorial on secure computer systems and hands him a thumb drive (with the full collection of documents). For the 16 hours of the flight GG can’t stop reading. He is amazed by the level of organization and pre thought put into the document archive. He immediately locates the FISA Verizon order that all domestic phone metadata records must be handed to the NSA.

We now enter the realm so well captured in the 1997 Norwegian movie Insomnia where the crime detective sent north of the Arctic Circle to the land of midnight sun finds he can’t sleep. GG doesn’t sleep for the next 10 days. When he is about to collapse, he pops a pill and drops off for a couple hours and is then back at work. Part of this is because constant communication with New York Guardian staff is necessary but mostly that he is too excited after chasing the NSA story for years, proof of the whole horrible reality and scope of their surveillance activities has fallen in his lap.
Snowden’s Hideaway

GG wants to meet the source immediately but LP thinks that would look suspicious so they wait til tomorrow. The source gives LP elaborate spy trade-craft instructions of how and where to meet. GG is expecting a hideaway but instead they go to a Kowloon five star hotel. They are instructed to find a meeting room with an alligator (not real) on the floor where at a precise time they are to wait for exactly 2 minutes. If the source doesn’t appear they are to leave making sure they are not being tailed. Twenty minutes later they are to return to the alligator for exactly 2 more minutes. If the source does arrive they will recognize him carrying a Rubiks cube (GG laughs). GG is expecting an older very senior Washington bureaucrat and is shocked when a young kid (Snowden was 29 but looks younger in a tee shirt jeans and nerd glasses) shows up carrying a Rubiks cube. GG thinks this kid can’t possibly have had access to all those top secret documents. But they are now committed so follow Snowden to his room.

GG was once a practicing lawyer and treats the first meeting with Snowden as a legal deposition where the lawyer tries to trip up a witness forced to answer all questions. Snowden is calm, articulate, very organized and thoughtful and GG can’t find any holes in his amazing story. GG can’t contain his excitement. LP films the deposition. They plan the first release of articles and the time when Snowden wants to reveal himself as the whistle-blower.

The first article will be the FISA Verizon order and the Guardian plans to tell the government ahead of publication as has become standard practice. Gibson calls the government the morning of planned publication and then total silence. At 3PM an army of White House, NSA and other officials call Gibson back. They want to meet in about a week to explain why the Guardian shouldn’t run the story, Gibson says they have until she hangs up to convince the Guardian. The government tries bullying and threats. They don’t work. Their reasons are totally lame and Gibson decides to publish. London and the lawyers agree. At 5:40 May 5, 2013 the story goes live. GG spends the rest of the day and night on the phone with interviews, then starts the next cycle for the PRISM story where nine internet providers are giving the NSA all their data.

The same cycle between the Guardian and government repeats but this time someone in government give lap dog Washington Post a heads up and they rush to post the story they have been holding without publication. GG reads the Post story and realizes they haven’t even asked the internet services for comment. The Guardian story which goes live 10 minutes after the Post’s includes denials from all nine providers that they were cooperating with the government. GG figures the providers and NSA can fight out their denials in public. GG suddenly remembers Cincinnatus and sends an email to thank him for suggesting the PGP program. Snowden immediately emails back you are welcome. GG has never connected Cincinnatus to Snowden. Several more articles follow.

Finally the time arrives to announce the identity of the leaker who the NSA has been unable to identify. LP wants to include a video of Snowden but can’t use the disjointed GG deposition. LP writes down a list of 20 questions and asks MacAskil, who everyone has come to trust, to read the questions while she films. The result is the 12 minute video we have all seen introducing us to Edward Snowden for the first time.

About the time of this release a Guardian lawyer is sent to Hong Kong who asks what is being done to protect Snowden once his identity is released. GG and LP and even Snowden seem to have given this little thought. As the last story began breaking an acquaintance of GG’s, who lives in Hong Kong, called GG pointing out that everyone would now be looking for Snowden in Hong Kong and asking if they didn’t need some qualified Hong Kong lawyers. He suggested two human rights specialists with good contacts in the Hong Kong government. The Guardian lawyer quickly vetted them via the Internet and decided they were good choices. GG agrees to meet and the friend tells him they are already in the Hotel lobby. When GG opens his door a swarm of reporters are waiting. They follow him into the elevator and GG finds still more reporters waiting in the lobby. He decides to give a short impromptu interview and within 15 minutes most reporter have left to file their stories.

GG was finally able to locate his friend and the lawyers. They suggested the lawyers accompany Snowden to a UN mission and from there to a safe house. But how to get Snowden out of his five star Hotel? Snowden is now ahead of them with a prepared disguise and he makes his way safely to an exit where the lawyers are waiting. So that is how the biggest story of GG’s life got told.

Also featuring is GGs Brazilian partner David Miranda who comes across as a wise, intuitive advisor without whom GG would be even more indecisive. It is Miranda that first concludes the source is for real. He advises GG to pressure the Guardian so the story gets out there. Later, he becomes a story himself when LP and GG decide to use him to courier Snowden material from Berlin, where LP lives to Rio de Janiero where GG lives. It never occurs to either that Miranda is in danger as he transits the London airport. Miranda is stopped, his possessions seized and he is threatened and bullied for nine full hours under a British terror provision. Under pressure from the Guardian and Brazilian diplomats, Miranda was released to continue his journey after the full nine hours allowed under this dangerous law. Miranda arrived in Brazil a returning hero, but very frightened. Presumably the British government (or the US) has the thumb drive he was carrying but GG doesn’t say.

Snowden prepared thumb drives for both LP and GG with all documents. He also prepared a separate thumb drive for the Guardian containing the documents pertaining to the British GCHQ activities. British authorities later descended on Guardian London offices demanding all Snowden documents. The Guardian refused but agreed to let the GCHQ supervise and observe the destruction of all computers at the Guardian. Before this happened, the GCHQ materials were forwarded to the New York Times where they must be sitting in limbo.

Snowden encrypted the documents and assured GG and LP that neither China nor Russia would have the capability to break the encryption. This reader assumes the US could break the encryption but only if they dedicated some super computers for several years to the effort. Even if the Miranda carried thumb drive is in either British or US hands, it is unlikely any attempt will be made to decrypt the material. It is likely that the NSA is still unaware of the full extent of the documents in the archive unless all are now located in the new Intercept archive.

One of the big lessons learned by GG in this adventure is the absolute necessity for investigative journalists to use encrypted communications. Their work will be impossible in the future without these tools. GG further advises all activists and any lawyer engaged with litigation against the government to encrypt all their communications. He uses the example of David Petraeus to illustrate how easy it is to destroy a career if unencrypted emails fall into the wrong hands.

Part two “Collect it All” highlights documents emphasizing the worldwide and universal scope of NSA ambitions.

Part three makes a strong case for the harm that Surveillance causes in a democracy. His strongest point comes in his conclusion. The public sector operates in total darkness and secrecy and privacy while the private sector is subjected to total surveillance of their activities with no place to hide. Somehow our system has become completely inverted. Snowden had expected Obama to reign in the illegal abuses and held off his release until it was clear things were worse than before.

Part Four is a discussion of the forth estate much of which (the corporate media) have become mere tools of the corporate state. GG was shocked that media personalities were at the forefront of attacks suggesting GG be prosecuted for his reporting. This is new. News organizations used to come immediately and strongly to the defense of journalists under Government attack. They no longer do this. The Obama administration has felt free to conduct open warfare against whistle blowers and their reporters who are trying to do investigative reporting as guaranteed in the Constitution. The Guardian’s own lawyers suggested GG should avoid returning to the US and repeatedly failed to get assurances from the US government that GG would not be arrested and prosecuted should he return.
David Gregory shocks Glenn Greenwald
David Gregory Calls for Greenwald to be Arrested for Snowden Reporting Live on Meet the Press.
Seymour Hersh (who broke the My Lai massacre and Abu Ghraib prison abuses stories) suggests that journalism would be greatly improved if about 900 corporate media types were to lose their jobs.

LP has now released her new documentary Citizenfour in a theatrical release. It will doubtless receive Academy Award nominations.