Australian intelligence review paves way for expanded political surveillance

Mike Head

Another sweeping enlargement of the political spying powers of Australia’s intelligence agencies is about to be undertaken, following the heavily-redacted release of what the Liberal-National government and the corporate media have described as the biggest overhaul of the country’s national security laws in four decades.

After an unexplained year-long delay, a 1,300-page declassified version of the 1,600-page report by former spy chief Dennis Richardson was made available for public consumption on December 4. The government said it had accepted 199 of the review’s 203 recommendations, either in full or “in principle.”

Many recommendations remain “classified”—that is, hidden from the population. Of those made public, some of the most far-reaching proposals include the expansion and consolidation of all the agencies’ secret electronic surveillance, data collection and physical tracking powers in one piece of legislation.

Former ASIO chief Dennis Richardson in 2017 (Credit: University of Sydney US Studies Centre)

Buried away in the mammoth document, and either not reported or barely mentioned in the corporate media, is an array of further anti-democratic powers. One is to officially authorise activities, or the handover of information, to a foreign partner agency that could cause death, serious harm or torture to an Australian person.

Recommendation 62 states: “ASIO should be required to seek authorisation from the Attorney-General for unilateral activities undertaken offshore, and when communicating intelligence to a foreign partner, where it is reasonably foreseeable that undertaking the activities will result in:

•  the death of, or serious harm to, the Australian person
  
  
•  the Australian person being detained, arrested, charged with or convicted of an offence punishable by the death penalty, or
  
  
•  the Australian person being subject to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”

Another key feature is the “streamlining” of the procedures for the intelligence agencies to obtain ministerial surveillance warrants, or to issue their own “internal warrants,” all without judicial scrutiny. Another is the strengthening of powers to compel telephone and internet service providers to enable the cracking of the end-to-end encryption platforms that millions of people now use for privacy.

By the end of 2019, Richardson said, Australia’s parliament has passed 124 “national security” bills, containing more than 14,500 amendments to previous laws, since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States triggered the “war on terrorism.” This is the greatest volume of such laws in the world.

Richardson’s complaint was that the legal framework had become “unnecessarily complex, leading to unclear and confusing laws.” This complexity, he claimed, had made it difficult for intelligence agencies to interpret and act on legislation. Hence, the powers had to be clarified and, in many cases, amplified.

Attorney-General Christian Porter declared that more than 1,000 pages of laws, currently contained in the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act, the Surveillance Devices Act and the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) Act, will be replaced by a single statute.

Significantly, the review was prepared in cooperation with partner agencies in the US-led “Five Eyes” global mass surveillance network—which also includes the UK, Canada and New Zealand—as well as France and the Netherlands. Richardson travelled to each of these countries for consultations.

As revealed by WikiLeaks—published by Julian Assange, and US National Security Agency whistle-blower Edward Snowden—the Five Eyes apparatus conducts electronic spying and data collection on millions of people worldwide. It also plays a critical role in conducting its members’ wars and war crimes, notably in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Richardson’s report was initiated as a result of an earlier “intelligence review,” published in 2017, which unveiled the most far-reaching revamp of the country’s “security” apparatus since the political convulsions of the 1960s and 1970s.

That review featured expedited measures to call out the military to suppress any outbreaks of “domestic violence,” and plans for a Home Affairs super-ministry to take command of seven surveillance and enforcement agencies. It also led to the creation of a new US-style Office of National Intelligence (ONI) in the prime minister’s office, to establish centralised control over the “National Intelligence Community.”

The 2017 report identified both the global and domestic concerns wracking the ruling elite. It warned that Australia’s “national security environment” was being re-shaped by the decline in the global influence of the US, intensifying conflicts between the major powers, and the rise of economic and political disaffection. It said “heightened tensions and instabilities” were generating “a growing sense of insecurity and alienation.”

The report further noted the immense political damage done to the public reputation of the intelligence apparatuses by the revelations of Assange and Snowden. “Following the WikiLeaks and Snowden unauthorized disclosures,” it was “critically important” to provide public reassurance and “build trust” with the population.

Richardson’s report will further boost the “Australian Intelligence Community (AIC).” The report acknowledges its vast growth already: “Thirty years ago the AIC consisted of the Office of National Assessments, Defence Signals Directorate, Defence Intelligence Organisation, Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and the Australian Secret Intelligence Service [ASIS]. A separate geospatial intelligence agency was formed in 1999, now the Australian Geospatial-Intelligence Organisation.

“The 2017 Independent Intelligence Review conceptualised the NIC [National Intelligence Community], consisting of the six members of the AIC plus the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission [ACIC] and the intelligence functions of the Australian Federal Police, the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre, and the Department of Home Affairs.”

Richard’s 190 declassified recommendations cover a huge field. They also feature expanded powers to collect intelligence on Australians overseas, including to assist military operations, greater use of public service postings as “cover” for intelligence officers, and extension of secret data collection to a wider range of federal and state agencies, including AUSTRAC, which monitors financial transactions.

Richardson proposed several restrictions on powers or proposed cosmetic oversight measures, saying these were necessary to prevent the public again losing “confidence” in the agencies. In several key instances, however, the government rejected such recommendations.

In particular, the government insisted that ASIS, the primary overseas agency, must have new powers to assist ASIO, both offshore and domestically, “without needing to obtain a ministerial authorisation for the production of intelligence on an Australian person.”

Likewise, the government rejected Richardson’s finding that the federal police did not need new powers to “disrupt online offending” and his suggestion that ACIC should remain subject to the Freedom of Information Act, which allows members of the public to obtain (very limited) information about its highly-secretive activities.

Between them, the intelligence agencies have more than 7,000 personnel and an annual budget exceeding $2 billion. Many, such as ASIO, have more than trebled in size since the “war on terrorism” was declared in 2001. They are now to be handed new powers that go far beyond terrorism, in particular to monitor the political activities of Australians both at home and overseas.

As revealed by the 2017 report, this build-up is driven by ruling class alarm over the decline in the hegemony of the United States—to which the fortunes of Australian capitalism have been tied since World War II—and the rise of discontent in every country, including Australia, under conditions of deepening economic crisis, ever-greater social inequality and the intensifying danger of war.

France ends coronavirus lockdown, as thousands of cases reported each day

Will Morrow

Yesterday was the end of the second, partial coronavirus lockdown announced by the Macron government at the end of October. The end to travel restrictions means people can move freely around the country in the leadup to the holidays. While there are still more than 10,000 new cases being reported each day, millions are expected to hold Christmas and New Year celebrations with their families.

A nationwide 8:00 p.m.-6:00 a.m. curfew will continue to be in place throughout the holiday period. While gatherings can continue to take place, the population will be forced to remain indoors after 8:00 p.m. except to go to work.

Prime Minister Jean Castex announced the end to the limited lockdown last Thursday. He did so despite admitting that even the government’s extremely high threshold of less than 5,000 daily coronavirus cases, which it had declared would be necessary for any loosening of restrictions, was not close to being met.

A nurse holds a phone while a COVID-19 patient speaks with his family from the intensive care unit at the Joseph Imbert Hospital Center in Arles, southern France, Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2020. (AP Photo/Daniel Cole)

Hundreds of people are continuing to die each day across the country and thousands throughout Europe. On Sunday, another 371 deaths were reported in France, 481 in Germany, 491 in Italy, 450 in Russia, and 232 in the UK. Across Europe, the total number of people infected with the virus surpassed 20 million yesterday.

In France, the limited lockdown enacted from the end of October, which did not include most workplaces or schools, reduced the spread of the virus, but there are signs that its impact had already peaked earlier this month and is now beginning to reverse.

The total number of cases per day is no longer decreasing. Except for Sunday, where the tally is suppressed due to the closure of testing centers, the daily case count has not dropped below 10,000 per day and is often closer to 15,000. The number of hospitalisations has actually increased for three successive days, with an additional 242 hospitalisations and 35 new admittances to ICU yesterday.

The travel of millions of people for the holiday season will ensure a further acceleration in the spread of the pandemic. This is exacerbated by the completely insufficient testing system. Last week, the Macron government advised that anyone who is asymptomatic should not get tested even before going to visit their families, because this would overwhelm the testing capabilities of the country. Since many young people carrying the virus are likely to be asymptomatic, this only ensures that more will contaminate their family members.

Yesterday, Castex gave an interview with Europe1 radio in which he declared that prior to the holiday period, anyone visiting with vulnerable family members should isolate themselves for a week beforehand if possible. He did not explain how this would be possible for millions of families, given that the government has maintained obligatory school attendance for students and kept workplaces open.

“If you can do it … isolate yourself before the eight days before Christmas. If you can—it’s not possible [for everyone]. In every case where it’s possible, above all, if you are receiving someone who is vulnerable…”

Castex added that on the coming Thursday and Friday only, parents were encouraged not to send their children to school, if they were able to. This only underscores the criminality and class contempt of the Macron government’s entire policy. The official lying justification for maintaining schools open has been that children are less likely to propagate the virus than adults. This has already been refuted by numerous scientific studies on the virus. The recommendation that parents “who are able to” will simply apply to those who are not compelled to be at work.

Following the holiday period, schools are to reopen as normal on January 4, and currently the government is aiming to reopen even restaurants and bars by late January.

The Macron government’s response to the pandemic has not been determined by the scientific requirement to combat the virus and save lives. It has been conditioned by the need to protect the profits of the major French banks and corporations and the wealth of its superrich.

Unlike the first eight-week lockdown in March, the lockdown in October did not restrict production. Keeping schools open, despite warnings that they would be transmission vectors for the virus, is aimed at keeping parents at work and preventing any impact on profits of an economic shutdown. Tens of thousands of people have unnecessarily died as a direct result of these policies.

The same policy has been pursued by governments across Europe and in the United States. In Britain, the Johnson government ended similar limited national lockdowns on December 3, and additionally permitted all stores to open 24 hours a day throughout December and January. In Germany, which has been presented internationally as a model for its response to the virus, there are now more than 500 deaths occurring every day, and the government has refused to close nonessential workplaces or schools.

The fact that these policies are being pursued even as a vaccine is beginning to be distributed, and could save countless lives within a few months’ time, only underscores the criminality of this policy.

The class interests that underlie it can be seen in the evolution of share markets across Europe. In France, the main CAC-40 stock market index fell sharply from late February to early March, as the virus spread rapidly across Europe. It stabilized after President Macron’s March 12 announcement of a lockdown, accompanied by a pledge to bail out the rich to the tune of hundreds of billions of euros. The CAC-40 has risen continuously since, climbing 20 percent since the end of October alone. It has almost regained its peak from the beginning of the year.

The Socialist Equality Party has advanced the following demands as the only means for countering the homicidal policy of the capitalist elite:

The immediate shutdown of all production at nonessential workplaces and schools.

The provision of a monthly income to all families to guarantee a decent standard of living until a return to work is possible.

The provision of relief to small businesses at an amount sufficient to maintain the economic viability of the enterprises and the wages and salaries of its employees until their operations can be resumed.

The allocation of trillions of dollars to accelerate the production and distribution of vaccines, free of charge and to expand the public health infrastructure, including for testing and contact tracing.

The collapse of the Arecibo radio telescope

Don Barrett

The destruction of the Arecibo radio telescope, a scientific crime, is a direct consequence of years of neglect and underfunding. Far from being an unforeseeable disaster, it directly flows from decades of impoverishment of all activities, scientific, cultural, artistic, that do not most directly channel the riches of labor into the overflowing coffers of the ruling class.

The telescope, 305 meters in diameter and commissioned in 1963, was the world’s largest single-dish instrument until the completion of a 500-meter dish in China in 2016, sharing its similar unusual design.

Damage after a cable broke in August(Image credit: University of Central Florida)

Instead of a large and massive movable structure consisting of a radio-reflecting dish and receiver at the dish’s focus, Arecibo was built in a natural area of Puerto Rico in which the underlying limestone geology creates bowl-shaped depressions rather than valleys. The water outflow is through underlying river caves in the limestone. The bottom of one of these depressions was outfitted with panels comprising a spherical radio-reflecting dish, and an array of receivers and a powerful radar were suspended at a movable focus high above on a network of cables from masts atop the bowl’s encircling ridges.

On August 10 of this year, after 15 years of increasingly tenuous funding, two changes in management and an ongoing transition to “pay-to-play” private partnership support, one of those cables snapped. Before the bureaucracy could even decide to approve, much less implement, temporary or permanent repairs, a main supporting cable from the same support mast snapped on November 7. At this point, without redundant support, the fate of the telescope was sealed: no safe access could be obtained to shore up the 900-ton suspended platform, and additional strand breaks began in an unstoppable cascade.

On December 1, the single remaining cable on the damaged side completely failed, dropping the platform 137 meters onto the dish and snapping numerous cables and support points throughout the mast system. Only ruins remain.

Arecibo has a distinguished scientific career behind it. Within months of commissioning on November 1, 1963, it managed the unprecedented act of bouncing radar off the innermost planet in the solar system, Mercury, and in so doing correctly measuring its rotation period of 59 days.

Map in yellow of Arecibo detection of presumed ice in shadowed craters at the north pole of Mercury overlaid on images taken by the Messenger spacecraft. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/Carnegie

With the detection of the Crab Nebula pulsar in 1968, Arecibo established the existence of highly compact neutron stars, exotic objects formed in some stellar explosions by massive stars at the ends of their lives, that weigh more than our sun but span only 20 kilometers and spin rapidly, up to hundreds of times per second, emitting radio pulses as they do. Six years later, the radio telescope detected the first instance of two neutron stars orbiting one another, a system where two star-like masses complete an orbit in only eight hours. This system provided the most exquisite test of Einstein’s theory of General Relativity until the recent direct measurement of black hole mergers by the new technology of gravitational wave telescopes, and won the 1993 Nobel Prize in physics for the discoverers, Russell Hulse and Joseph Taylor.

Artist impression of the binary pulsar detected by Arecibo in 1974 that won discoverers Hulse and Taylor the 1993 Nobel Prize. Credit: MPIFR/Kramer

In subsequent years, the instrument has imaged asteroids with radar (1989), made the first detection of planets outside the solar system, though in the decidedly exotic environment of a neutron star pulsar, not a regular star (1994), and detected possible ice in the shadowed craters of Mercury’s polar regions (also 1994). It has also conducted extensive surveys of the sky, detecting 203 new neutron star pulsars and mapping the distribution and velocity of hydrogen and numerous other gaseous substances in the Milky Way, our own galaxy.

Arecibo also played a significant role in promoting astronomy among the general population. It famously broadcast a message about Earth and humanity to the globular cluster M13 in 1974 with the hope that another intelligent species would pick it up and respond in kind. It was written by Frank Drake in collaboration with others, including Carl Sagan, and helped to popularize radio astronomy and science in general during that decade.

A color-coded representation of the digital message sent by Arecibo towards the M13 cluster and its million stars in 1974. The message will arrive in 25,000 years. Credit Arne Nordmann (CC/SA2.5)

The 1950s were heady times for a new horizon opening in astronomy, the use of radio waves to explore the universe. Only two decades earlier, in 1933, were radio signals discovered from outside the solar system, accidentally at that, as unexplained static on transatlantic radio links. While individual low-budget discoveries occurred in the following years, only in the 1950s did a systematic effort begin to plan and fund large radio observatories in the same way that revolutionized astronomy in visible light through its increasingly capable large telescopes.

But Arecibo bears only an indirect heritage to that lineage. It did not emerge from the birth of the National Radio Astronomy Observatories, in 1956. That federal research center was able to access $850,000 in its early days to begin construction of a 91-meter radio dish that could only be steered north to south along the sky’s meridian. That telescope, with a collecting area 11x smaller than Arecibo but still the largest in the world at completion, entered service the year before Arecibo.

Arecibo and its initial $12.7 million budget, and millions more in upgrades throughout its first decade, was a project initially of the Air Force. Its primary mission was not to understand the astronomical universe, but the “universe” of reentering intercontinental ballistic missiles, and how to separate the real thing from decoys. For this, it was originally designed only to look straight up, and outfitted with a powerful radar system not only to passively receive signals from the hot upper atmosphere region called the ionosphere and objects traveling through it, but also to probe them. Its chief task was to make such studies over a complete 11-year solar cycle, during which the changing magnetic field of the sun also changes the “climate” of the ionosphere.

The Air Force contracted with Cornell University to construct and manage the facility. This same period saw the birth of “Project Plowshare” in 1957 to sell “peaceful” uses of nuclear explosions, and for undoubtedly similar reasons, Arecibo’s design was reworked to make it steerable enough for astronomical observations, as the atmospheric and missile studies would occupy only a small fraction of its operations. No doubt the expertise attracted through participation of leading astronomers and other civilian experts also improved the “atmospheric” studies.

Only in 1970 and the end of its military research was responsibility transferred from the Air Force to the National Science Foundation. Cornell continued to manage the facility until 2011.

To further illuminate the relative priorities of science versus the Cold War, at the same time of Arecibo’s initial funding, the Navy became aware of the possibility of monitoring remote radio signals that bounced off the moon. In June 1958, groundbreaking took place in Sugar Grove, West Virginia, only 30 miles from the new civilian radio astronomy observatories, for a gigantic $79 million radio telescope consisting of a fully steerable 183-meter dish weighing 22,000 tons, what would have been the largest land-based movable structure ever created. Its budget even invited the attention of Congress, which capped outlays at $135 million in 1961. The following year, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara canceled it, after $42 million spent and a projected cost that had ballooned to $230 million, as it became clear that radio surveillance satellites, a new capability of the space age, made moon-bounce surveillance obsolete.

The modern highly classified space-based radio telescopes, pointed downwards to monitor decidedly terrestrial concerns, are by some estimates potentially 100 meters or more in diameter. The cost of these telescopes is classified, but their Titan IV launches alone cost half a billion dollars each, and seven have been launched since 1995. Like the optical Hubble Space Telescope, whose optics were only novel for being constructed outside of a classified supply chain and tasked to look outwards, pure scientific studies are a distinct stepchild.

Radio astronomy evolves. The focus in recent decades has not been on single radio dishes, but radio arrays. Because the “sharpness” of an image depends on the size not only of the telescope generating it, but also the wavelength of the electromagnetic radiation used, a single radio telescope is a hundred thousand times more blurry than an optical telescope of the same size. Arecibo at its shortest operational wavelength provided images about as sharp as what the eye can see. At its longest wavelengths, it could barely see the moon as something other than a point.

Large radio arrays can deliver a sharpness that depends on the size of the entire network, which today effectively means the diameter of the earth itself. Through these advances, the black hole at the center of our own galaxy was recently imaged, the equivalent of imaging a baseball on the moon.

But new technology does not always make the old obsolete. The recent Chinese version of Arecibo, FAST (Five Hundred Meter Aperture Spherical Telescope), is continuing the survey work of Arecibo, where the “blurry” beam is an advantage, if the unknown objects in it have signatures that can be pulled out of the radio signal. That they chose a large single dish telescope through which to innovate is also a reflection of American pressures to exclude China from international collaborations, including world-spanning radio arrays.

But FAST, while having Arecibo’s exquisite sensitivity and more, does not have the transmitter capability. There is no telescope operational on earth or planned to match the radar capabilities lost with Arecibo’s collapse.

The 91-meter dish in West Virginia also collapsed on November 15, 1988 after a structural failure and years of shoestring budgets. Other large-scale structural failures in the US, like the I-35W Mississippi River bridge in Minneapolis, which collapsed during evening rush hour on August 1, 2007, are testament to the increasing neglect to our infrastructure. So too is the hollowing out of our educational system a form of infrastructure collapse, a process greatly accelerated after the 2008 economic crisis, with the prospects after this year’s pandemic painful to imagine.

The 300-foot Green Bank telescope and after its 1988 collapse. Credit: NRAO

The operational costs of Arecibo, $12 million annually at a bare minimum, are also the same costs to simply maintain and operate a single F-22 fighter. Replacing Arecibo from scratch, perhaps $150 million by some estimates, would cost about the same as building that jet plane. The budget for one B-2 bomber would rebuild and maintain Arecibo for the better part of a century. The $2.2 trillion CARES act, largely directed to the already super-rich, already begins to enter the sphere of numbers formerly reserved to astronomy alone.

In that light, one must see the painful choices made by the Astronomical Sciences Division of the National Science Foundation when it recommended a 60 percent cut to Arecibo in 2006, a product of decades of straitened circumstances, and which marked the beginning of the end for the great Arecibo radio telescope.

Bob Dylan sells his songwriting catalog to Universal for a reported $300 Million

Matthew Brennan

Last Monday the Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG) announced it had secured a financial deal with American singer and songwriter Bob Dylan, now 79, for the rights to his entire songwriting catalog, which spans 58 years and more than 600 songs. Numerous media reports have indicated the deal is worth some $300 million.

The arrangement will allow UMPG, owned by the largest music company in the world, Universal Music Group (valued at $33.6 billion), to have exclusive intellectual property rights to Dylan’s music. Songs such as “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Chimes of Freedom” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’” can now be used in any manner UMPG chooses without the artist’s input or ability to veto a given decision. One entertainment page noted cheerfully, “Universal will now make money whenever a Dylan tune is streamed, played on radio, or used in an ad, film or TV show.”

Several other artists and bands—including Stevie Nicks (reportedly for $80 million), David Crosby, Chrissie Hynde, Blondie, Imagine Dragons (for $100 million) and others—have also signed over their entire catalogs to publishing companies or private equity firms.

Bob Dylan, 2010 (Photocredit–Alberto Cabello)

Crosby (of the Byrds and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young fame) has explained he felt compelled to sign the agreement because traditional sources of income for musicians were drying up during the COVID-19 pandemic. This increasingly untenable situation, as reported recently in the WSWS, is felt far more crushingly of course by musicians and artists who were barely scraping by, which encompasses the vast majority.

Among their financial concerns, the companies are looking to gain exclusive control of revenue sources and channels on the increasingly profitable online music streaming services. Advertisement-supported services such as YouTube, Spotify and Vevo, among others, currently account for nearly 80 percent of all recorded music revenue, according to a report by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), at around $11.1 billion in 2019.

Increasingly dependent on ad-driven algorithms and per-play profits, these companies no doubt view control over artist output and audience access as vital to their ability to monopolize and monetize this resource.

The Dylan-Universal arrangement is far and away the most notable among the various artist deals, in particular because of the singer-songwriter’s cultural legacy as the “voice of a generation.”

The whole business is quite degrading.

One can feel the corporate grip tightening over artists and artistic life as a whole. The publishing rights purchases come at a time when genuinely independent, oppositional and rebellious art is badly needed.

The rapidly changing moods of broad masses of people–subjected to the murderous “herd immunity” polices, with their aim of normalizing death and social misery—must intersect with the insight and courage of artists coming into opposition with the existing social order.

Not surprisingly, the establishment, with no interest in seeing artistic development thrive, or any slowing down of its profit-driven activities, seeks to dominate and make cash out of the existing outlets and platforms for such artistic-popular connections.

Whatever the financial needs of the artists themselves, there is no possibility of such agreements being a healthy development for growth and creativity.

The potential of wide access to online music resources, with the ability to engage a broad spectrum of sounds and feelings, will be further stifled by the ruling elite, and the technologies developed entirely (or to whatever extent circumstances permit) in its interests.

Given the present climate, why shouldn’t a weapons manufacturer such as Lockheed Martin, responsible for incalculable war crimes, purchase or “rent” Dylan’s 1963 protest song “The Times They Are A-Changin’” to celebrate their “first female CEO” Marilyn Hewson in online ads? An even more likely eventuality is that Dylan’s songs will be strategically placed and promoted round-the-clock on major streaming services to the exclusion of a wider array of new and emerging artists.

And what is one to make of Dylan’s evolution himself?

Now that he has signed away the ability to use or control his own music as he sees fit, one senses only the formal conclusion to a decades-long process of social and artistic retreat. It does not appear as though he has anything critical left to say. From an artistic and personal standpoint it is a sad affair.

Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan in Mississippi, July 1963

For a number of years, Dylan was able to convey something truthful, which resonated especially with large numbers of young people, about American life and society in the early and mid-1960s, the period of the Civil Rights movement and important political and cultural shifts. To the pleasure of many, Dylan articulated disdain for official hypocrisy, including a mockery of anti-communism, and a more free-spirited attitude toward personal and social relationships that belied the establishment’s stupid and empty claims about the greatness of the “American way of life.”

Certain early Dylan songs between 1962 and 1966 captured emerging angry moods with memorable imagery, including “Masters of War,” “Chimes of Freedom,” “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” and “With God On Our Side.”

Other songs of the time, perhaps less well worked through, nonetheless had a defiant and gripping quality to them, such as the already mentioned “The Times They Are A-Changin’” and “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Only a Pawn in Their Game” and “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” In 1963, Dylan refused to perform on the Ed Sullivan Show when CBS officials did not allow him to sing “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues,” which satirized Cold War hysteria in the US. A number of his love songs, with their footloose and occasionally self-critical edge, also carried real weight.

However, as we noted when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, Dylan’s transformation from a sharp-eyed and anti-establishment artist into a relatively harmless icon has been a lengthy, drawn-out process, with much of the transformation well underway before the late 1960s.

A comprehensive review of Dylan’s song material and artistic evolution is outside the scope of this article. But a few important elements can be pointed out.

The singer-songwriter’s radicalism, no doubt sincere, had, even at its height, an amorphous and highly uneven character. There was a growing, generalized shift, as noted, especially among the young, associated with the struggle for African-Americans’ basic rights, and mistrust of authorized nostrums. Elements of Beat Generation disaffection (Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, etc.) also entered into his art. In addition, a portion of his early outlook seems attributable to a semi-nostalgic looking back to the Depression-era leftism associated with figures in and around the Communist Party.

The issue of Stalinist influence seems to have played some role in Dylan’s evolution and eventual disillusionment. He emerged during the “folk music revival,” contemporaneous with the waning of the deadening atmosphere of the McCarthyite witch-hunt years. Important folk songwriters from a previous period, especially Woody Guthrie, were a strong influence on Dylan, even to the point of vocal mimicry. His early songs in fact sound like imitations of Guthrie’s “folksy”-populist ballads.

With much unresolved in his thinking and artistry, when Dylan came up against the “leftist” folk music establishment in the course of attempting to expand his artistic horizons in 1964-65, he seems to have drawn sweeping conclusions about any social commitment. The artistic result, in songs such as “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Positively 4th Street,” was a hard-driving musical advance, but unpleasantly pervaded with out-of-proportion bitterness and self-pity.

Even Dylan’s most affecting folk songs from 1962 to 1966 suffer from inconsistency, even carelessness, in their conceptions. There is an aversion, particularly after 1963, to being too direct and clear in his song craft. He is quick to jump away from his images and social references, more comfortable in arcane double-meanings and clever turns of phrase.

The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963)

Take for example “The Times They Are A-Changin.’” It is a moving observation of a mood that was undeniably present in 1963, that enormous shifts were taking place: “And admit that the waters/ Around you have grown/ And accept it that soon/ You’ll be drenched to the bone/ If your time to you is worth savin’/ And you better start swimmin’/ Or you’ll sink like a stone.” However, the song ends up—weakly—appealing to the politicians (“Come senators, congressmen/ Please heed the call…”), which was not much help.

Well-known refrains from songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind (“The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind”/ The answer is blowin’ in the wind”) and “Ballad of a Thin Man” (“Because something is happening here but you don't know what it is/ Do you, Mr. Jones?”), again, are evocative, but of what precisely?

As time went on in the mid-1960s, Dylan, now increasingly surrounded by a sycophantic entourage, seemed to become more and more satisfied with being an oppositional figure without being opposed to anything in particular, except the “unhip” and those not in on the secret, whatever that might have been. His persona or aura became the pivot point. And when an artist reaches such a stage, he or she is likely to deteriorate.

Blonde on Blonde (1966), which might be described as his last major album, is an artistically conceived and sharply delivered work, but by this point one would be hard-pressed to find a single song concerned with the fate of masses of people as many of his songs had been, in their own way, in the first four years of recorded music.

The remarkable singer and guitarist of the era, Dave Van Ronk, in a 1998 WSWS interview perceptively described some of the contradictions of early Dylan: “Nervous. Nervous energy, he couldn’t sit still. And very, very evasive. You never could pin him down on anything; he had a lot of stories about who he was and where he came from. He never seemed to be able to get them straight. What impressed me the most about him was his genuine love for Woody Guthrie….[His music] had what I call a gung-ho, unrelenting quality, a take-no-prisoners approach that was really very effective. He acquired very, very devoted fans among the other musicians before he had written his first song.”

Blonde on Blonde (1966)

That ambition, “nervous” energy and “unrelenting quality” had yielded positive, interesting results at one stage of Dylan’s development, but at another helped allow him to shed any sense of social responsibility and dedicate himself to developing his own career and reputation. For all the media chatter about “protest” songs, for better or worse, it is worth remembering that the singer had abandoned any such stance well before the large anti-Vietnam War protests took place in 1966-68 and beyond.

Cutting himself off from the source of the inspiration for earlier impactful songs, the career ambitions and an unfocused iconoclasm were nearly all that persisted. With the exception of some of his more moving songs about love and heartache in a later period, evasiveness and vagueness would become Dylan’s guiding principles.

The protracted process has led to the current news about the sale of his catalog. Now very wealthy, Dylan has nothing to say about events that are overtaking the events of his younger days.

Largest US overseas base placed on missile alert amid nuclear war warnings

Bill Van Auken

In an extraordinary incident that points to the grave threat of global war, personnel at the US military’s largest overseas complex were given chilling instructions to seek cover from an incoming ballistic missile attack.

The alert warnings last Saturday at Ramstein Air Base, the center of the so-called Kaiserslautern Military Community, consisting of 54,000 troops, civilian Defense Department employees, contractors and their families, were blared over sirens and the “giant voice” loudspeaker system that repeated the words “Aerial attack, aerial attack, seek cover, seek cover.” Cellphone messages were also sent out, at least to some.

Ramstein Air Base (Credit: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Justin Ward)

The incident was acknowledged by the military base’s Facebook page, which stated: “Today, the Ramstein Air Base Command Post was notified via an alert notification system of a real-world missile launch in the European theater. The Command Post followed proper procedure and provided timely and accurate notifications to personnel in the Kaiserslautern Military Community. The missile launch was then assessed to be part of a training exercise and not a threat to the KMC area.”

The US Air Force Europe–Army Africa command issued a separate statement reporting that “No US aircraft or pilots were scrambled. The missile launch was determined to be part of a regional training exercise and within minutes the control center again followed proper procedures and provided updated notifications.”

The Pentagon, however, has yet to publicly explain the nature of the “regional training exercise” or why it was mistaken for an imminent missile strike on its largest overseas base.

The media has quoted unnamed US military officials as linking the alert to a Russian military exercise Saturday in which a nuclear submarine submerged in the Sea of Okhotsk off Russia’s western Pacific coast fired a salvo of four intercontinental missiles that struck their targets 3,400 miles away in the Arkhangelsk region.

Russia had given a standard “notice to airmen” to avoid the area, signaling that such an exercise was taking place. The submarine missile launch was part of a broader four-day exercise involving the firing of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) from a submarine in the Barents Sea, along with the launching of a ground-based ICBM and the firing of cruise missiles by TU-160 and TU-95 bombers at test targets in the Arctic region.

Russian nuclear submarine Vladimir Monomakh firing ballistic missiles, Dec. 12, 2020. (Russian Ministry of Defense)

Why the US military perceived a military exercise that was forewarned as a real attack and why it thought missiles aimed at targets 1,500 miles away were going to strike Ramstein is still unknown. Also unknown is what countermeasures were taken by the US military in the face of what was perceived as an imminent missile strike. While the Pentagon reports that no planes “were scrambled,” it says nothing about ICBM bases in the US or nuclear submarines deployed at sea, which would be the first to respond to a nuclear attack.

In other words, the most critical unanswered question is how close this incident brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.

Replies to the statement posted on the Ramstein Air Base Facebook page ranged from expressions of the panic and fear caused by the sirens and loudspeaker warnings, to gallows humor and numerous complaints about the ramshackle character of the base’s alert system.

“I ran into the [base exchange] and started yelling at folks to take cover,” one airman wrote, adding, “When you hear this is not an exercise on the loud voice it makes your stomach knot up.”

“It made my heart skip a beat for a second,” wrote another, while a third commented, “The commissary might need to restock TP after that warning.”

Many reported, however, that they had received no warning. In some cases, the loudspeaker could not be heard across the sprawling base, while in others, personnel were misdirected or received no cellphone notifications.

“Had this been REAL real so many would’ve been screwed, at best,” read one comment. “Lodging literally told us it was training, even though command post/big voice told us to take shelter immediately.”

Others pointed out that the Air Force and the Army use different notification systems, with warnings going out to the former, but not the latter.

One airman commented, “Is the Command Post system tied to the Hawaiian alert system? Thought I left that behind. ...”

This reference was to the January 13, 2018, incident in which, in the midst of increasingly rabid war threats by Trump against North Korea, an alert was sent out by the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency to 1.5 million residents of the US Pacific island state that a ballistic missile would strike imminently and that they should “seek immediate cover.” The message, sent by cellphone and broadcast over television and radio added, “this is not a drill.” A full 38 minutes elapsed before the warning was rescinded, leaving an entire population in terror of nuclear annihilation.

As with the latest “false alarm” at Ramstein, the incident in Hawaii remained shrouded in secrecy, with the official explanation put out that it was the result of one employee’s mistake on a keyboard.

At the time, the World Socialist Web Site insisted that the incident could be understood only within the context of extreme global tensions and as “a necessary link in the chain of preparations for a catastrophic war.” It raised the question of whether the people of Hawaii were being used as “guinea pigs” and, whether the false alarm was staged as a means of gauging the reaction not only of North Korea, but China and Russia as well, to a US incoming missile alert. Such an event would doubtless compel all three countries to make their own preparations for imminent war, to be “carried out, all under the watchful eyes of US spy satellites, providing intelligence that could prove vital for a planned US invasion of North Korea.”

Whether such a staged “false alarm” was at work at Ramstein is unknown. What is clear from both events, however, is that US imperialism has no serious plans to protect anyone, military or civilian, from the threat of nuclear war. It factors in the deaths of countless millions in its war plans.

The incident at Ramstein was bracketed by two major statements directed to the incoming Biden administration on the subject of nuclear war.

The first was delivered by Gen. Timothy Ray, the commander of the Air Force Global Strike Command, to the 20th Annual Nuclear Triad and Deterrence Symposium held on December 10. In his opening remarks, Ray praised the Air Force’s nuclear-war-fighting capabilities: “Our bomber crews are more ready today than they’ve ever been in the history of Air Force Global Strike Command. Our ICBMs have been absolute stalwarts in this whole endeavor…they’ve never faltered. I could not be more pleased.”

The thrust of Ray’s remarks, however, was the insistence that there be no cuts to the proposed $2 trillion nuclear modernization program, and, in particular, to the Air Force’s bombers and missiles, which he described as a “visible” deterrent, presumably as opposed to the Navy’s submarines.

“It’s really important that we don’t let these issues, really, get swept up into ideologies or into political transitions between administrations,” Ray said. “It’s not simply a question of whether you are for or against nuclear weapons. It really isn’t an option anymore.”

Meanwhile, in an article titled “Sleepwalking Toward the Nuclear Precipice” published by Foreign Affairs on Tuesday, former secretary of energy Ernest Moniz, and Sam Nunn, a former senator and longtime chair of the Committee on Armed Services drew a direct comparison to present global tensions and the situation preceding World War I.

“Whereas a century ago millions died over four years of trench warfare, now the same number could be killed in a matter of minutes,” they warned. The incoming Biden administration, they write, “must confront the sobering fact that the potential for nuclear weapons use shadows more of the world’s conflicts than ever before. A single accident or blunder could lead to Armageddon.”

The bulk of the article is a plea for “dialogue and diplomacy,” beginning with the extension of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), the last surviving nuclear agreement between Washington and Moscow, which is set to expire February 5. It argues that this should lead to a mutual reduction in nuclear arsenals.

It further calls for strengthening “fail safe” systems to prevent an “accidental” attack, and the institution of rules requiring consultation with congressional leaders before going to nuclear war.

“World leaders are once again sleepwalking toward the precipice—this time of a nuclear catastrophe. They must wake up before it is too late,” the article concludes.

All indications, from Biden’s own record, to his selection of cabinet personnel and the right-wing character of the campaign waged against Trump on the grounds that he had been too “soft” on Russia and China, signal that the incoming administration will not depart from the bipartisan support for massive military spending—including the latest $741 billion Pentagon funding bill—and policies of militarist aggression from the Middle East, to Eastern Europe and the South China Sea.

If anything, with Biden’s coming to office, the US military and intelligence apparatus will seek to make up for lost time. This means the redoubling of both the “pivot to Asia” war buildup against China and the confrontation against Russia, which was sharply escalated with the US-orchestrated coup in Ukraine, both under the Obama administration.

Police arrested more than 117 journalists in the US in 2020

Alex Findijs

At least 117 journalists were arrested in the United States in 2020, setting a new record for arrests of journalists by a significant margin, according to a report released this week by the Freedom of the Press Foundation based on data compiled by the US Press Freedom Tracker. The number is expected to rise as more than a dozen cases are still under investigation.

From 2017 to 2019, 68 journalists were arrested: 9 in 2019, 11 in 2018 and 48 in 2017. In the week from May 29 to June 4 alone, more arrests of journalists were conducted than in these three years combined.

The timing of this police rampage against the press is significant.

CNN reporter Omar Jimenez being arrested during a live broadcast. (Image credit: CNN)

Prior to May 29, only two journalists had been arrested. However, following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, mass multiracial protests against police violence and racism spread rapidly across the country.

These protests are believed to be the largest in American history, with an estimated 15–26 million people participating in protests that occurred in 40 percent of American counties.

Immense social anger erupted, with millions of people taking to the streets to protest not just against Floyd’s murder, but against the whole police apparatus, which has been built up with hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and free military equipment, while the budgets of social programs and public education have been gutted year after year.

Working class people of all races and ethnicities joined together to voice their anger at the epidemic of police murders and violence that has ravaged communities across the country—with approximately 1,000 killing every year—culminating in calls for the defunding and even abolition of police departments across the country.

The fact that millions of working class people united in a common cause against the police, the agents of capitalist repression and class rule, sparked fear in the ruling class. Both Republican and Democratic politicians moved quickly to brutally repress the protests through violent police crackdowns, terrified that the protests would expand further.

The Democratic Party was especially afraid that the demonstrations would break free of its identity-politics stranglehold on social movements, prompting it to bring forward Black Lives Matter and pump millions of dollars into racialist initiatives, disregarding the fact that the plurality of police violence victims are white and that a black and Asian-American police officer were involved in the murder of Floyd.

President Donald Trump expressed this fear of social unrest most clearly when he told governors “it’s a movement, if you don’t put it down it will get worse and worse. ... The only time it’s successful is when you’re weak and most of you are weak.” He further expressed his fascistic intentions, stating that “you’ve got to arrest people, you have to track people, you have to put them in jail for 10 years and you’ll never see this stuff again.”

On June 1, Trump had threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 and deploy the US military against the protests but pulled back when the reluctant Pentagon brass made clear that plans for martial law were not well prepared and could trigger a civil war.

Both Republican and Democratic governors and mayors, however, were more than happy to oblige Trump’s call to action, deploying local and state police forces along with the National Guard in full force to the streets of dozens of American cities. The result was an escalation in police assaults on protesters, and a brutal campaign to silence journalists in an effort to cover up acts of violence committed by the police. Freelance and major network reporters alike were deliberately shot by rubber bullets and tear gas and had their equipment smashed.

So far in 2020, the US Press Freedom Tracker has recorded 311 physical attacks on journalists, 75 equipment damages, 17 equipment searches and seizures, and more than 960 violations of press freedom related to “national social justice protests.” Thirty-six percent of the 120 arrests were accompanied by a physical attack by the police.

No known officer has been charged with violating the constitutional rights of the press, yet 16 journalists currently face criminal prosecution.

These assaults on press freedom have catapulted the United States toward the top of the global list of press freedom violators.

In 2019, Turkey and China led the globe in imprisoned journalists with 47 and 48 respectively. While there are currently no journalists imprisoned in the US, a record of 120 arrests presents a serious warning that journalists may soon face prolonged detention and more serious criminal charges. Meanwhile, journalist and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is currently being held in London’s Belmarsh Prison, where he awaits extradition to the US where he faces a possible 175 year sentence for publishing information on American war crimes.

The sharp spike in the number and severity of attacks on journalists is bound up with the decline of American democracy and rapid descent of the US toward dictatorship, a process most clearly expressed by Trump.

President Trump has tweeted negatively about the press nearly 2,500 times since he began his presidential campaign in 2015, an average of 1.5 times a day, and he has repeatedly berated journalists at his political rallies.

Lucy Dalglish, dean of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, told the Committee to Protect Journalists that she had instructed her students to think twice about wearing press badges to the Republican and Democratic National Conventions this year as it may have made them a target for the police or demonstrators.

While the role that Trump’s verbal attacks on the press has played is significant, the escalation in press attacks cannot be understood as the product of Trump alone. The whole political establishment desires free rein to suppress protests without the impediment of reporters documenting their abuses.

Now, as Trump builds up a fascist base as part of his coup plotting against the constitution and President-elect Joe Biden, the threat to journalists who attempt to expose state violence grows ever greater. There is no reason to believe that the attack on journalists and demonstrations will cease under Biden, who denounced protesters as arsonists and looters this summer and declared Assange a “hi-tech terrorist” in 2010.

Without the independent intervention of the working class to defend democratic rights, it is only a matter of time before journalists in the United States are persecuted to the same degree as Assange and whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.