Sexual Predators in the Power Elite

John W. Whitehead

“As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensating to increase. And the dictator (unless he needs cannon fodder and families with which to colonize empty or conquered territories) will do well to encourage that freedom.”

—Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Power corrupts.

Anyone who believes differently hasn’t been paying attention.

Politics, religion, sports, government, entertainment, business, armed forces: it doesn’t matter what arena you’re talking about, they are all riddled with the kind of seedy, sleazy, decadent, dodgy, depraved, immoral, corrupt behavior that somehow gets a free pass when it involves the wealthy and powerful elite in America.

In this age of partisan politics and a deeply polarized populace, corruption—especially when it involves sexual debauchery, depravity and predatory behavior—has become the great equalizer.

Take Jeffrey Epstein, the hedge fund billionaire / convicted serial pedophile recently arrested on charges of molesting, raping and sex trafficking dozens of young girls.

It is believed that Epstein operated his own personal sex trafficking ring not only for his personal pleasure but also for the pleasure of his friends and business associates. According to The Washington Post, “several of the young women…say they were offered to the rich and famous as sex partners at Epstein’s parties.” At various times, Epstein ferried his friends about on his private plane, nicknamed the “Lolita Express.”

This is part of America’s seedy underbelly.

As I documented in the in-depth piece I wrote earlier this year, child sex trafficking—the buying and selling of women, young girls and boys for sex, some as young as 9 years old—has become big business in America. It is the fastest growing business in organized crime and the second most-lucrative commodity traded illegally after drugs and guns.

Adults purchase children for sex at least 2.5 million times a year in the United States.

It’s not just young girls who are vulnerable to these predators, either.

According to a 2016 investigative report, “boys make up about 36% of children caught up in the U.S. sex industry (about 60% are female and less than 5% are transgender males and females).”

Who buys a child for sex?

Otherwise ordinary men from all walks of life. “They could be your co-worker, doctor, pastor or spouse,” writes journalist Tim Swarens, who spent more than a year investigating the sex trade in America.

Ordinary men, yes.

But then there are the extra-ordinary men, such as Jeffrey Epstein, who belong to a powerful, wealthy, elite segment of society that operates according to their own rules or, rather, who are allowed to sidestep the rules that are used like a bludgeon on the rest of us.

These men skate free of accountability by taking advantage of a criminal justice system that panders to the powerful, the wealthy and the elite.

Over a decade ago, when Epstein was first charged with raping and molesting young girls, he was gifted a secret plea deal with then-U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta, President Trump’s current Labor Secretary, that allowed him to evade federal charges and be given the equivalent of a slap on the wrist: allowed to “work” at home six days a week before returning to jail to sleep. That secret plea deal has since been ruled illegal by a federal judge.

Yet here’s the thing: Epstein did not act alone.

I refer not only to Epstein’s accomplices, who recruited and groomed the young girls he is accused of raping and molesting, many of them homeless or vulnerable, but his circle of influential friends and colleagues that at one time included Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. Both Clinton and Trump, renowned womanizers who have also been accused of sexual impropriety by a significant number of women, were at one time passengers on the Lolita Express.

As the Associated Press points out, “The arrest of the billionaire financier on child sex trafficking charges is raising questions about how much his high-powered associates knew about the hedge fund manager’s interactions with underage girls, and whether they turned a blind eye to potentially illegal conduct.”

In fact, a recent decision by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals allowing a 2,000-page document linked to the Epstein case to be unsealed references allegations of sexual abuse involving “numerous prominent American politicians, powerful business executives, foreign presidents, a well-known Prime Minister, and other world leaders.”

This is not a minor incident involving minor players.

This is the heart of darkness.

Sex slaves. Sex trafficking. Secret societies. Powerful elites. Government corruption. Judicial cover-ups.

Once again, fact and fiction mirror each other.

Twenty years ago, Stanley Kubrick’s final film Eyes Wide Shut provided viewing audiences with a sordid glimpse into a secret sex society that indulged the basest urges of its affluent members while preying on vulnerable young women. It is not so different from the real world, where powerful men, insulated from accountability, indulge their base urges.

These secret societies flourish, implied Kubrick, because the rest of us are content to navigate life with our eyes wide shut, in denial about the ugly, obvious truths in our midst.

In so doing, we become accomplices to abusive behavior in our midst.

This is how corruption by the power elite flourishes.

For every Epstein who is—finally—called to account for his illegal sexual exploits after years of being given a free pass by those in power, there are hundreds (perhaps thousands) more in the halls of power and wealth whose predation of those most vulnerable among us continues unabated.

While Epstein’s alleged crimes are heinous enough on their own, he is part of a larger narrative of how a culture of entitlement becomes a cesspool and a breeding ground for despots and predators.

Remember the “DC Madam” who was charged with operating a phone-order sex business? Her clients included thousands of White House officials, lobbyists, and Pentagon, FBI, and IRS employees, as well as prominent lawyers, none of whom were ever exposed or held accountable.

Power corrupts.

Worse, as 19th-century historian Lord Acton concluded, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about a politician, an entertainment mogul, a corporate CEO or a police officer: give any one person (or government agency) too much power and allow him or her or it to believe that they are entitled, untouchable and will not be held accountable for their actions, and those powers will eventually be abused.

We’re seeing this dynamic play out every day in communities across America.

A cop shoots an unarmed citizen for no credible reason and gets away with it. A president employs executive orders to sidestep the Constitution and gets away with it. A government agency spies on its citizens’ communications and gets away with it. An entertainment mogul sexually harasses aspiring actresses and gets away with it. The U.S. military bombs a civilian hospital and gets away with it.

Abuse of power—and the ambition-fueled hypocrisy and deliberate disregard for misconduct that make those abuses possible—works the same whether you’re talking about sex crimes, government corruption, or the rule of law.

It’s the same old story all over again: man rises to power, man abuses power abominably, man intimidates and threatens anyone who challenges him with retaliation or worse, and man gets away with it because of a culture of compliance in which no one speaks up because they don’t want to lose their job or their money or their place among the elite.

It’s not just sexual predators that we have to worry about.

For every Jeffrey Epstein (or Bill Clinton or Harvey Weinstein or Roger Ailes or Bill Cosby or Donald Trump) who eventually gets called out for his sexual misbehavior, there are hundreds—thousands—of others in the American police state who are getting away with murder—in many cases, literally—simply because they can.

The cop who shoots the unarmed citizen first and asks questions later might get put on paid leave for a while or take a job with another police department, but that’s just a slap on the wrist. The shootings and SWAT team raids and excessive use of force will continue, because the police unions and the politicians and the courts won’t do a thing to stop it.

The war hawks who are making a profit by waging endless wars abroad, killing innocent civilians in hospitals and schools, and turning the American homeland into a domestic battlefield will continue to do so because neither the president nor the politicians will dare to challenge the military industrial complex.

The National Security Agency that carries out warrantless surveillance on Americans’ internet and phone communications will continue to do so, because the government doesn’t want to relinquish any of its ill-gotten powers and its total control of the populace.

Unless something changes in the way we deal with these ongoing, egregious abuses of power, the predators of the police state will continue to wreak havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives.

Police officers will continue to shoot and kill unarmed citizens. Government agents—including local police—will continue to dress and act like soldiers on a battlefield. Bloated government agencies will continue to fleece taxpayers while eroding our liberties. Government technicians will continue to spy on our emails and phone calls. Government contractors will continue to make a killing by waging endless wars abroad.

And powerful men (and women) will continue to abuse the powers of their office by treating those around them as underlings and second-class citizens who are unworthy of dignity and respect and undeserving of the legal rights and protections that should be afforded to all Americans.

As Dacher Keltner, professor of psychology at the at the University of California, Berkeley, observed in the Harvard Business Review, “While people usually gain power through traits and actions that advance the interests of others, such as empathy, collaboration, openness, fairness, and sharing; when they start to feel powerful or enjoy a position of privilege, those qualities begin to fade. The powerful are more likely than other people to engage in rude, selfish, and unethical behavior.”

After conducting a series of experiments into the phenomenon of how power corrupts, Keltner concluded: “Just the random assignment of power, and all kinds of mischief ensues, and people will become impulsive. They eat more resources than is their fair share. They take more money. People become more unethical.They think unethical behavior is okay if they engage in it. People are more likely to stereotype. They’re more likely to stop attending to other people carefully.”

Power corrupts.

And absolute power corrupts absolutely.

However, it takes a culture of entitlement and a nation of compliant, willfully ignorant, politically divided citizens to provide the foundations of tyranny.

As researchers Joris Lammers and Adam Galinsky found, those in power not only tend to abuse that power but they also feel entitled to abuse it: “People with power that they think is justified break rules not only because they can get away with it, but also because they feel at some intuitive level that they are entitled to take what they want.”

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, for too long now, Americans have tolerated an oligarchy in which a powerful, elite group of wealthy donors is calling the shots. They have paid homage to patriotism while allowing the military industrial complex to spread death and destruction abroad. And they have turned a blind eye to all manner of wrongdoing when it was politically expedient.

We need to restore the rule of law for all people, no exceptions.

Here’s what the rule of law means in a nutshell: it means that everyone is treated the same under the law, everyone is held equally accountable to abiding by the law, and no one is given a free pass based on their politics, their connections, their wealth, their status or any other bright line test used to confer special treatment on the elite.

This culture of compliance must stop.

The empowerment of petty tyrants and political gods must end.

The state of denial must cease.

Let’s not allow this Epstein sex scandal to become just another blip in the news cycle that goes away all too soon, only to be forgotten when another titillating news headline takes its place.

Sex trafficking, like so many of the evils in our midst, is a cultural disease that is rooted in the American police state’s heart of darkness. It speaks to a far-reaching corruption that stretches from the highest seats of power down to the most hidden corners and relies on our silence and our complicity to turn a blind eye to wrongdoing.

If we want to put an end to these wrongs, we must keep our eyes wide open.

Development, identity dominance and the politics of “doing” in India

Chetan Sinha

“Most dangerous person in the world is the person who believes he has discovered the meaning of life” (Isaiah Berlin)

Corporatisation is not development and market control does not mean freedom of choice. The current observation of right-wing populist understanding about the various sociopolitical notions directly shows the prevalence of right-wing mindset at the general level. Some of the debates about the rise of right-wing alternativelyseen as de-escalation of check over the right wing mindset which was always in its ritualised format within the cultural domain. This change in the language of rising has, in reality, halted the deep-seated need for change. In other words, the language of development in the name of right and authentic leadership immobilises social mobility and the further chance of social change.

The notion that in a democracy, it does not matter who gets elected has taken democracy and election in the reified understanding. The whole position of social change has been turned into different direction moderated by the populist understanding and reduced it to something inflated form of understanding of technology, traditions, and culture. Right-wing populism is not about the culture which people share, but it is an amalgamation of hegemonised beliefs about the modernity as anti-cultural together with the power discourse and state support. It is the imposition of one power discourse on others giving no space to an alternative version of the reality. The rise of right-wing government is not that democratic system has chosen it, but it also shows the rise of identity politics based on the social mobility and social class climbing based on the populist notions about Vikas (development).

The current times of majoritarianism combined with development and security nurtured the deep-seated support for the Varna and caste system. As Varna and caste system is not separate from the Hindu religion and in the current time, it has got its strong support from the politics of Hindutva. In one way, the leader who represents the system has got its face, which mirrors the face of impression long lived in the history of India, that is about identity purity and impurity. This dichotomy of the Indian society has overpowered many fields of thoughts and extended into the daily struggle of people from poverty, casteism and patriarchy. These events of the rise of right-wing are not new as it spread in a hegemonic way and it does not have the debatable ground too, as it was clear about what is deserving and undeserving, pure and impure, upper and lower, capable-mindful with incapable-mindless. Thus whole self aggrandization of being tolerant, as Hindu religion claim, towards the other was nothing but the right-wing propaganda to show itself as indigenous Hindu and the victim of outside forces. This categorisation of Hindu self-nurtured the hidden animosity for the diverse group and minority in the name of cultural revivalism which was suppressed in the past by the colonial force who brought the modernity and replaced the culture with new voices. This social order of caste and gender cannot be the result of the one-person army but the dominant identities who are driven by these social constructions, where even the hardest leader is the victim and who depict the face of the society or is a mirror image.

The notion that development is the marker of modernity is a historical paradox. In the times of ‘rise’ development or Vikas has been limited to the rise of highways, deforestations, corporatisation, the building of smart cities for upper middle classes, mines together with the revivalist agenda of Hindutva. This whole effort of the refurbishment of culture through the methodology of violence, trolling, humiliations of the leader who represents dissenting ideas has given the name of a new modernity, which is intolerant toward the socially powerless. The modernity which revitalises the fading pride of being from dominant caste and culture having the power to control the oppressed, which is the marker of one’s solid stand in the society. The diversity is needed to provide a comparative ground to asserts one’s dominance again with all the tools of regulations such as beating, killing, lynching, insulting and reactionary and intolerant.

The possibility of dialogue is less or no more, as questioning to the powerful is anti-national and contrary to the prevailing ethos of society. This prevailing ethos and nationalism, transformed through the force of Hindutva ideology and the agenda of this kind of development and modernity are the representations of the middle class and upper caste culture which in the current times heavily influenced the other classes too. Their aspiration elevate through these discourse of new modernity and change, which stamped the authenticity of Hindu Varna and caste systems, patriarchy, and populists understanding of poverty and social class (see Guduvarthy, 2018). A critical impact out of many of these development politics showed how the dominant industrialist class expanded its discourse about change and new India, which channelised the charisma of leader and took the hermeneutic turn where youths in all sections, middle class, academician, workers and other ordinary people were profoundly influenced and taken over.

The whole idea of development was constructed into the varieties of meaning by the people. As people want change, the development agenda shaped the hope of people and constructed their new self, which is in rhythm with the power discourse of the right wing. The power of right-wing authoritarianism injects as one’s self where both symbolises as one. Thus any idea contrary or critical to the agenda of the state is seen as a replacement of one’s self with something toxic and anti-cultural. So, to be a critique of power, to be dissenter and dialogic, one has to bear the brunt of being with the enemy who wishes to destroy the culture and ethos of India. Here the enemies are the nations or people from the diverse group who hold different religious practices, people from the minority background who are the victims of that dominant culture, and people who do not see the majoritarian leader as a representative of their collective self. For example, if the leader built the special economic zones (SEZ) eroding the tribal from their land and memories, their protest against the power and state’s attempt is brutally rejected as anti-nation and anti-development.

The focus of the present paper is to explore why, in some sociocultural context, the doing of a leader is perceived as work not done or done contrary to their interest? The choice of a leader by some group begets into the belief polarisation lest they portray the image of in-group with the samesocio-cultural background. In India, the country of many beliefs connected to the religion, caste, languages, and region, we can guess that we appropriate our leaders who represent our shared culture. However, the definition of leaders also changes according to the need rather than solely through the identities, but not much scientific data are available. The crisis of leadership is felt from time to time, and we have observed the turns in our interpretations of a leader. For example, India, as claimed by the Hindu nationalist, has Hindu past, contrary to the other groups who reject this idea of Saffron tunnel building, insteademphasis on the multicultural ethos which makes India a nation. Sometimes not doing something makes the idea of the nation as safe connections to different identities, as compared to doing something to stop it with an iron hand and destroying the freedom of being as a citizen with varied sociocultural identities. Thus, how the leaders conscious ‘doing’ and conscious ‘not doing’, construct the meaning of a nation is a significant point of contentions.

What are the politics of doing and enactments? Does an authentic leader mean who does something for the community? What if that leader enacts the prejudices held by the dominant group? Will he be, in a real sense, an authentic leader? The neoliberalism has changed the meaning of development from social aspiration to individual aspirations. The hegemonic aspirations of the new middle class, which was captured by the new India discourse changing the discourse of diversity politics and democracy into the homogenised form of nationalism. Social aspiration linked to the community building, for example, enhancement of the group’s dignity and self-esteem and giving back to the community by the members, in contrast to the individual aspiration as believing one’s merit, the superiority of class, and ejecting out of the community, if circumstances are favourable.

Neoliberalism is not seeming to be self-sustaining and multiplying economic approach but very much promoted, socially constructed through the dominant discourses, invisible, and regulated capitalists’ enterprise in the name of free reign. The current leadership promoting the neoliberalism are representative of classes that believe in individuality and independence, meritocracy and market, globalisation and technocratic capitalism. They believe that technology is the saviour of humanity which they constructed according to their experiences and rejects the experiences and values of other caste and tribal groups as savage, non-meritocratic, antagonistic to the idea of new India. The point of contention is despite their apparent knowledge of being liberal, their Hindu self becomes more rigid when it comes to caste-based rituals and to follow the saffronized modernity.

The politics of doing and development is not a new subject for any political regime, for example, the coming of special economic zones (SEZ), smart cities, big industries, roads and IT hubs at the cost of farmers and tribal interest. These developments had raised the employment of the middle classes, but at the same time isolating the lower classes and forcing them to the menial labour works. Instead of giving a technological help to the manual scavengers and labourers who risk their life, more emphasis is given to the skilled classes which are well versed in technological handling of education, government-run website, and banking service. Thus, an image of ‘development and doing’ is created, depicting a universal picture of the development and happiness of people. The Hindutva self and its representative leader have categorised the Indian society into a web of rigid categories which has less chance of bringing authentic social change which could protect the minority, diverse groups, and environment. Hindutva ideology is contrary to the natural self which connects to the ecology, rather it mesmerises itself in the false ego and selves, leading to destruction and making the minorities voiceless. The idea of India as propagated by the Hindutva forces cannot materialise under the universal and homogenous ideological system. However, there is less doubt that it is mostly present almost everywhere in families, institutions and in everyday interaction and will never vanish, and the concretisation of social categories without dialogues and tolerance will be contrary to the idea of India.

The states conscious politics of doing development and creating an imaginary space of sound and prosperous life, under the garb of more considerable effort with the help of media and political workers (karyakartas), they intentionally tried to stop freedom of universities and educational space, for example, arresting the critical leaders in the name of anti-nationality. Also, the presentations of the political will such as cleanliness movement  (Swach Bharat Abhiyan) under the politics of doing cleanliness very much attach to the inherent purity and impurity based social structure under the garb of which the caste-based occupational system has rigidified. The millions of manual scavengers (safaikaramcharis) are from lower caste background and the token to present India as a clean state forcibly normalised this caste-based occupational system. There is very less improvement of these workers’ status and working conditions with the help of technology which the government promoted as a useful tool of development. The discourse of development is limited but profound. It focuses more on the economic rise and poverty removal rather than life with dignity and social justice (see Rebecca Eapen, EPW). The term development may connect to some set features of the developed economy, and the political discourses based on development seem above the involuntary identities laden in one’s permanent belongingness to the social groups such as caste.

The discourses on doing and not doing are not new in the Indian political system. How the history of any nation is co-constructed with the people and goals are not made clear? Does development and doing are co-constructed goals? Who is involved in those co-constructions? No doubt change matters for every class where poverty and economic change matters a lot, especially to the oppresses classes when they had lost any scope of another kind of social change, so economic change is a bull work for their hope, as they feel they cannot cross their involuntary identities such as caste, and gender. Two waves of nationalism and the politics of doing observed. First, the politics of doing at the time of soft right and at the time of hard right is not to deny that hard right weakened when soft right reign over India. The bipolarity of being different kinds of right is also not an illusion that the right was not any person but spread in the sociopolitical and local need of the people. It is also not that right personality does not matter but the deeds and needs. The rhetoric of development and the way people think that this is a matter of authentic leadership and how any leader shows the people his authenticity, what rhetoric followed and what image is portrayed (e.g. Main BhiChowkidar rhetoric, either you are with India or with Pakistan rhetoric). The notion of development as leaders’ market it to the people is incomplete without a critical positioning of neoliberalism and capitalism. There are several instances where the development agenda of prominent industrialists are quickly established and given a green signal as compared to the fulfilment of the basic needs of people. The state induced administrative reforms have become the face of democracy in India, whereas local level power distribution and institutional development for the marginalised hardly noticed (see Gurukkal, 2018, p. 108). What is development and how this has turned into developmentalism is a matter of oppression when the notion of development itself overpower the weaker section of society and snatches their freedom with little space of raising the voice.

In conclusion, the massive movement to normalise history, rationality and development, the current leadership has claimed itself as authentic, righteous and absolute. It fitted into the scriptural model of Gita that whenever there is a breach of righteousness and morality, god transforms himself into human and come to earth to restore morality and righteousness. This transformation of god into the current leadership is becoming absolute and unquestionable. It has infused enough anxiety among the dominant groups that if our PM was not elected what will happen to India and all the promises made. In the same way, as people punished for criticising god and becoming unrighteousness through their criticality, the general masses of India, who areare also thinking beings was made unpolitical, unquestioning and prone to the coercive ideology of Hindutva (see Gurrukal, 2018). In an ideal way, authentic leadership must be valid to democratic values and deeds. However, there are many people from the marginalised background together with Dalit, Muslims, tribal and other who do not have the voice and are continuously on the verge of marginalisation without any scope of social change. The ideology of Hindutva is dehumanising and oppressing without any space for understanding the power dominance and state designed democracy. The coming up of various capitalistic enterprises are considered as pro-development but help given to the needy students to study in the university at the subsidy rate are not encouraged or rejected as unnecessary exchequer cost on the taxpayer money. There are colossal funding and charity given to the religious trusts, which are unaccountable to the public and making the Hindutva group more potent at the local level. Overall, these attempts to politicise the karma has added fuel to the self of the current regime and dominant groups majoritarian ethics at the cost of authentic democratic processes.

Turkey three years after the abortive coup against President Erdogan

Abdus Sattar Ghazali

Turkey commemorated Monday the July 15, 2016 failed coup attempt, allegedly orchestrated by the US-based self-exiled Turkish Imam Fethullah Gülen

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan laid flowers on the July 15 Martyrs Monument in the Presidential Complex early in the morning.

Erdogan, along with relatives of martyrs and veterans, went to the Bestepe Millet mosque for prayer services for the martyrs. Bakir Izzetbegovic, the former Bosniak member of Bosnia’s three-member Presidential Council, also accompanied Erdogan in the commemoration ceremonies.

Turkey marks July 15 as Democracy and National Unity Day. The day is commemorated with events honoring those who lost their lives beating back the putschists.

According to Mustafa Akyol, a Senior Fellow at the Washington-based Cato Institute, in Turkey, there is almost a national consensus that the Gülenists were, at least, the main component of the coup. This consensus is shared by all opposition parties, along with many secularists, leftists or liberals who are bitterly opposed to Erdogan on most other issues.

“The very fact that Gülen is based in the United States made many Turks assume that the Gülenists could not have launched a coup on their own. This deep distrust, amplified by Washington’s support for Kurdistan Workers Party-affiliated Kurdish militia in Syria, boosted anti-Americanism in Turkey,” Akyol says adding: That should make it easy to understand why Turkey has bought and deployed S-400 missiles from Russia, despite all the objections from Washington. Turkey received first shipment of the S-400 missiles three days before the abortive coup anniversary.

EU expresses solidarity with Turkey over the abortive coup

The EU on Monday expressed solidarity with the Turkish people as the nation marked third anniversary of the failed coup attempt.

“Our solidarity with the Turkish people is not into question at all,” the EU’s High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Federica Mogherini said in Brussels.

Addressing a meeting of foreign minister’s council, Mogherini said the EU members do remember the day and night of July 15 very well.

“Today is the third anniversary of the attempted coup and I think that we all remember that day and that night very well,” she added.

557 suspects nabbed at border since defeated coup

Since the defeated July 15 coup, Turkey has captured 557 suspects linked to Fetullah Gulen group in the country’s northwest as they were planning to cross to Greece.

According to data analyzed by Anadolu Agency, Turkish soldiers stationed along the Turkish side of the Greek and Bulgarian borders prevented the suspects from escaping to Europe.

The suspects placed under travel bans are ex-soldiers, academicians, teachers, police officers, and judges.

Many Gulen supporters members who were trying to escape by infiltrating among irregular migrants and cooperating with terrorist organizations such as PKK and MLKP were caught before they could escape to Europe, Yeni Safak newspaper reported.

According to the provincial gendarmerie command, security forces nabbed 18 suspects in 2016, 149 in 2017 and 266 in 2018. A total of 124 suspects were nabbed since the beginning of this year.

Efforts to take over Gulen group-run schools across the globe gather momentum

Turkish authorities continue to be in talks with many countries around the world to take over Gülen group linked schools, Turkish media reported.

The latest talks include discussions with Ugandan officials over transferring the management of both Gulen-linked schools and hospitals in the country to Turkey.

“The Ugandan government says the transfer of the establishments should be done within legal means,” Turkish Ambassador to Uganda Kerem Alp told Anadolu Agency (AA) Sunday.

“We have informed the authorities that some schools and hospitals in Uganda have links to FETÖ (Fetullah Terrorist Organization),” he said in the capital Kampala.

After the 2016 defeated coup, Turkey established the Maarif Foundation to take charge of FETÖ’s overseas schools. It also establishes schools and education centers abroad.

Ethiopia: Meanwhile, Turkish Ambassador to Ethiopia Yaprak Alp has said that the efforts aimed at getting Turkish schools back from the control of those linked to the FETÖ was on the rise.

Briefing reporters to mark the third anniversary of the July 15 failed coup attempt in Turkey, Alp said that in a significant breakthrough, a school linked to the FETÖ in Ethiopia was handed over to the Maarif Foundation last week.

“With the hard work of our missions abroad and the Maarif Foundation, we are gaining traction and are getting concrete results,” said the ambassador. “For instance, as a significant breakthrough in Ethiopia, a school linked to the FETÖ was handed over to the Maarif Foundation last week in Harar,” she added.

She said the school governed by the Maarif Foundation will prove beneficial for Ethiopia and the people of Harar in the eastern part of the country. She said it will also contribute to further improving relations between the peoples of Ethiopia and Turkey.

Afghanistan: Turkey on Friday took over five additional schools previously run by the Gulen group in Afghanistan. The schools — four in the capital Kabul and one in the southern province of Kandahar — were handed over to Turkey’s Maarif Foundation, according to a statement by the office of Afghanistan director of the education body.

The schools were named in the statement as Afghan-Turk Kabul Ariana Boys High School, Kabul Girls High School, Kabul Darul-Ulum High School, Kabul International Bereket High School, and Kandahar Primary School.

With the move, all 13 FETÖ-run schools in the war-torn country have been handed over to the Turkish education body.

What is the Gulen Movement?

Since the 1970s, Gulen and his followers have slowly built up a network of educational institutions, non-governmental organizations and businesses that started in Turkey, spread to Central Asia, and now is entrenched in every continent but Antarctica.  This network is called the Gulen Movement.

According to Turkish Invitation website, by November 2012, there were Gulen group run schools were established in as many as 120 countries.

It is extremely secretive, and many of its members (the “Gulenists”) and organizations will not even openly admit their affiliation.  Publicly, the Gulen Movement advertises itself as a grassroots volunteer civil society movement that is interested only in humanitarian and educational works.  Its members like to  stress that it is loosely organized with no central coordination.

Outside of Turkey, the network of Gulen schools has been rapidly expanding all over the world, and around 1999 the Gulenists began to establish publicly-funded charter schools in the United States, where they already had a small number of private schools.

In September 2010, a respected former police chief named Hanefi Avci wrote a best-selling book about how the Gulen Movement has infiltrated Turkish institutions and stealthily taken over the state. Not long after this book appeared, Avci was arrested. It is widely believed that the charges against him are false, and that the underlying reason for the arrest was retaliation for this book.

Gulen and his schools have been controversial not only in Turkey, but also in Central Asia , Europe , and  now the United States as well.

The doctoral dissertation of Mustafa Gokhan Sahin, who has several Gulenist affiliations, contains references to US support for the Gulen Movement’s activities outside of Turkey. Here are two quotes from his dissertation (boldface added):

“For many in Turkey this was exporting ‘Turkish Model’ to a region [Central Asia] which was under Iranian and Wahhabi influence. In policy circles, especially with U.S. support, the Turkish model of a secular state with a moderate pro-western Islam was the most highly regarded alternative. The international support for the Turkish Model also contributed to the expansion of the Gulen community in the region without any impediment until suspicion and resistance replaced the ‘cautious acquiescence of Russia’ and some other Central Asian states.  At times the activities of the movement was [sic] considered too pro–American, and schools run by Gulen community both in Russia and Uzbekistan were closed by the state in late 2000.”

What is Fethullah Gulen?

In an article with the above title Germany-based American writer Frederick William Engdahl provides incite into Fethullah Gülen life:

When Gülen fled to Pennsylvania in 1999, Turkish prosecutors demanded a ten-year sentence against him for having “founded an organization that sought to destroy the secular apparatus of state and establish a theocratic state.”

At that time the US Government’s Department of Homeland Security and the US State Department both opposed Gülen’s application for what was called a “preference visa as an alien of extraordinary ability in the field of education.”

They presented arguments demonstrating that the fifth-grade dropout, Fethullah Gülen, should not be granted a preference visa.

However, over the objections of the FBI, of the US State Department, and of the US Department of Homeland Security, three former CIA operatives intervened and managed to secure a Green Card and permanent US residency for Gülen.

The three CIA people supporting Gülen’s Green Card application in 2007 were former US Ambassador to Turkey, Morton Abramowitz, CIA officials George Fidas and Graham E. Fuller.

In 2008, shortly after he wrote a letter of recommendation to the US Government asking to give Gülen the special US residence visa, Fuller wrote a book titled The New Turkish Republic: Turkey as a Pivotal State in the Muslim World. At the center of the book was praise for Gülen and his “moderate” Islamic Gülen Movement in Turkey:

“Gülen’s charismatic personality makes him the number one Islamic figure of Turkey. The Gülen Movement has the largest and most powerful infrastructure and financial resources of any movement in the country… The movement has also become international, by virtue of its far-flung system of schools…in more than a dozen countries including the Muslim countries of the former Soviet Union, Russia, France and the United States.”

During the 1990s, Gülen’s global political Islam Cemaat spread across the Caucasus and into the heart of Central Asia all the way to Xinjiang Province in western China, doing precisely what Fuller had called for in his 1999 statement: “destabilize what remains of Russian power, and especially to counter the Chinese influence in Central Asia.”

By the mid-1990s, more than seventy-five Gülen schools had spread to Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and even to Dagestan and Tatarstan in Russia amid the chaos of the post-Soviet Yeltsin era.

Gülen never left the United States after that, curiously enough, even though the Erdoğan courts later cleared him in 2006 of all charges. His refusal to return, even after being cleared by a then-friendly Erdoğan AKP government, heightened the conviction among opponents in Turkey about his close CIA ties, Frederick William Engdahl argues.

The Military-Industrial Complex on Steroids

William D. Hartung

When, in his farewell address in 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of the dangers of the “unwarranted influence” wielded by the “military-industrial complex,” he could never have dreamed of an arms-making corporation of the size and political clout of Lockheed Martin. In a good year, it now receives up to $50 billion in government contracts, a sum larger than the operating budget of the State Department. And now it’s about to have company.

Raytheon, already one of the top five U.S. defense contractors, is planning to merge with United Technologies. That company is a major contractor in its own right, producing, among other things, the engine for the F-35 combat aircraft, the most expensive Pentagon weapons program ever. The new firm will be second only to Lockheed Martin when it comes to consuming your tax dollars — and it may end up even more powerful politically, thanks to President Trump’s fondness for hiring arms industry executives to run the national security state.

Just as Boeing benefited from its former Senior Vice President Patrick Shanahan’s stint as acting secretary of defense, so Raytheon is likely to cash in on the nomination of its former top lobbyist, Mike Esper, as his successor. Esper’s elevation comes shortly after another former Raytheon lobbyist, Charles Faulkner, left the State Department amid charges that he had improperly influenced decisions to sell Raytheon-produced guided bombs to Saudi Arabia for its brutal air war in Yemen. John Rood, third-in-charge at the Pentagon, has worked for both Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, while Ryan McCarthy, Mike Esper’s replacement as secretary of the Army, worked for Lockheed on the F-35, which the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) has determined may never be ready for combat.

And so it goes. There was a time when Donald Trump was enamored of “his” generals — Secretary of Defense James Mattis (a former board member of the weapons-maker General Dynamics), National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly. Now, he seems to have a crush on personnel from the industrial side of the military-industrial complex.

As POGO’s research has demonstrated, the infamous “revolving door” that deposits defense executives like Esper in top national security posts swings both ways. The group estimates that, in 2018 alone, 645 senior government officials — mostly from the Pentagon, the uniformed military, and Capitol Hill — went to work as executives, consultants, or board members of one of the top 20 defense contractors.

Fifty years ago, Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire identified the problem when he noted that:

“the movement of high ranking military officers into jobs with defense contractors and the reverse movement of top executives in major defense contractors into high Pentagon jobs is solid evidence of the military-industrial complex in operation. It is a real threat to the public interest because it increases the chances of abuse… How hard a bargain will officers involved in procurement planning or specifications drive when they are one or two years away from retirement and have the example to look at of over 2,000 fellow officers doing well on the outside after retirement?”

In other words, that revolving door and the problems that go with it are anything but new. Right now, however, it seems to be spinning faster than ever — and mergers like the Raytheon-United Technologies one are only likely to feed the phenomenon.

The Last Supper

The merger of Raytheon and United Technologies should bring back memories of the merger boom of the 1990s, when Lockheed combined with Martin Marietta to form Lockheed Martin, Northrop and Grumman formed Northrop Grumman, and Boeing absorbed rival military aircraft manufacturer McDonnell Douglas. And it wasn’t just a matter of big firms pairing up either. Lockheed Martin itself was the product of mergers and acquisitions involving nearly two dozen companies — distinctly a tale of big fish chowing down on little fish. The consolidation of the arms industry in those years was strongly encouraged by Clinton administration Secretary of Defense William Perry, who held a dinner with defense executives that was later dubbed “the last supper.” There, he reportedly told the assembled corporate officials that a third of them would be out of business in five years if they didn’t merge with one of their cohorts.

The Clinton administration’s encouragement of defense industry mergers would prove anything but rhetorical. It would, for instance, provide tens of millions of dollars in merger subsidies to pay for the closing of plants, the moving of equipment, and other necessities. It even picked up part of the tab for the golden parachutes given defense executives and corporate board members ousted in those deals.

The most egregious case was surely that of Norman Augustine. The CEO of Martin Marietta, he would actually take over at the helm of the even more powerful newly created Lockheed Martin. In the process, he received $8.2 million in payments, technically for leaving his post as head of Martin Marietta. U.S. taxpayers would cover more than a third of his windfall. Then, a congressman who has only gained stature in recent years, Representative Bernie Sanders (I-VT), began to fight back against those merger subsidies. He dubbed them “payoffs for layoffs” because executives got government-funded bailouts, while an estimated 19,000 workers were laid off in the Lockheed Martin merger alone with no particular taxpayer support. Sanders was actually able to shepherd through legislation that clawed back some, but not all, of those merger subsidies.

According to one argument in favor of the merger binge then, by closing half-empty factories, the new firms could charge less overhead and taxpayers would benefit. Well, dream on. This never came near happening, because the newly merged industrial behemoths turned out to have even greater bargaining power over the Pentagon and Congress than the unmerged companies that preceded them.

Draw your own conclusions about what’s likely to happen in this next round of mergers, since cost overruns and lucrative contracts continue apace. Despite this dismal record, Raytheon CEO Thomas Kennedy claims that the new corporate pairing will — you guessed it! — save the taxpayers money. Don’t hold your breath.

Influence on Steroids

While Donald Trump briefly expressed reservations about the Raytheon-United Technologies merger and a few members of Congress struck notes of caution, it has been welcomed eagerly on Wall Street. Among the reasons given: the fact that the two companies generally make different products, so their union shouldn’t reduce competition in any specific sector of defense production. It has also been claimed that the new combo, to be known as Raytheon Technologies, will have more funds available for research and development on the weapons of the future.

But focusing on such concerns misses the big picture. Raytheon Technologies will have more money to make campaign contributions, more money to hire lobbyists, and more production sites that can be used as leverage over members of Congress loathe to oppose spending on weapons produced in their states or districts. The classic example of this phenomenon: the F-35 program, which Lockheed Martin claims produces 125,000 jobs spread over 46 states.

When I took a careful look at the company’s estimates, I found that they were claiming approximately twice as many jobs as that weapons system was actually creating. In fact, more than half of F-35-related employment was in just two states, California and Texas (though many other states did have modest numbers of F-35 jobs). Even if Lockheed Martin’s figures are exaggerated, however, there’s no question that spreading defense jobs around the country gives weapons manufacturers unparalleled influence over key members of Congress, much to their benefit when Pentagon budget time rolls around. In fact, it’s a commonplace for Congress to fund more F-35s, F-18s, and similar weapons systems than the Pentagon even asks for. So much for Congressional oversight.

Theoretically, incoming defense secretary Mike Esper will have to recuse himself from major decisions involving his former company. Among them, whether to continue selling Raytheon-produced precision-guided bombs to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for their devastating air war in Yemen that has killed remarkable numbers of civilians.

No worries. President Trump himself is the biggest booster in living memory of corporate arms sales and Saudi Arabia is far and away his favorite customer. The Senate recently voted down a package of “emergency” arms sales to the Saudis and the UAE that included thousands of Raytheon Paveway munitions, the weapon of choice in that Yemeni air campaign. A similar vote must now take place in the House, but even if it, too, passes, Congress will need to override a virtually guaranteed Trump veto of the bill.

The Raytheon-United Technologies merger will further implicate the new firm in Yemeni developments because the Pratt and Whitney division of United Technologies makes the engine for Saudi Arabia’s key F-15S combat aircraft, a mainstay of the air war there. Not only will Raytheon Technologies profit from such engine sales, but that company’s technicians are likely to help maintain the Saudi air force, thereby enabling it to fly yet more bombing missions more often.

When pressed, Raytheon officials argue that, in enabling mass slaughter, they are simply following U.S. government policy. This ignores the fact that Raytheon and other weapons contractors spend tens of millions of dollars a year on lobbyists, political contributions, and other forms of influence peddling trying to shape U.S. policies on arms exports and weapons procurement. They are, in other words, anything but passive recipients of edicts handed down from Washington.

As Raytheon chief financial officer Toby O’Brien put it in a call to investors that came after the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, “We continue to be aligned with the administration’s policies, and we intend to honor our commitments.” Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson made a similar point, asserting that “most of these agreements that we have are government-to-government purchases, so anything that we do has to follow strictly the regulations of the U.S. government… Beyond that, we’ll just work with the U.S. government as they are continuing their relationship with [the Saudis].”

How Powerful Are the Military-Industrial Combines?

When it comes to lobbying the Pentagon and Congress, size matters. Major firms like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Raytheon can point to the jobs they and their subcontractors provide in dozens of states and scores of Congressional districts to keep members of Congress in line who might otherwise question or even oppose the tens of billions of dollars in government funding the companies receive annually.

Raytheon — its motto: “Customer Success Is Our Mission” — has primary operations in 16 states: Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Texas, Utah, and Virginia. That translates into a lot of leverage over key members of Congress and it doesn’t even count states where the company has major subcontractors. The addition of United Technologies will reinforce the new company’s presence in a number of those states, while adding Connecticut, Iowa, New York, and North Carolina (in other words, at least 20 states in all).

Meanwhile, if the merger is approved, the future Raytheon Technologies will be greasing the wheels of its next arms contracts by relying on nearly four dozen former government officials the two separate companies hired as lobbyists, executives, and board members in 2018 alone. Add to that the $6.4 million in campaign contributions and $20 million in lobbying expenses Raytheon clocked during the last two election cycles and the outlines of its growing influence begin to become clearer. Then, add as well the $2.9 million in campaign contributions and $40 million in lobbying expenses racked up by its merger partner United Technologies and you have a lobbying powerhouse rivaled only by Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defense conglomerate.

President Eisenhower’s proposed counterweight to the power of the military-industrial complex was to be “an alert and knowledgeable citizenry.” And there are signs that significant numbers of individuals and organizations are beginning to pay more attention to the machinations of the arms lobby. My own outfit, the Center for International Policy, has launched a Sustainable Defense Task Force composed of former military officers and Pentagon officials, White House and Congressional budget experts, and research staffers from progressive and good-government groups. It has already crafted a plan that would cut $1.2 trillion from the Pentagon budget over the next decade, while improving U.S. security by avoiding unnecessary wars, eliminating waste, and scaling back a Pentagon nuclear-weapons buildup slated to cost $1.5 trillion or more over the next three decades.

The Poor People’s Campaign, backed by research conducted by the National Priorities Project of the Institute for Policy Studies, is calling for a one-year $350 billion cut in Pentagon expenditures. And a new network called “Put People Over the Pentagon” has brought together more than 20 progressive organizations to press presidential candidates to cut $200 billion annually from the Department of Defense’s bloated budget. Participants in the network include Public Citizen, Moveon.org, Indivisible, Win Without War, 350.org, Friends of the Earth, and United We Dream, many of them organizations that had not, in past years, made reducing the Pentagon budget a priority.

Raytheon and its arms industry allies won’t sit still in the face of such proposals, but at least the days of unquestioned and unchallenged corporate greed in the ever-merging (but also ever-expanding) arms industry may be coming to an end. The United States has paid an exorbitantly high price in blood and treasure (as have countries like Afghanistan and Iraq) for letting the military-industrial complex steer the American ship of state through this century so far. It’s long past time for a reckoning.

New report confirms Germany’s deep-seated inequality

Marianne Arens

Last Wednesday, the German government presented its “Germany Atlas.” The report confirms that despite economic growth, social and economic inequality is deep seated in the country.

The study “Unequal Germany” from May 2019, presented by the SPD-affiliated Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FES), had already made clear that a large proportion of the German population live in regions with severe structural problems. In such regions the incomes of private households are low, municipalities are heavily in debt, the numbers of welfare recipients and low-income earners is increasing, together with poverty amongst seniors. Many rural areas lack access to public transport, doctors, hospitals and the Internet.

Upon taking office, the grand coalition (a coalition of the Christian Democratic Union, CDU, Christian Social Union, CSU, and Social Democratic Party, SPD), promised to establish “equal living conditions as far as possible in all parts of Germany.” To this end, it launched a commission a year ago and has now published the “Germany Atlas,” which looks at 56 benchmarks of equality. The report was presented to the press by federal Interior Minister Horst Seehofer (CSU), Minister of Agriculture Julia Klöckner (CDU) and Family Minister Franziska Giffey (SPD). As the maps show, Germany is further removed from “equal living conditions” than ever.

The findings of the “Germany Atlas” reveal deep and consolidated divisions, above all between West and East Germany, but also between southern (Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg) and northern Germany. Social divisions are especially pronounced in cities with a higher level of economic development.

An examination of the “Disposable income of private households” finds the East-West split particularly clear: all six states in former East Germany (GDR), with the exception of the city of Berlin, are located in the lowest range nationwide, i.e., with average incomes of less than €20,000 annually.

In West Germany, this applies only to a narrow northwestern border region around Leer and Bremerhaven, a part of Saarland and parts of the Ruhr area, while Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg, the Rhine-Main area and Hamburg register significantly higher average incomes.

The states in the former GDR show appallingly low rates in terms of gross domestic product per capita, the relative proportion of children, average growth rate (negative), increase in working volume (also negative) and broadband coverage. The population density is also relatively low. By contrast, these states have a concentration of senior citizens, school leavers without a proper qualification, and many vacant apartments.

It is clear that the “new federal states” of the former GDR are still suffering from the effects of capitalist restoration 30 years ago. Millions of jobs were destroyed when the GDR’s nationalised industry was privatised and closed down in order to profit Western companies.

In West German metropolitan regions, social polarisation continues to increase. Particularly low incomes (less than €18,000) are the norm in Gelsenkirchen, Duisburg, Bremerhaven, Offenbach am Main, Halle an der Saale, Frankfurt-Oder, Leipzig and Rostock.

The “Minimum social security” benchmark reveals persistent high levels of poverty. In Germany, 7.59 million people or 9.2 percent of the population receive assistance in the form of Hartz IV, social allowance or basic security payments. The average is particularly high in eastern German states (11.4 percent), compared to western Germany (8.6 percent). Over 18 percent of the population are dependent on welfare in several Ruhr cities, as well as in Bremen, Hamburg and Berlin.

The Atlas “Mini-Jobbers” yardstick provides information about where many people live who are employed in part-time jobs and earning a maximum of €450 per month. Kiel, the Bremen-Bremerhaven region to Delmenhorst, the north-western coastal region around Leer, the Ruhr area from Duisburg to Dortmund and beyond, as well as the western border region from Trier to Saarburg are the areas most affected. In these regions between 15 to 21 percent “are employed part time.”

An examination of “Basic security for seniors” indicates the extent of poverty among seniors in Germany. Basic security payments are in principle available to all senior citizens who do not have enough income to live on, but not all those eligible receive payments.

“Basic security in old age” was paid to about 544,000 persons (December 2017), i.e., over half a million or 3.1 percent of over 65s. Above average numbers of such citizens live in North Rhine-Westphalia, in parts of Lower Saxony and Hesse and in the Saarland, as well as in the city states of Berlin, Hamburg and Bremen. The highest proportion in this category, over 8 percent, reside in Frankfurt am Main and Offenbach.

By contrast, significantly fewer people in Eastern Germany receive “basic old-age security,” although many more may be eligible. Poverty amongst seniors has risen from 11 to 15 percent during the past 10 years, as a result of low-paid work, long-term unemployment and the raising of retirement age to 67. For eastern Germany in particular, several studies predict that poverty in old-age will rise to over 20 percent. There are apparently above average number of seniors who do not apply for basic security payments. The admission by the government that only 3 percent in all of Germany and just 1 percent in the East receive “basic security” is a devastating indictment of the government’s social policy.

The “Germany Atlas” offers a wealth of empirical material that is neither interpreted nor substantiated. Nothing is said about the causes of social division. In fact, social conditions today are primarily the result of the policies introduced by the SPD-Green government led by Gerhard Schröder (SPD) and Joschka Fischer (Greens). Beginning in 2000, the Schröder-Fischer government commenced a social counterrevolution with its “Agenda 2010,” “Hartz IV,” “Riester pension” and the introduction of taxes and deductions on pensions.

The huge gulf between the rich and poor is not dealt with in the “Germany Atlas.” In Germany, 36 individuals have as much wealth as the entire poorer half of the population, i.e., around 40 million people. This has been confirmed by numerous studies in recent months. These include, for example, the Oxfam study, several poverty reports by the Joint Welfare Association and the FES study “Unequal Germany.”

The German government has no intention of closing or even reducing the gap between rich and poor. Its official goal is merely to identify and upgrade “structurally weak regions.” Its “Germany Atlas” only hints at the glaring discrepancies between rich and poor.

The government fears that such extreme social polarisation could provoke a social uprising. “We need a more active state again,” Interior Minister Seehofer told the Süddeutsche Zeitung on July 10.

To the question: “What dangers threaten if this gap is not overcome?” Seehofer replied: “Many citizens feel left behind. That promotes radical forces who promise people paradise on earth.” When asked, “Are you afraid of protests like the yellow vests in France?” he replied: “If you do not respond in time, then you cannot exclude something similar here in Germany.”

Seehofer described the task of linking structurally weak regions as “the biggest project towards unifying Germany.” He made no mention, however, of where the money for such a project should come from. “We will need patience,” he stressed.

“I’m not announcing any tax increases today,” Seehofer added, making clear that the project will not be at the expense of the rich and the privileged. Instead, he announced the creation of a new Foundation for Engagement and Volunteer Work, shifting the burden of social problems onto unpaid volunteers.

The pronouncements by the Interior Minister should be regarded as a threat. The grand coalition is already spending tens of billions of euros to modernise the German army to carry out missions abroad. The cost of this is to be borne by the working population, while tens of thousands of jobs are being slashed in industry and the banking sector. At the same time, refugees are being arrested and deported.

In order to prepare for future social unrest the powers of the police and intelligence agencies are being expanded and upgraded, i.e., the very same state forces linked to the violent, far-right network which claimed conservative politician Walter Lübcke as its most recent victim.

Massive photo databases secretly gathered in US and Europe to develop facial recognition

Kevin Reed

A report in the New York Times on Sunday revealed that millions of facial photos have been scraped from online sources and taken by hidden surveillance cameras and then shared in databases for artificial intelligence (AI) research and development purposes for more than a decade. Created in secret by universities and tech companies, the photo data sets have been mined for the R&D of facial recognition and biometric technologies that are now used ubiquitously by police and state intelligence agencies around the world.

The large digital face and “selfie” photo databases—copied without authorization from websites, social media, photo sharing and online dating platforms and also taken by digital cameras in public places—have been used by state agencies, software engineers and researchers involved in perfecting AI algorithms and image pattern analyses in the quest for leading-edge facial recognition technology.

A collection of approximately 1600 student and pedestrian images in the Duke MTMC database

According to the Times report—based largely on information available on the website MegaPixels.cc published by Adam Harvey and Jules LaPlace—at least 30 facial image datasets were accumulated going back to at least 2007. The Times report says that Megapixels “pinpointed repositories that were built by Microsoft, Stanford University and others, with one holding over 10 million images while another had more than two million.”

Summarizing the MegaPixels exposures published online in 2017, the Times report went on, “companies and universities have widely shared their image troves with researchers, governments and private enterprises in Australia, China, India, Singapore and Switzerland for training artificial intelligence ...” Although the Times does not mention it, this also includes access to these datasets for testing and development purposes by US government and military agencies through their connections with both the private companies and university research institutions.

For example, a project called Brainwash was launched jointly by Stanford University and the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Germany in 2014 and deployed a hidden webcam in the Brainwash Café in downtown San Francisco. Stanford University is well known for its connections to US military-intelligence. For example, Google was developed at Stanford with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and other state intelligence agencies in the early 1990s. Although not mentioned by the Times, the Max Planck Institute has long standing and direct ties to German imperialism.

Over a three-day period, 11,917 video streams of 100 seconds each were captured without the consent of those in the Brainwash Café. According to MegaPixels, “No ordinary café customer could ever suspect that their image would end up in dataset used for surveillance research and development, but that is exactly what happened to customers at Brainwash Cafe in San Francisco.”

MegaPixels also said that the videos were published online using AngelCam, a web streaming service that is sold for home security purposes for as little as $6 per month. The Brainwash database was subsequently used for AI research purposes in China, Switzerland, Netherlands, the US, India and Canada.

In another case, the Times reported that Duke University researchers started a facial image database in 2014 called Duke MTMC using eight cameras on campus. The cameras had signs posted below them with a phone number and email address for people who wanted to opt out of the study. Two million synchronized video frames were gathered of approximately 2,700 individuals over 14 hours, most of them students.

However, the Times chose to conceal important details regarding US government use of the Duke MTMC dataset. While MegaPixels reports that the Chinese government used the Duke photos—with over 90 research projects in 2018 alone—for surveillance purposes, Harvey and LaPlace also explain that the original creation of the dataset was “supported in part by the United States Army Research Laboratory” and was for “automated analysis of crowds and social gatherings for surveillance and security applications.”

Furthermore, the MegaPixels report says, “Citations from the United States and Europe show a similar trend to that in China, including publicly acknowledged and verified usage of the Duke MTMC dataset supported or carried out by the United States Department of Homeland Security, IARPA, IBM, Microsoft (who has provided surveillance to ICE), and Vision Semantics (who has worked with the UK Ministry of Defence).”

The Times also reviewed the Microsoft dataset created in 2016 called MS Celeb that contained 10 million images of 100,000 people gathered from websites that was “ostensibly a database of celebrities.” However, many others had their names and pictures included in the database. Also not mentioned by the Times, is the fact that MegaPixels published a list of 24 names in the MS Celeb database who are authors, journalists, filmmakers, bloggers and digital rights activists.

Among them is Jeremy Scahill, a journalist and editor with the Intercept that has written extensively on US war crimes and defended WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange against imprisonment and rendition to the US. The MS Celeb dataset contains 200 facial photos of Scahill.

The MS Celeb data set had a goal of targeting 1 million people and included an additional 900,000 names that had no images attached. The 100,000-person dataset has been accessed internationally by more than a dozen countries. The MegaPixels web site shows that the MS Celeb data set was cited in 124 research projects that took place around the world in 2018, the majority of which were in China (47) and the US (42).

Two more image databases on the MegaPixels website were not reported by the Times, one from Oxford University and the other from University of Colorado. The Oxford Town Centre dataset contains video of 2,200 people captured in 2007 from a surveillance camera mounted at the corner of Cornmarket Street and Market Street in Oxford, England. The surveillance project was commissioned by Oxford University under the auspices of an EU artificial intelligence program called Project HERMES. MegaPixels reports that the image dataset has been shared extensively, with 80 research citations from all over the world.

The final dataset is from the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs campus in which 1,700 students and other pedestrians were “photographed using a long-range high-resolution surveillance camera without their knowledge,” according to MegaPixels. The photos were taken during the spring semester of the 2012-2013 academic year on the West Lawn of the Colorado campus and during the interval that students were walking between classes. MegaPixels reported that the Unconstrained College Student dataset was “providing the researchers with realistic surveillance images to help build face recognition systems for real world applications for defense, intelligence, and commercial partners.”

In total, MegaPixels located 24 million “non-cooperative, non-consensual photos in 30 publicly available face recognition and face analysis datasets” that “were collected without any explicit consent, a type of face image that researchers call ‘in the wild.’ Every image contains at least one face and many photos contain multiple faces. There are approximately 1 million unique identities across all 24 million images.”

Finally, the Times reported that a face database was gathered by the software company Clarifai with images from OKCupid, a dating site. Matthew Zeiler, the CEO of Clarifai, told the Times that he had access to the OKCupid images because “some of the dating site’s founders invested in his company.” Zeiler also said that he signed an agreement with a large unnamed social media company “to use its images in training face recognition models.”

Clarifai used the OKCupid photos to develop facial recognition software that can identify the age, sex and race of analyzed faces. When questioned about his intentions by the Times, Zeiler said, “Clarifai would sell its facial recognition technology to foreign governments, military operations and police departments provided the circumstances were right.”

The revelation that European- and US-based universities as well as Silicon Valley tech corporations have been involved in gathering “non-cooperative, non-consensual photos” for research purposes for more than ten years shows that the practical implementation of facial recognition and biometrics for state surveillance is well advanced. That these organizations secretly created and shared facial images for AI development also exposes the willingness of significant layers of academia and corporate America to participate overtly in attacking basic democratic rights.

Although the information published in the “independent art and research project” MegaPixels by Adam Harvey and Jules LaPlace—with support from the open source community at Mozilla—has been available since November 2017, the corporate media including the Times never saw fit to write about it until now. This is because there is growing public awareness and outrage in the US over facial recognition and biometrics surveillance of the entire population by local, state and federal police agencies.

Additionally, the Times story places emphasis on the use of facial image datasets by the Chinese government while deliberately leaving out significant details regarding the role of US, British and German military-intelligence in similar research. This position corresponds to the political and military strategy of ruling factions within these imperialist powers for a more aggressive posture toward China over strategic global interests.

The response of both Democrats and Republicans at every level of government is to push for legislation that will establish a legal framework for using facial recognition and AI tools to spy on the people. It is to this objective that the latest reports from the Times are directed and this is why certain key facts—especially those regarding the role of US military-intelligence—have been excluded from their coverage.