Dzhokhar Tsarnaev: The Big Issue Is Not Miranda, It’s Presentment

Posted on April 20, 2013 by emptywheel

Particularly given Lindsey Graham’s persistent tweeting yesterday that “the last thing we may want to do is read Boston suspect Miranda Rights,” there was a lot of discussion in the moments after Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was captured last night about whether he would be read his rights.
At first, there were reports he would be. But then DOJ announced he would not be read Miranda immediately; they would invoke the public safety exception to question him.

“The suspect is en route to the hospital for immediate treatment,” the official tells TPM’s Sahil Kapur. “But we plan to invoke the public safety exception to Miranda in order to question the suspect extensively about other potential explosive devices or accomplices and to gain critical intelligence.”

As of about 40 minutes ago, he had still not been read his rights.

Remaking the Federal Reserve, Building Public Banks and Opting Out of Wall Street

Wednesday, 17 April 2013 00:00 
By Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, Truthout | Op-Ed 

Creating a Finance System That Serves the People, Part II

In Part I of this series, we examined breaking up the too-big-to-fail-or- jail banks, regulating them - especially their massive and risky derivatives trading - and more aggressively enforcing laws and regulations against security fraud.

In Part II, we examine how to remake the Federal Reserve into a transparent, democratic institution that serves the necessities of the people and the economy, not just the bankers; how to develop public banks in every state and many cities throughout the nation; and how people can opt out of Wall Street right now.

In other articles and on our web site, we examine the broader economy and how to remake it by putting in place economic democracy so that people have greater control over their economic lives and more influence over the direction of the economy.
 

Why Not a New Deal Financed by Workers?

Friday, 19 April 2013 00:00  
By Joe Guinan and Thomas M. Hanna, Truthout | Op-Ed 

America's infrastructure is in disrepair, but the Obama administration's proposed solution emphasizes public-private partnerships with all the risks they entail. Instead, a true partner for rebuilding America can be found in the untapped potential of workers' vast pension fund assets. Such an approach could create important institutional alliances of state and local governments, public workers and labor unions, and lay the basis for a very different pattern of political economy capable of reversing spiraling inequality and displacing corporate power.

* * *
Last month, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) released their quadrennial report card on the state of America's infrastructure - the roads, bridges, ports, railways, airports, levees, dams and public buildings that make up the core of the built environment and the basis of the US economy. Overall, the United States scored a disappointing D+, a slight improvement over 2009's D rating, but still a desperately poor grade. The physical fabric of America is literally crumbling away.

Underinvestment in basic infrastructure impacts everything from economic performance to health and safety. A recent report found that Americans spend almost 5 billion hours a year in traffic, wasting nearly 2 billion gallons of gasoline at a cost to the economy in excess of $100 billion. "More time on lower quality roads," the Economist reported in 2011, "makes for a deadlier transport network." The road fatality rate in America that year was 60 percent higher than the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) average.

In Case You Missed It: Congress Takes Your Internet Privacy

Saturday, 20 April 2013 10:02
By Kristina Chew, Care2 | Report

To the disappointent of advocates for civil liberties and internet freedom, the controversial Cyber Intelligence and Protection Act (CISPA) passed the U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday by a vote of 288-127. 196 Republicans voted for the measure and almost half the House Democrats.

Few would dispute that cybersecurity is not a concern. A rapid flurry of recent cyberattacks of government and corporate websites has highlighted the issue. But as Internet security experts argue, CISPA approaches the problem in a wrongheaded manner, allowing companies to share information to make their networks more secure but at a cost to users’ rights.

Worker-Owned Cooperatives: Direct Democracy in Action

Saturday, 20 April 2013 10:45  
By David Morgan, Occupy.com | Report 

Flashpoints—those unexpected events that movements gather around, when everything is accelerated, exciting, and energizing—fizzle. Whether they fail to gain traction, or splinter off to catalyze multiple new efforts, movement events serve an important function: they are short­lived and inspiring.

At the same time, they are moments of immense opportunity when we can make strides and pool our collective power. The cooperative movement is experiencing a string of these moments now, and is burgeoning with renewed activity. I see this first­hand as a co­-owner of the Toolbox for Education and Social Action (TESA), a worker­-owned cooperative that participates in many co­op networks. We’ve facilitated hundreds of co­op workshops around the country, and taught thousands with our resource Co­opoly: The Game of Cooperatives.

Chechen Terrorists and the Neocons

April 19, 2013

 

The revelation that the family of the two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings was from Chechnya prompted new speculation about the attack as Islamic terrorism. Less discussed was the history of U.S. neocons supporting Chechen terrorists as a strategy to weaken Russia, as ex-FBI agent Coleen Rowley recalls.


By Coleen Rowley

I almost choked on my coffee listening to neoconservative Rudy Giuliani pompously claim on national TV that he was surprised about any Chechens being responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings because he’s never seen any indication that Chechen extremists harbored animosity toward the U.S.; Guiliani thought they were only focused on Russia.

Giuliani knows full well how the Chechen “terrorists” proved useful to the U.S. in keeping pressure on the Russians, much as the Afghan mujahedeen were used in the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan from 1980 to 1989. In fact, many neocons signed up as Chechnya’s “friends,” including former CIA Director James Woolsey.

What You Need To Know About Why The Boston Bombing Suspect Hasn’t Been Read His Miranda Rights

By Ian Millhiser on Apr 19, 2013 at 10:34 pm



Despite initial reports to the contrary, FBI agents did not read Boston Bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev his Miranda rights immediately after he was taken into custody. Instead, they invoked what is known as the “public safety exception” to delay reading those rights to the alleged bomber. Here’s what you need to know about this narrow exception to the Miranda rule:



The Public Safety Exemption Is Real



The Supreme Court first held that there is a public safety exemption to Miranda in a 1984 case known as New York v. Quarles. In Quarles a woman told police that a man with a gun raped her, and that he’d run into a nearby grocery store. Police quickly found the suspect within the store, arrested him after a brief chase, handcuffed him, and discovered that he was wearing an empty shoulder holster. Before reading him his rights, an officer asked him where the gun was, and the suspect told the cop where to find it. After retrieving the gun, police then read the suspect his Miranda rights.

'People's History' of Gulf Oil Disaster Reveals Deadly Truth Behind Dispersant Corexit

Report released on eve of Deepwater Horizon anniversary tells of BP lies and government collusion in oil 'clean-up'

- Jacob Chamberlain, staff writer 

 

Not only is the chemical dispersant that was used to "clean up" the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster of 2010 extremely dangerous, it was knowingly used to make the gushing oil merely "appear invisible" all the while exacerbating levels of toxicity in the Gulf waters, according to a report released Friday, the eve of the third anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, by the Government Accountability Project.

 

According to the report, Deadly Dispersants in the Gulf: Are Public Health and Environmental Tragedies the New Norm for Oil Spill Cleanups?, Corexit—the dispersant chemical dumped into the Gulf of Mexico by oil giant BP and the U.S. government in the spill's aftermath—was widely applied "because it caused the false impression that the oil disappeared."
 

The Hidden Money

By Richard D Wolff, Truthout | Op-Ed 

"Hiding money in the ways and amounts lately revealed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) is a deep kind of social corruption," writes Wolff. "It goes beyond questions of legality to the heart of modern political economy."

Recent revelations of hidden money by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) have embarrassed governments, large and small, and exposed many rich businesses and individuals. They used places like Lichtenstein, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Switzerland and, of course, Cyprus. Those countries' private banks wanted the money much as their governments wanted the revenue benefits of hidden money inflows. The rich around the world took advantage of those banks' services to launder money with some illegality attached to it, to evade or avoid taxes, to hide business deals from government scrutiny, and so on.

Reasonable estimates, based on ICIJ and other reports, suggest that many trillions of dollars sit in such hidden money accounts. It follows that debates in most countries about rates of taxation are missing the point. Many among the rich long ago found ways to avoid taxes, whatever the rates. They just needed and used that one "loophole" in the tax law that allows them to hide their money (or "offshore" it) in either personal or corporate accounts or both.

The Fed’s Foreclosure-Relief Fail

David Dayen     April 18, 2013

One woman’s nightmarish odyssey through the system that was supposed to help get her back on her feet.

Like far too many Americans, Debbie Marler of South Point, Ohio has her own foreclosure horror story. It involves one house, seven fraudulent mortgage assignments, three foreclosures, as many states, and five years. It ruined her career prospects, threatened her retirement security, and turned her life into what she calls “a living nightmare.”

This week, Debbie walked to her mailbox and found what the federal government considers appropriate compensation for this odyssey of suffering at the hands of JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s largest bank.

A check for $800.

How Congress Quietly Overhauled Its Insider-Trading Law

by Tamara Keith

April 16, 2013 5:12 PM

 

The legislative process on Capitol Hill is often slow and grinding. There are committee hearings, filibuster threats and hours of floor debate. But sometimes, when Congress really wants to get something done, it can move blindingly fast.

That's what happened when Congress moved to undo large parts of a popular law known as the STOCK Act last week.
 

‘Carbon bubble’ leading to another financial crisis, economists warn

By Damian Carrington, The Guardian
Thursday, April 18, 2013 20:11 EDT

The world could be heading for a major economic crisis as stock markets inflate an investment bubble in fossil fuels to the tune of trillions of dollars, according to leading economists.

“The financial crisis has shown what happens when risks accumulate unnoticed,” said Lord (Nicholas) Stern, a professor at the London School of Economics. He said the risk was “very big indeed” and that almost all investors and regulators were failing to address it.

Paul Krugman: The Excel Depression

In this age of information, math errors can lead to disaster. NASA’s Mars Orbiter crashed because
engineers forgot to convert to metric measurements; JPMorgan Chase’s “London Whale” venture
went bad in part because modelers divided by a sum instead of an average. So, did an Excel coding
error destroy the economies of the Western world?

The story so far: At the beginning of 2010, two Harvard economists, Carmen Reinhart and
Kenneth Rogoff, circulated a paper, “Growth in a Time of Debt,” that purported to identify a
critical “threshold,” a tipping point, for government indebtedness. Once debt exceeds 90 percent of
gross domestic product, they claimed, economic growth drops off sharply.

How Your Pension is Being Used in a $6 Trillion Climate Gamble

Fossil fuel companies' bet that climate agreements won't stop them from burning carbon puts pension funds at risk

 

by Bill McKibben and Jeremy Leggett

 

Suppose you weren’t worried that we humans are destroying our water supply and eroding our ability to feed ourselves by burning coal and gas and oil and hence changing climate. Suppose you thought that was all liberal hooey. What might worry you about fossil fuels instead? How about a six trillion dollar bet, including a big slug of your own money, on people not doing what they have said they are going to do, and that some have already sworn to do in law?

Six trillion dollars is what oil, gas, and coal companies will invest over the next ten years on turning fossil fuel deposits into reserves, assuming last year’s level of investment stays the same. Reserves are by definition bodies of oil, gas or coal that can be drilled or mined economically. Regulators allow companies, currently, to book them as assets, and on the assumption that they are at zero risk of being stranded - left below ground, "value"unrealized - over the full life of their exploitation. Yet a report published today shows they are at very real risk of being stranded, and in large quantity.

Why the ‘Spreadsheet Scandal’ Should Kill Obama’s Social Security Cut

By Richard Eskow | April 18, 2013


A recent “Spreadsheet Scandal” has rocked the economics world. It also seems to have eliminated the last remaining technical argument in support of the President’s “chained CPI” Social Security cut.

Not weakened it. Eliminated it.
 

CISPA passes U.S. House: Death of the Fourth Amendment?

Summary: The controversial cybersecurity Bill has passed the U.S. House and is now on its way to the Senate chamber. Privacy groups believe this tramples on the Fourth Amendment.

By Zack Whittaker for Zero Day | April 18, 2013 -- 18:53 GMT (11:53 PDT)

The controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) just passed the U.S. House, and will now head to the upper Senate chamber for further deliberation.

Rinse and repeat. This isn't the first time that this has happened, but it still poses a major threat to Fourth Amendment rights, according to civil liberties campaigners.

A Brief History of Our Deadly Addiction to Nitrogen Fertilizer

—By Tom Philpott | Fri Apr. 19, 2013 3:00 AM PDT

As investigators and rescuers move through a destroyed fertilizer factory in West, Texas, it makes me think about just what nitrogen fertilizer is, and why we use so much of it.

Nitrogen is one of the nutrient elements plants need to grow. Every apple or ear of corn plucked represents nutrients pulled from soil, and for land to remain productive, those nutrients must be replenished. Nitrogen is extremely plentiful—it makes up nearly 80 percent of the air we breathe. But atmospheric nitrogen (N²) is joined together in an extremely tight bond that makes it unusable by plants.

Disturbing report finds U.S. hospitals profit more when surgery goes wrong

By Agence France-Presse

Tuesday, April 16, 2013 20:59 EDT



US hospitals face a disincentive to improve care because they make drastically more money when surgery goes wrong than when a patient is discharged with no complications, a study published Tuesday found.



“We found clear evidence that reducing harm and improving quality is perversely penalized in our current health care system,” said study author Sunil Eappen, chief medical officer of Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary.

Noam Chomsky: How Close the World Is to Nuclear War

April 17, 2013  |  The following is an excerpt from the new book Nuclear War and Environmental Catastrophe [3], by Noam Chomsky and Laray Polk, which takes the form of a series of interviews with MIT Professor Noam Chomsky (Seven Stories, 2013).

Laray Polk:What immediate tensions do you perceive that could lead to nuclear war? How close are we?

Noam Chomsky:Actually, nuclear war has come unpleasantly close many times since 1945. There are literally dozens of occasions in which there was a significant threat of nuclear war. There was one time in 1962 when it was very close, and furthermore, it’s not just the United States. India and Pakistan have come close to nuclear war several times, and the issues remain. Both India and Pakistan are expanding their nuclear arsenals with US support. There are serious possibilities involved with Iran—not Iranian nuclear weapons, but just attacking Iran—and other things can just go wrong. It’s a very tense system, always has been. There are plenty of times when automated systems in the United States— and in Russia,it’s probably worse—have warned of a nuclear attack which would set off an automatic response except that human intervention happened to take place in time, and sometimes in a matter of minutes. That’s playing with fire. That’s a low-probability event, but with low-probability events over a long period, the probability is not low.

There is another possibility that, I think, is not to be dismissed: nuclear terror. Like a dirty bomb in New York City, let’s say. It wouldn’t take tremendous facility to do that. I know US intelligence or people like Graham Allison at Harvard who works on this, they regard it as very likely in the coming years—and who knows what kind of reaction there would be to that. So, I think there are plenty of possibilities. I think it is getting worse. Just like the proliferation problem is getting worse. Take a couple of cases: In September 2009, the Security Council did pass a resolution, S/RES/1887, which was interpreted here as a resolution against Iran. In part it was, but it also called on all states to join the Non-Proliferation Treaty. That’s three states: India, Pakistan, and Israel. The Obama administration immediately informed India that this didn’t apply to them; it informed Israel that it doesn’t apply to them.

Dean Baker: How Much Unemployment Did Reinhart and Rogoff's Arithmetic Mistake Cause?

That's the question millions will be asking when they see the new paper by my friends at the University of Massachusetts, Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin. Herndon, Ash, and Pollin (HAP) corrected the spreadsheets of Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff. They show the correct numbers tell a very different story about the relationship between debt and GDP growth than the one that Reinhart and Rogoff have been hawking.

Just to remind folks, Reinhart and Rogoff (R&R) are the authors of the widely acclaimed book on the history of financial crises, This Time is Different. They have also done several papers derived from this research, the main conclusion of which is that high ratios of debt to GDP lead to a long periods of slow growth. Their story line is that 90 percent is a cutoff line, with countries with debt-to-GDP ratios above this level seeing markedly slower growth than countries that have debt-to-GDP ratios below this level. The moral is to make sure the debt-to-GDP ratio does not get above 90 percent.

International Energy Agency warns: Lack of progress in clean energy could be catastrophic

By Agence France-Presse
Wednesday, April 17, 2013 11:16 EDT

Progress towards the use of cleaner fuel technology has stalled, with production of the world’s energy as “dirty” now as it was two decades ago, the International Energy Agency said Wednesday.

Two-thirds of greenhouse gas emissions come from the energy sector and the lack of change should “serve as a wake-up call”, the IEA’s executive director Maria van der Hoeven told a Clean Energy Ministerial meeting in New Delhi.

Tales of Reagan’s Guatemala Genocide

April 16, 2013

 

Exclusive: Guatemala is finally putting ex-dictator Efrain Rios Montt on trial for genocide in the extermination of hundreds of Mayan villages in the 1980s, but Ronald Reagan remains an American icon despite new evidence of his complicity in this historic crime, reports Robert Parry.


By Robert Parry

The first month of the genocide trial of former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt has elicited chilling testimony from Mayan survivors who – as children – watched their families slaughtered by a right-wing military that was supported and supplied by U.S. President Ronald Reagan.

As the New York Times reported on Monday, “In the tortured logic of military planning documents conceived under Mr. Ríos Montt’s 17-month rule during 1982 and 1983, the entire Mayan Ixil population was a military target, children included. Officers wrote that the leftist guerrillas fighting the government had succeeded in indoctrinating the impoverished Ixils and reached ‘100 percent support.’”

Yes, Let’s Talk About Kermit Gosnell

Post by Sarah Posner

Kermit Gosnell is on trial in Philadelphia, charged with eight counts of murder at his grisly abortion clinic. The Associated Press covered the opening proceedings of a trial expected to last eight weeks. A New York Times reporter was also present when the trial opened. His story appeared on page A17, which apparently wasn’t prominent enough for conservatives who are complaining that the media is under-covering the story because, as Charles Krauthammer put it, it places the issue of late-term abortion “starkly into relief.”

Gosnell is charged with illegally performing third trimester abortions, and slitting the spines of the babies, acts that were loudly condemned by pro-choice advocates. It doesn’t bring the issue of late-term abortion “starkly into relief”; it’s the story of a monster completely flouting the law and medical standards. When the story came to light more than two years ago, legitimate providers made that perfectly clear.

Poverty Expert Peter Edelman Explains How Low Wages and Racial Politics Line the Pockets of the Rich

By Adele M. Stan

April 9, 2013  |  Peter Edelman, one of the nation's foremost academic authorities on the subject of poverty in the U.S. has lived a life on the front lines of history and politics, holding positions ranging from senatorial aide to state bureaucrat to official in a presidential cabinet. But in his storied employment history, he is perhaps more famous for quitting one job than for holding it: in 1996, Edelman resigned his post [3] as an assistant secretary in the Department of Health and Human services to protest President Bill Clinton's signing the Republicans' welfare-reform bill into law. Since then, Edelman has held fast not only to his critique of that law -- which, he says, has left some 6 million people with no income other than food stamps -- but to his assessment of why poverty in the world's richest nation has become so intractable.

 

Edelman finds his answers in the tangle of racialized politics, mass incarceration, displacement caused by globalization, the explosion of low-wage jobs and the dilution of democracy by moneyed interests. In his 2012 book, So Rich, So Poor: Why It's So Hard to End Poverty in America [4], Edelman writes, "The American economy did not stagnate over the past 40 years: it grew, but the fruits of that growth went to those at the top."

FDA Let Drugs Approved on Fraudulent Research Stay on the Market

by Rob Garver and Charles Seife, Special to ProPublica,

April 15, 2013, 9:17 a.m.

On the morning of May 3, 2010, three agents of the Food and Drug Administration descended upon the Houston office of Cetero Research, a firm that conducted research for drug companies worldwide.

Lead agent Patrick Stone, now retired from the FDA, had visited the Houston lab many times over the previous decade for routine inspections. This time was different. His team was there to investigate a former employee's allegation that the company had tampered with records and manipulated test data.

Paul Krugman: The Antisocial Network

Bitcoin’s wild ride may not have been the biggest business story of the past few weeks, but it was
surely the most entertaining. Over the course of less than two weeks the price of the “digital
currency” more than tripled. Then it fell more than 50 percent in a few hours. Suddenly, it felt as if
we were back in the dot-com era.

The economic significance of this roller coaster was basically nil. But the furor over bitcoin was a
useful lesson in the ways people misunderstand money — and in particular how they are misled by
the desire to divorce the value of money from the society it serves.

Cutting specific pollutants would slow sea level rise

BOULDER – With coastal areas bracing for rising sea levels, new research indicates that cutting emissions of certain pollutants can greatly slow down sea level rise this century.

The research team found that reductions in four pollutants that cycle comparatively quickly through the atmosphere could temporarily forestall the rate of sea level rise by roughly 25 to 50 percent.

"To avoid potentially dangerous sea level rise, we could cut emissions of short-lived pollutants even if we cannot immediately cut carbon dioxide emissions," says Aixue Hu of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), the first author of the study. "This new research shows that society can significantly reduce the threat to coastal cities if it moves quickly on a handful of pollutants."

Sweatshops on Wheels

By Chris Hedges

WASHINGTON, D.C.—The deterioration of the nation’s public transportation, like the deterioration of health care, education, social services, public utilities, bridges and roads, is part of the relentless seizing and harvesting of public resources and programs by corporations. These corporations are steadily stripping the American infrastructure. Public-sector unions are being broken. Wages and benefits are being slashed. Workers are forced to put in longer hours in unsafe workplaces, often jeopardizing public safety. The communities that need public services most are losing them, and where public service is continued it is reduced or substandard and costlier. Only the security and surveillance network and the military are permitted to function with efficiency in their role as the guardians of corporate power. We now resemble the developing world: We have small pockets of obscene wealth, ailing infrastructure and public service, huge swaths of grinding poverty, and militarized police and internal security.

Shell’s Plot to Silence Protests Against Arctic Drilling

Phil Radford

Corporations want to work in secret. It’s what they do, and why they have lawyers. In secret, they can spill, clearcut, burn and otherwise destroy the environment and local communities while telling the world they’re doing just the opposite. Shell Oil’s legal team is currently working overtime to keep the company’s Arctic work secret from advocacy groups like Greenpeace. It’s a battle that will have implications well beyond the Far North. If Shell ultimately wins the legal battle with us this month, corporate secrecy will have the blessing of a federal court—and America’s First Amendment rights will take a devastating hit.

The thought is chilling.

It's Time to Shine a Light on the Poverty Creation Industry

Sunday, 14 April 2013 12:05

By Joe Brewer, Alnoor Ladha and Martin Kirk, Think Africa Press | Op-Ed

It's about time we called out the great myth that mass poverty just is, as if it were a natural part of some universal moral order. Such thinking is both profoundly untrue and disastrously misleading.

Poverty is human-made. It is created – knowingly and with scientific efficiency – by a vastly sophisticated industry that includes private companies, think tanks, media outlets, government policies, and more. This ‘Poverty Creation Industry’ is about the least talked about feature of our global economy and yet it is perhaps the greatest market force in the modern world. Until we acknowledge this startling truth, progress towards global prosperity and sustainability will fall far short of what is possible.

When capitalism consumed the Internet

The Web today is a far cry from the utopian digital playground envisioned by its early users and pioneers

By James Orbesen

“Let’s grab all this new technology in our teeth once again and turn it into a bonanza for advertising.” These are the words of former Procter & Gamble CEO Edwin Artzt. Renowned for his business acumen, Artzt, always one to turn a profit, told his fellow captains of industry to aim their attention to something new, something unseen before, something that needed to be conquered.

The early Internet was certainly a different place. It seemed a time of unlimited potential, when the old barriers to communication and information were said to melt away like so much butter in the microwave. People would be linked in ways never seen before, all in a purely public and noncommercial space. Early analysts claimed that the old media conglomerates were going to be swept aside by a coming Digital Age. For those looking to the future, the Internet would be the democratic space since its underlying principle, the networked sharing of data, was inherently leveling, free, and transparent.

The Propaganda System That Has Helped Create a Permanent Overclass Is Over a Century in the Making

By Andrew Gavin Marshall 

April 12, 2013  |  Where there is the possibility of democracy, there is the inevitability of elite insecurity. All through its history, democracy has been under a sustained attack by elite interests, political, economic, and cultural. There is a simple reason for this: democracy – as in true democracy – places power with people. In such circumstances, the few who hold power become threatened. With technological changes in modern history, with literacy and education, mass communication, organization and activism, elites have had to react to the changing nature of society – locally and globally.

From the late 19th century on, the “threats” to elite interests from the possibility of true democracy mobilized institutions, ideologies, and individuals in support of power. What began was a massive social engineering project with one objective: control. Through educational institutions, the social sciences, philanthropic foundations, public relations and advertising agencies, corporations, banks, and states, powerful interests sought to reform and protect their power from the potential of popular democracy.