There will, sadly, be collateral damage resulting as the Winter Solstice darkness approaches and gives the racketeering revelers necessary cover for their annual orgy of sacrificing the poor as an offering to the rich. But like the Democratic Party enablers always say, "we" must not let the perfect be the enemy of the good... for the robber barons who already have way more than their share of the public goods. To say otherwise is to be unpatriotic and possibly Russian.
The ruling class racketeers simultaneously care and don't care what the poor and middle classes think of them and their greed. Therefore, regular people have been simultaneously and unwillingly cast in the dual roles of victim and enemy. Measures must be taken by the pathocrats to protect themselves from the annoying rabble.
To that end, Congress-critters have tacked on some very sneaky companion legislation to their annual fiscal Saturnalia. Every single one of us would be subject to a new provision in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) which would explicitly allow the US government to drastically expand its warrantless spying powers against its own citizens. We would lose all rights to appeal if and when we are ever accused of a crime in a secret FISA court proceeding. Suspicion would, potentially, be tantamount to conviction without benefit of a judge and jury of our peers.
Jason Pye and Sean Vitka write in The Hill:
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has marked up the FISA Amendments Reauthorization Act, S. 2010. The bill, sponsored by Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) is actually worse than existing law. It explicitly allows the attorney general to use information collected under Section 702 for domestic crimes that have nothing to do with national security and forbids judicial review of that decision.All indications are that the expanded FISA reauthorization bill will pass Congress with little to no debate. And why not, since the media is doing its own complicit part and redirecting the alarm bells to the admittedly heinous sexual harassment scandals and cover-ups in that august body, for whom oversight and accountability are but quaint relics of some misty past.
Meanwhile, the House Judiciary Committee has marked up the USA Liberty Act, which, despite or because of painstaking deliberations, does not sufficiently protect innocent Americans from surveillance. The House version of the USA Liberty Act, for instance, has a weak warrant requirement, which would allow the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to conduct backdoor searches of electronic communications collected by the NSA for domestic, non-terrorism investigations. Additionally, the proposed end of “about” collection, in which the government collects information that is neither to nor from a target, would sunset after six years.
Meanwhile, the lucrative paranoia stemming from the 9/11 attacks keeps right on growing, and our civil, constitutional rights keep right on shrinking. Net Neutrality looks to be dead in the water on the say-so of a cabal of unelected overseers in the Federal Communications Commission.
If American journalists employed by RT, a Russia-owned TV station, can now be forced to register as foreign agents, so, potentially, can any writer or broadcaster or activist be decreed an enemy of the state for daring to criticize its leaders and institutions and endless wars. All the proof that the neo-McCarthyites need is to point the finger of "fake news" at anyone they deem to be a threat to their power.
The fog of totalitarianism in America isn't creeping around on little cat feet any more. It's breaking right out into the harsh light of day. It's snarling and it's slobbering like a primeval sabre-toothed tiger.
If that metaphor is too grisly for you, and because it's that most wonderful Saturnalian time of the year, maybe you'd prefer the image of Saturn eating his own children lest they grow up to be lazy poor peaceniks lolling about in their hammocks of dependency.
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| Hypercapitalist Holiday Greetings From Paul Ryan (graphic by Kat Garcia) |
The old excuse that we must give up our rights to privacy and free speech in order to protect some nonexistent entity called "national security" doesn't hold up once we realize that we're under attack by our own leaders. The two-party system and the bicameral legislature and the corporatized media and the "intelligence community" are revealed as nothing but a smokescreen to hide rule of, by, and for the ultra-rich and their profitable wars against humanity, and the earth itself.
"Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" loses all meaning when "the good" entails tens or hundreds of millions of people losing their their health, their jobs, their very lives, just to satisfy the voracious appetites of a very tiny group of sociopathic billionaires.
In order to literally survive, it is incumbent on us to start rejecting, en masse, the limited false choices being offered to us, including but not limited to: We can either be free, or we can be safe, but we can't be both. We must support the troops and cheer for war and plunder and state aggression as the necessary price for our future peace and prosperity. The Lessers must "share the sacrifice" and barely scrape by on the empty promise of some vague, future, trickle-down leftovers from the Masters of the Universe table.
As Hannah Arendt wrote in the last published collection of her essays, such choices are dangerously fallacious.
"Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.... If we look at the techniques of totalitarian government, it is obvious that the argument of 'the lesser evil' -- far from being raised only from the outside by those who do not belong to the ruling elite -- is one of the mechanisms built into the machinery of terror and criminality. Acceptance of lesser evils is consciously used in conditioning the government officials as well as the population at large to the acceptance of evil as such."Therefore, what more convenient time than this season of Peace on Earth and Good Will to Men for our rulers to ram through legislation which officially buries our civil rights deep within a terroristic spending package which will literally destroy the lives and livelihoods of the very people who, under the pretense of representative democracy, voted them into power? They rely, correctly, on the inability of many people to think for themselves. The media fog machine keeps belching, and American consumers keep consuming as the unhealthy alternative to active citizenship. And the fat cats keep baring their fangs.
They call it the Omnibus Bill for a very good reason. It aims to throw us right under a runaway killer bus. It aims to render us into roadkill for the voracious billionaire omnivores running the place.
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| Get Well Soon, America! (photo by Tom Garcia) |
8 comments:
From the Wikipedia page on the Church Committee:
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On August 17, 1975 Senator Frank Church appeared on NBC's Meet the Press, and discussed the NSA, without mentioning it by name:
“In the need to develop a capacity to know what potential enemies are doing, the United States government has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through the air. (...) Now, that is necessary and important to the United States as we look abroad at enemies or potential enemies. We must know, at the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left: such is the capability to monitor everything—telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide.
If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology. (...)
I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.
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God, if only we heard more of this kind of talk nowadays on the teevee.
You can fool enough of the people enough of the time ... for the time being.
But will enough of the people feel enough is enough before time runs out and makes fools of us all?
“There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again.”
~ George W. Bush
"Men want definite answers, not weaselly Talking Oak stuff such as threw old Macbeth for a loss. Let's have it in black and white. And if it cannot be had in black and white because it's gray, then let's have it in black and white just the same. Let the answers be satisfactory and we will not bother about how true they are. In fact, given the choice of a familiar lie and a strange truth, most men will select the familiar lie."
~ Ashley Montagu and Edward Darling, The Prevalence of Nonsense
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
~ Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
“The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.”
~ Gore Vidal
“Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression. In our Governments, the real power lies in the majority of the Community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from the acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the constituents.”
~ James Madison, Letters and Other Writings of James Madison Volume 3
“I believe that there will ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those who do the oppressing. I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the system of exploitation. I believe that there will be that kind of clash, but I don't think it will be based on the color of the skin ....”
~ Malcolm X
"So foul a sky clears not without a storm."
~ Shakespeare, KING JOHN, IV.ii.108
Yeah, the things that are wrong, whether in the political, economic, or psychological sphere, either already are systemic or the rich and powerful are trying to make them so. But we should always keep in mind that it has probably ever been so.
As I commented a couple of posts back, the progressive issues that seemed to be gaining some traction in the public consciousness during the first six months of Trump have nearly disappeared under the onslaught of Russia and sexual abuse coverage by the mainstream media. What I didn't address in that comment was my growing concern about the extent to which too many supposed progressives may have themselves either bought into that mainstream narrative (or allowed it to inordinately influence them subconsciously), or else given up, thinking that the entire situation in this country is probably hopeless.
I'm not going to address those things here either, but I do want to thank you, Karen, for maintaining your coverage of the eternally central issues of power, and its use and abuse.
For an alternative look, nominally pessimistic but undoubtedly intended as motivational, two short animations by Steve Cutts:
Happiness
https://vimeo.com/244405542
Are You Lost In The World Like Me?
https://vimeo.com/209248444
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
First Amendment to the United States Constitution
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
At the heart of the First Amendment is the recognition that the "freedom to speak one's mind is not only an aspect of individual liberty--and thus a good unto itself--but also is essential to the common quest for truth and the vitality of society as a whole."
Bose Corp. v. Consumers Union of United States, Inc. 466 U.S. 485, 503-504, (S. Ct. 1984).
Rhetorical hyperbole, verbal abuse, name calling, ridicule, jest, satirical statements and parody are all acceptable forms of protected forms of First Amendment expression by a private citizen, acting in a private capacity, even one who is professionally licensed as a lawyer. As the Supreme Court has noted in the First Amendment context, protected speech in various public disputes very often takes the form of "rhetorical hyperbole" used to convey a "vigorous epithet" by a protestor who considers his adversary's position "extremely unreasonable."
Milkovich v. Lorain Journal Co., 497 U.S. 1 (1990).
The First Amendment protects the use of profanities and offensive speech; a defendant cannot be punished simply for asserting his right to free speech.
W.L. v. State, 769 So.2d 1132 (3 DCA 2000).
Denis, Is that you?
Notice:
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