Enemies R Us

If Congress and its oligarchic masters get their way with their tax reform package, the ultra-rich will attach themselves like leeches on steroids to the body politic. They'll suck the poor and middle class as dry as it is possible to suck them without actually killing off too many their hosts.

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.
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.

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 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.

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.

Get Well Soon, America! (photo by Tom Garcia)