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(Pardon the extreme length; I seem incapable these days of using one sentence when three paragraphs will do.)
The first is: Ultimately, what's the plan for all this data? Fascist governments always seem to obsess about every detail of the private lives of their subjects, no matter how trivial.
Why is that? What does it buy them in the end? Isn't it enough to, say, look at a couple dozen political emails from somebody to determine if they're an enemy of the state? Why all the rest? And what do they do with all that extra data? Establish patterns? Find and track your family and friends? Steal your bank accounts?
I've no idea, but domestic surveillance is one of those repressive actions that dictatorships always default to -- like these pricks, who started snooping back in February 2001, despite lying to us that domestic surveillance is only to protect us from another "event of 9/11(tm)."
And the other question: Why have the majority of Americans rolled over yet again and accepted this complete takeover by Bush/Cheney with almost no meaningful resistance? We've been the world leaders in political apathy for decades, so it's no great surprise, but still... You'd think that when something as fundamental as your right to privacy and freedom from governmental snooping is threatened, you'd at least try to do something about it.
You'd expect to react with outrage, get politically active, join groups who are resisting this crap and badger the hell out of your representatives (useless though they are in most cases). But no; nothing like that happened, except from the usual groups like the saints at the ACLU, who at least half of America thinks is a subversive, pinko commie organization stealing our precious bodily fluids while we sleep. Maybe I just answered my own question...
Anyway, you look at the rest of the world -- particularly South and Central America and South Asia, along with continuous European trade union activism -- and things are exploding. People everywhere seem to have finally had it with right wing dictators stealing everything that isn't bolted down -- particularly those militarist, murdering wingnuts who are propped up by the CIA on behalf of US corporate interests. Unlike the places cited in Bush-babble, freedom really IS on the march in these countries.
They're electing a bunch of socialist land reformers, brand new leaders who advocate redistribution of wealth and nationalization of vital industries and, weirdest of all to an American, they actually stand for people over profits and govern accordingly. This of course pisses the US power elites off to no end. They've become facile in mouthing the correct pieties about "reform" in the abstract without having to deal with the messy reality. Actual reform is absolutely "off the table," as some highly forgettable congressperson once said.
But it's the centerpiece of the table throughout the rest of the world. People are fighting and dying to assert or keep their freedoms. And we go the reverse route; we just roll over like placid little emotionless androids and let the sons of bitches walk right in and steal everything of value in this country.
They leave behind the ugly underside of Americanism for us to wallow in every day: hyper-consumerism, Britany culture, religious insanity, debt and wage slavery, grinding poverty, no social safety net and all the stuff that makes European emigration look like such a great idea.
Seeing how little we care about our birthright as Americans, the US political leadership, such as it is -- from both treacherous sides of the aisle -- is free to toss the Constitution into the trash like last week's moldy pizza. And they're right; there are no consequences, other than a few scattered protest marches that didn't really happen anyway because our complicit media didn't cover them.
How did we get this disconnected from issues as vital and basic as our Constitutional heritage? When did a society whose creation myth places such high value on self-determinism and rugged individualism learn to cave to institutional authority without even breaking stride?
How can we be so casual and dispassionate when these hard-won freedoms and rights are being stolen right before our eyes? Are most of us really that thick or undereducated or alienated? Is it just the goddamned mass media keeping us dummied down after all? How about being too busy, broke and stressed to care about anything beyond our noses?
Here's a possible answer. It seems to me that there's at least on very important distinction between the US and these other countries.
Most, if not all, the people living in nations currently engaged in the struggle against governmental oppression have had recent experiences with the miserable reality of neo-colonialism, fascism, military dictatorships or Soviet-style totalitarianism -- either in their own countries, such as in Central and South America, or as members of a resistance force fighting to eradicate it, as was the case throughout Europe and much of Africa. They know fascism first-hand, have lived with its toxicity, and many would literally rather die than relive it.
The US, however, is just learning the ropes. Unfortunately, because we're slow learners, I think all we'll ultimately learn is how to open our mouths ever wider so the massuhs can shovel in even more shit, which we'll passively swallow because we don't really know anything these days besides obedience and complicity in our own oppression.
We've had various fascist movements here, and it's likely that fascists have pulled the strings in the US at various times over the past 120 years -- maybe a lot longer. But other than a few periods of hyper-patriotism, such as at the start of WW I and WW II when the right cracked down on dissent a lot harder than it is now, the US has retained at least "the illusion of freedom," as Frank Zappa famously said, because "...it's (still) profitable to continue the illusion."
But that era seems to be ending. The elites and dominant corporations have achieved a nearly unassailable position atop the social pyramid, largely due to that same warped part of the American character that rolls over in the face of institutional authority. Since nobody's doing much of a job fighting back, there's really little need to hide the grim reality behind a curtain any more.
Given that Bush/Cheney's top priority is the continued transfer of wealth from bottom to top, a transfer that is largely accomplished and will be virtually completed by the coming economic depression, maybe maintaining the illusion is getting a little too expensive to bother with. Maybe it's time to strike the set and expose the machinery of the totalitarian state and just "disappear" anyone who doesn't like it.
A lot of this began when we were taught in 2001 by mass media to see an amoral megalomaniac and intellectual incompetent as a noble leader and "war president." It continued when we consented to do a voluntary striptease for the TSA voyeurs just to board an airliner. It really got a kick start when our fine elected reps passed the patriot act without bothering to read it. And it reached maturity with the war fever and blood lust the administration whipped up by dragging the public into Cheney's alternate universe of paranoid fantasies, impossible hypotheses and shameless lies. Assisted again by mass media, the public bought this nonsense, chanted USA! USA! a few million times, and gave a hearty thumbs-up for invading Iraq.
After a while, we just got so used to the daily outrages that we failed to notice we were being slowly drained of our heritage as the leaches and parasites and profiteers and petty hustlers lined up to rob us of our money, our dignity, our jobs, our rights as human beings and our legacy as US citizens.
Now we're so used to being betrayed -- by this horrible excuse for an administration and by the congress we worked so hard to elect in 2006 -- that we're about half-way between the fourth and fifth stages of grief, transitioning from depression to acceptance. And if we ever do accept all this as normality or, worse, a positive step toward preserving the empire, we're cooked -- as a people, a nation and as honorable individuals and citizens of the world. We'll have no more right to breathe free air than does Karl Rove or Defibrillator Dick.
Using the US citizenry and capital punishment as the metaphor, I think the status quo looks like this: The scaffold is built and ready to go, the noose is in place and the hangman is heading slowly up the stairs.
All that's left is one little precipitating event -- and you don't even need another act of phony terror; a major storm or earthquake or power grid failure will do these days, thanks to NSPD 51/HSPD-20 -- and the lever creaks, the trapdoor opens, the hooded body politic drops, thrashes around for a minute or two, then hangs as lifeless as the Constitution and the Bill of Rights until somebody cuts it down and buries it in an unmarked grave.
The applause from DC is deafening as our elected representatives can finally go about their corrupt little lives without scrutiny from the irrelevant proletariat, as well as the more bothersome members of the free press -- all three of them left standing after mergers and acquisitions thinned the herd and "repurposed" corporate media as the ministry of propaganda for the GOP.
But don't mind me; I'm a little cranky today, having just heard another US for-profit medicine horror story. I'm collecting them for a possible book, so send them this way -- the more depressing the better.
This one may be hideous enough to deserve its own thread, possibly an OpEdNews article, certainly a few pages in the book.
Pardon me while I go punch a wall.
wp
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