Thursday, October 31, 2013

Privacy For the Elite, Not the Peasantry


Befitting a land of parasitical crony capitalism and a political class that operates with impunity outside of the established laws the Obama administration and NSA allies in congress are finally being mobilized into action by oligarchic anger. As the week unwound with report after report of surveillance of foreign leaders, allies at that the privileged occupiers of the U.S. government moved to at least cosmetically reign in the spying - on the elite, as for the peasantry well let them eat wiretaps. The besieged Barry seems to be cornered - finally for his inability/unwillingness to get his NSA Stasi under control as well as for  the botching of the Obamacare website roll out, a dysfunctional mess that has seen recent polls including this one from NBC/WSJ  having his approval rating in freefall. Not that polling in this country isn't a joke, you can make a poll reflect any desired result based on the type of questioning as well as the samples used but people I know, even O-Bots are rapidly losing faith in their once messianic leader. After five plus years of Obama's reign the change promised has been of the chump change variety. Yet media apologists and shills continue, I must say that the most astonishing thing that I have recently heard was the MSNBC megaphone Chris Matthews talking Barry up as the Dow rose to record levels (never mind that QE bubble) as the man who - "kills our enemies and he makes us rich, so why are you bitching?" on Tuesday's Hardball.  I believe that David Gregory may now have a legitimate challenger as the most dishonest and slimy media propagandist in the land.

Breaking with a unified establishment line of defense against NSA spying, none other than Senator Dianne Feinstein has called for "reforms" in the aftermath of the revelations that German Chancellor Angela Merkel was being surveilled since 2002. This is what it takes to get Di Fi riled up, she has up until this week defended every unconstitutional transgression of the NSA as long as it was being used to spy on millions of law abiding American citizens but when it is one of the global political elite that is of course a different story.  The stench of hypocrisy hangs heavy in the air along the Potomac as it always does but it is growing more fragrant by the day with the tales of snooping dropping out practically every day now and includes the leadership class. Justin Raimondo over at Antiwar.com once again pegs it in his most recent column entitled Surveillance Is for Peons from which I excerpt:

It’s fun to watch the consternation in Obama-land as the blowback from the Snowden revelations lands on Washington’s doorstep in the form of angry phone calls from world leaders. Of course, most of them were to some extent complicit when the NSA wanted to spy on their countrymen: in Germany, the intelligence services cooperated with the Americans, as the Brits certainly did, along with the French. It’s just that they thought they were personally exempt.

Their outrage is echoed by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, once the Senate’s biggest champion of the Surveillance State, who is now on the warpath because of the Merkel eavesdropping scandal. After announcing she is "totally opposed" to NSA spying on our European allies, she declared her intention to conduct a comprehensive formal review of US intelligence-gathering programs.
While many commentators remarked that if the NSA has even lost Feinstein they’re screwed, the oddity of her unexpectedly harsh reaction was pointed out by Spencer Ackerman and Dan Roberts writing in the UK Guardian: "Her position," they noted, "left many longtime intelligence observers puzzled. NSA spying on foreign leaders is far more traditional than its domestic bulk collection, which Feinstein has not criticized. Regardless of Feinstein’s motivations, intelligence veterans seemed to understand that the political momentum is not on their side."

But the rabble is continuing to push back. The hated by the establishment Justin Amash has joined with the PATRIOT Act author James Sensenbrenner to push legislation that would reign in the out of control NSA  “The days of unfettered spying on the American people are numbered”. NSA Stasi Commandant Keith Alexander invoked the terror talisman by urging congress that to “give up a program that would result in this nation being attacked”.  The reason why we are “hated” and why others would want to attack this nation is because of freaks such as he and his fellow warmongering militarists. When you invade, murder, torture and destroy other countries for the benefit of energy cartels, defense industry giants and other mega-corporations to expect anything other than hatred and counter attacks is sheer lunacy. Over a half century of U.S. policy and the wars and oppression of others may sell well with the television addled schmucks here in The Homeland but the civilized world outside these borders understands this. There has yet to be credible evidence that NSA surveillance on millions of American citizens has stopped even one terrorist attack – if it was so efficient then why didn’t it stop the Boston Marathon bombers? The only plots busted up are either those of fools or of those induced into actions through acts of government entrapment that justifies the continued looting of taxpayers to finance their own enslavement at the hands of those who should be standing in the dock at The Hague rather than running this nation’s military and intelligence programs.

I have long maintained that the best chance that we still have to prevent a future of tyranny is to find a unifying cause that will unite libertarians, principled conservatives and antiwar, pro-civil liberties progressives against Leviathan and this just may be it. The weekend's Washington "Stop Watching Us" rally was a diverse gathering that would seem to indicate that this is at least theoretically possible. Forget the liberals, they are useless and too invested in a myriad of identity group based crusades and also forget the dregs of society that comprise the Republican party base, primarily the decidedly pro-fascist religious right that hijacked the libertarian tea party and now is seen coalescing around the Texas Zamboni Ted Cruz.  They have finally found their Führer and hell will have no fury like a takeover by zealots who are already salivating over using the police state and spying apparatus against their many enemies, generating pickup lists of who they deem to be sexual deviants, intellectuals and defenders of liberty . 

Both of those groups are a part of the problem and should be shunned as lepers by any sane and patriotic American. The collapse is coming, while swine the likes of Chris Matthews gloat about the record levels of the stock market it is all as temporary as it is phony, capitalism has left the building in this once great country and the markets can no longer function without the constant heroin fixes provided by the government. It is all going to blow up sooner or later, whether it be two weeks, two years or a decade but it cannot be sustained. It is imperative that the NSA be stopped now because all of this surveillance of American citizens is going to be weaponized and used against any and all who attempt to hold the scoundrels accountable for the coming systemic wreckage.

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