A protester belonging to an Occupy Wall Street group in rural Pennsylvania is being charged with felony attempted bank robbery and a terrorism-related charge for holding signs up during a demonstration at a local Wells Fargo branch.
David C. Gorczynski, 22, was charged on Tuesday with attempted bank robbery and terroristic threatening, both felonies, as well as one misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct. Police detained him after he walked into an Easton, PA Wells Fargo branch with a sign that read “You’re being robbed” and another that said “Give a man a gun, he can rob a bank. Give a man a bank, and he can rob a country.”
Gorczynski was at the Wells Fargo bank as part of a demonstration led by Occupy Easton, the small Pennsylvania town’s OWS offshoot…
“He is not the criminal. If the police were truly there to protect and serve the taxpayers, the banksters would be arrested and this man would be called a hero,” the Occupy Easton group responds on Facebook.
Gorczynski was released on $10,000 bond after a defense and bail fund established online helped bring in enough money to buy his freedom after his arrest.
Remember what little man Bush said: “They hate us for our freedoms.” So Bush, the Neocons, and the Faux Democrats proceeded to dismantle the very freedoms that were purported to be the reason for why the terrorists hated us. We should be thankful our dear leaders were wise enough to know how to get at the root of the problem, our freedoms, in order to prevent further animosity toward America.
So as to not incur the wrath of future terrorist attacks, our every movement, thought, and expressed opinion must be tracked to ensure we are not exercising any freedoms believed to be so inflammatory to the terrorists amongst us:
…So what is TrapWire, and why has its leak created such a commotion? According to reporting at RT, TrapWire is a detailed surveillance system that “can collect information about people and vehicles that is more accurate than facial recognition, draw[s] patterns, and do[es] threat assessments of areas that may be under observation from terrorists.” Anything suspect gets input into the system to be “analyzed and compared with data entered from other areas within a network for the purpose of identifying patterns of behavior that are indicative of pre-attack planning.”
According to the article, this system has been secretly installed in most major cities and around landmarks across the United States, in Canada, and in the UK. Most local police forces are installing their own monitoring software that works in conjunction with TrapWire. Private properties, including casinos, are now signing up to TrapWire. Essentially, it sounds like Big Brother identifying you, watching you, assessing your every move for abnormalities, then indexing your behavior.
…
Last year, while the occupy movement peacefully protested in cities across the country, a new-militarized police force presented itself, and moved to brutalize protesters exercising their rights to freedom of speech and assembly. It was as if these long-cherished American values had suddenly become viewed by our government as threats to its power. The scores of video footage capturing these egregious acts of brutality — from city to city, in a seemingly coordinated effort — resemble scenes carried out in faraway lands by despotic regimes.
Here is the reality about freedom: you may have a bill of rights, but if you are brutalized anytime you attempt to exercise those rights, you eventually become intimidated from ever doing so. And that appears to be the new order in America.
The brutality against occupy protesters became such an issue for human rights groups, as well as media groups whose reporters were being assaulted (including NY Times, The Associated Press, The New York Post, The Daily News, Thomson Reuters, Dow Jones & Company, etc.), that even the U.N. felt compelled to intervene. Two U.N. human rights envoys petitioned the Obama Administration to “protect Occupy protesters against excessive force by law enforcement officials.” The White House completely ignored their petition, and did absolutely nothing to reign in, much less condemn, the brutality.
Legal experts from NYU and Fordham University filed complaints with the NYPD, the U.S. Department of Justice and the United Nations, accompanied by a 132 page report entitled Suppressing Protest: Human Rights Violations in the U.S. Response to Occupy Wall Street. The document “catalogs 130 specific alleged incidents of excessive police force, and hundreds of additional violations, including unjustified arrests, abuse of journalists, unlawful closure of sidewalks and parks to protesters, and pervasive surveillance of peaceful activists.” This document barely scratches the surface, since its scope is limited just to the police response in NYC. The group plans to release similar publications for Boston, Charlotte, Oakland, and San Francisco.
For those of you who believe that our nation’s dramatic shift towards a police-state is justifiable, in light of 9-11, you should know that nearly every police-state throughout history became so under the guise of national security threats. Most despotic regimes faced real, perceived, or sometimes manufactured threats to their national security. And most of them could point historians back to their own 9-11-like ‘turning point’.
For example, Adolph Hitler would surely point historians to the burning of the Reichstag building on February 27, 1933 as Germany’s ‘turning point’. He blamed the arson on the Communists (Note: some prominent historians believed the Nazis themselves were responsible for the arson). But regardless of who actually burned Reichstag, the Nazis capitalized on that crucial moment in a way that would forever change the course of history.
They used the shock and fear generated by that event as justification for the Reichstag Fire Decree. This new law suspended basic rights of all Germans and allowed detention without trial. Sound familiar? That was Hitler’s very first step in consolidating his power, and transforming Germany into a despotic regime.
A government shifting towards despotism always works to capitalize on a nation’s fear. It uses that fear as the impetus to strip its citizens of their inalienable rights. And unfortunately, once those rights have been fleeced, it often takes a full-scale revolution or war just to restore them.
America, land of the free feeble and home of the brave bamboozled…
Growing up in the seat of American power gave Gore Vidal, historian and scathing critic of the Empire, a front row seat to its inner workings. He was raised in Washington, D.C. at the home of his grandfather, Oklahoma Senator Thomas P. Gore. Being related to Jacqueline Kennedy, he held close ties to the Kennedy clan. He was also distantly related to Al Gore and Jimmy Carter. Gore Vidal himself ran for public office twice, once for Congress in 1960 in New York and once for the U.S. Senate in California in 1982. He knew his subject well enough to speak of the skeletons in its closet and the truth behind the glossy facade. In fact, he once said, “You know, I’ve been around the ruling class all my life, and I’ve been quite aware of their total contempt for the people of the country.”
My belated tribute to Gore Vidal will simply be to present twelve quotes from him and let his words speak for themselves. You could do much worse with your time than to spend it studying the writings of Gore Vidal:
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.
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…fifty years ago, Harry Truman replaced the old republic with a national-security state whose sole purpose is to wage perpetual wars, hot, cold, and tepid. Exact date of replacement? February 27, 1947. Place: The White House Cabinet Room. Cast: Truman, Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson, a handful of congressional leaders. Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg told Truman that he could have his militarized economy only IF he first “scared the hell out of the American people” that the Russians were coming. Truman obliged. The perpetual war began. Representative government of, by, and for the people is now a faded memory. Only corporate America enjoys representation by the Congress and presidents that it pays for in an arrangement where no one is entirely accountable because those who have bought the government also own the media. Now, with the revolt of the Praetorian Guard at the Pentagon, we are entering a new and dangerous phase. Although we regularly stigmatize other societies as rogue states, we ourselves have become the largest rogue state of all. We honor no treaties. We spurn international courts. We strike unilaterally wherever we choose. We give orders to the United Nations but do not pay our dues…we bomb, invade, subvert other states. Although We the People of the United States are the sole source of legitimate authority in this land, we are no longer represented in Congress Assembled. Our Congress has been hijacked by corporate America and its enforcer, the imperial military machine…
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We should stop going around babbling about how we’re the greatest democracy on earth, when we’re not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarised republic.
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Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.
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Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.
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…I think it is tragic that the poor man has almost no chance to rise unless he is willing to put himself in thrall to moneyed interests.
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Happily for the busy lunatics who rule over us, we are permanently the United States of Amnesia. We learn nothing because we remember nothing.
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We have ceased to be a nation under law but instead a homeland where the withered Bill of Rights, like a dead trumpet vine, clings to our pseudo-Roman columns.
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We must always remember that the police are recruited from the criminal classes.
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The hatred Americans have for their own government is pathological, if understandable. At one level it is simply thwarted greed: since our religion is making a buck, giving a part of that buck to any government is an act against nature.
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As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.
~~~~~~~
Every four years the naive half who vote are encouraged to believe that if we can elect a really nice man or woman President everything will be all right. But it won’t be. Any individual who is able to raise $25 million to be considered presidential is not going to be much use to the people at large. He will represent oil, or aerospace, or banking, or whatever moneyed entities are paying for him. Certainly he will never represent the people of the country, and they know it. Hence, the sense of despair throughout the land as incomes fall, businesses fail and there is no redress.
…In the State Department we used to discuss how much time that mythical average American citizen put in each day listening, reading, and arguing about the world outside his country. It seemed to us that ten minutes a day would be a high average.” So why bore the people? Secret bipartisan government is best for what, after all, is or should be a society of docile workers, enthusiastic consumers, obedient soldiers who will believe just about anything for at least ten minutes…
…Of course, there were elections during the crucial time, but Truman-Dewey, Eisenhower-Stevenson, Kennedy-Nixon were of a single mind as to the desirability of inventing first a many-tentacled enemy–communism, the star of the chamber of horrors–then, to combat so much evil, install a permanent wartime state at home, with loyalty oaths, the national peacetime draft, and secret police to keep watch over homegrown traitors, as the few enemies of the national security state were known.
Then followed forty years of mindless wars, which created a debt of $5 trillion that hugely benefited aerospace companies and firms like General Electric, whose longtime TV spokesman, Ronald Reagan, eventually retired to the White House…
Mr. Vidal, you told the truth with wit and wisdom and may you now rest in peace for that valuable legacy.
Since we were on the subject of rent-seeking in our last two posts, I happened to be in Phoenix over the weekend and was reminded of this insidious subject when I saw the following headline at the local newsstand:
This story was covered more in-depth at the Huffington Post. This post is not an endorsement of illegal immigration, but an expose’ of how the relentless and amoral function of profit-seeking in capitalism has taken over our correctional institutions through privatization, becoming another wasteful and corrupt form of rent-seeking. For-profit prisons are one of the more grotesque formations in the annals of capitalism.
According to the aforementioned articles, the for-profit prison industry has grown from just 10% of beds to the present proportion of one half. And this growth has come off the backs of taxpayers who are footing the bill for the expansion of federal facilities to house the roughly 400,000 illegal immigrants jailed each year. The cost to taxpayers will be nearly 2 billion this year. The question is how has this growth occurred in an environment of falling illegal immigration:
Much of the drop in illegal immigrants is due to the persistently weak U.S. economy, which has shrunk construction and service-sector jobs attractive to Mexican workers following the housing bust. But increased deportations, heightened U.S. patrols and violence along the border also have played a role, as well as demographic changes, such as Mexico’s declining birth rate.
If you read between the lines, the answer is in the amount of lobbying that the for-profit industry has carried out in order to milk the system and secure governments contracts:
The industry’s giants – Corrections Corporation of America, The GEO Group, and Management and Training Corp. – have spent at least $45 million combined on campaign donations and lobbyists at the state and federal level in the last decade, the AP found…
…it wasn’t until 2005 – as the corrections companies’ lobbying efforts reached their zenith – that ICE got a major boost. Between 2005 and 2007, the agency’s budget jumped from $3.5 billion to $4.7 billion, adding more than $5 million for custody operations.
Dora Schriro, who in 2009 reviewed the nation’s detention system at the request of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, said nearly every aspect had been outsourced…
…An AP review of Federal Election Commission data found the prison companies and their employees gave to key congressional leaders who control how much money goes to run the nation’s detention centers and who influence how many contracts go to the private sector…
Besides the fact that it’s your tax dollars being stolen, how does this affect you? You’re not an illegal immigrant, you say. The tentacles of the prison industrial complex have a way of entangling more of the ever-growing ranks of the poor, an increasing number of which are the former members of the crumbling middle class. If you fall off the capitalist treadmill of debt peonage and run afoul of the law, the 1%’ers have a bed in one of their for-profit prisons waiting for you…
It would be a mistake to view today’s finance capitalism as the “final stage” of industrial capitalism. The name of the new game is neofeudalism and austerity, and its preferred mode of exploitation is debt peonage. Like creditors in ancient Rome, today’s financial power is seeking to replace democracy with a financial oligarchy. The result is a resurgence of pre-capitalist “primitive accumulation,” by debt creation and foreclosure rather than the military conquests of past epochs.
Much of the dismantling of the social fabric that describes the general malaise of our times is not visible to the consumer or generic citizen. However, to peer down the darkened hallways in the backstage of American business is to glimpse the machinations of a frightening leviathan that subsumes social power in a manner that cannot be conceptualized in the traditional left vs. right paradigm.
The issue at hand is privatization, the stalwart conviction that free markets are the only means of adjudication for the natural tension between self seeking utility maximization of the individual, and the needs and rights of society as a independent entity. The perpetrators have constructed an arena of false contest, populated with sacrificial ideological tropes in pursuit of their real agenda.
It is the purpose of this article to examine some of the hidden means by which privatization- as practiced by the bourgeoisie- is being used to subsume the sovereignty of both individuals and small businesses.
A critical component to understanding privatization is to understand the need for obfuscation, e.g. to become invisible. Barring this, the next best defense against revolution and dissent is to deny that any disagreement exists, or if it does, then to valorize it and present it as irrefutable status quo, thus enjoining the conservatives who are loathe to change anything deemed as established, and can be counted on to circle the wagons in the so called “pursuit of liberty”.
Staunchly in the category of invisibility is the entire concept of rent-seeking, which is to say, the premise of unearned labor, or in plain English, getting something for nothing. Much of the financial economy of today is nearly totally dedicated to rent-seeking activities, so called financial engineering that attempts, through various debt mechanisms, to extract value from either land or industrial production without adding any value whatsoever. (For a particularly good and thorough discussion of rent seeking see this article)
If you are getting something for nothing, the last thing you want is for anyone else to know of this; so much of the current media discussion is either valorizing the financial class, or by working to maintain the invisibility of the rent-seeking genre. An understanding of this rent-seeking activity, and it’s relationship to so-called “free market” dynamics is critical to debunking the more mainstream conservative and Libertarian theories of economics, which crumble rather quickly within this framework.
Another frame of reference which adds to this discussion is a remedial listing of the three circuits of Capitalism, a.) Industrial capitalism, b.) Mercantilist Capitalism, and c.) Finance (Money lending) Capitalism. All three strains utilize exploitation to achieve access to surplus value, and all three seek to exchange supra-profits for social power. To illustrate, we can look at the Forbes list of the top 10 wealthiest Americans, and we can see that these three strains are all represented:
1. Bill Gates Microsoft (Industrial Capitalist)
2. Warren Buffett Berkshire Hathaway (Finance Capitalist)
3. Larry Ellison Oracle (Industrial Capitalist).
4. Christy Walton Walmart (Mercantile Capitalist)
5. Charles Koch manufacturing, energy (Industrial Capitalist)
6. David Koch manufacturing, energy (Industrial Capitalist)
7. Jim Walton Walmart (Mercantile Capitalist)
8. Alice Walton Walmart (Mercantile Capitalist)
9. S. Robson Walton Walmart (Mercantile Capitalist)
10. Michael Bloomberg (Finance Capitalist)
What is interesting about the relationship of these three strains is the internal competition for surplus value which is quite remarkable and very vigorous. Most of the publicized argument for regulatory constraints against the Finance Capitalist for example, is not from consumers or citizens, but stems from Industrial Capitalists who are loathe to give up surplus value to rent-seekers, preferring instead to capture this surplus for their own uses.
To further set the stage for our discussion, we can examine briefly the extents of control on modern media and the political economy by these three strains. The Financial Capitalists dominate the levers of power through direct capture of government figures, usually by interchanging and exchanging employees back and forth through key positions, as well their highly documented financial contributions. The Mercantilists however, are dominant in the advertising media, preferring instead to take their case directly to the consumer, shaping and stimulating demand by convincing consumers to purchase products and services that they did not know they needed. The long standing and principal Industrial Capitalists of course use both media and government to advance their objectives, but they add another dimension to their ideological control by purchasing controlling stakes in free market think tanks, such as the Libertarian Cato Institute (Koch brothers), the Heritage Foundation, and many others. Most of the so called “free market” think tanks that are influential on public policy can be traced to a controlling interest from Industrial Capital.
So we can see that the three strains of capital have hegemony in their own unique portals, influencing public policy with free domain to the exchange of their out-sized surplus values into social power.
The end game of all this is for the furtherance of rent-seeking activities. This is done in many different ways, but the subject of this article is a focus on privatization, and specifically the behind-the-scenes activities that are imposed on small businesses as well as employees.
The top level observation regarding the push to privatization is that it simply allows capitalist enterprise, large and small, to subvert constitutional protections by engaging private citizens in superficially mutual contracts. Modern political philosophy has been co-opted to allow wide ranging civil rights abuses under the cover of “mutual consent” in the context of a contract between private parties.
Examples would be private party contracts between employees (employment agreements) and between large and small businesses (supply agreements) .
Once private citizens enter into so called mutual contracts, the court system provides wide latitude for enforcement of virtually any draconian measure, as long as two private parties ostensibly agree. In many cases, basic constitutional protections are circumvented, and the entire principle of political economy is upended in the favor of the author of the contract. In theory, the employee or small business has the “right” to not sign any agreement which runs roughshod over his best interests, but in practice, such options are not readily available, particularly for employment agreements, when a prospective employee may be in desperate need of a job, as he or she is forced to sell his labor power for sustenance wages. If there are insufficient offerings of competing private employment contracts (as is often the case) the prospective employee must take what he can get- however onerous and biased the contractual terms are.
This is of course the objective of the Capitalist economy, to 1.) insure a standing army of unemployed workers, at the ready, to fill on demand openings in the Capitalist mode of production, incurring no costs to the Capitalist until such time as this labor power is needed, and then when needed to hire only using draconian and highly biased employment agreements that transfer State-like control to a Capitalist entity that is much better positioned to provide enforcement. 2.) To externalize costs to the greatest degree possible, such as societal infrastructure costs, by creating a privatized, Capitalist entity to take over former State controlled functions and to apply the aforementioned labor principles to realize this new profit center, that can cater such services only to these that can afford them, while exploiting those that provide labor power to these privatized entities.
Once these externalized functions are brought under the umbrella of the Capitalist mode of production, the issue of mutually agreeable contract law can be brought to bear to strip these workers of their Constitutional rights, and further weaken any efforts to consolidate and resist.
The folks over at Crooked Timber have provided some particularly good examples and arguments around this notion of using contract law to subvert even basic liberties:
Life at Work
To understand the limitations of these …….. we have to understand how little freedom workers enjoy at work. Unfreedom in the workplace can be broken down into three categories.
1. Abridgments of freedom inside the workplace
On pain of being fired, workers in most parts of the United States can be commanded to pee or forbidden to pee. They can be watched on camera by their boss while they pee. They can be forbidden to wear what they want, say what they want (and at what decibel), and associate with whom they want. They can be punished for doing or not doing any of these things—punished legally or illegally (as many as 1 in 17 workers who try to join a union is illegally fired or suspended). But what’s remarkable is just how many of these punishments are legal, and even when they’re illegal, how toothless the law can be. Outside the usual protections (against race and gender discrimination, for example), employees can be fired for good reasons, bad reasons, or no reason at all. They can be fired for donating a kidney to their boss (fired by the same boss, that is), refusing to have their person and effects searched, calling the boss a “cheapskate” in a personal letter, and more. They have few rights on the job—certainly none of the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Amendment liberties that constitute the bare minimum of a free society; thus, no free speech or assembly, no due process, no right to a fair hearing before a panel of their peers—and what rights they do have employers will fight tooth and nail to make sure aren’t made known to them or will simply require them to waive as a condition of employment. Outside the prison or the military—which actually provide, at least on paper, some guarantee of due process—it’s difficult to conceive of a less free institution for adults than the average workplace.
2. 2. Abridgements of freedom outside the workplace
In addition to abridging freedoms on the job, employers abridge their employees’ freedoms off the job. Employers invade employees’ privacy, demanding that they hand over passwords to their Facebook accounts, and fire them for resisting such invasions. Employers secretly film their employees at home. Workers are fired for supporting the wrong political candidates (“work for John Kerry or work for me”), failing to donate to employer-approved candidates, challenging government officials, writing critiques of religion on their personal blogs (IBM instructs employees to “show proper consideration…for topics that may be considered objectionable or inflammatory—such as politics and religion”), carrying on extramarital affairs, participating in group sex at home, cross-dressing, and more. Workers are punished for smoking or drinking in the privacy of their own homes. (How many nanny states have tried that?) They can be fired for merely thinking about having an abortion, for reporting information that might have averted the Challenger disaster, for being raped by an estranged husband. Again, this is all legal in many states, and in the states where it is illegal, the laws are often weak.
3. 3. Use of sanctions inside the workplace as a supplement to—or substitute for—political repression by the state
While employers often abridge workers’ liberty off the job, at certain moments, those abridgments assume a larger function for the state. Particularly in a liberal state constrained by constitutional protections such as the First Amendment, the instruments of coercion can be outsourced to—or shared with—the private sector. During the McCarthy period, for example, fewer than 200 men and women went to jail for their political beliefs, but as many as 40% of American workers—in both the public and private sectors—were investigated (and a smaller percentage punished) for their beliefs.
And, perhaps most succinctly:
What makes the private sector, especially the workplace, such an attractive instrument of repression is precisely that it can administer punishments without being subject to the constraints of the Bill of Rights. It is an archipelago of private governments, in which employers are free to do precisely what the state is forbidden to do: punish without process. Far from providing a check against the state, the private sector can easily become an adjutant of the state. Not through some process of liberal corporatism but simply because employers often share the goals of state officials and are better positioned to act upon them.
So this is the end state that the “free market” evangelists push for, this is the holy grail of privatization, externalized costs to a system that can act outside of the constraints of the Bill of Rights.
We can extend this discussion to the even further reaches of transparency, that of the nature of contracts between large and small businesses. In addition to the above noted employer/employee social relations enforced under a Capitalist entity governed by private contract, the same private contract modality has some startling repercussions for business:
1.) Mercantilists demand slotting fees to product producers for prominent product (shelf) placement at retail locations. They routinely create profit centers with draconian shipping requirements, for example, if a shipping label is off center from a specific location on a carton by even an inch, the producer is fined for each instance of this deviation. Missing or incorrectly filled out paperwork, spelling errors, any excuse for a “deviation” results in a back charge (fine) to the producers. It is not unusual to see small manufacturers shipping product to “big box” retailers, and to have so many back charges that their entire profit margin is consumed before the first unit is even sold. Which of course, is the goal.
2.) Small manufacturers are expected to honor dubious return policies, many large retailers force contract language on suppliers that require them to accept returns months, sometime years after shipment, often when the product was clearly misused. Replacement costs are often entirely pushed onto the supplier, yielding a system that is nearly impossible to accurately track inventory, when such products are never really sold, if they can be returned for full credit months later.
3.) Contract language for even small, non-mercantilist orders has escalated dramatically over the last few years. Consider:
a. Supply agreements can dictate and restrict any outspoken political dissent or endorsement.
b. You can be forced to decline sales within certain industries, to certain customers deemed competitive to the purchaser, or constrained to within certain geographic radii.
c. You can be prohibited from selling a certain product or service to anyone but the original purchaser.
d. You can be forced to accept liability for failures that have nothing to do with your product or service.
e. You can be forced to submit to a dress code for certain customer facing events, and translate this code internally to your own organization.
f. You are often forced to agree to all types of intrusive audits, in some cases unannounced, and can be forced to absorb any lost production costs or accounting support costs in support of these audits- regardless of their outcome.
4.) But perhaps most egregiously, it is now increasingly common to submit to mandatory electronic form of payment, wherein you provide your confidential banking account information, and payment is only made, and cannot be made any other way, by means of a wire transfer directly into your private business account. Reading of the small print in the contract yields an almost universal caveat, the payer can reverse any payment immediately and electronically, directly from your account, without notice and without permission; further, if there is any payment dispute, fines or penalties, or the occurrence of any perceived damages and liability that can result in charge backs to you, the supplier, these can be extracted without notice and without permission.
If you read the fine print on any recent home mortgage documentation you will see similar examples of this from our friends the Finance Capitalists, and if you are foolish enough to consider borrowing money for a business venture from a Finance Capitalist, you will get a first class education in exploitation via contract documents.
The sum total of all this, under the mantle of privatization, is the absolute and unchallenged control by the large scale Capitalist of both consumer and small business based endeavor, seeking to capitalize any surplus value that is achieved though small business or consumer debt onset, and to reduce this to rent-seeking in a fashion that would put Mussolini to shame.
Turns out the devil you don’t know is far worse than the devil you do know.
Connecting the ‘War on Terror’ with the control of resources abroad and the crushing of dissent both here and overseas:
In order to overtake and dominate, sometimes you have to draw your opponent in close to you. Knowing that the oil and gas reserves of the Middle East make it an area of vital geopolitical and national security importance, an empire would use all available opportunities to insert itself there, even if it meant invasion under some false pretense. With the trumped-up claims of terrorist ties to Iraq and WMD, 9-11 gave the empire the pretense to invade. Today we can see the results here and here and here.
“Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.” (p. 211)
“Never before has a populist democracy attained international supremacy. But the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public’s sense of domestic well-being. The economic self-denial (that is, defense spending) and the human sacrifice (casualties, even among professional soldiers) required in the effort are uncongenial to democratic instincts. Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization.” (p.35)
“To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected(!), and to keep the barbarians from coming together.” (p.40)
Now we get to today’s video from Journeyman pictures which gives further evidence from a whistleblower that all the stops were pulled in order to make this ‘War on Terror’ fly. No more Geneva Convention, no more questioning of the efficacy or, for that matter, morality of the brutal torture done by countries we once condemned as barbaric:
The War on Terror was the perfect existential threat needed to prop up neoliberal capitalism and its resultant world of an opulently rich class ruling over the teeming masses of serfs. In a civilization dominated globally by such an economic system which is designed to funnel the shrinking wealth (i.e. energy) of society into the hands of a tiny elite, there can be no other future to look forward to for those at the bottom but despair and poverty:
He looked like an assassin ready to go to war,” said Jordan Crofter, a moviegoer who was unhurt in the attack early Friday, about a half-hour after the special midnight opening of “The Dark Knight Rises.
Just a half hour drive from Columbine is the city of Aurora Colorado in which the latest ritual blood bath has been carried out in a hail of bullets. 71 hit and 12 dead.
Clad in a gas mask, ballistic helmet, and body armor from the neck down to the legs, the gunman burst into a theater after tossing in a couple of gas canisters. Was this a terrorist act from some fundamentalist Middle East group? No, it came from 24-year-old American James Holmes, described as “shy”, “high-achieving” and from a “good family.” He was in fact a college graduate with a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience. Tom Mai, a retired electrical engineer, said “the mother told him Holmes couldn’t find a job after earning a master’s degree and returned to school.” Holmes even left his apartment booby-trapped, a sort of double tap assault for those hunting him.
What can be said of this most recent disturbed outcry from modern civilization’s youth? I see it as a reflection of the perverse and twisted culture which this young person was faced with, an atomized society which commodifies everything in its site and turns all it can into a financial transaction of some sort. What is worth preserving of a society which destroys the future of its offspring with mountains of social debt in the form of exorbitant college loans, a degraded and polluted environment, no option for meaningful work, a two-tier class system of haves and have-nots, a rising Security and Surveillance State, and a world at war for the last of the earth’s resources? Of course this is all normal for a country that glorifies sociopathic behavior:
…Sociopathic behavior becomes normalized and even glorified in business culture, and the businessmen who are less sociopathic get eaten alive by the more sociopathic ones.
The entirety of business sociopathy is glorified by the nation’s culture, in art, media, etc. as tens of millions of Americans long to be the next Bill Gates, who is nothing more than a White Crips/Bloods gang member with glasses and a high IQ.
Less sociopathic businessmen who try to act decent are destroyed and then, for their decency, are attacked in common culture as losers, failures and even scum. Women avoid them and their families look at the ground when someone brings up their name. At the individual level, people who try to play fair and be nice are told that they are displaying loser attitudes and ordered to harden up and act more sociopathic.
Capitalism is really the normalization, rationalization, glorification and even deification of sociopathy across society.
My only surprise is that we don’t see more of these meltdowns taking place in this bankrupt and systemically corrupt system of ours. If you read medical journalist Robert Whitaker, America’s rise in mental illness has gone up in lockstep with “our society’s increased use of psychiatric medications.”
Another factor for America’s escalating random violence is the entrenched gun culture. America was awarded the dubious honor of being the ‘most armed country in the world’ by Reuters back in 2007. And lest we forget, America is the largest arms dealer in the world.
Surely the lack of effective gun laws that would prevent such massacres also is worth mentioning, thanks to the legendary lobbying power of the NRA whose motto was best exemplified by their now deceased spokesman Charlton Heston who said you can pry the gun “from my cold, dead hands.” America just loves its guns:
If there was a fast and sudden collapse of the economy and industrial civilization, America might be one of the last places you’d want to find yourself due to the above reasons I have described.
Paul Craig Roberts has written a very insightful piece entitled War On All Fronts. He describes an Empire which is pushing on all fronts, despite a collapsing economy and declining living standards for its own citizens here at home. Yes, the cost of American Empire has outstripped the benefits it once offered to its common citizen.
The world is catching on to the American corporatocracy’s covert use of what are called NGOs [non-governmental agencies] in spreading dissent within other countries and over throwing foreign governments. The latest case is Russia which is now passing a law similar to what the U.S. uses whereby members of NGOs, who are funded by foreign governments, must register with the U.S. Justice Department as ‘foreign agents’ under America’s ‘Foreign Agents Registration Act’(FARA):
…The Washington-funded Russian political opposition masquerades behind “human rights” and says it works to “open Russia.” What the disloyal and treasonous Washington-funded Russian “political opposition” means by “open Russia” is to open Russia for brainwashing by Western propaganda, to open Russia to economic plunder by the West, and to open Russia to having its domestic and foreign policies determined by Washington.
“Non-governmental organizations” are very governmental. They have played pivotal roles in both financing and running the various “color revolutions” that have established American puppet states in former constituent parts of the Soviet Empire. NGOs have been called “coup d’etat machines,” and they have served Washington well in this role. They are currently working in Venezuela against Chavez.
Of course, Washington is infuriated that its plans for achieving hegemony over a country too dangerous to attack militarily have been derailed by Russia’s awakening, after two decades, to the threat of being politically subverted by Washington-financed NGOs. Washington requires foreign-funded organizations to register as foreign agents (unless they are Israeli funded). However, this fact doesn’t stop Washington from denouncing the new Russian law as “anti-democratic,” “police state,” blah-blah. Caught with its hand in subversion, Washington calls Putin names. The pity is that most of the brainwashed West will fall for Washington’s lies, and we will hear more about “gangster state Russia.”…
Considering the revelation earlier this year that corporations were paying “strategic intelligence” firm Stratfor to spy on activists, it would come as no surprise that many NGOs here in the US are also used by multinational corporations to push their corporate agendas. As one commenter notes, the use of domestic NGOs in America by corporations is likely commonplace and key in controlling political dissent and keeping the ideology of neoliberal capitalism dominant over American society:
…How many of our “Tax-Exempt Foundations” and even religious organizations are in fact fronts for Global Corporations? Each state of the union could, if it had citizens with spines, force local do-good groups to register just like the outside agitators they really are. Politics in America would change overnight.
The Russians have been screwed by US “advice” since the Harvard Boys played Joseph to Russia’s Pharaoh after 1989 and destroyed their economy. Everyone should read the old Nation article even if only the cached version…
And on the Asian front we have China which is seen as another threat to be contained:
…President Obama today was asked about the strategy of containing China by establishing stronger economic and diplomatic ties with countries in the region – such as with the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal, which excludes China — as well as with today’s military announcement. What does the US fear from China? he was asked.
“The notion that we fear China is mistaken,” he said. “The notion that we are looking to exclude China is mistaken.”
The president insisted that “we haven’t excluded China from the TPP. What we have said is the future of this region depends on robust trade and commerce and the only way we’re going to grow that trade is if we have a high-standards trade agreement where everybody is playing by the same rules. …
Having drained the U.S. economy by offshoring to China in order to take advantage of their cheap labor pool and nonexistent environmental regulation over the last several decades, the American corporatocracy now looks to curtail a creature of its own making. Roberts notes the following:
…China has been cooperative with Washington, because the offshoring of the US economy to China was an important component in China’s unprecedented high rate of economic development. American capitalists got their short-run profits, and China got the capital and technology to build an economy that in another 2 or 3 years will have surpassed the sinking US economy. Jobs offshoring, mistaken for free trade by free market economists, has built China and destroyed America…
…It looks as if an over-confident US government is determined to have a three-front war: Syria, Lebanon, and Iran in the Middle East, China in the Far East, and Russia in Europe. This would appear to be an ambitious agenda for a government whose military was unable to occupy Iraq after nine years or to defeat the lightly-armed Taliban after eleven years, and whose economy and those of its NATO puppets are in trouble and decline with corresponding rising internal unrest and loss of confidence in political leadership:
There is a lot to think about in this latest article by Roberts and it says everything about the chaotic and expansionary nature of capitalism, much more than that of empire. Whether you are pro or anti-capitalist, the facts laid before our eyes do not lie. I found the following comment to Robert’s article a perfect mirror of my own thoughts:
Finally, revelations that Unregulated Capitalism and Democracy can only co-exist for so long. Those who have ignored this fact are now suffering from the ultimate results of this reality. Those who have always known this and are not surprised are likely doing quite well and could care less. Socialism, the Kryptonite to unregulated Capitalism, has reportedly gained increasing favor of late with younger people who can find no benefit associated with an economic philosophy that exists to serve a minority class consisting of the very wealthy as it strives to insure it’s dominance by perpetuating a Plutocracy masquerading as a functioning Democracy. Throughout history, Democracies have existed without a Capitalist economic system but the reverse is rare to find as Capitalism eventually requires total compliance by government to save it from it’s own excesses. Considering the fact that our economy has once again hit the fan, 11 recessions and two depressions in the last eighty years, when are we going to stop buying into the brainwashing and stop our blind acceptance of an unregulated economic system that is perpetually unstable and now requires a constant state of war and suffering by a majority of the planet’s inhabitance to insure a utopia for a wealthy minority at the very top?
What to talk about… Well I could talk about the presidential cufflinks that JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon wore to Capital Hill this week. The oligarchs like to show who really runs the show. …Or I could talk about the Fed’s new study showing the evisceration of the Middle Class. Do we really need them telling us how badly we’ve been screwed? …Or the traumatized people of Greece hoarding canned food. We’re all preppers now.
I’d rather talk about something that’s going to create blowback for the U.S. down the road that will make 9-11 look pedestrian by comparison – Drone warfare. Not only are these mindless killing machines causing worldwide anger outside the ivory towers in which our plutocrats sit, but this technology is being turned inwards on the Empire’s own peasants, i.e. you and me. Take a look at this DoD Current and Future U.S. Drone Activities Map. And would you trust these guys operating such weapons?
Before I get to the main article of this post, take a look at how commonplace and ‘user-friendly’ these deadly drone weapons are fast becoming:
The US military has issued soldiers in Afghanistan with a new class of lightweight unmanned drone known as the Switchblade, which can be carried in a backpack and used on the battlefield in place of an air strike.
The weapon, which commanders have dubbed the “Flying Shotgun”, has been widely tested by the US Army, US Marines and US Air Force. It has proved so effective that AeroVironment has announced more than US$14m (£9m) worth of Switchblade systems and related engineering contracts in the past 10 months….
While drone strikes from fixed-wing aircraft have a chain of command that stretches from Afghanistan to the United States, with multiple steps to avoid civilian casualties or friendly fire casualties, these ultra-light, portable drones bring the decision to kill down to the level of platoon commander or even individual soldier….
“Technology is moving at lightning speed and policy is moving at glacial speed,” said PW Singer, the author of Wired for War, a critical analysis of the military use of robotic technologies. “This tech is proliferating, with more than 50 countries now building, buying and using military robotics. The cat is already out of the bag.
These weapons will be as ubiquitous as guns with no more than a single person necessary to operate it. I can imagine these things getting into the hands of people who will want to use them in places other than “battlefields” in order to terrorize a population, but this scenario is already a reality since the U.S. has declared the entire planet a battlefield in its War on Terror. That’s not something we had to really worry about with tanks and jet fighters, but this drone technology is cheap and readily available. The larger drones like the Predator and Reaper require a network of people to operate and keep in the sky, but the smaller ones like the Switchblade do not. Nonetheless, both have the same thing in common – the ability to kill without proper forethought, reason, evidence, or moral compunction. Drones can and do kill innocent people remotely, leaving the operators of the device free from the scene of carnage and the brutal reality of what they have committed. And as you will read, what is even more frightening is that future plans call for drones to be completely autonomous, preprogrammed to find and kill targets using predetermined criteria.
…US major Bryan Callahan say(s) that drone pilots are taught ‘early and often’ to compartmentalise their lives, to separate the time they spend firing missiles on battlefields from the time they spend at home. This is perhaps the essence of the problem. The idea that we can separate ourselves off (at the personal and political level) from the economic, political, moral and human consequences of our actions has been taken to a new level by this new way to wage war.
Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control, by Medea Benjamin, OR Books, 2012.
The United States, the most prolific user of drones to carry out targeted killings, asserts its attacks are legally justified as it is engaged in a global war against Al Qaeda and associated terrorist groups. By this rationale, the CIA would be justified in dropping a Hellfire missile on a suspected terrorist in an apartment in Hamburg, a restaurant in London or a mosque in upstate New York. Why stop at merely dropping bombs in poor countries dominated by people of color? (page 135)
Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the women-led peace group CODEPINK, presents a readable, enlightening and alarming account which spells out the many reasons why drones are such an abomination. She explains the history of drones; the vast sums expended in lobbying by the arms corporations, and returned in lucrative government contracts; the secrecy in which the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) conduct the undeclared wars in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia; the crucial role of private contractors such as Academi (formerly Xe, and before that Blackwater) in operating the drone wars; and the moral dimension by which Obama and his henchmen flatter themselves with the words of Thomas Aquinas in pursuing what they present as “just war”.
The book returns again and again to the stories of the victims – both the “targets”, denied due process, and the thousands of innocent civilians who are being killed, maimed or their lives shattered under the shadow of the killer drones. People like Malik Gulistan Khan, a member of a local pro-government peace committee in Pakistan, killed, along with four members of his family in the first drone strike of the Obama presidency, on 23 January 2009. Or Roya, a 13-year old Afghan girl who became the family breadwinner after US missiles killed her mother and brothers following the 2001 invasion.
Gravesites throughout Asia and the Middle East are filled with testaments to drone attacks gone bad. And drones are not named Predators and Reapers for nothing. They are killing machines. With no judge or jury, they obliterate lives in an instant, the lives of those deemed by someone, somewhere, to be terrorists, along with those who are accidentally – or incidentally – caught in their cross-hairs. Think how terrifying it must be to live under the constant threat of a drone attack. Sometimes you’d see them flying menacingly overhead; sometimes they’d disappear but you could still hear their frightening, buzzing sound. (page 28)
The book’s publication coincides with muchhuffing and puffing about Barack Obama’s drone war policy, prompted by revelations last month in the New York Times about the president’s personal involvement in picking out targets from the “kill list”, presented to him at the weekly counterterrorism briefing (“Terror Tuesday”). As Dennis Perrin argued during the 2008 Obama presidential campaign,[1] no one can be surprised at the sight of another Democrat president eagerly outdoing his GOP predecessor and rivals in advancing the technological frontiers of industrial-scale death and destruction. Especially as BHO was a noisy advocate of drone strikes during that same campaign.
Even a casual observer will be aware that drones represent a particular, and particularly disturbing, shift. Obama’s weapon of choice in his ever-expanding, but undeclared and secret wars, is attracting increasing opposition from unlikely quarters, including the Telegraph’s Peter Oborne and former CIA counter-terrorism chiefs.
Drones, or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), are presented by the White House, and by a faithful media, as a new generation of smart weapons, able to spot, target and kill terrorists in remote areas in Afghanistan and Pakistan (and Yemen, and Somalia, and Gaza, and Libya, and the Philippines, the list goes on) while being controlled remotely from the safety of an Air Force base in the US. Yet, as Benjamin documents in her book, drones are anything but smart.
Of course, by themselves, drones are simply an assembly of metal and high-tech electronics, unable – for the moment – to do anything on their own. They rely on humans to launch, fly, navigate, spy, target and kill. In fact, as Benjamin notes, it takes 168 people to keep a single Predator in the air for 24 hours, while the Global Hawk surveillance drone needs 300: some on the ground, in the minority of cases where drones are deployed in a declared battle zone, but most, and more often than not, in bases hundreds and usually thousands of miles away. They collate “intelligence” from various sources, and analyse the 1500 hours of video and 1500 still images which the drones beam back each day. Finally, they make life or death decisions to launch Hellfire missiles from drones on the basis of the real-time images of people fed from the same drones’ spy cameras. Those people may or may not be the targets who got the presidential thumbs down that Tuesday, may or may not be engaged in hostile activity, may or may not be male or female, may or may not be 17 or 75, may be carrying an Improvised Explosive Device or simply walking the dog. The drone doesn’t know. The pilot on a 12 hour shift, sitting watching hour upon hour of blurry blobs on a screen at Creech Air Force base in Nevada, doesn’t know either. Far from being smart, the drone is more like a lunatic with a loaded gun.
What then is driving the shift towards drones? The first thing to understand is the big money that “cheap” drones represent for the weapons manufacturers, the military, the CIA, the JSOC and the private contractors. At $5 million for a Predator and $28.4 million for each Reaper, drones look cheap by comparison to fighter jets which can cost ten times as much. But, according to Benjamin, a drone costs between $2000 and $3500 every hour it is in the air, while usage has shot up – USAF drone flying missions alone increased by 3000 per cent between 2001 and 2010. Add in the cost of Hellfire missiles ($68000 a pop), and the unknown sums in the “black budget” of the CIA, which runs much of the drone war in Pakistan and Yemen, and it’s easy to see why drones are so popular among the military-industrial complex and their friends in Washington. Weapons manufacturers such as General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, which has benefited more than any rival from the drone boom, have adopted the “freebie marketing” business model from manufacturers of printers and razors.
Global spending on the research and manufacture of drones is expected to total more than $94 billion between 2011-2020. (page 32)
Competition for that money, most of which goes from federal US budgets to American corporations, is understandably fierce, and drives a relentless wave of technological innovation. Take for example, Boeing’s Phantom Ray, a fighter-sized drone which flies itself – autonomously, in the industry jargon. Or the General Atomics Gray Eagle, which “thinks for itself”, according to a GA press release quoted in the book. Benjamin makes clear that the way is clear for larger, faster, more autonomous drones which will, in the near future, be targeting not only unarmed civilians but conventional aircraft and other military forces of traditional enemies like Iran and China. Their increasing autonomy also heralds a generation of drones that not only fly by themselves, but use software to make the kill decision without any human intervention whatsoever. Meanwhile, pressure is building on the Federal Aviation Administration, not least from the White House in the form of the 2012 FAA Reauthorization Bill, to extend the integration of drones into US airspace beyond areas such as the Mexican border, where surveillance drones have been deployed at a cost of over $7000 for each undocumented immigrant or smuggler caught. Police departments across the country are queuing up to get their hands on the new toy.
Politically, back in the USA, the far-off drone wars play very well. A recent poll put support for Obama’s counter-terrorism policy at 83 per cent among all voters, and no less than 77 per cent among his liberal base. In embracing drone war, Obama has eschewed the messy business of capturing supposed terrorists (all that Guantanamo and rendition business didn’t look good, not that he has closed the former or discontinued the latter), in favour of quick kills which present no risk to American troops and, crucially, leave no evidence behind. As many have pointed out, carefully constructed election-year coverage plays his killer drones up rather than down, which testifies to their political utility.
So far, so depressing. Powerful forces are propelling us into the Drone Age. What to do about it? Benjamin is not without her critics, who accuse CODEPINK of being in the orbit of the Democratic Party. And certainly, there is a whiff of liberal, “awareness raising” activism throughout this book. But Benjamin’s closing chapters set out the serious opposition that is building to the Drone Age, both in the US and internationally. Corporations, governments and universities around the world are complicit in the drone wars, and the book closes with extensive references and links to sources of further information and groups engaged in direct action. A model for the fight against drones, Benjamin argues, is the campaign to ban landmines in the 1990s, which credits its success to “several factors”:
It had a clear message and goal. Signature states agreed to six major commitments, among them the destruction of their mine stockpiles within four years and their mine areas cleared within ten years.
It had a campaign structure that was non-bureaucratic and strategy that was flexible.
It put together an “unusually cohesive and strategic partnership” of non-governmental organizations, United Nations agencies, and governments.
There was a favourable international context.
Benjamin’s sources concede that the forces pushing drones are probably too powerful, and have too much to gain, for a ban on all drones to be a realistic prospect. But the fight to stop the new generation of “autonomous” drones can be won, and needs to start now.
Apparently the Mafia gang in the oval office decided it would be a good idea to employ the same tactics used by those they decide to ‘off’. As in the days of yore when Romans would usurp a foreign army and incorporate the best of that foe’s weapons and tactics, so it is that the American Empire follows in the footsteps of its long deceased predecessor, the Roman Empire. It’s called the “double tap” — sending in a second predator drone strike shortly after the first responders come to the scene of the initial assassination strike to rescue any survivors or retrieve the dead, including the mourners of resultant funerals held days later. This is a policy of treating the population as guilty by association, exterminating any and all who might be linked, however remotely, with the intended target:
According to the NYT, the Administration assumed that, “people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good” and therefore all military age males in a strike zone could be targeted. A former senior counterterrorism official calls earlier drone targeting, “guilt by association.” Of signature strikes in Pakistan, a senior (apparently still-serving) official joked “that when the C.I.A. sees ‘three guys doing jumping jacks,’ the agency thinks it is a terrorist training camp.” And one of Obama’s top political advisors, David Axelrod, was attending targeting meetings, injecting a political taint on the program…
There is no due process for a “suspicious” person to be marked for death by drone. Ask George Zimmerman about that. The only requirement is vague and ethereal intelligence information which, if it’s as reliable as the Iraq WMD intel, appears by all accounts to be radicalizing the affected population tenfold. This boomerang effect will inevitably please our Military Industrial Complex’s constant search for new enemies to grind into profits of war. Death by Drone smacks of a street thug mentality similar to some cheesy gangster movie script. Francine Prose notes :
As drama, the scene is reminiscent of great moments in cable TV: Tony Soprano and his colleagues deciding whom to whack, The Wire’s Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell conferring on which of their child employees must be eliminated. But it’s one thing to see murders planned on television and quite another to read that this planning session is occurring in the White House Situation Room in January, 2010, and that President Obama has assumed the grim responsibility of casting the final vote on every death sentence that this jury (so obviously outside traditional legal channels) is handing down…
..[consider] the following quote from Michael Leiter, former Director of the National Counterterrorism Center:
You can pass a lot of laws,” Mr. Leiter said, “These laws are not going to get Bin Laden dead.
Get Bin Laden dead? With its execrable grammar, its calculated thuggishness, and, for all that we have been reading about the assumption of personal responsibility, its euphemistic avoidance of what is really at issue (to get dead is not the same as to kill, and it’s never laws but people who get other people dead), the quote suggests a new dispensation in which our government, at the highest level, has given Tony Soprano license to ignore the rule of law and murder actual human beings, some of them harmless civilians. Shouldn’t we feel more frightened than reassured by the knowledge that the leader of our country holds himself accountable for every one of these deaths?
You better believe that the financial elite who run this country do have OWS and any other social movement under 24/7 surveillance. Anything that strives to change the status quo of neoliberal capitalism will be undermined and crushed, whether through covert actions or co-optive schemes. Social justice, the environment, and the very habitability of planet earth are not on the agenda of the 1%’ers.
Michael Parenti’s son, Christian, gives the methods by which the capitalist power structure controls rising social movements:
Parenti starts by noting a paradox within the capitalist system. “Capitalism needs poverty,”(2) states Parenti unequivocally, arguing that without enough poor people around workers start demanding better conditions and higher wages. However, at the same time, capitalism is threatened by too much poverty. Poverty, he argues, tends to breed dissatisfaction, which makes revolt more likely. The question is “How do you have poverty and manage the threat of poverty?”(3) The answer, for Parenti, is by expanding social control mechanisms through the criminal justice system. The buildup of prisons and policing in the last two decades is not a result, as some might have it, of corporations expanding into the criminal justice system for profits.(4) Rather, the growth comes from an increasing need by the capitalist class (in collusion with the state) for greater social control, a growth necessary to keep the poor from revolting. Prisons, mandatory sentencing, and the “war on drugs” become the means by which the state is able to subdue the working class and keep poverty at a level that maximizes profits while minimizing dissent. Here we see a clear example of “hard-line” social control.
Parenti also describes a second, softer tactic of social control, mainly co-optation. He briefly describes the way that workers’ movements in the 1960s were co-opted by turning their leaders into administrators of low income housing and social services. This co-optation happened at a time when the Unites States was economically strong enough to absorb the poor in order to legitimize the system. However, the economic crisis in the 1970s put an end to this tactic and brought with it the harder modes of social control. Parenti concludes that, “In a class society, rule comes down to two things, as Machiavelli said. The prince has two choices. He can either treat men [sic] well or crush them. . . . Sometimes economic conditions are plush enough that people can be treated well, but more often then not, in a capitalist society, the ruling class, through the state, must crush and intimidate people to reproduce their system. And that is what the criminal justice system is all about.”(5)
And tying together the previous post about Drones and the earlier post about the State’s oppressive security and surveillance apparatus, we have this essay which contains a perfect example of how the Corporate State crushes dissent:
“…I see other things coming even sooner, caused by the same ruling elite’s insatiable greed and lust for power, and by the same political system’s actions in support of their goals.
First there is the accelerating march towards a police state, which began in earnest during the first year of the Bush/Cheney administration with the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the passage of the cynically named USA PATRIOT Act, and the launching of the so-called War on Terror, but which has been carried forward to a place I could never have imagined by Bush’s successor, Barack Obama. Today, police in America ride around with fully automatic M-16s in their squadcars, routinely taser people, including children, the elderly and the disabled, for minor offenses, and when confronted with a peaceful and permitted political demonstration, respond in full military SWAT gear, complete with guns, pepper spray, clubs, tear gas, and undercover agents who deliberately try to incite violence.
Just yesterday, long-time Latino activist Carlos Montes, 64, was arrested in Los Angeles during a joint LAPD/FBI SWAT-team midnight raid on his house. The charge: possessing illegal weapons. But Montes possessed only licensed guns in his home. The catch was, the FBI, which was clearly after Montes, a retired Xerox salesman, for political reasons, conveniently told local police that he was not allowed to register firearms because of a (get this!) 1969 felony conviction for allegedly throwing a coke can at a cop (Montes says he never threw such a can). Note that the police knew all about that conviction when Montes first registered his guns. He has not been in trouble with the law since then. Clearly he could have simply been informed that his gun registrations were invalid, and the guns had to be turned in. Why Montes, who has remained politically active and a critic of the government, was really arrested in this Gestapo-like manner became clear when an FBI agent hopped in the car with him right after he was picked up, and said, “I am from the FBI and I want to talk to you about the Freedom Road Socialist Organisation.” Montes is now facing a possible 22 years in jail for possessing legally registered guns that the LAPD has known for years that he had in his home, and that nobody ever cared about before. (I had to learn about this from the British newspaper the Guardian. The corporate media in America have covered up this outrageous political bust.)
America today is crawling with secret police–local, state and federal. They’re all connected too, through 72 so-called Fusion Centers that receive federal funds, but remain insulated from any kind of public oversight. Our phones and our internet communications are monitored automatically by National Security Agency super-computers that look for key words like “airport, exercise, flu, blizzard, bridge, or fundamentalism,” any of which prompt closer attention to what we are saying or writing.
Meanwhile, the president has claimed the right to detain–in secret, without charge–any American he deems to be a threat, and to hold such people indefinitely, without any recourse to lawyer or trial. He is even claiming the right to execute such captives. So much for the Fourth Amendment, as well as the First, Second, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth!
While I don’t think we live in a police state yet (having lived in China for two years, and visited there as a journalist over four other years, I know what a real one looks and feels like), but all the elements for one have been put in place and await only the throwing of a switch.
In the vision I clearly have, I feel strongly that someone, whether Obama or Romney, or whoever follows him, will throw that switch. When power is available to political leaders, they inevitably avail themselves of it. It’s just a question of time.
But there is another vision I have too. It has to do with America’s increasing international lawlessness and bellicosity. As the nation turns increasingly to technology for its aggressive purposes, through the use of armed robotic drones, and through internet attacks on purported “enemies,” it not only opens the door to others to do the same to us; it virtually assures that we will be attacked ourselves in like manner to what we are doing.
It was one thing to be the world’s superpower when being a superpower meant having the biggest ICBMs and the most nuclear warheads — weapons that required an enormous military budget and a massive industrial base. Drone technology and internet “weapons” are something else altogether. As Israel has demonstrated with its Stuxnet virus, a very small nation can easily construct a weapon of tremendous destructive power. Iran demonstrated its own capability in that area by using computer savvy to take control of a sophisticated US surveillance drone flying over its airspace, actually stealing it electronically, landing it, and now, apparently, back-engineering it. And remotely-piloted drones are not particularly complex technologically. Basic ones can be purchased off the shelf in any hobby shop.
How long will it be before foreign predator drones begin flying over US airspace, taking out targets without leaving any clue as to who was the attacker? How long before other countries begin destroying American power systems, industrial sites or military command centers using internet-based computer viruses?
This is a game that many people can play, and I predict that it will not be long before we Americans will rue the day this country began playing it….”
