Category: Civil Liberties Page 6 of 8

An American Future

On December 6, 2010

So, I’m peering into my looking glass today, or rather tonight, as the snow eddies down, the first snowfall of winter, and it’s winter I see for America, and for the world.

It’s clear at this point that America is only the shell of a democracy, and instead is run by a self-perpetuating oligopoly whose only law, whose only imperative, is its own survival and aggrandizement, no matter what the cost to America, to American citizens, or to anyone else in the world who is not part of the western elite class. The same is, with America switched to Europe, true of the oligopoly who run Europe.

This is not a stable situation because the economics of it is not stable. In order to bail themselves out they are enforcing austerity policies which are wreaking and will continue to wreak economic havoc in the real physical and social economies of the countries whose policies they control. They are contracting the franchise, the membership of the oligopoly, pushing more and more people out of it, even as they impoverish millions of peoples at the bottom end of the economy.

They have created a two tier system of laws, where important people who commit trillions of dollars of systematic fraud are not prosecuted and where war criminals responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands are winked at, while small people are locked up for the most minor of crimes, where bankruptcy is essentially impossible for the small people, but the big people skate and are given whatever amount of money is necessary to bail them out of any bad decisions they have made.

They have created a surveillance state where they track in real time, without warrants, the movements of citizens through cameras and by tracking credit cards, debit cards and even loyalty cards. Their servants stare at the naked bodies of everyone who wants to travel by air or grope their genitals, inflicting sexual humiliation on the public as a matter of course.

When embarassed, as with Wikileaks leaks of diplomatic communiques, their response is a deranged manhunt combined with a truly Soviet-style screaming of “I can’t hear you” as they try and ban soldiers, the Library of Congress and public servants from reading information everyone has access to. This isn’t just authoritarian, it isn’t just jejeune, it is delusional. Every principal and teacher knows that if you tell people they shouldn’t read something, that will make them want to read it. If they wanted people to think they shouldn’t read these revelations, the reaction should have been muted, “ho, hum, nothing there”, not a deranged attempt to shut down anyone who mirrors the Wikileaks site and threats against anyone who dares read the information.

Meanwhile, in Congress, politicians of both parties, with Obama’s blessing, are set to extend tax cuts. A few months ago the mantra was “deficits, deficits, deficits”, but now deficits don’t matter. This isn’t to argue whether they do or not, simply to note that their real ruling ideology is that governments should only spend money on rich people, and that money spent on the middle class or poor is bad.

It will also, and I guarantee this, not help the economy. The past 30 years, and the past 10 years in particular, have been a huge experiment in tax-cutting, and for ordinary people, the result has been stagnation and now an absolute decline. Because ordinary people do not have pricing power, either as workers for their labor (since there are plenty of people who need jobs) or as consumers (because the oligopolies who sell food, energy, telecom and so on know you must have their services) every single red cent of tax cuts which go to the middle and lower class will be taken away by corporations and the rich. Those corporations and rich will then use that money to either play leveraged financial games or to offshore jobs to low cost, low regulation domiciles. Not only do tax cuts not do any good, they accelerate the loss of US jobs. No, this isn’t what you’ve been told, indeed propagandized, for the last thirty years. But how has trickle down economics worked out for you? Are you going to believe your lying eyes, or the talking heads who tell you that tax cuts create jobs?

So the economic situation is going to get worse. That doesn’t mean there won’t be cyclical ups and downs, just that the trend line is down, down, down. And every trend line reaches its end. My guess, at this point, is that the US has only one business cycle left before a Russian style collapse. The rest of the world just does not need to sell you oil for lousy dollars which don’t buy the future and don’t buy anything else, either. At this point what must be gotten from the US are a few capital goods, jetliners (well, from the US or Europe), some software,the very best military equipment and some miscellanea. That’s it. That’s all.

The rest can be bought from other countries. Now, if the next tech revolution was going to happen in the US, they’d have to keep their hands in, but it’s now clear that, no, that isn’t going to happen either. American producers don’t, American consumers can only do so if heavily subsidized by China, and American technology is more and more a joke at anything other than killing people.

The US is going to be cut loose.

The reaction to that will be war. Maybe in Iran, maybe in Korea, maybe in Saudi Arabia. Where doesn’t really matter, but it’s going to happen, because it’s the only card the US will have left and after Obama destroys the Democratic party by gutting Social Security, Veterans benefits and overseeing the cutting of Medicaid, yes, President Teabag is going to get in, whether Obama is primaried or not. And the only way to both provide stimulus and get the resources the US is going to need and no one else will soon want to sell to the US, is going to be war.

I have said it before, and I will say it again. If you can get out, get out. If you can’t get out, but you have children, get them overseas—send them on exchanges, send them to overseas relatives for a year, send them to a foreign university (they’re better and cheaper). Get them out, even if you can’t get out.

The game isn’t over in the US, but the smart money is that the first revolution in the US isn’t going to be a revolution of the left, it’s going to be a nutbar revolution from the right, and it is going to be extraordinarily ugly.

In the meantime, if you have to stay, make sure you’re on good terms with your neighbors, your spouse, your friends and your family. Figure out how to grow food wherever you are and how to reduce your dependence on anything but people you trust. (Don’t trust any corporation.) And, if you can, organize. Organize locally, organize at the State level, organize nationally. Understand the age of compromise is over. It is now too late to save the old system. It’s over. We tried, and we failed. It is beyond “reform”, it is going to flame out, the only question is how many people it will burn to death as it does so.

Wikileaks And The End of the Open Internet

By Ian Welsh

On December 4, 2010

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Let’s just state the obvious here: we’re seeing the end of the open internet with what is being done to Wikileaks. It’s one thing for Amazon to toss them, it’s another thing entirely to refuse to propagate their domain information. This has been coming for quite some time, and Wikileaks is not the first domain to be shut down in the US, it is merely the highest profile. Combined with the attempt to make NetFlix pay a surcharge or lose access to customers, this spells the end of the free internet.

The absurdity, the sheer Orwellian stupidity of this is epitomized by the State Department telling students at elite colleges not to read the leaks, or they won’t get jobs at State. As if anyone who isn’t curious to read what is in the leaks, who doesn’t want to know how diplomacy actually works, is anyone State should hire. In a sane world, the reaction would be the opposite: no one who hadn’t read them would be hired.

This is reminiscent of the way the old Soviet Union worked, with everyone being forced to pretend they don’t know what they absolutely do know, and blind conformity prized over ability.

Meanwhile a worldwide alert is out for the horrible Julian Assange for rape, aka: not using a condom. I certainly won’t defend not using a condom when your partner wants you to, if that’s what happened, but those guilty of such crimes don’t usually have worldwide manhunts called against them, do they? Meanwhile the squishy left wrings its hands and wails. Let me put it to you this way: no one who was willing to put themselves out there the way Assange did is not a massive risk taker. Going into this he had to know that eventually he would be locked up, discredited, killed or some combination. Prudent men and women who would never do anything stupid (like sleep with groupies) would not have created Wikileaks in the first place and would not have leaked the inflammatory material that Assange has put out there in the second place.

In the spirit of a rambling post, let’s move back to the internet. Leaving aside censorship, which is older than writing, and is banal, boring and predictable, especially from states on auto-pilot to authoritarianism like the US, the economic model to use when thinking about the internet is the old railroads of the 19th and early 20th century. The railroads were the only way to get your products to market if you weren’t on the coast, a major river or canal. They were hated, loathed with a passion, by farmers. Why? Because they took all the surplus value, all the profit. If you weren’t willing to pay, you went out of business. Even if you were willing to pay, you wound up in hock to them. You worked for the railroad, period. All or virtually all of what would have been profit went to them.

When the only way to get your product to market is an unregulated monopoly or oligopoly they will take it all. The result isn’t just unprofitable businesses, it’s failed businesses and businesses that never get off the ground, because they can’t afford to pay the freight, or more accurately, the vig. Oligopolies in between producers and consumers always strangle the economy. Always.

And, on top of p0litical repression of free speech, that’s what’s coming to the internet near you. The essentially free and open internet is dying and it will soon be dead.

(Note: text changed from Hilary Clinton to State department telling students)

The real reason for grope-athon and porn-scanners

By Ian Welsh

On November 21, 2010

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Matt Stoller notes:

Why does flying sucks more today? Rich people fly in private jets, so the powerful no longer hear complaints from their friends.

This comes back to what I wrote before, but with respect to public schools and the Iraq war. If important people don’t have skin in the game, things don’t get fixed and the quality of whatever experience they don’t experience doesn’t get better. Everyone, most especially the rich and powerful, must fly on the same planes, must be subject to the draft, must have their kids go to the same schools and so on. Only then will the general quality be high.

To the extent possible the rich have created an entire alternative structure: they don’t fly on the same planes, their kids don’t go to the same schools, they don’t fight in the wars, they have hotels that you will never enter (can you afford 50K a night?) They live in a system parallel to that of ordinary people.

The rich must never, ever, be allowed to opt out of the shared social and economic experience. Fly first class? Sure, but not on private jets. Drive in a limo? Sure, but not fly in a helicopter avoiding congestion. Get a room to themselves in the hospital? Sure, but not jump the queue for treatment in front of anyone.

As soon as you let money allow people to avoid the queue entirely, those people with power will not care about what is happening to ordinary people anymore.

This is true of general inequality as well. Why don’t the rich take the decline of the middle class seriously? Why aren’t they extending UI? Why do they yawn about the current economic crisis? Why did they do nothing to stop it from happening when any idiot could see it coming?

Because it’s not their experience. For over 30 years they have gotten rich, rich, rich! Everyone they know who matters to them — their friends, their spouses, their mistresses and boy-toys, their children — are doing not “just fine” but gangbusters! And after the 2008 financial collapse, their wealth has rebounded and corporate profits are at near all-time highs.

Life is good, baby! There aren’t any real problems. Not for the rich. And, as George Bush so memorably said, “who cares what you think?”

The porno-scanners are making important people rich, and those important people fly on private jets. So, what exactly is the problem?

I don’t see a problem…

The “Mosque” controversy and bigotry

By Ian Welsh

On August 23, 2010

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Ok, enough. As Glenn Greenwald points out, this ginned up controversy is now about bigotry. Or, to put it another way, it’s about who the acceptable out-group to hate is in America.

Apparently it’s Muslims.

This is turning into a propaganda coup for Islamic fundamentalists, who are able to point at this controversy and say that Americans hate Islam. And, frankly, from what I’ve seen, with even some of my readers saying they oppose the “Mosque” (really a chapel in a community center), they’re right. Americans do hate Muslims.

As many people have pointed out, even George goddamn Bush made sure that this sort of bigotry didn’t burn out of control, but lacking his leadership, it is now acceptable to hate Muslims and say they shouldn’t exercise their constitutional rights.

Meanwhile, employment is sucking wind, the economy is heading into a second downleg of the Depression, the war in Afghanistan continues its disastrous course, Mexico is turning into a failed state and on and on. America has a 1,000 real problems it isn’t dealing with, but it has time for a ginned up bullshit controversy of a “Mosque”.

This is a step down from the usual celebrity gossip and missing blondes who usually serve as American escapism from reality because it reveals something really fucking ugly about Americans and their hatred of a religious minority. Glenn’s right about that. Let’s let him have the last word:

Obviously, not all opponents of Park51 are as overtly hateful as those in that video — and not all opponents are themselves bigots — but the position they’ve adopted is inherently bigoted, as it seeks to impose guilt and blame on a large demographic group for the aberrational acts of a small number of individual members. (my emphasis)

Politico notices Hispanics Leaving Democrats

By Ian Welsh

On August 11, 2010

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This is something I’ve been on about for a while, because the Hispanic activists I know are almost all absolutely livid about Democrats in general and Obama in specific. The reason isn’t just that comprehensive immigration reform appears dead in the water, it’s that Obama not only continued Bush’s brutal “enforcement only” policy, which breaks up families but has actually ramped it up.

To put it simply, Hispanics are the future of America. Their population numbers are growing, fast, and Democrats need to sew them up. And their identification with Democrats is dropping, because Democrats are attacking them. It is quite common for citizen Hispanics to know undocumented immigrants; for those immigrants to be their friends or even family. And the outright prejudice that simmers behind anti-immigrant fervor is something they experience in their daily lives. Seeing Obama and Congressional Democrats pandering to that prejudice—spending more money and sending more men to the border and for raids, is not endearing Democrats to them.

They feel, in a word, betrayed. And as Politico notes, the Hispanic media has turned on Democrats as a result.

I don’t know why Democrats feel that kicking their own base: women, gays, Hispanics and such, is good politics. It hasn’t helped them with independents or Republicans, all it has done is demoralize the base in a base election year.

“We’re slightly less bad than the other guys” isn’t much of a slogan. And in some cases (abortion, immigration), it’s not even clear that it’s actually true. Democrats added new restrictions on abortion, and have ramped up anti-immigrant enforcement.

Promises are all very nice, but as with the Employee Free Choice Act, DOMA, DADT, and civil liberties, Obama’s rhetoric on Hispanic issues has been opposed to his actions.

Obama Claims Right to not just assassinate American citizens without trial but to deny them the right to a lawyer

By Ian Welsh

On August 3, 2010

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Seriously, fuck Obama and fuck anyone who defends this shit. Oh, I know, if you’re even thinking of defending this, you’re a moral imbecile, but you should at least be able to understand that unless you’re in the top .1%, you, personally, will eventually have only the rights the least amongst us do.

The government should not (I won’t say “does not” because they do it anyway) have the right to punish anyone without a timely trial before their peers, the right to see the evidence against them and the right to face their accusers.

I will add what should be obvious: while much worse than the no-fly list, this is a linear extrapolation of the no fly list (and a cousin to the idea of plea bargaining virtually everything). Punishment without a trial. We will see whether murdering people without a trial is still a step too far for US courts.

America cannot be America at perpetual war

By Ian Welsh

On July 4, 2010

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On this, the 4th of July, I, a Canadian, want to talk to Americans about their values. Perhaps that’s presumptuous. Perhaps I should just shut it and say “it’s none of my business.”

I could argue that it’s my business on purely pragmatic grounds: where goes the US, Canada often follows. We are a US subject state in all but name, and your failure to fix your problems makes it much harder and sometimes impossible to fix our problems.

But forget that. I don’t primarily care about the US because of Canadian interests, I care about the US because I care about the American dream.

I sometimes think that many of us who aren’t Americans believe in American ideals more than American citizens do. We imbibe, in other countries, a particularly pure form of the American civil religion. We hear about doing the right thing, about always giving the accused a day in court, about freedom of speech, about division of power and about rights that are rights not because they are given by government to its subjects, but because they are inalienable human rights.

Oh, as time goes by, you realize that America has always had problems with its virtues. You learn of the red scares, the Japanese internments, the genocide against the Indians, slavery and Jim Crow.

And yet… and yet, both people and countries are defined not just by their failures, but by the ideals they strive towards. America’s ideals, and its striving towards them, were what gripped the world and gave others hope. If the American experiment in freedom, in rights, could succeed, then perhaps it could succeed in other places.

But what we see today is the American Dream dying. Not just the dream of every generation being better off than the one before, though that’s dying, but the dream of a country where the citizens actually had rights, where they actually were free.

There are a number of reasons, but I think Jefferson’s prescient phase sums it up best:

I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies

I’m not so sure that banks are more dangerous than standing armies, but certainly the two of them together have brought the US to where it is.

The problem with standing armies is simple enough: if you’ve got one, politicians are always tempted to use it. When it’s a professional standing army, so the majority of the population is not effected by its use, that temptation increases. When the army is the most powerful (though not the most effective) in the world, well, that temptation increases even further.

War is an executive function. A war cannot be run by a legislature. As a result, during war the power of the executive grows. In the US the executive can now hold people without charge indefinitely, meaning President has the ability to lock people up without a trial. If he does bother to grant a trial, the accused does not have the right to face their accusers or to see the evidence against them and evidence obtained through torture can be used.

The President can spy on any American he wants, and you have essentially no recourse, since it is illegal to let you know that you’re being spied on. The President can declare American citizens combatants and have them assassinated, which is capital punishment without a trial.

Meanwhile, instead of the whole country being a free speech zone, free speech is only allowed in small areas if anyone important is nearby. Lord save the important people from having to actually see the people whom their policies are impoverishing and whose rights they are destroying.

The right of association has been severely crippled, since the executive can now declare any organization a terrorist organization without any trial and without any appeal. Any American who works with “terrorists” is a criminal. Even if they are, say, like Jimmy Carter, helping Hezbollah participate in fair elections.

To sum up, the President can do all of the following, in most cases without meaningful appeal or a trial: execute Americans, imprison people indefinitely, spy on anyone he wants, forbid people from flying, torture people, kidnap people, forbid people from associating with whoever they want, and deny them the right to speak freely anywhere except in small cordoned off zones.

This is America?

This is what the American dream has come to?

Your founders warned you about this. Warned you that standing armies and unrestrained banks would cost you your freedom.

And the sad thing is that most Americans are ok with it.

Are Americans who don’t believe that everyone is endowed with inalienable rights still Americans worth the name?

That is my question to you on July 4th.

Happy Independence Day.

What Actually Happened at the G20 Protests

By Ian Welsh

On June 28, 2010

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There’s been a lot of crying about “thugs and anarchists” in Toronto. I live about 4 blocks from where some of the vandalism occurred, though I wasn’t there at the time.

As best I can tell, what happened is that for about an hour, the Black Bloc protesters clearly and visibly prepared for action, with both the police and other, non-violent protesters able to see they were doing so. The number of Black Bloc vandals seems to have been between 50 to 100, certainly not more than 200. (The police had 20,000 men.)

The police actually withdrew, leaving behind police cars for the Black Block to torch. Which they then did. The Black Bloc then proceeded up Yonge street (the main north/south street in downtown Toronto), vandalizing as they went, and eventually many headed over to Queen’s Park, the Provincial capital. Two hours after the first violence, the police finally take action, ensuring that there are plenty of videos of police cars burning and vandalism that would not have occurred if they had taken action earlier.

According to the police, rather than confront a maximum of 200 protesters, they withdrew behind the barrier around the G20 meetings and let them vandalize downtown Toronto for 2 hours.

At the end of the day the people who matter never even saw any protests and the 1 billion dollar police presence and suspension of civil liberties was “justified” by vandalism and burning police cars.

Simply put, the police decided that they couldn’t spare say 2,000 out of their 20,000 men to stop 200 vandals. This was a deliberate decision to allow downtown to be vandalized.

I leave it as an exercise for readers to decide if this was a matter of incompetence, or if it was a deliberate strategy. And if it was deliberate strategy, just what they were trying to accomplish with their strategy.

Of course, along the way Canadian Civil Liberties observers were arrested as well, and protesters were not allowed to see lawyers.

I am ashamed to be Canadian today, and I am ashamed of my governments, at all levels.

(A video of a clearly peaceful protest nonetheless attacked, after the jump)