To anyone not distracted by all the Kabuki theater in Washington and elsewhere, it is quite clear that we are past the twilight of democracy, and into the full darkness. Let me use an analogy most Americans will understand. We are into slasher movie territory here - blundering around naively in the dark while murderous psycopaths pick us off one at a time.
We are witnessing the permanent end to "open laws, honestly enforced" in this country. We are entering an era of lawless violence and destruction. The last time something like this happened, people who were awake saw the truth...
The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our time.
- Sir Edward Grey
...but they were powerless to stop the thirty year European Civil War, aka WW1 & 2.
Think I'm being a drama queen? Below the fold, I will cite at least ten instances of the violence in the darkness.
A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce, or a tragedy, or perhaps both.
- James Madison
This week, we saw legitimate reporters threatened by hired thugs as they tried to report on an ALEC convention. (ALEC being the shadowy creation of Freddy and Kreuger Koch.) At the same time, those with access to the internet witnessed the corporate media deliberately ignore massive (4% of the country) protests in Israel; we saw them ignore the conclusion of the S&P report, that it was GOP intransigence that caused the Tea Party Downgrade.
Increasingly, the real action in our society happens without the public's knowledge - either because the media refuses to do its job or because the action happens "in the dark", "under the radar". This is the antithesis of democracy. It is nothing more than warfare. Warfare by ambush, warfare by thievery, warfare by denial of rights.
In the last week:
1. We saw Mitt Romney get an anonymous contribution of $1 M through a cutout, phony company - the kind of games the CIA has played for half a century, but all completely legal under Citizens United. It then came out that he received two other such contributions.
2. If one were awake, one learned that it was an anonymous $1 Billion bet against US Treasuries that led to the "Tea Party Downgrade" by the hypocritical crooks at S&P.
In the weeks prior to that, we experienced:
3. Bernie Sanders uncovering the fact that the 2008 Bailout amounted to $16 Trillion, and secret loans went to numerous foreign banks. Do you think that if this information was revealed in 2008, the country would not have been so forgiving to the banksters?
4. The bottom 99% of the country and the House Democrats being essentially excluded from the behind-closed-doors negotiations/ capitulation on Debt Ceiling terrorism. Behind closed doors = the dark:
"Democracies die behind closed doors."
- Judge Damon Keith
At the end, the American people were presented with a rigged, take-it-or-leave-it ultimatum to swallow more supply-side poison.
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The hits on the bottom 99% are coming at a faster and faster rate as big money consolidates its grip on all the levers of power in this country. Just to remind you what anonymous muggings Americans have long since learned to tolerate.
1. We have an $80 B "black budget" that not even Congressmen on the oversight committees are fully briefed in. We learned this week that we have conducted operations in over 120 countries this year. Can you say "What was done was done for the good of the State?".
2. We still have completely arbitrary and secret "no fly" lists and lists of charities proscribed for "aiding the enemy". BTW, the recent passage of the latter, anti-democracy law is one of the causes of the Israeli demonstrations.
3. Corporations feel free to break the law against the left. The shutdown of Wikileaks donations at the mere request of the government was totally illegal; but its OK if you're a corporate person.
4. Increasingly, GOP politicians have adopted the tactic of refusing to answer questions from reporters. Michelle Bachmann has been quite aggressive on this, with her guards roughing up Brian Ross. Ditto the Tea Party candidates, like the Governor candidate in Alaska with the militia bodyguards.
5. The NSA continues to wiretap every phone call; and the consolidation of the physical infrastructure of the Internet makes mass censorship ever more possible. Legal scholars of the Internet decry the complete lack of transparency surrounding the shuttering of websites, and they warn against the manipulation of search results.
6. Americans tolerate the increasing refusal of corporations to respond to grievances. The whack-a-mole game of trying to get satisfaction from a customer "help" line or website is the new form of road rage.
7. Innovation is being strangled by anonymous "patent troll" lawsuits from bogus "companies" who have purchased intellectual property for the sole purpose of extorting money from real companies. A recent episode of This American Life discusses this in depth.
8. Even the pushback against the corporate state are anonymous - most famously, the Internet hacker group "Anonymous". We are now familiar with DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks and "zombie computers". Corporate states launch their own anonymous attacks, like the StuxNet virus.
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We have reached the opposite situation that faced democracy in the 1700s, when Madison wrote:
Despotism can only exist in darkness, and there are too many lights now in the political firmament to permit it to remain anywhere, as it has heretofore done, almost everywhere.
- James Madison
With tons of money and tons of computers, the elites can shoot out the lights faster than we can replace them. The darkness grows.
Its hard to see solutions when you are in the dark.