This NSA document dump has created more heated name-calling and irrational, one-dimensional posting than I have seen in quite some time. But this kind of internecine rage is to be expected in the middle of a civil war. Civil wars are fratricidal. Fathers kill sons. Brothers kill brothers. (Don't mean to be sexist.)
Like the last one in the USA, this one is about slavery. This time, its about corporate slavery. For thirty years, corporations have been sending our jobs to the slave labor conditions of third world countries (see their latest poster child, Bangladesh). For the first twenty years, they had to be coy about it; but since the Bush selection/coup d'etat, its been open season on the middle class and on our democracy.
There is only one thing worth choosing sides over in this war (of which the NSA fracas is but one front): are you in favor of or against corporate slavery, of corporate ownership of government and thereby of the state monopoly of coercion? The rest of the media noise and the bloveating on these boards is noise, jamming, propaganda.
This is not about personalities, not about Snowden, nor Obama, nor the Koch Brothers, not about their personalities nor their characters. Those are distractions.
This is about how we shall be governed. Shall we be governed by secret laws with secret interpretations from secret courts that send "enemy combatants" to secret prisons to be tortured? Shall there be gigantic databases that amount to, "turnkey tyranny", time bombs just awaiting the next Dick Cheney to get into office (by either corporate purchase of the entire media/electoral system or by more blatant manipulation via the SCOTUS)? Or even worse, a drug cartel buys access to this data to gain political immunity. Shall we extend the "New Jim Crow" to everyone who makes any trouble at all? Shall we continue to outsource the coercion and the state "monopoly of violence" to private prison corporations, private security contractors (like BAH), and mercenary corporations with theocratic owners (like Blackwater/Xe)? What could possibly go wrong?
In fact, this current civil war (what Ted Kennedy called "our Cold Civil War") is not even a fair fight. Its as though the Confederacy had conquered South America (in our case, they trans-shipped our industrial plant and know-how to China) and used the money it got from running slavery there to buy off the Union. Then, instead of eliminating slavery, they spread it to every corner of the USA.
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What little resistance to corporate slavery exists in today's America is barely effective, more like guerilla warfare than a serious opposition. The handful of honest Democratic legislators in Congress do not have any influence on the corporate-owned party leadership (can you say Penny Pritzger? or the MMJ before financial crime DOJ). Anyone seen Obama going to the mat for Elizabeth Warren's bill to stop screwing student slaves? And, they are slaves. Their debt cannot be discharged or rolled over, even by the death of the student. In that case, their parents are on the hook. This is inter-generational debt bondage straight out of the seventeenth century.
If you were unclear before Occupy was smashed by a DHS-coordinated operation that was to the direct benefit of Wall St., you should be a little clearer after Bradley Manning and Mr. Snowden: the government (no matter which corporate party is in power) is not here to protect citizens from corporations. Its here to protect corporations from citizens, from democracy, from anyone they can't buy, intimidate, or disappear. Those inconvenient people go on watch lists, and no-fly lists. They get their taxes audited. They get their contracts broken, their unions smashed, and their organizations eliminated by Congressional Bills of Attainder (ACORN). They get a security proctoscopy from the likes of Mr. Snowden.
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Our democracy is pretty much beyond the political and economic event horizon - until climate change and economic collapse from looting by the 1% makes the whole system crash.
But, I will be damned if I will sit here and listen to people substitute the irrelevant minutiae offered by the corporate media, and by lots of trolls on this and other political boards, for the fundamental issue that is right in front of us. Is America just going to accept being turned into a continent-sized company store with a company police force that would make the Stasi jealous?
This NSA scandal is one of the fews rays of daylight we will ever have into the increasingly dark and out of control "intelligence" world. A view into the $80 B/year we spend supposedly fighting "terrorism", when we are really building an open air prison for everyone who is not a billionaire or a highly-talented and loyal lackey of a billionaire.
These canards like "your position is the same as hated politico X", or "hated politico Y agrees with you" are juvenile conversation stoppers or fight starters. It really gets me mad when people claim the NSA leak is "just more GOP scandal mongering". Excuse me? Is Snowden a Republican? Does it even matter? Is Glenn Greenwald a corporatist? I don't think so. Did the GOP have the NSA flat out lie to Congress, as these Top Secret documents demonstrate? Tell me another one.
All those types of arguments are trolls. Why? Because in a civil war, you see this kind of shattering of alliances and strange bedfellows ten times a day.
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My point, if there is one, is that we are moving into the final phase (The imposition of corporate rule via the TPP and its evil EU twin treaty.) of the consolidation of our corporate-ruled, worker-hating police state. We have put in place the kind of surveillance they use in "Communist China" (funny how that phrase vanished from the GOP lexicon). We have a limited (subject to massive surveillance, DHS cointelpro-style infiltration, and a hostile media environment) simulacra of democracy; and that only until the first time the GOP steal back the Presidency.
YMMV, but I intend to make the best use of that simulacra. Unless Morpheus shows up and shoves the blue pill down my throat.