If Edward Snowden is proving one thing, it’s this: in 2013, Planet Earth isn’t big enough to protect the American version of “dissidents.” Instead, it looks ever more like a giant prison with a single implacable policeman, judge, jury, and jailer.Truthout — | News Analysis
How to Be a Rogue Superpower
Tom Engelhardt | TomDispatch
Global totalitarianism is only possible for an empire. When is the president going to stop the pretense and start using his real title.
What Englehardt calls "deterence" is, of course, intimidation. Is the next step public execution.
What Englehardt calls "deterence" is, of course, intimidation. Is the next step public execution.
I think the tide is starting to turn here. The Humphrey email is only part of the mix. The Obama administration statements, actions and demeanor are unhinged and out of all proportion to the alleged national security threats posed by Snowden's revelations.
ReplyDeleteAll Snowden has revealed is the existence and names of programs whose existence people already suspected.
The Obama administration position has been reduced to, "The American people cannot be allowed to know of the existence of these programs, because if they did know, they would oppose them."
My impression of the President is that he is a psychopath desiring ultimate power. Secrecy gave him the opportunity to move in that direction and now that he is exposed his reactions are becoming, as Dan says, unhinged and extreme. He's now provoking diplomatic incidents with (apparently) no concern for the fallout, so long as he gets what he wants, which is Edward Snowden and resumption of business-as-usual. It's been fascinating to watch as the Pesident's sadistic tendencies have come to the fore since his Hopey McChange campaign in 2008 (look how many people I've killed, Manning is guilty, harsh treatment toward people who expose illegality, vendetta-esque behavior).
ReplyDeleteI recently listened to Andrew P. Napolitano give the talk entitled "Reflections on the Loss of Liberty" [given at an 2012 Mises convention]:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiXup3fWX7w
The talk facilitated recall of a bit of American history which currently seems quaint. My interest was not to learn about Austrian economics, but to recall the sharp controversies which have persisted through the past several centuries because those who profess to wish to govern all too frequently have very strong biases [including very many flawed concepts] regarding the nature of government as related to concepts of "public purpose" [a phrase frequently used by Warren M].
The Constitution was considered necessary to delineate privileges and responsibilities of government at an interval after the Revolutionary War when the Declaration of Independence was recognized to be an inadequate guideline and when the threats of popular democracy were becoming a concern to the [1%] elites. The Constitution was written to provide a guideline for governance; however, the Bill of Rights was a necessary add-on that facilitated wide-spread acceptance. Over the past 40 - 50 years, degeneration of politics in America has gone much further than most Americans can imagine. The extent of capture of the American Empire by the elites is such that even if some variation of MMT were ever adopted to prolong the persistence of capitalism as a popular description of the American economy, the degeneration of the culture is likely to continue unabated.