- Very suspicious! Edward Snowdon is a low-clearance guy with access to very highly secret documents.
- Hiding in plain sight? I sort of get this, that by telling everyone where he is at, he can’t be secretly killed.
- Good timing! In the wake of the Boston hoax, people are in a high state of tension, angry and scared. This spying system will not be dismantled.
It smells like a PSYOP to me, the National Security State telling is that we are being watched. They have emerged from the shadows, the velvet gloves taken off. It’s a little bit warmer now in our pot of water.
There are no “terrorists” of any note outside of FBI, Langley, Military Intelligence, Mossad and MI5 and 6. If they were worried about terrorism, they’d bomb Washington, Tel Aviv and London, do Hari Kari, make honorable exits, leave us alone, stop scaring the shit out of us.
It’s about us. We are the enemy. It is the people who smell a rat that the rat is watching.
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Russia is “ready to consider” offering Snowdon asylum, according to Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s press secretary. That’s one notch on the “this could be real” side.
Glenn Greenwald tweets “We are going to have a lot more significant revelations that have not yet been heard over the next several weeks and months.”
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If anyone is wondering why NSA is doing this, it is simple: They can. No one stopped them after 9/11, and now no one can. Even if we have some mass organizing movement to put a halt to this, how can we ever be sure. Everyone one is vulnerable now. No one has looked specifically at your or my information, but it is accessible. That’s the whole point, a gun that can be loaded at any time.
Imagine if they can store and access information on millions of us, how easy it is for them to corner a few hundred members of congress their staffs, media personalities like Anderson Cooper or even your local talking head. Information is power. Then perhaps you can understand why William Colby can say that “the Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media.” Owning did not necessarily come about by purchase.
Take it a step further – how did we Learn that Anthony Weiner was sexting? How did we learn about John Edwards’ affair? Every one of them are being watched, and most have something – an extramarital affair, drug habit, “secret” bank account. Even if they are clean, they can be framed easily enough.
There’s nothing that can be done. It happened right under our noses because of 9/11, a false flag attack done specifically for this purpose. We did not investigate it, we believed the lies, we allowed them to pass and keep USAPATRIOT. The republic was already stressed, not having had a worthwhile president since JFK, so it’s hard to point at 9/11 as a red line. If there was a time that brought about the repression we now live under, it would be the ‘1960’s’, or that period from 1965-75 when we had information, organization, freedom of expression, movement politics. That scared the shit out of the overlords, and it has been downhill since. We’ve been dumbed down, kids are saddled with inescapable debt, jobs are now prisons and even essential to get access to health care.
The word gets bandied about, but people do not know what it means: “Freedom.” We cannot have it without fighting for it, and Americans long ago forgot what it was and how to fight. There will be no uproar over this, certainly no uprising. We’re too scared.
If anyone knows a way out of this problem, keep it to yourself or write it down on a piece of paper. Otherwise, your information is being shared with the National Security State.
It goes back to the Powell Memo. Worth a read.
Piece of Mindful 
Been a long time since I read Orwell’s book.
I went 5 for 10. Give it a try.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/hnigatu/orwell-or-obama
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I got six. Surprises. I don’t like the “Obama” centeredness of it, so you should realize that Orwell’s 1984 was published before Obama was born, and yet the principles of totalitarianism hold true. You should probably think in terms of ideas that transcend people rather than current demons.
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This lady was WAY ahead of you. Check her out. She’s very interesting.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pI–BnrwcHQ
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I did try to check her out, but Internet is spotty and video streaming nearly impossible, even as it is a radio broadcast. I’ll take a look at her when we are back stateside.
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Seems to me this has special implications for the media and the 1st Amendment. Will they, or won’t they, investigate and report what they find back to the people? If they won’t expose the criminal secrets of corporations and governments there is no real freedom of speech, and nothing left of government “by and for the people.” The power elites have conquered and won if journalism is dead. The talking heads are spinning as never before. This must be important.
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I think it was Bill Binney who was on the Daily Show after the 2004 election and claimed that the government was eavesdropping on every journalist in the country – at THAT time. The silence was deafening – not one mention the day after that I saw, which gives some credence to his claims. Fear permeates that profession.
Not sure it was Binney, but the the timeframe is right. anyway, it’s like a trap being sprung. Now that we’re in it, how do we get out? It’s complicated by people being so scared of terrorism, not knowing that virtually all of that emanates from the same source as the surveillance. We’re in pretty deep doo-doo. I have no solution but ground-level organizing using paper communication and carrier pigeons.
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government was eavesdropping on every journalist in the country
My experience with government is that it is largely incompetent and obsessed with internal politics. If we are being watched by incompetent and distracted people, do we have that much to fear?
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History says yes. The psychopaths, generally untalented, can’t run it on their own and so hire technicians to manage it for them. That, to me, appears to be why this young man could so easily penetrate the system. If that is what happened.
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)History tells us that large, centralized governments often turn against the people. You advocate for such on the grounds of fairness and efficiency. Yet the thing often runs off the rails, and you then complain that tyrants and psychopaths have co-opted the proceedings. If power corrupts so consistently, maybe we should keep it dispersed.
)If the psychopaths are hiring and managing technicians that so completely control things, maybe they aren’t so untalented.
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It’s complex I agree and I don’t have the answers, but it does appear to me that high rates of taxation on legacy income is part of the solution. The problem is not government, per se, but pockets of concentrated wealth that invariably take control of the political system. High taxation of this wealth prevents high concentration and also discourages disinvestment, keeping employment high.
I think Canadians have it right that way, but they are being taken down our path. But we’ve got so many problems here – money corrupts politics, media is controlled by wealth, we’re being spied on, our military is out of control, poverty is spreading, people are dumbed down, that to say there’s a magical fix is naive. this will take decades to fix, just as it has taken decades to create.
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high rates of taxation on legacy income is part of the solution
I don’t agree, but I wouldn’t fight this. Our modern gov’t spends so much, this legacy taxation is small potatoes. And I don’t see a lot of evidence that what the gov’t spends money on is any better than what the rich do with it.
It is troubling that our elites are more “walled off” from the bulk of society today. Back when Colstrip units 3 and 4 were being built, the CEO of Mt. Power moved his family to Colstrip and lived in a trailer. Starkly different from latter day CEOs of such a company.
I’m not sure how much wealth drives politics. Wealth mainly lets people not suffer the consequences of politics. Much of modern US politics revolves around having the proper attitudes about race, women, gays, and immigrants of color. The burden of our policies of racial/gender hiring and mouthing pieties about hiring immigrant scab labor fall on the non-wealthy.
And the military is out of control in the sense that they are totally whipped by political correctness, eager to offer themselves as a sacrifice for including gays, women, muslims, etc. The plots you imagine them involved in are laughable.
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I agree on elitism.
From a taxation standpoint, small changes can make big differences. Just a small tax on financial transactions would stifle computerized trading, raise billions, and not affect small investors who don’t trade much.
In the same vein, the former system with a 70% tax on passive (now called “legacy”) income coupled with non-deductibility of dividends by corporations gave investors a choice: Turn it over to the government, or leave it be. It was not specifically meant to raise revenue, as most investors wisely chose to leave it in place, make investments and take the investment tax credit, or make charitable contributions. Tax policy was a social tool.
That’s wise tax policy. Contrary to folk wisdom, the “Reagan” tax cuts did not encourage investment, but instead encouraged disinvestment. I think economic numbers and the current depression that mires us bear this out. Investors pulled the plug on American industry. Tax policy encouraged this behavior.
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Maybe. When tax rates were 70%, there were lots of loopholes.
I try to look at larger trends. From 1924 to 1965, the US had a highly restrictive immigration policy. After “65, immigration gradually spooled up and messed things up. White male culture after WWII commercialized the automobile, put a man on the moon, and built a huge middle class. In the sixties, we put women in the work force and messed everything up. The civil rights era unleashed Black pathology and messed everything up. Bwaahaahaahaa.
Other things, too. Our industry was unchallenged after WWII, but Germany and Japan eventually rebuilt with even more modern industrial tools. Stuff like that.
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The timeline is OK in my opinion but cause and effect are up for discussion.
Just a word about “loopholes.” They were meant to be there, to give wealth holders a choice: Do something useful with the money, like invest, leave it invested, give it to charity, or pay tax at 70%. It was good incentive. Along came Reagan and new incentives were created – disinvest, accumulate, invest in luxury, send capital abroad in search of even better deals, or to tax havens where there are no taxes at all.
My old bosses, both millionaires, each year in December planned their tax bill by prepaying drilling costs on new oil wells and making very large charitable donations.
A lot of the “charity” was things like concert halls, private foundations, Catholic education – things of no concern to me. They also invested in shelters for runaway teens, the local hospital building fund … All due to the 70% tax rate. You may not like government-supplied incentives like that, but the other side of the coin is what we have now, disappearing jobs, decaying infrastructure, private wealth in complete control of politics, and inevitably in the face of world-wide financial decay, war.
It’s more complicated than you seem to think. The people who put those tax rates in place were not fools, nor did they mandate that the money be turned over to the government. They were making public policy and offering alternatives. Rich people grumbled. But the word “legacy” is useful. even more useful was an old term for such income: “passive.” There’s even a better one: “unearned.” You may think that mere jealousy, but I’ve no desire to be wealthy in that fashion, nor do most people. The wealth-gathering sector has to be controlled, or we implode and self-destruct.
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Just because money is spent in the private sector, that is no guarantee it will be productive. Likewise, just because money is spent by the government, that does not mean it is productive. It depends on the people spending it and the culture backstopping your commerce.
A better model is to think, “money spent by Finlanders, whether private or public sector, generates a certain return. Money spent by Albanians, whether private or public, generates a certain return”, etc. If you fill your country with Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic types, you generate their kind of economic return. If you fill your country with AmerIndian admixtures, you reap their benefits. Take the highly productive farms in Zimbabwe run by Dutch, German, and English farmers and give it to the local Bantus, to which mean level of production will those enterprises regress?
I don’t like your implication that if the rich aren’t taxed and guided to spending their money in certain ways, then they will burn it. You deride luxury spending and disinvestment, but why is luxury spending necessarily worse than the alternative? And disinvestment means the thing was sold to somebody else. Are the new owners incompetent? There is more to all this.
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Have you not been witness to events, boom-bust economy, 1980 forward? The roaring twenties leading to the Great Depression? “Rich” are anyone who happens to corner a lot of cash, you, me to Bill Gates. Individuals behave in predictable patterns within large groups. Excessive wealth concentration always leads to repression, totalitarianism, depression, reform.
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Then why are you so anxious to funnel so much wealth and power through the government? Who’s done more damage throughout history: wealthy individuals, or ambitious men co-opting the government power Tomato Guy is so eager to heap in one place in the nervous hope that he will get some “free” concession?
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I am like almost all of us. I want to be comfortable, but after I achieve a level of comfort, stop worrying about money and devote myself to the more interesting aspects of living. I don’t seek to accumulate piles of wealth. There is a small percentage of us who do, and the level of psychopathy among them is high. They don’t create, innovate, invent or make life better for anyone. They merely game the system.
Health care is a perfect example: The game was to enclose the health care system so that sick people can be booted out. Those people who are on the outs can die, get on Medicaid, who cares? They will not get private insurance. Once United Health and others got into the insurance business, they started buying up non-profit outfits like BCBS everywhere, and shortly thereafter perverted the term “preexisting condition”, which was a legitimate insurance moral hazard, and changed it to mean “we deny insurance to people who we think might get sick in the future.”
That enclosed the system, got rid of unprofitable clients, created 50 million uninsured. It wasn’t long before the industry owned politicians, and “reform” was perverted to mean that we would be forced to buy their crappy policies.
Those are rent seekers. They offer no social benefit. They are of no social good to us. As with Canada last century, when they leave, life gets better.
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I was standing and cheering after that entry. We need to gather up the wreckers and give them a proper show trial.
But we spend massively on actual care. Sure, we’ve got the evil insurance co. bureaucrats being evil, but they’ve also paid out a lot where other country’s would not have paid as much.
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That’s the definition of rent seeking! they are not creating wealth – they are siphoning it away from the weath creators.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
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Administering a health care policy is not necessarily evil, or rent seeking, if you are providing a useful service. And many do this. But I realize you need some Kulaks to kill.
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Nonsense. As an accountant I can tell you that people are driven by incentives. You leave an opening, they will drive a truck through it. In the case of for-profit health insurance, the incentive is perverse in that care of clients challenges the bottom line, so that insurers are incentivized to avoid sick people, old people, poor people and even people they think might get sick. The system is corrupt by design.
Switzerland offers private insurance, and it works because insurers are (1) not allowed to refuse a client, and (2) not allowed to profit on basic care. If anemone wants a privatre room and gourmet food, the insurance company can write it that way for a profit.
That’s the only way it works.
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It must be nice to have Swiss bureaucrats administering the thing. Do you suppose they would give us a bid to run our system?
If you tried to implement that here, where the Swiss have 100 bureaucrats, we would have 10,000 and the thing would cast even more than what we have now.
Where do you get the notion that the American political system can in any way shape or form adopt another country’s health care system and keep it in any way shape or form homomorphic?
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Because the essential difference is not Swiss or American, but rather presence or absence of the profit motive,
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And bureaucrats don’t suffer from an ersatz profit motive?
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Some words serve no other purpose other than to obfuscate. Among them are “free,” “capitalism,” “democracy,” and “bureaucrat.” Drop that last one from your vocabulary and you might gain some clarity of thought.
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Retreating into word games?
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Quite the opposite. The words I mentioned are obfuscatory. Not using them eliminates word games.
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You know what I mean.
So instead of “bureaucrat”, insert “American hired under Tomato Man’s scheme to create a public option, or single payer, or whatever the fuck you want to call it; a person likely to have worked for an insurance company before, but will now be a federal government employee, or better yet a contractor, and all that that entails. But no profit motive. Just the other stuff that in some cases is worse than the profit motive.”
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And, Jesus Christ, five years later I repeat again that the fact that it works elsewhere else very well doesn’t move you. You’ll just throw some non-specific non-studied race-based theory at me.
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What works elsewhere doesn’t necessarily work here.
When the US went to Europe in WWII, our allies were shocked at the amount of stuff our divisions required. They called them “comfort brigades”. US divisions required 300 tons of supplies a day while at rest. The Germans could FIGHT on 100 tons a day.
To wrap this up, I’ll concede our health system could be a lot better. But getting there would be much harder than you suggest.
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My only objective with you, ever, is to outlast you, to make be more comment than you.
I did not say it would be easy. But it would be faster than you think if the states are free to go their own way. (2021 as I understand it.) that’s how it happened in Canada – Saskatchewan kicked the private insurers out, and then pow! Pow! The others saw it worked, and followed suit.
People don’t steal bad ideas, which is why no one has copied our system.
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