Conventional wisdom says that “in polite company,” we don’t talk about sex, politics, or religion. Of the three, sex is clearly the least comfortable topic to broach.

You see, sex is a ‘hot’ topic; it’s erotic. Some may regard sex as joy; others regard it with shame; and still others with no apparent emotion. While nearly everyone has an opinion about it that does not mean that all are willing to engage in open conversation about sex.

This problem is particularly difficult with the topic of abortion. When abortion is brought up, what is missing is the honesty in the conversation – the honesty about how and why a woman becomes pregnant; what her thinking was before, during and after the act, and how the impregnator (the man) can frequently walk away from an act in which he was either an aggressor or a collaborator or some combination of the two.

Under the best of circumstances, the sex act is a consensual on the part of both individuals. At the time, the two may or may not have desired to pro-create. Under the best of circumstances, this is how the human race commits acts of love and carries on its existence from generation to generation.

But it doesn’t always evolve that way. There are numerous ways for complications or unfortunate circumstances to develop. Following the intercourse, the couple may decide that they are not in love and no longer want to be joint parents to a child.

If both believe in a traditional nuclear family, then the change in their relationship may cause one or both to decide that now is not a good time to give birth to a child. This can be particularly so with the woman who bears major responsibility for the pregnancy and the subsequent child-rearing.

Another dynamic may also be that there are other life changes for one or both progenitors. One is diagnosed with an illness or sustains an injury. It clearly is not a good time to bring a child into the world.

It may also be that as the adults’ lives evolve during the months following the pregnancy, that one or both parties decide that they are not ready to be parents; that they feel a greater compulsion now to pursue a career or avocation. This may seem crass to a strict pro-life advocate, but it is among the myriad of reasons why one or both parties to a pregnancy may want an abortion at a difficult time.

Perhaps the most likely cause of one or both parents not wanting to carry a pregnancy to term is that the process started off informally and then morphed into a “we just want to have a good time” occasion and little or no thought was given to a possible pregnancy during the act of intercourse.

The arguments in favor of abortion for women who have been victims of rape or incest are so compelling that it is hard to fathom why anyone would oppose them. It is often said that many conservatives are mean-spirited; their opposition to abortion following a rape or incest adds clear evidence to that assertion.

All of these reasons are tried and true parts of the ongoing human experience. As you read this, similar scenarios to the ones described above are happening all around the globe, and there is no stopping them.

Because sex is viewed by most as either ‘hot’ or ‘cold,’ most people have reasons to not discuss it in so-called polite company. But it’s too tempting to simply ignore. So rather than pretend that it does not exist, most of us, and especially the news media, either ignore it, or talk about it in code. This is something in which conservatives are exceptionally skilled. They frame issues in a way that do not use literal definitions. Instead, that they are cloaked in verbiage that assuages those conservatives who think that the only way to reference it is to disguise it. They talk about it as life, and what could be more pure. But their big fallacy is that they totally ignore the life of the mother, and the father. The force of the conservatives is so strong that it essentially inundates the mainstream media as well.

Conservatives will continue to dominate the abortion issue and wreak tremendous damage on the civil liberties and economic well-being of non-conservatives. The alternative is for progressives to discuss abortion and sex at the same time, and describe how abortion policy without a realization that “sex happens” will never reflect reality, empathy, and respect for basic civil liberties. Come on, progressives. News organizations now let us use the ‘F’ word as an expletive; why can’t we talk about it for what it really means. It will greatly help the whole country better come to terms with the abortion issue and make more logical and empathetic decisions.

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There was a saying popular among anti-war protestors of the 1960s. Just because you’re paranoid, don’t think they’re not out to get you.

We have even more reason to wonder about who is spying on our personal conversations today because technology can practically read our minds. For those of us exposed to the futuristic novels of the 1970’s and 80’s, the model is already in our heads. We just have to change the names and characters.

The reason I’m thinking about this right now is because I happened to hear a segment on NPR recently about the Russian composer Dmitry Shostakovich. He wrote a symphony during the Stalin era that mightily displeased those with the power to dictate what music should sound like. They preferred something rousing and militaristic. Dmitry was condemned and almost sent to a gulag.

So, very cleverly, he wrote another symphony more to the liking of the militarists in power but with a subtext recognizable as satire by lovers of great music. Saved from the gulag, he went on to greatness.

Do you believe in odd coincidences? They seem to jump out at me constantly. The day after I heard the story on NPR about Shostakovich, James Risen was on Jon Stewart’s show. Risen writes for the New York Times and has been researching topics that the militarists in our country would rather he didn’t. For that, he and other journalists have been harassed, forced to pay thousands of dollars in attorney fees, and might possibly end up in jail. Yes, there are people in power in our country who dictate how the music should sound.

Risen was on The Daily Show to talk about his new book, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power and Endless War.

One reviewer sums the book’s intent this way:
Still, his core message resonates. “We have scared the hell out of ourselves,” he quotes an expert on terrorism as saying. That conclusion is a fitting epitaph for the first decade of the current century. Mr. Risen certainly makes the case in this book that America has lost much in its lashing out against terrorism, and that Congress and the people need to wake up and ask more questions about the political, financial, moral and cultural costs of that campaign.

In another odd coincidence this past week, I happened to find in a pile of articles a review of Risen’s earlier work on how America was lied into war in 2003. He wrote in 2006 that there was plenty of evidence that Iraq had closed down its program to develop nuclear weapons, but the people who tried to get that information to the top level of decision-makers were silenced. None of that testimony was included in the National Intelligence Estimate that was used to convince Congress to vote for war in 2002. The demonstration of “evidence” by Secretary State Colin Powell at the UN in February 2003 was manufactured to fit a plan already written by Bush administration militarists.

We all know the expression “stretching the truth.” In Greek mythology, there is a character named Procrustes who offers travelers a meal and a bed for the night. If the wayfarer doesn’t fit the bed, Procrustes makes him fit by either stretching him on the rack or chopping his legs off. Hold that thought.

In a Fox News interview during the early days of the 2nd Iraq War, Vice President Cheney said that we would look back “ten years hence” and see that we had fundamentally changed the course of history in the Middle East. I think we can all agree that that life has changed for millions of families in Iraq as well as many other countries in that region. Most of us do not think the situation is much of an improvement for the vast majority of citizens in those war torn countries.

But, if the goal was to replace communism as the enemy which served the military so well during the Cold War with a new, equally difficult to define enemy, the opening of the tinder box in the Middle East has served its purpose.

President Obama inherited multiple foreign policy disasters. He has tried to wind down American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. But that doesn’t serve the purposes of the national security state and the war profiteers. Sen. Mitch McConnell set out to make Obama a one-term president. He couldn’t pull that off, so he set in motion the next best thing. Destroy the credibility of the man in the White House who wants to keep Americans out of other people’s wars.

Our democratic process has turned into what one writer for Salon calls kabuki theatre, a “pantomime: the fading shadow of a system that in essence, if not in law, has nearly reached a complete stop.” The writer concludes that the self-proclaimed oldest democracy in the world lacks the basics of real self-government: unfettered access to the polls, accountability to the voters by politicians, competition among candidates to discern the people’s will and real options for those who feel they are not being heard. (Salon, 11/4/14, Elias Isquith)

Examples abound of politicians ignoring the will of the people. Whether it’s raising the minimum wage, expanding Medicaid, making it easier for bright young people to afford post-secondary education, or facing the racial disparities in our culture, our appeals fall on deaf ears.

Power is so concentrated at the top and the oligarchy is doing such a good job of fencing off anyone who objects, we, the people, don’t stand a chance. When the 99% rose up in 2011-12, what happened? They were tolerated briefly until it became apparent that they might actually build an influential constituency. Their big mistake was to take on Wall Street. That had to be nipped in the bud, and so the “occupiers” were ridiculed in the media, made to look like bums and fools in the evening news, and eventually saw their encampments destroyed by the police. That wasn’t just in NYC’s Zuccotti Park either. Some of us attended events held at Kiener Plaza in St. Louis and brought food and blankets to the protesters camped out there. Under the guise of concern for the health and safety of the citizens, the City of St. Louis decision-makers ordered the encampment destroyed.

Two things are happening right now that deserve our attention. President Obama is insisting that Congress authorize spending billions more on the “war on terror” which will include sending a few thousand more Americans into harm’s way in Iraq. Nowhere in the discussion do we hear how we were misled into opening that Pandora’s box in 2003. Is the media forbidden to do historical analysis? Or do they choose to turn a blind eye to what a disaster our policies have been in that region? If people like James Risen are being harassed for documenting the lies that we were sold in 2003, how is that different from the kind of pressure applied to Russian dissidents during the Stalin era?

Locally the story to watch is a plan to eliminate Kiener Plaza as an amphitheater for rallies, protests and public meetings. The powers-that-be want to fill in the area below ground, cover it over with grass and, in truth, bury it. The “reasons” given are a real stretching of the truth. But that shouldn’t come as a surprise to those of us who have been watching the takeover of our democratic system by people as ruthless as Procrustes. Sadly, the majority of citizens prefer to ignore what is happening right under their noses. So Mitch McConnell, the man who vowed to destroy the Obama presidency and any hope we might have for some semblance of economic and social justice, will control the most important deliberative body in the world. Here in Missouri, we will be entertained by the puppets in Jefferson City who work for what a cartoonist in the Gilded Age called “malefactors of great wealth.”

A few of us will continue our attempts to explain to voters what is happening while they are not paying attention. It’s the least we can do for our grandchildren and great-grandchildren. FDR said the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. But it’s much more complicated than that.

The post When politicians dictate how the music should sound: Lessons from Shostakovich appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The financial meltdown of 2008 prompted many of us to look back to the decades after WWII for guidance—when Glass-Steagall kept banks in check, when labor unions had bargaining power, when a family could buy a house and live comfortably on a factory worker or a postal worker’s salary. Things seemed to be going well back then.

It was a time when the wealthy paid their fair share—the upper income tax bracket under Eisenhower was 90%. And there were jobs, and good paying ones—at least for some. In hindsight, it seemed like the “Golden Age” of American capitalism, when it seemed the economy worked for most people. The TV series “Leave it to Beaver,” which featured a generic, white, middle class family living in comfort in a generic, white suburb, furthered the myth that everyone in America could live a comfortable life if they showed up at work and paid their bills. For a large chunk of the population, of course, this wasn’t the case.

Banks and corporations constrained themselves after the Great Depression and WWII. Then, chomping at the bit to increase profits, they began to find ways to game the system. By the 70s, things started falling apart. Corporate globalization caused massive deindustrialization and the outsourcing of once good paying jobs, and the financial sector began its highjacking of the economy. The problem, the Golden Age myth would have us believe, was that bad capitalists and bad bankers took over what was really a good system.  If greed and bad behavior are held in check, the thinking goes, then capitalism really is the best economic system, synonymous with freedom, democracy and the American Way.

The myth vs. the reality of the post war era

In his recent article in ZCommunications, Paul Street debunks the “Golden Age” myth and sheds light on the failures of capitalism during this period.  He writes that, during the entire post war era, 10% of the population—20 million Americans—experienced no progress at all and deep poverty remained entrenched. Drawing on Judith Stein’s 2010 book, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance during the 1970s, Street provides the following statistics:

As the nation spent billions to put astronauts on the moon, millions of Americans remained ill-clad, ill-fed, and ill-housed. The median U.S. family income in 1968 was $8,362, less than what the Bureau of Labor Statistics defined as a “modest but adequate” income for an urban family of four. The Bureau found that 30 percent of the nation’s working class families were living in poverty and another 30 percent were living under highly “austere” conditions.

U.S. industrial capitalism at its “golden” best was no land of milk and honey for millions of Americans on the wrong end of capital’s constant drive to extract value from working people, the broader community, and the Earth. Thanks to its rapacious and wasteful extraction of wealth from the natural environment, moreover, the profit system had already generated what numerous left and other U.S. environmentalists were already describing as an ecological crisis (see Barry Commoner’s haunting 1971 book The Closing Circle).

In support of the idea that the problems with capitalism are systemic, Street quotes Yale trained economist Richard Wolff:

As Wolff explained two years ago: “Historical and contemporary records overflow with blame variously heaped on the illegal acts of financiers, corporate executives, corrupt state officials, union leaders, and ‘organized crime’ for causing capitalism’s cycles and crises. . . Pinpointing ‘the bad guys’ perpetuates the ancient art of scape-goating, deflecting blame on convenient targets when in fact the system is the problem. Capitalist societies can continue to monitor, identify, regulate, and prosecute economic misdeeds, but doing so never will prevent cycles and crises. Overcoming the systemic roots and nature of capitalist crises requires a change in the economic system.” (Wolff, Democracy at Work).

Can we change the American economic system?

Banks and corporations have no interest in doing so. Republican and Democratic politicians and government officials, most of whom serve their interests—and are rewarded handsomely for their efforts—have no interest in doing so. The American people, however, who continue to suffer the economic, social and ecological consequences of this rigged system, eventually, may want to try something different.

For starters, Wolff feels we can cure capitalism by bringing democracy to the workplace. “We would have stores, factories and offices, in which all the people who have to live with the results of what happens to that enterprise, participate in deciding how it works.” He recommends moving from the traditional top down, corporation—that squeezes workers in order to funnel money to CEOs, shareholders, and Wall Street banks—to cooperatives, where income is more equitably shared, and where decisions about what to produce are made democratically. Good news: there is already a strong cooperative presence in this country to build on.

As an answer to the current unemployment problem, if the private sector won’t provide jobs, Wolff says, then the government needs to do it—and he is talking 15 to 20 million jobs. The lion’s share of those jobs would address climate change through green infrastructure projects—building clean mass transportation, building green energy systems, retrofitting buildings, etc. This is a no-brainer, but vehemently opposed by a monied class that refuses to pay taxes to be used for the public good.

Wolff offers another solution for the unemployed.  He would do what Italy does. If you can get ten unemployed people together and start your own cooperative business, the Italian government gives all of you your unemployment benefits in a lump sum payment to fund your venture.

To see more of Richard Wolff, and hear more of his ideas, check out his appearances on Bill Moyers & Company here and here.

“Free market” capitalism (which relies heavily on a corporate nanny state) has brought us American imperialism, endless war, Orwellian government surveillance of our private communications, and life threatening climate change. It’s time liberals and progressives realize capitalism isn’t the only game in town. There are ways to organize an economy so that it serves the interest of all, not just the most aggressive and avaricious among us. We can start by learning more about the Nordic democratic socialist model, which provides a good standard of living for everyone in those countries, and expanding the democratic, cooperative workplace here at home. We need to shift our consciousness from believing a competitive economy—in which everyone is supposed to have (but in reality doesn’t have) a shot at success— is the best economy, to knowing that a more humane, peaceful economy—in which everyone has his or her basic needs met, and economic activity is channelled for the public good—is a recipe for saving ourselves and the planet.

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In his book, The Republican Brain, Chris Mooney describes how there are certain types of issues in which Democrats mimic the illogical positions of most Republicans. He cites examples such as the Keystone Pipeline and fracking for natural gas. Both of these involve considerable data analysis. Sometimes Democrats distance themselves from the data because it is so complicated. Thereupon, they let their emotions guide their views, and in these cases like Keystone and fracking, they tend to favor what is perceived as preserving the environment.

It’s possible that another one of these issues is the NSA data collection, which was brought to our attention by Edward Snowden. The legality of what he did may never be determined, because to date he has not come back to the United States. The morality of what he did is certainly up for discussion.

But support for the legality of what the NSA is doing, as opposed to what Snowden did, got a boost on Friday, December 27, 2013. As CNN reported:

(CNN) — The National Security Agency notched a much-needed win in court, after a series of setbacks over the legality and even the usefulness of its massive data collection program.

A federal judge in New York ruled Friday that the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of data on nearly every phone call made in the United States is legal.

The ruling contrasts with another ruling last week by a federal judge in Washington, who called the same program “almost Orwellian” and likely unconstitutional.

I certainly don’t envy the judges who have rendered these decisions, as well as those on the Supreme Court who will ultimately decide the constitutionality (or their political preferences) regarding data that the NSA collects, and what the NSA does with it.

Progressives have generally lined up with the ACLU in wanting to curtail the extent of the data collection by the NSA. The arguments in favor of their position are both considerable and valid. The primary one is the right to privacy. While the word privacy does not occur even once in the Constitution, courts have historically recognized it as a legitimate right. Virtually all judgments in favor of privacy are based on the Fourth Amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

It is not much of a stretch to extrapolate from here that electronic eavesdropping should require a warrant based on probable cause that some illegality was occurring. The right to privacy is not a luxury for a special class of people; it is a fundamental right for all of us.

We are left with the ongoing dilemma of what is more important: the right to privacy or the right to security. Neither is absolute, so we’re left to find a consensus between the two. It is presumptuous for any of us to say that we know with certainty where that line should be drawn.

I am certainly glad that Snowden provided us with a much more clear knowledge of what the NSA is actually doing. I’m also glad that a set of judges, rather than Congress, is going to set some guidelines as to how far the NSA can go. When they rule, it will not be the end of the discussion, but at least we’ll have rules that are much more reasonable than in the pre-Snowden era. Numerous questions will still remain, but hopefully we’ll be better prepared to try to answer them.

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Edward Snowden is back in the news with a story that the government may be considering offering him amnesty in exchange for return of the remaining estimated 1.5 million classified NSA documents in his possession. In the months since Snowden first leaked documents to the press, I’ve found myself engaged in conversations discussing issues I usually don’t talk about with friends and family—issues like privacy, security, and the fundamental relationship between the individual and government.

Those conversations often begin with questions of how concerned each of us should be about government intrusion into our emails, cell-phone records, and private lives as law-abiding citizens who pose no threat to the state or to our neighbors.  Those conversations often grapple as well with the future: how technological innovation could intrude ever more deeply into our privacy and whether history will judge Edward Snowden as hero or traitor for revealing the abuses and dangers inherent in new technologies.

What intrigues me most in those conversations is the hero/traitor discussion. The more I think about it, the less important figuring out how to label Mr. Snowden becomes. I realize two things: first, that the fact that Mr. Snowden sparked a national debate about privacy and security is reason enough to thank him. And second, that Snowden, and how we think about him and others who put themselves at risk to bring to our attention abuse and misuse of power, should encourage us to look more closely at our beliefs and assumptions about heroism.

When thinking about this, it’s inevitable that there are more questions than answers. Questions like who is a hero? What acts rise to the heroic? What is the relationship between heroism and the situation out of which it arises? Can acts of heroism be heroic in what they achieve but traitorous in the means employed? Is it ethical or unethical to exploit the idea of heroism to achieve certain outcomes?

Let’s look at what the dictionary tells us about heroes and heroism. The definition includes courage in the face of danger and actions that put the hero in danger or risk of bodily or other harm.

The definition couldn’t be clearer.  But clarity on paper is one thing. Real life is quite another. What are our commonly held concepts of heroism beyond the page? Without question, we recognize the heroic when the act of heroism is physical: firefighters and cops rushing into a burning building or climbing the stairs of a doomed skyscraper. Spectators rushing to aid victims of a bombing when it’s unclear if there are more explosions to come.  Good Samaritans jumping into raging floodwaters to save strangers caught in the deluge or jumping down next to electrified subway tracks to pull a person to safety and away from an oncoming train. Teachers shielding the bodies of their young charges from a madman’s bullets.

In these situations we rarely discuss or question the heroes’ motives beyond the impulse to aid, to give comfort, to save a life. We focus solely on the outcome of the hero’s act.  But ambiguity rears its head when the hero acts to achieve an outcome that is more abstract—as Snowden did—like protecting privacy or exposing the abuse of power.

Even in combat heroism is not without its ambiguities.  We label unreservedly as heroes those who are physically damaged. Their wounds—the missing limbs, disfigured faces, charred skin, scars from bullet holes—are worn like garments that become the physical manifestation of their heroic acts. Unfortunately, those who are psychologically damaged in combat do not fare as well.

Once upon a time the bar was set so high for the heroic that few could reach it. To be a hero was to be truly extraordinary.  It meant taking risks and actions almost beyond imagination. Today the jingoistic language of our elected officials—from commander-in-chief on down—commonly equates the choice to become an armed combatant with heroism itself.

The concept of heroism has been altered even more radically since the advent of all-day, all-night, all-media, everywhere-you-look-listen-or-read marketing. The shift is perceptual and semantic in nature. The hero and the heroic have been stretched and twisted into nearly unrecognizable shapes to fit into a package of marketing tools. Word devaluation is the most accurate way to describe what’s happened.  Just look at how the word is casually thrown around.  Television recruitment ads for the armed forces sell the promise of heroism for all. Bumper stickers extol those in uniform as “our heroes.”

It’s beyond question that young men and women who choose to devote a time of out of their lives and risk their health and lives for us deserve our admiration and gratitude.  But to label every one of them as heroes, regardless of their duties and the way in which they carry out those duties, is to diminish the heroism of the true hero. What we have today is hero-lite.

Something more insidious is going on as well. Call it spin or propaganda, whichever you choose. But heroism is not just about the person and the act. Calling something heroic bestows upon the act the seal of approval and justification.  We assume that if an act is labeled heroic then the cause for which the act was taken must also be just.   If every soldier, sailor, and pilot is a hero then the fight itself must necessarily be just.

No commander nor politician will ever admit that the lives of Americans lost in service to their country were sacrificed for naught. To admit that is to break a solemn trust with the families of those who have died. It is to admit as a society that we asked those men and women to defend us in a false cause. If the men and women of our military are all heroes, as our politicians and the advertising world tell us, then how can we question the justness of the wars they are engaged in? These brave individuals cannot be heroes for nothing. And so goes the self-reinforcing circle of logic.

But let’s return to Edward Snowden. It’s revealing that a majority of Americans recognize the ambiguities in judging Snowden’s actions.  In one poll, 46 percent said they didn’t know if Snowden should be called a traitor or a patriot. In another, 23 percent labeled Snowden a traitor, and 31 percent labeled him a patriot.

And what about Snowden himself? After fleeing the U.S., Snowden granted an interview to the South China Morning Post in which he articulated his view of the path he’s followed. Snowden chose his words carefully: “I’m neither traitor nor hero. I’m an American.”

After much thought, I understand exactly what he means.

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Alfred McCoy over at TomDispatch.com has taken the time to provide us with a brief, sordid history of the U.S. surveillance state and proven, to me at least, that there is still much to learn about where we are and how we got here. I was surprised, for example, to discover that the path to an Orwellian future began in the late 19th century with our presence in the Philippines.

McCoy writes (and elaborates later in the piece):

In 1898, Washington occupied the Philippines and in the years that followed pacified its rebellious people, in part by fashioning the world’s first full-scale “surveillance state” in a colonial land. The illiberal lessons learned there then migrated homeward, providing the basis for constructing America’s earliest internal security and surveillance apparatus during World War I.  A half-century later, as protests mounted during the Vietnam War, the FBI, building on the foundations of that old security structure, launched large-scale illegal counterintelligence operations to harass antiwar activists, while President Richard Nixon’s White House created its own surveillance apparatus to target its domestic enemies.

Perhaps the most damaging [domestically speaking] interference via illegal government surveillance took place during the civil rights movement and amidst heavy war opposition.

In response to the civil rights and anti-Vietnam protests of the 1960s, the FBI deployed its COINTELPRO operation, using what Senator Frank Church’s famous investigative committee later called “unsavory and vicious tactics… including anonymous attempts to break up marriages, disrupt meetings, ostracize persons from their professions, and provoke target groups into rivalries that might result in deaths.”

In assessing COINTELPRO’s 2,370 actions from 1960 to 1974, the Church Committee branded them a “sophisticated vigilante operation” that “would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity.” Significantly, even this aggressive Senate investigation did not probe Director Hoover’s notorious “private files” on the peccadilloes of leading politicians that had insulated his Bureau from any oversight for more than 30 years.

After New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh exposed illegal CIA surveillance of American antiwar activists in 1974, Senator Church’s committee and a presidential commission under Nelson Rockefeller investigated the Agency’s “Operation Chaos,” a program to conduct massive illegal surveillance of the antiwar protest movement, discovering a database with 300,000 names.  These investigations also exposed the excesses of the FBI’s COINTELPRO, forcing the Bureau to reform.

To prevent future abuses, President Jimmy Carter signed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978, creating a special court to approve all national security wiretaps.  In a bitter irony, Carter’s supposed reform ended up plunging the judiciary into the secret world of the surveillance managers where, after 9/11, it became a rubberstamp institution for every kind of state intrusion on domestic privacy.

It’s not all bleak. It turns out that Republicans of the early 20th century were actually a force of opposition to government sponsored violations of privacy.

In the aftermath of those wars, however, reformers pushed back against secret surveillance.  Republican privacy advocates abolished much of President Woodrow Wilson’s security apparatus during the 1920s, and Democratic liberals in Congress created the FISA courts in the 1970s in an attempt to prevent any recurrence of President Nixon’s illegal domestic wiretapping.

The two leading parties have, at times, agreed that unchecked government surveillance is a danger to all and took steps to prevent the massive levels of information gathering that we have today. For all the good it did, right? Unfortunately, public consent is a pretty large part of this history lesson. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have participated (and still do), perhaps misguidedly, in the surveilling of anti-war protesters, dissidents, and suspected terrorists. In the 20th century, remember, it was suspected communists and/or spies.

Just one example, as follows:

After the U.S. entered World War I in 1917 without an intelligence service of any sort, Colonel Van Deman brought his Philippine experience to bear, creating the U.S. Army’s Military Intelligence Division (MID) and so laying the institutional foundations for a future internal security state.

In collaboration with the FBI, he also expanded the MID’s reach through a civilian auxiliary organization, the American Protective League, whose 350,000 citizen-operatives amassed more than a million pages of surveillance reports on German-Americans in just 14 months, arguably the world’s most intensive feat of domestic surveillance ever.

This brief history is at turns horrifying and breathtaking. It seems to me the missing ingredient is a massive popular uprising against such illegal violations of our amendment and human rights. Much of what we have seen these past decades is apathy, as Mark Twain predicted.

During the U.S. conquest of the Philippines, Mark Twain wrote an imagined history of twentieth-century America.  In it, he predicted that a “lust for conquest” had already destroyed “the Great [American] Republic,” because  “trampling upon the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home.”

It’s true, sadly. Under President Obama, we have seen an unprecedented and largely unopposed prosecution of whistleblowers using the Espionage Act. There have been seven prosecutions thus far under Obama, preceded by only three since the law’s 1917 origins. As Linda Greene wrote back in 2011, proving once again the utter disconnect between what the president says to us and what he and those he appointed actually do:

When campaigning in 2008, Obama promised to protect whistleblowers, saying their “acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled,” ABC News’ Megan Chuchmach and Rhonda Schwartz reported on Aug. 4, 2009.

Regrettably, Campaign Obama is not around to protect the likes of Edward Snowden or Bradley Manning from either the media persecution or from government prosecution. It is difficult for an uniformed public to protest something they are unaware of, such as the NSA’s PRISM program. But it seems to me that when we allow the imprisonment and prosecution of those whistleblowers who seek to inform and empower us, we are granting the government permission to carry on with illegal acts of surveillance against us.

The people’s unspoken permission also sets the stage for our own possible imprisonment. When everything you say or do is subject to secret recordings and filed away in vast government-owned digital storage facilities, anything you have said or done can be used against you by a government with a history of “unsavory and vicious tactics… including anonymous attempts to break up marriages, disrupt meetings, ostracize persons from their professions, and provoke target groups into rivalries that might result in deaths.”

At the very least, the mere possibility of such is an effective tool of suppression and submission, perhaps most starkly proven by how easy it was for the NSA to obtain near-total corporate complicity in illegal information gathering. And as McCoy’s history lesson teaches us, this is not just an American fear. U.S. surveillance is of global concern; it is a much-used weapon in our war chest, as it is with some foreign governments.

Perhaps it is time to learn from our history, both distant and recent past, and act upon what we learn…in large, unimpeachable bipartisan numbers.

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On Tuesday, July 16, at an event in Atlanta, ex-president Jimmy Carter made his blockbuster statement referring to, among other issues, the mass surveillance of U.S. citizens. The event was sponsored by a German organization devoted to building German American relations. Der Spiegel and the International Business Times reported on Carter’s comments. His comments have yet to appear in American mainstream media.

This is not the first time ex-president Carter has expressed deep concern about the direction the country is headed.

In a 2012 New York Times op-ed, Carter criticized the Obama administration and Democratic and Republican legislators for abandoning the role of the United States as the global champion of human rights. He chastised a complacent public for allowing that to happen.

Revelations that top officials are targeting people to be assassinated abroad, including American citizens, are only the most recent, disturbing proof of how far our nation’s violation of human rights has extended. This development began after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and has been sanctioned and escalated by bipartisan executive and legislative actions, without dissent from the general public. As a result, our country can no longer speak with moral authority on these critical issues.. . .

In addition to American citizens’ being targeted for assassination or indefinite detention, recent laws have canceled the restraints in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 to allow unprecedented violations of our rights to privacy through warrantless wiretapping and government mining of our electronic communications.

In June of this year, Carter expressed his opinion about the newly revealed NSA surveillance scandal and Edward Snowden. Speaking to CNN’s Suzanne Malveaux, he said:

I think the invasion of human rights and American privacy has gone too far, and I think that the secrecy that has been surrounding this invasion of privacy has been excessive. . . Bringing it to the public notice has probably been, in the long term, beneficial.

He added that although Snowden violated US law, by bringing the issue to light, he may have ultimately done good for the country.

A few days ago, at the meeting in Atlanta, Carter cited the excessive influence of money in U.S, election campaigns and confusing election rules as playing key roles in the destruction of our democracy. The ex-president, who through his “Carter Center,” monitors elections worldwide, doubts the United States meets the Center’s standards for fair elections.

I only hope it begins to sink in among the general public that we have exchanged whatever fragile democracy we once had for a bi-partisan, secret military surveillance state whose main purpose is to protect and promote the interests of banks and multinational corporations at home and abroad. Perhaps an ex-president, a Democrat, will shake us out of our complacency.

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Snowden did what he did because he recognised the NSA’s surveillance programs for what they are: dangerous, unconstitutional activity. This wholesale invasion of Americans’ and foreign citizens’ privacy does not contribute to our security; it puts in danger the very liberties we’re trying to protect. —Daniel Ellsberg, Guardian 6/10/13

Many people compare Edward Snowden to me unfavorably for leaving the country and seeking asylum, rather than facing trial as I did. I don’t agree. The country I stayed in was a different America, a long time ago. —Daniel Ellsberg, Washington Post, 7/7/13

Long time contractor for the CIA and the NSA, Edward Snowden, became increasingly troubled by the domestic and international surveillance  activities of the US government under the Bush and Obama administrations. He told the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, that the NSA was intent “on making every conversation and every form of behavior in the world known to them.”

He made the decision to leak the NSA’s massive surveillance of U.S. citizens (and others around the world) to the press because he knew that whistle blowing within official channels would be futile. When previous whistleblowers, like high-ranking NSA executive Thomas Drake, used official channels to complain about government wrongdoing, they were ignored or demonized by superiors. When they eventually went to the press they were tried under the Espionage Act. Like Daniel Ellsberg before him, who Henry Kissinger called “the world’s most dangerous man” he knew the Obama administration would demonize him and label him a traitor. He knew President Obama had, six times since he took office, charged whistleblowers under the Espionage Act, and that if he went forward, he would become the seventh.

Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.

In 1971, military analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the press. Like Edward Snowden, he was charged under the Espionage Act for copying and leaking the Pentagon Papers to the press. His trial was dismissed in 1973 after evidence of government misconduct, including illegal wiretapping, was introduced in court. In 2007, in an interview with Democracy Now, Ellsberg said the documents he leaked “demonstrated unconstitutional behavior by a succession of presidents, the violation of their oath and the violation of the oath of every one of their subordinates” He leaked the Papers to end what he perceived to be “a wrongful war”. Writing in the Guardian, in a piece titled “Edward Snowden: Saving us from the United Stasi of America,” Ellsberg, in condemnation of the Obama administration’s policies and actions, says “Snowden’s whistleblowing gives us a chance to roll back what is tantamount to an ‘executive coup’ against the US constitution. “ Strong words, indeed.

One of main complaints leveled at Snowden is that he did not stay and face arrest in the United States as Ellsberg had done in 1971, but as Ellsberg explains, these are different times. After the New York Times was enjoined from publishing the Pentagon Papers, he went underground for 13 days to elude authorities while he approached other newspapers to publish the material. When he finally surrendered to arrest, he was released on a personal recognizance bond the same day. For the whole two years he was under indictment, he was free to speak to the media, to speak at anti-war rallies, and to give public lectures. In a recent op ed in the Washington Post Ellsberg  fully endorses Edward Snowden actions and defends his decision to flee the United States.

There is no chance that experience could be reproduced today, let alone that a trial could be terminated by the revelation of White House actions against a defendant that were clearly criminal in Richard Nixon’s era—and figured in his resignation in the face of impeachment—but are today all regarded as legal (including an attempt to “incapacitate me totally”).

I hope Snowden’s revelations will spark a movement to rescue our democracy, but he could not be part of that movement had he stayed here. There is zero chance that he would be allowed out on bail if he returned now and close to no chance that, had he not left the country, he would have been granted bail. Instead, he would be in a prison cell like Bradley Manning, incommunicado.

He would almost certainly be confined in total isolation, even longer than the more than eight months Manning suffered during his three years of imprisonment before his trial began recently. The United Nations Special Rapporteur for Torture described Manning’s conditions as “cruel, inhuman and degrading.” (That realistic prospect, by itself, is grounds for most countries granting Snowden asylum, if they could withstand bullying and bribery from the United States.)

The Obama administration’s “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment of whistleblowers is designed to deter others from doing the same. Obama’s attempt to make a journalist a co-conspirator in a leak case, and his ordering of the widespread surveillance of the cellphones of AP journalists, is designed to have a chilling effect on reporting what the government is doing, with the help of private contractors, in secret. Ellsberg believes Snowden has done nothing wrong and that such leaks are the “lifeblood” of a free press. They are essential for democracy to survive. He hopes Snowden

. . .finds a haven, as safe as possible from kidnapping or assassination by U.S. Special Operations forces, preferably where he can speak freely.

It is painful, and frightening, to write Ellsberg’s matter-of-fact comment. That a man with Ellsberg’s integrity feels the Obama administration could be trying to silence whistleblower Edward Snowden by kidnapping or killing him should send a chill down the spines of every U.S. citizen. That the Obama administration has openly lied to Congress should send up additional warning flags that the constitution is being violated.

Most journalists today are in a sycophantic relationship with government. The David Gregorys and Wolf Blitzers of the world function as stenographers to power. The true purpose of journalism is to be in opposition to the government, to hold it accountable to the people it is supposed to be serving. Leaks and whistleblowers are essential in a democracy to keep government in check. A government that operates in secrecy is not a democratic government. Ellsberg, in his full throated endorsement of Edward Snowden, reminds us that “secrecy corrupts, just as power corrupts.”

d States will be.

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I wasn’t much interested in all of the hullabaloo about the government spying on our phone calls, emails, etc., until I read this article about how the definition of “eco terrorist” is being stretched to include peaceful protests. If a “tree hugger” or “tree sitter” is a terrorist, then those of us who are members of any environmental or conservation group might also be labeled terrorists, too. I know there have been some people who have gone to extremes, like destroying the property of a company doing business that harms the environment or that tortures animals, and maybe those illegal acts can be stretched to fit the definition of “terrorism.” But even that is a stretch.

If all the protesters along the route of the Keystone pipeline are arrested, charged, convicted and jailed, what do we do?  I’m thinking of those civil rights activists in the 50’s and 60’s who just kept filling in the places of the ones arrested, until the police didn’t have any more jail space. Do we have to do that?  And would we?

And what about those of us who write articles and letters to newspapers criticizing the polluters? Are we a “danger” to the security of our nation? This past Tuesday evening, several dozen citizens spoke at a public hearing in Union, Mo., testifying under oath and for the record that we don’t trust Ameren Missouri to build a coal ash landfill in the Missouri River floodplain at Labadie. Some of us even hinted that Ameren bribes the decision makers with campaign contributions and by wining and dining them at parties when the American Legislative Exchange Council meets at fancy resorts. Since Ameren provides an essential product and service, does that make us subversive? Our faces are now in the video record, and our testimony transcribed by a court reporter. It would be incredibly easy for someone who wanted to intimidate us to find out where we live, get into our electronic devices, and do some real damage.

If this seems far-fetched, read in this DeSmog Blog article about the protesters outside a meeting of ALEC  in Phoenix in 2012. I happen to know some of the folks who were there and protested. They are hardly the dangerous type, since most are middle aged or older and couldn’t do any real harm even if they tried. But that didn’t matter to the powers-that-be.
I’ve been to many protests where we were allowed to walk peacefully up and down a public sidewalk carrying signs. The operative word here is “allowed.”  There are local rules and regulations about protests, rallies, parades, etc., and that’s fine. But how those rules are enforced can change pretty quickly. As long as we are not a real threat to the power structure, the police are told to just keep an eye on us.  But step on some toes, as the Occupy protesters did, and permits are canceled, and off to jail they go.

Like the frog in warm water, we may be getting used to limits on our freedom of assembly and our right to criticize the government or the corporations that actually run the government. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has to think twice about speaking out and ask myself how much I am willing to risk. I had a poster in the 70’s that said, “Just because you’re paranoid, don’t think they’re not out to get you.”  Where is the line between fear/paranoia and the need to be really careful?  I don’t know.

If you go to the website of the Labadie Environmental Organization, you can see a photo of the Labadie bottoms and the Ameren plant sitting right there next to the river. For now, no one has been charged as an “eco terrorist” for posting that photo or for taking interested citizens on tours around the area on public roads. At least not yet.

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I’m trying to sort out my thoughts and feelings about the recently revealed NSA data dragnet, in which millions of Americans’ phone and internet records are being monitored and saved in a huge data-storage facility. One thing that disturbs me is that, in a recent poll, a majority of respondents didn’t think the whole thing was a big deal. The thinking goes, apparently, that if you’re not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about when the government traces your phone records, email correspondence, Google searches and the like.

To that line of thinking, I must say: Tell that to the Jews, the gypsies, the homosexuals, the Tutsis, the Native Americans, the Armenians, the African-Americans,  and all of the other minorities who, throughout history, have been rounded up, jailed, persecuted and even killed–not for doing anything wrong, but simply for being who they were.

It seems to me that, throughout history, “doing something wrong” has often been a matter of definition. It was “wrong” to be  Jew in Germany and Poland in the 1930s and 1940s. Or to help a Jew escape.  It was “wrong” to be  Tutsi in Rwanda in the 1990s. It was “wrong” to be a black person in America’s South, and in many northern cities, it’s still “wrong” to drive while being black. It was “wrong” to be a Native American in the 1880s, when white people wanted the land.

No, I don’t think we’re living in a neo-Nazi America, and I don’t think President Obama or the NSA are planning anything like those horrors. But you can’t deny history. Injustices occur regularly. And having this gigantic database of information about American citizens strikes me as a way to enable nefarious actors to do bad things–even to people who aren’t doing anything wrong. It might not happen next week, or even next year. But it’s just too frightening to imagine how that ever-growing mountain of information in a data-storage facility in Utah might be used someday in the future, when “doing something wrong” is redefined yet again.

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