Discontent goes to Rio (and everywhere else)

For me the incoming daily news is mostly an unpleasant mix of confusion and disappointment. Yet one thing seems to be increasingly apparent, a new generation of discontents is coming on the scene. They are out in the streets everywhere most recently in Turkey, Brazil and now again in Egypt. Moreover there seems to be, simmering beneath surface, discontent everywhere. In Europe the attempts of the Eurozoners to placate the bankers further immiserates the hapless citizens - especially those of the southern European countries like Greece, Portugal and Spain. In China thousands of small protests occur every year but are ignored by those outside the country.

Here in Obamaland as his second term settles in, the discontent is mounting. His weak centrist program of trying to placate the right has only served to emboldened it. If he really had wanted to take on the post Reagan energized hard right with his so-called “Audacity of Hope” and confront its reactionary agenda, he would not have continued it by filling his cabinet with establishment neoliberal Wall Street hacks like Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner. Yet the worse was mitigated. A relatively successful (but unacknowledged by many) Keynesian fiscal stimulus did arrest the plummeting GDP and prevent a rerun of the 1930s. Beyond that it's difficult to discern what might have been possible. Suffice to say so far the legislative accomplishments have been minimal – zero real progress on confronting global warming (the real crisis of our time) and a complex, controversial health care reform package that addresses some of the problems. But the jury is still on its actual success. The Repubs of course want it to fail and are trying their damnedest to make that happen, and only because he's not one of them. The template for Obamacare came straight from a conservative think tank. And of course the "war on terror" continues, having morphed into an amorphous, pointless war no longer on Al Queda but mainly on the Pakistan/Afghan Taliban and their warlord allies.

The new pisser is this perchance for a seamless airtight security states sanctioned by Obama & Co as well as Congressional leadership in both parties. So now, surprise surprise, we find that the post 9/11 4^th Amendment negating "national security state" embodied int the so called Patriot Act engineered by Bush/Cheney was not only kept in place by Obama & Co but further fortified. The military-industrial complex  now has for-profit contractors joining with the already existing 14 government intelligence agencies, most notably the shadowy National Security Agency (NSA), into a huge Orwellian surveillance state. The idea apparently is to use all available technology to lock the place down. Since the technology now allows it, let's do it! Let's save every banal, routine, personal piece of verbal bullshit that anyone types or utters and save in a massive, ever growing petabyte scale database out on some giant server farm in the Utah desert. The US government apparently intends to collect and save every blurt, blab or giggle, every dumb joke, every careless stupid comment, every racist or politically incorrect aside, every personal confidential disclosure, every insurrectionist fantasy. every fucking thing that goes into any phone or over any Internet connection over much of the planet is save in perpetuity just in case it might be needed later in a some future "terrorism investigation." 

 

But, alas, one person out of the one million or so of loyal acolytes with top secret clearance went rogue and blew the whistle on this whole monstrosity (not that many didn't expect it existed.)  Now all hell has broken lose. Even the Germans, control freaks as they are, are up in arms. The seamless link between the two US political parties has finally been exposed. They may disagree on how much they should tweak and fuss with a capitalist economy that is running on less than eight cylinders, or what should be done for those left out for whatever reason, the old “widows, orphans and poor” question, but they are absolutely in synch when comes to keeping track of miscreants who can now conveniently be called “terrorists” or “would be terrorists.” This while always making sure the definition of terrorist is conveniently open-ended. Edward Snowden like others before him, most recently Bradley Manning and most notably Daniel Ellsberg, is an America hero. The truth will make you free..