Hating On Teh Government

As readers may know, I was a Federal employee for about 11 years and left to retire early because I was sick of what was going on, much of which I have mercifully blocked from my memory. It... wasn't pretty.

And this was well into the Obama Reign.

Strangely enough, during the Bush Regime, while matters were becoming more and more politicized and less professionalized, there was far less maneuvering and infighting in the agency, far more common interest in and devotion to duty.

Now why would that be?

There were of course plenty of signs of internal deterioration, but that dated back to the Clinton Era, when the Government was actually shut down several times. That, I'm convinced, did more to undermine government employee loyalty than just about anything else in recent memory, but the advent of -- and disappointment in -- the Obama Reign really did seem to change attitudes and actions to complete Survival Mode.

Leaving one to doubt there was any point in Public Service any more.

In discussing the situation with others, though, people who have much longer service than I do, it's clear enough that this situation -- especially the doubt in the value of Public Service -- is routine, comes and goes, and you work through it or you don't. Politicization of service comes and goes, "survivalism" is the usual state of bureaucratic institutions -- and therefore of their employees -- but not everyone is adapted to this frame of mind. Non-Survivalists, if that's an appropriate term, would probably be better off elsewhere.

In other words, I made the right decision. It's always gratifying to know you've done the right thing, isn't it?

Sure.

Having had experience "within the belly of the beast" as it were (and my experience with Government dates to long before I joined the Federal service, as I'd been contracting with and serving on local Government boards and agencies for many years) I sometimes find it amusing that so many people, particularly of a Libertarian bent, are shocked!, shocked I tell you! when they "discover" -- whether for the first time or over and over again -- the way Government operates.

Particularly are they astonished and outraged at the Hypocrisy of Electeds.

Good heavens! How can they be so unprincipled!? How can they not mean what they say!? I don't know. It is quite a trick, isn't it? So many of them get away with it, too, as they have since the origin of the Republic. Yet to discover that they still do, with bells on, continues to be a shock and surprise! Oh! My! Goodness!

I loved Senator DeMint's letter to Geithner and his determination that The Government would be Brought to Heel by his Manly Insistence that the Debt Ceiling not be raised unless all the cuts he and his cohorts demanded were enacted, in full, with interest, yadda yadda, and The Government could just pay interest on the Debt and not Default, what scare tactics the Other Side (ie: The Government) was employing, DeMint was not amused.

He prates on and on, waxing quite wroth, about The Government and what it has done and must do, and who is to blame and whatnot, never once acknowledging that he and his cohorts in Congress Assembled are part of this very Government he's waxing so wroth about, and so are the Courts and the President, and so on and so forth. And you can't separate them into The Government and Me-Not The Government.

But that's what clowns like him do, all the time, and those tactics appeal to a certain segment of the populi and so it goes.

Hilarity ensues.

Well, sometimes.

All I'm getting at is that Electeds behave the way they do because of the way Government and the Political System is arranged. The Government -- and the Political System that feeds it and is in fact part of it -- was set up for the protection of Privileged White Southern Gentlemen (many of whom got the notion that they "deserved to rule" therefore) and that is actually what it does and what it will continue to do. It has nothing at all to do with Principle.

Rand Paul, about as Privileged a White Southern Gentleman (well, White Male, at any rate) as there is discovered to his delight the other day that he could bring operations of the Senate to a screeching halt unless and until his Demands regarding the renewal of the PATRIOT Act were met. Those Demands were simple enough: a vote on his amendments, primarily one restricting The Government's ability to inquire about and investigate -- or even, gasp, refuse -- "terrorist" access to firearms. He dug in his heels, held the Senate hostage for three days, and he got his vote. His amendments were defeated. He was pleased.

Like many of his colleagues, he pretended that The Government he was holding hostage -- and whose actions he hated and despised -- did not include himself. It was instead some Alien Imposition on the Rights and Privileges of Citizens like Himself.

No, The Government, as flawed and faulty as it is, IS himself and all of his colleagues AND those who serve it, civilian and military alike. There is no "them/us." It is all of a piece, and he and his ilk are part of it.

But the pretense is as it has always been: The Government is by definition "alien" and an improper "imposition" on the Freedom of Citizens to... impose their personal and private authority on others.

In other words, Citizens banding together to Form a More Perfect Union is simply Usurpation of the Rights and Privileges of Individuals, particularly those of White Southern (Gentle)men such as the Pauls.

Therefore, ironically, the entire history of Constitutional Self-Government in this country is as Rand Paul's father -- and many of the Libertarian ilk -- have long claimed: deep in error, wrong from the get-go, and an intolerable usurpation of Individual Freedom.

The sole Principle involved is the individual (not Governmental, in other words) assertion of Authority over others -- and their lands, goods, and chattel.

That's it. Period.

Hating on the Government for interfering in this individual assertion of Authority is an ongoing theme in American Life.

There once was a time when American expansionism allowed plenty of physical space for individuals to assert their personal Authorities as they chose. But those days are long gone; now it is much more difficult for those with the urge to lord it over someone else or to form and rule some petty kingdom of his own -- without the regulation or imposition of The Government -- to do so.

So those who make their purpose in life the Individual Assertion of Authority can find themselves in a very difficult position. There is no unclaimed territory left for them to migrate to and assert themselves. The Frontier has long been closed.

What I'm seeing in response -- both from the inside and outside The Government -- is a concerted effort by a coalition of Libertarians and billionaires to literally dismantle The Government so as to ensure that it cannot interfere with their desire to impose their Authority without the interference of The Government. They are seeking to confine The Government entirely to the protection of their personal/private/corporate and individual interests, and to forbid The Government from serving the Public Interest -- which they don't believe in in any case.

They are winning, and they are using the deeply rooted flaws in our Constitution and the Political System to do so. And they are winning because they have almost no active opposition.

As I've said many times, we are witness to the End of the Republic, much as the Romans in times of yore witnessed the end of their Republic -- and Americans, like the Romans, are greeting it with a shrug.

Too bad that the replacement in both cases is... The Empire.

Taking Stock of the One Party State

As everybody knows by now, the selection of Rick Warren, High Priest of the Saddleback Churches in Southern California, to invoke Divine Blessing on the Inauguration of Barack Obama has caused something of a schism in "Progressive" ranks primarily due to Warren's repeated and unrepented dismissal of gay folk as sinners and the equivalents of pedophiles and miscegenists. Well I never.

Of course then he denies it.

And the Team Obama basically says what they always do when some issue or individual gets the peripheral members of the team all riled up: "That's OK. We're bringing people together. You can get on board or get off the bus. Whatever."

Which sort of puts hissy-throwing off the list of Appropriate Actions.

More often than not, the hissy-throwers find some other target for their ire, Team Obama goes on with its business -- that of reconstituting the State -- and that as they say is that.

Reconstituting the State, yes, but also Redeeming it.

Throughout the two long years of the Obama campaign for the Presidency, the theme of Redemption was strong, sometimes overwhelming. It's ironic because the Bush Regime was supposed to be "Redemption" for the religiously catasrophic Clinton Era.

Redemptionists see the American Presidency as the equivalent of the rule of a Biblical Priest-King. Priest-Kings must be morally stainless and blameless, and of course, Bill Clinton failed that test spectacularly. Ergo, the Nation had to be Redeemed from the Stain and the Sin of the Clintons, Redemption that was thought to have come with the Divine Selection of George W. Bush to be President.

Things big and small started going wrong from the outset of this Selection (hardly Divine), and the 9/11 attacks merely confirmed the Divine Displeasure with the Nation's Sinfulness (as made clear by America's Former Preachers, the Late Rev. Fallwell and the still Present Rev Robertson. It was Divine Judgement for the Sins of Abortion and Homosexuality that brought Retribution in the form of airplanes used as fuel-air bombs to destroy The Twin Towers. Yes it was. The High Priests at the Temple said so.

The Bushevik wars were then supposed to Redeem the Nation, only soon enough it was clear that the wars were simply going to make things worse. We learned very early on of atrocities committed in Afghanistan by our supposed allies, sometimes with American forces looking on or even participating. We learned early on of the lies and deceptions used throughout the Afghanistan campaign. Redemptionists set those things aside in the hope that over time the Annointed Ones in the White House would do the right thing according to Divine Will.

But they lied some more and decided to invade Iraq where things almost at once went from bad to horrible, as the situation stagnated into a bloody and futile mess.

Redemptionists imagined that eventually the Busheviks would get things right according to the Divine Order of Things, but somehow they never did.

In times of Tribulation, Redemptionists call out for Divine Guidance through the Annointment of Some Other King, and behold. In what's left of our faulty self-governing Republic there is a mechanism for choosing a New King, and surprisingly enough, that Mechanism "selected" Barack Obama to Redeem the Nation from its Original Sin as well as all the piled on Sins of History.

An African, well, part African, raised up By The Lord, to Rule in Majesty over Our Troubled and Broken Land.

Halleluja!

We have all but lost our secular moorings.

And Redemption for the Great Sins of Our Nation will require adherence to Biblical Command. That will not be an easy path, but it is one that the Busheviks (being in many cases barely reformed Trotsky-ites) could not and did not take.

President-King-Emperor Obama, on the other hand, seems quite clear, and quite firm in his commitment to Redeeming this Unhappy Land. And that means that The Rev. Warren will Invoke Divine Blessing at the Annointment-Inauguration whether anyone likes it or not.

The United States is a One Party State, directed by the Divine Spirit in this reading of our history and current Unhappiness. The Divine keeps appointing failed governance over us; we are supposed to take lessons in Submission from these failed leaders and give ourselves over completely to the Divine Will.

Obama fits perfectly into the pattern.

The question then is whether we will ever return to the Enlightenment and the principles of Secular Self Government. Or will we continue blindly on our path toward Imperial Byzantine Autocracy/Theocracy, with pastors great and small determining all aspects of our lives and calling it "Divine Liberty"?

Laura Flanders -- and friends -- explain it all for you

What's wrong with the St Paul lockdown and roundups.

Gena Berglund, of the Minnesota National Lawyers Guild and Karen Greenberg of the Center on Law and Security talk about the post-Seattle security state.

We have to go farther than fretting about this or that journalist, this or that lawyer, this or that "anarchist" snatched off the streets or rounded up.

The Seattle WTO protests in 1999 are the alleged model for the need for overwhelming force used against citizens. But it is a class and power issue: a demonstration that those with money, power and connections are immune, anyone else is fair game for the truncheons, the gas and the cages. They try to create a divide between "good" and "bad" protesters, so that the public will despise everyone who is rounded up -- because they are "bad." The ordinary citizens of St Paul have to say no!

Class war? Absolutely. And the police forces are employed to maintain the advantage of the rich and powerful.

Anyone who isn't one of them is a potential target.

St Paul Follow Up

So what have we learned boys and girls?

In St Paul, planning -- and announcing your plans -- to protest and commit acts of civil disobedience at and around a gathering of very rich and very powerful Republicans will get your house raided by Agents of the Law, will get you pre-emptively arrested, and will get you charged with conspiracy, riot, and the furtherance of terrorism. Got that? The lesson? Keep your mouth shut, stay off the intertubes, keep your head down.

In St Paul, acting in any way that is not previously vetted and approved by the Authorities, or just being where anyone is or might act that way, will get you arbitrarily harrassed, surrounded, blasted, gassed, maced, peppersprayed, beatup, zip-tied, and hauled off to the Detention Center for Processing, where you also might get beaten bloody. It's all good. The lesson? Stay in your home, say nothing, do nothing, do not go out on the streets, do not witness events for yourself, do not question Authority.

In St Paul, if you are a journalist simply trying to witness and report what is going on, you might get beaten, gassed, arrested, held, have your equipment confiscated, your press credentials withdrawn. But then, lucky you, you'll be Processed ahead of Ordinary Citizens. The lesson? Stay away from conflict scenes, take testimony, attend press availabilities, do not witness and do not record on your own, do not defend your colleagues, do not question Authority.

In St Paul, if you are a Citizen, you have no rights the Authorities are bound to respect, not so long as very rich and very powerful Republicans are in Convention Assembled. And so you will understand that, a selection of you will be beaten, gassed, rounded up and arbitrarily "detained" and arrested by the hundreds, just so the lesson sinks in.

Yes indeed. This is what a Police State looks like.

It's 3:00AM -- Canaries in the Coal Mine

A friend called me yesterday while I was finishing up my work for the day. "Have you heard," he said, "they're tasering protesters in Minneapolis and St. Paul." I said no, I hadn't heard that. He said it was in the paper, I'd better take a look. I told him some of what I had been reading and seeing on the Internets, about the numerous assaults by police and the mass arrests. He hadn't heard about the numbers arrested, had no idea so many had been hauled away.

Then I got around to checking out FDL's extensive and disturbing coverage of the police overkill in the Twin Cities. I'd been following Glenn Greenwald's less extensive but equally outraged coverage and had been spending a good deal of time in a kind of "dialogue" with various commenters there about the events unfolding outside the Republican National Convention in St. Paul. So, clearly I had missed a good deal of the news.

One of the noticeable aspects of the reports of what was going on in Minneapolis and St. Paul was that apparently very few people cared about what happened to a few hundred "anarchists" who got out of line. They broke windows!!! And they deserved every bit of what they got. There is nothing worse in the history of Domestic Terrorism than the breaking of windows!!!! Except for the balloons full of urine. And the bags of feces.

Then there were the reports of what happened to Keith Smith, 17, of Menomonie, Wisconsin.



According to reports, he'd actually stopped a line of police by sitting down in the street, shaking his sistrum, and being photographed. His action evoked something of the admiration people around the world have for the brave fellow in Beijing who stopped a line of tanks headed to Tienanmin Square to put down the revolt there in 1989.



Somewhat later -- how much later, I don't know -- he was assaulted by five police officers and beaten before he was arrested and taken to a juvenile detention center where he was held for a couple of hours and then released. His injuries are documented here.

And he is one of many peaceful and non resisting citizens and demonstrators who have been brutalized by the hyper militarized police forces deployed in St. Paul to protect and defend the Republican National Convention from the crazed youth who otherwise would interfere with their party.

As I watched some of the videos on this page, I became angrier and angrier that this sort of outrageous police overreaction continues in this country every time there is a significant gathering of the rich and the powerful in a city, gatherings which are by their nature subject to protest by citizens.

On a smaller scale the same thing happened in Denver during the Democratic National Convention. The police there also received $50 million and direction from the Secret Service and the FBI; but in St. Paul and Minneapolis (where many of the raids and pre-convention arrests took place), the brutality and the constant police instigated conflict, as well as the mass arrests and brutalization while in custody reached a new level -- for this year.

Of course it is nothing new. Since the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999, there's been repeated street warfare and street theatre again and again all over the country, large scale peaceful marches and protests being broken up and put down brutally.

Yet strangely, sports fans continue to riot whenever their team wins or loses, and there is little more than a shrug from the hyper-vigilant and militarized police forces. Strangely, enormous protests against the Iraq War, protests organized by a coalition of Communists, have gone off almost without a hitch. And strangely, too, Americans tend to look at these things -- when they look at all -- with a sort of distate and with boredom.

How do we break the cycle?

These incidents are the canaries in the coalmine for our deteriorating, vanishing rights as citizens of a free and prosperous land. Many Americans simply don't care what's happening to scruffy youths who think they have the right to mouth off to Authority. Yet what happens to those scruffy youth now is quite likely to be what happens to anyone in the future who tries to exercise civil and political rights against the orders and wishes of the Powers That Be. For now, the youths being brutalized by the Authorities in St. Paul are not like you and me, any more than the criminals being held in our bulging prisons and jails are like the rest of us. They are separate and different and so they can be -- and are -- treated with surpassing indifference by the rest of us, and with apalling brutality by the Authorities.

But what happens to them could happen to any of us.

And that's what those who do the brutalizing and those who are indifferent to -- or celebrate it -- need to come to understand.

Goin' Balls Out

This is absurd. But this IS America, so why should I be surprised?

Terrorism charges lodged against protesters at GOP convention
Prosecutors in Ramsey County, Minn., have formally charged eight alleged leaders of the RNC Welcoming Committee -- one of the groups organizing protests at the GOP convention in St. Paul -- with terrorism-related charges, The Times' P.J. Huffstutter reports.

Monica Bicking, Eryn Trimmer, Luce Guillen Givins, Erik Oseland, Nathanael Secor, Robert Czernik, Garrett Fitzgerald and Max Spector, face up to 7 1/2 years in prison under the terrorism enhancement charge, which allows for a 50% increase in the maximum penalty they could face.

It appears to be the first time criminal charges have been filed under the 2002 Minnesota version of the federal Patriot Act.

The RNC Welcoming Committee is a self-described anarchist group that has worked for months planning disruptions at the convention. Police blamed the group for sparking violence during Monday's antiwar protest in St. Paul. Although most of the estimated 10,000 people at the march were peaceful, police say a splinter group of about 200 people harassed delegates, smashed windows and started at least one fire.

Police have arrested nearly 300 people during the confrontations this week, according to the Associated Press. Huffstutter reported on the protests for the blog Tuesday. And this morning, we told the story of journalist Amy Goodman's arrest at Monday's march.

-- Kate Linthicum

Protest and civil disobedience are now officially Terrorism in this country. As we knew would happen once Joe Biden's Patriot Act and all the various tweaks to the various surveillance bills had settled in.

Protest? Yes, sure, as long as you have the approval of the Government and protest in approved ways, about approved topics, under approved surveillance, and then return to your jobs and families.

Civil disobedience?

Off to Gitmo with you. Or to one of the domestic camps.

I've been in an uncommonly nostalgic mood these last few days, maybe ancestral memories of Chicago '68 roiling my brain, but these latest charges of terrorism for planning to protest and be disobedient, remind me a bit of the hoopla around the Lodi Terror Cell (that few remember) which was broken up by intrepid FBI agents and a paid informant. There was a trial. The Pakistani ice cream truck driver was released after a mistrial. His son, who had gone to Pakistan to fetch a bride, and was charged with attending a terrorist training camp, was convicted. On the testimony of the informant. And an FBI agent who lied.

A summary of the
sorry tale.

Central to the case was a Pakistani immigrant and former Lodi resident whom the FBI recruited in Bend, Ore., where he was working as a convenience store clerk. The informant, Naseem Khan, 32, got the FBI’s attention a month after the terrorist attacks when he told agents he saw Osama bin Laden’s top deputy, Ayman Zawahiri, worshiping and lecturing at the small mosque in Lodi, where Khan lived in 1998 and 1999.

In three later interviews, Khan said he saw two other terrorists – wanted in connection with the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania – frequenting the mosque.

FBI agents said they quickly dismissed the claimed sightings as highly unlikely. Most terrorism experts and federal officials do not think that Zawahiri ventured outside Afghanistan or Pakistan after 1995.

But despite concluding that the claims were unreliable, the FBI in November 2001 hired Khan – who speaks Urdu and Pashto, two of Pakistan’s languages – to infiltrate Lodi’s large Muslim community.

During the three years leading to the arrest of the Hayats, Khan was paid nearly $230,000 in salary and expenses.

Defense attorneys Griffin and Mojadiddi relentlessly attacked Khan’s credibility in his multiple appearances on the stand. The approach eventually forced prosecutors to admit to the jury that they had no evidence Zawahiri had ever been in Lodi.

The prosecution, meanwhile, leaned heavily on the confessions of the two Hayats obtained after hours of interrogation at Sacramento FBI headquarters and on satellite photographs of a location in Pakistan that matched one of the varying descriptions of the camp that Hamid Hayat said he attended.

When the Lodi case broke last June, government officials initially said they had uncovered a full-blown terrorist cell.

Keith Slotter, then-head of the FBI’s Sacramento office, said that “various individuals connected to Al Qaeda have been operating in the Lodi area in various capacities, including individuals who have received terrorist training abroad with the specific intent to initiate a terrorist attack in the United States.”

An early U.S. Justice Department affidavit, later withdrawn, implied that the arrest of the Hayats was just the beginning, saying that “other individuals in the Lodi community” had been programmed in Pakistani camps to attack hospitals and food stores.

And the imams who supposedly led this cell of terror? They went back to Pakistan without charges.

Um. Hm.

On Storming the Winter Palace

Between 1825 and 1917, there were numerous attempted revolts and uprisings in the shadow of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. The rebels were routinely shot down by the Tsar's guards, or cut to pieces by the Cossacks. The Romanov Autocracy endured through them all, except the February Revolution of 1917, when the Provisional Government, first under Lvov then under Kerensky, abruptly terminated the Autocracy and shut the Romanovs up in the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo ("Tsar's Village") outside of what was then known as Petrograd.


Came October 25 (or on our calendar, November 8), 1917, there was another revolt, this time by Lenin's and Trotsky's Bolsheviks, and the Winter Palace was once more under seige. Shortly, the Provisionals withdrew; the Soviet Union soon emerged under the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. The rest, as they say, is History.

"Storming the Winter Palace" became an iconic image in the Soviet Union in part due to Sergei Eisenstein's brilliant movie, "Октябрь" or "Ten Days that Shook the World" (1927).

The Winter Palace itself was the center of Russian rebellion for generations before the overthrow of the Romanov dynasty. It was not just the Tsar's in-town residence, it was the seat of the Russian Imperial Court, the government as it were, and the Winter Palace compound, begun by Peter the Great, came to symbolize everything good and everything malign in Tsarist Russia.

There was plenty of both.

By 1917, most of what the Winter Palace symbolized was malign. The Autocracy was rotten, corrupt, decadent and brittle, it was under immense strain due to Russian losses in World War I and privations on the home front, and its overthrow proved surprisingly easy when the time came.

For reasons that few can really understand, the Cheney/Busheviks have set themselves up a little autocracy of their own in our own Petrograd, Washington DC, and they have their own version of the Imperial Court within which their courtiers flit and sing praises.

In fact, our entire government has become the creature of this Autocracy, to the point where it has become a self-perpetuating institution divorced from The People, despite the illusion of periodic elections.

The image of Storming the Winter Palace starts taking on at least symbolic meaning under the circumstances.

Just recall the Romanov Autocracy endured about 300 years -- opposed from within and without for all that time -- and despite being one of the most repressive regimes on earth at the time of its fall, the Autocracy collapsed with barely a push when the revolution finally came.

Will our own Autocracy last as long? Or is it already as brittle and rotten as the Romanovs became?