"Let Them Eat Cake...."

HUBGRAM
What the Others Won’t Print

How Do They Get Away With It?....

What I mean is how come this government has been able to violate so many protections of our democracy, indulge in so many lies, operate at such cross purposes with America’s interests and manage to survive looking for all intents and purposes as patriots while those who question such practices are viewed as the “enemy.”

On first blush, for many of us, it seems as if we are attending the Mad Hatters picnic….with no rabbit hole to escape through.

What we do know is that this is not business as usual. And that there is something wrong here; something shockingly wrong!. What strikes most of us hardest is that this is not a government that respects us, it doesn’t even know we exist!....

Even Nixon, as bad as he was, knew where to draw the line. This government seems to be obsessed with one idea: To operate beyond the controls of law for the benefit of its own kind (those who hear voices and those who command giant budgets, preferably military); and the hell with the rest of us.

This is Louis the XIV thinking transformed to modern day and it deserves some commentary; but it doesn’t exist!....

Why?

Because not only is this a monarchy in waiting, it is a government that underscores getting even at any cost.

And few have demonstrated the courage to take them on.

If we look hard, we find a government that attempts to get out of the work of government –see planning for Iraq, see Katrina mistakes-- but excels in using government for its own ends that incidentally overrides the restrictions and controls of law and the primacy of the Constitution. It’s modus operandi is the fact that it has an out sized enemy to blame. (Was bin Laden a pawn in this great scheme?) In short, this is a government of misdirection, that uses language as so much smoke and mirrors to obfuscate its true intentions.

The truth is that most of us underestimate this government. We point to Bush as a dunderhead; but the truth is that he doesn’t care what we think because he is getting his own way right in front of our faces and we don’t seem to get it.

In fact, they have developed a very nice play that features Cheney as the distraction while his counterpart does the dirty work of running a totalitarian state that gets what it wants. Here’s how it plays: While Cheney goes around acting as the “enforcer,” the real power behind the throne, Rove plays his games of political hardball in such a way that it impacts virtually every aspect of government—from treasury to interior, from war policy to “outsourcing.” And he does it with the full approval and support of the leadership!...
Some may look back at this period of Rovian politics as when scamming was legalized.

What we must not overlook, either, is the fact that the lobbyists recognize that this government plays ball so that they work overtime to keep their coffers full, giving them the resources to further uproot the conventional protections built in to a democracy. Clearly, the opposition has failed to explain how this process deliberately leaves the citizen unprotected and vulnerable and subject to arbitrary and unilateralist decision-making that has nothing to do with the rules of law or rationality.

How does it manage to get away with such travesties?

First, this is a government that knows how to manipulate the media to its ends.
Most of what they don’t want you to hear about, never makes it to the media.
They also understand that the media can be used two ways: to inform the people of what’s going on in government; or as a vehicle for government to manipulate the media to tell the people precisely what it wants them to believe. In the past seven years, we have seen much more of the later than the former. Think Judith Miller but is she only the tip of the pro-government editorial mavens and gurus who decide what we see and believe?

Moreover, with most of the legislation that has come through this government, the people-friendly aspects are exaggerated while the real goals and objectives of the legislation is subverted so that unless the public is willing to probe, for the most part, most people wind up being poorly informed. And when the people are poorly informed or disconnected or distracted, democracy begins to crumble from the inside out.

As an example, consider the Clean Air and Clean Water bills which one might think are aimed at what they say, “clean air” and “clean water,” but they are not—they don’t even come close; in effect, they are provisions that put this bit of legislation on hold. What difference does ten more years of ingesting harmful chemicals make after all when we are really addressing the grand design of furthering one’s power and control. From the hype, it is easy to assume that the government is looking out for our best interests; nothing is further from the truth!...

This is not only an example, it is a hyper-model for the way the public is roped in to tacitly endorsing free wheeling republican-initiated legislation ranging from drilling in the Arctic to The policies that allow the president under Fast-Track to make arbitrary and special interest oriented decisions as to trade policy. We are the dunderheads when all is said and done…

Consider NAFTA regulations that went into effect under Clinton. According to several legislators who commented on this package of legislation, most of it was prepared by lobbyists with an axe to grind and forced to a vote before most legislators had a chance to read the small type in this massive bill. In fact, I believe I’ve only heard of one legislator who claims to have read the bill before it was approved. No big deal you might say, yet NAFTA and its provisions subtlety took responsibility for the legal implications of product failures away from the court system and the American people allowing them to be settled without legal redress behind closed doors by appointees of business with their decisions final.

In other words, NAFTA is a bill where enforcement and other aspects of the legislation circumvent the provisions of the courts and the rule of law as dictated by the Constitution. An alarming development that has turned out to be news to even those who were rushed into voting for the bill but also a first and necessary step to the New World Order.

Again, Americans were fooled in the description of the bill that reached the media. We were told that the Free Trade Agreements would be good for American business. What we have here is another case of payrolled-economists seeing the world through rose-colored glasses or the bottom line on their paychecks where everyone operates on a level playing field. But theory is not reality, and for the most part, few companies provide the benefits and protections incorporated into the American system, and our laws. In addition, this bill takes advantage of great poverty in other nations to exploit the worker even further. The only ones who benefit, as it turns out, are the employers and the stock-holders who see profits and record dividends. That’s why the stock markets are going up while the workers of the Middle Class suffer grievous loss…

Another example of how we are lied to is described in the president’s explanation of how America tracks down potential terrorists using NSA to screen international calls. One might gather that from the way the president describes his actions, he is operating legally but the truth is that he has avoided getting court approvals for each case of eavesdropping on US Citizens which is against the law.

The fact is that to accommodate the president, special courts have been set up to expedite the approval process, but in most cases they have been ignored as the president and his minions continue to eavesdrop. When the Attorney General was queried on this seeming violation of Constitutional rights, the Attorney General got around the issue by saying that he is operating under the law in this program. The key is “this program.” The sharp and astute questioner might come to the realization that there are other aspects of data mining going on through NSA and outside vendors that violate privacy accords with impunity and are seemingly going on unimpeded without investigation. And they would be right!

In the context of many who are knowledgeable, there is general agreement that the president is operating outside of his core rights in assuming that as president, during wartime, that he is within his rights to interpret the law as he sees fit; inferring that it is also alright if he makes up his own to suit his convenience.

A case in point, is AT&T’s agreement to allow NSA to install a very high powered data mining system in its San Francisco office that feeds a duplicate data track through the NSA installation, giving NSA and its vendors, unlimited access to the calls and emails of literally millions of Americans, 99% of whom have no involvement with terrorism whatsoever. How many more of these NSA stations exist is beyond knowing; nor how many private vendors are complicit in this underground networking deal is too complex to know but initial probes indicate that NSA employs many private computer sources to get around legal limitations imposed on NSA by Federal law.

So, what do we see?

We see a government that has gone out of its way to cater to narrow right wing interests and has discovered a very ingenious way to put a happy face on what it does much like those toys that the Russians dropped in Afghanistan that really contained bombs. It has even hired a staff that does only one thing: to conceal the real meaning and content of legislation, policy, whatever for distribution to the media. In this context, it uses misdirection and language that is not representative of the intentions of the bill to change around its meaning for the general public. For the most part, this unilateralist government succeeds because like any tyranny, it keeps the opposition focused on a real or supposed enemy arguing that we need to employ such tactics to protect ourselves whereas in reality, it is protecting its own parochial interests at the expense of the many, and those of the Middle Class, who are disabused are forced to fend for themselves….

More on this another day….

The Hubmaster,

Les Aaron

MAY PEOPLE BE FOUND WHO BELIEVE THAT OUR FRAGILE DEMOCRACY IS WORTH SAVING….