The U.S. Government: Generating Fear and Job Security at the Expense of Democracy

Consider the haunting opening lines to the 2010 BBC documentary, "The Power of Nightmares":

In the past, politicians promised to create a better world. They had different ways of achieving this. But their power and authority came from the optimistic visions they offered to their people. Those dreams failed. And today, people have lost faith in ideologies. Increasingly, politicians are seen simply as managers of public life. But now, they have discovered a new role that restores their power and authority. Instead of delivering dreams, politicians now promise to protect us from nightmares. They say that they will rescue us from dreadful dangers that we cannot see and do not understand.

Ten years ago, I found this intense documentary online. Over the years, the links to the documentary keep breaking and I have fixed them at least twice. You can now view the entire work here. Also here is the full script.

What would motivate a phalanx of high-paid government-financed experts to protect us from a never ending procession of alleged nightmares? How about job security. More specifically, now that Middle East terrorism is no longer looming as a threat to Americans, how about drumming up the new threat of misinformation/malinformation/dysinformation? How about funding huge bureaucracies of highly paid experts to protect us from each other? Notice that they have now turn our suspicions and paranoia toward each other, a disgraceful tactic in a country founded on the principle that we the citizens are in charge and it is our duty as self-rulers to interact and negotiate with each other to find solutions to complex problems. To feed their coffers, they have found a gift that keeps on giving, the concept of "misinformation," ignoring that this concept is comically vague, in other words, perfectly suited for instigating Americans to form circular firing squads.

See the latest example, “They're searching for fears to tap into," article at Public by an excellent journalist, Lee Fang. Here is an excerpt:

Smith: So when you're talking about this mission creep, do you think that this is just an example of the government just trying to grab power increasingly or do they seem to have some sort of position that they're creeping towards intentionally, if that makes sense, like some sort of policy or what?

Fang: Bureaucracies tend to be self-perpetuating. We see this in a number of areas. The military is certainly an example of this. It's difficult to wind down major military programs to cancel or roll back major military conflicts. Even with wars ending and conflicts ending and winding down in Iraq and Afghanistan, oversized military budgets seem to only grow and grow. There's no peace dividend when these conflicts end. And the same is the case with the Department of Homeland Security. This agency has grown and grown.

And even as the threat of Islamic terrorism from Al-Qaeda or ISIS has radically waned in recent years, has gone down, this agency needs to justify its existence. So it's searching for new threats, searching for new fears to tap into, and coming up with new justifications for this enlarged bureaucracy and variety of government contractors. It's shifting from protecting against overseas terror threats to focusing on social media censorship. And that seems like a radical progression, but it helps justify the duration and expansion of these agencies.

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Matt Taibbi: Free Julian Assange

From Matt Taibbi's latest article, "Why Julian Assange Must Be Freed."

[S]ecrets do not belong to governments. That information belongs to us. Governments rule by our consent. If they want to keep secrets, they must have our permission to do so. And they never have the right to keep crimes secret.

I’m an American. Many of you are from the U.K. In our countries, we’re building skyscrapers and huge new complexes to store our secrets, because we don’t have room to keep them all as is!

Why do we have so many secrets? Julian Assange told us why. From an essay he wrote:

'Authoritarian regimes give rise to forces which oppose them by pushing against the individual and collective will to freedom, truth and self realization. Plans which assist authoritarian rule, once discovered, induce resistance. Hence these plans are concealed by successful authoritarian powers.'

When governments become authoritarian, they inspire resistance. Techniques must then be developed to repel that resistance. Those techniques must then be concealed.

In short: the worse a country is, the more secrets it has. We have a lot of secrets now.

Julian Assange became famous as we were creating a vast new government-within-a-government, a system of secret prisons, extraordinary rendition, mass surveillance, and drone assassination. Many of these things we know about only because of Wikileaks. Ostensibly, all this secrecy was needed to fight foreign terrorism.

The brutal irony now is the architects of that system no longer feel the need to hide their dirty tactics. My government, openly, wants to put this man in jail for 175 years, mostly for violations of the Espionage Act. These include crimes like “conspiracy to receive national defense information,” or “obtaining national defense information.”

What is “national defense information?” The answer is what makes this law so dangerous. It’s whatever they say it is. It’s any information they don’t want to get out. It doesn’t even have to be classified. What is conspiracy to obtain such information? We have a word for that. It’s called journalism.

My government wants to put Julian Assange in jail for 175 years for practicing journalism. The government of this country, the U.K., is going to allow it to happen.

If they did this to Andrei Sakharov, or Nelson Mandela, every human rights organization in the world would be denouncing this as an intolerable outrage. Every NGO would be lining up to lend support. Every journalist would be penning editorials demanding his release.

But because our own governments are doing it, we get silence.

If you’re okay with this happening to one Julian Assange, you’d better be okay with it happening to many others. That’s why this moment is so important. If Assange is successfully extradited and convicted, it will take about ten minutes for it to happen again. From there this will become a common occurrence. There will be no demonstrations in parks, no more news stories. This will become a normal part of our lives.

Don’t let that happen.

Free Julian Assange.

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Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Points Out the Wages of War

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is urging Americans to look into the mirror. Look who we have become. It's not pretty.

Let's take up that call from 60 years ago and ask Americans, all of us, to re examine our attitudes. We have been immersed in a foreign policy discourse that is all about adversaries and threats and allies and enemies and domination. We've become addicted to comic book Good versus Evil narratives that erase complexity and blind us to the legitimate motives and legitimate cultural and economic concerns and the legitimate security concerns of other peoples and other nations.

We have internalized and institutionalized a reflex of violence as the response for any and all crises. Everything becomes a war: the war on drugs, the war on terror, war on cancer, war on climate change. This way of thinking predisposes us to wage endless wars abroad, wars and coups and bombs and drones, and regime change operations and support for paramilitaries and juntas and dictators.

None of this has made us safer. And none of it has burnished our leadership or our moral authority. More importantly, we must ask ourselves, "Is this really who we are? Is this what we want to be? Is that what Americans founders envision?"

Is it any wonder that as America has waged violence throughout the world, violence has overtaken us in our own nation. It has not come as an invasion. It has come from within. Our bombs, our drones and our armies are incapable of stopping the gun violence on our streets and schools, or domestic violence in our homes. Waging endless wars abroad we have neglected the foundation of our own well being. We have a decaying economic infrastructure. We have a demoralized people and despairing people. We have toxins in our air and our soil and our water. We have deteriorating mental and physical health. These are the wages of war.

What will be the wages of peace?

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Neocons Who Are Being Rewarded for their Iraq 2003 Disgrace.

Some might wonder how it is that so many of our purported leaders who lied us into waging war against Iraq aren't still universally disgraced and ejected from government jobs and public influence. But no, in fact, they were responsible for leading us into war in Ukraine. This list of neocons includes Joe Biden, Victoria Nuland, Anthony Blinken, Robert Kagan, Max Boot, and William Kristol.  

Glenn Greenwald recently commented on the bizarre situation that all of these neocons not only remain in power and influential. Even worse, their warmongering views are embraced by modern day Democrats. What follows is the transcript of an excerpt from Glenn's System Update show, Episode 102:

One of the most extraordinary, alarming and baffling developments to witness in American politics is the complete rehabilitation of neoconservatives. Most Americans who know this term first learned of it in 2002 during the run-up to the American and British invasion of Iraq. The neocons were the most vocal and vehement advocates, not just of the invasion of Iraq, but more importantly, of the warmongering framework undergirding that attack, namely that the world is better off when the United States rules it, and especially the Middle East, through the application of superior military force, in essence, ordering all countries to do the bidding of the United States, always under the threat that failure to obey will result in attacks, invasions, bombings, regime change, coups and much more. This imperialistic and militaristic mindset was not exactly new.

This imperialistic and militaristic mindset was not exactly new. The U.S. fought wars, imposed tyrannies, and engineered coups all over the world, on every continent, during the Cold War and after but what distinguished neocons from standard warmongers and militarists were two qualities:

First, they have no other politics beyond their quest for endless war. Many neocons in fact began as liberals or even leftists and were willing to morph into anything they needed to be as long as doing so served the only issue they really cared about: placing the US in a state of endless war, almost always fought by other people's families and children rather than their own. Starting with the war in Iraq, a war they were craving and loudly demanding long before the 9/11 attacks – that attack became the pretext for the war in Iraq – they have supported every new and proposed American war since then. "Neocons" is a polite euphemism for "bloodthirsty, sociopathic warmongers."

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