(10 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
This post on Tuesday, How Shell is trying to send a chill through activist groups across the country, brings up one very interesting question…
HOW DID SHELL LEARN ABOUT A POTENTIAL AND hypothetical GREENPEACE PROTEST?
The case, Shell Offshore Inc. vs. Greenpeace, was filed by Shell Oil Company. Last summer, Shell assumed –based on conjecture – that Greenpeace USA would protest the company’s drilling in the Alaskan Arctic. Shell asked the 9th Circuit court for a preemptive injunction and restraining order against Greenpeace USA
The real question, it seems to me, is this: Is this the type of info the NSA is gathering and distributing to mega corps? 
I’ve seen some very disturbing polls, allegedly asserting that at least half of Americans (and that includes modern Dems … not my kind of Dem but oh well) support NSA programs, although there are indications Americans want um oversight of those programs. Yeah. Right. Oversight by whom?
Anyway. I do wonder how Americans would feel if that NSA spying on Americans program™ was primarily focused on disrupting the next OCCUPY protest? What if the NSA program is aimed at stopping Americans from protesting in the same manner as Brazil or Turkey? I wonder if Americans would approve. Maybe they would. Maybe America has changed so radically that people like me are the outliers… the bothersome and drab bearers of bad news trampling over the promise of more Brand Dems in the White House…
But one wonders why, with all the intel about the Boston Marathon suspects, that tragedy wasn’t averted…
Maybe some of us still think this is about political parties and getting Dems in National Office, abortion, immigration, and marriage equality. It’s not. They are cultural issues thrown into the waters like chum to attract a feeding frenzy by all those polarized and rapt in their “side-taking.” What is at play here is far more urgent… in the-short-term urgent life-on-planet-earth urgent… and it involves the NSA program, the trade agreement being negotiated that will upend our sovereignty, bailouts, water, and our food sources. And that little thing called climate change.
So… where are the priorities? Hillary in 2016 (don’t make me gag) or finding a way to change this game… and address the issues that will really change people’s lives. Clue: voting Brand Democrat in 2016 ain’t it.
I know one thing, I gonna continue to withhold my vote.
I’m gonna withhold my vote until we get candidates on the national slate who put the interests of human beings and our fellow earthlings before corporate profits.
No more voting for the lesser of two evils… no more participating and thereby giving tacit approval of a system that is corrupt.
It’s a simple thing, but hey, there it is…
6 comments
Skip to comment form
Here’s an interview with Russ Baker: http://whowhatwhy.com/2013/06/…
Like many big events the same people who brought you the assassinations and other events here and in dozens of countries may be implicated in Boston. If Baker, who is, right now, one of the top investigative journalists in the world with top-tier skills, says there is something weird about Boston then I think we need to take it seriously.
The intel operations against the American people on a federal level was started in earnest during WWI and has been built up over the past century to an unassailable network that Stasi would have killed to have. We live in an Orwellian state today–fortunately, it is much more benign than Orwell’s state and is run by people who don’t believe in mass killings of mass jailing but prefer mind-control and prudent use of violence. Most people don’t want to think about this stuff–and we can each live perfectly adequate lives without thinking about it–but if we want to think about politics we cannot think about it without understanding the dynamics of the State and the vast majority of people on the left choose not to see the real dynamics of power and, for that reason, the left has been stunningly ineffective and largely powerless at this time.
Last I heard our jail population topped all other modern countries.
Bloomberg’s New York City isn’t exactly a utopia for certain minorities and peaceful protestors.
NSA was once so secretive that employees were not even allowed to reveal where they worked to spouses but tools have increased the potential for harm enormously.
Easy enough to go on and on but that monstrous jail population is intolerable and hardly discussed.
Best, Terry
Most Americans on the cultural left and the cultural right accept, at face value, the claims of the security services that they are protecting us against dangerous and relentless enemies. The fact the left accepts this notion is one of the major reasons why the left is largely ignored in American politics other than in cultural issues like gay marriage etc.
I suggest that there is no big threat out there other than occasional outbursts of violence. I suggest that most of the threats are largely (not completely) fictional. I suggest also that it is logical and good policy for authoritarians and oligarchs to promote fears of “outside” threats in order to keep that oligarchy in power. Sadly, such an analysis despite overwhelming evidence is impossible for most of the left to conduct. There are many reasons for this that are cultural rather than strictly political–in part it is that the left still clings to the notion of American Exceptionalism–that somehow the USA has and can continue to escape history–that the drives and techniques laid out by classical historians and put together by Machiavelli somehow don’t apply to us. U.S. leaders would never stage a coup d’etat, assassinate leaders, kill Ameircans in order to gain political power and so on–such a thing is inconceivable. But evidence points in that direction as surely as a compass points north. We are not at the “end of history” we have not discovered the perfect political system, we are not the light unto the world nor are we the scourge or demon some make us out to be–we are just what we are–an extraordinary Imperial colossus that sits astride the world and attempts to direct the world in some bad and good ways–in my opinion our effect on the world is neither noxious nor benign so don’t count me as an “anti-American” American–I’m very much pro-American and proud to live here with all our little peculiarities.
But we would be much better off it the cultural left would decide to embrace a more robust and rigorous intellectual analysis of the power-relations in this country rather than just entertain convenient fantasies. To confront the truth does not mean having to take on an armed revolt–rather, it is to embrace the truth and accept the political realities of a complex and still creative empire rather than hiding our heads because it’s lineaments are a little scary. I’ve been around “bad guys” and violent people who are not afraid to be ruthless in getting what they want–yes, they are scary but they are human and complex and deserve compassion as much as anyone else. Such people occupy positions of power in this country and to ignore that fact is to be hopelessly naive.