You, That’s Right, YOU, Are The Enemy Of The State And Society’s Last Best Chance At Restoring Liberty And Liberating Our Democratic Institutions From The Endless Profligacy Of The State

"Of the tyrant (the state), spies and informers are the principal instruments. War is his favorite occupation for the sake of engrossing the attention of the people and making himself necessary to them as their leader" --Aristotle, over 2000 years ago

I thought I would slap this up in honor of Janet Napolitano and the politics of fear being waged in her Wal-mart Big Brother video.  There is something in the subconscious mind which creates a paranoia when our fearless leaders are intimating we should be on the look out for the boogeymen.  Of course, the state is driven by paranoia and finds its purpose in tactics of fear as Aristotle told us thousands of years ago.  ie, Behavior of the state is timeless.   

I got the charts below from the Center for Systemic Peace. The research on their site was funded by the CIA if you can believe that. The CSP is associated with the Polity IV project that I peruse irregularly. One of the intents of these projects is to anticipate future political volatility. Although I find their methodology lacking as the world will witness over the next decade, there is some good raw historical data available.  Interesting stuff.

You can do your own diligence but it seems to me that the only real changes in the level of terrorism dynamics we have seen in the last few decades are in countries the United States is occupying.  And there is no evidence of the “fight them there or eventually fight them on in our homeland” proselytizing pushed by George Bush and many self-interested bureaucrats who rely on the state and its control for their livelihood.  

Something we have written in our many state-based posts is that first and foremost the state will seek to sustain itself.  ie, Bureaucracy finds solutions by creating even more bureaucracy.   We see President Obama, the consummate bureaucrat, is very good at this.  We have tens of thousands of pages of new government red tape that serve the state and the corporatocracy while destroying personal freedoms and economic vibrancy. 

This is all really quite simple.  When the Cold War ended, the military-industrial complex (the state and its corporate welfare recipients) needed to find a new enemy to survive and remain relevant.  Those enemies are now terrorism, other states and the American people.  The state propaganda surrounding this dynamic and the boogeyman they have created is deafening.   It’s much better than Stephen King’s incarnation with the same title. 

We have probably spent over $10 trillion dollars fighting an enemy that is generally of our own creation. Hence my use of the term boogeyman.  This boogeyman was created by America’s interventionist foreign policy and has been elevated by our mind’s fears.  Of course all stoked by the military-industrial complex seeking the enemy it needs to sustain itself and remain relevant or “in power”.  The reality is the terrorist attacks outside of Afghanistan and Iraq really don’t exist on any increased level over that of two decades ago.   Our enemy is primarily a figment of the state’s imagination.   (In addition to the $10 trillion spent fighting this boogeyman, we have backstopped another $20 trillion on assets due to Wall Street corruption.  This cumulative amount of money could have bought every American household a home, paid for Social Security for the next two hundred years and provided a non-corrupt national health care system to every American for the next two hundred years.  We are not broke because social systems aren’t sustainable or because they are communist or other incessant stupidity furnished by ideological idiots, but instead because of massive fraud.  This massive spending driven by corruption creates enormous poverty by diverting society’s limited financial and economic resources from human and economic development to the pockets of the elitist class and the state.) 

The CIA sponsored research below shows no change in the scope or size of terrorism attacks around the globe except where manifested by American military and interventionist foreign policy.  It surely doesn’t support the level of histrionics and trillions of dollars of spending by the state, the military-industrial complex and its corporate welfare recipients. 

"As organization acquires power, it uses that power, not surprisingly, to serve the ends of those involved. These ends-job security, pay, promotion, prestige, company plane and private washroom, the charm of collectively exercised power-are all strongly served by the growth of the enterprise. (the state)  So growth enhances power over prices, costs, consumers, suppliers, the community (democracy) and the state and also rewards in a very personal way those who bring it about."  -John Kenneth Galbraith

As we wrote before, the mega banks are necessary for the state to sustain itself.   ie, The structure of our banking system serves the state and its search for greater control rather than democracy.  Were the state a person, we could classify it as a megalomaniacal sociopath.  The U.S. government cannot wage war on its boogeymen by having a public banking system or a community banking system whose goals would be human and economic development.  Who would be the outlet for all of that massive government debt used to fuel this corruption?  Remember, by law Wall Street dealers (too big to fail banks) are a guaranteed outlet to purchase government debt.   They are the financial tools used to wage interventionism and war, and they are more than happy to oblige as they mint billions doing it.  The state needs megabanks so it can borrow massive sums of money to wage its hegemony.  To perpetuate the state.   ie, As our government began crowding out individual rights and private enterprise thirty plus years ago, Wall Street grew larger and larger along with it as the government needed them to in order to wage its battles against boogeymen.  And in direct response, poverty rose linearly and sharply over that time frame.    

Are there people out there who want to kill Americans.  Sure there are.  There always have been and there always will be.  But a substantial reason why they want to kill Americans now is the self-fulfilling policy of belligerence perpetuated by United States’ preemptive and aggressive foreign policy and the rise of the police state at home. 

The state will never work its way out of existence on its own.  There are checks and balances in our society and the only check left is you.  The state will either collapse due to its illegitimacy, as all eventually do, or because you force peaceful change you desire onto the world around you.

I’m sure Janet Napolitano is a well-meaning truant officer.  So were the bureaucrats of the Soviet Union and countless other states.  But she’s a bureaucrat.  She bends to authority regardless of its legitimacy because free thought, liberty and social justice aren’t in a bureaucrat’s lexicon.  Bureaucrats speak the language of control.  And because this is how their mind is governed, this is where there obedience lies.  Or as we have cited many times, Thoreau wrote that politicians “rarely make any moral distinctions [and] are as likely to serve the Devil, without intending it, as God.”.   Tell me again Janet, how do you define suspicious?  What is normal behavior and who decides it?  Is anyone really normal?  This type of broad-based Orwellian public service announcement of reporting “suspicious behavior” invites fear, intimidation and abuse.  Who decides who is acting normal?  Because this is such a nebulous pronouncement,  I can see the Department of Homeland Security declaring it a success based on the number of calls received regardless of their legitimacy.   And if it is successful, it will seek to further the program or extend it to other corporations regardless of its accuracy or abuses of our liberties.  This is a state program of fear. 

We don’t need Americans spying on other Americans in the Wal-mart parking lot or in their neighborhood.  And we don’t need another bureaucratic program meant to expand the state’s authority to encourage intrusive attacks on our freedom and our right to feel safe from unwarranted intrusions of the state.  People are smart enough to call the authorities if something suspicious identifies itself without another bureaucratic program of fear sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security. 

You are the enemy of the state.  Your personal liberties, freedoms, protected privacy rights and search for economic and social justice hinder the encroachment of the state.  If you demand your constitutional and economic rights, you thwart the state and restore the balance of democracy.   

What we do need is a return to democracy, to democratic government and a democratic economic model which solves our primary issues of human development and A More Perfect Union.  And I believe that means we need to get rid of the Department of Homeland Security and fire Janet Napolitano.