Staggering up from a holiday-binge induced coma, this correspondent
fears a
Rip Van Winkle hallucination because it's looking a lot like Italy...
in
1939.
A few raghead camel-jockeys handed our Law & Order zealots their best
hook for
eviscerating the Constitution and Bill of Rights since McCarthyism.
Defense is
double-plus good and the Bush-Lite administration is merrily planning a
full-on Military Industrial Complex orgy with every weapons system in
sight - as
though terrorists plot fielding tank divisions and supersonic fighters.
And of course they're also cutting taxes, too (mostly to the benefit of
rich
asshole buddies, as opposed to the rest of us), leading to deficit
spending -
which is a striking contrast to last year's guess at major budget
surpluses.
(The parallels to Enron's pump and dump are scary, but not very
surprising.)
This is all more than mildly annoying, but what did we expect? We
"elected"
these people (or so they and a majority over at the Supreme Court tell
us).
But it's all just money (even though it is _our_ money). Easy come,
easy go,
wasting our taxes is what government does best, so who cares - guns or
pork?
This would all be more or less business as usual (the Republicans give
away
money to the rich, then the Democrats give some to the poor and
middle-class)
except for the present assault on basic liberties, rights, and citizen
data.
You read it right, bucko: "All your data are belong to us" - sayeth the
Feds.
Their pretense for this is the claim that cross-indexing every scrap of
your
data - all your purchases, where you live and with whom (for ten years
or so),
your education, drivers licenses and vehicle tags, arrests and
misdemeanors,
civil actions, credit information, even IP addresses, web posts, and
email -
will enable them to single out "suspicious" airline passengers,
preemptively.
All of your data will be fed into a web of interconnected databases to
track
your every move, record your every public act, and log your every
statement,
"private" or not - all for a dubious justification of making airplanes
safe.
A parallel initiative put forward by the desperate corporate bastards
running
the airlines would let people submit to "voluntary" background checks
to get
exempted from obnoxious security checks at airports. It's bad enough
that a
government agency wants to shred our privacy and Constitutional
protections, but
having airlines extort our privacy to avoid draconian security checks
is
simply an unconscionable proposition. Here comes a stratified class
society
courtesy of an unholy collusion between "our" (yeah right) government
and a
cabal of bigass overleveraged airlines desperately seeking to create
profits.
In the 1930's sometime, Mussolini said "Corporatism is Fascism." Of
course he
meant that as a recommendation for Fascism, but it was perceptive of
him.
And after all - as was said in Chamberlain's Britain all too glad to
appease the
Axis Powers way back in those days - fascism made the trains run on
time.
When my recreational drugs run out, I'm going to get me some Greyhound
stock.
