Listen to Naomi

More about Brexit

From an Intercept email:

On Thursday, Britain elected the most right-wing government in decades. The Conservative Party won 365 out of 650 seats, giving Boris Johnson the strongest Tory majority since 1987 and, in his words, “a powerful new mandate to get Brexit done.” While the American public digests what to make of the Labour Party’s crushing loss (what might it mean for 2020), U.S. business interests are surely celebrating. Johnson has promised a withdrawal by January 31, 2020 — and U.S. industry groups, from pork to pharma, are eyeing the negotiations as a Trojan horse for corporations to seize more power and gut consumer protections.

British voters think Brexit will simply restore national sovereignty, limit migration, and restore local control, writes Lee Fang. In fact, corporate lobbyists now see a “historic opportunity” to use Johnson’s proposed swift exit from the European Union to forge bilateral trade deals. One of the greatest risks of Tory leadership is to the U.K.’s National Health Service. The NHS is already outsourcing an unprecedented level of patient care to private health care firms, many of which are owned by U.S. corporations. As Brexit moves forward, health care executives hope to “capture” more and more of the British market.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Another step in government/corporate control

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Deconstructing America - Part Whatever

It might not get as much press coverage as other Donald Trump administration calamities, but the U.S. president is set to appoint a known union buster to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), push the body to a Republican majority and reverse Obama-era protections that rankle Big Business.

On July 13, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee held hearings on Trump’s two NLRB selections and his deputy labor secretary pick. All three of these men are expected to be confirmed.

  In These Times

Who would have expected anything less?

William Emanuel, one of Trump’s NLRB appointees, is a management-side attorney and a member of the conservative Federalist Society. He is also a shareholder of Littler Mendelson, an infamous union busting firm that was most recently brought in by Long Island beer distributor Clare Rose to negotiate a contract full of pay cuts.

After being selected, Emanuel disclosed 49 former clients and declared he would recuse himself for up to a year if any of the companies found themselves in front of the NLRB.

A whole year, huh?

The list included multiple businesses that have clashed with the labor board, including JPMorgan Chase Bank, MasTec Inc, Nissan and Uber.

[...]

In 2016, Emanuel authored an amicus brief that defended class-action waivers in employment contracts.

[...]

“You have spent your career at one of the country’s most ruthless, union-busting law firms in the country,” [Senator Elizabeth Warren] said. “How can Americans trust you will protect workers’ rights when you’ve spent 40 years fighting against them?”

In response, Emanuel claimed that he would be objective whenever making decisions for the agency.

I'm glad that got cleared up.

[Trump's Marvin] Kaplan pick excites business executives and their advocates, who envisioned him helping overturn Obama-era labor regulations.

[...]

Kaplan served as counsel for Republicans on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. The New York Times reports, “The committee held hearings during his tenure scrutinizing prominent NLRB actions in which the witnesses skewed toward business representatives and other skeptics.” Kaplan also helped develop the The Workforce Democracy and Fairness Act, legislation that would kill a labor board rule that shortened the amount of time between when the board authorizes a workplace unionization vote and when the vote actually takes place.

[...]

Trump’s Labor Department nominee is Patrick Pizzella, a Federal Labor Relations Authority Member who was grilled by Minnesota Senator Al Franken on his ties to the infamous lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Pizzella worked with Abramoff during the 1990s to exempt the Northern Mariana Islands from federal labor regulations.

[...]

[Trump's] NLRB could potentially reverse rulings that made it easier for small groups of workers to unionize, established grad students as employees, put charter school employees under NLRB jurisdiction, and held parent companies jointly liable [...] with franchise operators who break labor laws.

[...]

“Unions and their allies should be convening research teams to plot out a campaign of regulatory and judicial activism. That work should begin now.”

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

But Go Ahead and Vote

The powerful web of interlocking corporate entities is beyond our control.

[...]

Government utilities and services, with the implementation of the Trade in Services Agreement, will see whole departments and services, from education to the Postal Service, dismantled and privatized. Our manufacturing jobs, sent overseas, are not coming back.

[...]

No vote we cast will alter the configurations of the corporate state. The wars will go on. Our national resources will continue to be diverted to militarism. The corporate fleecing of the country will get worse. Poor people of color will still be gunned down by militarized police in our streets. The eradication of our civil liberties will accelerate. The economic misery inflicted on over half the population will expand. Our environment will be ruthlessly exploited by fossil fuel and animal agriculture corporations and we will careen toward ecological collapse.

  Chris Hedges

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Addressing the Problem of Democracy

Z is for Zeitgeist: Brexit is insular but not wholly British. You hardly have to try and see parallels, across the Channel or the Atlantic. Better thinkers than me have addressed this crisis, the arrogance of neoliberal elites in constructing a politics designed to sideline and work around democracy while leaving democracy formally intact. Democracy becomes a potential weapon, a trigger you can vote to pull. But weapons don’t fire themselves, and the genius of Farage and Johnson and Gove (and Trump, potentially) is to get people to focus on the target, not on the one holding the gun.

  Tom Ewing "An A to Z of Brexit"

I don't think this arrogance belongs solely to the neoliberal elites, but to political elites from both ends of the spectrum. And definitely not Trump "potentially" - that potential is more than filled. Otherwise, I'm in agreement with Ewing, and he's put his finger very precisely on the situation.  The goal of those elites is to work around democracy (an inconvenience) and focus the masses on "the other" in their midst, away from the political elites who are actually the source of the masses' financial and political woes.  And they're doing a bang-up job of it.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Corporate Press Working Hard to Combat Bernie

Last night, Associated Press – on a day when nobody voted – surprised everyone by abruptly declaring the Democratic Party primary over and Hillary Clinton the victor. The decree, issued the night before the California primary in which polls show Clinton and Bernie Sanders in a very close race, was based on the media organization’s survey of “super-delegates”: the Democratic Party’s 720 insiders, corporate donors and officials whose votes for the presidential nominee count the same as the actually elected delegates. AP claims that super-delegates who had not previously announced their intentions privately told AP reporters that they intend to vote for Clinton, bringing her over the threshold. AP is concealing the identify of the decisive super-delegates who said this.

Although the Sanders campaign rejected the validity of AP’s declaration – on the ground that the super-delegates do not vote until the convention and he intends to try to persuade them to vote for him – most major media outlets followed the projection and declared Clinton the winner.

This is the perfect symbolic ending to the Democratic Party primary. The nomination is consecrated by a media organization, on a day when nobody voted, based on secret discussions with anonymous establishment insiders and donors whose identity the media organization – incredibly – conceals.

  The Intercept

She's good for their economy.

Maybe she's for economic inequality.  Was that what she was saying?

Look at the lady with the sign behind her.  She's either completely deluded or a CEO.

This is simply Hillary on her game.  Signaling to her donors while paying lip service to middle and lower class voters.

Okay,  Enough.  I'm going to just let the cat out on this one.

 That is one damned ugly coat. I don't care how much it cost, it's butt ugly. I hope she's wearing those stupid pants and sneakers, too.

Oh, look. She probably got a great deal on that "coat".

Reality Bites

Now, this really does surprise me.

 

From the 1980s the policymaking elite has waved away the notion that they were acting ideologically – merely doing “what works”. But you can only get away with that claim if what you’re doing is actually working.

[...]

[W]hen the Bank of International Settlements, the central bank’s central bank, warns that “the global economy seems unable to return to sustainable and balanced growth” [, the ideology underpinning contemporary capitalism is failing].

[...]

In the IMF’s flagship publication, three of its top economists have written an essay titled “Neoliberalism: Oversold?”.

[...]

At last a major institution is going after not only the symptoms but the cause – and it is naming that cause as political. No wonder the study’s lead author says that this research wouldn’t even have been published by the fund five years ago.

[...]

For so long mainstream economists and policymakers have denied the very existence of such a thing as neoliberalism, dismissing it as an insult invented by gap-toothed malcontents who understand neither economics nor capitalism. Now here comes the IMF, describing how a “neoliberal agenda” has spread across the globe in the past 30 years.

[...]

In this way, the public sector is replaced by private companies, and democracy is supplanted by mere competition.

The results, the IMF researchers concede, have been terrible.

  Guardian

I never understood why this has been called neoliberalism. The first time I heard it actually named was when Hugo Chávez started railing against it. What" I thought.  The forced austerity, privatization schemes are neoliberalism? In light of what the putative liberal party in the US has become (or returned to), I can see the reason now.

Neoliberalism hasn’t delivered economic growth – it has only made a few people a lot better off. It causes epic crashes that leave behind human wreckage and cost billions to clean up. [...] And, they say, its costs “could be large – much larger than the benefit”.

[...]

Two things need to be borne in mind here. First, this study comes from the IMF’s research division – not from those staffers who fly into bankrupt countries, haggle over loan terms with cash-strapped governments and administer the fiscal waterboarding. Since 2008, a big gap has opened up between what the IMF thinks and what it does. Second, while the researchers go much further than fund watchers might have believed, they leave in some all-important get-out clauses. The authors even defend privatisation as leading to “more efficient provision of services” and less government spending.

That's more like it.

Last year the rich countries’ thinktank, the OECD, made a remarkable concession. It acknowledged that the share of UK economic growth enjoyed by workers is now at its lowest since the second world war. Even more remarkably, it said the same or worse applied to workers across the capitalist west.

[...]

[W]hat you’re witnessing amid all the graphs and technical language is the start of the long death of an ideology.

Much too late. Better late than never? Too late might is never for millions and millions of people and for the environment.



That, too.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

And Now....Today's Leak

(Actually, yesterday's)

The Dutch chapter of the environmental activist group Greenpeace on Monday disclosed a trove of documents from the talks over a proposed trade deal between the European Union and the United States.

The documents, Greenpeace said, showed that American trade negotiators had pressed their European counterparts to loosen important environmental and consumer protections, along with other provisions.

  NYT

I guess Greenpeace didn't like Obama's remarks about negotiations being kept quiet until after the US presidential nominations were decided.

But American and European trade officials, while not denying the validity of the materials, insisted on Monday that the documents — 248 pages, which Greenpeace said amounted to two-thirds of the latest negotiating text — merely represented negotiating positions, and that the criticisms were off base.

Damage control.  Triage.

Today’s shock leak of the text of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) marks the beginning of the end for the hated EU-US trade deal, and a key moment in the Brexit debate. The unelected negotiators have kept the talks going until now by means of a fanatical level of secrecy, with threats of criminal prosecution for anyone divulging the treaty’s contents.

[...]

The European Commission slapped a 30-year ban on public access to the TTIP negotiating texts at the beginning of the talks in 2013, in the full knowledge that they would not be able to survive the outcry if people were given sight of the deal.

[...]

The documents show that US corporations will be granted unprecedented powers over any new public health or safety regulations to be introduced in future. If any European government does dare to bring in laws to raise social or environmental standards, TTIP will grant US investors the right to sue for loss of profits in their own corporate court system that is unavailable to domestic firms, governments or anyone else.

[...]

The leaked texts also reveal how the European Commission is preparing to open up the European economy to unfair competition from giant US corporations, despite acknowledging the disastrous consequences this will bring to European producers, who have to meet far higher standards than pertain in the USA.

According to official statistics, at least one million jobs will be lost as a direct result of TTIP – and twice that many if the full deal is allowed to go through.

  Independent

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

So You Want a Third Party?

Here's how today's corporate interests are going to placate you:

Ignore Jill Stein and replace a genuine third party with a faux third party.

Establishment America deserves disruption, but not of the Sanders or Trump type. Here’s how to do it.

  Wall Street Journal

Mark Zuckerberg? Michael Bloomberg?

“Why [Biden/Bloomberg/Random General] Should Run”

The Reasonable Center media needs a Reasonable Center candidate to placate some vaguely dissatisfied Reasonable Center that the current candidates aren’t addressing. Somehow exceedingly centrist Hillary Clinton is too “polarizing,” while Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders (often facilely lumped together) are too nutty and extreme.

First was the non-stop “mulling” of Joe Biden, whom TV news gave more airtime to in 2015 than Sanders and Cruz combined, despite never actually running. Then it was perennial tease Michael Bloomberg (trial-ballooned by Sanders-hating Jon Chait during Clinton’s February slump) whose uncalled for campaign involved a strategy of hiring “gig economy” workers to promote his McKinsey & Company-style candidacy. Then some GOP “elites” wanted Gen. David Petraeus, which would have been rich, considering he committed a security breach far greater and far wider than what’s being alleged against Clinton, the GOP’s favorite target.

The disinterested pundit class was searching for a pro-corporate, pro-gay marriage avatar who was a bit more liked than Clinton, despite the fact that Clinton was liked well enough to garner more votes than anyone in either party’s primary.

  Adam Johnson @ FAIR

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

This Is What Happens When You Invite Corporations to Design Public Policy

UnitedHealth Group, the largest U.S. health insurer, announced Tuesday that as of 2017 it would minimize its active participation in Affordable Care Act insurance exchanges to just a "handful" of the 34 states where it currently offers individual plans. The company warned in November that this may happen as the market ended up being smaller and financially riskier than anticipated.

  The Week

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Offered Without Comment

Big Pharma Rules!

No, really.

Not Coming Up with Anything Either

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/06/columbia-finally-stopped-giving-money-private-prisons

Fast Track to Banana Republic

In a move that elicited a collective groan from virtually all of progressive America, the Obama administration and congressional Republicans reached a deal on April 16 on so-called “fast track” trade authority. This is the legislation needed to ram new trade agreements through the U.S. Congress with limited debate and no amendments.

[...]

The bill lays out trade policy objectives that elevate the narrow interests of large corporations and undercut efforts to support good jobs, the environment, and financial stability.

Nowhere is this corporate bias more explicit than in the “investor-state” dispute settlement mechanism. In fact it would be hard to find in any U.S. policy a stronger example of excessive power granted to large corporations. Under this mechanism, private foreign investors are allowed to sue governments in international tribunals over actions—including public interest regulations— that reduce the value of their investments.

[...]

You would think the proliferation of such “investor-state” suits in recent years would give policymakers pause. Here we are, for example, in the middle of the climate crisis, and yet investors are allowed to sue governments over policies to encourage renewable energy. In the wake of the Fukushima disaster, we have a case against Germany over their decision to phase out nuclear power. And at a time when tobacco-related health costs total about half a trillion dollars per year, Philip Morris is suing the governments of Australia and Uruguay over anti-smoking laws.

What I find particularly galling is that in the wake of the financial crisis, we still have trade agreements that allow private investors to sue governments if they use policies called capital controls to deal with destabilizing hot money flows. Good grief, it was back in the aftermath of the 1990s global financial crisis that reasonable people started pointing out the foolishness of such policies.

  War Times

But “people” don’t run things.

On a conference call with a small group of reporters, President Obama significantly intensified his criticism of Elizabeth Warren and other opponents of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, accusing them of being “dishonest” about the secrecy around the TPP process, suggesting they were playing to their “fundraising” lists, and arguing flatly that they were using “misinformation that stirs up the base but doesn’t serve them well.”

[...]

“The one that gets on my nerves the most is the notion that this is a ‘secret’ deal,” Obama said. “Every single one of the critics who I hear saying, ‘this is a secret deal,’ or send out emails to their fundraising base saying they’re working to prevent this secret deal, can walk over today and read the text of the agreement. There’s nothing secret about it.”

[...]

Obama allowed that some parts of the deal cannot currently be read, but argued that allowing those portions that have not yet been finalized to receive public exposure could undermine ongoing negotiations.

  Greg Sargent

But that’s not secret. I wonder what secret means.

Obama actually said that there are “brackets” for parts of it that are not finalized, meaning that those parts don’t actually exist yet.

TBA. After it’s done.

How can anyone with even a pretense of being "progressive" look at economic issues we face -- most of them tied to raging plutocracy - and say, "you know, what we REALLY need to do now is push a corporate agenda of fast tracking "free" trade deals"?

The fact that Obama has made TPP his key 2nd term economic priority says one (or both) of two things -- and I don't know which is worse.

Either Obama and his administration never had the slightest intention of doing anything other than push a corporate economic agenda, or they've gotten behind TPP because they think it's a get, a doable deal -- something to add to list of presidential accomplishments.

Either motive would be depressing, but in some ways 2nd one would almost be worse: Careerism as Obama's only real authentic ideology.

  Billmon Twitter

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

(And I think that's a fair assessment of what Obama is all about.)

On the Fast Track to Corporate World Control

Here's what's happening: (1) American consumers have a basic right to know where their meat comes from, but (2) that right has been pitted against American corn flakes and ketchup in a "trade war" that (3) is being forced upon us by a handful of corporations that produce, slaughter, butcher and package meat outside of our country but (4) are allowed under trade agreements to challenge a U.S. law that had been duly enacted for the people inside our country, so (5) America was sued in an obscure, autocratic, private organization created by and for corporate interests and headquartered in Switzerland. Then (6) that corporate "court" did indeed rule that the "profit right" of foreign meat packers is superior to our people's basic right of self-determination.

Holy Tom Paine, this is corporate tyranny! But it's about to get worse, for President Obama and Congress intend to hang another bad trade deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, around our necks this spring.

[...]

Even though the looming power grab has now spawned protests around the world, generated a major coalition of some 500 grassroots groups in our country loudly opposing the ripoff deal and has produced an odd-bedfellow, a rare bipartisan alignment of opponents in Congress, there's been a TV blackout. Could it possibly be that the global conglomerates that own our so-called "news" networks don't want us knowing what's up behind TPP's closed doors?

[...]

If anyone doubts this pact is a corporate boondoggle dressed in trade clothes, let them read its shameful financial provisions. Our nation's financial regulations would have to be "harmonized" to comply with TPP's extreme deregulation, re-creating the anything-goes Wall Street ethic that crashed the world economy in 2008.

To help stop this anti-democratic nasty, go to www.exposethetpp.org.

  Jim Hightower

Is Brat's Victory a Wake-Up Call to Washington Insiders?

We can hope so. But they're pretty isolated in their decades-long bubble of privilege.

From what I’ve observed, [David Brat, the college professor who defeated House Majority Leader Eric Cantor on Tuesday,] has not talked like a forty-seven-per-cent conservative complaining about how tax dollars are being shovelled to the undeserving poor (although maybe he does believe that and didn’t emphasize it in the campaign). He comes across, instead, like a ninety-nine-per-cent conservative who sees the real villain as corporate America and its addiction to government largesse. One of his biggest applause lines is about how bankers should have gone to jail after the 2008 financial crisis. Brat is the Elizabeth Warren of the right.

[...]

I’m an economist. I’m pro-business. I’m pro-big business making profits. But what I’m absolutely against is big business in bed with big government. And that’s the problem.

[...]

Instead of lecturing the most vulnerable about the moral beauty of the marketplace, Brat targets the most well off. “Free markets!” he declared in Hanover, like a teacher about to reveal the essence of the lesson. “In a nutshell, what does it mean?”

It means no one is shown favoritism. Everyone is treated equally. Every firm, every business, and you compete fairly. And no one, if you’re big or small, is shown special attention. And we’re losing that.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the kind of rhetoric that Ralph Nader, and even Noam Chomsky, have used for many years to pillory the government for protecting the rich and the well connected from the vagaries of the free market.

[...]

Cantor was oblivious to the wave that was building back in his district, in the suburbs of Richmond [Virginia]. On the morning of the election, he was at a Washington coffee shop raising money from lobbyists.

  New Yorker

Privatizing the Water Supply

As you know, the world banking industry has its hands in most third world countries' economies, making loans on the condition that the countries introduce extreme austerity and privatization of public resources, including water supplies.

This article will explain the water privatization issue and its obvious problems. The money quote  (pun unintended, but you are welcome to it) for me:

In addition, financing by the IFC, which is both investor and adviser on these projects, poses a conflict of interest. On the one hand, the IFC is advising governments to privatize the sector; on the other, it’s investing in the corporations getting those contracts. “It’s self-dealing: setting up a project that it’s in a position to profit from,” Naficy told me. When the IFC was established in 1956, it was expressly prohibited from purchasing corporate equity to avoid this sort of conflict, but the board amended this rule a few years later, allowing these kinds of deals.

  alJazeera

See any problem there?...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Big Trouble for the Democrats

Health industry officials say ObamaCare-related premiums will double in some parts of the country, countering claims recently made by the administration.

The expected rate hikes will be announced in the coming months amid an intense election year, when control of the Senate is up for grabs. The sticker shock would likely bolster the GOP’s prospects in November and hamper ObamaCare insurance enrollment efforts in 2015.

  The Hill

Let me guess….the GOP is better attuned to the needs of the “health” industry.

What a way to thank Mr. Obama for letting you make the rules. His own fault. Silly hen who invited the foxes to set the chickenhouse health agenda.

In Iowa, which hosts the first presidential caucus in the nation and has a competitive Senate race this year, rates are expected to rise 100 percent on the exchange and by double digits on the larger, employer-based market, according to a recent article in the Business Record.

And don’t expect those employers to just absorb that cost. That’s going to cut into the employees’ income and benefits.

The [claims] come less than a week after Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius sought to downplay concerns about rising premiums in the healthcare sector. She told lawmakers rates would increase in 2015 but grow more slowly than in the past.

“The increases are far less significant than what they were prior to the Affordable Care Act,” the secretary said in testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee.

Her comment baffled insurance officials, who said it runs counter to the industry’s consensus about next year.

“It’s pretty shortsighted because I think everybody knows that the way the exchange has rolled out … is going to lead to higher costs,” said one senior insurance executive who requested anonymity.

The insurance official, who hails from a populous swing state, said his company expects to triple its rates next year on the ObamaCare exchange.

[...]

Some insurers initially underpriced their policies to begin with, expecting to raise rates in the second year.

[...]

Several major companies have been bullish on the healthcare law as a growth opportunity.

What stroke of genius would it have taken for people to realize when this thing was drawn up that the insurance companies were looking at a windfall?

Areas of the country with older, sicker or smaller populations are likely to be hit hardest, while others might not see substantial increases at all.

Precisely the ones who needed decent and affordable insurance coverage in the first place.

Republicans frequently highlight President Obama’s promise on the campaign trail to enact a healthcare law that would “cut the cost of a typical family’s premium by up to $2,500 a year.” “They’re going to have to backpedal on that,” said [Bill Hoagland, a former executive at Cigna and current senior vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center.]

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The Deep State

There is the visible government situated around the Mall in Washington, and then there is another, more shadowy, more indefinable government that is not explained in Civics 101 or observable to tourists at the White House or the Capitol. The former is traditional Washington partisan politics: the tip of the iceberg that a public watching C-SPAN sees daily and which is theoretically controllable via elections. The subsurface part of the iceberg I shall call the Deep State, which operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power.

[...]

The conventional wisdom has it that partisan gridlock and dysfunction have become the new normal. That is certainly the case [... but] it is also imperative to acknowledge the limits of this critique as it applies to the American governmental system.

[...]

Despite this apparent impotence [of a government in gridlock], President Obama can liquidate American citizens without due processes, detain prisoners indefinitely without charge, conduct dragnet surveillance on the American people without judicial warrant and engage in unprecedented — at least since the McCarthy era — witch hunts against federal employees (the so-called “Insider Threat Program”). Within the United States, this power is characterized by massive displays of intimidating force by militarized federal, state and local law enforcement. Abroad, President Obama can start wars at will and engage in virtually any other activity whatsoever without so much as a by-your-leave from Congress, such as arranging the forced landing of a plane carrying a sovereign head of state over foreign territory.

[...]

During the time in 2011 when political warfare over the debt ceiling was beginning to paralyze the business of governance in Washington, the United States government somehow summoned the resources to overthrow Muammar Ghaddafi’s regime in Libya. [...] At a time when there was heated debate about continuing meat inspections and civilian air traffic control because of the budget crisis, our government was somehow able to commit $115 million to keeping a civil war going in Syria and to pay at least £100m to the United Kingdom’s Government Communications Headquarters to buy influence over and access to that country’s intelligence. Since 2007, two bridges carrying interstate highways have collapsed due to inadequate maintenance of infrastructure, one killing 13 people. During that same period of time, the government spent $1.7 billion constructing a building in Utah that is the size of 17 football fields. [...] They need that much storage to archive every single trace of your electronic life.

[...]

As a congressional staff member for 28 years specializing in national security and possessing a top secret security clearance, I was at least on the fringes of the world I am describing, if neither totally in it by virtue of full membership nor of it by psychological disposition. But, like virtually every employed person, I became, to some extent, assimilated into the culture of the institution I worked for, and only by slow degrees, starting before the invasion of Iraq, did I begin fundamentally to question the reasons of state that motivate the people who are, to quote George W. Bush, “the deciders.”

  Mike Lofgren

Continue reading “The Deep State” essay at Bill Moyers.

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.