Surveillance and the Corporate State

Guest Post by Steven Miller

(This is the first of four guest posts by Steven Miller about the rise of the surveillance state.)

NSA’s PRISM

Edward Snowden’s courageous exposure of how NSA routinely intercepts the communications of private American citizens threatens to expose how corporations rule America. More political exposures are promised. The situation is not yet under control.

This can of worms includes a wide number of issues about the relations of police and the citizens in this country. The central and most outrageous issue is that 70% of $72 billion dollar intelligence budget goes to private contractors. These are private corporations. They are being put in charge of far more than the militarized government intelligence. Coordinated through the Department of Homeland Security contracts, police and military services at all levels have been privatized, from private prisons to intelligence to corporate police squads.

Corporations have now accrued to themselves actual police power to use force over the people in society. These bodies meet in secret (“proprietary secrets”, “trade secrets”) and make policy about how to exercise their police authority. These discussions are now hidden from the public. Furthermore US law is clear: each and every corporation with police powers must guarantee maximum profits. This includes those with newly usurped police powers.

By exercising the will of corporations, these bodies are implementing a new, direct form of corporate rule. Laws, after all, are just words. When you come up against it, people are legally bound to obey the authority of whatever organization is empowered to exercise that authority, even if it’s violent. This is political power. On the street, with “the Rule of Law”, it’s the ruling that matters, not the “law”.

Ruling America 2.0 – Recent Developments

Let’s examine this transfer of power in the context of recent events. Since the Boston Marathon bombing, the American people has been getting lesson after lesson about the nature of the state apparatus. Here’s the sequence of events:

The Media Industrial Complex’s on-the-fly, multi-network crafting of narrative during the manhunt was a tremendous display of power. It was designed to do so, crafting the story of Muslim terrorists, while repeatedly showing the same film clips of police in body armor and tanks patrolling the streets, to demonstrate America’s strength to the world, and not insignificantly, to the American people.

No matter than most of the narrative was later shown to be untrue. No matter the creepy implications of the fact that you are always on film now. No matter that ex-CIA counter-terrorism director, Philip Mudd, publicly stated that the bombers seemed more like Columbine wackos than terrorists. (1)

It doesn’t matter either that the 1997 satire, “Wag the Dog”, revealed in detail how the state can fabricate what you see and therefore believe. As Robert De Niro, playing a “special op” in the film, said, “Of course it’s true! I saw it on TV”.

It’s not 1984 anymore. Thirty years later, Big Brother has far more in his tool kit than the clumsy techniques of the Industrial Era.

The Boston area was “shutdown” by police forces, with no declaration of martial law. This production was another message to anyone who seeks to challenge the power of the state. In post-911 America, this is all OK ‘cuz we’re getting the terrorists. The implications are clear for any city, perhaps like Los Angeles in the 1992 Rodney King Rebellion, that rises up against police control.

On May 13, Michael Sheehan, revealed that “War for Your Lifetime” will continue at least 10 to 20 more years. Writing in Wired, Spencer Ackerman, provided these insights:

“It was just two months ago that the top U.S. intelligence official testified that al-Qaida had been battered by the U.S. into a state of disarray . A year ago, the current CIA director, John Brennan, said that “For the first time since this fight began, we can look ahead and envision a world in which the al Qaeda core is simply no longer relevant .” Just this week, the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, Army Lt. Gen. Joseph Votel, told a Florida conference that he was looking at missions beyond  the counterterrorism manhunt .

Yet a spokeswoman, Army Col. Anne Edgecomb, clarified that Sheehan meant the conflict is likely to last 10 to 20 more years from today — atop the 12 years that the conflict has already lasted. Welcome to America ’s Thirty Years War.  

There is no geographic limit to that war, Sheehan and others testified, thanks to the seminal law authorizing it in the days after 9/11, known as the Authorization to Use Military Force. Thanks to that relatively terse authorization, US counterterrorism stretches ‘from Boston to the FATA,’ Sheehan said, using the acronym for Pakistan ’s tribal areas.”  (2)

The same day, for the first time in US history, the military instituted its “right” to police America domestically, thereby undoing the Posse Comitatus Act that has been in effect since the Civil War. Jeff Morley wrote in the Long Island Press:

“By making a few subtle changes to a regulation in the U.S. Code titled “Defense Support of Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies” the military has quietly granted itself  the ability to police the streets without obtaining prior local or state consent, upending a precedent that has been in place for more than two centuries.

The most objectionable aspect of the regulatory change is the inclusion of vague language that permits military intervention in the event of “civil disturbances.” According to the rule:

Federal military commanders have the authority, in extraordinary emergency circumstances where prior authorization by the President is impossible and duly constituted local authorities are unable to control the situation, to engage temporarily  in activities that are necessary to quell large-scale, unexpected ‘civil disturbances’.

Bruce Afran, a civil liberties attorney and constitutional law professor at Rutgers University, calls the rule, ‘a wanton power grab by the military,’ and says, ‘It’s quite shocking actually because it violates the long-standing presumption that the military is under civilian control.”  (3)

The state has been asserting its power to rule in other ways. Last year, Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act. From Forbes Magazine:

“So despite the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of a right to trial , the Senate bill would let the government lock up any citizen it swears is a terrorist, without the burden of proving its case to an independent judge, and for the lifespan of an amorphous war that conceivably will never end.”  (4)

The NDAA eliminates many protections of the Bill of Rights and contains the option of extraordinary rendition, by black ops into secret prisons, of virtually anyone, up to and including citizens, who are identified as “terrorists”.

Right here, just on this basis alone, every politician who agreed to this, up to and including the President and the Attorney General, not to mention a gaggle of Congressional leaders, are open to impeachment.This is after all Prima Facie evidence.

Notes and Background

(1) Ex-CIA deputy director: Boston bombing ‘more like Columbine than al Qaeda”. David Edwards Fox News, 4-21-2013

(2) “Pentagon Spec Ops Chief Sees ’10 to 20′ More Years of War Against al-Qaida”. Spencer Ackerman, 5-15-2013

(3) “US Military ‘power grab’ goes into effect”. Jed Morey, May 14, 2013.  Long Island Press

(4) “The National Defense Authorization Act is the Greatest Threat to Civil Liberties Americans Face”. Forbes, 12-5-2011

To be continued

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Steven Miller has taught science for 25 years in Oakland’s Flatland high schools. He has been actively engaged in public school reform since the early 1990s. When the state seized control of Oakland public schools in 2003, they immediately implemented policies of corporatization and privatization that are advocated by the Broad Institute. Since that time Steve has written extensively against the privatization of public education, water and other public resources. You can email him at nondog2@hotmail.com

 

Crossposted at Daily Censored

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