Surveilling the surveillors

More and more is America becoming a surveillance society. Only Great Britain is ahead of us in its Orwellian fantasy. With the fear of terrorism and a paranoid focus on security, we are allowing our privacy and civil rights to be compromised. We are not only spied upon and our personal data collected by our government, but by businesses for their use to manipulate us to buy their products. Massive databases have been created to hold all of this information and its uses are not open to public knowledge. How do we fight it? If we are to live in a surveillance society it must be a two way street.

We have the weapons in the form of digital still and video cameras easily available to all. Only we can protect ourselves. We can't trust the government and its operatives to protect us. Freedom and justice is our responsibility. Recent uses of citizen video surveillance of police malfeasance against protesters in many legal actions has caused such cases to be dismissed. Justice has been served. So why shouldn't we be always ready to surveill government actions? Shouldn't our politicians, bureaucrats, police - all public employees - be subject to our inspection to be sure that they fairly do their jobs? We have a right to know what they're doing. I could propose that 24/7 surveillance cameras be installed in all government offices and the ouptut be made publicly available.

Of course, in this surveillance paradigm we lose much privacy, and we must weigh the costs of that loss, but only openness is the remedy to a powerful institutional secrecy that may be used against us. Whatever policy we choose to follow, surely our society will be radically changed.

Carry your camera. It may save your life.

The People's Power

Have you ever wondered why we haven't been able to address the problems of the energy needs we face for the near future? It's because of centralized corporate monopolies that have control over our energy. Big oil, the so-called "public utilities", the phone and Internet companies are all private profit makers who want to keep their power in the short term, even if it means their eventual downfall when society crashes.

You see, if we were to have individual solar electric panels on most of our homes and businesses, along with local wind farms, we could provide all the power we need. Coal and oil products wouldn't be needed to produce power and that would drastically reduce pollution and greenhouse gasses. Of course, the manufacturers of solar and wind equipment would earn one-time windfall profits, but after that they wouldn't control energy production. It would be the people's energy.

Corporate greed and political power are the worst culprits preventing us from having a clean environment and plentiful energy. Their minority private interests cannot serve society. They want control of energy production as a centralized model, and we helpless slave-consumers who have no control over our basic needs. It's time that necessary public utilities be truly public.

Credit Crunch

It's a big-selling candy bar. Although it tastes wonderfully good, this bar doesn't satisfy. It makes you hungrier and saps nutrition from your wallet. Don't complain if you're starving.

Our economy is wobbly, gas, food and many other commodities are becoming very expensive, mortgage defaults and foreclosings abound. We're up to our necks in credit we can't afford to pay off. Whose fault is it? Ours. It's as much the fault of the credit industries as it is of those who receive credit, perhaps more fault should be placed on the industry for enticing us to borrow and making it too easy. These devils tempt us. How many credit card applications do you get every week? Can you even pay off one? It would appear that the industry doesn't care how much debt you incurr as long as they can get the interest payment and keep you on the credit merry-go-round for life. And the industry had the bankruptcy laws changed a few years ago to make it much harder to file for bankruptcy.

Primarily, I blame the credit industry for the problems we're facing now. If they had acted responsibly, they wouldn't have offered easy credit and the economy wouldn't have grown so fast; many of us wouldn't have been able to spend irresponsibly. If the lending industry wants payback it should be willing to sacrifice some of its earnings, share the loss with us, if not, they should be terminated with extreme prejudice and the funds owed them written off - a mass bankruptcy amnesty.

We, Like Sheep, Have Gone Astray

We have become a nation of sheep. The shepherd is insane. When will he lead us off the cliff? We have lost many of our constitutional rights and don't seem to care. Our ideals of individual freedom, political equality and fairness toward each other have been perverted or ignored. America is slipping down the tubes.

We are living out of unfounded fear that has been manipulated by our government for its nefarious reasons – to protect officials for treasonous crimes, for power to commit any act. It has no respect for us, the people.

We have allowed the Bush administration and Congress to pass laws that are clearly unconstitutional. All of the domestic surveillance laws, the Patriot Act, founding Homeland Security, FBI security letters, the growth of secrecy and closing government access to us are violations of our freedom and do not protect us. We weren't asked if we wanted them. The President asserts a probable unconstitutional Executive Privilege and the use of signing statements to ignore laws passed by Congress. If the courts and justice system don't oppose these laws it only proves that they are corrupt or afraid of opposing the administration. They have been politicized to the detriment of us all. Why do we allow this? Why aren't we so screaming mad to rip the administration out of the White House by our bare hands for a violation of our rights that amounts to mass rape? I don't advise violence, but a legal impeachment process seems in order to get at the facts. We seem to be afraid to exercise this right.

This administration has only a corporate and imperial mentality – to promote the interests of powerful corporations to rule the country and the world. It has no clear conception of freedom or democratic values. It is corrupt, but we allow this corruption. What does that say about us? We have given corporations far too much power over our society to use us as fodder at our expense, their gain. Privatization has been fostered to empower special interests and destroy the public sphere that every society needs to be a functional for everyone. We are being split away from the social body and pitted against each other. We are no longer one society. We can't blame immigration and diversity for this condition because we have always been a nation of diverse immigrants who learned to live together while pursuing our individual dreams. There is no valid scapegoat for this situation; the blame rests squarely on us.

The President has the lowest popularity of any president in history, which strongly suggests that we don't trust him, but we still allow him to keep his office. This does not compute. How can we do this unless we are insane? Or have we simply given up all ideals of humanity, hope and wait only for the apocalypse? Whatever the reason, we are a sick nation.

The war on terrorism is overblown. The motives underlying it are questionable. Ultimately, it was our meddling policies that led to the resurgence of terrorism in the Middle East. Read some history. On top of that, there are too many loose ends from the 9/11/2001 World Trade Center catastrophe that should make us call the official reports into question. Something is fishy here – it just doesn't ad up. We have acquiesced to the government's report. Why? Only each one of you can answer that.

We live with an insane war in Iraq that has sapped our nation of its power in the world and has hurt our society in many other ways. Our economy is sinking. Our public infrastructure is crumbling. The rising prices of every necessity can be traced to war spending, estimated at $3.3 trillion, most of which has been borrowed, making us the world's greatest debtor nation. How long will it be before we are suffering as much as the people of Iraq?

Aggravating this condition, the problems of climate change are the gravest situation we face. Our lives cannot continue as we are living them now. Continuous population growth and increasing wants for more products only exacerbates these problems. Our resources are running out. I think I am seeing the human race slowly commit suicide.

Add all these problems up and it might appear that this administration is trying to destroy America. Who or what is being sacrificed and for what reasons?

There are things that a civil society should do for itself to foster well-being and the common good. We need to find better ways to care for ourselves that will make our nation stronger and a better place to live. Improving the lives of individuals is the way to improve society by unleashing the power of healthy, individual minds and bodies toward solving social problems. We need universal medical coverage, rethinking agriculture so that food may be supplied to everyone, new ways of providing homes so that no one would be homeless unless they want to be; these are only a few of the things we could do if it weren't for the current political climate. The capitalistic profit motive can't be the highest ideal because it pits narrow private interests against the common good, leaving many people out, causing many people to suffer, essentially weakening society. How do we turn this around?

Why Bush?

George W. Bush is a third-rate human being. He was a C student at Yale. He isn't capable of being president of anything. Even his business ventures failed and he had to be bailed out by family and friends. If you look closely at his body language you will see that he is a very insecure person. There's a hurt little boy look in his eyes. He is emotionally driven, not rational, but a strong believer, that's why he is “The Decider”. He isn't thoughtful or curious, not interested in learning about the world. He has a good-ol'-boy manner that communicates with people who share that emotional makeup. His lack of language ability demonstrates an inability to think clearly. When his supporters hear his often incomprehensible statements, they only hear the emotional tone that resonates with theirs' and ignore the content, just like Bush. Whether he is a puppet may be a matter of interpretation, but he is certainly heavily influenced by business and other authoritarian concerns. It's likely that he doesn't understand freedom and democracy – he has no feel for it.

President Bush is a reflection of our social dysfunction - we deserved him. A growing political polarization was tearing apart our nation. Had we been sane back in 2000, we wouldn't have elected him as our president. His obvious incompetencies were ignored. But we had economic and other worries after the DotCom bubble burst and the Clinton sex scandal in the late 1990s, so we were angry and wanted a change. When the 9/11 attack happened, we were ripe for authoritarian, paranoid manipulation from politicians who were living a delusion and devised an imperialist, preemptive agenda for the Middle East. It was certainly about protecting our access to oil, but there was a need to control other nations to force them to do our bidding. Bush also wanted to fulfill what he thought was his father's failure in Iraq, and the Neocons found he was easily manipulable to fulfill their warped agenda. This is an administration of emotionally dysfunctional authoritarians, bad for the nation and the world. That's why much of the world doesn't like us.

We must rid ourselves of this administration and its failing conservative policies to get back on a path where America can again lead the world. Whether we are coming back to rationality only time will tell. It's time for a mass healing.

"There's something that doesn't love a wall..."

Our country is very split over immigration. We fear potential terrorism, loss of jobs, that it's unfair to allow illegal immigrants an amnesty. But there's also simple prejudice, especially against Mexicans, because they're not of our predominately European culture. However, we need immigration to support low-level jobs that most Americans don't want to do. After all, our entire nation was created by immigrants. The Mexican immigrants I've met, whether legal or not I don't know, appeared to be very hard-working, nice people who wanted to make a good living for themselves and families. I don't see that as a problem. I've only wished that they could speak English better because I don't know Spanish, making it difficult to communicate. Perhaps they were newly in the country and trying to learn our language. That's a problem that's easy to solve.
With NAFTA, the North American continent was supposed to be a free trade zone. Both Canada and Mexico are participants. Whether or not you like the NAFTA rules, they should have opened the borders, but after the 9/11 attack we began to fear terrorist ingress across our borders and tightened security against what appears to be very little threat. Now, the Bush administration and Homeland Security are trying to build a real border wall between us and Mexico, from where most of the illegal immigrants come. We don't have that problem with Canada; they're much more like us, if we're white.
North America should be a more unified economic entity. It just makes sense. Canadians, Mexicans and Americans have much more in common than differences. Working together, we can build and secure a stronger tri-nation unity that will benefit us all.
The border wall is a misguided and very economically wasteful approach based only on fear. It creates more distrust and fear among our nations when we need friends. How long can it last?
Mr. Bush, tear down that wall!

A Surly Introduction continues

The Iraq war has cost us an estimated $3.3 Trillion! It wasn't too many decades ago that the entire budget of the U. S. government and the GNP was less than one trillion. Of course, we're living in a very inflated economy. But if you wonder why our economy is tanking, it's the war, stupid. Almost all the funds for social programs have been cut to fund the debacle in Iraq. If you wonder why schools, medical care, veterans' services are going down the tubes, it's the fault of our administration who appear willing to spend us into bankruptcy. Much of this money is borrowed, especially from China. And why is gas so expensive? Again, it's the war, stupid. Our military and all of the private contractors hired by our government haven't been able to get the Iraqi economy functioning. They told us that Iraqi oil would fund it. They're living an emotionally-driven ideological delusion and many of us want to follow along. Wake up, people!

A Surly Introduction

Daylight wasting time started today. According to a report on NPR yesterday, Daylight Savings Time causes us to waste energy because when we get up earlier we need more heat or when we come home earlier in the afternoon in the summer we turn up the air conditioning. If government and business want to open and close an hour earlier, they should do so, but leave the time alone. How many of you hate DST? Let's abolish this turkey and get some rest.


Now that I've gotten that irritation off my chest I want to welcome you to my new blog.

My completely revised website, The Surly Curmudgeon, hosting a large number of political and social critiques, is now online. Check it out at http://www.thesurlycurmudgeon.com