PoLiTiCaLlY CoRrEcT

It’s as though we’ve stumbled into a bizarro world, like the one that confounds Superman, or in the Seinfeld episode when Elaine encounters people the exact opposite of her friends. Everything has gone topsy-turvy.

The government is supposed to operate in the open. Your affairs are supposed to be private. How that has been stood upside down!

The prohibitions against government in the Bill of Rights are essential to the privacy of Americans who wish to go about their business peacefully and unmolested. They are a linchpin of our prosperity. But witness what the politicians of both parties have done.

In the same spirit of renegade disregard of our privacy, the FBI under the Patriot Act has issued hundreds of thousands of “National Security Letters,” effectively subpoenas demanding information. That the branches of American government are divided as a check on power is meaningless when the executive is allowed to read the judicial branch out of the picture. The FBI, the CIA, and now even the Pentagon issue these demands on their own initiative without a demonstration of probable cause and without judicial oversight.

“Since 9/11, the Bush and Obama administrations have succeeded in claiming they have congressional consent for the massive NSA spying by merely getting a consensus from the Gang of 12. There is, of course, no provision in the Constitution for the substitution of all 535 members of Congress with a select group of 12 of them, but Congress and Presidents Bush and Obama have gone along with this.”

“The kicker is that all members of the Gang of 12 have been sworn to secrecy and threatened with prosecution if they reveal to anyone, including other members of Congress, what the NSA and other intelligence agencies reveal to them.”

Of course, many of these outrages stem from the 9/11 attacks. But since the government operates in secrecy, Americans may never learn the sordid details of state sponsorship of the 9/11 attacks. Twenty-eight pages of the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 report have been concealed from the American people by both the Bush and Obama administrations. But Congressmen Walter Jones (R-NC) and Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) describe themselves as “absolutely shocked” at the level of foreign state involvement in the attacks that they have discovered in the report.

They are prohibited by federal law from revealing details they have learned.

We may not have star chambers yet, the abusive state security courts of kings that the founders tried to prevent, but we have had torture, so we can’t be sure. But we know that we have secret courts.

Up is down and down is up wherever you look. Even the smallest public companies are audited. The government insists on it. But we can’t even get close to an audit of the biggest, most powerful financial institution on the face of the earth, the Federal Reserve.

Its operations are secret.

 The government has never enjoyed more secrecy. Your private affairs  — financial, medical, social and family relationships, communications, and activities — have never been more open to state snooping.

No good can come of this.

Best regards,

Charles