With the massive protest against SOPA/PIPA comes the states response in the form of the takedown of filesharing site MegaUpload.com. It serves as yet another example that the state can and will do anything they want whether or not their actions are codified in some legalese passed by old men in a congressional chamber. The codification of their acts only acts as a way of removing any doubt of their ability – a metaphorical smearing in our face of their power. Like the NDAA before this, these proposed laws are actions that the state already commits. It really doesn’t matter if they pass or not. It. Is. Already. Happening.
Coworkers of mine took time to go down to one of our state’s fine senator’s offices to join a protest against SOPA/PIPA on Wednesday – we work in the web industry so these bills have been common office conversation subjects. I tried to convince them that no matter how many times they called and complained to some intern at the senator’s office or however many online petitions they managed to sign that this bill really only puts in writing the world we live in already. I didn’t win the argument and off they went to feel like they were changing the world, and maybe in some insignificant way they did. If the bills are killed as they appear to be as of this writing, did they win something?
Not if the actions taken Thursday against MegaUpload are any indication. The bills are nothing more than propositions on paper, but still the U.S. government (and governments abroad) managed to take down the offending site and arrest its employees without the help of SOPA or PIPA. Just as prisoners in Guantanamo have been held without charges or trials and American citizens have been assassinated on suppositions well before NDAA passed (despite Obama’s threatened veto, hilariously). More people need to understand that what is and is not law is in no way a guide to what your government can or cannot do to you. Will my website be safe if SOPA/PIPA passes? Fuck, the better question is if my site is safe now. Looking at very recent events I would say no.
This site could disappear tomorrow regardless of what the law is or whether or not I have violated it. It happens quite frequently, in fact. The sooner people realize these things, the better.
If this election’s primary season for the Republican nomination hasn’t presented enough evidence to show us the truth of this, then take a look at this article on io9. Turns out, democracies only work when large swathes of uninformed individuals side with a perceived majority. Well no kidding. What else would cause an endless cycle of individuals voting against their every interest, relieving themselves of any ounce of power they might have held, and placing it in the hands of sociopathic millionaires? The fallacy that we are taught, that democracies only work when people are informed, is proven false every 2 years in America yet we go on believing we can make a difference in those booths.
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Fat and happy from a wonderful family gathering over the holiday weekend, I returned to check my Facebook account this morning and was greeted with a liberal friend’s usual in-your-face Obama infatuation. This time, in the form of a supposed George Clooney quote basically putting down anyone who isn’t satisfied with Obama by making the point that Republicans could be made happy voting for him. I have pictured it for you here (click for enlarged indignation):
I’m disillusioned by the people who are disillusioned by Obama, quite honestly, I am. Democrats eat their own. Democrats find singular issues and go, ‘Well, I didn’t get everything I wanted.’ I’m a firm believer in sticking by and sticking up for people whom you’ve elected. If [Obama] was a Republican running, because Republicans are better at this, they’d be selling him as the guy who stopped 400,000 jobs a month from leaving the country. They’d be selling him as the guy who saved the auto-industry. If they had the beliefs, they’d be selling him as the guy who got rid of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’ who got Osama bin Laden. You could be selling this as a very successful three years.
-George Clooney
First of all, it’s a pet peeve of mine anytime I hear some fucking celebrity tell me anything about politics, whether I agree with them or not. I don’t need some mega-rich asshole, who pretends for a living, to tell me what my best interests are. However, since I suspect that this election year we will be seeing a lot of attacks on people who are sick of Obama – let’s indulge Mr. Clooney.
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If you couldn’t predict the turn of events concerning the National Defense Authorization Act and Obama’s “threat” to veto it, calling you naive would be an understatement. The man has basically caved on every plank of his campaign, embraced every reactionary idea, and sacrificed no expansion of his power. This is the same man who has already killed Americans without trial and held them indefinitely without charges. Why then, would he have vetoed what he is already doing? That’s not the behavior of power!
So yeah, the White House is backing down on its veto threat, in a move that has become so tired we can barely even pay attention. When it passes, and it will, we’ll have been thrown onto the next in vogue faux outrage. Much like the SOPA bill, that again, simply codifies already occurring acts committed by those in power. It never mattered if we defeated this bill.
Indeed, if reports are to be believed, it was never our lord and savior Obama who was trying to save us by threatening to veto the bill for further destroying the rights of Americans, but rather it was he who demanded the ability to do so! He wants to hold you forever, trial or not. He wants these things, and his threat to veto it was a complete lie. It only furthers the concept that you can never rely on a savior to give you your victory.
As often happens when tyrants get a taste for blood, American leadership wants to codify its recent behavior against American citizens. They want to be able point to a document and explain that they are simply following the law, not acting out their dominance fantasies. While a few new outlets (very few actually, I hardly see coverage of this in most corporate media outlets) are freaking out, it needs to be explained that even if the National Defense Authorization Act passes and becomes the law of the land – it wont change the status quo of life in modern America. It simply codifies what has been happening for years. It makes the treatment of José Padilla, Bradley Manning, and Anwar al-Awlaki the law.
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As if the leaders of our government’s legislative bodies couldn’t be more deaf to the demands of not just those courageous enough to protest in the Occupy movement, but to long-standing widespread public opinion throughout the country, their latest campaign seen in the planned and managed train wreck that is the “Super Congress” is nothing more than barely masked austerity designed not to create jobs for the mass of unemployed, but to rob them further. Remember the Bush tax cuts, the ones that along with two costly wars has drained the ability for the U.S. government to provide even basic service to its most vulnerable citizens? Remember when Obama, who campaigned dishonestly for ending the cuts, extended them for the millionaires whilst the poorest still go without basic necessities every day? Well, looks the Democrats might have them made permanent.
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Blinding the workers of this country to the crimes of their lords is commonly (perhaps even more commonly in the current age) done with warfare. Warfare allows our lords to excite patriotism in a variety of ways which both eliminate scores of workers from this living coil, as well as blinding many of them to the very criminality of the follies they are cheering on. Our workers are convinced in scores to raise up arms against an enemy they have never met, to revenge against crimes that they have never been the victim of, and to win a victory none of us deserve. It weakens us all to fight their wars by forcing us to become their cannon fodder. For each worker that is killed in an imperialist rich man’s war, that is one less potential knife against the throat of our lords’ grasp on power.
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The so-called “Super” Congress tasked with finding a means of cutting the deficit is a pure and simple joke. A joke few, if any, are likely to fall for. It is most simply designed to further the austerity agenda and steal from the poor of this country in order to further fund this stumbling empire’s tragic mistakes. If these wise old members of our congress fail to come up with spending cuts and revenue increases by late November, the cuts get made anyway, though they are across the board. The whole arrangement is the most obvious attempt at planned dead-lock I have ever seen. Who seriously believes that this group will come up with an agreed upon solution, or that if they do, it will be passed by their peers in congress? Or beyond that, that any measures that would possibly be passed by this monied body would be satisfactory to any portion of the working classes? Maybe 9% of Americans that still approve of Congress do.
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I’ve been against the Western intervention in Libya because I know that U.S. and E.U. interests are the only interests that will be served by helping the Libyan people overthrow their brutal government. The regime that takes over will be one approved by these interests and not the interests of the Libyan people. Their revolution has been co-opted in order to steal the wealth of the Libyan people while their lives change little if any. There’s also the broader idea that revolutions should be won and not handed over. The Libyan people cannot emancipate themselves if their revolution is won via American missiles, or as Eugene Debs would say, “I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, some one else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition.”
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Not that we ever needed to, but if we ever needed to prove to ourselves that the Tea Party protests were/are anything besides corporate-corralled dissent redirected into expressions of racism, misogyny, and staggering ignorance, the Tea Partiers reaction to the Occupy Wall Street movement provides all proof we could ever need. The predominately white, older, middle/upper class members of the Tea Parties have been seen taking every chance to insult and minimize OWS or its members, despite the overlapping portions of their agendas. The corporate and think tank controlled Tea Party decried the bailouts (among many other things, sensical and otherwise) too, so why does this Venn diagram refuse to meet? The strings attached to the Tea Party prevent any ability to recognize what all workers are suffering. It was designed to never do anything besides make noise and elect more capitalist politicians. So long as OWS can retain independence from a controlling authority like the Democratic Party or something similar, it flies in the face of the Tea Party’s agenda and abilities.
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