Think about it in terms of cold, hard cash...

[MrScorpio]

Last edited Sun Aug 25, 2013, 04:33 PM - Edit history (2)

The true meaning behind the NSA scandal and the Military Industrial Complex is more about the upward distribution of wealth than it is about anything else.

Now you can sit there and ignore this point as you rhapsodize over your poor lost "freedoms", but the fact is that, as long as we live in a country where we gauge a person's intrinsic value on a scale of their wealth, your so-called freedoms will always be defined in ways which won't harm that systematic wealth distribution for those in which it serves the most.

Once you try to redefine the system of value and worth with something like... I dunno, democracy, that's when things begin to get problematic for the people who actually run the show.

Which is where we come to systems of control: The lopsided redistribution of wealth, the restriction of voting rights, a constant stream of propaganda to convince you that you're under threat internally and externally, false narratives and distractions, "entertainment", divide and conquer techniques, massive pharmaceutical distribution, so forth and so on.

NSA surveillance is about transferring wealth and building a self-sustaining intelligence infrastructure which will do anything to justify its continued existence. It's a bureaucracy whose first obligation is to perpetuate itself and justify its own existence, even though there really is no reason for it to exist at its current size and scope. The creation of new invasive techniques only happens because the system of procurement demands an ever increasing diversification and application of capability. They're always looking for new ways to build a better mousetrap.

It's no accident that the private sector has been outsourced as a facilitator of this Intelligence State. It's already happened to a much greater extent with the Defense industry. Why do you think that the Pentagon Budget is so big and why the government is always looking for circumstances in this already volatile world to insert and facilitate that volatility with a steady supply of fresh arms? If not us, it's going to be the other guy and we'll always contend that when opposing sides are willing to destroy each other, they should use the best killing machine that money can buy, good old American armament, baby!

Since the very same people are both in charge of enhancing that capability and ensuring that the money spigot is always turned on, that inhibits them from adhering to their other responsibility; oversight and the protection of civil liberties. You can tell what's most important to them by the way they're moving the goalposts to accommodate the former.

It's being used to facilitate those systems of control that I mentioned earlier. It's a tool to create a sense of danger in things that are as not as dangerous as other things that cause real harm. It's not like they're using the NSA to prevent the tens of thousands of deaths from gun violence in this country, right? Of course, not. The people who run things aren't really concerned about that, because gun violence isn't a threat to them, it's a threat to the rest of us.

So, have your guns, for all they care. (Speaking of guns, stop giving the gun lobby your money and try to manufacture your own arms for a change. If you can. Then see how long the NRA will stand up for people who are taking food out of the mouths of their gun industry masters)

What they want is your fear and your fervent adherence to the cultural and economic status quo.

So, again. Think about the money, where it's going: To contractors that benefit overwhelmingly from the creation and perpetuation of the Security State and where it's not going, to facilitate real economic security for all.

Now, I'll tell you a secret: Everyone in Washington is in on it. Because if anyone gets the idea that they can change the game, they can easily be replaced. Our current system of binary political factions and privately financed elections guarantees it. The only choice is no choice, so it seems.

So, get your head out of politics when it comes to this NSA issue. It's way beyond politics. It's about money, who's running the show and the system by which they're controlling the definition of right and wrong and who has influence over all of that. You, me and everyone else, on the other hand, are merely the field on which the controllers play until we all do what we must to wrest that control away from them.

Power concedes nothing without a struggle. Never forget that.

[cantbeserious]

1. The Matrix Demands Compliance To Perpetuate The Illusion That Democracy Still Exists

eom

[Scuba]

2. Great post, Scorpio, thanks for your cogent thought. You nailed it ...

[JEB]

7. Looks like trouble coming.

Like the housing bubble or numerous other anomalies, an excess like this will not stand. Sooner or later, one way or another things will return to a more normal level. It is ugly now with so many left out of the recovery, but will be much uglier if the elites aren't reined in.

[zeemike]

3. Well said MrScorpio

K&R

[JustAnotherGen]

4. Very well said

Follow the money.

[2naSalit]

5. Yup!

[Beer Swiller]

6. Excellent job of following the money.

Like my dad told me many, many moons ago, "If you want to know why something happens in politics or foreign policy or why businesses do the things they do, follow the money, and it will lead you to the truth most of the time."

He'd have loved this one. In fact, he said much the same thing 40 years ago.

[lastlib]

8. K & R!! Thank you for this!!

I've occasionally had similar thoughts but never have verbalized them as cogently as you did here!

bookmarking for future ref....

[Arctic Dave]

9. Yep. Justifying their existence by trying to forever "build a better mouse trap".

To concerned about the "mice" to see the house is falling down.


The thing about mousetraps too, once you build them you have to test them, why do you think they spend so much time and money setting up fake crimes.

[heaven05]

10. thank you

very well put with excellent reasoning and insight.bookmarked for safe keepng

[freshwest]

11. Best OP this year! Cutting through it all. Follow the money...

[MrScorpio]

13. I don't know if it's the best

But thanks for the appreciation.

[Hekate]

12. Follow the money, follow the money. KnR, Mr Scorpio.

[freshwest]

14. That was our mantra doing research pre-internet in libraries to find the interlocking directorates

Last edited Mon Aug 26, 2013, 02:23 PM - Edit history (1)

of the companies that profited off the Vietnam war, and so many other things going on.

Now even with the net, the information is less available, hiding behind paywalls, member only or professional privileges. But it underlies what we see in real life and government, since they organize and then show up to promote their interests.

Which is what those who want change would be smart to emulate by organizing locally and proving their electoral clout to representatives.

That is what government 'by, of and for the people' really is. Not just howling for a brief season and leaving. Because those other groups are at it every single day.

[Hekate]

15. You have some really valuable research experience there

How do you manage similar research in these times? Is more a matter of finding that one lone member in an organization who would be willing to pass along the directories, or simply once again dogged footwork of putting together the links by inference?

[freshwest]

16. Can't hardly do a thing now. When Scroogle was up and running for a decade or so, I could access

university research and history, government and corporate texts in the hundreds with the click of a mouse since the late nineties and this century. It wasn't a matter of asking to access, it was all public. There is no way to find the names of someone you don't know and ask.

In the Vietnam era without the internet, we also didn't ask as we searched for subject matter, that's not how we did it. We poured through college and public library and even newspaper records, etc. I will add we were not paid for any of that.

I have found nothing that compares with Scroogle in the internet era, as they kept it free of the advertised links that now take up the prescribed number of results to display. With the use of -com or other tactics, one could skip any commerical result wasting one's time trying to sell something.

Google kept changing the rules and kept saying the repeated requests for data from their proxy search through Google assets, was a bot or just spamming. It began to be shut off frequently as this tactic continued. One day without warning it was gone, and looking for the reason it was said to be personal. I didn't buy it.

A great deal was also lost from the work of the Bush internet team they called the 'scrubbers.' They were deleting any opposing views by a few techniques. Now there are the bots and paid people such as revealed in a video here on DU. It was a seminar (really a jobs seminar, no doubt) where they said that conservatives needed to get their message out by posting on anything - Amazon, whatever - to push down results of liberal views. They are shameless in their desire to suppress facts.

It's worked well, now searches are inundated with their spam until any other answers that might be on the net doesn't show up anymore.

I have seen also a strong push to make the results skew religious and in favor of GOP, Libertarian and the Bircher CTers. Then one runs out of options as it can take a very long time to find anything to support a liberal, progressive, Democratic view, no matter what search terms are used.

I was once able to find many sites and expand from there, now you must cite a website you know to get the result. This is a narrowing of information that really hurts us, as we don't get to go to more than a few places and those who are asking a question, will never see what we know, they will only get the pro-conservative sites.

I have found with very specific queries on official matters - who won what election, how to get information on voting, etc., that the page is full of what are actually conservative push sites designed to appear official. Or the results no longer answer the question at all, they post things that are years old and not current, even newspapers are refusing to offer content online, many of them.

When Groogle changed to highlight paid links for commerical interests, it was frustrating to go through them instead of getting useful results on Google. Scroogle had the option of a hundred results per page and many pages, all with meaningful information to use in making up one's mind and finding how things were being arranged. Now the information we want to prove our case won't even show up.

We're at a disadvantage now 'footnoting' our posts or threads due to our voices being literally shut down by big money - they have enough to pay for bots, for manual posting - and we can't get what we need. They know exactly what they are doing to control the flow of information and brag about it.

Back to the Vietnam era and getting proofs then. As Reagan came in, a big push to streamline and make 'modern' libraries and the amount of data one could find was reduced by simply selling off the reference manuals and herding people to what was trendy. In my city, a beautiful public library built by the WPA in the downtown area was shuttered and made off limits to the public in the 1980's, ostensibly to use for administrative purposes. A new one was built nearby, with uncomfortable seating, less ability to access data. It was like a modern art museum with little information.

The heyday of getting information online was in the early part of this century. Try as I might, current search engine choices are not working as well. I have 5 engines ones on my browser.

Strangely enough, Google Images is one of the best I have now as one can pick the image link, or the website link hosting an image. But it is falling under the conserative bots as very few liberal sites make it into the results.

Even a specific query, like 'ugly republicans' comes up with dozens of 'ugly democrats' instead of the GOP and then it runs out of space. Anyt query that doesn't go conservative still gets their results. Things that I know I've seen online, even Bible scripture that support liberal beliefs, are now shoved out.

That's the only solution I can get give you but since they are indeed being paid to drown our voices out to support the conservative meme, it's getting very hard. I have no alternative that does not go alternative or CT media and that ends up being Bircher when you go into it. Those are very plentiful.

[Hekate]

18. Thak you for the thoughtful reply

I have to say -- bloody discouraging.

[haele]

17. Welcome to the United States of America, LLC.

I suspect much of the "failure to comply" the NSA found during audits were not against individuals, but against companies or to gain information for certain contractors to make money from. Since the mid 1960's, at a certain political level, it's no longer participating in governance, it's a game to see who can retain wealth and power... (see Cheney, Poindexter, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Summers, Greenspan, etc...)

Thank you, Richard Nixon, Donald MacNamara, and Ronnie Ray-gun, for making sure your friends remained safe and secure against those evil, socialist FDR policies and from having to take responsiblity of participating in actual governance for all U.S. Citizens.


- As a side, I sometimes wonder that in politics, if the old Spoils system as reward to get legislation passed might not have been better than the current revolving door Lobby system Congress participates in. By reducint the influence of outside money and keeping those power-greedy useful idiots in positions "of community respect" where the salaries and benefits are regularly audited and controlled, I think it would cost the taxpayers less than the current corporate welfare system does. And they might actually have to work for a living.

Haele