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The people we elect aren’t the ones calling the shots, says Tufts University’s Michael Glennon. Others at SN have also voiced similar opinions so I thought this might be an interesting read for our members.
The voters who put Barack Obama in office expected some big changes. From the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping to Guantanamo Bay to the Patriot Act, candidate Obama was a defender of civil liberties and privacy, promising a dramatically different approach from his predecessor.
But six years into his administration, the Obama version of national security looks almost indistinguishable from the one he inherited. Guantanamo Bay remains open. The NSA has, if anything, become more aggressive in monitoring Americans. Drone strikes have escalated. Most recently it was reported that the same president who won a Nobel Prize in part for promoting nuclear disarmament is spending up to $1 trillion modernizing and revitalizing America’s nuclear weapons.
Why did the face in the Oval Office change but the policies remain the same? Critics tend to focus on Obama himself, a leader who perhaps has shifted with politics to take a harder line. But Tufts University political scientist Michael J. Glennon has a more pessimistic answer: Obama couldn’t have changed policies much even if he tried.
Though it’s a bedrock American principle that citizens can steer their own government by electing new officials, Glennon suggests that in practice, much of our government no longer works that way. In a new book, “National Security and Double Government,” he catalogs the ways that the defense and national security apparatus is effectively self-governing, with virtually no accountability, transparency, or checks and balances of any kind. He uses the term “double government”: There’s the one we elect, and then there’s the one behind it, steering huge swaths of policy almost unchecked. Elected officials end up serving as mere cover for the real decisions made by the bureaucracy.
[Related]: ‘National Security and Double Government’
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday October 22 2014, @08:40PM
Washington DC and those who control it consider the American people to be the greatest threat to them. They have demonstrated that with their failure to punish the NSA for massively violating our Constitution, and not charging investment bankers for laundering money for drug cartels or defrauding the American people, and militarizing local police departments, and a whole host of other crimes and usurpations. They have already declared war on us. It is important to understand that.
Our system of checks and balances was well-designed, but over the last 200 years it has been subverted to the point of collapse. There remains no branch of government or traditional avenue for peaceful change that can or will do anything about it, because they are all in on it. It is up to the American citizens to stand up and enforce the law.
Soylentils can do their part by developing software and hardware that undermines their central control and makes it impossible for them to conduct business as usual. Let's crowd-source intelligence gathering on them and make it public for all to see, so they can be hoisted on their own petard. Let's send clouds of drones to swarm over their homes. Let's stop working to help them, and apply our considerable skills to resist and stop them. There are millions more of us than there are of them. Snowden has shown us all how powerful information can be, so let's follow that example and do likewise.
Washington DC delenda est.