Señor Peligro and His Fascist Friends

We’ve really slipped into the postmodern-cyberpunk corporate dominated fascist state that reared its head in Blade Runner and other modern works of science fiction. Telecommunications companies secretly giving phone calling lists to the NSA for just about all Americans is the latest in a long list of atrocities being committed at our expense. Also consider the following inexhaustive list:

1. We’re paying $3.00 a gallon for gas, while oil corporations such as Exxon Mobil are posting record quarterly profits in the billions. Home energy costs are through the roof as well, and I’m sure these corporations aren’t hurting either. Is anyone doing a thing to relieve our burden?

2. Credit card companies can charge through the nose in interest rates depending on which state they operate in, they’ve collectively raised the minimum payment we must pay each month in order not to be in default, and they’ve made it tougher for us to file for bankruptcy if these payments overwhelm us. Consider that they passed this bankruptcy legislation through Congress with broad bipartisan support. Also, they’re allowed to inundate us with advertisements by mail, phone, and e-mail, and they can claim us to be in default if we have been delinquent with accounts that rest at other institutions.

3. Media has been continually consolidated into the hands of fewer and fewer corporations. AOL Time Warner, NBC Universal, Viacom, Disney, Newscorp—all huge, multifaceted corporations that have benefited greatly from Bush’s tax cuts. Consider the noncritical coverage of Bush going to war in Iraq, and their lack of real interest in the debacle that has unfolded, and their at best tepid criticism of Bush despite his freefall in the polls and breaking below the 30% approval barrier.

4. Pharmaceutical companies spend billions and billions on advertising each year. There’s medicine out there for every possible condition imaginable, and these companies are doing quite well. Meanwhile, 40 million Americans do not have health insurance. Health insurance costs are going through the roof, as fewer employed people are able to get coverage through their workplaces. A person who is uncovered and gets hit with a catastrophic illness is deeply screwed and will be forced to file for bankruptcy (but, wait, not so fast—see #2 above).

5. Defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin make a killing building airplanes and weapons systems for war. Contractors such as Halliburton, a company that once had the current Vice President of the United States as its CEO and has been revealed as being fraudulent in its billing and accounting, make a killing cleaning up the mess left by the war machines built by the defense contractors. Halliburton has billions of dollars of government money unaccounted for in Iraq and has been found to provide inadequate service to our soldiers as well as overcharging the government for oil. They stay on as government contractors despite this.

Even though Bush and his corporate cronies will praise a free market economy where government imposes few restrictions on corporations and demonize countries such as Venezuela and Bolivia where corporations have largely become state-controlled, corporations have become, paradoxically, an extension of the government. They are supported by the government through hefty contracts and hefty tax breaks and corporate welfare. They do the government’s bidding, whether it’s to report phony news stories or not report news stories at all, and secretly provide phone call lists when the government asks them to, or turn over Internet search records if pressed. They work the government so that laws are passed in their favor and there’s minimal oversight of their activities. To me, corporations and the government seem to be one and the same. Welcome to our fascist future.

Now, I don’t support socialist-leaning countries such as Venezuela and Bolivia. These countries will turn into dictatorships, if they haven’t already, and their citizens will become oppressed. I recognize why they’ve become the way they have though. They’ve been exploited by corporations and American foreign policy for too long, and they’ve grown tired of it.

Will the U.S. eventually head in this direction? The Republicans will have you believe that liberals are doing to this country, even though Republicans have controlled government policy for 25 years and have cemented their control the last five by controlling all branches of government. I mean, we can’t even get a good universal health care system talk going.

The reality is that we’re headed toward the other extreme, and may already be there. Corporations controlling the government instead of the government controlling corporations. Take your pick. Neither is good.

The War on Americans

The War on Americans

Yesterday, it came to light that the NSA, under the orders of the executive branch, has been compiling a list of the phone calls of tens of millions of Americans. They’ve received this information from telecommunications companies Verizon Communications, AT&T Corp., and BellSouth Corp., with Qwest refusing to participate. The President has told us before, when other secret programs have been revealed, to not worry, that they are tracking international calls only, that they are only tracking terrorists. They’ve lied. We’re all potential terrorists. We are the enemy. The government has waged war on its own people.

This is the War on Terror. It’s what it’s been all along. They can’t actually eliminate terrorists, only embolden them with empty rhetoric and bullshit wars in Iraq. So, like any good totalitarian state, they wage war on their own people because that’s the only way to be successful.

Now cue the fools. The ones who will say this program is protecting the country, that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’re not a terrorist. That you’re liberties are being protected, and really, who cares as long as you’re safe from terrorists, right? The fools. The cads. Trust the Bush administration when, as seen by his falling poll numbers, more people than not don’t trust him. Trust him, when continually they say something is not true and then it turns out to be true.

Trust us, the administration will say, we’re not using this information for anything else but to protect you. But how long before that’s revealed as a lie? Will we soon learn that they’ve used this information to track their political enemies, people who have disagreed with them? Wow—abuse of power, who would think that would ever happen, especially when Republicans are in charge? (It’ll all be a different story if, say, there’s a President H. Clinton (D-NY) in office.)

At this point, after the voluminous collection of lies that have been thrust upon us over the last five years by this administration, why would we give them the benefit of the doubt of trust? Even if they were trustworthy, such a program should arouse the suspicion of all patriotic Americans regardless of political party.

And if the pattern isn’t clear yet, it should be now. Bush has asserted himself as above the other branches of government. Indeed, he can mimic their functions as he sees fit, creating law as he needs to and interpret the exist ones as fits his plans. And he chooses to ignore the other branches if he chooses to, so he can do as he chooses, making his power without limit. In case you haven’t paid attention to world history, a leader who does that is called a dictator. Bush has asserted himself as dictator, and the violations that generally occur when someone is a dictator—namely, the right to privacy—have been happening and are now coming to light.

Of course, the Congress is complicit in this, for not living up to their Constitutional responsibility of checking the executive branch. This is the great tragedy, because a Congress as a check could’ve stopped this. They could’ve impeached if they had to, to defend the republic from such aggression. But the Republicans who control the Congress put party above country and now we’re paying for it. Yeah, the Democrats are complicit too, for not putting up a fight, even they are a mostly helpless minority, and giving Bush the benefit of the doubt. Now we have the Founding Fathers’ worst nightmare—an unchecked executive branch, its power run amok. I mean, this is why they wrote the Declaration of Independence and told England to shove it, for fuck’s sake.

It’s a War on Americans. They’re fighting me, you, the guy down the street walking his dog, the lady in the grocery store trying to keep her child from crying because she refuses to buy him Pop-tarts. They’re fighting the old man in the checkout line trying to find enough change in his pockets to buy a bag of chips. The thousands of people in cars, locked in gridlocked traffic, $3.00 a gallon gas burning, hoping they make it to work on time. They’re fighting people dying too young from cancer, bullet wounds, poisoned air that is that way to help the smokestack business on the horizon pad its bottom line. They’re fighting a five-year-old calling her frail great-grandmother on her 95th birthday. They’re fighting a fifteen-year-old boy, his voice cracking and afraid as he calls a girl for the first time to ask her out on a date. They’re fighting you as you struggle to get a human being to answer customer service at a company that received hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks or even helped the government wage its war against you despite the fact that you pay your bills on time.

Where’s does this war end? That’s the question we should all ask. We should be thinking in terms of how we, the people, will win. It’s looking grim now, though, and we may have let it slip too far for us to recover.