Your mother, partner, whoever they can get to to hurt you. When they come…they come at what you love

[kpete]

Last edited Tue Aug 20, 2013, 08:05 PM - Edit history (1)

[font color=purple]Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?[/font]

This political and economic system is most comparable to how the Mafia is organized, in essence we live in a protection-racket state. The racketeers on Wall Street and in the corporate sector chisel money out of the economy using various scams a part of which is then funneled into campaign contributions for politicians who make sure the security forces – DoD, NSA, FBI – get nice budgets. The security forces secure the business interests of the racketeers at home and abroad. One hand washes the other. If anything goes wrong, the government will bail out the racketeers or cover up for excesses of the security forces. It’s a pretty good deal if you are getting a piece of the action. Wall Street and Washington D.C. never had a recession, let alone a Great Recession. It’s not a democracy. It’s not even a republic. When people challenge the Mafia state there really is no alternative but to destroy them because no reasonable argument can be mustered that such a system is in the interests of 99% of the population. Critics must be marginalized or annihilated.

Otherwise people might start asking questions like what’s the point of all these bullshit jobs? Why, in a “free market” allegedly based on opportunity and competition does the richest 1% of the population have more financial wealth than the bottom 95 percent combined?

The answer isn’t because the rich create value or most of what Americans do at work is so essential, but rather the goal of the kleptocratic elite and their Mafia state is to keep people busy and indebted while looting as much as possible. Guess what? It’s working. Even after the scheming collapsed on itself in 2008, the button pushers and bagmen in D.C. went to work. Now the 1% have become richer than they were before the crisis.

So there is no choice really. When journalists like Barrett Brown expose the corporate intelligence firms snaking government contracts and protecting Big Business from journalists, or Glenn Greenwald exposes the security services for grossly violating the Constitution – the gloves come off. Your mother, your partner, whoever they can get to to hurt you. When they come… they come at what you love.


MORE:
http://news.firedoglake.com/2013/08/20/barrett-brown-glenn-greenwald-and-the-mafia-state/#comments

[frazzled]

1. Okay, I've had it

I've been silent for days on this, but my tolerance for this whiny baby, hyperbolic, overblown reaction to someone--not just someone, but some non-journalist who was couriering secret documents internationally--being questioned for 9 hours. Ya think?

Let's talk detention, whiny folks. Detention is like when the FDR administration decides that because you are of Japanese ancestry you need to be sent away for several years to a camp because you might be a threat. Your family might be separated. You lose your home. You lose your job. You work in some distant camp. That's detention to whine about.

I was detained for four hours once in the Toronto airport. I was 10 (maybe 11) years old. So that was 1961 or 1962. They kept me in a smoke-filled room with five or six interrogators giving me (a little ten-year-old girl) the third degree. I was traveling to go to summer school at the National Ballet of Canada. They wanted to see my "letter of acceptance." I showed them other letters, telling me where my lodgings would be and what my schedule was. But they needed four hours and lots of cigar smoke to ask about the formal acceptance letter.

I was ten years old and did not whine or cry. I was scared, but then I was a little girl.

I was detained for several hours coming back into the US from Canada once, during the Vietnam War. Frisked and searched, questioned, separated from my friend, who was being searched and frisked separately.

Stop acting like this is something new, or something that horrific. Someone stole government records, and someone who was ferrying them across international borders got stopped. No surprise there. Also, no harm done to the person, except 9 hours lost.

ON EDIT: And some day, when I ask my Mother or partner or whomever to sneak a bunch of top secret documents I've stolen from government computers, I'll expect they might get stopped and questioned.

[xfundy]

2. A layer of water can keep

guacamole from turning brown!

[woo me with science]

4. [phone]

[Skittles]

7. YEE HAW!

[Cerridwen]

5. Just think if someone had stopped it before it started.

But, you're right, of course. You've been through it and we shouldn't repeat it.

Where is that stop point so we don't repeat it?

Which group should we wait to suffer or be detained before we realize it could be any of us; even a young girl labelled as a potential "enemy of the state" or the modern version "terrorist."

[Fire Walk With Me]

9. It's illegal to reveal illegal government spying. Got it. You do realize Snowden got his NSA info

while at Booz Allen Hamilton, which is 2/3s owned by the Bush family? That Booz Allen is worth $5 billion and the Bushies just got $2 billion from it? That the Bush family are thus able through ownership to access all the electronic communication going through BAH?

You're either with the terrorists or you're with the Bush family. Get the idea?

[bemildred]

10. Yep, nobody likes a whiner. nt

[markpkessinger]

11. Characterizing those who disagree with you as "whiners" . . .

. . . how very Bill O'Reilly of you. Congratulations.

[geek tragedy]

3. This is a perfect companion piece to the diary calling Miranda both

a 'terrorist' and Greenwald's 'boyfriend'

I certainly hope the discussions on Capitol Hill re: NSA are smarter than the ones on sites like this.

[woo me with science]

6. K&R

[MineralMan]

8. Indeed they do.

...

Sometimes it is the government, and sometimes those who do that are anonymous. Such attacks can come from anywhere.

[markpkessinger]

12. K&R! n/t