Explaining Democracy

by Stephen Fleischman

But, Son, the oligarchy always hedges its bets.

It looks very democratic because a black man and a white woman are running for president. The oligarchy has three dogs in the fight this election, with John McCain on the Republican side. But remember, all have the same master. The oligarchy likes to pick the candidate that has the most credibility with the public, yet is committed to carrying out the oligarch’s agenda. That’s why they hold these primaries, caucuses and elections. Keeps up appearances.

No, no, you don’t understand. This is not just a democracy. This is a capitalist democracy. Our founding fathers set it up this way. Of course, back in 1776 and 1789, when we had our revolution, kicked out the British and the nation was formed, capitalism was young. The Industrial Revolution had just taken hold—a revolution on steroids.

“Malversation and peculation were rife,” said Shakespeare referring to another period in history similar to this one. Exploitation was the name of the game.

We had slavery in this country until the 1880s. The Civil War was fought over differences between North and South in their economic relationships with England, the mother country. Slavery was not the issue. It was a victim of collateral damage.

“…this government cannot endure … half slave and half free”, said Lincoln.

The victory of the North ended the slave system because of its inefficiency, not for humanitarian considerations, the Abolitionists notwithstanding.

Once the nation had rid itself of the slave system, the burgeoning, ravenous new capitalists instituted a wage slave and profit system.

What does that have to do with what’s happening now? Well, everything. I call it a “wage slave” system because only a part of a worker’s labor is stolen from him—the surplus value he creates by his labor, over and above the value he puts into the commodity for which he is paid. That’s where profit comes from. Karl Marx figured that one out but most of these capitalist economists, today, keep mum about that. It would blow their whole schtick.

You still don’t get it? Well, what I am telling you is that capitalism has grown up. It’s no longer a system of simple commodity production. We’ve gone through the market fluctuations, booms and busts, inflation and deflation, recessions and depressions, for more that 150 years. Capitalism has to grow or die. We’re still growing. We’re now in the period of monopoly capitalism and war is our modus operandi. We have to keep a war economy going. A domestic economy, alone, will no longer cut the mustard. That would mean social programs for the people; repeal of tax cuts for the rich. We can’t countenance that. We’ll simply have to go abroad to make ends meet. It’s only imperialism. It’s been done many times by many countries for many centuries. We have to save those places by taking over their markets and their resources—as we’re doing in Iraq right now.

Why don’t the people do something about it?

That’s a good question. You have to understand, people are placid. They don’t like to rock the boat. They can be made to act like sheep, herded this way and that, and let me tell you how. The Fourth Estate.

The Fourth Estate? That’s just a fancy name for the press or what we now call the media—newspapers, magazines, radio and television, and all those honorable ways to keep the people informed. The media is also there to keep the government honest.

You call it a crock, do you? Now wait a minute. That’s what the Fourth Estate is supposed to do—not what it really does. The mainstream media (MSM) is asleep at the switch. But they’re not really asleep. They’ve just been brainwashed, co-opted, whatever you want to call it—taken over by the Second Estate.

What’s the Second Estate? The nobility. We call them the ruling elite. The mighty corporations of America that have now become multinational. They own the media; Time Warner, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, Disney, Viacom, Bertelsmann AG, Vivendi SA; half a dozen conglomerates that control just about everything we see, hear and read. As Noam Chomsky says, they manufacture consent, so everyone believes the same lies.

The control goes deeper than that. It permeates the whole system—from cradle to grave…even children in grade school. The curricula, the textbooks that are used. It runs through high school and academia. We’re all subliminally trained to believe the same conventional wisdom. Then, there’s government, all levels. The corporations control the levers of government. They own most of the politicians which is why so many of them are disrespected by the public. There are politicians and there are statesmen. I haven’t seen a statesman in quite a while.

This doesn’t last forever. There comes a time, a turning point, when people come alive, no longer sheep. When the system fails to provide the basic needs of life, the people change it. Sometimes peacefully. Usually not. The ruling class doesn’t like to give up even some of its power. Then, the people have to take it forcefully. It’s built into our Constitution. Our founding fathers had a couple of good ideas. One of them was the Declaration of Independence, especially this part:

…all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government…

Oh, now you get it. I knew you would, Son. It’s built into your constitution.

YouTube Wars

TRex, the theropod in the treehouse, and Gavin from Sadly, No! have been having a techno-pop YouTube war for the past few days.

From the Treehouse:

The YouTube war continues apace. Gavin got down and dirty and pulled out not just Dschingis Khan (with subtitles!) but Sparks (featuring Jane Wiedlin), too. Oh, the paaaaain. Balloon Juice has turned to WMD’s with the deployment of John Cage.

But I will triumph. Mwah-ha-haaaaaa!!

Brace yourselves, boys. I’m breaking out the Baltimora.

Suffer, bitches.

UPDATE: Logan from C&L has contacted me via the TReehouse’s secret, untraceable phone line (a pair of tin cans connected by a string) and thrown Klaus Nomi into the mix. Singing Lou Christie. To which I can only add this.

Well, that’s it then, Nomi wins. Let’s stop.

Ralph Nader: Monkey Wrench or Cattle Prod?

by Stephen Fleischman

“Here we go again,” murmured the old guard Democrats when Ralph Nader officially announced his candidacy for president in 2008, on Tim Russert’s “Meet the Press” show, Sunday, Feb.24th.

“Nader—the spoiler,” they called him since the 2000 election when Al Gore lost the presidency to George W. Bush. “It’s all Nader’s fault!” they cried. Nader was a good scapegoat, a good person to blame, so they wouldn’t have to examine their own souls. Yes, George W. Bush was named President. He won Florida by 537 votes. Ralph Nader got 97,488 votes in Florida. It’s simple. If Nader hadn’t run, Gore would have won!

Hold on! It’s not as simple as that!

George W. Bush got just a little help from his friends. His brother Jeb Bush, who happened to be Governor of the State at the time, Katherine Harris, Secretary of State of Florida, in charge of election procedures, election officials in Fort Lauderdale who produced ballots that apparently were designed by Rube Goldberg and left hanging chads.

The US Commission on Civil Rights conducted an extensive investigation of irregularities during the 2000 presidential election in Florida, published in The Washington Post on June 5, 2001, said: “the most dramatic undercount in this election was the nonexistent ballots of the countless unknown eligible voters, who were wrongfully purged from the voter registration rolls, turned away from the polls, and by various other means prevented from exercising the franchise.” The Report went on to say: “The disenfranchisement of Florida’s voters fell most harshly on the shoulders of African-Americans. Statewide, based upon county-level statistical estimates, African-American voters were nearly ten times more likely than white voters to have their ballots rejected in Florida.” The Commission pointed the finger at where the blame belonged: “the governor and the secretary of state, in particular, chose to simply ignore the mounting evidence that many counties were experiencing rising voter registration rates in communities with out-dated voting technology. Furthermore, they ignored the pleas of some supervisors of elections for guidance and help.” Then there was the US Supreme Court that stopped the re-counts and gave the Presidency to George W. Bush.

So, you must admit George W. Bush got just a little help from his friends. Everybody knows, today—it’s the conventional wisdom—that George W. Bush stole that election. But, as far as the old guard Democrats are concerned, their lost election is all Nader’s fault. They blame him for the disastrous last seven years of the Bush Administration. They blame him for the Iraq war. (If Al Gore had been elected, it never would have happened) They blame Nader for Bush’s failed economic policy, tax cuts for the rich and everything else bad that the Bush administration has done.

The two Democratic candidates talk endlessly about Universal Health Care but neither of them mentions those two little words, “single payer”, the only way it can ever happen. Both are afraid of bucking the mammoth health insurance industry in this country. Maybe Nader can prod them into fighting a little harder for what they claim they want.

We know Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is on the Armed Services Committee in the Senate and in the pocket of the defense industry, but then Barack Obama talks about increasing the military buildup instead of cutting the bloated military budget that we have. The sheepish Democrats might need a little cattle prod for moving on this issue.

Why is a discussion of corporate crime and corporate welfare off the table in this campaign, when corporatism in on the march. Benito Mussolini, pre-World War II Italian dictator, defined the term “corporatism” as “fascism”, and he should know. He coined the phrase and turned Italy into a fascist country that linked up with the Nazis. Is that what we want here? Corporatism? We’re certainly moving in that direction, if not already there. Congress is corporate occupied territory. We just don’t want to face it. Maybe Ralph Nader can explain it to people who have closed minds. We dare not listen—because mainstream media has tried to make Nader into some kind of joke.

What about the “monkey wrench” effect? Will Nader be accused of blowing the election for the Democrats, again, in 2008? Lose to John McCain? It would take Houdini to do that. As Nader said to Tim Russert in the “Meet the Press” interview, “If the Democrats can’t landslide the Republicans this year, they ought to just wrap up, close down, emerge in a different form. You think the American people are going to vote for a pro-war John McCain who almost gives an indication that he’s the candidate for perpetual war…”.

In the interview, Nader cites Solon Simmons, a professor at George Mason University, who made a study of the election shenanigans during the 2000 Florida campaign and argues that by cattle prodding Al Gore to the left with his aggressive, resolutely left-of-center rhetoric, Nader may have actually delivered more votes to the Democrats than he took away.

So much for the “monkey wrench” effect.

A Festival Of Ignorance

Who was that guy? More like him please.

Late Night Music: Total Control

Something about the way the sax comes in has always given me chills.

One of my favorite mix moments in “Something Wild”.

Tipping Point

by Stephen Fleischman

“Be not afraid of greatness; some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.”

–William Shakespeare

I hate to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, who said: “You fight with the army you have, not with the army you want”, but allow me this: “we work with the candidates we have, not with the candidate we’d like to have”.

Barack Obama might not have been born great, might not have achieved greatness, but he’s standing in a place where he may have greatness thrust upon him.

Most great leaders in world history did not spring full grown from the rib of Jove. They were molded by the confluence of historical events, unexpected circumstances and the pressure of the people behind them.

George Washington. He was caught in the maelstrom of an insurgent movement, pushed forward by the farmers and landowners of the 13 colonies to take on the British redcoats of George III and beat them with his rag-tag army of freedom fighters, much as Ho Chi Min and the Viet Cong did in Vietnam with a guerrilla army fighting with bamboo spears against the tanks and helicopters of the American invaders.

What are the freedom fighters of Iraq doing right now?

If the Shia, the Sunni, and the Kurds could get together, instead of fighting a centuries old religious war, they’d have the American invaders out of there in a New York minute, probably by helicopter from the top of the US Embassy building in Baghdad. The Grand Ayatollah Ali Hussein al-Sistani is probably working on that right now.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the aristocratic former Governor of New York State had greatness thrust upon him by the Stock Market crash of 1929. Herbert Hoover and the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act added to that greatness in the elections of 1932, plunging Roosevelt into the depth of the Great Depression when he took office in 1933. The Republican right-wing also thought tax cuts for the rich would be a good way to crawl out of the depression using a stimulus package.

As the story goes, Pelle the Conqueror, achieved greatness by learning how to speak Danish, whereas Alexander and Peter did it just by calling themselves “the Great”.

Jesus Christ was born great, whereas Babe Ruth did it with his bat and Barry Bonds with his bat and a little help from a yellow submarine.

Revolutions don’t come along very often but when they do they produce a lot of greatness. When Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette, were guillotined, Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre and his Jacobin friends had their moment in the sun, called the Reign of Terror. Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité did not emerge directly from the Reign of Terror, but eventually the great Napoleon Bonaparte did.

Napoleon’s ambition was to conquer Europe (if not the world). In 1804, he crowned himself Emperor of France and proceeded to knock off one country after another until he got to Russia. There, the great Russian winter smothered him, as it did another would-be world conqueror a century and a half later.

We won’t mention Hitler and Stalin and we’ll go right to the wanna-be great George W. Bush. Now there’s a man who would like to have greatness thrust upon him. If his Democratic opponents had any “cojones”, any at all, even a wee bit, they would thrust him and his puppet-master the un-great Dick Cheney right out of office.

We had a president who was tossed, not too long ago, within the memory of most of us—Tricky Dick Nixon, in 1974. His high crime and misdemeanor was authorizing a second-rate burglary at the Watergate Hotel in Washington in order to steal some election campaign strategy from the office of the Democratic National Committee. Too bad. His burglars got caught red-handed. No greatness thrust upon Tricky Dick.

And we had a president, even more recently who was impeached by the House of Representative in 1998, President Bill Clinton impeached, not for the real crimes and misdemeanors that he committed, like bombing Iraq on a regular basis for over a year; for supporting sanctions on the Iraq people that resulted in the death of more that a half million Iraqi children; for keeping in office a Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, who said the deaths of these children were “worth it”. No, he wasn’t impeached for any of that.

Bill Clinton was impeached for denying that he had sexual relations with “that” woman—Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern. The US Senate didn’t have the guts to put him on trial (as impeachment protocol called for) and, if found guilty, evict him from office. No greatness there.

Now, Bill Clinton is on the campaign trail, aiding his wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (Dem. New York) in her ambitious drive to become President of the United States. No greatness there but lots of Chutzpah.

The tipping point seems to have come with the Obama victory in the Wisconsin primary.

When young people come out to vote, you know the thrust of greatness is on the move.

Late Night Music: Linda Ronstadt

I have always really loved Linda Ronstadt, but she has always kind of puzzled me. She has without doubt one of the best voices ever I have ever heard, but her choice of material has often left me wondering, and her stylistic choices have wound a serpentine path from country/rock to Motown to Aaron Neville love ballads to Mexican mariachi to Nelson Riddle, and somewhere out there was Walt Disney. It’s been a strange ride loving Linda.

But she did have one ass-kicking decade from 1968 to 1978, and her version of this song did not leave me wondering.

Enjoy one of the best female vocalists ever.

Whatever Happened To The “Class Struggle”?

Ed. note: While cleaning out my email inbox I came across this blog, which Steve sent me back in November when I was in Mixing Hell, and which I neglected to post for him. Please accept my apologies for my tardiness in getting this posted, it is perhaps more relevant now than it was 3 months ago when it was written.   – Sangemon

By Stephen Fleischman

Class Struggle. Now, there’s an expression with clout. You don’t hear it much, anymore. Don’t fool yourself. It’s there. It’s like an underground stream. It surfaces now and then.

You can call it the war between the haves and the have-nots. It’s been going on since the beginning of human endeavor. But it was Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels who pinned it down. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle,” they said.

There are nodal points in history, called revolutions. The industrial revolution, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, were nodal points, where quantitative change turned to qualitative change, where political and economic systems that no longer met the needs of people changed to fit the new conditions. The slave system to feudalism. Feudalism to Capitalism. Capitalism to –?  Â

Marx defined an economic class by its relationship to the means of production–its position in the social structure that characterizes capitalism–two classes, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, otherwise known as the working class and the capitalist class.Â

In a free labor system, under capitalism, you pay your worker a wage (that represents only a part payment for the value he produces). You have only to extract the surplus value that the worker contributes to the making of the product. You call it profit and say it is derived from entrepreneurial skill, reward for taking risks, from the machinery, the land, or other such gibberish. Once you extract the surplus value the worker creates, let him be free to go his own way and the devil take the hindmost. There is always a plentiful supply of labor to be had.

That’s not the end of the story. What happens is that eventually, the worker wises up and starts to demand the full value of his work, or maybe settle for a larger slice of the pie. That’s when the fur begins to fly. That’s called the class struggle.

Throughout economic history that struggle has gone on. It’s an old, old fight between the haves and the have-nots. It pushes capital on to heights of glory, monopoly and war. We’re in such a period right now.

We need to keep production high and labor costs low to keep the system afloat, they tell us. The EPA notwithstanding, production and profits trump the environment. Take a look at us now. Shop until you drop, the propaganda organs shout. “But with what?” asks the underpaid and the unemployed. The productivity of labor is at its height. The purchasing power of the working class is low.

Under capitalism, the assault on labor has been overwhelming, continuous, inhuman and destructive from the beginning of the industrial revolution to this very day. No wonder unions are dysfunctional and chaotic. So are most of their leaders. If they’re not coerced, co-opted or corrupted, they’re framed, jailed or neutralized in some way. Only when capitalism is in the throes of crisis, deep depression and near collapse can labor leaders like Eugene V. Debs or John L. Lewis emerge.

Debs organized the American Railway Union, an industrial union for all railroad workers in 1893, became a confirmed Socialist while serving time in prison for refusing to comply with a federal court injunction, ran for President of the United States four times on the Socialist Party ticket, the last time from prison in 1920 and received nearly 1 million votes.

John L. Lewis led the United Mine Workers in organizing most of the coal industry, was one of the organizers of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1936 and joined the Reuther brothers, Walter and Victor, in organizing the United Auto Workers’ sit-down strikes against General Motors at their Flint, Michigan plants.

For 44 bitterly cold winter days the auto workers in Flint held out, eventually inspiring more than two-thirds of General Motors l45 thousand other production workers to strike as well, at dozens of other plants. The strikers in Flint seized, shut down and occupied one, then two, and then three of the key GM plants. Suddenly, workers everywhere were sitting-down. There were 477 sitdown strikes by the end of 1937, involving more than half a million workers.

Mighty GM had vowed publicly that it would never allow the UAW to represent its employees. But the General Motors Corporation ended up granting that crucial right–and more–to the union. It was a stunning victory for the United Auto Workers. It led the way–and swiftly–to the unionization of workers throughout heavy industry and, ultimately, to unionization in all fields. It certainly was the high water mark of labor power in America.

The class struggle goes on. One day, it will reach a turning point, again. With computers and digital technology, a planned economy is not only more feasible but inevitable in a future socialist society.

It took capitalism four hundred years to hone its skills. It’s a trial and error process. The system served its purpose and is now ready to leave the stage of history, or “dig its own grave” if you prefer Marx’s expression. There’s a new one waiting in the wings. Socialism. Only been around about a century. Made a couple of mistakes but learning.

Open Letter to Obama

by Stephen Fleischman

You’re rounding the turn, heading down the home stretch, running neck and neck with the lead horse, so don’t blow it now.

You’ve got those super-delegates waiting in the paddock ready to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Your jaws. Your victory. This is your big chance, so don’t blow it now.

Change is a great slogan. It’s gotten you where you are. But it’s been co-oped, here and there, by other candidates, and it can’t stand alone. It’s a generality, or, as McCain would say a “platitude”. You’ve got to bite the bullet and get specific. I know specificity can get you into deep do-do, but you’ve got to do it. Just say those two little words; they’re gentle and non-aggressive. They won’t bite. “Single Payer”.

“Socialized Medicine!” they’ll scream. And hit you with everything they’ve got. They’ll call you a “communist”, or even worse, a social democrat. They did it to Dennis Kucinich who merely murmured “single payer” and they knocked him out of the box before he even got into it.

You’re a man of fortitude and can take anything they can throw at you.

You can show them that the word “socialized” doesn’t scare you into submission. You can show them that “Socialized Education”, made this country great. Not just grade school public education for every child, but the Land-Grant College system, for example. Every state in the Union has one as well as the territories and the District of Columbia. They were established way back in the 19th Century by the Morrill Act of 1862 and extended in 1890. Justin S. Morrill was the senior Senator from Vermont. The mission of these Acts was “to teach agriculture, military tactic, the mechanic arts, and home economics, not to the exclusion of classical studies, so that members of the working classes might obtain a practical college education”.

The mission of the Land-Grant Universities was further expanded by the Hatch Act of 1887 and the Smith-Lever Act of 1914 to provide federal funds to states to establish agricultural experiment stations and cooperative extension services, the sending of agents into rural areas to help bring the result of agricultural research to the end users.

Then, after World War II, there was the GI Bill of Rights. GI, for those too young to remember, stood for “Government Issue”, the returning World War II veteran. The Act paid for a GI’s entire education. It encouraged universities across the country to expand enrollment. The University of Michigan, for example, had fewer than 10,000 students prior to the war. In 1948 their enrollment was well over 30,000. Syracuse University saw their enrollment skyrocket from approximately 6,000 before the war to 19,000 students in 1947.

Another provision was known as the 52–20 clause. This enabled all former servicemen to receive $20 once a week for 52 weeks a year while they were looking for work. The GI Bill applied to all who served in the armed services, including African-Americans and women. Now, there’s a social(ist) program worth emulating.

It’s time to apply it to health as well as education. Most civilized countries around the world already do with univeral health care for their citizens. All we do is talk about it and try to devise schemes that fit into the profit-taking schemes of the health insurance industry. It’s not going to work.

So, Barack, just say those two little words. You may have to back away from some of your supporters. Get those mammoth health insurance companies off your back. Hillary knuckled under to them. You don’t have to do that. You need a landslide vote to frustrate those super-delegates. You need the people and the wind at your back to beat Hillary to the finish line and McCain to the White House. And those two little words will do it.

Remember, Barack, we’ve come a long way.

This country was born in genocide (the killing of the Indians) and grew up as a slaveocracy (use of the Africans). The myth that our founding fathers were liberal democrats is just that, a myth. They were rich, white, landowners (only landowners could vote) and most were also slave owners. Yes, they broke from colonialism and beat back the British. They wrote the constitution to suit their needs. But we lucked out. It was Thomas Jefferson (also a slaveholder) who put democracy into our constitution with the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments. Ex-slaves got the vote with the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, women with the 19th Amendment in 1920.

It’s now time to extend those rights, to guarantee the health of the American people.

You must learn to walk in the footsteps of the great Americans this country has produced; not only men like Senator Justin S. Morrill, but also unionists and political activists like Eugene V. Debs, one of the founders of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), organizer of one of the first industrial unions in the United States, the American Railway Union. He ran for President of the United States five times as the Socialist Party of America candidate, in 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920, the last time from prison where he was jailed for his part in the Pullman strike and received a million votes.

You must walk in the footsteps of the great John L. Lewis, organizer of the mine workers and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) which established the United Steel Workers of America and helped organize millions of other industrial workers in the 1930s.

And, of course, you must walk in the footsteps of Abraham Lincoln who bucked the slave system and saved the Union.

Today, the Union must be saved again, and you’re the man to do it.

Blackshirts, Brownshirts, Blackwater, Infragard

Matthew Rothschild writes in The Progressive magazine:

Today, more than 23,000 representatives of private industry are working quietly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. The members of this rapidly growing group, called InfraGard, receive secret warnings of terrorist threats before the public does—and, at least on one occasion, before elected officials. In return, they provide information to the government, which alarms the ACLU. But there may be more to it than that. One business executive, who showed me his InfraGard card, told me they have permission to “shoot to kill” in the event of martial law

So what is Infragard?

InfraGard started in Cleveland back in 1996, when the private sector there cooperated with the FBI to investigate cyber threats.

“Then the FBI cloned it,” says Phyllis Schneck, chairman of the board of directors of the InfraGard National Members Alliance, and the prime mover behind the growth of InfraGard over the last several years.

InfraGard itself is still an FBI operation, with FBI agents in each state overseeing the local InfraGard chapters. (There are now eighty-six of them.) The alliance is a nonprofit organization of private sector InfraGard members.

So, can just anyone join this organization?

To join, each person must be sponsored by “an existing InfraGard member, chapter, or partner organization.” The FBI then vets the applicant. On the application form, prospective members are asked which aspect of the critical infrastructure their organization deals with. These include: agriculture, banking and finance, the chemical industry, defense, energy, food, information and telecommunications, law enforcement, public health, and transportation.

And what, exactly, do these captains of industry do as members of Infragard?

FBI Director Robert Mueller addressed an InfraGard convention on August 9, 2005. At that time, the group had less than half as many members as it does today. “To date, there are more than 11,000 members of InfraGard,” he said. “From our perspective that amounts to 11,000 contacts . . . and 11,000 partners in our mission to protect America.” He added a little later, “Those of you in the private sector are the first line of defense.”

He urged InfraGard members to contact the FBI if they “note suspicious activity or an unusual event.” And he said they could sic the FBI on “disgruntled employees who will use knowledge gained on the job against their employers.”

And here’s the topper:

“Then they said when—not if—martial law is declared, it was our responsibility to protect our portion of the infrastructure, and if we had to use deadly force to protect it, we couldn’t be prosecuted,” he says.

So we have Blackwater ready to petrol our streets and now we have this – jeez I don’t know what to call it – secret organization of “private sector” operatives with some kind of deadly pseudo-law enforcement powers granted by the FBI. It sure sounds familiar. Remember these other secret, quasi government organizations?

This is pretty shocking, but not surprising to me. I have been concerned about this type of thing for a long time.

These scoundrels have been consolidating power and undermining American democracy ever since they were installed by the Supreme Court after the 2000 election and it has seemed to me ever since that they have been getting all their ducks in a row for what I have feared since that fall of 2000, a bloodless coup, imposition of martial law, dictatorship, the end of democracy in America.

Just another duck in the row.