If This Goes On … Then What? – Part 4

The next aspect of the mess we’re in that I’ll touch upon is the surveillance state.  For generations, but much more severely since the 9/11 attack, the intelligence agencies; the FBI, Justice Department, CIA, NSA, etc.; have been surveilling the American people and punishing anyone who speaks against them.  And lately they’ve taken it a step further and now have an effective veto on any elected office holder in the federal government.  What they did to Donald Trump when he was elected president shows that they can disrupt the activities of the President of the United States to such an extent that they effectively nullify his ability to select his own personnel and carry out his agenda.  And now they even prosecute candidates for high office to rob the electorate of their only effective means of control over the federal government.

Unlike the earlier installments of this series of posts there is only a binary choice.    And of the two paths forward, the preponderance of evidence indicates things will only go one way.  But I’ll lay out the two scenarios.

The first choice is that we solve this problem.  And what would have to happen to fix this?  The first step would be for the Congress to refuse to re-authorize the Patriot Act and the FISA courts.  And this would be an enormous action.  After the 9/11 attacks the American people willingly acquiesced in allowing the government to spy on us to prevent further terrorist actions occurring within the United States.  But just as some people on the Left warned us back then, the intelligence agencies have used these weapons against us.

The next step involves de-weaponizing these agencies but especially the FBI and Justice Department.  In plain language what it means is removing from power the whole upper echelons of these agencies.  These people would either have to be fired or transferred from their present positions into jobs where they effectively have no control over law enforcement responsibilities.  They would have to be given make-work positions and left to rot until they retire.

And the budgets of these agencies would need to be severely reduced so that we no longer have a situation where the NSA can afford to spy on all Americans simultaneously in real time and effectively controls the internet and the economic activity on it.

And finally, the agencies in question would need to have their charters rewritten to reduce their capacity to do harm.  And robust oversight would have to be built into other agencies and the presidency to more easily step in if criminal activity resurfaced.

So that’s scenario one.

The second scenario is simple.  Nothing gets done.  We continue on the present track where the Justice Department is the de facto enforcer of the banana republic junta we presently have running the country and by extension the whole western world.  What we’ve already seen of this thugocracy will only increase in scope when it becomes obvious that nothing can be done to correct the problem.  Who knows, we may even cease to go through the charade of elections and instead go to a permanent martial law basis where some committee “appoints” a dictator for life who will be rubber stamped by the Senate or whatever other clique of ruling class apparatchiks emerge.

I have to confess.  I’m pretty pessimistic about this.  The Deep State enjoys enormous power.  It seems more likely that the United States itself could unravel than for the intelligence agencies to be ripped out by the roots.  I think the bureaucracy in general and the intelligence agencies in particular are the Achilles heel of our republic.  They’ve become our masters and we don’t have the wherewithal to throw them off.

What do you think?

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