What to write about tonight? Well, how about thinking about, “How did we get here?”
I know all about the deep dives where everything traces back to the Enlightenment and the loss of faith. Or there’s the Abolitionists and the Civil War enshrining social justice in our government. But I don’t want to go back that far. I’ll settle for Woodrow Wilson and FDR as the source of the runaway bureaucracy that Washington DC has become. Sure, in between, there were others but I think Wilson set the stage with the WW I expansion and FDR metastasized the problem with the New Deal and the WW II expansions.
Now, I’m not denying that by creating the Leviathan FDR assured the defeat of Hitler and Japan. He did. And by funding the Manhattan Project he created the American Empire and eventually destroyed the Soviet Union. But at what cost? As one of his successors (Eisenhower) warned, the melding of the US war machine with corporate interests fueled by almost limitless investment from the Federal Reserve has swallowed up our democracy. And with it, has enveloped us in a police state that dictates to us in a way that is in line with what the Stasi did in East Germany and what China does with its people today.
The final nail in the coffin was 9/11/2001. The reaction to that attack assured that the Patriot Act and the FISA Courts could treat American citizens like Stalin’s victims that we read about in the Gulag Archipelago. You can be arrested, convicted, sentenced and buried in the gulag for annoying the bureaucrats or just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Freedom of speech, unreasonable search and seizure and the right to an open and fair trial are all stripped away with the wave of a magic wand when the FISA Court and the Patriot Act declare that national security is threatened. And all kinds of other atrocities are possible when the intelligence agencies can convince banks, airlines and social media companies that you are a dangerous person because you don’t agree with the bureaucracy’s priorities.
And all of this is because a bunch of rag tag Islamic extremists hijacked four airliners. Well, as I’ve confessed innumerable times, I was one of the fools who agreed to this nonsense back in 2001. I allowed myself to be swayed by anger to allow George W Bush and his geniuses to put in place the very laws that would plague Americans ever since. All of us who agreed with these measures put on our chains voluntarily. More the fool me.
Well now it’s time to start undoing all of this. And I mean all of it. First to go must be the FISA Courts and the Patriot Act. Ending the ability of the CIA and FBI to target American citizens and sweep away their constitutional rights is the primary goal. That must go.
But after that, the military industrial complex must be examined and the practices that allow it to bribe elected officials and collude with contractors to bleed the American taxpayers must be changed. Sure, we need up to date weapons to assure the security of this country. But we’re not even getting that anymore. We have bloated weapons programs that produce expensive but unimpressive results. Our state-of-the-art Abrams tanks are being decimated on the battlefields of Ukraine by $500 drones. Our next-up super-fighter jet is a vaporware project that is so poorly defined that despite a price tag rumored to be close to a trillion dollars we don’t know why we should build it, other than it will enrich the contractors beyond their wildest dreams.
Getting this done will be a battle royale. Both Democrats and Republicans will defend the military industrial complex with every fiber of their beings. People like Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell have amassed huge fortunes and incredible influence by serving the interests of the defense contractors in everything they do in the Congress. It’s not too much to say that Donald Trump and his cabinet appointees in the Department of Defense will be risking their lives when they defy the vested interests there. There is probably no limit to what they might do to prevent reform of the present situation.
Let’s pray for their success. Nothing less than the freedom and prosperity of our children hangs in the balance over the next few years.
