What to write about tonight?\u00a0 Well, how about thinking about, \u201cHow did we get here?\u201d<\/p>\n
I know all about the deep dives where everything traces back to the Enlightenment and the loss of faith.\u00a0 Or there\u2019s the Abolitionists and the Civil War enshrining social justice in our government.\u00a0 But I don\u2019t want to go back that far.\u00a0 I\u2019ll settle for Woodrow Wilson and FDR as the source of the runaway bureaucracy that Washington DC has become.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Now, I\u2019m not denying that by creating the Leviathan FDR assured the defeat of Hitler and Japan.\u00a0 He did.\u00a0 And by funding the Manhattan Project he created the American Empire and eventually destroyed the Soviet Union.\u00a0 But at what cost?\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
The final nail in the coffin was 9\/11\/2001.\u00a0 The reaction to that attack assured that the Patriot Act and the FISA Courts could treat American citizens like Stalin\u2019s victims that we read about in the Gulag Archipelago.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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\u2019t agree with the bureaucracy\u2019s priorities.<\/p>\n
And all of this is because a bunch of rag tag Islamic extremists hijacked four airliners.\u00a0 Well, as I\u2019ve confessed innumerable times, I was one of the fools who agreed to this nonsense back in 2001.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 All of us who agreed with these measures put on our chains voluntarily.\u00a0 More the fool me.<\/p>\n
Well now it\u2019s time to start undoing all of this.\u00a0 And I mean all of it.\u00a0 First to go must be the FISA Courts and the Patriot Act.\u00a0 Ending the ability of the CIA and FBI to target American citizens and sweep away their constitutional rights is the primary goal.\u00a0 That must go.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 Sure, we need up to date weapons to assure the security of this country.\u00a0 But we\u2019re not even getting that anymore.\u00a0 We have bloated weapons programs that produce expensive but unimpressive results.\u00a0 Our state-of-the-art Abrams tanks are being decimated on the battlefields of Ukraine by $500 drones.\u00a0 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\u2019t know why we should build it, other than it will enrich the contractors beyond their wildest dreams.<\/p>\n
Getting this done will be a battle royale.\u00a0 Both Democrats and Republicans will defend the military industrial complex with every fiber of their beings.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It\u2019s 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.\u00a0 There is probably no limit to what they might do to prevent reform of the present situation.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s pray for their success.\u00a0 Nothing less than the freedom and prosperity of our children hangs in the balance over the next few years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What to write about tonight?\u00a0 Well, how about thinking about, \u201cHow did we get here?\u201d I know all about the deep dives where everything traces<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[135,1873,636,1174],"class_list":["post-31578","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-trump","tag-deep-state","tag-fisa","tag-military","tag-patriot-act"],"yoast_head":"\n