Reply #31: Newberry presents an interesting paradigm. [View All]

[TahitiNut]

"... the present Democratic Party has ratified ... the mandate of the new government. Breaking the law and then making it legal ex-post facto is precisely the kind of formal violation which establishes the will of a new mandate coming into being. There is not only no going back to the Liberal Democracy, but America now lives in a post-Federal era. There is a national shadow government, and it is not bound by the limitations of the bill of rights."

This maps to the 'reality' we're seeing. The forces at work are the forces of ownership - an ownership interest that ignores boundaries and regards (local) government as mere hireling agencies which administer ownership (entitlement) interests. On an overpopulated globe, most human beings are now mere livestock to such interests. Whether used as consumers, producers, enforcers, or administrators in this political order, individual human life (and liberty interest) is now devalued proportionally to the increase from less than one to more than six billion on a shrinking globe being made less fit for habitation - even by the ownership class itself.

Those who persist in elevating individual human beings (and their liberty interest) above the now-diminished role of livestock and pests are regarded as the "enemy" to this extant paradigm of ownership. We've completed the migration of our consciousness from "fear of the unexplored and untamed" (frontier mentality) to "fear of the opponents within and rogue" even as primal and anachronistic instincts are exploited.

Since the Federal government already defines "terrorism" to include domestic acts of vandalism, and the NIE which has been partially declassified declares "leftists" and "anti-globalists" to be on the list of potential terrorists, this is not about catching the perpetrators of a series of terrorist attacks - embassy bombings, the attack on the USS Cole, 9/11, M-11 and 7/7 - but an unlimited and unchallengeable right to detain, try and punish anyone who is deemed (by the shadow powers) to be "an unlawful combatant".

However ...

As long as people are able to purchase the goods and services they need, as long as they are able to cash checks and carry on daily commerce, there is absolutely no chance of revolution, because revolution disrupts all of these things. People will drive forward, even knowing they are going the wrong way, rather than turn into a stopped off ramp. It is only when the highway becomes clogged to the point of immobility that they will consider leaving it.

And this is exactly where we're headed. However vaguely, the public recognizes this. It is recognized in the diminishing middle class, the worries over Social Security, the response to wholesale importation of cheap labor, the wholesale exportation of remunerative employment of skilled and intelligent labor, the corresponding 'dumbing down' of the education system (an excess of thinking people are a threat), the perversion of a health care system into a health profit system (only the 'owners' are fully-entitled to lives free of illness, pain, and disability - there is no 'right'), and the intentional deterioration of not only public infrastructure but of habitable housing (see the response to Katrina).

Since America has given unlimited power to those who promise that the dividends and treasury bonds will be paid, and that war will go on forever, the other promises will have to be revoked to pay for that. There is no other choice.

It was a nice Republic, pity we could not keep it.

Indeed.