I am sorry to say that viewing USA from outside I notice these kinds of changes more than when I was living there. Might be worth considering this idea while it is still possible to do something about it - whether that is to challenge the changes or to provide a way to protect your assets and family. From what I have read a lot of people in many countries in the past did nothing during such a drift and regretted it later. That includes the many past dictatorships in Latin America and the ones in Europe too.
I hope that things get better in USA and around the world next year and it is possible that they will get much worse before they get better.
Michael
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I have to admit I had to reread Perdue's remark to see if I read it correct in the first place
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Sam Smith
For quite a few years, I’ve written from time to time about the end of the First American Republic. As I put it on one occasion:
“We are clearly in a post-constitutional era. Depending on what day it is, we think of its replacement variously - ranging from an adhocracy to proto-fascism. But one does not need to know the end of the story to know that we headed at a rapid pace away from the extraordinary principles of American democracy towards the dark hole of power with impunity. . . to the sort of world in which, as Rudolph Giuliani has calmly asserted, 'freedom is about authority.'"
Some probably thought I was exaggerating a bit, but the number who did so probably also declined with the advent of the Patriot Act, CIA renditions, mass wiretapping and so forth. Still I have to admit that even I was surprised by today’s comments by two prominent political figures openly calling for moves towards dictatorship:
“I think we ought to suspend, perhaps, elections for Congress for two years and just tell them we won't hold it against them, whatever decisions they make, to just let them help this country recover. I really hope that someone can agree with me on that. You want people who don't worry about the next election.” - NC Governor Bev Perdue
“To solve the serious problems facing our country, we need to minimize the harm from legislative inertia by relying more on automatic policies and depoliticized commissions for certain policy decisions. In other words, radical as it sounds, we need to counter the gridlock of our political institutions by making them a bit less democratic.”. - Former Obama budget director Peter Orszag
The typical way the corporate media deals with such comments is to treat them like a rainy day, or, at worst, a thunderstorm. For example, Ezra Klein of the Wahington Post defended Orszag like this:
“’We need less democracy’ is a good headline, but if you read the piece closely, that’s not actually what Orszag is arguing. Rather, he’s arguing that we need less Congress. And that’s a bit different."
Less Congress is a bit different? And what about automatic policies and depoliticized commissions? Is Klein aware of what the British went through to get a Parliament at all? Or the struggle we fought to win a Congress for ourselves? Or that a depoliticized commission is sometimes also called a “junta?” Or that the Congress was meant to be a partner with the White House and not just another presidential town hall meeting?
With the help of the media, which finds the White House so much easier to cover than 535 independent minds on the Hill, Congress has, over the past few decades, slowly faded in power, a fact now so calmly accepted that various end runs like the Simpson-Bowles commission or the bipartisan congressional committee to tell us what to do – which would have been an anathema a half century ago – are now just accepted as normal.
We are taught to believe that political evil comes by revolution and riot by tedious incremental steps. Nothing is further form the truth, as a German professor tried to explain about the Nazis:
“What happened was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to be governed by surprise, to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believe that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. . . . The crises and reforms (real reforms too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter. . . . To live in the process is absolutely not to notice it -- please try to believe me -- unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted.' . . . Believe me this is true. Each act, each occasion is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow. . . . Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven't done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we did nothing) . . . You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.”
Which is why the comments of Bev Perdue and Peter Orszag should worry us deeply?
From:
http://prorevnews.blogspot.com/2011/09/drifting-toward-dictatorship.html
Here are some related stories in the news
'Stingray' Phone Tracker Fuels Constitutional Clash
September 22, 2011, Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904194604576583112723197574.html
For more than a year, federal authorities pursued a man they called simply "the Hacker." Only after using a little known cellphone-tracking device — a stingray — were they able to zero in on a California home and make the arrest. Stingrays are designed to locate a mobile phone even when it's not being used to make a call. The Federal Bureau of Investigation considers the devices to be so critical that it has a policy of deleting the data gathered in their use, an FBI official told The Wall Street Journal. A stingray's role in nabbing the alleged "Hacker" — Daniel David Rigmaiden — is shaping up as a possible test of the legal standards for using these devices in investigations. Stingrays are one of several new technologies used by law enforcement to track people's locations, often without a search warrant. These techniques are driving a constitutional debate about whether the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, but which was written before the digital age, is keeping pace with the times. Mr. Rigmaiden maintains his innocence and says that using stingrays to locate devices in homes without a valid warrant "disregards the United States Constitution" and is illegal. Note: For lots more on threats to civil liberties from reliable sources, click here.
Fear of Repression Spurs Scholars and Activists to Build Alternate Internets
September 18, 2011, Chronicle of Higher Education
http://chronicle.com/article/College-20-Fear-of/129049/
Computer networks proved their organizing power during the recent uprisings in the Middle East [but] those same networks showed their weaknesses as well, such as when the Egyptian government walled off most of its citizens from the Internet in an attempt to silence protesters. That has led scholars and activists increasingly to consider the Internet's wiring as a disputed political frontier. One weekend each month, a small group of computer programmers gathers [in Washington DC] to build a homemade Internet—named Project Byzantium -— that could go online if part of the current global Internet becomes blocked by a repressive government. The leader of the effort ... says he fears that some day repressive measures could be put into place in the United States. He is not the only one with such apprehensions. Hundreds of like-minded high-tech activists and entrepreneurs in New York at an unusual conference called the Contact Summit. The summit's goal is not just to talk about the projects, but also to connect with potential financial backers, recruit programmers, and brainstorm approaches to building parallel Internets and social networks. The meeting is a sign of the growing mo
