A recent Tom Tomorrow cartoon targets the TSA’s invasive airport searches.

While everyone is up in arms about the TSA’s security methods, let us not forget the bigger picture, that such practices are enabled because we have passively let the government create a national security state that thinks it can abuse people at will.

The really serious abuses are happening elsewhere, in the denial of basic protections to preserve the life and liberty promised in the constitution. Paul Craig Roberts provides a horrific account of what the government did with Omar Khadr and to Dr. Aafia Siddiqui and her three young children who are now missing.

As Roberts says:

We have a Congress that has forfeited its power to declare war and sits complicit while the president not only usurps its power but uses illegitimate power to commit war crimes by launching naked aggressions on the basis of lies and deception.

We have a Congress that turns a blind eye to criminal actions by the president, vice president, and executive branch, including violations of US statutory law against torture, violations of US statutory law against spying on Americans without warrants, and violations of every legal protection in the Bill of Rights, from the right of privacy to habeas corpus.

The hallmarks of the remade US legal system, thanks to the “war on terror,” are coerced self-incrimination and indefinite detention or murder without charges or evidence.

We should not be satisfied with reforming just airport security, we should seek the dismantling of the entire national security state and restoring the democratic rights that are being stolen from us.

Repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”

Yesterday Congress finally repealed the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in the military. This move has both small and big implications.

It is small in the sense that it affects a small segment of the population (gay people in the military) and eliminating this rule will not cost any money or changes in the way the military is run or affect the nation in any noticeable way. It will not be long before people wonder (if they remember it at all) what all the fuss was about, why we had such an absurd rule in the first place, and why it was so hard to eliminate it.

But this change is big in a symbolic sense, and should give a boost to efforts to obtain full equal rights for gays in all areas of society. When the government condones discrimination in one of its major institutions, it gives ammunition to all the homophobes who want to deny gays their rights in other areas. So the long-term significance of this repeal should not be underestimated. It may well symbolize the beginning of the end for anti-gay discrimination in the US.

But this high profile debate illustrates another feature. The one-party oligarchic state that we have in the US cannot be too obvious about its monolithic nature. It needs hot-button issues that the oligarchy does not care about (sexuality, abortion, guns, religion, etc.) that the two factions can strongly disagree on and fight over, and which serve to give us the illusion that we have two opposing parties instead of two factions of the same party. This allows for heated fights and gives each faction’s supporters the impression that they are winning some battles and losing others, when in reality, the oligarchy is winning on all the major issues. So repeal of DADT gives supporters of the Democratic faction something to feel good about and to rally around their leaders.

But even allowing for that, the repeal of DADT is to be welcomed and congratulations extended to all those who fought so hard for it.

David Stockman, budget director under Ronald Reagan and a consummate insider, slams the recent tax cut deal that was passed with such speed and bipartisanship:

What we’re doing is perpetuating the most colossal fiscal mistake in history. These tax cuts and the Bush tax cuts were originally put in in 2001, 2003. They were premised on the prospect of a five trillion budget surplus over the coming 10 years, and the idea was to give some money back to the taxpayer.

Well, here we are 10 years later, two unfinanced wars, housing boom and bust, and bailouts everywhere, the huge stimulus programs, massive deficits have broken out. And in that 10 years, we’ve actually had five trillion of deficits.

So, we have accomplished over the last decade a $10 trillion swing from an illusory surplus to a gigantic deficit. And therefore, it just underscores even more as unaffordable as they were a decade ago. It is utter folly in the face of this deficit to be extending them. (My italics)
…
The idea of this will stimulate domestic production and jobs as wrong. That’s an obsolete idea that may have been true 40 years ago. But today, given that we buy almost everything we consume from abroad, this tax cut-induced spending really is going to stimulate the Chinese economy, not ours, build up our debt further and require that we borrow from China so that we can increase the deficit here in the United States.

When one of the architects of Reagonomics (whose views haven’t changed much since those days) blasts away at the fiscal irresponsibility in government and comes off as a militant progressive, you know that the greed of the oligarchy is out of control.

Bank of America has said that it will no process any transactions for WikiLeaks.

It is interesting that this is the same bank that is rumored to be a target of a release in January 2011 by WikiLeaks of documents that will presumably expose its shady practices.

I wrote about this earlier where I said that the oligarchy (of which the big banks are a central part) will fight back with everything they’ve got to preserve their right to continue looting the system.

In this radio program, Glenn Greenwald discusses the WikiLeaks issue with Jamie Rubin, a former State Department spokesperson, and John Burns of the New York Times, whom Greenwald has criticized before for his hatchet job on Julian Assange.

The first 22 minutes consists of Burns talking about the Assange court hearing in London and the next 10 minutes has Rubin making the case why what WikiLeaks does is bad. Greenwald only enters the discussion around the 32-minute mark. If you don’t have time to listen to the whole thing, I would suggest that you start there because it then becomes very lively as Greenwald points out how people like Rubin simply make up stuff in their efforts to discredit Wikileaks.

It is interesting that when confronted with facts that go against their position (and Greenwald usually has the goods), both Rubin and Burns either make up stuff or say that they cannot be bothered to debate Greenwald. The common view of Burns and Rubin symbolizes perfectly the collusion between the mainstream media and the government when any challenge to the establishment comes up.

After the program, Greenwald put up a blog post documenting how Rubin was flat out wrong in his statements.