“Who run bartertown?” The conservative coalition run bartertown, Selfish, greedy, cowardly intellectuals on the top and their mental slaves, the ones with the brawn, on the bottom. The cops, the soldiers, even a goodly proportion of the construction workers. TSA thugs. FBI thugs. CIA thugs. Commanded by white haired whiteskinned grinning old men on yachts, citizens of all nations and taxpayers in none, running the world into the ground for their own ends, fearing no God nor man alive.
Their influence was everywhere.
The latest thing was this: some guy with a conscience ended up working for the NSA, otherwise known as “No Such Agency” otherwise known as the “National Security Agency”. This is some arm of the government that seems to believe that it can do whatever it wants, the United States Constitution be damned. Apparently government officials used to deny that the agency even existed, which means that its creation was probably unconstitutional and illegal. How a person with a conscience ends up working for the NSA in the first place is a question for another day, but somehow he got in there. And what he found was morally repugnant to him.
It seems that the NSA has been spying on random American citizens for years, analyzing “metadata” such as people’s phone calls, their internet searches, their facebook posts, what have you. The government has been spying on millions of citizens, supposedly to catch terrorists, who are the “communists” of the 21st century, that is, a bogeyman enemy whose primary existence is to excuse the extra-legal activities of the most powerful government in the world. Osama Bin Laden and his moron followers have allowed the United States to turn the future into one of those science-fiction movies, so-called “dystopias” where there’s all this awesome technology, robots running around and talking computers and all that, but also everything sucks because some combination of an evil government and evil corporations seem to run everything. Almost all science-fiction movies, at least all the good ones, are based on this scenario. For instance, Alien gave us “The Company”, a corporation that finances space expeditions and gladly sacrificed the lives of astronauts to preserve a monstrous space-creature that could be studied and perhaps sold to our evil government for biological warfare. Then there was the Tyrell corporation from Blade Runner, a company that invented human-like slaves implanted with actual human memories, who gradually became more and more human despite having been programmed to die at a predetermined “expiration date”. Naturally, the robot slaves eventually rebelled and sought to find a way to preserve their lives, which efforts were opposed by the corporation and its dutiful servants in government. Then there’s the situation in Robocop, where the government pretty much is a corporation, creating and dispatching monstrous robots to keep the populace down in the guise of draconian “law enforcement”, all in the pursuit of profits for an overclass of white guys in suits. There have been hundreds of science-fiction movies with similar premises, so nobody can argue that we haven’t been warned.
So here we have the “future” of 2013. All kinds of cool technology around. Robots! We’ve got ‘em, though for some reason we haven’t yet found any useful domestic applications for them, like the robot maid in the optimistic cartoon “The Jetsons”. The most interesting thing they seem to be able to do is to kill people. See, we’ve got these robots called drones, that fly around- they can go anywhere- and shoot missiles at houses and cars, burning people alive or blowing them to pieces, depending on how direct a hit they get. Some guy sitting behind a computer screen in a bunker, with a joystick in his left hand, and a beer or perhaps his other “joystick” in his right hand, can fly this thing around and kill anybody, anywhere, just by pressing a button. And if he kills a bunch of little kids by accident? Well, too bad, nobody ever finds out who the guy is, and nobody holds him accountable because hey, it was only an accident. Sucks to be a parent in some ill-favored third world country and find out your three-year-old daughter was burned to death by a robot plane from the U.S., but that’s life, right? This is what our futuristic dystopia looks like. But there’s more, actually. We’ve also reinterpreted the Constitution to allow torture and infinite detention without trial for people suspected of links to terrorism. We’ve got this eternal war going, just like in Orwell’s 1984, and this eternal war gives the government the ability to arrest people on mere suspicion of being connected to “the enemy”. If you’re lucky you get sent to an unconstitutional prison in this weird netherzone between the U.S. and Cuba, where they can torture you in certain legally specific ways and hold you forever without trial, even after you’ve been proven innocent of any wrongdoing or connection to terrorism. If you’re unlucky you get “rendered” to another country that will torture you until you tell them what they want to hear, just like in the Spanish Inquisition. Or you get sent to a CIA “black site”- which is actually a euphemism for these completely unconstitutional, illegal, and immoral dungeons- where people from our own U.S. government get the privilege of torturing you to death in whatever manner they see fit, and your body is never found. You’re just disappeared. Hopefully you were guilty of something, but if you were completely innocent, oh well, because, you know, terrorism!
So back to this guy with a conscience working for the NSA. He finds out what the U.S. is up to, and he decides to fight back in a small way, to serve the common people of the U.S., to stand up against the dystopian government. So he compiles some documents that prove the existence of the government’s illegal spying program and gives them to a reporter. The reporter then tells the world about what the U.S. government has been doing, and of course the government flips out because somebody had the nerve to stand up to it. You get corrupt congressmen like Peter King calling for prosecution, even so-called “Democrats” like Senator Diane Feinstein labeling the guy a traitor for his attempt to serve the American people in our ever-corroding democracy. You see, these fat-cat Congresspeople, who have been feasting at the trough of the corporato-governmental security-industrial-complex for years now, were actually in on the surveillance, and they never saw fit to inform their constituents that the government was spying on them. So the government is going to go after this poor devil like he’s a murderer or something, dedicating all their resources to hunt down a good guy who called them out on their illegal activities. It took them ten years to hunt down an actual terrorist, former U.S. ally Osama Bin Laden. It took them fifteen years to hunt down another former friend, mass murderer Whitey Bulger. I bet they catch this poor devil Snowden in two weeks, because what he did was far worse than murder, far worse than terrorism. He had the gall to tell people the truth.
