by Patrick Devlin

Mirroring, or perhaps parroting, the neo-fascistic theories underpinning the televised comments of President Barack Obama this past summer where he acknowledged that his government, with the full cooperation and unflinching assistance of the world’s largest data service and communications businesses, has continued with and expanded upon the warrantless spying on innocent Americans and citizens from every country on earth that had begun under his predecessors George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, a federal judge (appointed by Democratic president Bill Clinton), has established as federal case law that citizens cannot have privacy in their associations and communications under American law and have no right to challenge what the US government has acknowledged is complete and continuous spying within the US court system.

Furthermore, the judge declared that the personal communications of Americans and the citizens of other countries, even as these communications are the physical expressions that reveal the personal cogitative energies carried out by individual humans – the thoughts that are our own and that we understand to be ‘self-expressions’, are in fact not “owned” by us (the expressing individuals) but, are rather the personal possessions of the data service and communications businesses upon whose equipment we hire to deliver our personal ideas and expressions through. As in: the above 2 sentences are the personal possessions of the dizzying array of owners, renters, users, firewall builders, server operators and data transmitting and information storing entities who may desire to lay claim to the above two comma laden attempts at cogitation&communication (& this one, too).

While America has, in its illustrious past, condemned and threatened the abusers, quashers and subverters of individual expression, even sending soldiers to uphold its putative support for the concepts of free expression and free thought and how these freedoms underpin the very essence of constitutional democracy in a free society, we now as a people can be known as the promoters and supporters of the notion that our safety from terrorism requires us each to understand, with “no doubt”, that our military’s; “bulk telephony metadata collection program vacuums up information about virtually every telephone call to, from, or within the United States…by design.”

As inheritors of the Bill of Rights and the US Constitution, we can rest easy because all of this personal rights subversion and annihilation is being carried out as a “counter punch” by our protecting homeland security operatives against the “al-Qaeda’s terror network,” and (as President Obama noted in June 2013, when he conjectured, “I think the American people understand that there are some trade-offs involved” with respect to our constitutional freedoms when it comes to protecting the homeland from the terror of terrorism), we should express no fear that our personal information and our expressed ideas are being collected because, the “bulk telephony metadata collection program is subject to executive and congressional oversight, as well as continual monitoring by a dedicated group of judges who serve on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.”

Further, and most importantly as it coagulates our proctors’ in big business, our elected leaders’ and now the court system’s, vision of a new American philosophy of freedom, we must understand and accept the notion that;

“Liberty and security can be reconciled; and in our system they are reconciled within the framework of the law…the success of one helps protect the other. Like the 9/11 Commission observed: The choice between liberty and security is a false one, as nothing is more apt to imperil civil liberties than the success of a terrorist attack on American soil.“

One may ask if Pauley’s ruling is not itself the creation of case law that pours poison on the soil of American democracy and its citizens’ rights in an effort to render that fertile ground permanently barren; after all, it was the proto-fascist leader Benito Mussollini who is said to have quipped: “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power”, but, no need to worry, Judge Pauley and the Obama Justice Department have our collective backs.

We must as a free people struggling to create a society, a politics and a system of judicial protection that can preserve the beautiful and inspiring ideals captured by our founders in documents such as the Declaration of Independence, congratulate U.S. District Judge William Pauley and the Obama Justice Department lawyers who recognized for all of us that it is the sacred and solemn duty of these protectors of the homeland, “to reject as false, claims in the name of civil liberty which, if granted, would paralyze or impair authority to defend [the], existence of our society.”

And we are obliged to thank our elected officials, our geo-political strategizing think tankers, our masters of commerce, our brave drone pilots, our ‘friends’ in the Middle East, our mass-media-message-massagers, and also, our independent judiciary for making us all so much safer that we have the personal comfort zone required to be able to appreciate that we have to curtail freedom in democracy to protect it.

This is true even though our experience has shown that humans are more inclined to suffer evils of all kinds before they will take a stand, stand together, and stand against petite totalitarians who wrap themselves in American flag bunting and hyperventilate scare-stories about the various boogey-men that we are often warned are “threatening” democracy (or, as the case often is, threatening the ability of a small group of self-interested rich boys to make boatloads of money).

This is true even though we should honestly concede that our leaders have refused to grant us the rights that we have and that are enshrined in our constitution. And true even though we should acknowledge that the pay-to-play system by which our country’s laws are now created damages, threatens and curtails our rights and serves only to protect the rights of a small group of oligarchic owners in our land, serving to functionally abolish our country’s most valuable laws and fundamentally alter the traditional form of popular democracy in America.

This is true even though we should understand that agencies such as the National Security Administration and the Office of Homeland Security are not structured to protect Americans or America but are self-justifying systems that serve to both harass innocent Americans and denude the substance of American democracy and the civil rights that have been engendered over the course of 250 years, even depriving Americans of the benefits of basic due process and a trial by jury.

This is true even though we should note that mass surveillance conducted by the government and private businesses and carried out under the auspices of military functionally removes the US military from under civilian control.

This is true even though we have to be clear that international treaties and federal laws written by privately owned and run transnational corporations such as the Trans Pacific Partnership and The Affordable Care Act place us under the jurisdictions of private foreign businesses eviscerating both our country’s laws and our constitution’s protections.

And, this is true even though we know that we must rip our country’s future from the vicious talons of the despotic rich who run the world and our country to protect the fragile and beautiful small d-democracy that exists here in America.

From the Obama Justice Department’s legal theory spinning and Judge Pauley’s ruling, we can be sure that our protectors do in fact agree with Mussolini in a prediction that he offered way back in 1928, “Democracy is beautiful in theory; in practice it is a fallacy. You in America will see that someday.”

“We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards…My orientation is going to be moving foward.”

Barack Obama, January 11, 2009

Here are excerpts of the June 08, 2013 defense of the NSA’s broad and warrantless spying tactics by President Barack Obama fashioned into a sonic art piece by members of the acme arts collective on July 04, 2013 : “somehow suspicious”