The Real U.S. Government
By Glenn Greenwald
July 19, 2010
Most of what the U.S. Government does of any significance -- literally -- occurs behind a vast wall of secrecy, completely unknown to the citizenry. . . . Secrecy is the religion of the political class, and the prime enabler of its corruption. That's why whistle blowers are among the most hated heretics. They're one of the very few classes of people able to shed a small amount of light on what actually takes place.
That's why it is difficult to imagine -- short of some severe citizen unrest -- how any of this will be brought under control. One of the few scenarios one can envision for such unrest involves growing wealth disparities and increasingly conspicuous elite corruption. In The New York Times today, investment banker and former Clinton Treasury official Roger Altman announced that the alleged "tension between President Obama and the business community" can be solved only if the political class is willing to "fix Social Security" -- i.e., to slash Americans' retirement security. Sooner or later (probably sooner), one way or another (probably this way), that's going to happen. It's inevitable.
That's really the only relevant question: how much longer will Americans sit by passively and watch as a tiny elite become more bloated, more powerful, greedier, more corrupt and more unaccountable -- as the little economic security, privacy and freedom most citizens possess vanish further still? How long can this be sustained, where more and more money is poured into Endless War, a military that almost spends more than the rest of the world combined, where close to 50% of all U.S. tax revenue goes to military and intelligence spending, where the rich-poor gap grows seemingly without end, and the very people who virtually destroyed the world economy wallow in greater rewards than ever, all while the public infrastructure (both figuratively and literally) crumbles and the ruling class is openly collaborating on a bipartisan, public-private basis even to cut Social Security benefits?
The answer, unfortunately, is probably this: a lot longer. And one primary reason is that our media-shaped political discourse is so alternatively distracted and distorted that even shining light on all of this matters little. The New York Times' Peter Baker had a good article this weekend on how totally inconsequential squabbles dominate the news more or less continuously: last week's riveting drama was the bickering between the White House and Nancy Pelosi over Robert Gibbs' warning that Democratic control of the House was endangered. Baker quotes Democratic strategist Chris Lehane as follows: "Politics in D.C. have become Seinfeldesque. Fights about nothing."
If you read and write about politics full-time and are thus forced to subject yourself to the political media -- as I am -- what's most striking aren't the outrages and corruptions, but the overwhelming, suffocating, numbing stream of stupidity and triviality that floods the brain. One has to battle the temptation to just turn away and ignore it all. Every day, day after day, is consumed by some totally irrelevant though distracting melodrama: what Sarah Palin wrote on her Facebook page, some "outrageous" snippet of a comment made by John Boehner or Harry Reid, some "crazy," attention-attracting statement from some fringe idiot-figure or TV blowhard that is exploited for superficial partisan gain or distraction value (hey, look over there: I think Michelle Bachmann just said something outrageous!!!!).
Meanwhile, the Real U.S. Government -- the network of secret public and private organizations which comprise the National Security and Surveillance State -- expands and surveills and pilfers and destroys without much attention and with virtually no real oversight or accountability. It sucks up the vast bulk of national resources and re-directs the rest to those who own and control it. To their immense credit, Dana Priest and William Arkin will spend the week disclosing the details of what they learned over the past two years investigating all of this, but the core concepts have long been glaringly evident. But Sarah Palin's Twitter malapropism from yesterday will almost certainly receive far more attention than anything exposed by the Priest/Arkin investigation. So we'll continue to fixate on the trappings and theater of government while The Real Government churns blissfully in the dark -- bombing and detaining and abducting and spying and even assassinating -- without much bother from anyone.
Read the full article at:
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/07/19/secrecy/index.html
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