It is easy to identify the most evil and destructive people in society. All you need to do is look at who has immunity from prosecution and privilege of secrecy. Government tells us that they use secrecy for security. But they tell us if we want privacy we must be criminals who have something to hide. When government operates in secret, is it possible that they are doing that to cover their crimes?
Secrecy’s a neutral thing
It can be used to protect national security and it can be used to cover the crimes of government. There is plenty of evidence that government uses secrecy for both reasons. That’s because when government agencies can operate in secret, they can do anything they want – good or bad. Our security agencies, the agencies that enjoy the most secrecy, literally normalized torture – not just one incident – but ongoing programs of torture.
They normalized illegal mass surveillance
They normalized selling weapons to our enemies. They normalized human experimentation. They normalized the psy-op that system of making up something false and getting all the media to repeat it in order to get people to support something that the government wants to do, like invade Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Ukraine there are many more. How do these agencies get away with criminal wrongdoing on mass scales year after year? Secrecy! The worst things a society can do the secret agencies do first and do most and then the rest of government follows suit because government does whatever it wants and the media applauds whatever they do.
We now know about a lot of the unlawful things our secret agencies have done
Imagine what they’re doing that we haven’t found out about. But it’s not just security agencies, all of government is secret, isn’t it? What about our local bureaucracy your tax collector’s office Housing Development planning departments health services? They’re literally square miles of government office space where people are doing things and hundreds of billions of dollars passed through their hands. No one gets to visit those offices, no journalists, no tourists not even relatives of the employees. I worked for a city government years ago – city Recreation Department. They didn’t keep good inventory on the candy in the snack bar at the public pool. So employees stole candy. Otherwise good and responsible people stealing candy. One of my co-workers arranged with the department to put his personal car repair on an agency expense account. My department director told me this is a government agency. We have no requirement to provide any service. Nobody can do anything to us if we do not perform. The only thing we do have to do here, is make sure our budget gets spent, so that we can get more next year. My department director had another interesting expression. He used to say:
Any problem that is ignored long enough will go away
That is the way government supervisors think – our tax dollars at work. But my department directors own admission was that our agency was a non-performing money wasting exercise where obligation to the community was secondary to disposing of the budget. If that Recreation Department took their entire budget and burned it in a trashcan, they would in their eyes be doing their job. When you go to the voting booth and vote for some new tax or bond measure for more schools or police or fire prevention, have you ever seen any government official announce sometime later about how well spent that money was? Or how much we got for that money? Of course not because government is a place where money just disappears. They take it from us, they asked for it, we vote for some bond, and that is the last we hear about it.
The money disappears. Is that any way to run a system?
People say if there was that much corruption in way somebody would say something you think so every one of those people are collecting a paycheck. Every one of those people says something they not only lose their paycheck, they feel the hate and anger of everyone else who loses their paycheck and they can wind up in prison for being part of that corruption and waste. Trust me they say nothing but it gets worse. In the secret halls of government you are not only tempted to break the rules, you have a natural immunity from prosecution.
Have you ever noticed that the police hardly ever arrest anyone who works for government?
When a whistleblower comes forward they fabricate some way to prosecute the whistleblower, even though that is illegal. And they rarely prosecute the criminals in government who were reported by the whistleblower. They do this consistently, Edward Snowden, William Binney, Thomas Drake, Joe Banister, Cheri Peele Jackson. There are hundreds. Each of them prosecuted by government, while the actual crimes they reported are never investigated or prosecuted. This is evidence that integrity in government no longer exists. Not only is government swamped with corruption and waste, there is no longer any way to fix any of that. Whistleblowers can’t do it. Elected officials can’t do it the media can’t do it. Our system has failed.
We are in a state of irreversible decline
Government is a club and you’re not in it. Even your congressional representatives can’t find out what goes on in the bureaucracies behind those badge clearance stations and password-protected doors. These are offices you are paying for and if you walk in one of them you will be arrested. Have you noticed that government tracks you by your cell phone, your emails, your credit card activity. They even scan your license plate of the supermarket. That is how they treat your privacy and we are not able to find out the first thing about our public servants – their performance, their efficiency, their productivity, nothing.
Why is their privacy more important than ours?
So are we naive enough to think that millions of public employees can operate in secret have de facto immunity from prosecution, are handling billions of dollars and none of them are doing anything wrong? It’s ridiculous to believe that. I think most people have an instinct that secrecy in government is not good but the nature of government is makes us say ‘well, there’s nothing I can do about it’. There’s a lot we can do about it. We can have a transparent and accountable government, or a secret unaccountable government.
It’s just a matter of how many of us get together to demand access and accountability
But we have to do something. Government won’t do this for us unless we make some noise. The smallest gesture to demand transparency would be a tidal wave if everyone would take some small action like that. Government likes to make us feel like they are in charge. They work for us. We are in charge unless we go to sleep and most of us are asleep. when it comes to demanding transparency accountability and integrity from government. but they seem to have convinced most of us that there’s no need to tell us what they’re doing so they can just do anything they can do any crime any evil any destructive act that is what secrecy means.
Crime is very profitable
Drugs, murder, embezzlement, bribes, human trafficking, sexual exploitation of children, you name it. We tend to forget that any of these things can be done if any person or organization is allowed to operate in secret so if they can get away with crimes like that. is there any question that waste inefficiency petty theft and corruption would be commonplace? They work for us so we are ultimately responsible to commit oversight. But they love to characterize us as their lowly subjects as if we are all serving some king or dictator. We are told that because we vote we agree to support all those secret agencies. We are told that because we use credit cards and cellphones, we agree to be tracked and monitored by criminals committing mass surveillance. We are told that because we participate in commerce, we have agree to be taxed and exploited to the point where we have literally no hope of ever getting out of debt. The arrogance and stupidity but that is what we are told over and over. And so many of us now believe that. I guess it’s just it’s not hard to deceive people about what government is doing and what it’s for. Most people in Germany thought that what the Third Reich was terrific, while it was murdering millions of people. Many Russians thought Joseph Stalin was terrific while he was murdering 30 million innocent Russians. We can’t go by what they tell us we have to look for ourselves.
People who are evil want secrecy, and people who can operate in secrecy can commit evil
If you want to find and stop evil you start where there is secrecy and privilege. Imagine how little of us knows about what really goes on in Congress, the White House, the Pentagon, the county and city halls. What we know about the world that controls us, is a fly speck on a bus that is hurtling down a mountain road with no brakes. We are riders on a ship to disaster because we know nothing about who our captains are, where the compass is pointed, what poisons and crimes surround us, what storms are coming over the horizon. Our most powerful institution the one that affects us the most, our government, tells us that for their protection we may not know anything about what they’re doing. With so much secrecy we are made to be completely unprepared to command our lives in any meaningful way.
We are blind and we are told that is how we should be to be good citizens
But this is the perfect time for all of us to wake up. Our economy is in a state of collapse, our politics are hopelessly corrupt, our institutions are free-wheeling and rogue. We as citizens have absolutely no agency or power on the institutional scale because we let them divide, us intimidate us, keep us ignorant. Now is the time to find our way out, to reinvent ourselves, to question everything, to rebuild, rethink, and renew society, where we stop thinking about what we need to obey and start thinking about what we can build for ourselves, where we have some control over our lives, our property, our future. People like Bill Gates think they are entitled to control the world, while most of us don’t even think we’re entitled to control our own lives. As long as we think small we will be small. The flaw in the human creature is that he believes some other human creature should make decisions for his life. It makes no sense that we could create a government, hire the people to work in that government, and then let that government tell us what to do. It is our job to tell them what to do let’s start doing it.
