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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

National Security State « Previous | |Next »
September 27, 2009

In Entangled Giant in the New York Review of Books Garry Wills, in describing the emergence of the National Security State, says that:

the momentum of accumulating powers in the executive is not easily reversed, checked, or even slowed. It was not created by the Bush administration. The whole history of America since World War II caused an inertial transfer of power toward the executive branch. The monopoly on use of nuclear weaponry, the cult of the commander in chief, the worldwide network of military bases to maintain nuclear alert and supremacy, the secret intelligence agencies, the entire national security state, the classification and clearance systems, the expansion of state secrets, the withholding of evidence and information, the permanent emergency that has melded World War II with the cold war and the cold war with the "war on terror"—all these make a vast and intricate structure that may not yield to effort at dismantling it. Sixty-eight straight years of war emergency powers (1941–2009) have made the abnormal normal, and constitutional diminishment the settled order.

And so we have the shadowy, secret empire of the National Security State out of the American republic. This process has changed the fundamental nature of American government as it led to the national security state, the military-industrial complex, and the militarization of foreign policy. The “global war on terror” has been used as a front for a domestic war against democracy and personal liberty in the U.S. itself, with the main tools being legislative changes handing the president’s office greater power than ever before; spying on citizens’ emails, phone calls, and mail; and the overall training environment in which Americans are taught and conditioned to think in terms of fear, threats, plots, and conspiracies on a daily basis.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:20 PM | | Comments (1)
Comments

Comments

I would suggest that there is a mathematical formula describing this, if there isn't; one should be invented. in language it goes something like this -
the rich get richer etc.
As the level of complexity increases so does the level of concentration.
The increasing specialization of a society leads to its increasing bureaucratization. Its management, in a humanly perceived way, requires increasing centralization. Knowledge as secret, has been a human trait as long as there has been us. Thus, as it becomes more bureaucratized, the willing are less so. As is further evidenced in the privatization of knowledge itself. A thought as brand, is owned and therefore you have McDonalds. A variety of DNA is branded, therefore biology is privatized then owned then secreted , so to speak.
Who was the scientist who studied human behavior by studying ants?
Cheers Bob.