{"id":49176,"date":"2013-07-10T11:59:40","date_gmt":"2013-07-10T10:59:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/denouncing-nsa-surveillance-isnt-enough-we-need-the-power-to-stop-it\/49176\/"},"modified":"2013-07-10T11:59:40","modified_gmt":"2013-07-10T10:59:40","slug":"denouncing-nsa-surveillance-isnt-enough-we-need-the-power-to-stop-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/denouncing-nsa-surveillance-isnt-enough-we-need-the-power-to-stop-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Denouncing NSA Surveillance Isn\u2019t Enough \u2013 We Need the Power to Stop It"},"content":{"rendered":"

For more than a month, outrage has been profuse in response to news about NSA surveillance and other evidence that all three branches of the U.S. government are turning Uncle Sam into Big Brother.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now what?Continuing to expose and denounce the assaults on civil liberties is essential. So is supporting Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and other whistleblowers \u2013 past, present and future. But those vital efforts are far from sufficient.<\/span><\/p>\n

For a moment, walk a mile in the iron-heeled shoes of the military-industrial-digital complex. Its leaders don\u2019t like clarity about what they\u2019re doing, and they certainly don\u2019t like being exposed or denounced \u2013 but right now the surveillance state is in no danger of losing what it needs to keep going:\u00a0power.<\/span><\/p>\n

The huge digi-tech firms and the government have become mutual tools for gaining humungous profits and tightening political control. The partnerships are deeply enmeshed in military and surveillance realms, whether cruise missiles and drones or vast metadata records and capacities to squirrel away trillions of emails.<\/span><\/p>\n

At the core of the surveillance state is the hollowness of its democratic pretenses. Only with authentic democracy can we save ourselves from devastating evisceration of the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments.<\/span><\/p>\n

The enormous corporate leverage over government policies doesn\u2019t change the fact that the nexus of the surveillance state \u2013 and the only organization with enough potential torque to reverse its anti-democratic trajectory \u2013 is\u00a0government\u00a0itself.<\/span><\/p>\n

The necessity is to subdue the corporate-military forces that have so extensively hijacked the government. To do that, we\u2019ll need to accomplish what progressives are currently ill-positioned for:\u00a0democratic mobilization to challenge the surveillance state\u2019s hold on power.<\/p>\n

These days, progressives are way too deferential and nice to elected Democrats who should be confronted for their active or passive complicity with abysmal policies of the Obama White House. An example is Al Franken, senator from Minnesota, who\u00a0declared<\/a>\u00a0his support for the NSA surveillance program last month: \u201cI can assure you, this is not about spying on the American people.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0The right-wing Tea Party types realized years ago what progressive activists and groups are much less likely to face \u2013 that namby-pamby \u201clobbying\u201d gets much weaker results than identifying crucial issues and making clear a willingness to mount primary challenges.<\/span><\/p>\n

Progressives should be turning up the heat and building electoral capacities. But right now, many Democrats in Congress are cakewalking toward re-election in progressive districts where they should be on the defensive for their anemic \u201copposition\u201d to \u2013 or outright support for \u2013 NSA surveillance.<\/span><\/p>\n

Meanwhile, such officials with national profiles should encounter progressive pushback wherever they go. A step in that direction will happen just north of the Golden Gate Bridge this weekend, when House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi appears as guest of honor to raise money for the party (up to $32,400 per couple) at a Marin County reception. There will also be\u00a0a different kind of reception that Pelosi hadn\u2019t been counting on<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 a picket line challenging her steadfast support for NSA surveillance.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the first days of this week, upwards of 20,000 people responded to a RootsAction.org\u00a0action alert<\/a>\u00a0by sending their senators and representative an email urging an end to the Insider Threat Program \u2013 the creepily Orwellian concoction that, as McClatchy news service revealed last month, \u201crequires federal employees to keep closer tabs on their co-workers and exhorts managers to punish those who fail to report their suspicions.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Messages to Congress members, vocal protests and many other forms of public outcry are important \u2013 but they should lay the groundwork for much stronger actions to wrest control of the government away from the military-industrial-digital complex. That may seem impossible, but it\u2019s certainly imperative: if we\u2019re going to prevent the destruction of civil liberties. In the long run, denunciations of the surveillance state will mean little unless we can build the political capacity to end it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Norman Solomon<\/strong> is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include \u201cWar Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death<\/span>.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Republished with permission from: Global Research<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For more than a month, outrage has been profuse in response to news about NSA surveillance and other evidence that all three branches of the U.S. government are turning Uncle Sam into Big Brother. Now what?Continuing to expose and denounce the assaults on civil liberties is essential. So is supporting Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-49176","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49176\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}