— by Polydamas
In the 19th century, British philosopher Jeremy Bentham pioneered the philosophical theory of utilitarianism. Boiled down to its bare essentials, utilitarianism holds that human societies should operate on the hedonistic principle of the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.
Although the principle of majority rule animates democracies, many philosophers and scholars — including America’s Founding Fathers — rejected utilitarianism as inimical to individual liberty. The lives and liberties of any individual man or woman can never be safe if three of their neighbors can gang up and vote to take them away, arguing that the happiness of the three outweighs the rights of the one. It is no wonder that the world’s most bloodthirsty dictators, the National Socialists of Adolf Hitler’s Germany, and the Communists of Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao Tse Tung’s China, were enthusiastic adherents of this disastrous philosophy and purported to act in pursuit of the greatest happiness for the greatest number of their people.
Jeremy Bentham made yet another deleterious contribution to humanity’s lot, his vision of the perfect prison, the Panopticon. The Panopticon, taken from the Greek for an all-seeing eye, was designed as a circular prison whose enlightened wardens at the structure’s center could peer at will into every cell and keep every inmate under surveillance. Since no inmate could know when his cell and activities were observed, he was incentivized to conform his conduct at all times to the required norms.
George Orwell’s classic novel “1984” concerns a Panopticon society in which Big Brother and his minions control the populace by means of constant surveillance. Advanced technology did not merely permit the overseers to randomly spy on a representative sample of society at any one time. Technology allowed the overseers to spy on every member of society all of the time.
America started down the road of the Panopticon surveillance prison on September 11, 2001. A fearful American populace gave its overreaching, power hungry politicians and government bureaucrats an unlimited mandate to do whatever it took to keep Americans safe. Unbeknownst to the citizenry, the Deep State bureaucracy seized upon this golden opportunity to vastly increase its powers and budgets in a mission to spy on every man, woman, and child in America ostensibly for the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.
The truth is that, since 2001, every telephone conversation in America has been recorded by the National Security Agency, “just in case” there was any smidgen of catastrophic terror, and later for any crime or any misdemeanor that could be prosecuted in the future. Every cellular telephone has tracked its owner and transmitted to the government every location its owner has been. Every bit and byte on the internet is now vacuumed into the National Security Agency’s supercomputers and sifted through for any nugget or pebble of useful information. Government apparatchiks now know exactly what sites you visit on the internet, what news you consume, what products you buy, what material you read on your tablet computer or laptop, the contents of your computer’s hard drive, and every entry in your computerized diary as soon as you type it.
America’s overseers blithely listen in on telephone conversations between people and their attorneys. The confidentiality of communications with legal counsel used to be considered sacrosanct in the America of yesteryear. The Fifth and Sixth Amendments to the Constitution used to mean something. Not anymore.
The First Amendment and freedom of the press also used to mean something. Not too long ago, intrepid reporters and respected journalists used to follow their stories wherever they led. Now, America’s overseers already know every anonymous source, informant, and whistle blower. In turn, these would-be sources and informants know well that, if they provided information, they will be caught and prosecuted to the hilt so it is better and safer to just mind your own business. The death of independent, investigative journalism resulted in guileless millennial reporters regurgitating as “breaking news” the information handed to them in official press releases.
Jeremy Bentham, that demented court philosopher to tyrants, would be immensely proud of America. America’s Deep State took his relatively modest vision of a Panopticon prison for housing a few hundreds of inmates and transformed it into a bigger and better prison for three hundred million Americans.
Save for a few handfuls of libertarian-leaning Senators, Congress Representatives, and deeply-closeted members of executive agencies, whose true number cannot be estimated, America’s career politicians and the mandarins of the civil service are united in complete agreement. They believe that the entirety of the American people, the undocumented illegals in their midst, and the tourists who visit our country should all be spied upon, their every telephone call should be recorded, and their every movement online and in the real world should be monitored. After all, both Republicans and Democrats firmly believe that they represent the ruling class of this country, and that the American people need to be guided by their shepherds in accordance with Jeremy Bentham’s principle of the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.
The biggest scandal in the history of Washington politics is not that America’s law enforcement agencies spy on lowly Americans and foreigners. That, unbeknownst to them, lowly Americans have been under constant electronic surveillance since even before 2001 was a well-known secret, even before former NSA contractor Edward Snowden spilled the beans to the sheeple with his 2013 revelations of America’s mass surveillance programs.
Rather, the biggest scandal in American political history is that the usually supine and pusillanimous Elmer Fudd Republicans, who are wholly owned and operated by the Chamber of Commerce, have awoken from their slumber because Barrack Hussein Obama’s most ethical and transparent administration ever was caught red handed in its own Watergate caper. Back in 1972, Republican President Richard Milhous Nixon’s underlings were caught in their third-rate burglary to install listening devices in the Democratic Party’s headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. Nixon’s bungling plumbers were unsuccessful. This made no difference to the American people, who were dismayed by the fundamental deceit of one team snooping in another team’s huddle.
President Obama’s most ethical and transparent administration ever was guiltier than the East German own secret police Stasi and the Soviet Union’s KGB at spying on its political opponents. It is a little known and talked about secret that Barrack Obama and his leadership team had the NSA and the Department of Homeland Security spy on the Senate and Congress. During the Obama administration’s secret nuclear negotiations with Iran in 2014 and 2015, Obama and his people were concerned that Israel would derail the accord that he was determined to sign with Iran at all costs.
Obama ordered the NSA and the Department of Homeland Security to electronically surveil the mostly Republican but also some Democrat Senators and Congress Representatives who met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli diplomats. Obama wanted to know the Republicans’ game plan in order to defeat it and to create the favorable media “echo chamber” that his national security adviser Ben Rhodes had boasted about. However, Obama was concerned that directly spying on members of a co-equal branch of the government would not go over well. Their solution to the problem was clever and sneaky.
Diplomats and operatives of foreign countries are routinely spied on. Instead of spying on congressional Republicans directly, the Obama administration’s NSA and Homeland Security spied on them indirectly. The NSA and FBI then listened in on the mobile phones of the dastardly diplomats and operatives of that evil foreign government, Israel, which has been a staunch American ally for more than half a century, and vacuumed up the game plan and play calls from the Republican huddle. The rubric was, in other words, the apparent Republican “collusion” with Israel and the Jewish lobby.
The Obama administration was elated by its success at defeating Republican and Israeli opposition to the disastrous nuclear accord with Iran. Obama and his people were further emboldened by the servile Republicans’ muted, halfhearted, and mild objections to being spied on. During Obama’s eight years in office, Republicans were cowed into meek silence by a state-run media that ingrained in them the fear that any criticism of the Obama administration’s policies was tantamount to the unforgivable sin of racism against the President.
During the 2016 presidential campaign season, members of the Obama administration decided to spy on all of the Republican presidential candidates using the same stealthy ruse and to steal their playbooks to help Obama’s eventual Democrat successor. Republican presidential candidates Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio have Cuban parents. Thus, they could be spied on based on any tangential connection to Cuba. The NSA and FBI followed the family trees of people in Cuba to their relatives in Florida to listen in on Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio for “collusion” with Cuba. The same is true of Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush and his connection to Mexico through his Mexican-born and raised wife Columba for his “collusion” with Mexico.
The Obama administration’s spycraft on Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was predicated upon tangential connections to Eastern Europe. Trump’s wife Melanija Knavs is from Slovenia, Yugoslavia, but this angle for spying on him was quite weak. Selling to FISA judges Trump’s “collusion” with Yugoslavia would be laughable so the Obama administration decided to spy on Trump through his associates who had some business dealings with Russia and other former republics of the Soviet Union. Had Trump enjoyed stronger connections to Japan or China, the “collusion” narrative would have substituted those countries for the “collusion with Vladimir Putin and Russia” narrative.
It is very likely that, despite the best efforts of Obama and Hillary Clinton partisans at the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the NSA to destroy evidence, the truth will come out anyway. We at The Cassandra Times have a very educated theory that these agencies spied on Donald Trump well before Fusion GPS and British MI-6 spy Christopher Steele concocted the fictional and salacious report that those dastardly Russians had kompromat, compromising blackmail material, on Trump. In fact, the Steele Report was both a political smear job to depress Trump’s political stock to elevate Hillary Clinton to the presidency, and, at the same time, a clever ruse to distract from the Obama administration’s stealthy preexisting surveillance of its political enemies.
The most ethical and transparent administration ever of Barack Hussein Obama was unmistakably guilty of spying on its political enemies and opponents (and maybe even allies) to an extent undreamed of by Richard Nixon and even by the first FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. It is not hyperbole that its spying on political opponents, more extensive than Stasi and KGB, was a million times worse than Watergate because Watergate was bungled, unsuccessful, unprofessional failure.
Republicans in the Senate and Congress now realize that, but for Donald Trump’s victory, they tottered on the brink and would have fallen into the third-world abyss of forever becoming America’s minority party. Had Donald Trump not won the presidency, President Hillary Clinton’s underlings would have vacuumed up every secret and lie in Washington as political blackmail material on her political opponents in the same way that she amassed in 1993 some 800 FBI files. They knew that their mobile phones and computers would be secretly examined in the same way that the NSA and Department of Homeland Security already do to us lowly and deplorable Americans.
Republicans understood that, after eight years at the helm and armed with blackmail, Hillary Clinton would have handpicked her inevitable successor. Any congressional oversight of the imperial American president would be doomed to failure. This would be because Lois Lerner of Internal Revenue Service fame and her fellow travelers would have made sure that any evidence of presidential wrongdoing and overreaching would be swept under a thousand carpets. All mobile phones and hard drives would be melted to slag with acetylene torches, documents would be burned and their ash buried in a top secret landfill in the corner of Area 51 in Nevada.
America’s saving grace is that normally sleepy and tractable Republicans are now finally unwilling to condemn themselves to live in the same Panopticon America that they condemned us lowly citizens for the past two decades, with Hillary Clinton and her Saul Alinsky-inspired leftist cohorts as the all-seeing jailers.