The NSA wanting 24/7 surveillance on citizens is little different from Wall Street financiers in the 1930’s who financed the Nazi Party. The goals are the same; the fusion of business and government for control and profit. A few on the top benefit mightily. Everyone else is a serf. Control needs to be absolute. Outside threats are used as the pretext for the control.
Instituting that control is hugely profitable to firms like Booz Allen, who had $3.85 billion in federal contracts in 2011, virtually all their income. The copyright industry pushes hard for Internet surveillance (as do other industries.) US national security agencies routinely swap confidential data with thousands of US companies. I would assume that means credit card and medical records as well as Internet communications. All this data can and of course will be used against political and business opponents and has little to do with stopping terrorism.
Protecting us from terrorists isn’t the goal of the national security state. Hitler’s real goal was establishing rigid control. He used persecution of Jews as the vehicle to achieve that end, which was a merging of business with the government allied against the public. Our national security state uses the fear of terrorism as the pretext.
This virulent strain of totalitarianism recurs every few decades in the US. The NSA is just the latest manifestation of it.
The Union Banking Corporation, formed by financiers including Prescott Bush, helped finance the rise of the Nazi Party in the 1930’s. It was shut down by the US government when the US entered WWII. In my opinion, everyone involved in UBC should have been arrested, especially since they were clearly pro-fascist and wanted fascism here too. That’s not just my opinion.
[In 1933] U.S. Ambassador to Germany, William Dodd, wrote a chilling letter to President Roosevelt:
“A clique of U.S. industrialists is hell-bent [on bringing] a fascist state to supplant our democratic government and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy. I have had plenty of opportunity in my post in Berlin to witness how close some of our American ruling families are to the Nazi regime”¦. A prominent executive of one of the largest corporations told me point blank that he would be ready to take definite action to bring fascism into America if President Roosevelt continued his progressive policies. Certain American industrialists had a great deal to do with bringing fascist regimes into being in both Germany and Italy. They extended aid to help Fascism occupy the seat of power, and they are helping to keep it there. Propagandists for fascist groups try to dismiss the fascist scare. We should be aware of the symptoms. When industrialists ignore laws designed for social and economic progress they will seek recourse to a fascist state when the institutions of our government compel them to comply with the provisions.”
All of this was fueled by the viciously anti-Semitic attitudes of Wall Street WASPS during that era. If a certain class of people are subhumans, then it doesn’t matter much what you do to them. Also, these financier WASPS loathed and detested FDR and his policies, especially since FDR was one of them. He was as blue-blood and WASP as it gets. Of them he famously said “They are unanimous in their hate for me–and IÂ welcome their hatred.” (He also probably saved them by staving off serious social unrest by creating safety nets and jobs during the Depression.)
In case you have any illusions about UBC.
“The Union Banking Corporation was a holding company for the Nazis, for Fritz Thyssen. At various times, the Bush family has tried to spin it, saying they were owned by a Dutch bank and it wasn’t until the Nazis took over Holland that they realised that now the Nazis controlled the apparent company and that is why the Bush supporters claim when the war was over they got their money back. Both the American treasury investigations and the intelligence investigations in Europe completely bely that, it’s absolute horseshit. They always knew who the ultimate beneficiaries were.” – John Loftus, vice-chairman of the Holocaust Museum in St Petersburg FL.
