KOCH BROTHERS VIEW OF PERSONAL FREEDOM

The media has distorted the debate on government spying on citizens on so many different levels it no longer makes sense. It is as it everyone blames everyone else. The radical right points the fickle finger of Fox News accusation first at Obama and then the government. The far left, led by such notables as Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow, MSNBC talking heads, blames the government for everything. What is most obvious is that, if terrorist attack us both groups would be the first in line to blame the government for spying on them. Thus, radicals complete the political circle making it a full cycle to the point that one cannot tell the radical right from the radical left.

I posted a blog a while back in which I argued that credit card companies could warn you that your spending pattern has changed perhaps suggesting that someone stole your credit card and is using it. We welcome such service but do not stop to think how much that company has to know about your private business to do that. Amazon announced the other day that they are shipping things that you will order to the area you live so they can deliver them more quickly; they are looking for accolades from you for knowing enough about you to know what “you will buy”. Write in an e-mail that you are thinking of going on a vacation and ads for vacation sites start to show up on your e-mail address. Post a blog about how you support gun control and instantly ads show up saying “NRA will send you a free knife” or how you can buy a look on how to obtain a concealed carry permit.

Did you not realize that in order for the government to obtain private phone records from phone companies, the company has to hold those records? This is no secret; look at your phone bill, the phone companies records every call, how long it lasts and to whom you made the call. Example after example exists of companies doing these things. Try to murder someone or go over the speed limit! Once in the court, a judge has access to your bank accounts, your phone records, and your arrest record; an attorney can ask that all sources of “private” information revealing your daily activity be given to the courts whether you like it or not; you have to know that the “e” in e-mail stands for evidence.

There seems to be magic formulas in the minds of the media that naively say terrorist plots cannot somehow hatch using domestic calls or that “all” United States citizens can be trusted. What is at the bottom of all of this seems to be a profound distrust in government. This distrust is so persistent, pervasive, and nurtured that it seems only explainable as human nature. Certainly, as evolutionary psychology suggests, hierarchy dominance is embedded in our genomes but also embedded with it is distrust in leadership; I will follow the leader but only until it starts to jeopardize my own survival.

It is my contention that an element in our society is nurturing this distrust in government, and doing so for a reason. As in any system of hierarchy dominance, we should look to see who would benefit most from having distrust in government. Start with the idea of democracy, the constitution says the power to govern is in the hands of the people. What made America so great was that the power switched from nobility with all its fallacies to the people with a different set of fallacies. A major benefit of democracy, like evolution with the trial and error of natural selection, is that we pick and chose laws and rules, and try them. If they are not good for the majority of the people, we discard them. If they are good, we can keep them; survival of the fittest applied to ideas in government. In fact, in America, but also a large part of the world, our current social structure, both government and legal, is a manifestation of this evolution or refinement of hierarchy dominance; our culture is the thing we see as our humanization; we are moving us away from our bestial beginning.

The one element in our society that would benefit by switching sovereignty from the people to them is the economic elite, an evolved form of economic royalty. This represents a shift from bestial strength and all intervening steps from the bestial strength of a primitive family to strength and cooperation for leadership among bands and tribes, finely to the economic strength of multinational corporations where we are now. The shift of strength to the economic elite from the people to corporations implies the power to retain leadership rests in boardrooms and not the ballot box. We can knot vote them out of office. The corruption of political purpose is complex. The massive drive supported by Koch brothers, Walton Family, Sheldon Adelson, etc to emphasize personal freedom has a nefarious purpose—a dark side.

To explain, the right to own a firearm, the right to life, the right to not wear a helmet when riding a motor cycle, the right to teach creationism, the right to deny climate change, the right to prevent black people from eating at a lunch counter you own are all put under the banner of personal freedoms. These are all thing the majority of the people do not want, therefore the government regulates them, which makes the government evil in the eyes of the members of each of these small or minority groups. When you add up all the things that “ring a bell” for small groups of “common everyday people”, you have many people, enough to swing an election—especially when you have Koch brother’s money constantly working the bell clapper. Americans for prosperity ads fill your living rooms and say you  “have the right” to vote for people who will fight for their personal freedom and against the government who is trying take away those freedoms; that is the way our country was formed and maintained. It is true that people buy this; but what are they really buying.

The Koch brother, Walton family, Sheldon Adelson, and many other economic elite have you egger to vote for their personal freedom as well. The corrupt Robert’s Supreme Court Citizens United decision should make it clear, corporations are people that have personal freedom; no one, especially the government, should be able to tell them what to do any more that they should be able to tell you that you have to wear a helmet while riding a motor cycle. However, just what do these people see as their personal freedom?

They see many things as “their” personal freedoms. The right to pay workers the least amount possible for their labor, child labor, the right to dump coal ash waste in rivers, the right to drill for oil in national parks, the right to build hazardous oil pipelines all over the country. They have the personal right to build schools for their own children and exclude poor kids. The owners of bank and loan companies have the right the right to write bad mortgages. State governments have the right to cut corporate taxes and increase taxes on the people. They have the personal “right” to raise utility rates by double digits without state supervisory control.

The list is long but when all of “their personal freedoms” are added together under the “hate the government” banner it smack of a shift of sovereignty from the people, from the Constitution to the economic elite. Did you notice that there is a huge Republican—the party of the rich—movement to prevent common people from voting? Did you notice that Congress does not vote the way the people want?  Did you notice that corporations know every private thing you do and say but that it would be immoral for the government to know anything even the slightest personal thing about you? The reason of course, is that knowledge is power, “What was it I just write about who knows what?”

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