NSA SURVEILLANCE VS CORPORATE SURVEILLANCE AND SNOWDEN

Some people were terribly upset; Snowden revealed that National Security Administration (NSA) has been snooping into our phone calls and messaging. I think there is something sinister about all of this; not that NSA was snooping into you private lives but that people were upset about it.

Even though biologically fundamental, self-preservation may be a difficult concept to get your head around because of myriad cultural complexities involved. We want to protect ourselves from insult and damage of all kinds ranging from insult to death threatening injury, and at all levels, from all sources ranging from the natural environment to our fellow man, and in society especially their fellow man; it is part of whom we are. We have an innate (bestial) tendency to associate with others called gregariousness and another innate drive to order or govern that association with hierarchy dominance, equally indelible. Thus, we have woven all of that into society and government and into our normal every day business. Sometimes even the most gregarious lose track of the big picture and focus on them selves; it is selfishness. This is the so-called libertarian, like Rand Paul, who thinks he can live like a hermit in New York City. However, most rational people realize self-preservation is the purpose of it all. It is why we do what we do.

With this in mind, we hardily have to ask what the purpose of surveillance is. In addition, everyone understands that we organized our government to protect us from “everything”. We have organized government to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves; we do not even have to think about that—we understand it. The question in modern society is what do we mean by the phrase protect us from “ourselves”? What do we mean when we use the word sovereign: independent, autonomous, self-governing. How can it be that we have to protect ourselves from the government when we are self-governing? It makes no sense until we understand that we as the “body politic” want to consider ourselves sovereign but do not have a nice neat modern definition of the expression. How can we apply the concept of libertarianism to diverse subunits of society? We understand how tribes, states, or nations can be sovereign but individual are still individuals. We also have the confusion introduced by huge massive private corporations that have taken on individual identity as sovereign units: Google, AT&T, Exon Oil, and American Express, for example.

There are those who would ask us to believe there is such thing as a “body politic” for a corporation. The workers for a corporation are not looked at as “the people of a nation, state, or society considered collectively as an organized group of citizens”. To equate corporate employees to a “body politic” definition seems inappropriate; “the people of a nation, state, society, or corporations considered collectively as an organized group of citizens”. Making corporations people pits wealth of corporations against wealth of individuals, which obviously give corporations a huge, huge advantage.

What makes “corporate personhood” especially awkward is that there is the inherent conflict. We cannot protect ourselves from corporations as individuals; we need the collective power of society to do that, which is government. Individuals are vulnerable to corporate wealth but recently corporate wealth has reached a point where it can challenge our government’s wealth. There is no better way to put this in perspective then to look at what is happening with NSA surveillance; corporate information gathering verses government information gathering. Credit card corporations know so much about us that they know when our spending habits change. AT&T is were the NSA (government) has to go to get telephone information, I blog in support of gun control and the National Riflemen Association (NRA) posts an ad on my site offering a free knife to those who become new members. If I write on an email saying I am going on vacation, ads for vacations destinations, start appearing in my e-mail.

My point is that private corporations controlled by individuals, those who voters have not control over, are snooping into to every aspect of our lives for their economic advantage. Yet, #Snowden, #Greenwell, and supporters in their ignorance divulge government secrets—our secrets—they are the supporting corporation sovereign rights to collect and misuse information over their own government’s rights. Again, this means they support corporate rights over the rights of government. Ludicrous! When the government is accused of having phone meta data records, even much less information than most corporations, there a left wing uproar of #Chris Hayes and #Rachael Maddow added to the ingrained right wing hate against the government. The result is that everyone hates the government, which is just exactly what corporate sovereignty requires for them to complete their take over of what is intended to protect us from them. Restated, the very people who cry the loudest about NSA surveillance are the ones who support corporations’ rights to spy on us—them; they are the ones who hate the government, and they are the tools of corporate money—the ones Koch brothers are leading around by the nose.  Sad indeed.   

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