Snowden and the NSA

       Control is the principal reason to gather and store information on people.  Power brokers, especially within the bureaucracies of government have always done this.  Robert Moses, who amassed tremendous political power in his career as a petty bureaucrat working for the state of New York,  maintained files on anyone of significance to him politically and regularly updated those files with new information as it was available.  Years later, when he wanted something from that person or wanted to head off something that person was doing, out came the file.  If there was any dirt, anything that might have been forgotten, that information was used as a bludgeon against them.  J Edgar Hoover also maintained files for his political advantage as head of the FBI and used the information he had to threaten even a sitting president.  There is no one who does not have a skeleton somewhere that can be unearthed, that does not have a secret, a past indiscretion, a bankruptcy, a run in with the law, a mistress or a lover unknown to their spouse, a habit the children do not know about and should never know about.  Added to this are the innumerable laws and regulations passed by the government or its agencies which are transgressed by all of us at one time or another.  The government is fond of using IRS audits as punishment for political transgressions, but in addition to this are the increasingly convoluted web of regulations that govern everything we do.  The mere threat of surveillance will color the discourse which takes place in America.  Any terrorists who are actually capable of doing great harm probably do not use social media or unencrypted email to communicate.

     That the government is already using sophisticated techniques to control the population is evident in the carefully structured and regulated information flow to the media over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Our leaders do not want to see a repeat of the debacle of the popular protests against the Vietnam war.  Information in these wars has been more tightly controlled than in any other war.  Our media served chiefly as a cheering section as the bombs landed on Baghdad and the tanks rolled across the desert from Kuwait.  It is through control of the narrative that our government chiefly controls us.  Violent means available to control the population are not necessary when a superior effect is achieved by public relations professionals.  But if you add to that the threat of retribution by virtue of access to private knowledge of any individual, the effect on any organized social protest is chilling.  The rubber will hit the road for this system when there comes a real danger of social uprising or mass civil disobedience.  If the economy ever fell as far as some pundits predict to levels lower than those of the great depression,  there will be trouble.  In the last depression, people who had money were seriously worried that such an event or uprising could occur bringing the siezure of power and assets by a completely different cadre of people than those who possessed it at the time.  The world had just witnessed it take place in Russia and in Mexico.   The NSA is now in the business of making revolution impossible under any circumstances for any reason.  If someone else, read the government, has a gun  over you,  you are very likely to be robbed or killed by that government. 

     The fact that it was a private company that has access to the data, Snowden, a private citizen, said he could find out about anyone he wanted through the information they had, complicates both the prosecutorial and the constitutional issues.  This is a highly profitable government -industry complex which has access to limitless taxpayer funding in order to control those same taxpayers.  Much of the NSA budget is in the so-called black budget, which is concealed even from the majority of Congress under the guise of national security.  Snowden’s crime was to  betray the anti-american NSA.  But the real crime is the failure of our elected officials who swear an oath to defend the constitution to put a stop to this clear violation of the right of the people to be secure in their homes and papers.  Obama should be impeached, the bums in congress, if they are not prosecuted themselves, should be voted out of office.  This of course will not happen.  The activist portion of our population is already basically powerless to affect any real change and the majority will continue to struggle financially to pay for the giant leach called government attached to their backs.

Who Killed JFK?

     We will probably never know who killed John Kennedy as he rode through Dallas in November of 1963.  No one saw the gunman pull the trigger.  Those who would have been the major players in an assassination conspiracy at the time are all dead.  I was nine years old at the time of the assassination.  It has haunted me all my life, especially because my mother was one of the first conspiracy theorists who read article after article about the oddities surrounding the murder.  The generally accepted wisdom believed by the majority of the populace at the time was that Oswald was the killer.  We believed our government and we believed our media pundits who told us the simple story of a single fanatical gunman.  "I'm a patsy", Oswald said on national television,  rolling his eyes in disgust.  Before he had a chance to tell his story, he was dead.   The CIA,  the Russians or Cubans and the Italian mob all have been the accused in one or another hypothetical scenario.  The author Gerald Posner almost won a Pulitzer prize for his book Case Closed laying all the blame on Oswald.  I read this book and found it convincing although, I could not at the time contest or verify any of his evidence.  The House Select Committee on Assassinations also blamed Oswald, but, declared that there was a high probability of a conspiracy.  For some people, the case will never truly be declared closed.  But what does it matter?  It was a long time ago, no one is left to punish, never mind be found guilty.  Yes, we would like to know the truth, but we also have lives to live and things to do.  What does the truth matter, especially if we can never really know?  If it was a conspiracy from within the government,  it was a coup d'etat, something which has been commonplace throughout history but which is not supposed to happen in America.  The murder of rival leaders has been the rule not the exception since the dawn of time.  If it was a coup d'etat, it de-legitimizes our government and even our country itself.  That would matter.

     One of the best historical biographies I have read was Robert Caro's story of Robert Moses in The Power Broker.  I found it so good that when he began his series on Lyndon Johnson I read every volume as they were published.  Caro claims that in all his research he encountered no credible evidence that Johnson was involved in the assassination of JFK,  although, even in his extensive notes, there is no indication that he was looking for such evidence.    However, it was while reading the first volume, Path to Power in 1983,  that I became convinced that  Johnson and his financial and political backers engineered Kennedy's death.
   
      Most of the lines of evidence for this crime have been so muddled that little will be known for sure.  Conspiracy theorists will say there are layers and layers of evidence,  all of it in dispute.  But other than circumstantial or controversial evidence,  there are some witnesses.  Billy Sol Estes, Johnson's business associate in Texas and convicted con man testified to a grand jury in 1983 that Johnson was behind the assassination.  Johnson's mistress claims  in an interview that the day before the murder Johnson told her, "after today those sons of bitches, (the Kennedys), will never humiliate me again." The interview with her is on YouTube.  Jack Ruby,  in a recorded interview, states that if Adlai Stevenson had been Vice President there never would have been an assassination.   Johnson had the personal, political and financial motivation and he had the means at hand to orchestrate and cover up the assassination.  He wanted to be president, it was his life's ambition and his backers were powerful people in Texas who stood to make and did make millions of dollars in a Johnson presidency.   Johnson's biggest financial backer, Brown and Root, a construction company now known as Halliburton, was granted enormous contracts to build facilities during the Vietnam War.

     For me, this is the version of events that finally puts all the pieces together, it is the one that makes the most sense and seems the most likely once the blinders are off about the fallibility of our system.  It makes sense too that Johnson could never have his bitter political enemy Robert Kennedy in the presidency where he was very likely to have found out the truth.