by ALEXANDER COCKBURN
PHOTO/Name Withheld; Digital Manipulation: Jesse Lenz/Wired “Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital ‘pocket litter.’ It is, in some measure, the realization of the ‘total information awareness’ program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.” TEXT/Wired
The news is in. White births are no longer a majority in the United States. The Bureau of the Census confirms that non-Hispanic whites accounted for 49.6 of all births in the year ending July, 2011, while minorities including Hispanics, blacks, Asians and those of mixed race — reached 50.4 percent.
I felt lonely and went out on the porch and hollered for my neighbor, a white German-American. Nothing stirred. I went back to my computer. At least someone is thinking constructively. The World Wildlife Fund says we need two planets. The rationale is that we create too much waste for one, but the roots of American environmentalism were always nourished by dislike of “those of mixed race”, and some over there at WWF has got their thinking cap on.
Is whitey ready for a fresh start? Face it, we may be a minority, but we got the firepower.
Where did we go wrong? Too much atonal music, maybe. Richard Pryor probably put his finger on it. Pryor to a white audience:
“What the matter, y’all stop fuckin’? There will be no shortage of niggers. Niggers is fuckin’.”
I began to sort things out for the big move to Planet 2. What a mess whitey had made of things! One horrible move after another. What will we Americans handing on to the new majority? The news is not good. At almost exactly the moment we yielded majority status, we – not the people to be sure – but our president and our Congress were putting the finishing touches to our modern system of government, known as fascism.
The mobs who flooded into the streets to revel in the execution of Osama bin Laden were not exulting in America, land of the free and of constitutional propriety. They were lauding brute, lawless, lethal force. In this year of political conventions we’ll be hearing a lot of tub-thumping about American freedoms, but if there’s any nation in the world that is well on the way to meriting the admittedly vague label of “fascist,” surely it’s the United States.
Fascism, among other things, is a system of extreme, methodical state repression, violent in contour and threat, buttressed by ultra-nationalist mythology, a militarist culture and imperial ambition. In the 1980s America started locking up its poor people. Seven million adults were under correctional supervision in 2009.
A fascist system uses constant harassment. Last year there were more than 600,000 stop-and-frisks in New York City, overwhelmingly of blacks and Hispanics.
Historically, fascist regimes have been particularly cruel toward what is deemed to be sexual deviancy. US sex offender registries doom three-quarters of a million people—many of them convicted on trumpery charges—to pale simulacra of real life. Others endure castration and open-ended incarceration.
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