Every other year I’m stuck in limbo, alternating between apathy and exasperation.
I have never had a desire to join a political party and neither allow independents to vote in Maryland primaries. So here I am, once again, stuck on the sidelines as the old guard doles out money and support to partisans that toe the party line.
In the giant electoral race towards pitiful mediocrity, the Maryland Democratic Party political machine churns away, insuring that there is little chance of anything new.
The results are predetermined, though the person sporting perfectly quaffed hair and spitting out dull talking points may change.
In this situation, I feel apathy is justified, if far from ideal. The exasperation is what kills me.
Primaries are a perfect time for candidates to establish safe positions for the “low hanging fruit” issues. Find something that appeals to your base and might draw some independent votes, then let gerrymandering do its job in November.
In the all-consuming need for conformity and no meaningful debate, incredibly important issues that will sculpt the future of America are systematically ignored or suppressed.
To get into office, candidates cannot just set themselves apart from the herd and find something that resonates with the people. Candidates have to stick to the same inconsequential issues.
Here is a prime example. The fruit doesn’t hang any lower than this, but congressional candidates won’t touch it.
Two-thirds of the population are concerned about the collection and use of [their] personal information by the National Security Agency. Either party could take it up, considering 70% of Democrats and 77% of Republicans agree on it.
Yet no one will break ranks with their parties and risk being buried in an election landslide as their competitors get all the money and backers.
In fact, the concerted effort to keep this issue out of the ballot box makes the situation even worse. It is an implicit mandate to double down on blatant government overreach that attacks key rights and liberties enshrined in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.
Here are three new developments recently made available in the public record that Democrat and Republican candidates should be clamoring to tear down, if only our democratic republic wasn’t corrupted and compromised.
Monitoring Your Finances
Swing over to the national mortgage database web page at the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) and it explicitly states, “This database will not contain personally identifiable information.”
Yet the FHFA is going to start collecting the most intimate and sensitive details of our financial lives. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) — with no chance of anyone missing the irony here — will work with the FHFA to collect the data and build the database.
As many as 227 million Americans may be compelled to hand over all of their personalized information including: mortgage owner’s name, address, Social Security number, and all credit card and other loan information with account balances.
In the wake of massive hacking revelations and data breaches, these agencies are setting up a one-stop shop for identity theft and credit card fraud.
FHFA officials claim this is essential to creating the monthly mortgage survey required of it by law (it hasn’t needed it since the law was passed in 2008) and for annual reports to Congress.
CFPB director Richard Cordray, during a January 28th hearing of the House Financial Services Committee, said repeatedly that the database will only contain “aggregate” information with no personal identifiers.
The complete reversal was not mentioned directly to Congress. It was only filed amongst hundreds of other notices in the obscure Federal Register. This was a notice of revision, not a proposal that would warrant a vote in Congress.
Even More Personal
At least that just concerns numbers. There are even more obscene levels of monitoring being proposed.
Buried deep in the over 800 pages of the recently proposed immigration bill, there is a mandate for the creation of a “photo tool.”
This is quite the misnomer, considering it would be a massive federal database administered by the Department of Homeland Security containing names, ages, Social Security numbers, and photographs of everyone in the country with a driver’s license or any form of state-issued photo ID.
This is in addition to the FBI’s plan to have 52 million photos in a facial recognition database by next year.
The legislation only allows the database to be used for employment purposes. Employers would be obliged to look up every new hire in this database to ensure they are legally allowed to be in the country and employed.
As we’ve seen too often though, these limitations are rarely kept in place. Social Security numbers used to only be for federal benefits. Now, you can’t apply for a loan, insurance, or even apply for a job without being asked for it.
As Chris Calabrese with the ACLU states, “It starts to change the relationship between the citizen and state, you do have to get permission to do things. More fundamentally, it could be the start of keeping a record of all things.”
Military Force Against the People
Take a step back and look at the broad picture. A comprehensive database of all things is being formed. Your picture is being hosted alongside your Social Security number, which can be referenced for all of your family’s mortgage, credit, and loan information.
Meanwhile, the NSA has the capacity and will to monitor all of your communications and GPS position, linking you to who you talk with, who you are around, where you go, and where you will be.
Your entire life is going to be fed into federal databases, and I have no doubt federal domestic spying programs will easily and secretly access it all.
All of this makes a 2010 Pentagon directive recently unearthed that much more sinister.
Directive 3025.18, entitled “Defense Support of Civil Authorities,” provides unprecedented leeway for unilateral action by the president or military.
In “extraordinary emergency circumstances where prior authorization by the
President is impossible and duly constituted local authorities are unable to control the situation,”
Federal military commanders may “engage temporarily in activities that are necessary to quell large-scale, unexpected civil disturbances” under two conditions.
The first condition is that these activities are needed “to prevent significant loss of life or wanton destruction of property and are necessary to restore governmental function and public order.”
The second is when federal, state, and local authorities “are unable or decline to provide adequate protection for federal property or federal governmental functions. Federal action, including the use of federal military forces, is authorized when necessary to protect the federal property or functions.”
This carefully worded document has far more leeway than you’d think. A U.S. official said the Obama administration considered but rejected deploying military force under the directive during the Nevada stand-off between rancher Cliven Bundy’s armed supporters and the Bureau of Land Management.
Pardon my French…
If deploying the military to protect federal interests concerning unpaid cattle grazing fees out in the Nevada scrublands almost happened, we’re pretty far up shit creek without a paddle.
The federal government will know who you are by sight. They will know what you buy, what you own, where you live, where you’ve been, who you’ve talked to, and who you’ve been around.
If nothing changes, it might not be long before we’re all too afraid of the military moving in “to restore governmental function and public order” if we, or anyone we ever talk to or work with, brings up something disruptive to the government-military-intelligence complex.
All I want is a paddle. In this case, that means the primaries producing a candidate who is in tune with voters on critical issues that have significant impacts on the fate of our nation.
Americans overwhelmingly want it, our nation’s founding principles demand it, and it might just do something to restore some faith in government and politics if progress is made.
