Reforms and Concessions

This post was supposed to come out earlier and briefly touch on Obama’s NSA reform speech but it applies to most politician speeches including O’s more recent, lackluster State of the Union “festival of lies”. A large majority of the people already saw through Obama’s NSA speech as nothing but a PR stunt. Glenn Greenwald’s piece does well in conveying the sentiments of the people. Reforms and concessions lead us nowhere. Voting seems to only lead to more reforms and concessions. I don’t think folks are voting for the continuation of this bureaucratic capitalism that kowtows to greedy Wall St. oligarchs. Nor do I think folks are voting for the continuation of the ineffective, DEA backed, racist drug war that, like the school-to-prison pipeline, also feeds into the racist prison-industrial complex. The people certainly aren’t voting for gender inequality, a minimum wage that is drastically lower than a living wage or ruling-class drafted policies that aid and abet the destruction of our planet either. It’s time for revolution or change or whatever you feel comfortable calling it but it’s time for it now! It’s not like the ruling class is preparing a list to potentially suppress dissenters or anything, that couldn’t happen here!

I leave you with Jonathan Jackson Jr.’s analysis, in 1994, of COINTELPRO  which is just about 100% transferable today if one just swaps COINTELPRO for PRISM and FBI for NSA.

COINTELPRO, however, was really a symptomatic, expendable entity; a small police force within a larger one (FBI), within a branch of government (executive), within the government itself (liberal democracy), within the economic system (capitalism). Reformists in radicals’ clothing unknowingly argued against symptoms, rather than the roots, of the entrenched system. Doing away with COINTELPRO or even the FBI would not alter the structure that produces the surveillance/elimination apparatus.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Later for that! We’ve got to get together. We got to unify and organize. These reforms and concessions in Obama’s NSA speech are only addressing the symptoms and not the beast that, like COINTELPRO to PRISM, will surely continue to oppress us only under a different name next time.