"When the government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny."

Thomas Jefferson.

Snips from a couple of articles I read this morning...the big picture isn't getting any better as we roll past 1984 into the new century...

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"Maryland State Trooper David Uhler pulled over motorcyclist Anthony Graber for speeding and reckless driving. Graber had a video camera mounted to his helmet that was recording at the time of the stop. Uhler, dressed in street clothes, emerged from his unmarked car with gun drawn, yelling. Graber was given only a traffic ticket, but he was miffed at Uhler’s behavior. So he posted the video on YouTube. Days later, Maryland State Police conducted an early-morning raid on Graber’s home, held Graber and his parents for 90 minutes, confiscated computer equipment, arrested him, and took him to jail."
...

"Maryland is one of 12 states with a wiretapping law that requires consent from all parties to a conversation for someone to legally record it. But in 10 of those 12 states, including Maryland, the statute says a violation occurs only when the offended party has a reasonable expectation that the conversation is private."
...

"Civil liberties advocates argue that on-duty police officers, like people attending city council meetings or walking down a public street, do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy. For Graber to be convicted under Maryland’s wiretapping law, a prosecutor would have to argue that Uhler—a police officer who had pulled over a motorist, drawn his gun, and yelled at the guy on the side of a busy highway—had a reasonable expectation that the encounter would remain private."

Read the full article:
http://reason.com/archives/2010/12/07/the-war-on-cameras


"One of the hallmarks of an authoritarian government is its fixation on hiding everything it does behind a wall of secrecy while simultaneously monitoring, invading and collecting files on everything its citizenry does. Based on the Francis Bacon aphorism that "knowledge is power," this is the extreme imbalance that renders the ruling class omnipotent and citizens powerless."
...

"And this is all supposed to be the other way around: it's government officials who are supposed to operate out in the open, while ordinary citizens are entitled to privacy. Yet we've reversed that dynamic almost completely. And even with 9/11 now 9 years behind us, the trends continue only in one direction.

Read the full article:
"The government's one-way mirror - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com:

Unraveling the Tax-Cut Deal - Newsweek

Exra Klein

"It was a confusing week.

But it was also a clarifying one. The deal, which sees Republicans giving the White House about $300 billion in stimulus in return for the White House giving Republicans about $130 billion in tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, laid bare some realities of how Washington works—and doesn’t work—right now. It’s worth going through them one by one."

Read the whole unravelling here:
Klein: Unraveling the Tax-Cut Deal - Newsweek:

Andy Kroll, How the Oligarchs Took America

"Never before has the United States looked so much like a country of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich."

How did we get here? How did a middle-class-heavy nation transform itself into an oligarchy? You'll find answers to these questions in Winner-Take-All Politics, a revelatory new book by political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson. The authors treat the present figures we have on American wealth and poverty as a crime scene littered with clues and suspects, dead-ends and alibis.

Unlike so many pundits, politicians, and academics, Hacker and Pierson resist blaming the usual suspects: globalization, the rise of an information-based economy, and the demise of manufacturing. The culprit in their crime drama is American politics itself over the last three decades. The clues to understanding the rise of an American oligarchy, they believe, won’t be found in New York or New Delhi, but on Capitol Hill, along Pennsylvania Avenue, and around K Street, that haven in a heartless world for Washington’s lobbyists.

"Step by step and debate by debate," they write, "America's public officials have rewritten the rules of American politics and the American economy in ways that have benefitted the few at the expense of the many."

Read the full article here --
Andy Kroll, How the Oligarchs Took America | TomDispatch:

Andy Kroll is a reporter in the D.C. Bureau of Mother Jones and an associate editor at TomDispatch.com.