Social Contracts, Sovereign People & The CIA
A recent newspaper article from the New York Times Corporation reports on CIA domestic wiretapping, assassination plots, mind-control and spying on Americans. It quotes CIA director Michael Hayden saying that yesterday’s release of highly censored government documents was part of the agency’s “social contract” with the American public.
That’s so silly. There is only one social contract — the one which sovereign people, alleged to be the source of all governing authority — make among ourselves to determine how we go about governing ourselves.
Of course, THAT social contract has been half-assed in practice from In the Beginning, given that a minority of people denied the majority their fundamental rights. But think, for a moment, that maybe it’s the idea that counts.
The CIA — and all creations of law, of government (including business and propaganda corporations) — are nothing but subordinate entities. They have no legitimacy except in being subordinate to the sovereign people.
Neither the CIA nor the Microsoft Corporation has authority — legal, moral, cosmic — to make “social contracts” with its superiors. Their legitimacy comes only from being obedient, from following orders, from licking We the People’s shoes metaphorical and literal, (not to mention our bare toes).
Which makes all this secrecy stuff not only absurd but contrary to fundamentals of self-governance. How can We the People, We the Sovereign People, even dream about governing ourselves when most of what our temporary public servants have been and are doing is kept from our eyes and ears?
There are empirical data galore demonstrating when law and our acquiescence enable mere creations of law — from corporations to government bureaus — to operate in secret, the result is governance by the few.
And destructive, stupid, rights-denying, authoritarian governance at that.
(These data, to be sure, precede today’s ephemeral Bush & Chaney and Pelosi and Reid.)
Of course, they — like their predecessors — make sure it’s all “legal,” and made necessary by some terrifying “other” out there — like for instance a fiendish enemy bent on destroying this country’s values and violets. For millennia, very important people have been obsessed with rendering their destructions and rights denials and oppressions as “legal.”
For them, “legal” has been a fetish.
And, our persistent authoritarians also make sure to instruct us over and over again that their secrecy, repression, fascism and legalities are for our own good.
See, for example, the popes who authorized European pillage of North and South America, Asia, and Africa, the kings and queens who paid for these pillages, their viceroys and generals and captains and men of religion, President McKinley who sent American soldiers to crush the Philippine War of Independence…and the endless violence and rights denials waged by governments from Germany to South Africa around the world. Read their documents and speeches, and see “legal” “legal” “legal” “legal” “legal” (accompanied, of course, by “God’s Will” “God’s Will” “God’s Will”….)
But it’s not about them. Rather, isn’t this all about us? About us as individuals, and us as We the People — and who among us truly aspires to BE the sovereign people, and what does it mean to ACT in concert like sovereign people?
All to say: the headline on the NYTimes Comany’s first page story this morning is “Files on Illegal Spying Show CIA Skeletons from Cold War.” If we the sovereign people really want to know, so we can act commensurately, don’t we need the files on all the LEGAL spying?
When people tore down the Berlin Wall and the East German government evaporated, thousands of people stormed into the STASI (secret police) headquarters and started pouring through the files.
Will We the American people one day storm into the CIA, NSA, FBI, Homeland Security, White House, Congress, Supreme Court, the Library of Congress and other of the people’s buildings so we can begin to learn what we need to know to start governing ourselves?
If we aspire to democratic self-governance, then don’t we gotta demand, and act upon, NO MORE SECRETS?
For starters?
- Richard Grossman, CELDF
on July 10th, 2007 at 10:12 pm
Richard provides another really good posting worth following up on a bit. Firstly, for succinctly pointing out the inherent assumptions about who holds ‘contracts’ with whom in this country, and who is responsible to whom in their name. Even more importantly, the method often used to ensure the continuation of the power structure that currently exists - that of minority elites wielding those levers of control in contradiction to what is stated to be the operating ’social contract’ of the nation, that of power emanating from We The People - is by the use of secrecy and control of information
As Richard states: “There are empirical data galore demonstrating when law and our acquiescence enable mere creations of law — from corporations to government bureaus — to operate in secret, the result is governance by the few. ”
This is how all despotisms, all tyrannies, all authoritarian governance systems operate. It is essential to them. Secrecy, lack of accessibility to information, lack of means for people to transmit and share that information, with those means being centralized in the hands of the ever fewer.
It all culminates in his final line, actually a demand and call to action - NO MORE SECRETS.
That reminds me of a truism the mother of a dearly departed friend of mine used to say, which has continued to resonate with me all these years
“Secrets Make You Sick”
She referred that to the personal, but it applies not only to one’s own body and soul, but that of the body politic as well. A truism on any level of existence, from the individual to the societal collective.
Deception, self-delusions, hidden dualities, these schisms between our stated intentions, our declared actions, and our actual thoughts and behaviors, will always result in serious imbalance and unhealthy manifestations in the energy force of whatever entity is engaged in that kind of duplicitous cover up. On the political level, one need only to recall the rot and decay that brought down such political structures as that of the Warsaw Pact bloc of eastern Europe as evidence of how rampant secrecy, hypocrisy and societal fraud eats away at the very foundation of the civic ties that bind the citizens of such nations together. When the duplicity becomes too great, the entire edifice comes crashing down.
Living a lie will always come back to haunt and to demand its reckoning, and our society certainly is due some major ‘blowback’ since it has been fleeing from reality for quite some time. There is no need here to recount the litany of ways that American (though probably more accurately defined as “global corporate”) society is running amok with self-destructive, delusional and addictive behaviors. Waking the hypnotized, narcotized and anesthetized amongst our fellow citizens, including those elements within ourselves that remain resistant to the changes necessary, is one of the most important things we can consciously do in our day to day endeavors.
- Andy Valeri
USTV Media
http://www.ustvmedia.org