Back in December of 2005 Forbes published an AP report on the FBI and the ACLU’s claims that it is misusing its ever-expanding powers under the rubric of ‘terrorist surveillance’.

Not only is this telling because it exposes the current administration’s tactics and targets on who they are investigating, but why and how they define people and organizations as being a ‘threat’.

Its becoming abundantly clear that the Bush administration is using the security apparatus of the United States as a vehicle for political power (very Nixonian in that regard).

I would like to bring attention to the money shot line in this whole article, and the most telling and revealing aspect to it, and that is the fact that the government sees Catholic charities as being inherently dangerous to the security of the nation because they are supposedly advocating “a communist distribution of resources.”

So, if you are dedicated to living out according to the principles of Jesus, and wish to express those principles through social action such as economic charity to the needy, you become an enemy of the state?

This seems rather revealing in that much of the focus of what is deemed ‘American security’ in our history is not about protecting the nation against threats to our physical security and our Constitutional Bill of Rights, but is rather about protecting the prevailing structure of economic power and control by economic elites who translate that economic oligarchic and plutocratic dominance into political control over the nation.

So by this public statement, our political police seem to be admitting that someone who proposes changing the economic processes of the nation (which it remains to be seen that the Catholic Workers Group is even doing) is a ‘threat’ to ‘national security’, when it does not necessarily mean that at all. I’m not advocating ‘communist redistribution of wealth’ here, but simply pointing out that that is an economic policy not incongruous with a democracy, if the populace so chooses to organize the society they live in along those lines.

What it really means is that they are a threat to the current prevailing order of control by the plutocrats and corporacrats which own our political system. These political and economic elites manage society for the continued sustainment of their position of dominant authority and control over the means of wealth and distribution of not just this nation, but as much of the world as possible. (thus the continued illegal interventions in other nations around the world, most specifically latin and south America). This claim by the Justice Department about investigating potential ‘threats’ is another revelation as to the disingenuous conflating of an economic threat to the oligarchic elites with a political threat to the integrity of the nation’s continued existence as a constitutional democratic republic, and is a trick the corporatists have been pulling on the American people for a long, long time.