All right, already. The general election is Tuesday next, and I hope you’re all planning on voting. Unless of course you’re voting for Admiral McCain – if so, please just stay home. There, that’s done it. Election over.

Not quite. Would that it were that easy. Of course, as is usually the case, people generally to the left of the political center have to overcome themselves as well as the legions on the right – legions of pre-organized churchgoing Republicans who march out to the polls each and every election and pull the lever or punch the card or touch the icon next to the biggest caveman’s name. (We’ve seen the results.) The liberal-left does not come in simple, pre-organized packages like this – neither do the folks in the natural constituencies for leftward political appeals, such as the poor and working class. We’re constantly carping at one another. We splinter in so many different ways.

A lot of people far to the left, like me, are disgruntled with Obama’s tepid positions on issues we feel strongly about. Understandably so – these are crucial issues of war and prosperity, health and civil liberties, etc. Still, I intend to vote for Obama and encourage you like-minded folks to do the same. In fact, I’m actively working for his election. Here’s why: McCain. He’s certainly the best argument for voting for Barack Obama. I don’t know about any of you, but the thought of having McCain in the White House after eight years of Bush/Cheney is enough to make me scream. This man is all over the road. He lurches from one thing to the next. His vaunted foreign policy credentials are bogus; just the fact that McCain’s taking advice from Randy Scheunemann, a prominent booster of Ahmed Chalabi six years ago, should be enough to convince anyone that his administration will be like a third Bush term. (Scheunemann looks like a prime candidate for National Security Advisor or some senior State Department post.)

McCain’s economic team is no better, hawking the usual G.O.P. prescription of cutting rich people’s taxes, gutting social programs, and glutting the war machine. In as much as that brain trust is likely to be headed up by UBS exec. Phil Gramm, former senator, and primary architect of the current financial meltdown. He would no doubt be joined by Joe the Right-Wing Talk Radio Wingnut (and unlicensed plumber), who is full of great ideas and is, in McCain’s words, a “national hero” and the Senator’s “role model.” (Honest.) Since presidencies are largely about the people the successful candidate drags with him to Washington, this does not augur well for a McCain administration.

Sure, Obama’s got a lot of points that irk a leftist like me. (The fact that Rashid Khalidi is somehow being used to “slime” Obama merely by his being in the same room as him at some point is astonishing to me.) But he’s marginally closer to my way of thinking than any Democratic nominee in quite a few years. I have less trepidation about voting for him than I did with either Kerry or Gore, frankly. And in a zero-sum match-up against McCain, I’ll vote Obama. I encourage you to do the same. Just don’t let it be your only political act of the next four years.

Let’s pull this thing out, folks. Otherwise it’s going to be another long four years.

luv u,

jp

All right – I was listening to journalist James Bamford on Democracy Now! talk about his new book on the NSA, The Shadow Factory, and it has really made me angry. Part of what is so irritating about this is that it isn’t even considered significant news – that people have become so inured to the notion of a government tapping their phones, reading their email, transcribing their private conversations, and archiving them for whatever future use they may want to put them to. For chrissake, these fuckers in the Bush White House directed the NSA to work with companies like AT&T and Verizon – companies that profit from our business – to sift through our correspondence without any limits, to the point where staffers at the NSA were actually passing around recordings of intimate phone calls between members of our military deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan and their spouses and partners back home. Hey, Charlie – get a load of this one! What the fuck.

But it’s far worse than just an invasion of privacy. In accord with typical Fortune 500 practice, the telecom “giants” outsourced the actual data collection and analysis to foreign-connected firms, including two companies named Narus and Verint, both founded in Israel. Verint can boast of a founder and former CEO who is currently on the lamb in Namibia to avoid prosecution for felony charges of fraud and other violations. Both companies have extensive relationships with intelligence services in anti-democratic and repressive regimes the world over. Bamford also tells of the NSA’s pre-9/11 fuck-ups, including not informing the FBI that two Al Qaeda 9/11 hijackers under surveillance by the NSA were living in Los Angeles and, later, within spitting distance of the NSA headquarters in Laurel, Maryland. (The hijackers even frequented the same restaurants and Gold’s Gym as NSA staffers.) Even more bone-chilling for me was his description of how NSA analysts in Georgia determine targets in Iraq and Afghanistan – i.e. houses to bomb or invade – based on sloppy translations of communications intercepts and often reckless assumptions about what is being said. So people are killed, wounded, and incarcerated on the basis of snap decisions made in a building thousands of miles away.

This obsession with all-encompassing surveillance and an expansion of our ability to project deadly force anywhere on the globe with the casual push of a button – it is all intimately intertwined. This has been the project of the U.S. government for at least the last decade, probably longer. It involves a massive investment in the technology of death – sophisticated unmanned drones, orbital launch platforms, etc., all capable of reaching any point on the planet nearly instantaneously whenever our interests are threatened, in a manner so easy and safe that even Cheney could do it. Those “interests,” by the way, include economic considerations, obstruction of trade, disruption of shipping or energy supplies, and so on. So this is the 21st Century equivalent of gunboat diplomacy, executed with a simplicity once seen only in television dramas. “Find the enemy. Kill the enemy.” In what is often called the most important election of our lifetimes, I have yet to hear this issue addressed by the major party candidates. What will either of them do about this steady movement toward the establishment of a global police state for that less-fortunate 70% of humanity?

Kind of seems like the answer is “nothing”. That’s why we need to push a little harder on this.

luv you,

jp