Sunday, June 30, 2013

Snowden's Fate: Fugitive Slave Act 2013

Oggy has been relatively quiet on the subject of whistle blower Ed Snowden. I'm percolating the misinformation that I find. What does it all mean? Today, I think I see what it all means. This is, I submit, the latest permutation of the fugitive slave act...that declared that once a slave managed to escape his shackles in Mississippi or Georgia, the northern state like Massachusetts was required to wrap him up and stamp "return to sender" on his ass. How this law managed to find anything less than outrage is baffling. I guess Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore were even worse politicians than the trash we have today. This act went so far as to turn all northern residents into cowardly two legged blood hounds owned in-absence by cotton plantation owners. Vermont, Michigan and Wisconsin fully campaigned against and nullified this act but other states hardly resisted it. Thoreau knowingly flaunted this act because he seditiously thought for himself. This was long before CNN and Fox News's massive propaganda efforts reduced Americans to fuckwads who can't speak longer than two sentences without eating Taco Bell.



Anyway, Snowden, if you haven't been following the news, deliberately found work with the NSA to gather information he thought was outrageous and against the spirit of a free and transparent America. Basically, he alleges that the NSA had become a step child of the Hitler's Ministry of Information, which determined that in the interest of national safety nothing was off limits from prying Third Reich eyes. If we lived in 1937 Germany I'd totally agree with them: The fucking Gypsies and Handicapped Gays are wrecking everything!  I'd even swear an oath to confess all my crimes. My kids would go to camp to learn to spy on me. And while we're at it, Poland really belongs to us...so.. But we live in the land of the free and something is wrong when there is no privacy. I guess digital search and seizure isn't covered by the 4th Amendment. Or maybe it got rewritten while I was in Labrador....

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, except when it's important, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, or secret executive order, supported by Oath or affirmation, or a bunch of guys deciding it's cool, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized, especially emails between ambassadors." Signed, B. Obambam.

Obama clumsily said that everything was done with approval of judges and congress...and my immediate reaction was, "So they don't even have a good excuse? They aren't even pretending to be ignorant? Can't you blame Biden or G. Gordon Liddy?"

Obama likes to posture a transparent government except leaving out all the bad stuff. He's almost more dangerous than Bush because I can't tell when he's lying and I can read almost anyone. He's super smooth. In this case he doesn't even have Nixon's sense to keep his trap shut until he knows how to play the sheep.

So, Snowden releases some documents, US spies on EU...blah blah blah...US gathers data from emails...blah blah blah...Oggy Bleacher is a traitor....etc. etc. etc...
And then he flees to China and then Russia (maybe). And the biggest spies in the world now accuse Snowden of spying without authority to spy by judges and congress. It's OK to spy as long as a small clan of rich senile white men give you that authority. But if you do it on your own and then release the material to the public instead of secretly hiding it away or selling it to the highest bidder, then you are in trouble because you spied on the spies...and that's really spying.

But I started to think this sounds like something from the past: The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Russia and China and Ecuador are being asked to return our slave. It's a watershed moment, have no doubt, and one that could get ugly. The EU already is horrified their computers were hacked. But will they conspire to capture and return Snowden, the person who revealed this information? It's like catching someone strangling and cooking a puppy while you're trespassing on their lawn. Do you get in trouble for snitching on the puppy killer? The law suggests they must find him and return him for trial. In 1850 the slave was recognized as property to be returned to its owner. This became a controversy 12 years before a major civil war...because it scratched the surface of self-determination. The slave was fucked either way, let's be honest, but the person who found the slave in New York had to actually make a moral decision...abide by the law and kidnap the slave again for return south, or ignore the slave, or help the slave move north. Even though I suspect most people were thinking, "This is not an issue I'm going to have to deal with because what are the chances I will encounter a slave in Maine or Ohio?" But it still was one of the "Peripheral Moral Issues" that led to war.

Like the gay marriage issue, if you are dull and blind to the financial perks of marriage or the inherent nature of homosexuality then you will see a prohibition on same sex marriages as harmless. And if you are gay and want to be recognized by your spouse's insurance company then you'll see pure discrimination on the part of a militant Christian judicial system. And if you are not gay then you will either narcissistically think it doesn't apply to you, or like me, be irked the supreme court is interested in whom I fuck, SINCE IT IS NONE OF THEIR FUCKING BUSINESS.

So even though there is more slavery world wide today than in 1850 this particular issue is no longer a problem...until now. Now, whole countries are being publicly asked to return this slave to us because he broke a law that our own government doesn't even recognize. To capture Snowden a country is sort of saying that a Government can illegally spy, but a person can't. Who wants to admit such a hypocritical thing? It turns out neither China nor Russia nor Ecuador will admit such a thing. Like Julian Assange said, "It is getting to the point where the mark of international distinction and service to humanity is no longer the Nobel Peace Prize, but an espionage indictment from the US Department of Justice."

I think Obama is clever enough to not push the issue, to let the dogs go back to sleep. Some scandal with a celebrity will wash away any memory of this. Time returns us to a stupor. What's on TV? The reactions of these governments like Russia will forever be on their record. Did they obey the Simon Legree, even though Legree had spied on them, or did they think for themselves and decide to cook up a pot of cabbage stew and invite Snowden to sit down, eat, and tell us everything you know? Truthfully, if the NSA allowed these secret spy operations to become public knowledge then they get what they deserve. Don't they know that kids these days were educated in the most amoral public school system in the history of the world? This is a strong case for a K-12 school specifically for future NSA contractors because there's no other way to guarantee these spies never had a hippie teacher like Oggy Bleacher who instilled some kind of silly moral code in them. What did Lenin say? "Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted."
But that was Lenin. Our schools need at least 12 years to do the same thing because teachers need golf vacations. Lenin also said that "Fascism is Capitalism in decay."

I'll end with a funny anecdote: I started to work in the hydro-fracturing oil field mainly for the money, but I also thought it would give me a new perspective on an industry that I've been critical of but was basically ignorant about. (I also considered it amusing to answer all the people who told me to "conform" by picking an occupation that I know is going to kill everyone eventually. lol. Go ahead and pat me on the back with your doomed hand.) I didn't consider sabotage because I have too much pride in my work...but the funny part is that it turned out the hippie, climate change activist from a Yankee state is one of the most dedicated oil field workers here. Everyone else just wants a paycheck and if they work 2 hours and bill for 12 then that's fine. I'm kind of offended by that tradition. I never dreamed it would be the longest gravy train I've ever been on. One of the strategies is to get everyone on 30 hours overtime (doing nothing) so the corporation can build up "Days Without An Accident" and safety records. It's all flim flam. It's kind of a miracle anything gets accomplished in 110 degree heat. Basically, I came here expecting to meet a bunch of nature-loathing dirty roustabouts and I find that everyone is doing more to sabotage Shell and Exxon than I could ever do. And I'm the asshole because I work through lunch and make them look bad. In my defense, I tell them that I'm used to working for a living and they look at me like a total traitor. In a debate about the environmental effects of fracking, no one would defend it. If a better paying job came up building butterfly habitat, everyone would leave. They have absolutely no loyalty to the energy industry...even less than me because I foolishly see it as my responsibility to take part in my own energy production. Isn't that ironic?

Snowden and I came to our respective fields for less than honest reasons. He ultimately realized he had information he had to make public for the good of American Values. I realized that the oil field is staffed by people who would rather do nothing to make money and I was completely deluded if I thought everyone out here is trying to destroy the world. (Only the CEOs and 400 million ignorant public are trying to do that) The average oil field laborer just wants nice cowboy boots; so I'm better off keeping my mouth shut. Funny how that worked out.

As for Snowden and Assange, the espionage twins, their fate is a reflection on the direction of our own moral compass. The fate of our Democrazy is at stake. This is why I'm so careful to keep every detail of my personal life a complete secret.

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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.