Mike Krieger: "We Can Do A Lot Better Than This"

Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

 

The dark ages still reign over all humanity, and the depth and persistence of this domination are only now becoming clear.

Politics is absolutely hopeless. That’s why everything has gone wrong. You have ninety-nine percent of the people thinking “politics,” and hollering and yelling. And that won’t get you anywhere. Hollering and yelling won’t get you across the English Channel. It won’t reach from continent to continent; you need electronics for that, and you have to know what you’re doing. Evolution has been at work doing all these things so it is now possible. Nobody has consciously been doing it. The universe is a lot bigger than you and me. We didn’t invent it. If you take all the machinery in the world and dump it in the ocean, within months more than half of all humanity will die and within another six months they’d almost all be gone; if you took all the politicians in the world, put them in a rocket, and sent them to the moon, everyone would get along fine.

– Quotes by Buckminster Fuller

When thinking about the financial crisis of nearly a decade ago, many people wrongly focus on the event itself as opposed to the response. I’m of the view that the most destructive aspect of that grotesque period of American history wasn’t the collapse itself, but the government and central bank response to it. This response centered around bailing out and rewarding those most responsible for the disaster, which merely served to further concentrate power and wealth in the hands of people who should be rotting in jail as opposed to guzzling Château Lafite at Davos.

Once the U.S. permitted the crime of the century to go, not just unpunished, but handsomely rewarded, we solidified an incentive structure in which elite criminality became the only game in town. If you’re a sociopathic person driven by greed and unbounded by any semblance of decency, the response to the crisis proved you’ll never face consequences for your crimes as long as you’re a top tier predator. As such, there’s absolutely nothing holding back the worst of the worst, and things are turning out exactly as you’d expect within such an environment.

There’s nothing more destructive to a society than the institutionalization of immunity for elite criminals, yet that’s exactly what’s happened since the financial crisis. Top tier predators, whether they operate within government or mega corporations, recognize that the system they control will never hold them accountable for anything they do. In the past week alone, we’ve seen two additional examples of what occurs within a culture of rampant elite lawlessness.

First, we learned that the FBI conveniently “lost” text messages between two key government officials. Politico reports:

 

The FBI is missing five months of text messages between two senior officials who Republicans on Capitol Hill have accused of political bias, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) revealed in a letter to the bureau made public on Sunday.

Republicans have been scrutinizing the text messages between senior counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page as part of their inquiry into whether bias infected the bureau’s investigations into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state and into President Donald Trump’s ties to Russia. 

Johnson, who leads the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, wrote to FBI Director Chris Wray with questions about the missing communication, which he said spanned Dec. 14, 2016 to May 17, 2017, the day Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

In his letter — delivered Saturday — Johnson said correspondence from the FBI a day earlier ascribed the missing text messages to “misconfiguration issues related to rollouts, provisioning, and software upgrades that conflicted with the FBI’s collection capabilities.”

Just an honest mistake, right? To the contrary, it appears such “mistakes” have turned into an epidemic these days when it comes to U.S. intelligence agencies.

Also from Politico:

The National Security Agency destroyed surveillance data it pledged to preserve in connection with pending lawsuits and apparently never took some of the steps it told a federal court it had taken to make sure the information wasn’t destroyed, according to recent court filings.

Word of the NSA’s foul-up is emerging just as Congress has extended for six years the legal authority the agency uses for much of its surveillance work conducted through U.S. internet providers and tech firms. President Donald Trump signed that measure into law Friday.

Since 2007, the NSA has been under court orders to preserve data about certain of its surveillance efforts that came under legal attack following disclosures that President George W. Bush ordered warrantless wiretapping of international communications after the 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S. In addition, the agency has made a series of representations in court over the years about how it is complying with its duties.

However, the NSA told U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey White in a filing on Thursday night and another little-noticed submission last year that the agency did not preserve the content of internet communications intercepted between 2001 and 2007 under the program Bush ordered. To make matters worse, backup tapes that might have mitigated the failure were erased in 2009, 2011 and 2016, the NSA said.

“The NSA sincerely regrets its failure to prevent the deletion of this data,” NSA’s deputy director of capabilities, identified publicly as “Elizabeth B.,” wrote in a declaration filed in October. “NSA senior management is fully aware of this failure, and the Agency is committed to taking swift action to respond to the loss of this data.”

Do you think for a moment anyone will ever be truly held accountable for this? Don’t be ridiculous.

Defiance of a court order can result in civil or criminal contempt charges, as well as sanctions against the party responsible. So far, no one involved appears to have asked White to impose any punishment or sanction on the NSA over the newly disclosed episodes, although the details of what happened are still emerging.

As I noted on Twitter earlier today, we have an apology based justice system when it comes to top tier predators.

When top tier predators break the law (bankers, intelligence agencies), their punishment is they must apologize. pic.twitter.com/xnJoUOatrr

— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) January 22, 2018

 

The major silver lining to all this is the world’s dominant institutions have become so clownishly corrupt and discredited it’s now undeniable. In other words, things are so bad there’s plenty of low hanging fruit. The paradigm under which this planet functions is so obviously demented and pernicious you’d have to be the greatest cynic about humanity’s potential to think this is the best we can do.

I see things in the exact opposite way. I believe we’ve been intentionally held back as a species, and that the current period we live in is a gigantic universal wakeup call. It seems to me enough people see the problem clearly at this stage, we just feel helpless and can’t figure out a way to change course. In this regard, I want to offer a little guidance.

First of all, there’s no silver bullet. Electing the “right people” is definitely not the answer, as we have a totally captured government (and shadow government) run by oligarchs who will never reform or punish themselves. They’ll just delete all the evidence if anyone ever gets close to uncovering it.

I think there’s only one sustainable way out of our current predicament, and it was best expressed by Buckminster Fuller.

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

This is the only way out. It’s also why I’ve been such a passionate supporter of Bitcoin and crypto assets in general over the years. If we’re to evolve beyond the absurd and destructive reality in which we live, focusing on the symptoms and tweaking at the edges will do no good.

We need to build an entirely new paradigm, and each and every one of us must think deeply about how we can individually contribute to this project of existential significance.

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