From: "Agent Smiley" <skywalker at disinfo.net>
...What isn't laughable are the priorities of those in power, who feel that democratic opposition to fascist structures of world governance should take law enforcement precedence over serious criminal syndicates operating in Central Europe. For there are in fact well funded and well organized cliques who warrant international cooperation between intelligence operatives in the US and Europe. But these cliques are not interested in sustainable development or debt relief, however. They have other interests, like the abduction and forced prostitution of teenage Ukrainian girls, kilos of heroin, cases of Kalishnakovs, and little vials of weapons grade Strontium.
I say let the FBI worry about these things, and let the citizens of the world take care of the IMF. But if the Bureau is really worried about us activists, they can start their files with me.
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There is something a little off in this view, but it is interesting to think about what is wrong. This might take awhile so hit the delete now if your not interested.
Earlier in this message there was mention of the Panther's and the FBI surveillance. The Panthers were threatening local law enforcement and local government. So the Panther's were considered quasi-criminal quasi-terrorist organization. The police and government were completely and intentionally deaf to the political dimension of the Panthers and simply criminalized them.
Okay, sure, so what? Notice that business and the infrastructure of capital was completely off the scope at the time.
In the Sixties the FBI mission was changed several times beginning with Robert Kennedy's move against union corruption and links to organized crime. The move was away from the earlier anti-communist bend of the McCarthy era (which Kennedy conveniently slimed out of). Under Johnson it became increasingly involved in domestic political surveillance in the civil rights and then anti-war movements. Under Nixon all that intensified and of course included Nixon's enemy list and further domestic activity of the CIA and NSA---and so forth and so.
But notice that the targets themselves in those eras were not devoted to attacks on business and capital infrastructures. These were almost entirely off the conscious registers. It's not that we were not bitching about it, but nobody was doing much about it. Corporations were essentially absent from the fray despite the occasional rhetorical swipes like the nice poster of the burning Bank of America in Santa Barbara.
This more or less continued to be the case until exporting US production infrastructure became the preferred track of US corporations who could pull it off.
The older FBI mission of pursuing traditional criminal activity remained more or less primary through the Reagan and Bush era focusing on drugs and with the usual forays into domestic political activity that had international implications, primarily defined around concepts of anti-terrorism--which again was mostly political. Reagan did of course revive some of the anti-communist noise along with FBI-CIA collusion over Central America.
To cut all this short, with the so-called end of the cold war, and the evolving relocation of US manufacturing and production away from domestic laws and wages, the government pushed this international development as a means to its own extension of global influence and power, i.e. imperialism. It was their neoliberal idea of pounding swords into plough shares or moving from emphasing military to economic dominion.
With those changes the security apparatus has also changed and realigned. Under the Clinton era the security apparatus has changed and its primary mission became more explicitly the protection of US economic interest. This is actually a new development in the sense of its intense expansion and emphasis away from a political definition and towards a definition of economic interest.
Simultaneous with this development has been the expansion of what constitutes economic interest. The primary direction of expansion is mirrored in the now vastly expanded field of intellectual property law. This of course includes just about everything that can be construed as such, from lab protocols and branded white mice to entire agricultural production systems and whole genomes, as well as most of the high tech software and hardware industries. In other words the so-called new economy.
So, that is the part that is either missing or mistakenly identified in the message from Agent Smiley. What the FBI is doing in Europe, Asia, and the rest of the world is protecting US economic interests by monitoring potential threats to that interest.
Under the Clinton-Gore concept of neoliberalism it seems that the US government has completely identified itself with these economic interests, as part of its domestic emphasis on regulation for the benefit of the top rather than the middle or bottom. This is a substantial policy substitution for what was once dominated by various cold war ideologies.
Recall that the primary concept behind the cold war was the containment of political and military influence by the Soviet block. But the important part to understand now, is that emphasis was on the political and military dimension. With the exception of Cuba and sections of Latin America, economic interest was not on the top of the agenda. For example Vietnam was not fought over the remnants of the french colonial plantation system. Although early on some limited rhetoric was developed over US economic interest in SEA.
So in the past if politics were criminalized in order to make them proscribed in a society in which political activity was theoretically protected, then we can now look forward to the same development in the definition of political activity directed against economic interests.
And of course that is already arrived. The important part to notice is the redefinition of criminal activity, which now includes the whole spectrum of intellectual property law and which more or less completely corresponds to the so-called new economy. It is the projection of this domestic legal realm and its mirror as the new economy, into international bodies that forms the primary wedge for international US economic policy. Therefore that is the also the primary international security concern of the US security apparatus.
In the past, US domestic political activity was Left but politically left, even though in a theoretical expression it had a economic dimension. With the arrival of the new economy, while most activity against its development has remained Left, now instead of being a political expression, the Left has changed to emphasize its economic dimension. The left now appears more classically Marxist than it did in the recent past. In turn the security apparatus arrayed against Left movements is reasserting its anti-communist dimension. So, it now appears that communism and marxism which was criminalized long ago as proscribed political activity, is now being redefined by both sides around the forms and expression of the so-called new economy.
To a large extent this is absurd, since there is nothing communist or particular politically radical per se about protesting US corporate intellectual property rights law and its applications in global institutions. However, these have been redefined by US policy as such, and further as criminal activity.
``What isn't laughable are the priorities of those in power, who feel that democratic opposition to fascist structures of world governance should take law enforcement precedence over serious criminal syndicates operating in Central Europe...''
So, now it should be a little clearer why ``democratic opposition to fascist structures of world governance...'' are the more serious threat. Thanks to neoliberalism, under the new economy definitions of criminal syndicates, we are those new criminal syndicates.
The shabby white slave traders, drug traffickers, and illicit weapons dealers are just petty hoods. We have become the real criminals. Which reminds me. Somebody used to post pieces from Strator's. Those actually helped to keep track of what the establishment considered security issues. So, start posting those again, if you feel like it, especially if they seem to apply to economic interests.
Chuck Grimes,
obviously a criminal as well as amoral scum.