Ball of Confusion

It's a truth almost universally acknowledged that since 9/11, the USA has been rapidly disintegrating into the Orwellian nation of Oceania. But it's also true that while vast swaths of data are being collected and stored on every man, woman and child on the planet, they're not serving any earthly purpose except as junk food for the insatiable maw of the Department of Homeland Security. (DHS)

Those DHS "fusion centers" are bastions of delusion sinking under the weight of their own bureacratic excess. Like the old Temptations' protest song, our spy state is just one great big Ball of Confusion. I have been saying for awhile now that as they're frantically scouring cyberspace for every last bit of information on us, they still don't know what in hell to do with it. I'd suggested copying all million pages of Remembrance of Things Past in a chain email to thousands of our closest friends just to punk them and keep them busy in their thousands upon thousands of DHS cubicles. The Fusionistas seem like an illiterate lot, with reports neglecting to include even the Basic Five: who, what, when, where and why. The average training period before they get to work culling our emails and Tweets? One whole week. I mean, we knew the government was in a race to the bottom vis a vis education, but this is de trop.

A Senate subcommittee finally did come out with a report today confirming what we already knew: while the spy state is shredding our civil liberties, the information they're coming up with is truly shredder-worthy itself. James Risen of the New York Times writes:

The report found that the centers “forwarded intelligence of uneven quality — oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens’ civil liberties and Privacy Act protections, occasionally taken from already published public sources, and more often than not unrelated to terrorism.”

The investigators reviewed 610 reports produced by the centers over 13 months in 2009 and 2010. Of these, the report said, 188 were never published for use within the Homeland Security Department or other intelligence agencies. Hundreds of draft reports sat for months, awaiting review by homeland security officials, making much of their information obsolete. And some of the reports appeared to be based on previously published information or facts that had long since been reported through the Federal Bureau of Investigation

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Even worse, DHS has "lost" more than $1 billion and even outright lied about the very existence of certain fusion centers. They're called fusion centers because they are supposed to link federal resources with local police agencies. The centers have been implicated in the coordinated national crackdown against Occupy camps last year. Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information law revealed

....that on November 9, two days after a demonstration by 1000 Occupy activists in Chicago protesting social service cuts in that city, the NOC Fusion Desk relayed a request from Chicago Police asking other local police agencies what kind of tactics they were using against Occupy activists. They specifically requested that information be sought from police departments in New York, Oakland, Atlanta, Washington, D.C. Denver, Boston, Portland OR, and Seattle — all the scene of major Occupation actions and of violent police repression.

DHS tried to cover its tracks over its anti-Occupy activities, which were patently illegal. The Fusion Center employees, funnily enough, had obtained most of their information on the Occupy camps from public records and blogs. They were copy-and-pasting plagiarizers as well as spies! Risen recounts several other incidents of DHS incompetence in his Times piece. They range from the comical to the bizarre to the downright frightening. One example:

Last November.... an Illinois center reported that Russian hackers had broken into the computer system of a local water district in Springfield and sent computer commands that triggered a water pump to burn out. But it turned out that a repair technician had remotely accessed the water district’s computer system while he was on vacation in Russia.

Homeland, Homeland Uber Alles is being run by a gang that can't straight-talk, let alone shoot straight.

Occupy the Debates

I know you're all champing at the bit in anticipation of Debate Night this week. How many pre-approved fake spontaneous retorts will erupt from the mealy mouth of Mitt? Just how carefully is Barack Obama being trained to suppress his million-dollar grin as a charm-offensive prelude to every non-answer to every softball question?

Since the trio of presidential Q&As (they're not really debates at all) are privately planned and funded by the exclusive Commission on Presidential Debates, only the two apparatchiks of the Duopoly will be allowed to participate. There will be no Jill Stein, Rocky Anderson, Virgil Goode and Gary Johnson in attendance to rock the leaky ship of state. It's unlikely that the questions most people have on their minds will even be asked.

So to give you the illusion of a participatory democracy, Occupy the Debates.org has a website that does allow you to ask those questions and generally kvetch. You can take a survey about pressing issues. Find out how you can get on Mutiny Radio to rebut the buttheads. There truly are ways to cope with the blatherfests other than drinking and doping and tuning out. It cannot be merely coincidence that our friendly DEA designated this past Saturday as "Get Rid of Your Prescription Drugs Day". As Molly Ivins so wisely said, satire is a deadly weapon when used against those in power.

The League of Women Voters, you may remember, used to run the presidential debates. But that all ended during the 1988 Bush I-Dukakis race, in which those particular duopolists reached a "gentleman's agreement" to throw democracy out the window. They demanded control over the stenographers asking the questions and the height of podiums as well as a new rule making it impossible for third party candidates to share the stage. The League refused to go along and thus was born the corporate Commissariat on Presidential Debates.(CPD)

To give you an idea of how contrived Debate Theatre is, the New York Times ran a puff piece in its Sunday Review section profiling the CPD's executive director, DC socialite Janet Brown. As the candidates over-prepare for their roles in the optical illusion, Ms. Brown is concentrating solely on the optics:

Lately it’s mostly debate set diagrams, which are more like architectural renderings than anything else. They describe the sets, where the candidates are positioned, where the moderator sits, where the eight cameras are placed. They are very detailed and specific in terms of dimensions, the lighting grid and camera placement for exact coverage and clarity of the candidates.

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We also get the earthshaking scoop that Janet Brown adores Marvin Hamlisch tunes (she and hubby Michael Brewer, former Harvard VP, former Wall Street executive, venture capitalist, president of the National Symphony Orchestra, knew him personally!) and eating littleneck clams and Oreo milkshakes, but not together. The Times kindly provides us with a link to the restaurant where the elites get their eats.

And that's about all we unwashed masses apparently need to know, as far as The Times is concerned. But my further research reveals that Janet Brown's Washington socialite mother was the model for a Jeffrey Archer novel. She was not only a member of Nelson Rockefeller's inner circle, she became even more fabulously wealthy marketing a product that resulted from the experimental dipping of her brittle manicured fingers into a concoction of preserved fruit. Those maligned nails ladies made famous by a snobbish attendee at a Romney Hamptons fundraiser could very well be using product invented by the ancestress of the directress of Presidential Propaganda Theatre, Inc.!

Still hoping there will be a lively discussion on the class war and the evils of free market capitalism Wednesday night, or any night? Think again. Just keep track of all the "My Name is Beavis and I'm An Energy Voter" pro-fracking/drilling ads paying for the propaganda, and you'll soon get the drift... the drift to the Far Right. The only cliff we have to fear is the the make-believe cliff where all hope teeters and tumbles down to oblivion.

** Update: The CPD is still mum on the exact terms of the contract Rombama hammered out to ensure each side looks good and remains protected from all scrutiny. A few advertisers have even decided to boycott the event in protest of its anti-democracy format.