Following on from yesterday's post about Obama, socialists and control, comes this today.
Bill would give president emergency control of Internet
Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet.
They're not much happier about a revised version that aides to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, have spent months drafting behind closed doors. CNET News has obtained a copy of the 55-page draft (excerpt), which still appears to permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency.
The new version would allow the president to "declare a cybersecurity emergency" relating to "non-governmental" computer networks and do what's necessary to respond to the threat.
Looks like the yanks are starting down that long road we joined in 1997.
5 comments:
"Starting?" "1997"?
This is a much longer process that just the New Labour years. It's simply the latest stage of something that has been going on for more than a century, since the anglosphere's elites were gripped by their version of socialism- corporatist, moral reformist and incrementalist. New Labour didn't invent it, and that's one reason electing Cameron won't change a goddamned thing.
But having said that, yes, Obama is their Blair. Like us, the Americans will find, a few years from now, that drastic changes have been wrought which the majority were barely aware were happening.
The difference between Left parties and Right parties in the anglosphere is merely that the Left have a better revolutionary technic. Right parties will adopt the policies of the left- e.g. terror of racism, homophobia, extreme child protection, diversity, without really understanding why, so their policy implementations are far more fragmented and incoherent.
The Left parties have a considerable heritage of structural theory which directs them to modify political structures in a very organised and successful manner. As such, Obama is the leader of a structural revolution, as was Blair; it's not the surface policies that really matter, but the structural changes that will be made to the political structures of the USA. Once those structural goals have been achieved, the government is then free to make what policies it likes, which is why the first few years of Blair's reign seemed somewhat mild, and even "right wing" on occasion (e.g. on student grants) and then suddenly we caught in a massive rush of policy that seemed almost to come out of nowhere. It was the putting in place of ideological sound apparatchiks imbedded in a carefully designed apparat (such as OFCOM, both FSAs[1], etc) and appropriate enabling legal instruments that was the key thing.
But this is only another lurch forward of a longer process. The USA had the Progressive Era, the New Deal, the Great Society; each of them a period of irreversible anglosocialist structural innovation. Ten years from now the americans will find themselves in an unpleasant place with no hope of reversing out, just as we have.
It's the structure that matters. The Left just understand that far better than anyone else ever has.
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[1] Remember how the Food Standards Agency was sold as simply protecting us from mouldy cheese, but is actually a major enforcer of lifestyle fascism in the "joined up government"?
The fence panels are being slid in and suddenly what seemed open is becoming enclosed.
Shit.
And no coincidence that Rockefeller is behind it?
Ian B wrote: which is why the first few years of Blair's reign seemed somewhat mild, and even "right wing" on occasion (e.g. on student grants) and then suddenly we caught in a massive rush of policy that seemed almost to come out of nowhere.
I agree. I didn't really notice until 2005, when the complete smoking ban began to be openly discussed, and I thought, "They'll never do that!" And then they went and did it.
I've put it down to the the Iraq-driven downfall of Blair, and the emergence of a New Labour fundamentalism to fill the vacuum he left. Blair himself had a great many reservations about a complete smoking ban. He worried about a nanny state. He always had a good sense of what the British people would and wouldn't accept. If he had been the master of the Labour party in 2006 that he had been not 3 years earlier, he could have headed off that fundamentalist upsurge. But by then he'd been fatally weakened.
I don't see any long term 'plan' to what's happening. Or at least I don't see how Reagan and Thatcher might fit into any such plan. Do you remember how unelectable Labour looked back then? Blair's singular feat was to make Labour electable again. In part he did that by accepting the Thatcher market doctrine, and watering down socialism to fit that. Which is why the early Blair years looked a bit "right wing". Now that Blair has gone, and the Labour party has lost his guiding hand, they've simply reverted to their unreconstructed socialist type.
And made themselves unelectable again. Because people aren't going to forget for a long time the smoking ban, the DNA databases, the police powers, the CCTV cameras, the entire apparatus of their bully state.
Ian B wrote "Ten years from now the americans will find themselves in an unpleasant place with no hope of reversing out, just as we have."
There is always a way to 'reverse out'. Once the authoritarian policies start kicking in, it's just a question of time before people call 'enough!' The pity is that the way back is likely to be a lot more painful than the lazy, sleep-walking that got us into this.
http://www.mass.gov/legis/bills/senate/186/st02pdf/st02028.pdf
Massachusetts becomes a police state
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