Poo-tee-weet

Glenn Greenwald goes on . . . and on and on and on today in his continuing efforts to bore me out of caring about the question of corporate collusion in government surveillance of citizens. He writes at some length about the cooperative efforts between telecoms and government agencies along these lines. Ike had a phrase for this sort of thing. I won't remind you. Greenwald:

There simply is no separation between these corporations and the military and intelligence agencies of the Federal Government. They meet and plan and agree so frequently, and at such high levels, that they practically form a consortium.

You'll hear no argument out of us. But then Greenwald, as is his wont, pivots to toss off a parenthetical observation that, were it true, would entirely obviate everything he's just written:

There is obviously nothing inherently wrong with corporations competing for lucrative government contracts.

Obviously. Reader, I ask you why this government or any should have enough lucre to make those contracts worth the competition.

Greenwald doesn't claim to be a liberal or progressive. He sometimes identifies with a vague libertarianism (as if there's any other kind!), but most often seems to see himself as a disaffected conservative, pushed aside in part because of his sexuality and in larger part because of the abandonment of conservativisms rhetorical--if not actual--committment to constitutional government, the old Republic, and so forth. I'm inclined to agree with this latter self-characterization. Greenwald is basically a defender of the status quo ante. The conditions of said status quo never actually obtained, but conservativism in all its forms has always been essentially arcadian, so I won't bore you with further notes on the fantasism at its core. Greenwald isn't exactly naive, but he's taken a very childish, civics-class notion of American public life and government to heart as a sort of temps perdu to be searched out and regained. I'll let the Proust fans comment on the irony of that idea.

Ultimately Greenwald (and I use him as an exemplar of this view; he isn't alone in it, and I don't mean to single him out) evinces a belief that the United States as constituted since roughly the turn of the twentieth century and the dawn of the Progressive Era represents a fine institutional model, and that the horrors, wars, and degredations we currently face result from the corruption of men and institutions by other corrupt, power-hungry, and ideological men. As Menken said the English used to say, I find myself quite unable to associate myself with that thesis.

The idea that a massive government- and military-subsidized corporatist state is eminently corruptible but equally redeemable depends on several fallacies. Consider Greenwald's argument. On the one hand, it's "obviously" fine for corporations to take billions of dollars from the government, sometimes in the form of direct subsidies, but otherwise through the only slightly subtler means of government contracts. On the other hand, corporations are not supposed to do the bidding of the government--to accede, say, to government demands for private records, because of some sort of committment to the principles of the Constitution. It sounds absurd when I write it here, but that is essentially what Greenwald is arguing: that corporations in these instances should act as our bulwarks against government intrusion--out, one presumes, of some kind of moral calculation. I should hardly have to note the foolishness of such a notion. Corporations, despite the legal fiction of their personhood, are not people. The entire idea of the modern corporation is amoral and apersonal. That's why Joseph Nacchio of Qwest was abberational and not normative.

Greenwald:

This behavior--having telecoms secretly turn over to the Federal Government all information about the communications of Americans--is exactly what multiple federal laws were designed to prevent. We criminalized exactly that behavior through the laws we enacted.

And now that it is revealed that the Federal government and many (though not all) telecoms continuously broke those laws--motivated by profit in the case of telecoms and by a desire for unchecked surveillance power in the case of the Bush administration--our political establishment and Congress are working hand-in-hand to prevent any further disclosures of this lawbreaking and to forever prevent any accountability for it. Merely to describe this behavior is to demonstrate its profound corruption and threat to the very concept of an open democratic government operating under the "rule of law."

Let's ask Mr. Eric Blair what he has to say about it.

A Party member lives from birth to death under the eye of the Thought Police. Even when he is alone he can never be sure that he is alone. Wherever he may be, asleep or awake, working or resting, in his bath or in bed, he can be inspected without warning and without knowing that he is being inspected. Nothing that he does is indifferent. His friendships, his relaxations, his behaviour towards his wife and children, the expression of his face when he is alone, the words he mutters in sleep, even the characteristic movements of his body, are all jealously scrutinized. Not only any actual misdemeanour, but any eccentricity, however small, any change of habits, any nervous mannerism that could possibly be the symptom of an inner struggle, is certain to be detected. He has no freedom of choice in any direction whatever. On the other hand his actions are not regulated by law or by any clearly formulated code of behaviour. In Oceania there is no law.

So it goes.