Quartz City

Everyone is linking to William Safire’s column today. And yes, it’s that important:

If the Homeland Security Act is not amended before passage, here is what will happen to you:

Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend – all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as “a virtual, centralized grand database.”

To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial sources, add every piece of information that government has about you – passport application, driver’s license and bridge toll records, judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the F.B.I., your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance – and you have the supersnoop’s dream: a “Total Information Awareness” about every U.S. citizen.

This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario. It is what will happen to your personal freedom in the next few weeks if John Poindexter gets the unprecedented power he seeks.

Make it this one. And decide whether you want to switch… to Canada.

I don’t know which is scarier. Bill Moyers’ warning or the ferocity of the attacks against him in PBS’ discussion forums.

Way back in the 1950’s when I first tasted politics and journalism, Republicans briefly controlled the White House and Congress. With the exception of Joseph McCarthy and his vicious ilk, they were a reasonable lot, presided over by that giant war hero, Dwight Eisenhower, who was conservative by temperament and moderate in the use of power.

That brand of Republican is gone. And for the first time in the memory of anyone alive, the entire federal governmen – the Congress, the Executive, the Judiciary – is united behind a right-wing agenda for which George W. Bush believes he now has a mandate.

That mandate includes the power of the state to force pregnant women to give up control over their own lives.

It includes using the taxing power to transfer wealth from working people to the rich.

It includes giving corporations a free hand to eviscerate the environment and control the regulatory agencies meant to hold them accountable.

And it includes secrecy on a scale you cannot imagine. Above all, it means judges with a political agenda appointed for life. If you liked the Supreme Court that put George W. Bush in the White House, you will swoon over what’s coming.

And if you like God in government, get ready for the Rapture. These folks don’t even mind you referring to the GOP as the party of God. Why else would the new House Majority Leader say that the Almighty is using him to promote ‘a Biblical worldview’ in American politics?

So it is a heady time in Washington – a heady time for piety, profits, and military power, all joined at the hip by ideology and money.

Don’t forget the money. It came pouring into this election, to both parties, from corporate America and others who expect the payback. Republicans outraised democrats by $184 million dollars. And came up with the big prize – monopoly control of the American government, and the power of the state to turn their ideology into the law of the land. Quite a bargain at any price.

Provocative Washington Post piece about the privatization of public life, and the shift from being “citizens” to being mere “consumers”.

We are watching the slow-motion collapse of American citizenship. For more than two centuries, ordinary citizens were important actors on this country’s stage. Their vanguard entered political life with a bang in the 18th century, rising up to fire the shot heard ’round the world. Over the ensuing decades, tens of millions more served their revolutionary republic as citizen-soldiers, jurors, taxpayers and citizen-administrators who helped to extend government authority and services across a sparsely populated continent. At the same time, government extended voting rights to citizens once excluded from the electorate.

Now our government no longer needs us. The citizen-soldiers have given way to the professional all-volunteer military and its armada of smart bombs and drone aircraft. The citizen-administrators have disappeared, too, replaced long ago by professional bureaucrats. Americans may still regard each other as fellow citizens with common causes and commitments. But the candidates seeking votes on Tuesday see us as something less: not a coherent public with a collective identity but a swarm of disconnected individuals out to satisfy our personal needs in the political marketplace. We see them, in turn, as boring commercials to be tuned out.

It would be a mistake to conclude, as many commentators do, that Americans are apathetic citizens gone AWOL. But there’s no question that the fundamental relationship between citizen and government has changed. Increasingly, public officials regard us as “customers” rather than as citizens, and there are crucial differences between the two. Citizens own the government. Customers just receive services from it. Citizens belong to a political community with a collective existence and public purposes. Customers are individual purchasers seeking the best deal. Customers may receive courteous service, but they do not own the store.