Friday, February 11, 2011

NOW THAT'S PROGRESSIVE...

Most Americans don't deserve America. A nation founded on basic principles of freedom and civil liberties is a nation where its people should have a healthy skepticism about the reach and power of government. Instead, Americans have diluted and diminished and given away their liberty and privacy out of fear and indifference.

The latest assault on privacy comes from auto insurer Progressive Corporation. The company is offering up to a 30% discount on auto insurance if a customer will allow them to attach a small device to the car's on board diagnostic computer. The device would measure when customers use their vehicle, how far they drive and how hard they brake. Progressive would use the information to determine which drivers are less likely to get in an accident. So far at least 25% of customers who are eligible have signed up to participate. Allstate, State Farm and other insurers are rushing to follow with similar offers.

I know some claim we have no privacy left anymore so why worry. The Wall Street Journal has run a series of articles chronicling all the ways advertisers are spying on you every time you go online. They are now able to "fingerprint" your computer and track where you go, what you see and search, and what you buy whether you want them to or not. The "cookie" is now so yesterday. Cars are sold with On Star and other services connecting you to some central control. Your cell phone can be tracked even when it's off and even the Fast Pass you use on Bay Area bridges tracks your movements and the information is available to be subpoenaed.

There are companies like Foursquare which reward you for "checking in" to a store or restaurant and letting others know you are there. Add Facebook and Twitter, and maybe it would appear those under the age of thirty find privacy to be an outmoded concept. Now, to save a few bucks, you can allow insurance companies to monitor how you drive. Really? Insurance companies?

It doesn't take any kind of psychic abilities to see the potential abuse of this latest "advance". At first it will be voluntary. Eventually, it will be mandated to get auto insurance. The devices will get more sophisticated and measure speed, driving habits etc and all of this information will be stored and available to the government and to any lawyer with a subpoena. If this had existed after September 11th, can you imagine what Bush and company would have done? They would have demanded every piece of information about every driver under scrutiny or maybe just every driver in the country. We know corporate America will cooperate and they don't even require a warrant.

I have to admit I'm baffled by the cavalier attitude Americans seem to have when it comes to their privacy and the right to move freely, talk freely, shop freely, email freely, and search freely without anyone knowing what they are doing. The old saw,"...if you aren’t doing anything wrong, you don't have anything to fear," is such an anachronism when the people who write the laws, and prosecute and determine guilt, are the same ones watching what you do. Even if it's not the government, the idea corporate America is building profiles on each online user in order to sell products, without any permission, smacks of a big brother Orwell couldn't have fathomed.

The same people who populate Tea Party rallies and scream about intrusive Obama care, are the same ones who championed the Patriot Act and defended warrantless searches, secret national security letters and illegal data mining of private communications and now they are handing over their personal habits and data to an insurance company to make a couple of bucks. Who says irony is dead.

Perhaps this is a fight we have already lost. Will there be a car sold in this country which won't connect to the Internet? In a Super Bowl ad, Chevy bragged about the "cruise" which connects real time to Facebook. Smartphones have apps where the phone can spy on you and apps which allow you to use it to spy on others. However, to save a few bucks I will not be handing any driving information to any insurance company so they can have me in their central file and I will continue to raise alarms about the continued assault on our privacy. The right to freedom of movement and association and personal shopping and other habits...now that's progressive. What do you think?

7 comments:

  1. Dear Lionoftheleft,
    Your remarks are totally consistent with the stated goals of the New World Order which has assumed control over the minds of Americans.
    It is all over. Here, everyone reading this, lock onto this and, if you can find a way to deal with this, let us all know with your comments below!
    -------------------------------------------
    2011: A Brave New Dystopia
    Monday 27 December 2010
    by: Chris Hedges | Truthdig

    The two greatest visions of a future dystopia were George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” The debate, between those who watched our descent towards corporate totalitarianism, was who was right. Would we be, as Orwell wrote, dominated by a repressive surveillance and security state that used crude and violent forms of control? Or would we be, as Huxley envisioned, entranced by entertainment and spectacle, captivated by technology and seduced by profligate consumption to embrace our own oppression?

    It turns out Orwell and Huxley were both right. Huxley saw the first stage of our enslavement. Orwell saw the second.

    We have been gradually disempowered by a corporate state that, as Huxley foresaw, seduced and manipulated us through sensual gratification, cheap mass-produced goods, boundless credit, political theater and amusement. While we were entertained, the regulations that once kept predatory corporate power in check were dismantled, the laws that once protected us were rewritten and we were impoverished. Now that credit is drying up, good jobs for the working class are gone forever and mass-produced goods are unaffordable, we find ourselves transported from “Brave New World” to “1984.”

    The state, crippled by massive deficits, endless war and corporate malfeasance, is sliding toward bankruptcy. It is time for Big Brother to take over from Huxley’s feelies, the orgy-porgy and the centrifugal bumble-puppy. We are moving from a society where we are skillfully manipulated by lies and illusions to one where we are overtly controlled.

    Orwell warned of a world where books were banned. Huxley warned of a world where no one wanted to read books. Orwell warned of a state of permanent war and fear. Huxley warned of a culture diverted by mindless pleasure. Orwell warned of a state where every conversation and thought was monitored and dissent was brutally punished. Huxley warned of a state where a population, preoccupied by trivia and gossip, no longer cared about truth or information. Orwell saw us frightened into submission. Huxley saw us seduced into submission. But Huxley, we are discovering, was merely the prelude to Orwell. Huxley understood the process by which we would be complicit in our own enslavement. Orwell understood the enslavement. Now that the corporate coup is over, we stand naked and defenseless. We are beginning to understand, as Karl Marx knew, that unfettered and unregulated capitalism is a brutal and revolutionary force that exploits human beings and the natural world until exhaustion or collapse.

    THIS COMMENT TO BE CONTINUED IN NEXT COMMENT

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  2. “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake,” Orwell wrote in 1984:
    “We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”

    The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin uses the term “inverted totalitarianism” in his book “Democracy Incorporated” to describe our political system. It is a term that would make sense to Huxley. In inverted totalitarianism, the sophisticated technologies of corporate control, intimidation and mass manipulation, which far surpass those employed by previous totalitarian states, are effectively masked by the glitter, noise and abundance of a consumer society. Political participation and civil liberties are gradually surrendered. The corporation state, hiding behind the smokescreen of the public relations industry, the entertainment industry and the tawdry materialism of a consumer society, devours us from the inside out. It owes no allegiance to us or the nation. It feasts upon our carcass.

    The corporate state does not find its expression in a demagogue or charismatic leader. It is defined by the anonymity and facelessness of the corporation. Corporations, who hire attractive spokespeople like Barack Obama, control the uses of science, technology, education and mass communication. They control the messages in movies and television. And, as in “Brave New World,” they use these tools of communication to bolster tyranny.
    Our systems of mass communication, as Wolin writes, “block out, eliminate whatever might introduce qualification, ambiguity, or dialogue, anything that might weaken or complicate the holistic force of their creation, to its total impression.”

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  3. The result is a monochromatic system of information. Celebrity courtiers, masquerading as journalists, experts and specialists, identify our problems and patiently explain the parameters. All those who argue outside the imposed parameters are dismissed as irrelevant cranks, extremists or members of a radical left. Prescient social critics, from Ralph Nader to Noam Chomsky, are banished. Acceptable opinions have a range of A to B. The culture, under the tutelage of these corporate courtiers, becomes, as Huxley noted, a world of cheerful conformity, as well as an endless and finally fatal optimism. We busy ourselves buying products that promise to change our lives, make us more beautiful, confident or successful as we are steadily stripped of rights, money and influence. All messages we receive through these systems of communication, whether on the nightly news or talk shows like “Oprah,” promise a brighter, happier tomorrow. And this, as Wolin points out, is “the same ideology that invites corporate executives to exaggerate profits and conceal losses, but always with a sunny face.” We have been entranced, as Wolin writes, by “continuous technological advances” that “encourage elaborate fantasies of individual prowess, eternal youthfulness, beauty through surgery, actions measured in nanoseconds: a dream-laden culture of ever-expanding control and possibility, whose denizens are prone to fantasies because the vast majority have imagination but little scientific knowledge.”

    Our manufacturing base has been dismantled. Speculators and swindlers have looted the U.S. Treasury and stolen billions from small shareholders who had set aside money for retirement or college. Civil liberties, including habeas corpus and protection from warrantless wiretapping, have been taken away. Basic services, including public education and health care, have been handed over to the corporations to exploit for profit. The few who raise voices of dissent, who refuse to engage in the corporate happy talk, are derided by the corporate establishment as freaks.

    Attitudes and temperament have been cleverly engineered by the corporate state, as with Huxley’s pliant characters in “Brave New World.” The book’s protagonist, Bernard Marx, turns in frustration to his girlfriend Lenina:

    'Don’t you wish you were free, Lenina?' he asks.

    'I don’t know that you mean. I am free, free to have the most wonderful time. Everybody’s happy nowadays.'

    He laughed, 'Yes, ‘Everybody’s happy nowadays.’ We have been giving the children that at five. But wouldn’t you like to be free to be happy in some other way, Lenina? In your own way, for example; not in everybody else’s way.'

    'I don’t know what you mean,' she repeated.

    The façade is crumbling. And as more and more people realize that they have been used and robbed, we will move swiftly from Huxley’s “Brave New World” to Orwell’s “1984.” The public, at some point, will have to face some very unpleasant truths. The good-paying jobs are not coming back. The largest deficits in human history mean that we are trapped in a debt peonage system that will be used by the corporate state to eradicate the last vestiges of social protection for citizens, including Social Security. The state has devolved from a capitalist democracy to neo-feudalism. And when these truths become apparent, anger will replace the corporate-imposed cheerful conformity. The bleakness of our post-industrial pockets, where some 40 million Americans live in a state of poverty and tens of millions in a category called “near poverty,” coupled with the lack of credit to save families from foreclosures, bank repossessions and bankruptcy from medical bills, means that inverted totalitarianism will no longer work.

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  4. We increasingly live in Orwell’s Oceania, not Huxley’s The World State. Osama bin Laden plays the role assumed by Emmanuel Goldstein in “1984.”
    Goldstein, in the novel, is the public face of terror. His evil machinations and clandestine acts of violence dominate the nightly news. Goldstein’s image appears each day on Oceania’s television screens as part of the nation’s “Two Minutes of Hate” daily ritual. And without the intervention of the state, Goldstein, like bin Laden, will kill you. All excesses are justified in the titanic fight against evil personified.

    The psychological torture of Pvt.Bradley Manning
    —who has now been imprisoned for seven months without being convicted of any crime—
    mirrors the breaking of the dissident Winston Smith at the end of “1984.”

    Manning is being held as a “maximum custody detainee” in the brig at Marine Corps Base Quantico, in Virginia.
    He spends 23 of every 24 hours alone.
    He is denied exercise.
    He cannot have a pillow or sheets for his bed. Army doctors have been plying him with antidepressants.

    The cruder forms of torture of the Gestapo have been replaced with refined Orwellian techniques, largely developed by government psychologists, to turn dissidents like Manning into vegetables.

    We break souls as well as bodies.

    It is more effective.
    Now we can all be taken to Orwell’s dreaded Room 101 to become compliant and harmless. These “special administrative measures” are regularly imposed on our dissidents,
    including Syed Fahad Hashmi,
    who was imprisoned under similar conditions
    for three years before going to trial.

    The techniques have psychologically maimed thousands of detainees in our black sites around the globe.
    They are the staple form of control in our maximum security prisons where the corporate state makes war on our most politically astute underclass—African-Americans.
    It all presages the shift from Huxley to Orwell.

    “Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling,” Winston Smith’s torturer tells him in “1984.”
    “Everything will be dead inside you.
    Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity.
    You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”

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  5. The noose is tightening.
    The era of amusement is being replaced by the era of repression.
    Tens of millions of citizens have had their e-mails and phone records turned over to the government.
    We are the most monitored and spied-on citizenry in human history.
    Many of us have our daily routine caught on dozens of security cameras.
    Our proclivities and habits are recorded on the Internet.
    Our profiles are electronically generated.
    Our bodies are patted down at airports and filmed by scanners.
    And public service announcements, car inspection stickers, and public transportation posters constantly urge us to report suspicious activity.
    The enemy is everywhere.

    Those who do not comply with the dictates of the war on terror, a war which, as Orwell noted, is endless, are brutally silenced.

    The draconian security measures used to cripple protests at the G-20 gatherings in Pittsburgh and Toronto were wildly disproportionate for the level of street activity.
    But they sent a clear message—DO NOT TRY THIS. The FBI’s targeting of antiwar and Palestinian activists, which in late September saw agents raid homes in Minneapolis and Chicago, is a harbinger of what is to come for all who dare defy the state’s official Newspeak.
    The agents—our Thought Police—seized phones, computers, documents and other personal belongings. Subpoenas to appear before a grand jury have since been served on 26 people.
    The subpoenas cite federal law prohibiting “providing material support or resources to designated foreign terrorist organizations.”

    Terror, even for those who have nothing to do with terror, becomes the blunt instrument used by Big Brother to protect us from ourselves.

    “Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating?” Orwell wrote. “It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself.”


    Chris Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute. His newest book is “Death of the Liberal Class.”

    All republished content that appears on Truthout has been obtained by permission or license.

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  6. I won't be voluntarily giving my information to any insurance company. However, I can see a day where insurance companies will influence legislators to mandate this device be included in new cars. They already have legislators mandating auto insurance. They have legislators mandating that we buy health insurance (I would like to see single payer health care, like medicare). I don't smoke and don't like the smell, but the fact is the insurance companies are a major force behind anti-smoking legislation. I know there is a substantial cost to society for caring for people who smoked. There is also a cost to society to not having auto and health insurance. Similiarly, the insurance companies will save lots of money if the device you mentioned is installed in cars. There are lots of examples where we give up freedom to save a few bucks. Technological fixes are easy and cheap, but real solutions to society's problems are difficult. Ironically, they're cheaper in the long run. They also preserve one's freedoms. You're right Bernie, most Americans don't deserve the freedoms they get as Americans.

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  7. The freedom killer is the ban of all bans: New York's ban on smoking in public parks, beaches, etc..

    I never thought it would see the light of day... And I do not smoke.

    There has got to be something in the air in New York that people are breathing other than cigarette smoke to propel them to pass this insidious law.

    Talk about infringement of our civil liberties.

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