The Rise of the American Corporate Security State Six Reasons to Be Afraid

39 Pages·2014·2 MB·English

An Excerpt From

The Rise of the American Corporate Security State
Six Reasons to Be Afraid

by Beatrice Edwards
Published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers

The Rise of
the American
Corporate
Security State
Six Reasons to Be Afraid
Beatrice Edwards
The Rise of the American Corporate Security State
Copyright © 2014 by Beatrice Edwards
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distrib-
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First Edition
Paperback print edition ISBN 978-1-62656-194-6
PDF e-book ISBN 978-1-62656-195-3
IDPF e-book ISBN 978-1-62656-196-0
2014-1
Interior design and production by Dovetail Publishing Services.
Cover design by Brad Foltz.
For the staff and clients at the Government
Accountability Project, who never met a windmill
that wouldn’t tilt.
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Contents
Foreword vii
Preface ix
Part I The National Security State 1
Chapter 1 The Government-Corporate Complex:
What It Knows about You 3
Reason to be afRaid #1
Average citizens are subject to ever-expanding surveillance
and data collection by the government-corporate complex.
Chapter 2 Official Secrets: Absolute Control 17
Reason to be afRaid #2
Control of information by the government-corporate complex
is expanding
Chapter 3 The Constitution Impaired: The Bill of Rights Annulled 27
Reason to be afRaid #3
The separation of powers established by the Constitution is
eroding. Rights guaranteed by constitutional amendments are
becoming irrelevant. Reporting a crime may be a crime, and
informing the public of the truth is treason.
Part II The Corporate Security Complex 39
Chapter 4 Zombie Bill: The Corporate Security
Campaign That Will Not Die 41
Reason to be afRaid #4
The government-corporate surveillance complex is
consolidating. What has been a confidential but informal
collaboration now seeks to legalize its special status.
Chapter 5 Financial Reform: Dead on Arrival 57
Reason to be afRaid #5
Financial reforms enacted after the crisis are inoperable and
ineffective because of inadequate investigations and intensive
corporate lobbying.
v
The Rise of the American Corporate Security State
Chapter 6 Prosecution Deferred: Justice Denied 69
Reason to be afRaid #6
Systemic corruption and a fundamental conflict of interest are
driving us toward the precipice of new economic crises.
Chapter 7 The New Regime 79
Acknowledgments 89
Endnotes 91
Index 99
About the Author 103
About the Government Accountability Project 104
vi
Foreword
By Jesselyn Radack
In the pages that follow, Bea Edwards shows the post-9/11
merger of corporate wealth and government power in the United States—
beneath a thinning veneer of democracy. The book in your hands explains
the way in which this private/public collaboration gives policy-making
over to profit-seeking corporate interests, which then become a direct
threat to our civil rights and our way of life.
Peace and financial stability are the first casualties. Increasingly, well-
connected corporate directors, with their privileged access to military
resources and the national treasury, placed the country on a permanent
war footing even as they dismantled government regulation of their busi-
nesses. They made a series of decisions and actions that the public never
considered, debated, or approved, even indirectly.
The Rise of the American Corporate Security State examines the way
corporate power behaves when it takes a dominant role in government
policy-making and explains the advent of endless war. For profit-seekers,
war is desirable for three reasons:
1. It is extremely lucrative for some companies.
2. The withdrawal of civil liberties is simpler in wartime because
people are frightened.
3. The public accepts greater official secrecy because the nation is
under threat of attack.
War justifies the dragnet electronic surveillance of Americans; the
government claims to protect us by searching for the terrorists among us.
The government also justifies withholding information about its actions,
citing national security.
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The Rise of the American Corporate Security State
To comingle private wealth and public authority, US elites are pro-
moting an antidemocratic legal regime that allows the exchange of con-
sumer information among the corporations that now own the nation’s
critical infrastructure—banks, power companies, transportation compa-
nies, and telecoms—and America’s intelligence agencies. This new legal
collaboration will provide certain private interests with the cover of legal
immunity for their invasive surveillance. It will eradicate the remains of
your privacy and deliver your personal data to the government. Should
you protest or demand redress, you will find that you have lost your legal
right to remedy.
As an attorney, I represent whistleblowers from the National Security
Agency, who speak about the intrusiveness and illegality of bulk surveil-
lance of Americans. And I, too, became a whistleblower at the Justice
Department when I witnessed the slide of the US government away from
the Bill of Rights into a morass of illegal detention and torture. In dif-
ferent ways, through different means, our government accused my clients
and me of betraying the country. But the opposite was true. We remained
loyal to the Constitution, while our government betrayed it. When we
spoke up, the Justice Department turned on us. Every day, we experience
firsthand the consequences of the government’s unwanted attentions. We
know what happens when your government suddenly notices you—and
sees you as a threat.
Edward Snowden, of course, knows this, too. He is stateless because
he exposed the extent to which our government has compromised our
constitutional rights and promoted the joint operation of private and
public sector surveillance—under the guise of counterterrorism. The
significance of his disclosures cannot be overestimated. He is revealing
the whole ugly antidemocratic project, and he came just in time. Bea
Edwards’s analysis explains why we must act on what he’s showing us, and
if we do, we can back away from the brink of permanent war and gross
economic inequality where the Corporate Security State is leading us.
viii