Fascism for Dummies: San Francisco Cops Help Apple Corporate Security Search a Man's Home

The Fascist State lays claim to rule in the economic field no less than in others; it makes its action felt throughout the length and breadth of the country by means of its corporate, social, and educational institutions, and all the political, economic, and spiritual forces of the nation, organized in their respective associations, circulate within the State. — Benito Mussolini, "The Doctrine of Fascism," 1935

This past decade, the Apple Corporation has risen to become one of the wealthiest and most powerful private concerns in the world. Apple's public image may be benign, but no organization can ascend to such lofty heights as a globe-spanning colossus without being utterly ruthless. Just how ruthless? SF Weekly has the story:

The bizarre saga involving a lost prototype of the iPhone 5 has taken another interesting turn. Contradicting past statements that no records exist of police involvement in the search for the lost prototype, San Francisco Police Department spokesman Lt. Troy Dangerfield now tells SF Weekly that "three or four" SFPD officers accompanied two Apple security officials in an unusual search of a Bernal Heights man's home.

Dangerfield says that, after conferring with Apple and the captain of the Ingleside police station, he has learned that plainclothes SFPD officers went with private Apple detectives to the home of Sergio Calderón, a 22-year-old resident of Bernal Heights. According to Dangerfield, the officers "did not go inside the house," but stood outside while the Apple employees scoured Calderón's home, car, and computer files for any trace of the lost iPhone 5. The phone was not found, and Calderón denies that he ever possessed it.

In an interview with SF Weekly last night, Calderón told us that six badge-wearing visitors came to his home in July to inquire about the phone. Calderón said none of them acknowledged being employed by Apple, and one of them offered him $300, and a promise that the owner of the phone would not press charges, if he would return the device.

The visitors also allegedly threatened him and his family, asking questions about their immigration status. "One of the officers is like, 'Is everyone in this house an American citizen?' They said we were all going to get into trouble," Calderón said.

One of the officers left a phone number with him, which SF Weekly traced to Anthony Colon, an investigator employed at Apple, who declined to comment when we reached him.

Reached this afternoon, Calderón confirmed that only two of the six people who came to his home actually entered the house. He said those two did not specifically state they were police officers.

However, he said he was under the impression that they were all police, since they were part of the group outside that identified themselves as SFPD officials. The two who entered the house did not disclose that they were private security officers, according to Calderón.

"When they came to my house, they said they were SFPD," Calderón said. "I thought they were SFPD. That's why I let them in." He said he would not have permitted the search if he had been aware the two people conducting it were not actually police officers.

SF Weekly goes on raise the pertinent question:

At the least, the incident is sure to raise questions about the propriety of multiple SFPD officers helping private detectives conduct a search -- which was never properly recorded, per standard police operating procedure -- of somebody's home. "Apple came to us saying that they were looking for a lost item, and some plainclothes officers responded out to the house with them," Dangerfield said. "My understanding is that they stood outside." He added, "They just assisted Apple to the address."

Because we citizens all know that if we had something stolen from us, the police would be sure to assign no less than four detectives to go with us to the suspect's house and attempt to get it back. Wait a minute...they wouldn't? In fact, we'd be lucky if they ever exerted any more effort than just filling out a police report? Sorry, I must have been thinking about some other America.

So basically what we have here is the spectacle of police officers allowing themselves to be used as enforcers for corporate America. The citizenry of San Francisco should loudly demand a full investigation of this abuse of power and punishment for everyone found to be accountable. But of course they probably won't, and another awful precedent will have been established eroding what still remains of our already tattered civil liberties. What Mussolini was describing in the quote above was fascism as the combination of corporate and state power. Welcome to our brave new world.

Top Military Brass Cry Like Spoiled Children Over Proposed Cuts

Chart: World's top seven military budgets by country, courtesy Wikipedia

I know that many of my readers share my belief that the first cuts in America’s out-of-control deficit spending ought to come out of the Pentagon’s budget before any social programs are touched. Direct and indirect military spending adds up to more than one-fourth of the total federal budget. America spends as much on its military, in fact, as nearly every other country in the world combined.

Think for a minute about how insane that is. There is no country or combination of countries in the world that are a realistic threat to the United States. The United States Military does not “defend” America. Instead, it maintains over 700 military bases around the world, policing the globe to make it safe for American international conglomerates to make a buck, and also, not incidentally, to enrich the very defense contractors many of the top brass go to work for after they retire.

According to Wikipedia, America’s direct military spending in 2010 was $687 billion. That means we could slash such outlays by 75%, to $171 billion, and still be way ahead of the world’s number two nation, China ($114 billion). Doing so would require ending the pointless occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the ongoing aerial attacks in Libya, Yemen and Pakistan. It would require closing our overseas bases and bringing all the troops back home. But guess what? If we did all of that, we would still be completely immune from conventional military attack.

But that is not the way the military sees it. Just yesterday, I found this little piece of Pentagon advocacy masquerading as legitimate journalism in the Examiner.com:

According General Martin Dempsey, President Obama’s nominee to be the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, it would be "extraordinarily difficult and very high risk" to cut $800 billion from defense spending as is proposed by President Barack Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid as part of efforts to reduce the national debt.

General Dempsey accurately points out that "national security didn't cause the debt crisis nor will it solve it.” Despite this fact, Senate Democrats and the President continue to insist on cutting defense to pay for deficit reduction anywhere from $400 billion to over $800 billion.

While many local political leaders -- governors, mayors, county executives and their staffs -- believe it's better to reduce the bloated military budget than cutting social programs, they forget the axiom, "We must fight them over there, so we don't have to fight them over here.”

Wow—let’s take those three awful paragraphs one by one. First, we must remember that the $800 billion Obama and Reid proposed cutting was spread out over ten years, meaning that it represents only $80 billion per year. That would eliminate exactly 11.6% of the direct military budget. Given how much money the Pentagon wastes every year on unnecessary weapons systems, for example, that would hardly represent a “very high risk” to anything, except maybe for some defense contractors’ bank balances.

Let’s next examine General Dempsey’s quote in the second paragraph, "national security didn't cause the debt crisis nor will it solve it.” National security may not have caused the crisis, but out-of-control national security spending more than played its part. Anyone remember the so-called “peace dividend” that was supposed to come after the end of the Cold War, allowing the United States to spend more on butter and less on guns? Whatever happened to that, anyway?

But it’s the third paragraph and the quote from the author of the article that really makes my head hurt: "We must fight them over there, so we don't have to fight them over here.” Who exactly are we going to have to fight over here? The Chinese barely even have a navy, let alone an invasion fleet. Check the other countries on the chart at the top of this page depicting the world’s largest defense budgets. France, the UK, Japan and Germany are all currently American allies, and the only threat Russia poses to America is with its aging nuclear arsenal—something which hardly justifies spending approximately $2000 for every man, woman, and child in the United States EVERY SINGLE YEAR.

I’ll actually flip General Dempsey’s argument back around on him. Right now the debt crisis is in fact the biggest national security threat currently facing America. Massive cuts being made in social spending to maintain the military will result in widespread civil unrest and violence here at home. Continuing to deficit spend as we have to avoid cuts in both social spending and the military will result in a rapid devaluation of the dollar and skyrocketing oil and food prices. This will exacerbate the pressure those factors are already placing on autocratic Middle Eastern regimes such as Saudi Arabia. Should Saudi Arabia fall, world oil prices would skyrocket past $200 a barrel, domestic gas prices would quickly shoot towards $10 a gallon and America’s consumer economy would quickly collapse, making it unable to continue to support a massive military-industrial complex.

So, General Dempsey, it’s like the saying on the old car repair commercial, “you can pay me now or you can pay me later.” You can accept Obama and Reid’s relatively minor cuts now, or you and your Pentagon buddies can face the collapse of everything you hold dear in relatively short order. Collapse is, of course, inevitable anyway. But all you are doing by being so obdurate is hastening the date of your own inevitable and well-deserved demise.

1972: Tricky Dick Successfully Cons the Working People

Not long ago, I finished reading author Rick Perlstein’s excellent biographical work, Nixonland, which is essentially a social and political history of the United States from 1964-1972. To me, this period is THE pivotal moment in recent American history. Not only did it see the coming of age of our largest and most influential generation, but it also marked the culmination of the progress that America liberalism made in reshaping the nation beginning with the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932. Not incidentally, it was also the moment when America’s domestic oil production peaked and began a slow decline that has closely mirrored that of the country as a whole.

Perlstein’s account shows how the seemingly disgraced former Vice President dusted himself off after his narrow 1960 campaign defeat by John F. Kennedy and his subsequent loss in the 1962 California governor’s race to ride a wave of public reaction and resentment to the White House in 1968. It’s a fascinating and ultimately depressing story. Nixon was perhaps the shrewdest politician to occupy the Oval Office during the post-World War Two period. He was also the first one willing to do ANYTHING, however damaging to the country, to get elected.

During the run-up to the 1968 election, Nixon figured out that exploiting the growing backlash against the antiwar and civil rights movements was the key to victory. Never mind that these movements had history on their side and held the moral high ground. When it came to doing the right thing versus exploiting the fear and loathing of the electorate, Nixon invariably chose the latter throughout his long political career. Once in office, he cynically prolonged and expanded the scope of the Vietnam War for political advantage after making vague promises during the campaign that he would find a peaceful solution.

As he geared up for reelection in 1972, the increasingly paranoid Nixon became obsessed with victory at all costs. He raised tens of millions of dollars for the effort from corporate America, an unprecedented sum at the time. With some of that cash, he financed his own domestic spying operation headquartered out of the basement of the White House. Among the antics of the so-called “Plumbers” was to break into the office of the psychiatrist who was treating Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. They then decided to get really cute, and on June 17, 1972, led by ex-FBI agent and all around maniac G. Gordon Liddy, broke into Democratic Party campaign headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington.

During that campaign, Nixon’s opponent was Senator George McGovern, the last true progressive to win the nomination of one of the two major parties. In addition to being a World War Two veteran, McGovern was a fundamentally decent man who was motivated to run in the first place by his passionate opposition to the Vietnam War. On economic issues, McGovern stood far to the left of Nixon, and was a strong advocate for the poor in the best tradition of the New Deal and Great Society. Beyond ending the Vietnam War, he also proposed a whopping 37% reduction in Pentagon spending. Now THAT was change you could believe in, the American electorate has not had such a clearly defined choice in any election since that year.

Nixon clearly represented the worst excesses of postwar America, while McGovern tried to defeat him by appealing to what Lincoln once called, “the better angels of our nature.” Of course, we all know what happened next. Nixon won reelection with more than 61% of the vote, meaning that nearly two-thirds of all Americans who showed up at the polls supported a figure with a long reputation as a political hatchet man who had not ended the divisive war he had promised he would end. Nixon successfully convinced millions of working and middle class voters that the hippies and the civil rights marchers were a greater threat than the big corporations that had underwritten his reelection effort.

Nixon’s resounding victory set the stage for the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 with the support of many of those same working and middle class voters. It was Reagan, serving as corporate America’s first hand puppet president, who ratcheted up the class warfare by the financial elites that is reaching its zenith today under a Democratic president who is raising so much corporate cash for his own reelection effort it would have made even Tricky Dick blush.

Nixon was ultimately done in by his own hubris, and the Watergate scandal utterly consumed his presidency before his second term was even half over. Back then, the political system was still functioning as it should, and there was still this quaint notion that no person, not even the president, is above the law. That ideal was upheld when Nixon was forced to resign in 1974, much to the chagrin of two young Nixon aides named Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who vowed that such an usurpation of executive power would never happen again. Thirty years later, they and their neoconservative fellow travelers completed the effective destruction of American representative democracy under George W. Bush.

America today finds itself rapidly approaching the endgame of four decades of disastrous economic and foreign policies that have hollowed out the nation’s public finances and are now destroying the working and middle classes. It’s been a long, strange trip, indeed, since the days when Tricky Dick politically kneecapped his genteel rival from South Dakota. During the 1972 campaign, in the first instance of what would become a distressingly familiar pattern, the electorate decided to trade, in the immortal words of Benjamin Franklin, “a little liberty for a little safety.” In the long run, just as Franklin predicted, they have actually gotten neither.

Where Were You When the Walls Went UP?

I used to consider myself extremely fortunate to have graduated from college the very year that the Berlin Wall fell--a very exciting time to be a young American just embarking on your working career. The Cold War was over and the future seemed so bright that we had to wear shades, but no longer to shield us from the glare of a possible nuclear holocaust. Where were you when The Wall came down? That was a question many of us asked each other back then in our enthusiasm for the future.

Two years later the Soviet Union collapsed for good and by the following autumn I had relocated from Chicago to Washington, DC. It was an exciting to be living in the nation’s capital. Bill Clinton was elected President less than two months after I got here, and even if you weren’t terribly political you could tell there was a sea change in the air as a stuffy generation of older politicos gave way a young and vibrant new generation. We were going to change the world back then, using the so-called “Peace Dividend” to help America finally live up to its values and principles.

So what the hell happened?

The shortcomings of Bill Clinton as a “leader” are well documented and need not be recounted here. The first Baby Boomer president turned out to be just as superficial and narcissistic as the stereotype that bedevils his generation in general. He was followed, of course, by an even worse Boomer in Junior Bush; the two of them representing the ying and yang of college age 1960s youth—counterculture on the one hand and establishment on the other.

Between them they managed to oversee the completion of the project to wreck American representative democracy that gained steam with the election of Ronald Reagan back in 1980. The central component of this effort was our nation’s transition from republic to empire, and nowhere has this transformation been more physically evident than in the Imperial Capital.

Amazing as it seems now, when I first moved to DC an American citizen wanting to visit one of their representatives or even the office of a government official could walk right into a federal building without having to pass through security barriers or enduring an airport-security style screening. Security in the nation’s capital as we know it today didn’t really start to ratchet up until after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, when Clinton took the first big step by ordering that Pennsylvania Avenue be closed in front of the White House:


Of course the security measures then REALLY took off after 9/11. Partly because of fear of the next terrorist attack, but mostly because Beltway bandit contractors and their paid army of lobbyists recognized just how much money there was to be made from the latest political buzzword. No elected official or senior government bureaucrat was ever going to take a chance at being accused of being “soft” on security measures. Certainly not if he or she wanted to keep their job.

And so the security barriers went up--from the Capitol to the Washington Monument--and with them was born Fortress DC, an unwelcoming place in which the people’s so called “representatives” and bureaucratic officials hide from the public behind walls that become a little more forbidding with each passing year. Today you can’t even ride on the Washington Metro subway system without the specter of your bag potentially being searched, and just to make sure the masses go along with it prerecorded messages from the likes of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano blare over the Metro’s public address system extolling riders to be vigilant and if they “see something, say something.”


True story: one day a few years ago the building that I work in was locked down for a couple of hours after some overly hysterical employee reported finding white powder on the floor of the women's restroom. The hazmat team from the local fire department responded and determined that the potential "deadly" threat was (surprise! surprise!) talcum powder.

Lost in all of the hysteria is that there has not been a successful terrorist attack on the American homeland in nearly ten years. This is not to say vigilance isn't important, but it must be weighed against the waste of many billions of dollars and the loss of our basic freedoms.

All of this has somehow become “normal” and accepted by a docile public. The national security state radiates outward from the Capital Beltway through the nation’s airports and sports venues and even more recently to its small town Walmarts. Paranoia strikes deep, and it has indeed struck our own body politic so deeply that we fail to even recognize it as paranoia anymore.

No supposedly democratic society can survive with the malignant cancer of an out-of-control national security state metastasizing within its bowels. It's a supreme irony that the fall more than 20 years ago of the most iconic symbol of state security repression the world has ever seen should have been almost immediately followed by the rise of a repressive national security state within the very open society that had led the fight to tear that wall down.

Benjamin Franklin had it right when he said that those who would trade a little liberty for a little safety deserve neither. He also said that the founding fathers had given us a republic, if we could keep it. Unfortunately, it has become very evident that we cannot. Osama bin Laden did not take our freedoms away; we managed to do that to ourselves.