Obama Regime Creates Another Martyr

No, not yet another jihadist martyr. Those are a dime a dozen, The U.S. senses no consequences from that.

An American martyr. (No, not Anwar al-Awlaki, or his 16 year old son, or Samir Khan, blown to kingdom come by drones in Yemen in separate assassinations.)

Aaron Swartz, a computer genius, a child coding prodigy (involved in the creation of RSS at age 14), was driven to suicide by the prospect of 35 years in prison under draconian U.S. criminal law, plus a million dollar fine for good measure. [Free Speech Radio News says he was facing over 50 years.] He was alleged to be guilty of “computer crimes,” After two years of stress induced by the U.S. government, he hung himself.

Swartz was indicted on 13 Federal criminal counts- via the usual U.S. prosecutor procedure of turning one act into numerous “crimes.” (One way they multiply the charges is by counting everything as double- one for doing it, and one for “conspiring” to do it, although that shouldn't have applied in this case, since you need at least two people for a “conspiracy,” even if one of them is a government agent and creator of the “conspiracy.”)

The heinous act that Swartz did, worthy of 35 years in the slammer (he was 26 years old, so the U.S. Government was looking to steal the rest of his youth and most of his middle age) was sneak a computer into a closet at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.- an important node of the military industrial imperialist complex that provides scientific support for violent and repressive technology) and hook it up to M.I.T.'s network in order to download scientific papers hoarded by a company called JSTOR. JSTOR at the time charged for access to the documents. MIT had paid access to JSTOR's database. Swartz thought the information should be freely available. [One of his reasons for believing this is that because of the exorbitant prices charges by information-hoarding companies, scientists in the Third World are cut off from needed information to participate fully in the scientific process. The U.S. media has ignored that angle in its predictable misreporting of this sorry and tragic episode.]

Swartz's death stands as an example of several common and fundamental things about America: 1) it's extreme repressiveness, and 2) its waste of human potential. Even if he hadn't killed himself, as a dangerous “computer criminal” and Svengali in the eyes of the U.S., a la Kevin Mitnick, he would have been banned from computer use in prison.

Basically Swartz was facing 35 years for trespassing at M.I.T. and downloading data. The “victim” of the “theft,” JSTOR, was not interested in pressing charges, in fact M.I.T. instigated the prosecution. JSTOR settled with Swartz in June, 2011, with no claim of civil liability or interest in criminal prosecution. Swartz returned the “stolen” data at that time.

In justifying this draconian persecution, U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz self-righteously fulminated that “stealing is stealing.” (Who ever heard of prosecuting someone for “stealing” from someone who refuses to press- or even bring- charges?) Of course, when you actually steal from someone- take a physical object, or money, for example- you deprive that person of what is stolen. JSTOR of course still had all its data. Downloading something merely copies it. Calling that “theft” would be as if I had a photocopy of your driver's license and someone said I “stole” your license. There may be good reasons not to allow me to do that, but I didn't “steal” it.

Now that Ortiz has hounded Swartz to death, she refuses to back down one inch, insisting that she and her myrmidons behaved “honorably.” (So did the Waffen-SS, by their own lights. And all the butcher fascist military juntas of Latin America. I think someone else should be the judge of your “honor,” Ortiz.) But Ortiz did offer insincere “condolences.” That's purely political, like a vending machine flashing the message “thank you for your patronage,” mechanical and emotionless and totally calculated.

[Oh, by the way, see what a great difference “diversity” makes? Ortiz is a Hispanic AND a woman- she's doubly “diverse.”

Do names like Margaret Thatcher, Hillary Clinton, Madeleine “Killing 500,000 Iraqi children with sanctions was worth it” Albright, Janet “The Butcher of Waco” Reno, etc. ring any bells? How about Clarence Thomas, Herman Cain, Marco Rubio, Ileano Ross-Leitinen? Do not judge a book by its superficial cover.

It's the most brain-dead identity politics that equates female or “minority” with “progressive” or “Good Guy,” or even “liberal.”]

But I digress...

Of course this is all about defense of property- namely the property of corporations that “own” intellectual “property.” i.e. ideas.

It used to be that ideas came under civil copyright law. And even now, if someone steals my writing, the FBI and DO”J” isn't going to investigate and prosecute them under the recent laws that criminalize copyright infringement. This is all about defense of big business and its profits.

The new repressive computer “crime” laws are part of a counterattack against people violating what big corporations believe are their prerogatives in the Internet Age.

Ortiz's loathsome husband, an IBM executive named Tom Dolan, attacked Aaron's parents for not mentioning an alleged plea bargain his wife tried to extort their son into accepting, a 6 month prison term. He finds it “truly incredible” that they blame his wife for Aaron's suicide instead of Aaron's own stupidity for not taking the Great Deal Ortiz supposedly offered. (She also coldly offered to lock him up pre-trial so he wouldn't kill himself, when his lawyer told her he was suicidal a year ago. That would have done wonders for his mental health, and for his ability to prepare a defense. Cute move, Ortiz.)

Guess Aaron should have taken that offer! (If in fact it was actually on the table.) Especially since it's virtually impossible to be acquitted at trial in Federal courts unless one is charged with a “white collar” crime. People need to get away from stupid attitudes like “seeking justice” in the frame-up factory that is the U.S. legal system, a meat grinder of human beings, or seeking “exoneration” from the system, or trying to “clear their names.” Stop caring what stinking “respectable” people think. This system is illegitimate. Stop caring about their opinions, their judgments! “Oh, I'll have a conviction on my record!” Consider it an honor to be important enough to those creeps to be one of their targets. People need to become psychologically independent of the ideological system, to free their minds.You need to think of the government and its agents as your enemies.

More outrageously, the Government continued the persecution even though JSTORE

announced it was making the “stolen” material freely available, a few days before Swartz's suicide. That's an ironic kicker worthy of a great novel by Charles Dickens, or Victor Hugo. A remorseless, pitiless system that irrationally persecutes without mercy.

But of course that's “irrelevant.” Just as it was irrelevant that the Federal oil lease auction spoiled by Tim deChristopher bidding in it was later cancelled entirely by the Government. He still sits in the slammer doing a two year sentence for daring to interfere. (Wonder why they didn't just ignore his bids, or have a security guard escort him out?)

The issue here is messing around with the U.S. Power structure. It is a remorseless, merciless system. If you don't believe me, I can point you to millions of dead people around the world- indeed millions incinerated alive in U.S. wars in Vietnam, Japan, Germany. And millions forced to live under U.S.-imposed fascist military dictatorships (fewer of those around now, no thanks to the U.S.).

Maybe someday people will make some obvious connections between “domestic” and “foreign” “policy.” Policy is such an anticeptic, anodyne euphemism for terrible realities.

Turns out there are Americans of a socioeconomic and status class who care about Swartz . Unlike the millions locked up in American prisons for outrageously long sentences, the people who care about Swartz 's fate have some influence in American society. The brilliant politician Obama didn't see that. Not that he was directly involved. He merely sets the tone and the priorities for the machinery that he and the medieval-minded Attorney General Eric Holder Jr.* (a Clinton regime retread, like so many Obama regime apparatchiks, brought back to do more evil). So the oh-so-politically-agile Obama regime screwed up this time. The question is, if Swartz had been sentenced to a long prison term for being a petty miscreant, what would the reaction have been then, from those now aroused by his death? Why does it take death to rile people up? Leonard Peltier is rotting in prison- where is the outrage over that? We are all living under hideously punitive laws- lots and lots of them, not just the Swartz was targeted under- with viciously draconian penalties. The problem isn't just the so-called Computer Fraud and Abuse act, with its breathtakingly absurd penalties. See,.e.g. “drug” laws. See 60 NEW Federal death penalty laws Bill Clinton enacted- how come no one ever brings that up? For that matter, how come no one ever speaks of Clinton's murders, not just the massacre at Waco, but in Haiti when he overthrew Aristede the first time, or the thousands of deaths resulting from his bombing the only pharmaceutical factory in Sudan as soon as it was completed, fraudulently calling it an Al-Qaeda chemical warfare plant!

And speaking of computer fraud and abuse, the U.S. Government thinks it's fine to “steal” this essay as it travels from my computer to a blog or email account, and to you, and store it in NSA supercomputers and run it through programs that sift all that “stolen” data. Of course, unlike with Aaron Swartz, their intentions are malign.

Yes, the suicide of Swartz is a tragedy. One of millions, really. His persecution was just part and parcel of the “normal” operations of the system we exist within. Oddly, people manage to believe the Big Lie that we live in “freedom” under a “democracy.” If only it were so. It will never be as long as the current system exists. Looking at things narrowly, through the prism of one's pet “issue,” will never resolve anything. Only millions of people united in a common movement can do that. And that requires stepping back and seeing the big picture. Each discrete issue, each individual tragedy, is connected to that big picture, to that larger reality in which it is embedded. One has to understand reality to begin to change it.

*Holder infamously (it should be infamous, at any rate) instructed a law school student audience that “due process doesn't mean judicial process.” (His emphasis.) It means a bunch of executive branch assassins secretly deciding who to kill, and ordering their deaths. There was no visible outcry or even refutation in the bourgeois media over this outrageous assertion. If the victim has no chance to challenge the “findings,” indeed even to know that there are “proceedings” against him, that is the exact antithesis of due process. Not to mention the absence of an ostensibly neutral third party- a judge- to hear the Government's (or King's) arguments, and the accused having a chance to respond to the accusations. So Obama in this area has the power of Kings prior to the Magna Carta, 500 years ago.

Of course, increasingly in the U.S., even when an issue of state repression is allowed into a court, the “evidence” is kept secret from the victim and his/her lawyers. We are truly in the Dark Ages in the U.S.

[For the despicable actions of U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy around the issues raised by the persecution of Aaron Swartz, see "The Most Dangerous Person in the U.S. Congress."]