USA: Again, the Dilemma betweenSecurity and Rights

This week, the Obama administration had to explain its spying on journalists and tax persecution of opponents. The arguments were alarming.

The epidemic nature of a problem doesn’t bring comfort. Generalizing the catastrophe does not solve anything, but actually increases alarm bells. That democracy itself — the rights that give it identity and legal body —are in question, not only in a handful of countries but almost everywhere from north to south, is an example of a movement in the wrong direction that should not be accepted without resistance.

The problem in our era is not indifference or neglect of the effects of this dangerous decline, but rather the heights that this phenomenon has reached. The current incident in the United States, with a government that again takes as legitimate spying on journalists or uses the services of its tax division to persecute political opponents, shows a thinning of these democratic limits and an assault on individual rights that few would take as characteristic of much less developed political systems.

The issue is surprising, but it should not be. It happens at a time when one can see an attempt to deconstruct the republic with lax ways that recall in many cases the methods of a monarchical centralism. The citizen evolves into a plebe, obliged to obey power without capacity of appeal.

This displacement of democratic checks and balances, not yet at an extreme in the U.S., is observed in the global South: in high profile cases such as in Venezuela which has eliminated the division of powers and established militant censorship; and in Argentina, which marches frantically up that path.

But it also occurs in any number of authoritarian models, such as those governing in Hungary, in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, or those even more aberrant forms of institutional control such as in Alexander Lukashenko’s Belarus. In Italy under Silvio Berlusconi, a man who is a living master of the practices that make the state a personal fiefdom, contempt of parliament and justice became commonplace, along with the notion that nothing is greater than the executive. This explains in large measure [how] the bogged down leadership [still] traps that nation.

There is a naive idea that the systems most tested in the exercise of democracy may have functioned as a reference to avoid these depths. But setting aside the case at hand, one should not forget that the U.S. — using the argument of the misty war on terror declared by former President George W. Bush — has long since pulverized much of that country’s remarkable legacy of individual rights.

The idea is that Americans (and their allies) had to choose between their safety and their constitutional rights. The Patriot Act of October 2001 and the creation of the Orwellian Department of Homeland Security after the Sept. 11 attacks that year untied the hands of government to intervene in private affairs of the people beyond any legal limit.

This even includes surreptitiously searching private homes when residents were away.

It is clear that the “terrorist” theme is used for these abuses. But they had no connection with violence. They are used to shield a vertical accumulation of income that ended in the current global crisis with an explosive trail of poor and unemployed since the 2008 financial collapse. It wasn’t patriotism. Using the specter of al-Qaida, Bush built a barrier to protect deregulation of the banking system and the stock market and to prevent any reaction from the victims of this process.

Barack Obama, far from the illusion of a change that was just a continuity of the exceptional forms imposed by the collapse of the U.S. economy, has maintained and deepened that intervention scheme of the state on the people. The current scandal is that the Associated Press found that the Ministry of Justice had spied on at least 20 cell lines of its journalists for two months in four of its major newsrooms and in the offices of the medium in Congress, as well as on the home and cell phones of one of its top editors.

This followed an investigation by the agency of a covert operation of Washington in Yemen.

With an argument that sounded like it was taken from a store of Bush terms, Obama said Thursday he was not going to apologize to the AP for this “Watergate,” claiming that “freedom of information is good, but leaks in national security puts people in danger.”* Even before, his attorney general Eric Holder had launched a criminal case against The New York Times, which had investigated the government’s use of pilotless bombers and the existence of a list of people to be killed with these instruments of war.

It is difficult to assume that everything that relates to this alleged national security — and not the new reality of a country with a steep income concentration which drags more than 40 million people into poverty and social unrest — is not relieved by the slight decrease in unemployment as new jobs are more precarious and poorly paid.

The central point is to note that what is involved is not a naive defense of press freedom, but a set of ideas about how things should work.

In countries that have suffered dictatorships, the deep meaning of this dilemma should be clear.

Yet also in the U.S., which still maintains a prison whose inmates have no legal defense in Guantanamo, where it has been proclaimed (as Holder himself did) that the president has the right to order the assassination of Americans without trial, that among other dialectical acrobatics, Obama has said that press freedom should investigate these excesses because that, and freedom of expression, are aids to make democracy work.

By putting them aside, they are not considered as constituent parts of the system. Without these core attributes, an empty democracy is not a democracy.