I dream of another world

Naivete and amazement should always be your guides, your Virgil and Sacajawea, when tracking across the zona.

So, take the issue of the law. It used to be the case, and according to the droning theorists, waving their Rawls around, it still is the case, that a law is passed in order to implement or regulate some practice.

Perhaps I should say retract that “used to be the case”, given the massive fraudulence of the Cold War. But I do find it astonishing that few seem to investigate another function of the law: to seemingly address and issue, and thus give a cover to the government to fundamentally transgress it. In other words, the laws exist much like the declaration of freedoms in the Soviet Constitution of Stalin’s time: as a curtain.

So, in the U.S., laws were passed to prevent government agencies from extending to investment banks the kind of insurance that are extended to other banks. And so in the U.S.. these laws were casually and massively broken, and nobody really cares.

In the UK, which is becoming the black hole of civil rights in the West, Nu Labour came up with an idea that obviously sample surveyed like a cool Net advertisement: Freedom of information. It sounds so good, let’s plaster the name on a bill! No sooner thought of than done. The Guardian editors and CiF can trumpet the progressiveness of it all, and the Government can proceed to ignore it.

So the Heathrow airport protesters are finding out. This is from the Index on Censorship:

“Following Jack Straw’s veto of the release of the pre-Iraq war cabinet minutes, the government’s commitment to freedom of information (FOI) has again been called into question. Campaigners against the third Heathrow runway are finding the Department for Transport (DfT) strangely reluctant to publish the latest versions of documents that have already proved painfully embarrassing for ministers. Both Greenpeace and Tory MP Justine Greening have previously used FOI laws to obtain evidence revealing the relationship between ministers and officials at the DfT and BAA over airport expansion. In this light, it is not surprising that the department is trying every trick in the book — and some that aren’t in the book — to block new requests for similar papers.

Greening famously obtained proof that BAA helped the DfT to ‘reverse-engineer’ its forecasts to show that a new runway would meet ministers’ ‘strict environmental tests’. This evidence came from a request for disclosure of communications between the two organisations. But the DfT has refused two almost identical requests from Greening covering later periods. The Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, is expected to rule shortly on her complaints.”
I’m on pins and needles about that ruling! Like the investigation of the BEA, or like, well, almost anything done by that horrendous collection of crooks that took a moribund socialist party to the Thatcherite heights, we already know what happens when the guardians figure out the puzzle of who will guard the guardians: pass fake laws, of course.
The DIT claims that if it publishes earlier studies where the parameters weren’t fixed to make everything look Potemkin village fine, it will lead to ‘ill-informed’ speculation. The rulers, having our interests at heart, have come down hard, throughout the freedom loving nations, on ill informed speculation. That’s why the Fed coolly told the Senate to fuck off when the Senate enquired about AIT counterparties. That is why we watched the SEC pretend that they were so in the midst of investigations, of a very delicate nature, that they could by no means and in good conscience answer questions they were being asked about the nutty, ideologically driven lea-way they gave to any fly by night company to rip off the public. They invoked executive privilege even thought the executive hadn’t been told – why bother? The organs function when the body is dead. Every zek knows this.

Je rêvais d'un autre monde