Washington Murdered Privacy At Home And Abroad

By Paul Craig Roberts

03/22/2010

In the Swiss newspaper Zeit-Fragen, Professor Dr. Eberhard Hamer from Germany asks, "How Sovereign is Europe?"

He examines the issue and concludes that Europe has little, if any, sovereignty.

Professor Hamer writes that the sovereign rights of Europeans as citizens of nation states were dissolved with the coming into force of the Lisbon Treaty on Dec. 1, 2009. The rights of the people have been conveyed to a political commissariat in Brussels. The French, Germans, Belgians, Spanish, British, Irish, Italians, Greeks, and so forth, now have "European citizenship whatever this may be."

The result of aggregating nations is to reduce the political participation of people. The authority of parliaments and local councils has been impaired. Power is now concentrated in new hierarchical structures within the European Union. European citizenship means indirect and weak participation by people. Self-rule has given way to authoritarian rule from top to bottom.

Professor Hamer then examines the EU commissariat and concludes that it, too, lacks sovereignty, having submitted to the will of the United States. The problem is not only that Europeans are waging an unconstitutional war ordered by the U.S. in a region of the world where Europe has no interests. Europe’s puppet state existence goes far beyond its mercenary service to the American Empire.

The EU has given in to Washington’s demand for "free access to the banking data of the central financial service provider, Swift, in Europe. All financial flows in Europe (and between Europe and the rest of the world) will now be monitored by the CIA and other American and Israeli intelligence services." The monitoring will include transfers within Germany, for example, and within individual cities. "The data, even data of completely innocent citizens, have to be stored for five years, of course, at the expense of the banks and their customers."

How sovereign is the EU when it is unable to protect the financial privacy of its citizens from foreign governments?

For some time Zeit-Fragen has been reporting Washington’s pressure on the Swiss government to violate Swiss statutory law in order to comply with American demands to monitor financial flows within Switzerland and between Switzerland the world. Writers show their astonishment at the total contempt Washington has for the sovereignty of other countries and the privacy rights of their citizens.

We Americans should not be surprised. Not withstanding statutory laws, our privacy rights are long gone. In the U.S. privacy has become a cruel and expensive joke. It means that parents cannot find out about the college grades of a son or daughter without the permission of the son or daughter. It means that credit card companies, banks and other financial institutions are required to waste money sending a steady stream of "privacy notices" to customers about the use of the customer’s information. It means an American cannot get information about his account with a credit card company, telephone, cable, and Internet provider, bank, utility company or make any alteration in his account without providing a stranger with his Social Security number or other private information over and beyond one’s name, address, and account number. This routine is a joke when the government has access to everything. It is part of our Orwellian world that privacy is protected by the requirement to give strangers private information over the telephone.

The American sheeple quietly accepted the complete destruction of their right to privacy. Encouraged by success in smiting the American people, Washington has now destroyed the privacy of Europeans.

Indeed, the "freedom and democracy" government spies on the entire world and sends drones into foreign countries to murder people disapproved by Washington.

Washington denounces other governments for human rights violations while itself violating human rights every day.

Washington puts foreign leaders on trial for war crimes, while committing war crimes every day.

What happens when the dollar goes and Washington no longer has the money to bribe compliance with its demands? When that day arrives, freedom will reemerge.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider’s Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct. His latest book, How The Economy Was Lost,

has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press.