It's been sad watching some so-called "progressives" tie themselves in knots trying to defend the abuses of the Obama administration (apparently out of some misplaced loyalty, a mistaken belief that under it all Obama is some sort of closet progressive). The state is generally the ally of the powerful, not of the working class or of the disenfranchised. Progressives should seek to empower it only when the alternative is plutocracy, and only in ways that are subject to open and democratic control. David Segal and Sam Adler-Bell have an excellent look at this issue over at In These Times:
Why NSA Surveillance Should Alarm Labor
...
Nayman may be right that “[d]efense of life, freedom and property is a legitimate function of government,” but history loudly testifies to the fact that the state always defends “life, freedom and property” more vigorously for some than for others. Any wholesale defense of the U.S. government’s spying apparatus depends on a disturbing amnesia about the state’s dealings with working people and their organizations, both in the recent and more distant past. And it depends on the assumption that working people and their organizations have never been, and will never be, the targets of surveillance.
But throughout the 20th century, U.S. domestic spying tended to focus on precisely those individuals and organizations who posed a perceived threat to corporate plutocracy and the hegemony of (white) elites—i.e. radical labor, left-wing advocates for a more just economy, and organizers in the fight for racial justice. As early as 1916, New York police were revealed to have wiretapped the phones of labor organizations in the city. “The police tap the wires of a union as soon as a strike is started,” testified a union official, “as soon as it is known that trouble is brewing.” Information regarding unions’ plans, he said, was then transmitted to the employers, enabling them to block strikes.
...
Leaders Eugene V. Debs, Emma Goldman, and hundreds more were charged and imprisoned under the Espionage Act of 1917. (It’s not incidental that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has also been charged under the Espionage Act). And in 1920, Goldman and 248 other suspected foreign radicals were loaded onto the USAT Buford—nicknamed the “Soviet Ark” by the press—and hauled off to Soviet Russia.
...
As PCFJ executive Director Mara Verheyden-Hilliard explained to Democracy Now, “[t]hroughout the materials there is repeated evidence of the FBI and Department of Homeland Security, [and other] American intelligence agencies working as a private intelligence arm for corporations, for Wall Street, for the banks, for the very entities that people were rising up to protest against.”