The “Break it Down” Blog

A relatively new nonpartisan group, AfterDowningStreet, has formed recently to work on exposing the impeachable actions of the president and vice president.

As the campaign has set out to organize events and talks around the country they noticed something strange going on… most of their emails were getting lost, especially the ones from some of the founding members.

As they looked into the issue, they discovered that the “lost” emails were simply being thrown out for people sending emails that had Comcast as an ISP. Upon further investigation Comcast confirmed the blocking of the emails and gave a read that the address of the site (www.afterdowningstreet.org) had been complained about “46,000 times” from customers as spam.

When the group pointed out that they simply had not existed long enough let alone that they never spammed anyone, Comcast passed the buck to Symantec’s “Bright Mail” filtering software as the cause for the “lost” emails.

Then the BRAD BLOG picked up the story about the issue an included the Symantec phone number on his blog. Within minutes of calling the AfterDowningStreet folks had gotten the ban on the emails lifted, something that Comcast had been unable (unwilling maybe?) to do, but the damage and the message was clear.

We are starting to see what happens when a few huge corporations control the only source of communication. What happens when a few corporations control our only sources of news. And what happens when you have the government and corporations functioning in complete harmony for absolute top-to-bottom monitoring of all it’s citizens, at all times, with no cause.

Naomi Klein wrote a book titled “The Shock Doctrine” describing how we are being “shocked” into fascism (read: corporatism) by the administration, all starting with one “Pearl Harbor like” event, and that is something we have covered here before… but you can track these changes day-by-day, week-by-week.

It started with illegal wiretapping… you see the cycle:

1. Outrage
2. Investigation
3. Bargaining
4. Acceptance

Then we saw it with the lies about the reason we invaded Iraq (over 100 documents), the lies about the progress being made there, the lies about why we need to stay, the lies about what it takes to rebuild Iraq, the lies about health care and social security and on and on and on.

I have no idea where this stops, and I have no idea what needs to be done to avoid it in the future… assuming of course we get our country back at some point and are allowed to try and fix the problem.