Corruption And The Federal Government Killed Aaron Swartz- What That Means TO YOU!

The name Aaron Swartz must become burned into our collective consciousness.   He is dead now, dead at the hands of a miscreant federal government that would not let this innocent soul live.

He is dead because he dared to challenge the most horrific beast that the world has ever created….he challenged the political establishment of this corrupt United States of Amerika.

When you read his story, penned here by his friend Matt Stoller, you must become sickened and enraged.   How is it that the Wall Street criminals thrive, that the banking criminals thrive, that the Department of Justice and FBI and every federal agency do not have resources or the wherewithal to go after real crimes…..but they can pursue Aaron Swartz with a passion and fury….until they kill him? They killed him just as surely as if they had tied the noose themselves.

It’s not just Aaron, although his name must become a rallying cry.   It is every citizen that dares to stand up and speak out against the criminal regimes that own and control this dammed government. Could you imagine if anyone within the halls of government cared one bit about prosecuting fraud and corruption?   Could you imagine if we had a president or anyone in power who was not corrupted by the same powers as the opposition parties?   Me either.

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But listen to Stoller tell Aaron’s story:

Aaron Swartz was my friend, and I will always miss him. I think it’s important that, as we remember him, we remember that Aaron had a much broader agenda than the information freedom fights for which he had become known. Most people have focused on Aaron’s work as an advocate for more open information systems, because that’s what the Feds went after him for, and because he’s well-understood as a technologist who founded Reddit and invented RSS. But I knew a different side of him. I knew Aaron as a political activist interested in health care, financial corruption, and the drug war (we were working on a project on that just before he died). He was a great technologist, for sure, but when we were working together that was not all I saw.

In 2009, I was working in Rep. Alan Grayson’s office as a policy advisor. We were engaged in fights around the health care bill that eventually became Obamacare, as well as a much narrower but significant fight  on auditing the Federal Reserve  that eventually became a provision in Dodd-Frank. Aaron came into our office to intern for a few weeks to learn about Congress and how bills were put together. He worked with me on  organizing the campaign  within the Financial Services Committee to pass the amendment sponsored by Ron Paul and Alan Grayson on transparency at the Fed. He helped with the website NamesOfTheDead.com, a site dedicated to publicizing the 44,000 Americans that die every year because they don’t have health insurance. Aaron learned about Congress by just spending time there, which seems like an obvious thing to do. Many activists prefer to keep their distance from policymakers, because they are afraid of the complexity of the system and believe that it is inherently corrupting. Aaron, as with much of his endeavors, simply let his curiosity, which he saw as  synonymous  with brilliance,  drive him.

Aaron also spent a lot of time learning how advocacy and electoral politics works from outside of Congress. He helped found the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, a group that sought to replace existing political consulting machinery in the Democratic Party.  At the PCCC, he worked on stopping Ben Bernanke’s reconfirmation (the email Aaron wrote called him ” Bailout Ben”), auditing the Fed and passing health care reform. I remember he sent me  this video  of Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, on Reddit, offering his support to Grayson’s provision. A very small piece of the victory on Fed openness belongs to Aaron.

By the time I met and became friends with Aaron, he had already helped create RSS and co-founded and sold Reddit. He didn’t have to act with intellectual humility when confronting the political system, but he did. Rather than approach politics as so many successful entrepreneurs do, which is to say, try to meet top politicians and befriend them, Aaron sought to understand the system itself. He read political blogs, what I can only presume are gobs of history books (like Tom Ferguson’s  Golden Rule, one of the most important books on politics that almost no one under 40 has read), and began talking to organizers and political advocates. He wanted, first and foremost, to know. He learned about elections, political advertising, the data behind voting, and grassroots organizing. He began understanding policy, by learning about Congressional process, its intersection with politics, and how staff and influence networks work on the Hill and through agencies. He analyzed money. He analyzed corruption.

Read more at https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/01/aaron-swartzs-politics.html#B26A4Ad9Y4QwRmVE.99