This Thanksgiving, We Say ‘No Tanks’

Thanksgiving is not what it once was.

Then again, America is not what she once was.

Americans have become so enthralled by the “bread and circuses” of our age—tables groaning under the weight of an abundance of rich foods, televisions tuned to sports and entertainments spectacles, stores competing for Black Friday shoppers, and a general devotion to excess and revelry—that we have lost sight of the true purpose of Thanksgiving.

Indeed, the following is a lesson in how far we have traveled—and how low we have fallen—in the more than 200 years since George Washington issued the first Thanksgiving proclamation, calling upon the nation to give thanks for a government whose purpose was ensuring the safety and happiness of its people and for a Constitution designed to safeguard civil and religious liberty.

This Thanksgiving finds us saddled with a government that is a far cry from Washington’s vision of a government that would be a blessing to all the people:

• governed by wise, just and constitutional laws
• faithfully executed and obeyed by its agents
• assisting foreign nations with good government, peace, and concord
• promoting true religion, virtue and science
• and enabling temporal prosperity.

Instead, as the following shows, the U.S. government has become a warring empire, governed by laws that are rash, unjust and unconstitutional, policed by government agents who are corrupt, hypocritical and abusive, a menace to its own people, and the antithesis of everything for which Washington hoped.

George Washington didn’t intend Thanksgiving to be a day for offering up glib platitudes that require no thought, no effort and no sacrifice. He wanted it to be a day of contemplation, in which we frankly assessed our shortcomings, acknowledged our wrongdoings, and resolved to be a better, more peaceable nation in the year to come.

It is in that true spirit of Thanksgiving that I offer the following list of things for which I’m not thankful about the American police state.

The U.S. has become a corporate oligarchy.  As a Princeton University survey indicates, our elected officials, especially those in the nation’s capital, represent the interests of the rich and powerful rather than the average citizen. We are no longer a representative republic. As such, the citizenry has little if any impact on the policies of government. There are 131 lobbyists to every Senator, reinforcing concerns that the government represents the corporate elite rather than the citizenry.

Americans are being jailed for profit. Imprisoning Americans in private prisons and jails run by mega-corporations has turned into a cash cow for big business, with states agreeing to maintain a 90% occupancy rate in privately run prisons for at least 20 years. And how do you keep the prisons full? By passing laws aimed at increasing the prison population, including the imposition of life sentences on people who commit minor or nonviolent crimes such as siphoning gasoline. Little surprise, then, that the United States has 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of the world’s prisoners. The government’s tendency towards militarization and overcriminalization, in which routine, everyday behaviors become targets of regulation and prohibition, have resulted in Americans getting arrested for making and selling unpasteurized goat cheese, cultivating certain types of orchids, feeding a whale, holding Bible studies in their homes, and picking their kids up from school.

Endless wars have resulted in a battlefield mindset that is infecting the nation.  The Departments of Justice, Homeland Security (DHS) and Defense have passed off billions of dollars worth of military equipment to local police forces. Even EMS crews and fire fighters are being “gifted” with military tanks, Kevlar helmets and ballistic vests. Police agencies have been trained in the fine art of war. It has become second nature for local police to look and act like soldiers. Communities have become acclimated to the presence of militarized police patrolling their streets. Americans have been taught compliance at the end of a police gun or taser. Lower income neighborhoods have been transformed into war zones. Hundreds if not thousands of unarmed Americans have lost their lives at the hands of police who shoot first and ask questions later. And a whole generation of young Americans has learned to march in lockstep with the government’s dictates.

Militarized police, shootings of unarmed citizens, SWAT team raids, misconduct and qualified immunity have transformed the U.S. into a police state.   What we must contend with today is the danger of having a standing army (which is what police forces, increasingly made up of individuals with military backgrounds and/or training, have evolved into) that has been trained to view the citizenry as little more than potential suspects, combatants and insurgents. Despite propaganda to the contrary, it is estimated that U.S. police kill more people in days than other countries do in years. On an average day in America, at least 100 Americans have their homes raided by SWAT teams (although I’ve seen estimates as high as 300 a day), which are increasingly used to deal with routine police matters: angry dogs, domestic disputes, search warrants, etc. Every five days a police officer somewhere in America engages in sexual abuse or misconduct.

The barrier between public and private property has been done away with. Call it what you will—taxes, penalties, fees, fines, regulations, tariffs, tickets, permits, surcharges, tolls, asset forfeitures, foreclosures, etc.—but the only word that truly describes the constant bilking of the American taxpayer by the government and its corporate partners is theft. What Americans don’t seem to comprehend is that if the government can arbitrarily take away your property, without your having much say about it, you have no true rights and no real property. In this way, the police state with all of its trappings—from surveillance cameras, militarized police, SWAT team raids, truancy and zero tolerance policies, asset forfeiture laws, privatized prisons and red light cameras to Sting Ray devices, fusion centers, drones, black boxes, hollow-point bullets, detention centers, speed traps and abundance of laws criminalizing otherwise legitimate conduct—has become little more than a front for a high-dollar covert operation aimed at laundering as much money as possible through government agencies and into the bank accounts of the corporate oligarchy that rule over us.

The technologically-driven surveillance state has become the fourth branch of government. This fourth branch—the NSA, CIA, FBI, DHS, etc.—came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum, and yet it possesses superpowers, above and beyond those of any other government agency save the military. It is all-knowing, all-seeing and all-powerful.  It operates beyond the reach of the president, Congress and the courts, and it marches in lockstep with the corporate elite who really call the shots in Washington, DC. This age of technological tyranny has been made possible by government secrets, government lies, government spies and their corporate ties. Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it will all be recorded, stored and used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing. Privacy, as we have known it, is dead. The police state is about to pass off the baton to the surveillance state.

The schools, modeled after quasi-prisons, are churning out future compliant citizens. Within America’s public schools can be found almost every aspect of the American police state that plagues those of us on the “outside”: metal detectors, surveillance cameras, militarized police, drug-sniffing dogs, tasers, cyber-surveillance, random searches, senseless arrests, jail time, the list goes on. Whether it takes the form of draconian zero tolerance policies, overreaching anti-bullying statutes, police officers charged with tasering and arresting so-called unruly children, standardized testing with its emphasis on rote answers, political correctness, or the extensive surveillance systems cropping up in schools all over the country, young people in America are first in line to be indoctrinated into compliant citizens of the new American police state.

The courts have become courts of order in an age of government-sanctioned tyranny. With every ruling handed down by the courts, it becomes more apparent that we live in an age of hollow justice, with government courts, largely lacking in vision and scope, rendering narrow rulings that have nothing to do with true justice. This is true at all levels of the judiciary, but especially so in the highest court of the land, the U.S. Supreme Court, which is seemingly more concerned with establishing order and protecting government agents than with upholding the rights enshrined in the Constitution. Given the turbulence of our age, with its police overreach, military training drills on American soil, domestic surveillance, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, wrongful convictions, and corporate corruption, the need for a guardian of the people’s rights has never been greater. Yet when presented with an opportunity to weigh in on these issues, what does our current Supreme Court usually do? It ducks. Prevaricates. Remains silent. Speaks to the narrowest possible concern. More often than not, it gives the government and its corporate sponsors the benefit of the doubt. Rarely do the concerns of the populace prevail.

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, these are abuses that no American should tolerate from its government, and yet not only do we tolerate them, but we help to advance them by supporting meaningless elections, allowing ourselves to be divided by partisan politics, and failing to hold the government accountable to abiding by the rule of law, the U.S. Constitution.

Mark my words: if we do not push back against the menace of the police state now, if we fail to hold onto the Constitution and our constitutional republic, and if we allow the government to remain the greatest threat to our freedoms, then future Thanksgivings will find us paying the price with tyranny at home and anarchy throughout the world.

 

Excerpt from “This Thanksgiving, Let’s Say ‘No Thanks’ to the Tyranny of the American Police State” By John W. Whitehead, November 2015

Photos courtesy leaksource, beforeitsnews, negotiationisover, censure.centerblog.net

 

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America Gone Mad

 

“The price of Liberty is Eternal Vigilence.”

– Thomas Jefferson –

Many people become uncomfortable when anyone criticizes their country. Patriotism, to them, means accepting whatever your country does… period. “My country, right or wrong” is the best expression of this blinkered kind of patriotism. But such simple-minded, blind faith has had a down side, for it has allowed corrupt people and nefarious interests to steer our country down some very dark paths.

It’s understandable to love your country unconditionally, even as you would love a child. But loving someone does not mean we should ignore when that person does something wrong. Likewise, loving our country should not mean that we shouldn’t recognize, and hold it accountable, when it does not live up to the principles and ideals upon which it was founded.

So here are 7 ways in which our country and our government has gone terribly wrong;

The Government is Controlled by Big Money, Corporate and Military Interests

It has probably always been true to some extent that big money interests have exerted considerable interests on all levels of government. As long as there are people who can be bought for money, gifts or opportunities, there will be politicians who are happy to work for the interests of the elite. But at least in the past, these types of political vermin were recognized as corrupt, if not outright criminals. Today, we have institutionalized the co-opting of politicians, and made the selling of their services to the highest bidder the de facto manner in which the electoral process works.

The Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United Decision declared that corporate campaign donations are the legal equivalent to speech and therefore freed up corporations to make unlimited contributions to the candidates of their choice. This distortion of the concept of free speech is an egregious example of how the interests of the elite have even taken over the highest court in the land. And what we should all be asking ourselves is, now that they can “speak” to the government with massive voice of their millions of dollars… is it even possible anymore for our puny little voices to be heard at all?

Wall Street’s  So-Called Free Market Operates More like a Crooked Casino

A Free Market is supposed to be a system where prices are determined purely by the laws and forces of supply and demand – but today’s financial markets bear little resemblance to that. In recent years our banking and financial markets have been exposed as little more than criminal enterprises where the only operating imperative is to fleece the most amount of people possible. From the LIBOR interest rating scandal, to the manipulation of gold pricing, to high-frequency, front-running stock trading, to allowing banks to borrow money at 0% interest to artificially inflate stock market and prop up the failing market for US Treasury Bonds… these and many more fraudulent practices have destroyed any semblance of a free market and exposed the truth that what is erroneously called ourFinancial Markets are in fact closer to  crooked casinos – but in these rigged games not only does the house always win, but the casino owners are allowed to sit at the table and take your money directly.

“Free Trade” Agreements have Allowed Multinational Corporations to Destroy our Domestic Economy

For the past 50 years big, multinational corporations have had one major goal – to put their operations, agendas and practices outside the control of pesky government authorities. They have systematically achieved this goal through the implementation of so-called Free Trade Agreements, such as The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the pending Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), and many others. These complex legal agreements, typically written by corporate lawyers, are sold to us as ways to improve our domestic economy by opening up foreign markets to U.S. exporters by eliminating barriers to trade.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The truth is that Free Trade agreements are instead directly responsible for the shuttering of thousands of American factories and the loss of tens of millions of jobs as Multinational Corporations – now freed from the danger of having import taxes levied on their foreign-produced goods – have been allowed to place their production facilities in whatever countries offer the lowest labor costs, the cheapest resources and most lax environmental and safety regulations. This off-shoring of American productive capability, this undermining of the earning potential of millions of American workers, this expatriation of hundreds of millions in annual tax revenues has all been very good for corporations and the owner class – but devastating to our country.

America is Addicted to War

For decades, U.S. military spending has outstripped all other countries combined – and several times over. These hundreds of billions of dollars have paid for the most lethal weapons in the world and made our military industrial suppliers extremely profitable and influential. Due to their critical role in our national security, military suppliers are the only industry that by law cannot outsource their production capabilities to other countries and therefore it is the only domestic industry that our government protects… and boy do they protect it!

With the fall of the  Soviet Union – and the subsequent crash in U.S. military budget – the neocons in the government were desperate to identify a new enemy – one which would allow them to justify increases in military spending. In a white paper entitled The Project for a New American Century, they proposed the need to increase our military might so that no other country could every pose an existential threat to America’s dominance in the world – but they realized that this could not happen “without a catalyzing event, such as Pearl Harbor.” So they created an new existential threat called Terrorism and they aided and abetted the required catalyzing event, which was 9/11. Armed with a boogeyman for their new century, the neocons and their friends in the military industrial complex entered a new golden age of military spending.

American arms manufacturers today sell a total of $235 billion in material and weapons each year – supporting millions of people in an otherwise declining economy. We have 16 spy agencies employing 100 thousand employees, another million people employed by military and national security law enforcement agencies. As Jonathan Turley, Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washing University writes, in America “we don’t just endure war, we need war.”

America’s Tax Code Enslaves the Masses while Giving Rich & Corporations a Pass

The current tax code is 70,000 pages long. For most Americans the rules that pertain to us, those for paying taxes on our income, investments, property etc. could easily be be summed up in less than a hundred pages. So what’s in the remaining 60,900 pages? These remaining pages contain the arcane loopholes, dodges and tax avoidance instruments which were specifically inserted into the code so that the wealthy and powerful could protect their riches and avoid paying taxes like the rest of us.

The cost of tax breaks for corporations has been escalating for the past few decades, totaling $176 billion in 2013 alone. Tax for individual taxpayers are heavily tilted in favor of the top income earners, and in 2013 amounted to more than $770 billion – in that year 4,000 of America’s top 1% owed no income tax at all due to loopholes in the tax code.

What’s important to remember is that these tax breaks & loopholes have the very same effect as any other kind of government spending – and should be subjected to serious consideration and oversight. Currently our government looses over $1 trillion per year in lost revenues. If recovered, these losses would erase the federal budget deficit with a few hundred billion to spare! But with our elected officials in the pocket of the billionaires, bankers and corporations, tax code reform is unlikely to ever receive any serious attention.

Our Elected Officials No Longer Represent We The People

You could make a case that our system has never been quite as democratic as information ministers would have had us believe. Big money and industrial interests have always had a great deal of influence on our government. Congress has a long tradition of pork barrel politics, where constituent industrial interests are rewarded with pork in the form of plush government contracts or advantageous legislations, sneakily embedded into otherwise innocuous bills. Legislators have gotten away with this sort of light corruption because it was easily spun as necessary for the creation jobs for the people in their districts.

But this deference to big money interests is not always in the interests of the people. Tax havens and loopholes add untold millions of dollars to corporate coffers, tightening government budgets and shifting the tax burden onto ordinary people. The increasing globalist agendas of multinational firms – and their desire to be free of any governmental restrictions or oversights – has eliminated millions of jobs and dismantled many of our traditional worker’s rights and benefits, off shored millions of American jobs and given rise to corporate excesses like genetically modified foods and fracking.

But the nail in the coffin of our democratic process had to be the Supreme Court’s unbelievableCitizens United decision which conferred citizen status on corporations and with it the right to free speech – which in the case of corporations means the right to donate as much money to the campaigns of politicians as they wish. This single decision has singlehandedly overturned America’s long tradition of protecting the election process against the undue influence of big money. Now the only politicians we will even be allowed to vote for are those already in the pocket of bankers, billionaires and corporations. Your vote, essentially, serves only to legitimize an electoral process – and rubber stamp the candidates – that have been purchased by the money elite.

And the worst thing is… the only way to overturn this hideous Supreme Court decision is through the excruciating process of Constitutional Amendment – the last such amendment, the 27th, was originally proposed in 1789 and only ratified in 1992.

Our Bill of Rights has been Systematically Dismantled

The greatness of America has been owed in large part to the protection of individual freedoms and liberties guaranteed to its citizens by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. These rights were meant to make this a country where the Rule of Law reigns supreme – where the people are protected against the governing class’s historical tendencies toward tyranny and despotism. So accustomed are Americans to these unique freedoms that we take them for granted, never imagining that we could ever be subjected to a system where we would lose things like the presumption of innocence, the right to a speedy trial, the right to privacy or protection against illegal search or seizure.

Yet thanks to the unprecedented attacks on freedom contained within the villainous Patriot Act and it’s co-conspirator the National Defense Authority Act, the possibility of just such a dystopian reality is a very real and present danger.

Thanks to the Patriot Act, we now live in a security state where we have lost the right to privacy in our homes, in our person and in our communications. The government is now constantly recording our calls and emails, watching and tracking us as go about our lives, checking our papers at illegal checkpoints and subjecting us to invasive groping and scan technologies when we travel.

The NDAA has overturned 200 years of law which has kept the military out of domestic policing and ushered a new police state where the military is now allowed to conduct operations against the American people, and where someone who might simply have been at the wrong place at the wrong time can be detained without charges or representation, held indefinitely and transported anywhere in the world for a trial in a tribunal of the government’s choosing.

So there you have it, 7 things really wrong about this country.

Now you might say that this is too negative, that it doesn’t consider the many good and fine things about this country… and you’d be right. But the point is that much of what’s good and great about this country is directly attributable to the rights and freedoms that we have only recently lost. The uncomfortable truth is that our government has given itself the powers of a fascist state – but so far they have kept a friendly face on it. There is no way of knowing for sure if this campaign against freedom will be reversed, or if it will evolve into something ever more dark and sinister. But we must all be careful about a government who asks us to trade our freedom for security. For as Plato recognized ages ago, “This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.”

Excerpt from “7 Things REALLY Wrong with America”  on Vote-Revolt.com May 2015

 

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America – Wrong On So Many Levels

 

What in the world is happening to America?  Perhaps you have asked yourself that question from time to time.  Today it seems like everything is falling apart.  Our economy is crumbling, our politicians are incompetent, we have just gotten involved in another war, corruption is everywhere and the American people are so addicted to entertainment that hardly anything can wake them from their stupor.

Unfortunately, right now most Americans are completely asleep.  Just like during the declining years of the Roman Empire, most people that live in the U.S. are spoiled, decadent and completely addicted to entertainment.

(2011) The following is how many Americans actually plan their weeks….

Monday: Watch Dancing With The Stars

Tuesday: Watch The Dancing With The Stars Results Show

Wednesday: Watch American Idol

Thursday: Watch The American Idol Results Show

At this point, most people in this country cannot even intelligently discuss the pressing issues of our day.

In fact, 63 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 cannot find Iraq on a map and 90 percent of Americans in that same age group cannot find Afghanistan on a map.

We’ve got a lot of work to do.

America is in sorry shape and it desperately needs some heroes.

The following is a list that will make you really think that there is something seriously wrong with this country…

#1 According to the Economic Policy Institute, almost 25 percent of U.S. households now have zero net worth or negative net worth.  Back in 2007, that number was just 18.6 percent.

#2 According to the Pentagon, the cost of the first week of attacks on Libya was 600 million dollars.

#3 The major food producers are shrinking the sizes of their packages so that they won’t have to raise prices.  The New York Times recently did a story about one woman who was absolutely shocked when she started keeping track of shrinking package sizes at her local supermarket….

Ms. Stauber, 33, said she began inspecting her other purchases, aisle by aisle. Many canned vegetables dropped to 13 or 14 ounces from 16; boxes of baby wipes went to 72 from 80; and sugar was stacked in 4-pound, not 5-pound, bags, she said.

#4 It is being projected that for the first time ever, the OPEC nations are going to bring in over a trillion dollars from exporting oil this year.  Their biggest customer is the United States.

#5 According to a recent census report, 13% of all the homes in the United States are sitting empty.

#6 Barack Obama promised us that radiation from the nuclear disaster in Japan would not be a problem in the United States, but already it has shown up in milk in Spokane, Washington.

#7 Dallas Federal Reserve Bank President Richard Fisher recently said the following….

“If we continue down on the path on which the fiscal authorities put us, we will become insolvent, the question is when.”

Of course the Federal Reserve system was designed to get the U.S. government trapped in perpetual debt so actually he should be blaming himself and his friends over at the Fed.

#8 Thanks for all the money printing Bernanke – according to one unofficial estimate, the U.S. in on track to have an 8.3 percent rate of inflation.

#9 According to a recent article posted on the website of the American Institute of Economic Research, the purchasing power of a U.S. dollar declined from $1.00 in 1913 to 4.6 cents in 2009.

#10 The number of homes that were repossessed reached the 1 million mark for the first time ever during 2010.

#11 The U.S. industrial base has disintegrated so badly that we could literally export our entire manufacturing output and still not balance our trade with the rest of the globe.

#12 The National Institutes of Health has spent approximately $442,340 to study the behavior of male prostitutes in Vietnam.

#13 Today, the U.S. national debt is over 14 times larger than it was back in 1981. What do we have to show for it?

Excerpts from “A List Of 28 Things That Will Make You Think That There Is Something Seriously Wrong With This Country”  by Michael Snyder, March 2011

 

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